You know... Making sounds illegal is soooo 8th century BC...

I am a little confused by the article.....

"Narcotics", such as morphine or other opium derivatives, are generally considered sedatives (not stimulants). Meaning, you dont get a "high" off of heroin/morphine. Meaning, narcotics (sedatives) and methylamphetamines (stimulants) are two different categories of drugs.

Some might be in denial, but a huge part of this is simply marketing firms being paid to try to spread bad information on the iPhone in hopes of selling competitor phones. Not many people out of over 2 million are reporting what Consumer Reports is saying. Also, I own one of those "flawed" phones, and cant make it reduce bars no matter how I hold it...

I agree as long as that person has innocent intent. Consumer Reports clearly created this article to sell copies rather than push factual information. Also, the reality is that a good amount of this type of "information" that was on the newsgroups was being put there by marketing firms who are being paid to push a certain agenda. The article "Is the Iphone 4 Apple's Vista" comes to mind here...

Lets cut to the chase... If Apple is so concerned about negative information on the iPhone 4, do you honestly think that there would be a 3 week lead time on shipping the of the phone? No, they would not. Also, the antenna issue is completely overblown, and I am sure Consumer Reports knows this internally...

In my opinion, it has always been my experience that...

Real money is made on Windows
Real work is done on Linux..

In short, I do not develop .NET because it is the best development environment. I do it because their seems to be an unlimited number of businesses that will pay obscene amounts to develop for on this platform. Add in the fact that MS's incompetence has already conditioned these people to expect support contracts, and you have a nice consulting/career option.

That is just simple minded to think we do not want bubbles. We have known since the 1980's that the current path is unsustainable, but was designed to be only transitionary (aka sustain the post industrials until asia's gdp per cap improves). It was thought that the 1990's recession would be the end of the major economic cycle, but the tech bubble and 2000's re-estate bubble slowed the inevitable to this point. It appears we will not be so lucky this time...

In short... It is very easy to see a bubble, and most of us knew exactly what it was. However, to pretend that you want to predict bubbles pretends that you have sustainable system. The current system is not...

Tolerance Yes... But it is all about keeping the body off balance. There is little doubt that coffee (aka caffeine) makes you more focused and energized. I mean to suggest that over 300 years of active "research" has no validity is kind of nieve in my mind. Sometimes so called researches have a hard time remembering this...

It doesnt take a genius to figure out that the "typo" theory is BS... In 2008, it was a "computer fault"... Deflation is still very much in control at the moment, and it appears that we have only delayed it. As greece and many other sovereigns start to default on their debts, we will see the leg down... Acceptance is a b&^%*& sometimes...

Probably living on the planet where we actually develop this crap rather than just talk about it, and realize that the only reason for using big words is to try to make people think you are smarter than you really are. Dont try to cast stones when you live in a glass house...

Not to be completely an ass, but your assessment of the situation is laughable. "Cloud Computing" started with SUN micro trying to find a business model, and should have died there. Just think about what IBM is doing... They are creating a center to "educate" (aka market) to people on all of the benefits of outsourcing their server needs. If it was such a wonderful thing, do you honestly think they would have to be doing this? No...

And yes, "cloud computing" is a buzzword about making your product deployments extremely expensive, and about pretending that outsourcing is a great thing. IBM is not doing this because it is the "next great thing". They are doing it because they realize that their currently service consulting based business model is quickly burning to the ground, and that they need something else to jump to. Just like with SUN micro, it will not work and will be a complete waste of money for them... Dont believe me? Ask any of the guys at Amazon's cloud setup how that is working out for them...

I could not disagree anymore with your statement. As a consultant, I have designed and personally coded more than a dozen projects that were much larger than what the poster had. Also, it is simply impractical many times for the developers too stay simply because it is just not cost effective to do so. People generally will pay to have the new system in place, but rarely want to pay allot to maintain it. My experience is that it is generally best for me to move on, and let someone else maintain the system. To be honest, some systems have turned out poorly (typically due to late exploration of the requirements), but generally the codebases are quite simple for even a novice to maintain.

However, I have found thru experience that the key to a good codebase is how it is segmented. Abstracting complexities is extremely important to a well maintained codebase. Meaning, in my opinion, the ideal design is one where you have hundreds of simple objects (although OO principles are not critical) that make up a very complex system.

In short, I have sent a number of systems just like what the poster is talking about. They are generally poorly designed, hard to maintain, and typically very difficult to find/fix bugs on. If there is not a business case to re-design the system, however, then it is typically best to slowly start segmenting and abstracting the codebase until it starts to can reliably predict it will perform in the field.

Tests like these are flawed from the beginning, and I am sure that these scientists know this. The trick that is always played by supplement manufactures are to set the dosages much lower than what is required to reduce side effects. Meaning, for any "drug" to work, there will always be side effects.

For Ginko, the effective dosage is around 600mg per day, and I can tell you from years of experience that it works quite well at this dosage. There are many side effects in some people at this dosage, however. Also, it is a very powerful blood thinner as well, however, so this side effect can be quite dangerous for some people as well. None of this is a problem at 120mg, however, which is why it showed no improvement.

"Chief Strategy Officer" - Means he does not actually do anything, but sure does talk allot of crap that he has no clue about or how to implement...

As long as you can build servers for around $300 and colo them very cheaply, there will never be much traction on cloud computing... Also, no level of people talking about "the support costs" is going to change the fact that a good secured OS (Headless Linux boxes especially) require nearly no level of support.

I am sick and tired of pie in the sky thinkers who think they know more than their actual abilities clearly indicate.

No technology is an "end all be all", and that includes web technologies as well. Each have its own unique strengths and weaknesses. Also, any time I see words like "crowdsourcing", I want to vomit simply because they continue to try to minimize the process of solving ideas and building real products. Personally I think that in the next 50 years, the time right now will be remembered as when business managers were able to walk the earth freely assuming that they know everything. In time, however, their companies failed because they contribute very little to the overall process of creating a business or product. MS learned this very painful lesson first hand with Vista (aka No amount of business marketing/technique solved poor development), and hopefully they have corrected their issues with Windows 7.

In short.... Real people have to build these "Real" technologies, and we understand that each technology is not perfect. Meaning, the "Web OS" will never a reality unless people are willing to compromise on functionality simply because fat clients will almost always trump any web app simply due to sheer amount of resources and options available to it.

So if I am on the call with a "support representative" for 1 hour, it would cost them $52 in raw employment costs?? What type of service could possible afford this structure other than the financial services industry??

They dont outsource because they are evil. They do it because they are trying to reduce the cost of things.... Yes, the model is flawed, however, and I suspect that in 10 years a computer will be the new support representative. Then I can tell it how bad I hate the company it works for while not feeling bad about it...