1.My first attempt at purchasing an HDTV LCD (Westinghouse) drove me nuts because even if it was advertised as HDMI, it would not pass sound. A week later it died, so I returned it.
2. My second and third attempts (Magnavox and Memorex, both 19") worked fine with our two Xbox 360s and our HDMI upscaling DVD players.
3. I swapped the 19" Memorex for a 32" Olevia. It worked fine with the HDMI upscaling DVD players but the Xbox 360s could not get a secure link. That TV is still with us, with the 360 connected to it with component cables, my son doesn't mind. After very little research I found dozens of documented cases of people that couldn't get the 360 to connect to that specific 32" Olevia model. Olevia TVs have a USB port for firmware updates, but to date there is no firmware update for that specific model.
4. I swapped the 19" Magnavox with a 37" Olevia, which has dual inputs for everything. Both the 360 and the HDMI upscaling DVD players connected at the same (same HDMI cables that failed with the 32" Olevia) and everything works beautifully.
5. I also noticed a separate issue with the upscaling DVD players that we were using (Philips, we got them for about $55 at Target right before Xmas). Whenever we switched inputs and tried to go back to that HDMI channel, it would not recognize the link and forced us to restart the DVD player. The 360 never had that issue with the five TVs we have tried to date.
To add insult to injury, those cables are expensive if you buy them at retail. A friend just picked an upscaling DVD player with HDMI at Walmart last night for less than $40, then almost flipped when he saw that the cable would cost almost the same.
I don't recall the size restriction, but it is now illegal for a retailer to display a non-ATSC capable television for sale without a clearly marked disclaimer/warning about the switchover.
While the fines aren't massive, they do show that the FCC takes retailer compliance with its rules seriously. Those rules, which went into effect on May 25, 2007, force any company selling analog-only TV sets to display a prominent "Consumer Alert" in "a size of type large enough to be clear, conspicuous and readily legible" that is located on the set itself or immediately adjacent to it. The Alert warns potential buyers that the set will not receive over-the-air broadcasts after February 17, 2009 without a converter box.
My knee-jerk reaction was to search for hello (b1946ac92492d2347c6235b4d2611184) and yes, I did get results. It was the only one I could find thru Google.
Bean bag lap desks
on
Lap Desks
·
· Score: 2, Informative
These are inexpensive, the last two I bought were about $20 apiece. One was plastic, with a non-slip soft rubber/plastic mat glued on its top surface. The other one was wood. Both had a beanbag underneath, which adapts to the shape of your thighs. These are barely wide enough for a laptop and a small mouse.
In my first job as a civilian (ex Army here), my non-compete forbid me from working for another company doing the same specific work within a 50-mile radius and for 18 months. It was a planned move on their part, it was a satellite communications company in Virginia with just one competitor in the area. There was nothing that they could do to stop me from working for their competitor, but I would not be able do to for them the same kind of work for the first 18 months. This was perfectly legal, it was disclosed in my offer letter in very plain language.
The funny thing is that one of those noncompetes actually saved me from a messy situation once. An ex employer reached out to me to get him out of some mess I would rather not get into. I was able to tell him that no, my noncompete in my new job forbid me from doing that kind of work for anyone within 50 miles. My previous employer was just 5 miles away, tough shit. I did invite them to call my current boss and see if he could fit the work in my schedule. That's the last I heard from them.
If you have survived 15 years as a code monkey, then you have had your fair share of successful and failed projects and you have met pretty much the whole spectrum of manager types in the industry. Simply try to do as the managers from your past that you consider successful (or less disastrous).
Whatever you do, try to remember that one of your most important jobs as a manager is to act as a shit shield so your employees can do their jobs without outsiders screwing with them.
The bigger web-based companies usually try to be proactive about this. I am positive that I have received advance warning from at least Amazon, eBay and Pay Pal whenever a new user agreement would kick in.
Those agreements are redacted by lawyers and go through countless revision cycles before they are approved. It doesn't hurt them to use their next sales email to point out that effective whatever date, new terms kick in, a link to read the new terms, and instructions on what to do if you do NOT agree with these. For example, if you don't agree with the new terms, you are allowed to close your account without penalty.
That's how I see it, as bang for the buck. I would rather pay $60 for a game like Oblivion, that almost a year later still keeps me entertained, than pay $50 or less for a game that takes 15-20 hours to beat.
My first weekend was like that, up and down nonstop. Why? Because the tech installed the splitter backwards.
I think another reason why it is so stable is that this county was one of the first national test beds for cable modems. They basically tore down most of the cable tv infrastructure for this county. I have no clue if this is how the rest of the country received cable internet, or if they simply plugged in new equipment and kept the old cables.
Comcast, 16MB up, 2 MB down, is about $55 including the modem rental. This is a $10 add-on to the basic service, which they claim is 8 MB down, 1MB up. In reality it is about 13MB down, 1MB up. During busy hours it will drop as low as 6 MB. Anything under 6 MB usually means there is something wrong.
I have had Comcast since 2000, I have had maybe 4 real outages, none lasted a day. It is so stable that I freak out if it as much as loses sync.
Their only real problem is that until FIOS got here, they were the only game in town, so for example when the download caps nonsense started, we had no choice but to STFU. Now that there's competition, you don't hear a peep about either download caps, or about hosting from home.
Exactly, I just don't understand why one would want to mess with something that has worked so well and across so many varied systems.
I went from a Tandy Color Computer 2 to a VAX 11/750 (WATFIV), then PCs, Mac Plus, VAX 11/780, more PCs, then alternating between Macs and PCs. The last thing that went through my mind was the column counts, except for WATFIV of course (first 8 columns and last 8 columns had to be kept blank).
Nowadays, I use iTerm and it works very well, regardless of the kind of machine I connect to. My only real source of aggravation is that in that rare occasion that I need to type a DOS command in a Windows server, the clipboard can't be accessed with keystrokes, it has to be done through menu choices.
Every day, people use Google to learn more about an illness, drug, or treatment, or simply to research a condition or diagnosis. We want to help users make more empowered and informed healthcare decisions, and have been steadily developing our ability to make our search results more medically relevant and more helpful to users.
Although we have some talented people here with extensive backgrounds in health policy and technology, this is an especially complex area. We often seek expertise from outside the company, and health is no exception. We have formed an advisory council, made up of healthcare experts from provider organizations, consumer and disease-based groups, physician organizations, research institutions, policy foundations, and other fields. The mission of the Google Health Advisory Council is broadly to help us better understand the problems consumers and providers face every day and offer feedback on product ideas and development. It's a great privilege for us to work with this esteemed group...
The list of advisory council members is pretty varied. They span the full spectrum from medical research, HMO evil empires, mainstream medicine and all the way to patient advocacy.
Done. It was an interesting call actually. The first time they simply hung up on me, the second time they tried to move me to their triple bundle (premium digital, VoIP, internet) for 24 months.
I told her the triple bundle was a triple miss:
1. I got a 2-for-1 deal with Sunrocket, and I still got 11 months of the "free" year to burn. 2. I have been a loyal comcast customer for 10 years, it is not fair to ask me to sign a 2-year service agreement. 3. They still make me take channels I no longer want.
I am about to (as in, in the next 10 minutes) cancel it too, since there is no appeal left. Why spend so much on premium packages when so much of my viewing time falls on either the big three networks or the documentary channels?
This Mac Book Pro 2.33GHz Core 2 Duo had a couple kernel panics that I could blame on Parallels, but since the last update I am yet to have Parallels kill OS X. Every time that Windows has killed Parallels the rest of OSX stays fine. There's two of us at the company with identical laptops, same versions of parallels, windows and development tools, and we are both seeing Parallels stable.
Because the best windows PC I have ever used is this Mac Book Pro. OSX is just the icing on the cake.
My license of Parallels was $79, and I had a retail license of XP, no need to purchase a full license of XP. When 3.0 comes out, I qualify for a competitive upgrade, so it will be $50 ($40 if I order before launch date).
When I get a blue screen of death in XP, all I lose is VS.net, VSS, SQL Server management studio and whatever browser windows I had open. Everything else in the machine is OSX and running fine.
When my boss gets a call from a customer about technology X, whatever the hell it means, he knows there's two of us that are ready to hit on it, be it Windows, OS X or something that runs as a BSD/Linux program. Before that he would have had to get defensive the second the conversation strayed away from Windows.
My previous work laptop was a Dell. It was a cheaply built, unrealiable, pathetic piece of dog shit. It was sad sad, because I only purchase Dell servers and I couldn't believe that the same company that sold me those super reliable servers also sold that horrible laptop. I am glad that I was given the flexibility to order two a Mac Book Pro as a replacement.
The end result of having parallels is the ability of carrying one laptop that, right out of the box, is already running two operating systems without rebooting. Then you can start and stop additional operating systems, each in its own VM, without disturbing the host machine.
I get thousands of spams per month into my Gmail account (376 spams caught since May 23), yet I only get to use the spam button maybe once a day.
I got 28,252 emails stored in my account, dating back to 2004 and I have never lost an email in that account or felt that the spam was anywhere close to overwhelming.
My Google apps for domains mailbox has accumulated 2303 spams in less than one month, that one averages maybe 2 emails per day that I have to mark as spam manually.
Employment in the financial sector will bring upon you the greatest scrutiny you will see outside of the defense and law enforcement fields. It is nothing remotely new, it is not a post 9/11 thing or a conspiracy to strip us off our constitutionally given rights. It's nothing more than due dilligence to make sure that the wrong person is not put in a postion to exploit or harm a financial system.
I have a long and illustrious history of caffeine addiction. It did not help that both my family and my godfather's family owned coffee plantations (I was born and raised in Puerto Rico). I was drinking coffee by the time I was 6.
I think the worst was the $7/day Starbucks habit during my dot com years. Company went down, I had to find a job elsewhere and instead of having a Starbucks across the street, I found myself in the one lousy spot in Arlington, VA where you actually have to walk a 1/4 mile to find a Starbucks. Right around that time I found out I was lactose intolerant, which completely ruined the cappuccino magic for me, lactase be damned.
I started buying drip coffee from places closer to the office, but I was never happy. None of these people mastered the concept of consistency.
Right around that time pod coffee started becoming popular. I asked the wife to get me a machine so I could take a shot at it. I had already found non dairy liquid creamers that I really liked, so I was out of cappuccino withdrawal.
When we got the machine I experimented a lot. I stupidly assumed that the most expensive pods would taste better. Wrong.
The more I paid for a pack of pods, the worse it tasted. They either tasted burned out, or the extra flavoring was too strong while the coffee part was weak. Then I decided to try in the opposite direction: check the cheaper stuff.
Lucky me, I found Senseo Douwe Egberts Dark Roast pods (Amazon B0001ES9FI). Taking into account that I would not be wasting coffee like when I was using drip makers, the price per dosage was in the order of 25 cents a cup instead of $2 or worse. Small problem: finding them.
My wife works at Target, so whenever that specific kind of pod arrives, she tries to buy me as much as she can. If I am almost out of pods and there are none at the local Target we have to check all over county. When I found them at Amazon the price was literally identical, plus shipping was free. Now I buy my monthly supply in one shot.
Now, there's nothing spectacular about these pods. They taste strong but not burned. The machine makes sure that each cup is very consistent, which is all I want. On top of that, there's nothing to clean, just discard the used pod and rinse the holder with some cold water. There is also no waste like with drip machines, since you brew up to two cups at a time and that's it.
All they do is make the fast forward so painfully slow that you just don't bother using it. While the Comcast PVR FF goes up to 8X, I doubt that the FF on the on demand channels is anywhere close to 2X.
On top of that, most of the shows on the non-premium on demand channels (the "free" areas within Comcast's Channel One) have plenty of ads already.
These days it seems it is too much to ask people to bother reading the instructions. This whole search engine optimization as a business model movement is going too far. I have a small blog (1500 or so original articles spanning 5 years) and I have never had trouble with Google indexing me. As far as I can tell from my traffic logs, most of my articles get indexed within 48 hours of publishing. I don't do anything special, I don't even have custom meta tags, just whatever is placed by Wordpress.
I never print photos. The only reason I keep a printer is because once a month or so I am stuck printing one or two pages and it is easier to keep that piece of crap printer around than to drive the mile and a quarter to the closest office depot to have them printed.
If I was printing a lot of stuff, I would go back to laser, no doubt about it. Brother makes a nice little printer that goes for less than $100, the 1000 page toner cartridge are about $80 new, a lot less if refurbished.
I use both SQL Server 2000/2005 and MySQL. There is no way in hell that you can compare the out-of-the-box admin tools that ship with MySQL with the Enterprise Manager+Query Analyzer in SQL Server 2000 and the SQL Server Management Studio in 2005. This is why most people use phpmyadmin, Aqua Data Studio or an equivalent third party tool instead of the CLI interface.
Also, installing SQL Server 2000 and/or 2005 is pretty effortless. Just run the installer and the basic defaults will do for most people. When you say "The fact that I can download a copy and get it running in about 20 minutes is the best part." you are implying that you can't install SQL Server in 20 minutes. Sure, you can't download it because it isn't free, but installing it takes just a few minutes.
That said, I am a fan of MySQL. It is a great product and the price is right. Even paying for commercial support is affordable. SQL Server is awesome, but I don't agree with the pricing for the developer and standard editions. SQL Server 2005 developer should be free, and SQL Server Standard should cost no more than $300.
There's another thing I really like about MySQL is that all of the database objects for one database are not clumped together into one file like SQL Server does (SQL Server allows you to spread out one database across many files, but MySQL saves each object within the database as one or more files). This has not caused me to lose data (yet) in the past 7 years, but it did create some hairy situations.
My last HP printer was on sale for less than $40. If the ink runs out before it is 90 days old, I'll exchange the whole printer. If it is more than 90 days old and the cartridge costs within 5% of the cost of a new printer, I will probably grab the new printer and hand off the used printer to somebody else and tell them "here's a free printer, try to use generic ink first, which costs half as much." If the printer breaks, it was free so my friend is only losing $20 instead of $40.
I print so little nowadays that my main concern is that the printer will simply stop working due to lack of use.
Slashdot Mirror
The HDMI compliance issue is very real.
1.My first attempt at purchasing an HDTV LCD (Westinghouse) drove me nuts because even if it was advertised as HDMI, it would not pass sound. A week later it died, so I returned it.
2. My second and third attempts (Magnavox and Memorex, both 19") worked fine with our two Xbox 360s and our HDMI upscaling DVD players.
3. I swapped the 19" Memorex for a 32" Olevia. It worked fine with the HDMI upscaling DVD players but the Xbox 360s could not get a secure link. That TV is still with us, with the 360 connected to it with component cables, my son doesn't mind. After very little research I found dozens of documented cases of people that couldn't get the 360 to connect to that specific 32" Olevia model. Olevia TVs have a USB port for firmware updates, but to date there is no firmware update for that specific model.
4. I swapped the 19" Magnavox with a 37" Olevia, which has dual inputs for everything. Both the 360 and the HDMI upscaling DVD players connected at the same (same HDMI cables that failed with the 32" Olevia) and everything works beautifully.
5. I also noticed a separate issue with the upscaling DVD players that we were using (Philips, we got them for about $55 at Target right before Xmas). Whenever we switched inputs and tried to go back to that HDMI channel, it would not recognize the link and forced us to restart the DVD player. The 360 never had that issue with the five TVs we have tried to date.
To add insult to injury, those cables are expensive if you buy them at retail. A friend just picked an upscaling DVD player with HDMI at Walmart last night for less than $40, then almost flipped when he saw that the cable would cost almost the same.
I found this at Ars Technica:
My knee-jerk reaction was to search for hello (b1946ac92492d2347c6235b4d2611184) and yes, I did get results. It was the only one I could find thru Google.
These are inexpensive, the last two I bought were about $20 apiece. One was plastic, with a non-slip soft rubber/plastic mat glued on its top surface. The other one was wood. Both had a beanbag underneath, which adapts to the shape of your thighs. These are barely wide enough for a laptop and a small mouse.
In my first job as a civilian (ex Army here), my non-compete forbid me from working for another company doing the same specific work within a 50-mile radius and for 18 months. It was a planned move on their part, it was a satellite communications company in Virginia with just one competitor in the area. There was nothing that they could do to stop me from working for their competitor, but I would not be able do to for them the same kind of work for the first 18 months. This was perfectly legal, it was disclosed in my offer letter in very plain language.
The funny thing is that one of those noncompetes actually saved me from a messy situation once. An ex employer reached out to me to get him out of some mess I would rather not get into. I was able to tell him that no, my noncompete in my new job forbid me from doing that kind of work for anyone within 50 miles. My previous employer was just 5 miles away, tough shit. I did invite them to call my current boss and see if he could fit the work in my schedule. That's the last I heard from them.
If you have survived 15 years as a code monkey, then you have had your fair share of successful and failed projects and you have met pretty much the whole spectrum of manager types in the industry. Simply try to do as the managers from your past that you consider successful (or less disastrous).
Whatever you do, try to remember that one of your most important jobs as a manager is to act as a shit shield so your employees can do their jobs without outsiders screwing with them.
The bigger web-based companies usually try to be proactive about this. I am positive that I have received advance warning from at least Amazon, eBay and Pay Pal whenever a new user agreement would kick in.
Those agreements are redacted by lawyers and go through countless revision cycles before they are approved. It doesn't hurt them to use their next sales email to point out that effective whatever date, new terms kick in, a link to read the new terms, and instructions on what to do if you do NOT agree with these. For example, if you don't agree with the new terms, you are allowed to close your account without penalty.
That's how I see it, as bang for the buck. I would rather pay $60 for a game like Oblivion, that almost a year later still keeps me entertained, than pay $50 or less for a game that takes 15-20 hours to beat.
Or for all we know, the reason the scans come from these places is because THEIR machines are infected with something.
My first weekend was like that, up and down nonstop. Why? Because the tech installed the splitter backwards.
I think another reason why it is so stable is that this county was one of the first national test beds for cable modems. They basically tore down most of the cable tv infrastructure for this county. I have no clue if this is how the rest of the country received cable internet, or if they simply plugged in new equipment and kept the old cables.
Comcast, 16MB up, 2 MB down, is about $55 including the modem rental. This is a $10 add-on to the basic service, which they claim is 8 MB down, 1MB up. In reality it is about 13MB down, 1MB up. During busy hours it will drop as low as 6 MB. Anything under 6 MB usually means there is something wrong.
I have had Comcast since 2000, I have had maybe 4 real outages, none lasted a day. It is so stable that I freak out if it as much as loses sync.
Their only real problem is that until FIOS got here, they were the only game in town, so for example when the download caps nonsense started, we had no choice but to STFU. Now that there's competition, you don't hear a peep about either download caps, or about hosting from home.
Exactly, I just don't understand why one would want to mess with something that has worked so well and across so many varied systems.
I went from a Tandy Color Computer 2 to a VAX 11/750 (WATFIV), then PCs, Mac Plus, VAX 11/780, more PCs, then alternating between Macs and PCs. The last thing that went through my mind was the column counts, except for WATFIV of course (first 8 columns and last 8 columns had to be kept blank).
Nowadays, I use iTerm and it works very well, regardless of the kind of machine I connect to. My only real source of aggravation is that in that rare occasion that I need to type a DOS command in a Windows server, the clipboard can't be accessed with keystrokes, it has to be done through menu choices.
From Google Health Advisory Council:
The list of advisory council members is pretty varied. They span the full spectrum from medical research, HMO evil empires, mainstream medicine and all the way to patient advocacy.
Done. It was an interesting call actually. The first time they simply hung up on me, the second time they tried to move me to their triple bundle (premium digital, VoIP, internet) for 24 months.
I told her the triple bundle was a triple miss:
1. I got a 2-for-1 deal with Sunrocket, and I still got 11 months of the "free" year to burn.
2. I have been a loyal comcast customer for 10 years, it is not fair to ask me to sign a 2-year service agreement.
3. They still make me take channels I no longer want.
After that the comcast rep was very helpful.
I am about to (as in, in the next 10 minutes) cancel it too, since there is no appeal left. Why spend so much on premium packages when so much of my viewing time falls on either the big three networks or the documentary channels?
This Mac Book Pro 2.33GHz Core 2 Duo had a couple kernel panics that I could blame on Parallels, but since the last update I am yet to have Parallels kill OS X. Every time that Windows has killed Parallels the rest of OSX stays fine. There's two of us at the company with identical laptops, same versions of parallels, windows and development tools, and we are both seeing Parallels stable.
Because the best windows PC I have ever used is this Mac Book Pro. OSX is just the icing on the cake.
My license of Parallels was $79, and I had a retail license of XP, no need to purchase a full license of XP. When 3.0 comes out, I qualify for a competitive upgrade, so it will be $50 ($40 if I order before launch date).
When I get a blue screen of death in XP, all I lose is VS.net, VSS, SQL Server management studio and whatever browser windows I had open. Everything else in the machine is OSX and running fine.
When my boss gets a call from a customer about technology X, whatever the hell it means, he knows there's two of us that are ready to hit on it, be it Windows, OS X or something that runs as a BSD/Linux program. Before that he would have had to get defensive the second the conversation strayed away from Windows.
My previous work laptop was a Dell. It was a cheaply built, unrealiable, pathetic piece of dog shit. It was sad sad, because I only purchase Dell servers and I couldn't believe that the same company that sold me those super reliable servers also sold that horrible laptop. I am glad that I was given the flexibility to order two a Mac Book Pro as a replacement.
The end result of having parallels is the ability of carrying one laptop that, right out of the box, is already running two operating systems without rebooting. Then you can start and stop additional operating systems, each in its own VM, without disturbing the host machine.
I get thousands of spams per month into my Gmail account (376 spams caught since May 23), yet I only get to use the spam button maybe once a day.
I got 28,252 emails stored in my account, dating back to 2004 and I have never lost an email in that account or felt that the spam was anywhere close to overwhelming.
My Google apps for domains mailbox has accumulated 2303 spams in less than one month, that one averages maybe 2 emails per day that I have to mark as spam manually.
Not news.
Employment in the financial sector will bring upon you the greatest scrutiny you will see outside of the defense and law enforcement fields. It is nothing remotely new, it is not a post 9/11 thing or a conspiracy to strip us off our constitutionally given rights. It's nothing more than due dilligence to make sure that the wrong person is not put in a postion to exploit or harm a financial system.
I have a long and illustrious history of caffeine addiction. It did not help that both my family and my godfather's family owned coffee plantations (I was born and raised in Puerto Rico). I was drinking coffee by the time I was 6.
I think the worst was the $7/day Starbucks habit during my dot com years. Company went down, I had to find a job elsewhere and instead of having a Starbucks across the street, I found myself in the one lousy spot in Arlington, VA where you actually have to walk a 1/4 mile to find a Starbucks. Right around that time I found out I was lactose intolerant, which completely ruined the cappuccino magic for me, lactase be damned.
I started buying drip coffee from places closer to the office, but I was never happy. None of these people mastered the concept of consistency.
Right around that time pod coffee started becoming popular. I asked the wife to get me a machine so I could take a shot at it. I had already found non dairy liquid creamers that I really liked, so I was out of cappuccino withdrawal.
When we got the machine I experimented a lot. I stupidly assumed that the most expensive pods would taste better. Wrong.
The more I paid for a pack of pods, the worse it tasted. They either tasted burned out, or the extra flavoring was too strong while the coffee part was weak. Then I decided to try in the opposite direction: check the cheaper stuff.
Lucky me, I found Senseo Douwe Egberts Dark Roast pods (Amazon B0001ES9FI). Taking into account that I would not be wasting coffee like when I was using drip makers, the price per dosage was in the order of 25 cents a cup instead of $2 or worse. Small problem: finding them.
My wife works at Target, so whenever that specific kind of pod arrives, she tries to buy me as much as she can. If I am almost out of pods and there are none at the local Target we have to check all over county. When I found them at Amazon the price was literally identical, plus shipping was free. Now I buy my monthly supply in one shot.
Now, there's nothing spectacular about these pods. They taste strong but not burned. The machine makes sure that each cup is very consistent, which is all I want. On top of that, there's nothing to clean, just discard the used pod and rinse the holder with some cold water. There is also no waste like with drip machines, since you brew up to two cups at a time and that's it.
All they do is make the fast forward so painfully slow that you just don't bother using it. While the Comcast PVR FF goes up to 8X, I doubt that the FF on the on demand channels is anywhere close to 2X.
On top of that, most of the shows on the non-premium on demand channels (the "free" areas within Comcast's Channel One) have plenty of ads already.
That is correct.
These days it seems it is too much to ask people to bother reading the instructions. This whole search engine optimization as a business model movement is going too far. I have a small blog (1500 or so original articles spanning 5 years) and I have never had trouble with Google indexing me. As far as I can tell from my traffic logs, most of my articles get indexed within 48 hours of publishing. I don't do anything special, I don't even have custom meta tags, just whatever is placed by Wordpress.
I never print photos. The only reason I keep a printer is because once a month or so I am stuck printing one or two pages and it is easier to keep that piece of crap printer around than to drive the mile and a quarter to the closest office depot to have them printed.
If I was printing a lot of stuff, I would go back to laser, no doubt about it. Brother makes a nice little printer that goes for less than $100, the 1000 page toner cartridge are about $80 new, a lot less if refurbished.
I use both SQL Server 2000/2005 and MySQL. There is no way in hell that you can compare the out-of-the-box admin tools that ship with MySQL with the Enterprise Manager+Query Analyzer in SQL Server 2000 and the SQL Server Management Studio in 2005. This is why most people use phpmyadmin, Aqua Data Studio or an equivalent third party tool instead of the CLI interface.
Also, installing SQL Server 2000 and/or 2005 is pretty effortless. Just run the installer and the basic defaults will do for most people. When you say "The fact that I can download a copy and get it running in about 20 minutes is the best part." you are implying that you can't install SQL Server in 20 minutes. Sure, you can't download it because it isn't free, but installing it takes just a few minutes.
That said, I am a fan of MySQL. It is a great product and the price is right. Even paying for commercial support is affordable. SQL Server is awesome, but I don't agree with the pricing for the developer and standard editions. SQL Server 2005 developer should be free, and SQL Server Standard should cost no more than $300.
There's another thing I really like about MySQL is that all of the database objects for one database are not clumped together into one file like SQL Server does (SQL Server allows you to spread out one database across many files, but MySQL saves each object within the database as one or more files). This has not caused me to lose data (yet) in the past 7 years, but it did create some hairy situations.
My last HP printer was on sale for less than $40. If the ink runs out before it is 90 days old, I'll exchange the whole printer. If it is more than 90 days old and the cartridge costs within 5% of the cost of a new printer, I will probably grab the new printer and hand off the used printer to somebody else and tell them "here's a free printer, try to use generic ink first, which costs half as much." If the printer breaks, it was free so my friend is only losing $20 instead of $40.
I print so little nowadays that my main concern is that the printer will simply stop working due to lack of use.