Then came Outhouse and suddenly one of the most hilarious and baseless internet myths of all time was true.
...for about a month, after which Microsoft fixed it.
And a few months later, somebody figured out how to make Mutt run an attached shell script automatically (or something of the sort), thus wiping the smug look of satisfaction of the face of thousands of *nix users who swore that sort of thing could never happen on a system that wasn't designed by Microsoft.
Yes, it's true that for a short while there was a security hole in a Microsoft product that allowed malware to propagate automatically, but it's also true that 99.9% of malware requires explicit user interaction to do it's thing, and the people who are willing to blindly give it will do so regardless of what operating system they run.
Using phrases like "Darwinian selection" or "Darwinian evolution" implies there must be another kind of evolution at work, a process that can be described with another adjective. For instance, "Newtonian physics" distinguishes the mechanical physics Newton explored from subatomic quantum physics. So "Darwinian evolution" raises a question: What's the other evolution?
Lamarckian Evolution, which was beginning to gain popularity before Darwin published the Origin of Species, and may have paved the way for his work. It has since been discarded because (surprise) our current understanding of genetics provides a more accurate model of how characteristics were inherited from one generation to the next, but at the time, even Darwin recognized it as a valid theory.
Darwin was a slightly flawed individual, living as he was in a time when social values were "Victorian". He would naturally had a view of the world that was somewhat tainted by a patriarchal society that was imperial, sexist and racist. And creationists are often found to be using this as evidence against his theories.
Why, hello, kettle! Nice to see you today! Hey there, pot! What's happening?
Honestly enough, I've never really understood any but the most literal creationist's objections to evolution.
Of course, if you get too literal, you run into other problems. After all, there are passages in Genesis that make reference to God setting up the pillars that support the four corners of the earth... While I'm sure there were still plenty of them in Darwin's time, I doubt you'd find even the staunchest creationists today that still believe that the earth has corners. So somehow they have to pick and choose which parts are literal and which are not. I suppose they use the same logic that they used to decide that homosexuality is still a heinous sin, but the restrictions on eating pork and seafood, when it's acceptable to sell your daughter into slavery, and most of the other old testament laws no longer apply in today's society.
As far as dinosaurs go, maybe you just weren't paying attention... Most of them claim that our dating mechanisms aren't accurate. They claim that dinosaurs lived side by side with humans up until the flood or until the expulsion from Eden. Others claim that the dinosaurs never really existed at all, and that fossils are part of the earth God created, to test our faith (or planted by the devil to mislead us). I've also heard the claim that our current measures of time and human lifespan were not applicable until the expulsion from Eden, meaning that Adam and Eve may have lived happily in Eden for millions of years before the beginning of the supposed 6,000 year recorded history in the Bible. (Although, you're starting to get away from strict Creationism there, because that interpretation can also be stretched to imply that the "seven days" of creation actually lasted about 4 billion years by our current measurements.)
I am surprised to see a high ranking Scientist make a statement like this, though. I agree with the reasoning behind it, but I had assumed that the Scientific community had already gotten away from using the term "Darwinism". The only times I can ever remember hearing it used were either 1) Religious types who use the term as a sort of straw man for attacking evolutionary theory, or 2) attempts to apply Darwin's ideas to areas outside of biology, e.g. "Social Darwinism". Is "Darwinism" really still in widespread use among scientists? Or is this more of an attempt to convince non-scientists to give up a term that scientists have already abandoned long ago?
This guy's answers are hilarious. They only make sense in a universe where everything is inherently locked down, and your customers are idiots to be abused.
In other words he used to have the same position with a cell phone carrier? This guy would fit right in at Verizon.
I don't think that the soldiers should get legal protection for their acts, and it doesn't sound like the GP does either:
For the... soldiers (who should be tried in court (military or civil) before their identities are relaeased.
I think his point was to keep them from being the target of vigilante retribution, which I agree with. The soldiers are not above the law, and should be held responsible for their actions. But those who would condemn them are not above the law either.
Well, this is a first. I never thought I'd hear somebody complaining about getting raped on peripherals and cables and then talk highly about the Apple Store in the next breath. Apple is far worse than any of the others - not only do they not even carry inexpensive cables, they will go out of their way to sell you cables you don't need (they once sold my wife a $15 cable that was already included in one of the other items she purchased) or purposefully redesign their products so that only their $50 cables will work (e.g. video out on the iPhone / iPod classic.)
Overall, I'd say it's nothing to be scared of as long as the entire company embraces it. It's when portions of the employees are working regular weeks and some are on 9/80 that things tend to fall apart.
Interesting, I would have thought the opposite. When I had a 9/80 schedule, the place I worked allowed you to choose between standard 8 hour days, 9 hour days with a day off alternating weeks, and 10 hour days with a day off every week. I loved having the extra day off every other week, and in the middle of summer when I had a lot going on over the weekends and the days are long anyway, I would switch to 10 hour days. But there were a lot of people who worked there that didn't like waking up early or staying at the office late, and would just as soon put in their 8 hours and get out. If we were forced to go all one or the other, I'm fairly certain the people on 9/80 or 8/80 schedules wouldn't have won out.
My wife used to work at a company where they would have mandatory "summer hours". They would work 9 hour days on Monday through Thursday and get a half day on Friday. While my wife enjoyed it, most of her friends there always complained about it. I got the impression that it was a decision the bosses made without consulting any of the employees so they could have their Friday afternoons for golf.
I'm not that fond of it, however, because of the way they handle holidays: every holiday is still charged as 8 hours, so during the week of a holiday you have to pull a 10 hour shift.
I remember running into this at a past job, however, as I recall it wasn't much of an issue unless you were taking multiple days off. The thing is, technically in a 9/80 schedule, one of those days is still an 8 hour day, otherwise it would be 9/81. The place I worked, the convention was to have the Friday you were working be the 8 hour day, so Monday through Thursday were always 9 hour days and Friday was either an 8 hour day or off. However, if you were going to be taking a day off during the pay period, they would just move the 8 hour day to the day you were taking off, and you had to work 9 hours that Friday. If you were taking more than one day off in a pay period it became more of an issue, although if I was taking a longer break, I generally tried to work it so that one of the days off was the Friday I didn't work anyway.
Somebody with a 0.81 BAC probably has to worry more about a visit with a coroner than a judge or a slick attorney, whether they've been driving or not.
Perhaps China is looking to ensure that their local manufacturers get/stay on the boat. Or maybe they are hoping to speed up the process- It's been a while since I got a new phone, so I have no idea whether the standardization mentioned in that article has arrived yet, or when it might.
Flying a plane is easy. Piece of cake. Even a fighter plane. (I imagine*)
Now landing... That's the trick.
* Admittedly, the only real basis I have for saying this is the many hours I spent playing "Chuck Yaeger's Advanced Flight Trainer" and "Mig-29" on a 386 and P-90 respectively.
The feature has valid uses and not so valid uses. I saw instances of both at my last job. As I recall, even if the recipient does have Outlook, the recall shows up in your Inbox, so you can still see that a message was recalled, and I think you can still see the contents of the message. (I don't remember for sure now - maybe that's only if you read the email before the recall was issued).
No, it's not very useful when you discover a sudden sense of remorse over the flame you just sent to half the company. But it can be handy if you send out an email with a wrong date in it, or accidentally hit Ctrl-S instead of Shift-S while you are typing. All in all, it's about as reliable as delivery confirmation, which also requires cooperation for the recipients MUA, and probably more useful.
The summary is a little misleading, but from the article, the "notice" was in response to the reply-all's taking down their server, not the cause of it. And it doesn't sound like the notice was sent via email. TFA describes it as a "cable".
A cable sent last week to all employees at the department's Washington headquarters and overseas missions warns of unspecified "disciplinary actions" for using the "reply to all" function on e-mail with large distribution lists.
Wow, how many people really look at the UID on every post they read just to see how long the guy's been around? Most of the time I barely notice the name of the user, much less the ID. If I recognize people at all, it's usually because of their.signature - the basis for both my current.sig and my habit of changing it every few months.
But even still, I find the whole thing rather humorous in a way. For a long time, Slashdot didn't even have user IDs or user names. You used to be able type whatever you wanted to have displayed as your name on every post you submitted. And when they first added accounts, people didn't always rush to sign up for one right away. I can think of a few very notable Slashdot regulars from the days before accounts existed that still have ID's in the 5000+ range (Bruce Perens comes to mind), and at least one with a user ID in the 100,000+ range (John Carmack). Actually, if I remember right, the whole reason they even started displaying user IDs publicly was because of the number of impostors pretending to be one of the early high profile users - do a user search for "Perens" and you'll see what I mean. (Oops - I guess he's not quite in the 5,000+ range. My bad...)
The moral of this story? Besides just being able to talk about how long I've been reading Slashdot (which I swear I normally never do), there's a good chance that any UID under 10,000 has probably been around, on average, about the same amount of time. And even if it's not that low, it doesn't really mean anything. And really the whole thing is kind of silly. (Although I suppose if I was offered the chance to buy a 2-digit UID for $100, I'd probably take it. <sigh>) And is it really so surprising that people who have been visiting this site for a long time might have more to say than just "Get off my lawn you young'uns"?
Maybe we should go back to the days when they didn't display user ID's publicly. I wonder how many people would really be up in arms if they tried it?
I can think of one reason, especially if (Hello? Google guys? You listening?) you can have both profiles open in separate windows at the same time. The first example that comes to mind is that I have two Google accounts, one for personal stuff and one for work stuff. Each has it's own email, calendar, documents, etc. Every now and then I'll be logged into one account and need something that is in the other account, so I have to log out, log into other account, get what I need, log out again... You can sort of short cut the process using incognito windows, or using two separate browsers, but neither of those feels like a real solution to me. There are enough times that I've thought that it would be nice to be running two (or more) browser windows each with it's own independent "cookie space" that I'd really like to see somebody add this as a feature.
Beyond that, why assume that multiple browser profiles must automatically belong to different users? If they are simple enough to manage and use (something nobody has really done so far) there's no reason that a web developer couldn't have one profile for testing and one for email/ calendar/ other browsing. Or even a separate profile for each client. Maybe you need to use a proxy server on your laptop when you connect from certain locations. Again, this is something that I have always accomplished in the past by using separate browsers - e.g. Opera goes through the proxy, while Firefox connects to the internet directly.
I think there is an assumption by most people that a cell phone is a piece of hardware, like a cd player or consumer electronic device, that will never change and always be the same as when you got it. People don't seem to expect much in the way of updates for them because that would require "computer knowledge". Smart Phones are a bit of a different beast, because people expect to be able to do many of the same things that they can do with a computer. In particular, you typically want to exchange information between your smart phone and a computer, and if the sync software doesn't keep up with changes on the computer side, it can get really messy.
I had a Treo 300 some years ago, back when HandSpring was still a separate company, and Palm still had a decent OS. I used it for a really long time, and to this day it is possibly the best phone I have ever owned. But the entire time that I used it, I don't think they updated the Palm Desktop software once. I remember having a lot of problems getting it to work when I switched to XP. Regardless of desktop OS, contacts would pretty much only sync reliably with Outlook, and even then, "reliable" was something more akin to "fails in predictable ways" than "works without hassle". I can't remember how many other headaches I had to endure at the hands of Palm Desktop, but I still shudder at the thought of it.
It's sad what Palm has squandered. That 7 year old phone could run circles around my BlackBerry 8800 in terms of installed and third party software. (Blazer was pretty crappy, but somehow still far and away better than RIM's built in browser of 6 years later.) Even the data network speed was nearly on par. My BlackBerry still can't sync contacts with Thunderbird. Their desktop software isn't really any better than Palm's, but it at least has the saving grace that my BlackBerry has never crashed, so I have never had to use it. The only real points in favor of the BlackBerry are 2 third party software packages that didn't exist when I had my Treo - GMail and Opera Mobile. I'd love to have a more modern version of my Treo, but I can't bring myself to buy another Palm product. They've spent the last five years running around in circles, and I am not ready to believe that they've suddenly found their direction now.
I appreciate the thought, but does he ask if the video games are for the kids or the adults before refusing to sell them? Obviously, the fact that there are video games with "M" ratings shows that video games aren't made just for kids but too many people assume so anyway. Is somebody who automatically assumes anyone with a kid in tow is buying the game for the kid, necessarily doing any better then the people who don't know about the ratings in the first place?
Sorry, I'm not trying to be too critical of somebody I've never met. I appreciate his attempts to educate, and I fear that most of the time his assumption is probably correct. Still, the belief by so many people that video games are kids' toys that you must "grow out of" at some age really gets to me sometimes.
Where were you able to buy a home furnace that cost you less than 2000? My wife and I got a huge discount on our furnace (she's an architect) and we still paid a fair amount more than that. And our house is not very large. Unless you live in a condo or a small townhouse (or perhaps Florida) you're going to pay a lot more than that for a furnace.
At any rate, I don't think that the standard is all that much lower for consumer electronics in general. Last year my parents finally replaced their TV, which was only slightly younger than the furnace that my wife and I replaced around the same time. I have a 200 disk Sony CD changer that is 10 years old, and recently gutted a 22 year old CD player (that still worked) to use the case for a home theater PC.
For computer hardware the standard is definitely lower, but I think that is more due to the assumption that most of the time the item in question will be obsolete before it wears out anyway. Is it really worth building a computer to last 10 years when more than 95% of the people who buy it will replace it within 3 regardless of whether it still works? How many of those 95% would change their mind about the purchase if the item in question cost 15% more because the manufacturer decided to use higher quality parts. There are computers that are made to last that long - I have a 200 MHz Pentium Pro in the basement that still works - but you have to be willing to pay a premium for them.
In the end, consumer electronics are really not all that different than any other product - you get what you pay for. Making a product well costs money. If you buy a cheaply made product because you want to save a few bucks, that's your decision, but you shouldn't act surprised if it doesn't have the same life expectancy. The same is true in your example as well. If you had purchased a $50 Sanyo microwave from Bed Bath & Beyond five years ago, you probably wouldn't have gotten the same response.
Last I looked (admittedly some time ago), Virtual PC was really only useful for running Windows guests on Windows workstations. VMWare's closest competing product (VMWare Player) has already been free for a while. I'm not particularly familiar with VirtualBox, but from what I understand, it's very similar to VMWare Workstation, is it not?
VMWare's primary breadwinner seems to be the server virtualization market. While Xen can provide solid competition on Linux servers (albeit not nearly as easy to use), there doesn't seem to be any serious competition for windows servers. I suspect that Workstation stopped being a significant source of income for them some time ago. The only people I know who still use Workstation got their licenses for free because they were already spending so much for their server products.
Internet Explorer lost ground because Microsoft abandoned developers. Unless Microsoft can win back developers, it doesn't matter how many alternatives there are, assuming they remain sufficiently compatible with the same standards. As long as developers prefer to work with Firefox, Chrome or Safari, it doesn't really matter how much share of the end user market IE has, it will never again have the same dominance it did in 2001.
Just because they can't learn from their parents doesn't mean that they couldn't learn from other octopi. If every newborn octopus spent the first two years of his life following around a three year old octopus, they could learn quite a bit. What they lack is not the ability to reproduce without dying, but rather the instinct to congregate with other individuals for mutual benefit. This instinct has developed in many unintelligent species, and has failed to develop in some other intelligent species, so I would say things aren't completely hopeless for them, but I would expect that if they don't already have any social tendencies, it would take an awfully long time for them to develop.
If Ted Stevens had made an otherwise coherent argument where he happened to characterize the Internet using a new variation of otherwise common technical slang, I suspect that very few people would have even noticed, and I doubt that we'd still be talking about it two years later.
But if you look at the whole speech, you get several other wonderful nuggets like: "Ten movies streaming across that internet, and what, what happens to your own personal internet? I just the other day got- an internet was sent by my staff at ten o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all the other things that are going on in the internet commercially!" In that light, it's a lot harder to think of him as a generally clueful person who happened to misuse a bit of jargon that he was not acquainted with. In that light, the "Series of Tubes" comment, rather than being a sign of incompetence itself, is just the easiest bit for the world to latch onto, and repeat forever and ever. Sort of like President Bush's "Internets".
Slashdot Mirror
And a few months later, somebody figured out how to make Mutt run an attached shell script automatically (or something of the sort), thus wiping the smug look of satisfaction of the face of thousands of *nix users who swore that sort of thing could never happen on a system that wasn't designed by Microsoft.
Yes, it's true that for a short while there was a security hole in a Microsoft product that allowed malware to propagate automatically, but it's also true that 99.9% of malware requires explicit user interaction to do it's thing, and the people who are willing to blindly give it will do so regardless of what operating system they run.
Lamarckian Evolution, which was beginning to gain popularity before Darwin published the Origin of Species, and may have paved the way for his work. It has since been discarded because (surprise) our current understanding of genetics provides a more accurate model of how characteristics were inherited from one generation to the next, but at the time, even Darwin recognized it as a valid theory.
Why, hello, kettle! Nice to see you today!
Hey there, pot! What's happening?
The ironing is delicious...
Of course, if you get too literal, you run into other problems. After all, there are passages in Genesis that make reference to God setting up the pillars that support the four corners of the earth... While I'm sure there were still plenty of them in Darwin's time, I doubt you'd find even the staunchest creationists today that still believe that the earth has corners. So somehow they have to pick and choose which parts are literal and which are not. I suppose they use the same logic that they used to decide that homosexuality is still a heinous sin, but the restrictions on eating pork and seafood, when it's acceptable to sell your daughter into slavery, and most of the other old testament laws no longer apply in today's society.
As far as dinosaurs go, maybe you just weren't paying attention... Most of them claim that our dating mechanisms aren't accurate. They claim that dinosaurs lived side by side with humans up until the flood or until the expulsion from Eden. Others claim that the dinosaurs never really existed at all, and that fossils are part of the earth God created, to test our faith (or planted by the devil to mislead us). I've also heard the claim that our current measures of time and human lifespan were not applicable until the expulsion from Eden, meaning that Adam and Eve may have lived happily in Eden for millions of years before the beginning of the supposed 6,000 year recorded history in the Bible. (Although, you're starting to get away from strict Creationism there, because that interpretation can also be stretched to imply that the "seven days" of creation actually lasted about 4 billion years by our current measurements.)
I am surprised to see a high ranking Scientist make a statement like this, though. I agree with the reasoning behind it, but I had assumed that the Scientific community had already gotten away from using the term "Darwinism". The only times I can ever remember hearing it used were either 1) Religious types who use the term as a sort of straw man for attacking evolutionary theory, or 2) attempts to apply Darwin's ideas to areas outside of biology, e.g. "Social Darwinism". Is "Darwinism" really still in widespread use among scientists? Or is this more of an attempt to convince non-scientists to give up a term that scientists have already abandoned long ago?
Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs.
It's called something like "Octoshape Plugin for Flash Player"
In other words he used to have the same position with a cell phone carrier? This guy would fit right in at Verizon.
I don't think that the soldiers should get legal protection for their acts, and it doesn't sound like the GP does either:
I think his point was to keep them from being the target of vigilante retribution, which I agree with. The soldiers are not above the law, and should be held responsible for their actions. But those who would condemn them are not above the law either.
Well, this is a first. I never thought I'd hear somebody complaining about getting raped on peripherals and cables and then talk highly about the Apple Store in the next breath. Apple is far worse than any of the others - not only do they not even carry inexpensive cables, they will go out of their way to sell you cables you don't need (they once sold my wife a $15 cable that was already included in one of the other items she purchased) or purposefully redesign their products so that only their $50 cables will work (e.g. video out on the iPhone / iPod classic.)
Interesting, I would have thought the opposite. When I had a 9/80 schedule, the place I worked allowed you to choose between standard 8 hour days, 9 hour days with a day off alternating weeks, and 10 hour days with a day off every week. I loved having the extra day off every other week, and in the middle of summer when I had a lot going on over the weekends and the days are long anyway, I would switch to 10 hour days. But there were a lot of people who worked there that didn't like waking up early or staying at the office late, and would just as soon put in their 8 hours and get out. If we were forced to go all one or the other, I'm fairly certain the people on 9/80 or 8/80 schedules wouldn't have won out.
My wife used to work at a company where they would have mandatory "summer hours". They would work 9 hour days on Monday through Thursday and get a half day on Friday. While my wife enjoyed it, most of her friends there always complained about it. I got the impression that it was a decision the bosses made without consulting any of the employees so they could have their Friday afternoons for golf.
I remember running into this at a past job, however, as I recall it wasn't much of an issue unless you were taking multiple days off. The thing is, technically in a 9/80 schedule, one of those days is still an 8 hour day, otherwise it would be 9/81. The place I worked, the convention was to have the Friday you were working be the 8 hour day, so Monday through Thursday were always 9 hour days and Friday was either an 8 hour day or off. However, if you were going to be taking a day off during the pay period, they would just move the 8 hour day to the day you were taking off, and you had to work 9 hours that Friday. If you were taking more than one day off in a pay period it became more of an issue, although if I was taking a longer break, I generally tried to work it so that one of the days off was the Friday I didn't work anyway.
Somebody with a 0.81 BAC probably has to worry more about a visit with a coroner than a judge or a slick attorney, whether they've been driving or not.
Most of the major cell phone manufacturers in the US and Europe had already agreed to do this over a year ago: http://news.cnet.com/Pros-seem-to-outdo-cons-in-new-phone-charger-standard/2100-1041_3-6209247.html
Perhaps China is looking to ensure that their local manufacturers get/stay on the boat. Or maybe they are hoping to speed up the process- It's been a while since I got a new phone, so I have no idea whether the standardization mentioned in that article has arrived yet, or when it might.
Flying a plane is easy. Piece of cake. Even a fighter plane. (I imagine*)
Now landing... That's the trick.
* Admittedly, the only real basis I have for saying this is the many hours I spent playing "Chuck Yaeger's Advanced Flight Trainer" and "Mig-29" on a 386 and P-90 respectively.
The feature has valid uses and not so valid uses. I saw instances of both at my last job. As I recall, even if the recipient does have Outlook, the recall shows up in your Inbox, so you can still see that a message was recalled, and I think you can still see the contents of the message. (I don't remember for sure now - maybe that's only if you read the email before the recall was issued).
No, it's not very useful when you discover a sudden sense of remorse over the flame you just sent to half the company. But it can be handy if you send out an email with a wrong date in it, or accidentally hit Ctrl-S instead of Shift-S while you are typing. All in all, it's about as reliable as delivery confirmation, which also requires cooperation for the recipients MUA, and probably more useful.
The summary is a little misleading, but from the article, the "notice" was in response to the reply-all's taking down their server, not the cause of it. And it doesn't sound like the notice was sent via email. TFA describes it as a "cable".
Wow, how many people really look at the UID on every post they read just to see how long the guy's been around? Most of the time I barely notice the name of the user, much less the ID. If I recognize people at all, it's usually because of their .signature - the basis for both my current .sig and my habit of changing it every few months.
But even still, I find the whole thing rather humorous in a way. For a long time, Slashdot didn't even have user IDs or user names. You used to be able type whatever you wanted to have displayed as your name on every post you submitted. And when they first added accounts, people didn't always rush to sign up for one right away. I can think of a few very notable Slashdot regulars from the days before accounts existed that still have ID's in the 5000+ range (Bruce Perens comes to mind), and at least one with a user ID in the 100,000+ range (John Carmack). Actually, if I remember right, the whole reason they even started displaying user IDs publicly was because of the number of impostors pretending to be one of the early high profile users - do a user search for "Perens" and you'll see what I mean. (Oops - I guess he's not quite in the 5,000+ range. My bad...)
The moral of this story? Besides just being able to talk about how long I've been reading Slashdot (which I swear I normally never do), there's a good chance that any UID under 10,000 has probably been around, on average, about the same amount of time. And even if it's not that low, it doesn't really mean anything. And really the whole thing is kind of silly. (Although I suppose if I was offered the chance to buy a 2-digit UID for $100, I'd probably take it. <sigh>) And is it really so surprising that people who have been visiting this site for a long time might have more to say than just "Get off my lawn you young'uns"?
Maybe we should go back to the days when they didn't display user ID's publicly. I wonder how many people would really be up in arms if they tried it?
I can think of one reason, especially if (Hello? Google guys? You listening?) you can have both profiles open in separate windows at the same time. The first example that comes to mind is that I have two Google accounts, one for personal stuff and one for work stuff. Each has it's own email, calendar, documents, etc. Every now and then I'll be logged into one account and need something that is in the other account, so I have to log out, log into other account, get what I need, log out again... You can sort of short cut the process using incognito windows, or using two separate browsers, but neither of those feels like a real solution to me. There are enough times that I've thought that it would be nice to be running two (or more) browser windows each with it's own independent "cookie space" that I'd really like to see somebody add this as a feature.
Beyond that, why assume that multiple browser profiles must automatically belong to different users? If they are simple enough to manage and use (something nobody has really done so far) there's no reason that a web developer couldn't have one profile for testing and one for email/ calendar/ other browsing. Or even a separate profile for each client. Maybe you need to use a proxy server on your laptop when you connect from certain locations. Again, this is something that I have always accomplished in the past by using separate browsers - e.g. Opera goes through the proxy, while Firefox connects to the internet directly.
I think there is an assumption by most people that a cell phone is a piece of hardware, like a cd player or consumer electronic device, that will never change and always be the same as when you got it. People don't seem to expect much in the way of updates for them because that would require "computer knowledge". Smart Phones are a bit of a different beast, because people expect to be able to do many of the same things that they can do with a computer. In particular, you typically want to exchange information between your smart phone and a computer, and if the sync software doesn't keep up with changes on the computer side, it can get really messy.
I had a Treo 300 some years ago, back when HandSpring was still a separate company, and Palm still had a decent OS. I used it for a really long time, and to this day it is possibly the best phone I have ever owned. But the entire time that I used it, I don't think they updated the Palm Desktop software once. I remember having a lot of problems getting it to work when I switched to XP. Regardless of desktop OS, contacts would pretty much only sync reliably with Outlook, and even then, "reliable" was something more akin to "fails in predictable ways" than "works without hassle". I can't remember how many other headaches I had to endure at the hands of Palm Desktop, but I still shudder at the thought of it.
It's sad what Palm has squandered. That 7 year old phone could run circles around my BlackBerry 8800 in terms of installed and third party software. (Blazer was pretty crappy, but somehow still far and away better than RIM's built in browser of 6 years later.) Even the data network speed was nearly on par. My BlackBerry still can't sync contacts with Thunderbird. Their desktop software isn't really any better than Palm's, but it at least has the saving grace that my BlackBerry has never crashed, so I have never had to use it. The only real points in favor of the BlackBerry are 2 third party software packages that didn't exist when I had my Treo - GMail and Opera Mobile. I'd love to have a more modern version of my Treo, but I can't bring myself to buy another Palm product. They've spent the last five years running around in circles, and I am not ready to believe that they've suddenly found their direction now.
I appreciate the thought, but does he ask if the video games are for the kids or the adults before refusing to sell them? Obviously, the fact that there are video games with "M" ratings shows that video games aren't made just for kids but too many people assume so anyway. Is somebody who automatically assumes anyone with a kid in tow is buying the game for the kid, necessarily doing any better then the people who don't know about the ratings in the first place?
Sorry, I'm not trying to be too critical of somebody I've never met. I appreciate his attempts to educate, and I fear that most of the time his assumption is probably correct. Still, the belief by so many people that video games are kids' toys that you must "grow out of" at some age really gets to me sometimes.
Where were you able to buy a home furnace that cost you less than 2000? My wife and I got a huge discount on our furnace (she's an architect) and we still paid a fair amount more than that. And our house is not very large. Unless you live in a condo or a small townhouse (or perhaps Florida) you're going to pay a lot more than that for a furnace.
At any rate, I don't think that the standard is all that much lower for consumer electronics in general. Last year my parents finally replaced their TV, which was only slightly younger than the furnace that my wife and I replaced around the same time. I have a 200 disk Sony CD changer that is 10 years old, and recently gutted a 22 year old CD player (that still worked) to use the case for a home theater PC.
For computer hardware the standard is definitely lower, but I think that is more due to the assumption that most of the time the item in question will be obsolete before it wears out anyway. Is it really worth building a computer to last 10 years when more than 95% of the people who buy it will replace it within 3 regardless of whether it still works? How many of those 95% would change their mind about the purchase if the item in question cost 15% more because the manufacturer decided to use higher quality parts. There are computers that are made to last that long - I have a 200 MHz Pentium Pro in the basement that still works - but you have to be willing to pay a premium for them.
In the end, consumer electronics are really not all that different than any other product - you get what you pay for. Making a product well costs money. If you buy a cheaply made product because you want to save a few bucks, that's your decision, but you shouldn't act surprised if it doesn't have the same life expectancy. The same is true in your example as well. If you had purchased a $50 Sanyo microwave from Bed Bath & Beyond five years ago, you probably wouldn't have gotten the same response.
Last I looked (admittedly some time ago), Virtual PC was really only useful for running Windows guests on Windows workstations. VMWare's closest competing product (VMWare Player) has already been free for a while. I'm not particularly familiar with VirtualBox, but from what I understand, it's very similar to VMWare Workstation, is it not?
VMWare's primary breadwinner seems to be the server virtualization market. While Xen can provide solid competition on Linux servers (albeit not nearly as easy to use), there doesn't seem to be any serious competition for windows servers. I suspect that Workstation stopped being a significant source of income for them some time ago. The only people I know who still use Workstation got their licenses for free because they were already spending so much for their server products.
Internet Explorer lost ground because Microsoft abandoned developers. Unless Microsoft can win back developers, it doesn't matter how many alternatives there are, assuming they remain sufficiently compatible with the same standards. As long as developers prefer to work with Firefox, Chrome or Safari, it doesn't really matter how much share of the end user market IE has, it will never again have the same dominance it did in 2001.
Just because they can't learn from their parents doesn't mean that they couldn't learn from other octopi. If every newborn octopus spent the first two years of his life following around a three year old octopus, they could learn quite a bit. What they lack is not the ability to reproduce without dying, but rather the instinct to congregate with other individuals for mutual benefit. This instinct has developed in many unintelligent species, and has failed to develop in some other intelligent species, so I would say things aren't completely hopeless for them, but I would expect that if they don't already have any social tendencies, it would take an awfully long time for them to develop.
If Ted Stevens had made an otherwise coherent argument where he happened to characterize the Internet using a new variation of otherwise common technical slang, I suspect that very few people would have even noticed, and I doubt that we'd still be talking about it two years later.
But if you look at the whole speech, you get several other wonderful nuggets like: "Ten movies streaming across that internet, and what, what happens to your own personal internet? I just the other day got- an internet was sent by my staff at ten o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all the other things that are going on in the internet commercially!" In that light, it's a lot harder to think of him as a generally clueful person who happened to misuse a bit of jargon that he was not acquainted with. In that light, the "Series of Tubes" comment, rather than being a sign of incompetence itself, is just the easiest bit for the world to latch onto, and repeat forever and ever. Sort of like President Bush's "Internets".
Indeed...