Science Fiction without the science is fiction. Laser guns and space ships do not science make. If they'd gone to explain a bit how some of this stuff worked, it would qualify more to me as science, but Luke's light-saber is no more explained than Gandalf's staff. Star Wars would better be classified as Fantasy.

In the long run, nobody cares. Initially everyone cares because there's a big negative blow-up in the press, the stock takes a beating, and everyone spins their heads off. Then the quarter ends, the media loses interest, the stock comes back, and it's business as usual. And the real potential losers, the customers, never cared at all, they just want their latest fashions. The six people who might care do their shopping elsewhere, but they're statistically irrelevant. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to see what's shiny and new at Fry's.

Oh, don't be ridiculous. PDFs have the benefit of being approximately as portable as Word documents while being harder to change. I love PDF. I never send customers anything BUT PDFs any more, because I've been burnt too often on someone making a change to my "document" and then insisting that was how I sent it to them.

Your response is brilliant.

Oh incidentally, you owe me $1 for agreeing with you. If you want an agreement with more substance, that'll be $1.50.

Or chrome.

...it wasn't for 20 days, and it wasn't coding, but eight years ago I spent a week in a 6x12 unventilated wiring closet (door locked and left closed for "security reasons") doing detailed firmware upgrades, configurations, and security audits and traffic tracing on network switching infrastructure, plus tracing a whole lot of wires. The temperature in the room was around 100 degrees, there was no chair so I had to sit on the floor... next to the gaping holes where the utilities entered the building. The customer told me: "don't worry about the rats, they are more scared of you than you are of them. And oh yeah be sure to wash your hands immediately when coming out of that room before touching anything."

Made me think that the "security reason" was "the receptionists are scared of the rats".

and their actions verge on discrimination.

Discrimination on the basis of what? That you are a druggie, a drunk, or just a dick? I don't think those are protected statuses.

An ASP.NET C# programmer wouldn't jump in and start telling a C++ device driver how to do his work.

You must be new here!

STP isn't the perfect solution to all problems. Just last month I had a customer with a core network of brand-new 54xxz switches, with STP turned on (because I've been bitten by not having it on before). The problem is that STP does precisely nothing for you if your STP switch is plugged into a dumb switch, and the loop is on the dumb switch -- the result just looks like a lot of traffic.

HP has something called "loop protect" which helps in circumstances like this, and now we have that turned on, too.

And yes, I know the "correct" solution is to throw away all the dumb switches, but for various political/cost/stupid reasons, we can't. The customer has been around for seveal years, and the only reason they have nice core switches now is because they had other storms and we made them buy proper core equipment.

Welcome to Economics 101.

Price isn't controlled by the cost of production, it is far more influenced heavily by the consumer's willingness to pay.

What Microsoft is doing is trying to monetize the value that consumers get from their product. To wit: it is worth $$ to customers to run more than three applications, so Microsoft wants a cut of that.

Where cost of production only becomes a serious influence on price is where the cost of production exceeds the consumer's willingness to pay for the product. To wit: you can't buy 2GB spinning-platter hard disks any more, because they'd still cost $30 or $40 to make, and for $100 you can buy a half-terabyte drive, and for $2 you can buy a 2GB flash drive. So there's no market for 2GB hard drives. So nobody makes them.

My guess is that they are trying to create (or enter) a market where cost is a big decision driver; this will get them some sales in a market where previously they had almost none, and will not steal too many sales from other, higher priced markets.

Seen some IT people spends hours and hours trying to get something to work, the competent Joe IT fixes it in five minutes.

Don't be so quick to dismiss those who take hours and hours to fix something. If you've never seen something before, you SHOULD take the time to understand it, and what is wrong. Random, unplanned, unknowledgable poking around can (and usually will) make things worse.

I can't tell you how many times I've been called in to look at some system which is broken, production critical, and has some self-important management type jumping up and down beside it screaming about the end of days should this not be up RIGHT NOW WHY ISN'T IT UP YET!!!! and taken hours to examine and fix.

Many times I've fixed these things, while having to listen to stories of "the competent Joe IT" who could fix it in five minutes, all with a thinly veiled suggestion that I was some kind of moron because I can't do what "Joe IT" does.

Many times when I've gotten feedback later, it turns out that while "Joe IT" could regularly fix it in five minutes, after I'm done, it doesn't break.

Doing it quick is not always the same thing as doing it right.

Of course, I'm just as human as Joe is. When pressed for time I've done the same thing as Joe -- bandaid it up quick and hope for the cycles to go back and fix it properly.

And there are a subset of really complex problems that I've seen and fixed before, so I can blow in and fix correctly in five minutes. Those are the ones that really make your reputation.

I have to admit my first thought was: when the hell did PC Magazine become a technical programmer's magazine?

Don't know if you can block ads. I don't care, I personally don't see how a third-party wanting to pay the web site that I'm looking at some money in order to get their message in front of me is bad. It puts money in the pocket of those generating the content I want to read without it having to come out of my pocket. Being in the internet service industry myself, I understand that bits always cost money, and generally speaking something which helps my customers pay the bills I send them is OK in my book.

But if you don't want to look at ads, then yes Chrome is probably not for you (today).

It doesn't do pop-up/under/whatever, that's good.

Or perhaps they should use an "external browser" and one "internal" one.

You offer this solution in jest, but in fact it is what I advocate to my users.

When Chrome came out, I tried it, and was impressed enough that my personal browsing is now done almost exclusively with it.

However, I still have a bunch of old, stupid network devices and other random corporate applications that either insist on, or just plain work better with, IE as a browser. So my "corporate" browsing is done through IE.

It also makes things easy to separate out visually; ie the IE window is safe to leave up when the boss/customer unexpectedly looks into my cube. :)

Interestingly, this meant that for me, Firefox was the browser left out in the cold -- between IE and Chrome, I no longer need it. I still have it installed, for the one-in-a-$BIGNUM site which insists on it, but it practically never gets started. My usage of it is so infrequent that it seems every time I start it up I have to almost immediately restart it because of some upgrade it has done.

For most people there is nothing to hold you back from running 64-bit Linux."

Except the lack of a compelling reason to run 64-bit Linux on the desktop.

Seriously, what can I do on a 64-bit desktop Linux computer that I can't do on a 32-bit Linux computer?