I hate to do this to a +5 insightful, but you're wrong.

The first iPod that came out was in direct competetion with the nomad zen. The zen had a longer battery life (14 hours vs 10 hours), bigger harddrive (60gig vs 20 gig), usb1.1 and firewire (the iPod only had firewire), a tuner, and a microphone, and worked on windows, osx and linux (the iPod was a pain on osx and a nightmare for windows). I will give you that the interface was a step up after you got your music on it, but viewed side by side, and dollar for dollar (as I did back then), you'd have to wonder what people were smoking when they bought an iPod. They were not competing with cd-mp3 players at all, and they didn't start competing with the flash players till years later.

The only thing they at had at first had was white headphones and a bunch of monocrome dancing ads, but, as history has shown, marketing beat out the technically superior product. It wasn't till about 2005 that the iPod actually became the superior product.

When passwords first were introduced to the unwashed masses, how may people got away with three letter passwords. How many people still get away with it.

Picture login is at that same stage. Pretty soon you'll see picture login policies like "Passwords must contain at least three swipes, four taps and a loop-de-loop, pictures must contain at least 6 faces and 12 different lines. blah blah blah." It's just a matter of time till everyone realises that this isn't a holy grail and people can still socially engineer obscenely weak passwords. Once the dust settles though, this will probably be a better solution to passwords.

I have a land line and am considering a dumb cell just due to costs.

I sit at work next to a phone with the Internet in front of me, I have a 10 minute commute home where I also sit by a phone and the Internet. Aside from 20 minutes a day that I spend driving, I don't need to pay some one $80 a month to duplicate functionality.

Here's a good one http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm
"So the conclusion is: To make movies/Virtual Reality perfect, you'd have to know what you want. To have a perfect illusion of everything that can flash, blink and move you shouldn't go below 500 fps."

Also from Wikipedia to debunk the 24fps recording thing:
  Judder is a real problem in this day[when?] where 46 and 52-inch (1,300 mm) television sets have become the norm. The amount an object moves between frames physically on screen is now of such a magnitude that objects and backgrounds can no longer be classed as "clear". Letters cannot be read and looking at vertical objects like trees and lamp posts while the camera is panning sideways have even been known to cause headaches. The actual amount of motion blur needed to make 24 frames per second smooth eliminates every remnant of detail from the frames. Where adding the right amount of motion blur eliminates the uncomfortable side effects, it is more than often simply not done. It requires extra processing to turn the extra frames of a 120 FPS source (which is the current recording "standard") into adequate motion blur for a 24 FPS target. It would also potentially remove the detail and clarity of background advertising. Today, devices are up to the task of displaying 60 frames per second, using them all on the source media is very much possible. For example, the amount of data that can be stored on Blu-ray and the processing power to decode it is more than adequate. Though the extra frames when not filtered correctly, can produce a somewhat video-esque quality to the whole, the improvement to motion heavy sequences is undeniable. Many televisions now have an option to do some kind of frame interpolation (what would be a frame between 2 real frames gets calculated to some degree) using technologies like Trimension DNM. Sophisticated algorithms can utilize motion compensation information to achieve a very high degree of accuracy with few artifacts.

Balls in your court now.

The number one best thing you can ever do in your situation is ask your bosses what they think the system should be doing.

Step 1: All the squirrelly business logic and the rationale behind each system you have to maintain should have a plain text description. You have to know the 'Why' before the mess of band aids that is the 'How' will ever make sense. Have your boss (or his secretary, or whoever) document it and get it to you. Do NOT do this step yourself. Repeat do NOT perform this step.

Step 2: Put out fires till someone not you finishes step 1. Start making backups of every last scrap of data you can get your grubby hands on.

Step 3: Once step 1 is done compare it to the mess. Note where the realities that are in your bosses head diverge from what is actually happening. Your job is to now create a detailed functional spec that takes what your boss says, and expand on it with what is really happening. Try to include worst case scenarios and document them as intended features.

Step 4: Have your boss and sales and marketing, and every other top level manager sign off on it. This will not happen. No two managers in your company will fully agree on what the current system is actually doing. Your goal is to figure out what sales and marketing are telling your users that your products do. Do not disregard this step or it will come back and bite you very hard.

Step 5: Once every department actually agrees on what your job really is, you will be well equipped to start the long process of fixing things. Again make lots and lots of backups. Management will sign off on step 4, then you'll fix a gaping security hole, and some customer somewhere will throw a raging fit because sales promised that they'd be able to get admin access to your databases or something ridiculous.

Step 6: Don't be an ass. When step 5 inevitably happens, explain the miss-step in communication graciously, and roll back. If you pulled not being an ass off properly, you now have a great platform to explain to management why X was a bad idea, and present an idea to fix it.

I'm a grizzled vet to your situation. If someone would've told me what I just told you when I started out, there would have been a lot less headache and stress. Hang in there, it can be an intensely rewarding experience.

A Christian perspective to this:
Read the comments bashing religion in this thread. I have not seen one single argument against religion in this thread that I had not already heard from a tenured prof in a public college/university during class (US uni, but still applies). I have no idea what the circumstances were in this instance, however I've seen plenty of Christians get up and leave class when the prof decided to go off on a half hour tirade against all organised religion because they didn't believe in evolutionary bio-genesis.

Fun fact though. Well over half of the arguments in this thread were presented to me by my (community college) ethics prof. While the rest seemed to come from the sciences departments, not a single one came during my biology class. (I was a CS major).

Depends on your credit union. I get all that and if I over draw my account by under $500 they take out a low interest loan for me, so I dont bounce anything.

Credit union is lake michigan credit union.

No, but it does means that the app checks a lot of the same boxes as an app that is not "clean and well controlled".

I think the DOE isn't necessary when the states level energy departments are doing a lot of good. Also what percentage of Americans get educated federally? I went to a state university, a county technical school, and both city and private K-12.

Granted I also don't fully agree with him on all his points, but if all those federal dollars went direct to our city, county and state education I think we'd be a lot better off.

In order from ggp, State funded energy research, every state park we currently have, state/county/city public education boards, all the housing assistance programs that are not federally based (ie most), and every road and bridge in this country that is not on an interstate. Oh you wanted private company examples? Maybe you should've paid attention to what he was actually saying instead of the trollish article summary.

Not that I'm agreeing with him on this on everything, but the fact is that he's pointing out that we can cut out a lot of useless redundancy here. No need to go all herp-de-derp.

I'm calling BS on this. I use Google to search for what I want on Amazon because 99% of the time Google takes me to what I actually want. Their personalised recommendation system is good, but their search is utter fail.

There is a debt collection agency that called the emergency line to our elevator about once every two days (my desk is near the elevator). They did give us the option to press 1 to talk to an associate, but it was an emergency phone. You could only pick it up, and press the single button to call the fire department.

Finally one day the robo dialer left a call back number, I called back, but unfortunately they had no idea how to make the calls stop since I couldn't give them the name of the person they were trying to collect on, and they couldn't look the number up unless I was calling back from the emergency phone.

They still call about once every two days. If I can get $500

Came here to say exactly this. Just bought a Toshiba Thrive off the egg because it was (after a promotion) about $70 less than I could get it for anywhere else. They will be fine.

Yeah, this is pretty standard over hyped fare here. It could as well be, "Worlds best stem cell doctor decides to live in Switzerland." I bet he's rich over there too.

Basically the US has the best medical industry because we pay through the nose for it, and (in general) the best surgeons from around the world can make a killing by living in the states. Doesn't mean that you won't find outstanding doctors that decide, hey living in Europe is more cool than a third BMW.

I RTFA. I still don't know what it was that I saw. Maybe if the author knew how to type he'd be able to get a coherent thought down before rambling on like a vagrant on amphetamines.