No, it's because it IS a manual transmission, which makes intelligent decisions about when to shift for optimal mileage.

Some of the new Fords, namely the Focus and Fiesta (which are actually Euro models finally being manufactured and sold in the US) come standard with dual-clutch auto-shifting 6-speed manual transmissions, similar to the kinds you find on higher-end European sports cars. They're actually rated for higher MPGs than their manual counterparts. So, there is some progress being made at getting away from torque-converter transmissions at least.

Hulu ARE the copyright holders. They're 90% owned by NBC, FOX and ABC, so of course they have no negotiating power with their masters. It's why everything with Hulu sounds like a great idea at first, and is then immediately crippled by draconian DRM and advertising idiocy.

They really should have taken a page from Apple. When the music labels tried to strong-arm iTunes pricing in the early days, Apple just laughed at them and said "No. You'll take what we give you, and you'll like it." They could do this, because the iPod, and thus iTunes, was by far the most wildly popular digital music platform in the world, and they knew they had all the bargaining leverage against the labels that they needed

Netflix is in the same boat. They are far and away the biggest streaming platform around, wildly popular, and almost ubiquitous at this point. At least in North America. Who can compete with them? Blockbuster? Their platform is a joke. Hulu? Nextflix is (was) not much more per month, and Hulu still forces ads on you and has asinine and frustrating device playback restrictions on certain content, mainly because they're run by the media companies. Netflix should have all the muscle needed to force their way around the studios.

What they lack, is a strong personality like Steve Jobs in their leadership, who had no issues playing hardball with anyone, anytime.

Does this mean my MP3.com t-shirt from 1998 is back in style again?

That last sentence is what's known as a "Slashdot Cred Enhancer". It's +1 credibility point for proclaiming that you run Linux as your only OS, and +2 credibility points for actually calling it GNU/Linux.

Back in 2001, a virus stole all my TreeLoot dollars. 2 years of punching the monkey, all down the drain in an instant.

use Open::Innovation;

What I learned from this list, is all anyone cares about is Project Managers. So, who's actually going to do all the real work?

I really don't understand why a small web startup would go with Microsoft. The licensing costs when you (hopefully) start to scale up are going to kill you. There's a reason that all the big-hit startups over the past decade weren't standardizing on Windows as their web platform.

I don't think quite you get the point. Mid-size businesses generally have progressed beyond the limitations of the free ESXi and vSphere Essentials level (which is a good fit for smaller businesses), but don't have needs that require vSphere Enterprise (which, realistically, Microsoft has nothing that can compare to). At that mid-level point, Hyper-V's pricing is very attractive compared to VMware, which is still fairly expensive, even with the Standard package. And when you're already an all-Windows shop, it's an easy jump to make.

It's still a bad decision, because if you grow, you're going to be stuck with the fairly limited Hyper-V and have a more difficult migration path into VMware when you're ready to join the big-boy world. But it's still a tempting deal.

Microsoft has been making some inroads with Hyper-V with mid-size businesses that are already 100% Windows environments - especially ones that haven't quite started down the virtualization path. Their licensing is attractive to these smaller companies, compared to VMware (at least the higher-end vSphere offerings). And it's Microsoft, which they're already comfortable with.

VMware destroys Hyper-V in just about every possible way at the enterprise level, but mid-size companies often don't need all the bells and whistles that vSphere offers, even as cool as they are.

I'd imagine his name might have had a small amount of impact on his popularity.

Have you tried turning it off and back on again?