Why did Van Halen insist that RMS wear brown when he sat on the bowl?

Which is why it was so begging to be made into an app for a smartphone.

Yeah, as long as the person who got beaten is removed from the list. It'd be a bizarre Sex Offender List Ponzi Scheme.

Ha ha I knew fanbois could get irrational about Jobs, but the one who gave him credit for curing cancer really went above and beyond.

It's not just cutting corners to save money. In many cases it's refusing to move to a different technology because the profit comes from something the technology consumes (which the end-user must continue to purchase). Vacuum cleaner bags, ink cartridges, proprietary laptop batteries, etc.

Dyson's marketing frequently tells the story of how James Dyson couldn't sell his invention because companies manufacturing vacuums didn't want to introduce a bagless vacuum and lose the revenue to be had selling bags. (I'd include a link to a mention on the official Dyson site, but the damn thing is all Flash.)

Every Dyson vacuum owner I know of (including myself) is something of a Dyson fanboi, and Dyson employs very Apple-like tactics selling its products: They are more expensive, but they actually perform better than all the competition, they are well-designed, arguably "sexy," and, most importantly, they tend to perform so much better than the other available products that the end-user winds up with an emotional attachment to the product or brand because the product met or exceeded their expectations and experience. Part of convincing people to pay more for a better product is making the product so good that the people who bought it without needing to be convinced can help you convince the next batch of consumers. It's making products that can turn customers into fanbois.

I'm annoyed by Apple fanboism like many other people here, and there are manifestations of it that are not rational at all, but at the core a lot of it is exactly like my Dyson fanboism: I wanted a product that did X in the most elegant and useful way possible, and holy shit does this product ever do X! I'll never buy anything else to do X again!

The other reason things changed is that, at the time of release, XP was 2000 with DRM and optional new pretty windows. XP running SP3 (or even SP2) is considerably more stable than it was at release, even if it is still an obviously direct descendant of NT->2000 under the hood. So, it's not really funny how things change unless you think a lot of updates and fixes over the course of several years making a product more appealing is funny.

I agree with both short lists of elements, but I think this pair (for good and bad teachers, respectively) needs to be expanded because there's more to it than the Iron vs Lenient Fists that it implies.

Which is to say that all of my best teachers were adept at being approachable and friendly while also maintaining the authority to be taken seriously by (all but the most deliquent) students.

The worst teachers erred on one side or the other. Some created an atmosphere where they could be treated as peers (and were often charismatic or generally thought of as "cool" by students) which undermined their authority when they finally did have to lay down any law, be it punishment, reward, policy, whatever. The rest were nothing but authority figures which made them less effective with most students because they were just another incarnation of "The Man."

My assessment of my own best and worst teachers is of course subjective, but it does include plenty of adult reflection after the fact, and the general observations apply to several teachers I had between 4th grade through undergraduate college. (I graduated from college in 1996. I recognize that the abililty to have "adult reflection" doesn't necessarily coincide with any age or event.)

Pretend I challenged your geek credibility as a thinly-veiled excuse to enumerate my own, which naturally outnumbered yours.