I've been watching HP's slide for a while, wondering what they were thinking. I look at their LaserJet III, IV, and V printers and compare them to the trash they sell these days, and I blows my mind. Or how about, their obvious attempts to wipe the memory of 3COM's products away? Over the last 8 months, I've run into an absolute brick wall finding utilities and firmware updates for some legacy 3COM equipment. http://infodeli.3com.com , once my go-to site, is no longer of any use to me. If HP is trying to drive me away from 3COM to HP, the opposite will likely happen. Don't get me wrong -- I like the ProCurve line and like their warranty terms, but if HP is intent on continuing down the path they are on, who can say if the warranty will mean anything in a year?

You say that like it's a bad thing.

I try to be mindful of circumstances and go appropriately. I especially try to avoid feeding into traffic waves.
http://trafficwaves.org/

Platters = mirrors and windchimes. I attack them with a grinder if they really need to be wiped.
Magnets = good fun and usefulness
Logic boards = into a box at work until I call for the next pickup from the free PC recycling company
Aluminum chassis and aluminum platter spacers = aluminum recycling bin
Screws = trash

I noticed this phenomenon about a decade back. Used to be in the 70s and 80s, when you went to Walt Disney World in Florida, it had this solid "golly gee" factor when talking about the future, especially at Epcot or Tomorrowland at the Magic Kingdom. I don't pick up on that so much now; in fact I pick up on a definite retrospective and/or nostalgic feeling when I go there. It's like, now that pretty much any thing is possible technologically, talking about something that's not present but possible is just an exercise in talking about something that will be here when the engineers figure out how to make it profitably.
To paraphrase Yogi, "The future ain't what it used to be."

Stable? Yes
Ugly? Yes
Last release? 2001.
Still widely used in the 2000's? Definitely, though declining precipitously.
Good or bad, it should have been on the list.

That would sure be nice, but where I live has absolutely nothing of the kind available.

Yeah, like I could sell a house in this economy. Really, though, I bought a house, signed the papers, lost my job the following day, and then found the job I'm at (true story). I'm not moving for a while.

I really, truly, *hope* you are kidding with the sleeping-under-the-desk thing.

I drive 60 miles a day for work, whether I work 15 minutes or 14 hours. I'm all for whatever has me driving one less day, since that's 60 miles off my car and gas tank at a whack. Actually, 4 longer days would work really well, since that would put a sizable amount of my work day outside of normal office hours, so I'd get fewer people contacting me for help during my work day, which translates into more concentration.

How will I use two mice then? I usually have two computers with their monitors close to each other, one set up for right-hand mouse and the other set up for left-hand mouse, so if I need to do two different things on the computers, I can sit between the monitors and grab a mouse in each hand and glance back and forth and alternate what I'm doing. There's no way I'm the only one doing this...

Leinster foresaw this only 63 years ago. Go look it up; it's a good and amazingly prescient story.

That's where being older can be either a curse or a benefit. If you can age but still retain the ability and desire to learn new things, you have the potential of possessing several assets newer workers don't have:
1) A sense of perspective. This problem may be bad, but you've likely seen worse.
2) More emotional maturity. The ability to deal with non-IT types and not lose your cool is invaluable.
3) Deeper troubleshooting senses. Familiar or not, if the device's optical drive doesn't work, you're not likely going to shout "Defrag!".
4) A grasp of the way computer systems in general work. Bits are bits. Directory systems are directory systems. Permissions are permissions. The implementations change, but if you're around long enough, you will have seen something like it before.
5) You've learned that specializing is great for the short term, but if you want to keep it up, that can be a real bear. A CCIE from 1999 won't still be a CCIE in 2009 unless they've been studying for the last decade. But that 1999 CCIE is likely a very good networking tech.

Doctor Dan Streetmentioner called, and he wants royalties for your use of his tenses!

Well, of course! It just doesn't sound the same when one says "I wouldn't touch that with a 3-meter pole."