The main thing I recall about AOL and AIM are the hundreds and hundreds of floppies and later on cds that would appear in the mail or in every magazine on the news stand (even completely non computer oriented ones). We used to have contests to find innovative uses for our AOL disk stashes. The floppies made great coffee coasters (they made for a good and free supply of floppies too for the unimaginative, just format and store something REALLY useful on them) :) Later on the CDs made Christmas tree ornaments and they could be melted and warped into a number of interesting and light catching shapes. CD's also made great coffee coasters, even better than the floppies. You mean to tell me that intelligent people used to actually USE the software to communicate? Really? ;)

While it would be a nice feature if your phone company were required to notify you of overages (a smart carrier could make this a real value ad to their plans) and I don't disagree with the concept that the overage charges are way out of line given the amount they charge for your normal usage... Whatever happened to adults being responsible to watch their spending? Is your bank required to notify you when the money in your checking account is getting low or are you expected to stop writing check/using the debit card when you are out of money? With a cell phone you are spending minutes/megs of data/number of texts. Why is that so different? I have to say that as a parent with kids on a family plan I had to flat out laugh at the recent commercials from one of the major carriers... in particular one where the family is pleading for help from the superheros because their daughter "won't stop texting"... now I'm all for finding a better plan with a better price or more features etc... BUT if your kid is texting you into the poor house and "won't stop texting when you tell them to" the solution to that is... ready??? TAKE AWAY THEIR PHONE!!!! GASP! What a radical idea!!! Just my humble opinion!

Where I work this is referred to as the infamous ID-ten-T issue!

This article makes me wonder if any OS is really properly optimized for SSDs. Has there been any analysis as to whether or not windows machines properly optimize the use of solid state disks? Perhaps the problem goes beyond just linux?

The place you describe sounds like the company I work for. A former telecom related company that went through a bankruptcy due to fraud and then was bought out and merged with another big player who shall remain nameless for the purpose of this post.

At any rate I understand your position completely and would recommend to you that you check out guru.com . They post requests for freelance development work and you can post your qualifications as a freelancer there as well. They also help with setting things up to make it more likely you will actually get paid, which is always a good thing when you are doing freelance development. They have varying levels including a free account which is all I have ever needed to use.

Hope this helps, happy hunting.