OK, here's the slightest failing I've felt numerous times: Old laptop whose graphics under WinXP were just fine, if a little slow. Install Linux with your favorite desktop (LXDE works best for me on that machine). Machine is under moderate load. Click and drag a window to move it. When you release the mouse button, the window is still following the cursor, because the mouse-button-up event was not handled properly.

JWZ complained abut this sort of thing (events not being presented to the handler in proper order) when he was working on the Unix/X version of Mozilla. ISTR him saying that it was a problem wih the protocol itself, which would explain why the problem persists almost 20 years alter.

We know about GNU/Linux and GNU/Hurd. ISTR someone cobbling together a GNU/BSD at some point. Any others? GNU/Solaris? GNU/HP-UX? GNU/DR-DOS?

Talk about bricking your device!

The same thing happened with HP/UX 9. HP tried all sorts of things, including free consulting to get customers to upgrade to 10.x, but the don't-fix-what-isn't-broken crowd kept driving their dump trucks to Cupertino. They finally ended it by pointing out that there was no way to make it Y2K compliant without breaking backwards binary compatibility.

And if you think they will, look at when Microsoft originally wanted to EOL WinXP, and when they actually did.

I just took a 21" CRT to the recycling place. In 1995, it cost about $2200 new. In 2001, my employer gave it to me as scrap when our building was closed and they decided that a lot of that stuff was cheaper to give away than to move to some warehouse across the country. (Plus it was a tiny bit of good will that the local management could show the laid-off employees when the Big Guys were being callous pricks kicking us to the curb while we were still going to 9/11 funerals.)

ObTopic: $400 is an expensive monitor these days, but it wasn't that long ago that $400 wouldn't buy you a useable SVGA monitor.

Send it to me. I wouldn't mind having a headless <5W NIS server for my home network.

It is when you run old clunky hardware like I do. LXDE runs very nicely on my ten-year-old Dell C640 laptop.

Too true. 6500K CFLs are so "cold" looking that they make me shiver.

The problem I have with Crees is th form factor. We have recessed lighting in our kitchen, mostly R30, and the fixtures are 40 years old, certainly superseded by newer standards. Regular R-30 bulbs fit perfectly. The Cree equivalents take some work to fit right, especially the ones with the built-in bezels.

That said, I love the light they produce. It's a bit brighter, and only slightly whiter than the light the 65W incandescents put out, at a fifth the power consumption.

I have one question for the pick-your-color manufacturers: Have you ever consulted an interior designer? The colors of paint, fabric, etc. in a room are all picked with specific lighting in mind, both natural and from lamps. Start futzing with it, and things will start looking crappy. Ever wonder why a hotel room looks fine under CFLs but the same CFLs in your bedroom make everything an ashy grey? It's because the colors in the hotel room were picked specifically because they complement the color spectrum put out by the CFLs.

I'm looking forward to the day not far off when I can have all LED lighting in the house, but I have no desire to make radical color changes (except for special applications people have mentioned ike aids for the deaf).

IBM support still sucks. You spend more time proving to them that you're entitled to support than you spend getting support. Customer number? Site code? How about I give you the number of dollars we've sent you, and then we can talk about how you can't find those other numbers in your system.

I went through this yet again earlier this week. At one point I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying, "Four months ago, my company wrote you an eight-figure check for worldwide licensing and support. If that's not in your database, maybe you should switch to Oracle."

I see dead OSes. They're everywhere. They don't know they're dead.

Too bad they didn't go the other way too: us.konicaminolta.com, uk.konicaminolta.com, etc. Were I registering domains for a big company selling to consumers, I'd register anything they might reasonably guess. (Plus use geolocation to guess for them.)

OTOH, people use Google (etc.) so much that the actual domain names almost don't matter--just click on what Google found. (I still can't remember our public library's convoluted domain name even though I go to the site a couple times a week.)

And it persists. My kid's teacher's email address is @brrsd.k12.nj.us.

I've had the same experience with disks. I've had brand-new drives fail in under 200 hours of use, and I have 20-year-old 1GB drives that are built like tanks and still work fine, even though they make that irritating buzzy bearing noise.