I'm thinking he should read "War and Peace", or perhaps the Old Testament.

It also appears to be in-store only (Black Friday special?). Foo.

Speaking of New Madrid, I'd be a whole lot more worried about that going off again, than a modest 5.6 earthquake, as it has the potential for ruining much of the Midwest.

New Madrid would like to disagree with you.

Sure, it's a couple hundred miles away but, due to the geology of the midwest, you WILL feel it the next time it goes off. (H*ll, the last it went off, it rang church bells in Boston, and knocked over chimneys in Maine.)

iOS IMAP and the gmail iOS interface are crippled, as neither supports push.

As BitZtream said, the exchange sync (aka, "google sync") is the way to go, as you get push email, and also synchronized contacts and calendars. The only downside is that google sync doesn't support contact groups -- all of your contacts get lumped into one big pile (if you want contact groups, use iCloud -- iCloud contacts is the one really good thing about iCloud).

I'll wait for the Z68000.

In many places, it's not that easy. Money for towers is just a part of the problem. I imagine that people screaming, "Oh NOES! Radiaaashun!", are probably the major obstacles these days. For example, as much as people like to whine and moan about AT&T coverage in San Francisco, here is one small example of what AT&T has to deal with (yes, it's a bit old, but likely still 1000% valid): http://cdn.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/07/06/BAT01E8QTQ.DTL

Other examples:
http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/15/west-virginias-quiet-zone-becomes-refuge-for-those-on-the-run/
http://gawker.com/372440/?tag=television (this is for wifi, but I'm sure the sentiment extends to cellular)

Uh, you're in violent agreement with The123king. There's nothing he said that conflicts with what you wrote.

Really? The figures for Firefox show a nearly flat, but downward trend. The numbers for chrome show a significant upward trend.

Don't like w3schools? Let's try another site. Oh, look, that one shows the same downward trend for Firefox, too.

And a third site (warning: flash required) shows the same thing, too: Firefox has a downward trend.

I like Firefox, too, but the devs actions seem to be driving users away. I'm only using FF because of the addons (but I'm getting really tired of some breaking every month or two).

My friends and co-workers are slowly moving away from Firefox to chrome. While personal anecdotes may be fun, they're not all that useful.

lol, nope. While I may occasionally have my moron moments, I'm not a total idiot. I do have protection. :)

The main fileserver (which is on 24x7) does have hot-swappable raid; if a drive dies, I just pop it out and put in a new one. I do backups of that because the rebuild takes 1-2 days, and, with my luck, (1) I'll get a power failure that lasts one minute longer than the UPS (which won't last anywhere near 1-2 days), or (2) one of the other drives will fail (two drives are from the same manufacturing batch). (For that matter, I really, should replace the UPS battery, as it's been more than a couple of years since I last replaced it ....)

No, you misunderstand.

Because I've got a multi-terabyte array to backup, I've got to use either another NAS or some external USB/FW raid box. A plain single drive is just not big enough. While I could automate this, I do NOT want a backup process that is constantly powered (for HD wear reasons) or constantly connected to the LAN or power (to prevent power transients or lightning from possibly damaging anything).

And, yes, there is an element of laziness involved. To perform a backup, I've got to haul everything out, connect it up, and run a backup script. (And, since I'm still using a 100BT LAN, even differential backups take a while.)

Maintenance is still an issue.

As time goes by, one collects more and more "stuff". In my case, I've got 5+ TB of "stuff" (mostly tivo'd shows), and this is just going to grow with time. For me, maintenance is a hassle, because simply backing up by copying now takes on the order of 1 day. Also, I can't use the cloud because, even ignoring the storage costs, 5+TB of bandwidth is going to be slow, expensive, or both.

Start with a vanilla Win7 x64 installation. Install FF, no addons, no plugins, no nothing.

Start FF and login to gmail. Leave FF alone. That's it.

On FF6 and earlier, FF will slowly grow and grow and grow, until it finally runs out of memory and dies. I haven't measured the memory consumption rate recently but, on FF4, the memory consumption rate was approximately 1MB/minute, on average (sometimes it wouldn't grow for a while, and sometimes the usage would spike upwards, but the overall average was around 1MB/min).

Yes, something that google is doing is triggering an issue with FF. However, this memory growth doesn't appear on chrome.

I haven't used FF7 long enough to be sure, but the FF people claim that this has been fixed (bug 645633).

The commented BIOS listing did exist (I used to have a copy), although I think it was an extra cost manual (under $100, IIRC). It came in the usual cloth-covered-heavy-cardboard binder.

As others have said:

* These days, phone numbers are something you enter once, and forget about. Computers and phones now remember them for you.

* Phone number pads are, arguably, "more obsolete" than calculator/computer numeric pads, and so the world should move to the "789" keypad style. (Here, "more obsolete" is relative, as we'll still have telephone keypads for years to come.)

* Even if you're right, the majority of people don't really care. And, if either keypad were to change, the public outcry and complaints would likely be of biblical proportions. Bottom line: nothing's going to change.

If it really bothers you, pop off the numeric keypad keys on a PC keyboard, and remap the scan codes. With MS Windows (from XP onwards, IIRC), it's pretty easy to remap scancodes deep down in the keyboard driver, using the registry. I do this to swap the caps and ctrl keys.