Frankly, I don't think they have the right to deliberately handicap the stuff I paid for, without me getting a say in it. The changes to itunes were designed to make it do less. They were not accidental. No company has the right to retroactively and deliberately decide that the products they sold me should do less than they did when I bought them, even if that functionality was not one they intended originally. Macs are expensive enough as it is without apple going around sabotaging their feature set.

Think of yourself as a part-time salesman. You're not just building ideas, you're trying to sell them too. How do you sell ideas? The same way you sell anything else: marketing.

What you call bragging I would call a marketing campaign to soften management up for future ideas. It's the reason I'm a team leader even though I'm one of the most recent hires. It's also the reason why I have control over the feature roadmap of the products I'm developing, which is a rare perk in software engineering. I would have never been allowed to build the stuff I've built the past year if I hadn't learned to talk with management in their language instead of mine.

And yes, that does mean you have to do powerpoint presentations sometimes. Deal with it.

http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html

It certainly hasn't been my experience with the various major releases of OS X (10.2 through 10.6) - on the same hardware, each release has been faster.

See, this is how apple is smarter than microsoft. Apple started with something really slow and bloated (10.0), so that with a reasonable effort they could make each successive release faster.

NT was substantially more advanced than OS/2. Multiuser, SMP capable, fully 32 bit, almost-a-microkernel, etc.

This is the thing I never quite got. NT4 ran fine in 32 MB of ram, and it made 128 MB of ram seem infinite. And it did in fact multitask very well. I never understood why it was that XP had to be SO much heavier than NT, while still doing essentially the same stuff. I've always had this nagging feeling that the team that built NT4 really knew what they were doing, and that the guys that came after just weren't as good at their game.

The newer e-ink vizplex readers can render grayscale pictures reasonably fine (dithered, like it was printed cheaply). The price has also come down quite a bit, starts at 200 usd for a 5 inch screen.

I've been reading on laptops, cell phones and pda's for years also. Recently bought an e-ink reader (cybook opus). I have to say, it's worth the expense (for me). There's two things that make a real difference compared to the other options: it has extremely crisp letters (200 dpi), and the non-backlit screen strains the eyes a lot less. I can just dump html files on it, so there's no DRM issue.

The common e-ink readers all support non-DRM formats. Most also don't allow remote wipe. Mine (cybook opus) is a regular usb drive, so I can drag and drop html or txt files on it, and start reading.

Readers like that Sony and the Kindle have black text on a matte gray background. I find it difficult to read very quickly or easily with that color scheme.

I've spent the last two days reading on a cybook opus (200 dpi vizplex screen). If I had to compare the experience with a form of printing, I would compare it with a cheap newspaper.

This image is actually very true-to-life:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ebouquin/3809003294/sizes/l/

Whether the lower contrast is annoying will depend on the person, but if you don't mind reading cheap paperbacks or cheap newspapers, I doubt you'd mind reading on this. The letters themselves are very crisp (200 dpi, no bleed), which does make up quite a bit for the lower contrast.

As an aside, I can highly recommend the opus reader itself. It's pocket-size and lightweight, mounts as a standard usb drive (no sync software necessary), supports most formats, and lets you drop your favorite fonts into a folder. It has a motion sensor for automatically orienting the page correctly, which turns out to be surprisingly convenient to put the page-flip button under the appropriate hand depending on how you're sitting to read. Downsides are somewhat tough navigation buttons and a pdf feature that doesn't quite enable you to comfortably read A4 pdf's on the small screen. Upside is that it runs on linux :)

You might want to give a practical example of an unregulated market that tends towards optimal efficiency.

The problem is this: the free market makes prices drop to marginal cost levels, so market agents have two incentives: (1) merge and acquire to increase scale and drop costs, so as to achieve higher profits, and (2) find ways to reduce market freedom so prices no longer have to remain at marginal cost levels. These two incentives combine to reduce market efficiency. Let any market run free, and it will rapidly tend towards oligopoly. Once the number of players becomes small enough, they start to cooperate to reduce market freedom and raise prices.

Alain de Botton wrote a book about modern day work that (among other things) covers the process of shipping tuna from where it is caught to where it is eaten.

http://www.alaindebotton.com/work/

Remarkable stuff, and it flies entirely under the radar even of the people who buy it. Highly recommend that book to anyone wanting to get some insight on the fabric of modern society.

You must be mistaken as to which site you're on. This is slashdot. We don't tolerate those sorts of lifestyles here.

Searching through the history has never been slow for me, I think you're just making excuses for Firefox mashing the functionality of something (history) with something else (ACTUAL TYPED URLs) that never should have been placed together in the first place.

UX testing disagrees with you. You're the exception. People that prefer everything in one bar are the rule. It doesn't make sense to cater the default behavior to the exception.

Even thinking about it logically, this makes sense. A url is a search query with one result. Why should you type search queries with one result in one box, and with more than one result in another box? It's arbitrary, and inefficient from a user perspective.

the mentality of devs is that the hardware can take the bloat just give it some time and as far as I am concerned it's a cancer slowly eroding away at what software should be. quick, clean and efficient.

It's exactly the wrong move from a cost-effectiveness standpoint to put too much effort in supporting old hardware. The replacement cost for hardware is an order of magnitude less than the engineering cost of supporting that hardware. If we kept everything working on decade-old hardware, it would mean less features got developed, which meant people could do less with their computers. You personally might not mind, but society as a whole would make a loss on that deal.

Which is not to say the firefox devs don't care about performance. A lot of performance work went into FF 3.5, and memory-wise it's gotten much leaner than FF3. It does mean that if you're running hardware more than 5 years old, you won't be catered to, and for good reason.

If you're interested in the economic theory behind why it doesn't make sense to support old computers, I can highly recommend "Free", by Chris Anderson (the audiobook version is actually free itself).

Looks cool, but what nasty DRM lurks underneath?

Probably not so much because this isn't a music or video player. Sony isn't in the book publishing industry, so they probably won't be hard-edge about their DRM. It's always the content arm of sony that dislocates the shoulder of the gadget arm.