It can happen anyway. I let myself get promoted into management, then when someone got a wild hair for a re-org, I got shown the door when the shuffle was over.

When I looked for a new job, I specifically stayed away from management jobs. Yeah, I'm making a little less, but my job is much more stable, and I'm a LOT happier.

Bottom line is, would you be happier doing the management position than the grunt work? If the answer is no, in the long run the money is not going to make up for it.

Meh, I've got a Pentium Pro 200 (1995) beige-box that I'm still using. The only thing changed is the drive, and that's only because I always use a new drive when doing a major OS upgrade (in case I f* it up.)

I've found that properly cared for, most boxes will last a lot longer than most folks assume.

Somewhere around here I've got an old 368SX/25 (199?) notebook with an ancient copy of slackware on it. It still works, though I have no idea what to do with it. The last task it had was as a portable terminal for programming routers/switches. The battery of course is many years dead.

I don't think it will be an iPhone killer. At best, it will slow Apple's growth to a significant degree. However, with it's exchange integration, etc, it could take a measurable chunk from Blackberry.

And, as a long-time Palm user, this will likely be the last nail in the coffin for Palm. I'd decided months ago that the replacement for my 700p was not likely to be another Palm, but nothing was really grabbing me. I was resigned to go to a crackberry. Now though, I may end up an early buyer of the Droid.

My wife will almost certainly get one, since she was on the edge of buying a GPS device.

Gotta love the apologists.

"it can read it, you just gotta use this thing on another device to convert it then transfer it"

By this logic, MS notepad can read PDF files. Just open a PDF in Acrobat, select the text, copy, paste into wordpad, then save as text.

Um, seriously dude? That means it can't read it.

Yeah, seriously. Can someone make one of these without the stupid 3G, just wifi? And knock $20-$50 bucks off the price for not including it?

And putting it on the Nation's fastest^H^H^H^H^H^H^H least reliable Network is like kicking the buyer in the nuts. "Here, we have a really nice reader for you, but we're going to have to punish you for buying it."

Ironically, in my current job, I was hired as a PHP developer, but I'm spending most of my time lately writing C.

Been having a blast too.

You seem to be fixed on #6. The problem is that you don't understand #1.

#1 doesn't require that there be no competition, only that you have enough influence to control the market. MS has shown in many ways that they had or have that level of control, though I will admit it is eroding.

At the time that MS had a near 100% lock on the browser market, it was obtained because of their near lock on the OS market. That is monopoly power. At the time that MS bullied the PC makers into purchasing a license for every PC they made, regardless of what it shipped with, that was *absolutely* monopoly power.

And currently, MS still holds monopoly power over the non-apple hardware desktop OS market. You really can't convince anyone that there is a statistically significant number of non-windows desktop OS installs on PC hardware.

There's also some argument that they have monopoly in the office software market now. They hold the lion's share of the market, and those small few that do compete live and die by their ability to read/write MS format files.

As for the server side, MS never really had monopoly there, and probably never will.

See, this is why I'm seriously thinking of taking up smoking. I constantly worry that when I tell someone that I don't smoke, they'll immediately think I'm a sanctimonious asshole.

As for flying, haven't done it since shortly after 9/11. When I did it then, it really wasn't too bad, just a few soldiers with M-16s stationed here and there. But it's gotten progressively worse every year since. Then add to that the fact that the airlines have been making flying progressively less comfortable. Truly, I can think of very few things I'd like to do LESS than fly commercial air in the US. Given the choice between flying and having radiation therapy again, I'd really have to think about it a while.

Not just demos. A piece of industrial software I worked on in the 90's was usually paid for in monthly installments. Every month when you paid your bill, you got a new key. Don't pay your bill? It would go into a cripple mode. Once the final payment was made, you were given a key that would work indefinitely.