Which ISP was that? They have never owned nor operated the largest ISP. That honour has gone to Telecom New Zealand (no relation to Telstra) for at least the past decade.

As much as I would much prefer using OSS, I have to concur with the parent. Windows on my laptop just works perfectly. On Linux however I have problems with graphics (ATI's drivers are not that great, resulting in X crapping itself, occasionally requiring a reboot, once a week at least) and problems with suspending randomly not working correctly (requiring a reboot and losing my work in the process. Even when ATI drivers crap itself in Windows, Windows does a good job of isolating the problem and reintializing the driver. Suspend/hibernate/etc works 100% perfectly under Windows (I can't recall an occassion where it has failed to work). Add in the fact that all the software I use have Windows ports, it's a no-brainer to use Windows (even though I actually use a lot of OSS on top of that). Don't judge people for using Windows -- for many of us it is the only OS that works reliably with the hardware we have on hand.

I think Microsoft is doing very well in terms of backward compatiability when you compare certain products of theirs to those offered by other companies. One example I'm sure many people can relate to is Windows. It is the only OS I'm aware of that can run many apps compiled in the '90's on the current version without requiring a lot of hacking. I still play games from the '90's on Windows 8, many of which work fine out without any tweaking. Try that with Apple, Linux, et al. While Microsoft hasn't always done well with all their products (IE, Outlook, et al comes to mind), there are several products (such as Windows) where they are doing very well and they should be acknowledged for that.

That was my thought also. I'm in New Zealand where I'm around 150-200ms away from most of the major US-based sites and I'm not complanining. First world problems I suppose.

When a call for your number comes in, the incoming call is NOT transmitted nationally. Only in the GSM-cell that you are actually in is the signal transmitted. So, the system has to know in which cell you are to be able to "call" your phone.

Not quite, a GSM switch will keep track of which Location Area (LA) a mobile device is in. A LA can contain a few or upwards to several hundred cells. Using Vodafone's GSM network in New Zealand as a point of reference, their largest LA covers all of Auckland's (our biggest city with 1.5m population) CBD with around 150-200 sites while in rural areas a LA generally only has around 50 sites.

When a phone is being called, all the cells in the LA will send out a broadcast request to all mobile devices in the LA and the mobile device will respond by contacting the nearest cell. This is quite useful as it reduces the need for the mobile device to check in frequently — the mobile device only needs to check in with the network when it moves into a new LA.

I'm not too familiar with how UMTS or LTE works but I presume the same principles applies but I may stand corrected.

Last year I was foolish enough to embark on a migration of several mailboxes (several gigs of 10k+ emails each) from Gmail to my self-hosted Dovecot IMAP storage server. I was shocked at the shoddy state of Gmail's IMAP implementation which was (and probably still is) riddled with bugs including bugs where certain actions (like deleting an email) might randomly just not work without throwing an error.

http://weblog.timaltman.com/archive/2008/02/24/gmails-buggy-imap-implementation
http://www.playingwithwire.com/2009/02/some-frustrating-gmail-imap-gimap-bugs/

These bugs made the migration quite difficult since I had to figure out Gmail's quirks and implement some workarounds to faciliate the migration. Prior to this experience I thought all the issues I had with Google's IMAP was due to poor client-side software but after my experience I have realised Google only follows the standards when it suits them and breaks the standards when it suits them. Sounds just like Microsoft doesn't it?

In fact they're no better than Microsoft, Apple, et al when it comes to standands complaince -- and in this case I know Google actually has, by far, the worst IMAP implementation I have ever seen from any leading Mail provider. I'm thankful I no longer use Google (or indeed any propiriety solutions) for anything important -- all important data is now stored on a standards-compliant server running open-source software.

Good for you. Here in New Zealand our carriers only push updates a few times a year, if at all. I had an HTC Android with a extremely annoying bug which my carrier (Telecom NZ) took 6 months to push an update for. I ended up just cracking my phone and putting on Cyanmodgen only to have my carrier release the update a few weeks later. I basically traded issues I had with the stock software with issues I had with the Cyanmodgen software so I was still pretty unsatisfied with the phone. My experience with Android's overreliance on carrier updates has been so bad I'm actually considering WM8 or Apple for my next smartphone. At least with Apple (and WM8 I'm hoping?) you get your updates directly from the horses mouth instead of having to wait for your carrier to push it at their leisure.

I have been using Windows 8 for the last few weeks and it seems to work just as well as Windows 7 did on the same machine. I suspect most of the issues the OP is having is just due to change anxiety due to for example the new Metro interface. Metro does take a while to get used to but like the ribbon it grows on you after a while. I think there are better things to rant about than Windows 8 to be honest.

I think all smartphones (definitely Android phones) display an "emergency call" button on the lock screen.

I've has a couple of android phones, and neither have had that.

My Android phone has an emergency call button on the lock screen. However I think it only appeared when I switched to the CyanogenMod firmware so I guess HTC doesn't include the button in their firmware. YMMV.

Metro apps open in seconds for me and that's on a laptop with a 5400RPM hard drive. YMMV I guess.

The majority of the phones in the US run Symbian.

Do you have a source for this? I personally find this hard to believe.

People still use Symbian?!

In suburban Auckland, New Zealand I pay NZD $0.2388/kWh for energy plus NZD $0.3750/day for the connection. That converts to USD $0.1863/kWh and $0.2925/day.

My last bill, after prompt payment discount, cost NZD $110.53 (USD $86.2252) for 456 kWh which works out to a overall cost of $0.1891/kWh including the daily fee and discount.

The Web needs a practical HTML standard that documents how you DO write HTML, not how you theoretically SHOULD write HTML.

That's a nice idea of standardizing based on how people do write HTML. However if we go down that train of thought, whose method of writing HTML should we standardize? Should we have a standard that adpots how Microsoft does HTML, or how Mozilla does HTML, or how Apple does HTML, or, worse, a hybrid/combination of these?

At the end of the day the only practical way to develop a useful standard is to get everyone together to agree on a standard and have commitment from everyone involved to actually implement the standard as specified.