You're never going to get noticed carrying your iPad in a bag - if you want to really get noticed, and your iPhone is looking a bit passè, then get 3G, and surf constantly while in public - extra points for doing it in places that have no hope of being wifi enabled - eg. the beach, open parks and fields or at your nervous employer's offices.
3G = the adoration of the crowd. Frankly, whatever it costs, it's worth it.
This, and other, wise opinions only available on/.
Well, here in the UK, and possibly in Canada, just because you say "vehicles left at owners own risk" on a sign in your car park doesn't mean that you absolve your responsibility to people who pay you to park their cars.
What I'm saying is that a high proportion of EULAs on websites in particular are completely unenforceable. Just because a given site says "we can track you all we want, and we can sell that data how we choose" doesn't make it legal. In fact, in the UK that would be complely illegal, as it is over most of Europe.
So, just because I clicked "okay, yes, I agree and swear to abide by it, and waive my legal rights in all cases" doesn't mean I have actually done so, should we ever end up in court. This article at worst a "water is wet" sort of article, but at best, it highlights that in some places in the world, there are better legal systems and "terms of engagement" than others. I'll leave it to the reader to decide which ones I'm talking about in particular here.
I wonder how enforceable this is - asking all website owners to ask if they can set an anonymous cookie? Really?
However, I wonder if the spirit of it is best achieved in the browser. Essentially, accept cookies from the hostname/domain written in the address bar, and don't accept any others. Thus, visiting/. will give me a slashdot.org cookie (maybe), but won't give me (or send out) the Google Analytics or Addme cookies (which aren't in my interest, as they aren't sites I'm visiting).
Personally, I hope this gets watered down to a browser feature, rather than what it appears to be right now. But I can see worse worlds than one where you can't have anonymous cookies without permission. Of course, we realise that ad networks will move out of the EU to avoid this, but that will slow down ad delivery, which will make them less attractive to advertisers than the in-EU ones, so we may well see less of that than we might imagine at this point. In the longer term, I'm sure the lowlives of the tracking world will find ways to do their work without worrying about these regulations, but keeping them out of the EU isn't really a bad thing for us Europeans.
And more to the point, if there is something bad on one kids phone, you can bet he's already passed it on to at least one other kid. Thus, teacher deletes the file, and it is instantly restored from a crowd source backup.
Looks like one of those proposals that goes out specifically to get it shot down by everyone except the Daily Mail.
I'm not really sure this is as important as TFA suggests. However, it could potentially open up HD TV streaming. As far as I know, that's not possible on 54Mbps wireless (even if you have it entirely to yourself), so a bandwidth increase would make it possible.
Truthfully though, my phone (for example) isn't bottlenecked by the wifi speed, it's bottlenecked by it's own ability to put things on the screen and request the next thing it needs. I doubt it'll need 1Gbps for a good few years. In many ways, neither does my laptop, because 90% of what it downloads comes from the Internet (which is a whopping 10Mbps), not the local NAS server I have. However, backups would sure go quicker with a faster wifi connection.
So I say 'meh' to this - nice to have, but hardly the impetus to throw away all my devices and buy new ones. That said, I'll be the local PC shoppe will be touting the 1Gbps machines as "better" than the 54Mbps ones, even though the specs under the bonnet probably aren't much different.
Isn't the link to a completely different case, in a completely different country? TFA mentions a Connecticut ambulance company, but the link is to something that could very well be British (it mentions a P45) , which I think is unique to the UK).
(IMHO, the example you link to is far less unreasonable - adding your boss as a 'friend' and then slagging them off isn't very bright, and if the boss's comment is anything to go by, there were other reasons to fire the employee, and the FB post was the 'last straw'. However, it's easy to comment when you don't know anything about it;-)
I've seen this happen a few times, and it almost always fails. Either the top guys 'just get it', or they 'just get' that they need to equally represent finance, engineering, sales and administration by getting experts to help them. If he hasn't been getting it thus far, he's not going to now (probably), he'll just hire some people and make sure they're seen to be 'adding value', but won't actually achieve very much.
These 'top engineers' are going to come up with SuperWhizzo 1.0. They'll pitch it to him, and he'll either: 1) Accept it because he's got to accept some technical ideas 2) Reject it because he still just doesn't get it What he won't do is evaluate it on it's merits, and then facilitate it's execution because he's actually on-board with it.
(Contrast this to what you know about how Apple works, for example)
I've got a handful of squeezeboxes, and occasionally listen to last.fm streams on them. Since I'm only an occasional listener, I won't be subscribing. Conversely, the likes of somafm are far more suited to occasional use - you just pay them a few bucks whenever you feel like it.
For all of last.fm's blustering about helping me find new music, I've 'loved' hundreds of tracks, but haven't actually bought much of it - they're actually not that great at actually pushing you towards albums or artists that you might want to buy. So in that respect, last.fm is no better than someone like somafm.
So my point is that whilst this doesn't preclude listening on my werk PC, it polarises mobile/squeezebox customers into "properly engaged (or too rich)" and "not too bothered". I fall into the latter category, and who knows... maybe I'll drift off entirely eventually.
Unfortunately, all that openness has lead to a phone that has crappy rough-edged core applications, few useful 'apps' and zero street-cred.Conversely, the iphone has no openness, good core apps (not perfect, but good), loads of 'apps' and oodles of street-cred.
Now. if you were a phone company, which would you prefer?
I see what you're saying, but the actual logic goes like this:
35,000 accidents, with (say) 32,000 causes versus 10000 accidents with one cause.
Whilst you and I would say "yeah, but we can concentrate on the one cause, and fix it, and besides, we've had a net-gain", the world says "I want no part of that one thing". No one said it was logical, but it's how things will go.
I've read the comments on here with some interest - I'm guessing almost all of them are from Americans. Why? Because something about American work culture seems to think that it's perfectly okay to work all day and all night.
Here in the UK, we sympathise quite a bit. We're far more American than our European counterparts, and even we would, generally, dislike anything more than 8 (or maybe 9) hour days. In France, Italy or Spain, this sort of proposal would result in the most extreme responses. You simply wouldn't even get to say the sentence without a very strong response from your staff.
I know many people look at (say) France and think it's a bit of a joke (commercially). Stories such as managers being taken hostage, and road blockades and the like don't help. But the French do "standard of living" really, really well. The French really respect the simple act of hanging out with each other. A lunch break less than an hour is an affront to many, because they want the opportunity to just "hang out". The suggestion that they may get home so late that their kids have already gone to bed is disgusting.
I'm not going to say which of the European and American approaches are better. However, you only get one life, and even though you may be young and single, and really just spending time in bars or whatever - that has a value, which cannot simply be substituted by money (or stock). When I was single, I valued my personal time much less than I do now, and honestly, that was a bit of a mistake. I should have been doing more with it, but at the time, instead of thinking for myself, I used work as a way of defining what I should do with my time. Now I'm married, and I can't put a price on a couple of hours just hanging out with my wife. If my employer wanted to take that away from me for more than a couple of weeks, I'd be thinking very seriously about the suitability of that employer. Whilst I understand the need to get things done for a deadline, no amount of money substitutes actual life experiences.
Lastly, if your boss is asking for more hours to get the company profitable, you need to figure out why. If your company is working, but not yet profitable, then can it not simply demonstrate this to an investor, and have that investor subsidise the company for a year or whatever? If the company can't convince investors to do this, why on earth would you want to do it? (That's essentially what you're being asked to do, after all). Is it in fact that the company is not working, and the product not selling, and the customers are not happy, and that the company will fail in a years time? If the latter, then no amount of extra hours is going to stop that happening.
Anecdotally, I can recommend a 'rate limiter' on the front end as well. Essentially, something that challenges the viewer if they view too many pages in too short a time (again, something unexpected that a human can do easily, but a computer cannot - the simplest challenge would be "please click here to continue", but you can go as crazy as you like). In my meagre experience, putting something like that on my sites has reduced my bandwidth costs, hit counts, and comment spam. In my case, Mollom gets the rest.
Of course, the Big Boys all do this sort of thing already (albeit with far more generous limits than I have), and it's not working for them. Ultimately, if you're a target, then you're going to get hit. However, small sites actually have lots of options available to them. In your case specifically, putting (and checking for) an extra field in the submit form (even if it's just a hidden field) would probably help.
I'm (now) with you. I've been getting to this point for a while, but today's done it for me. By coincidence, I just got a bill. I got billed more for "outside of contract" things than I did for the contract, which of course they don't break down into line items unless I pay them to do so.
As soon as this is up, I'm either just going to keep the phone, or else buy another outright. I'm then going on a 30 day contract, or maybe PAYG.
Read your contract? Are you kidding? Mine was 2 pages of A4, all printed in a font about 1-1.5 mm tall. Hell, I'd need to scan it and double size-it just to be able to make out any characters on it for more than 5 seconds.
My computer (Fedora 12) already does this. It involves putting a boot strap image onto the harddisk of my laptop. I then boot it up, and it downloads the bits of the OS it needs. It caches these parts to disk, for faster booting next time. Now I come to think of it, even Windows does this. I don't have any Apple computers, so what do they do?;-)
Right - and a lot of corporates probably downgraded it to XP, pending doing the upgrades en-masse later in the year. I'm not sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if the upgrades double-count those machines (but as someone's already answered, this is "online usage share", so that isn't immediately relevant here).
However, this doesn't explain where 10% of all the computers on the desktop are ChromeOS. That would suggest that one in 10 computers use it, and yet, apart from maybe seeing people trying out the Chrome browser, I don't think I've ever seen a machine actually running ChromeOS. Either all of Google has switched, or else something fishy is going on...?
1) Fax the Wikileaks cables to public service office 2) Wait n days 3) File a Freedom of Information request for the contents of the Wikileaks cables
Of course, if thousands of people/computers do (1) and (3), then you could indeed cause a problem. Not sure not-your-Pal and the like would respond to FoA requests, although some UK companies do because they're public/private partnership.
My plan has more holes than a block of Swiss cheese, but it still amuses me;-)
Actually, the Wookie are particularly sensitive about their weak bladders. It's one of the reasons they don't drink pints. I wouldn't mention WookieLeaks if I were you.
Diplomatic cables aren't "speaking in private". They're something akin to a diplomatic version of an online forum. The US's own policies (as an example) ensure that these cables are stored, categorised, shared (via secure internal websites) to a vast number of other government branches and generally munged into all kinds of other forms. That's how this stuff was leaked in the first place - it wasn't by over-hearing someone's private conversation they'd taken steps to create, it was copied off something like a diplomatic intranet.
If a diplomatic cable says "the entire government of Durkadurkastan are a bunch of crooks" then that's perfectly quotable material (provided you have clearance to read it, and you don't violate the classification of it). This stuff is essentially the professional opinion of the diplomatic offices themselves. What they say - goes. In extreme cases, it may form supporting material in foreign policy (either trade or military agreements, or on some occasions, deciding to invade someone else's country).
Diplomats have plenty of private conversations, either in private clubs or offices around the world, over lunch or over a boardroom table. None of those things is being leaked, and nor should it. What we're talking about here is the specific intelligence that results from those private meetings. IMHO, diplomats need to think about the consequences of their, hitherto, unfettered actions. Just like the rest of us have to.
Whilst it's not necessarily easy to see how this fights injustice, what is clear is that it's beginning to "level the playing field" for citizens and their governments. I don't believe that instantly makes anyone more in control or more upstanding, but it does start ordinary people asking questions of their elected officials. There is probably some 'collateral damage' while this takes place, and I'm mixed about whether I agree with it or not. However, personally, I can't argue with the benefit of transparency.
Back on topic: As for PayPal, they're probably worried because they've got so much dirty laundry that Wikileaks might publish;-)
...and in Google's case specifically, you provide lots of bright coloured rooms and toys, a "flat hierarchy" and reduced requirements for professionalism or social skills, all of which helps ensure you never grow up and become useful to anyone else.
All I can say is that my wife's NORCS [sic] are definitely a source of some economic power, and the envy of some (me, in particular) for their reserves of natural resources.
(if that link is being slow, try the google cache instead)
I have to say that virtualising was the best thing I ever did too. I actually only do it server-side, and looked at a few options before plumping for KVM. It's taken a good deal of reading snippets of forums, documentation and even bugs to figure out how to do all the things I wanted to do, but now it's all working, I have to say it's really great. I had some networking problems (with some really sucky performance), but got that nailed by doing some not-well-documented stuff with taps. I run a "mysql VM" that uses an NFS mount for the database store, so networking matters. I'm not a huge DB consumer or anything, but it works at least as well as the old dedicated machine it replaces. One thing I really love about KVM (which may be in the others too) is that a VM gets a VNC server of it's own, by default, so you get to see the console of the box booting up via VNC. I don't have a windows VM at the moment, but this is really useful if you do.
I've used vmware and a bit of xen at werk. Vmware particularly seems like a "full product", in so much as it's got all the tools you need, has GUIs and so on. KVM's getting these things, but some of them are definitely quite young at the moment.
Having said all of this... I do none of it on my laptop, although actually, I'd like to in the future. When I do, I'll definitely be looking at tools and GUIs, and the suggestion of virtualbox above looks like it might just meet my requirements.
Slashdot Mirror
I know "crazy talk" but I'm a storage jbod and it irks me when people lose VERY important data!
Sorry, couldn't resist ;-)
You're never going to get noticed carrying your iPad in a bag - if you want to really get noticed, and your iPhone is looking a bit passè, then get 3G, and surf constantly while in public - extra points for doing it in places that have no hope of being wifi enabled - eg. the beach, open parks and fields or at your nervous employer's offices.
3G = the adoration of the crowd. Frankly, whatever it costs, it's worth it.
This, and other, wise opinions only available on /.
Well, here in the UK, and possibly in Canada, just because you say "vehicles left at owners own risk" on a sign in your car park doesn't mean that you absolve your responsibility to people who pay you to park their cars.
What I'm saying is that a high proportion of EULAs on websites in particular are completely unenforceable. Just because a given site says "we can track you all we want, and we can sell that data how we choose" doesn't make it legal. In fact, in the UK that would be complely illegal, as it is over most of Europe.
So, just because I clicked "okay, yes, I agree and swear to abide by it, and waive my legal rights in all cases" doesn't mean I have actually done so, should we ever end up in court. This article at worst a "water is wet" sort of article, but at best, it highlights that in some places in the world, there are better legal systems and "terms of engagement" than others. I'll leave it to the reader to decide which ones I'm talking about in particular here.
I wonder how enforceable this is - asking all website owners to ask if they can set an anonymous cookie? Really?
However, I wonder if the spirit of it is best achieved in the browser. Essentially, accept cookies from the hostname/domain written in the address bar, and don't accept any others. Thus, visiting /. will give me a slashdot.org cookie (maybe), but won't give me (or send out) the Google Analytics or Addme cookies (which aren't in my interest, as they aren't sites I'm visiting).
Personally, I hope this gets watered down to a browser feature, rather than what it appears to be right now. But I can see worse worlds than one where you can't have anonymous cookies without permission. Of course, we realise that ad networks will move out of the EU to avoid this, but that will slow down ad delivery, which will make them less attractive to advertisers than the in-EU ones, so we may well see less of that than we might imagine at this point. In the longer term, I'm sure the lowlives of the tracking world will find ways to do their work without worrying about these regulations, but keeping them out of the EU isn't really a bad thing for us Europeans.
And more to the point, if there is something bad on one kids phone, you can bet he's already passed it on to at least one other kid. Thus, teacher deletes the file, and it is instantly restored from a crowd source backup.
Looks like one of those proposals that goes out specifically to get it shot down by everyone except the Daily Mail.
An opportunity too good to pass up, I suspect. Mercury was also the messenger of the gods: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(mythology)
I'm not really sure this is as important as TFA suggests. However, it could potentially open up HD TV streaming. As far as I know, that's not possible on 54Mbps wireless (even if you have it entirely to yourself), so a bandwidth increase would make it possible.
Truthfully though, my phone (for example) isn't bottlenecked by the wifi speed, it's bottlenecked by it's own ability to put things on the screen and request the next thing it needs. I doubt it'll need 1Gbps for a good few years. In many ways, neither does my laptop, because 90% of what it downloads comes from the Internet (which is a whopping 10Mbps), not the local NAS server I have. However, backups would sure go quicker with a faster wifi connection.
So I say 'meh' to this - nice to have, but hardly the impetus to throw away all my devices and buy new ones. That said, I'll be the local PC shoppe will be touting the 1Gbps machines as "better" than the 54Mbps ones, even though the specs under the bonnet probably aren't much different.
Isn't the link to a completely different case, in a completely different country? TFA mentions a Connecticut ambulance company, but the link is to something that could very well be British (it mentions a P45) , which I think is unique to the UK).
(IMHO, the example you link to is far less unreasonable - adding your boss as a 'friend' and then slagging them off isn't very bright, and if the boss's comment is anything to go by, there were other reasons to fire the employee, and the FB post was the 'last straw'. However, it's easy to comment when you don't know anything about it ;-)
I've seen this happen a few times, and it almost always fails. Either the top guys 'just get it', or they 'just get' that they need to equally represent finance, engineering, sales and administration by getting experts to help them. If he hasn't been getting it thus far, he's not going to now (probably), he'll just hire some people and make sure they're seen to be 'adding value', but won't actually achieve very much.
These 'top engineers' are going to come up with SuperWhizzo 1.0. They'll pitch it to him, and he'll either:
1) Accept it because he's got to accept some technical ideas
2) Reject it because he still just doesn't get it
What he won't do is evaluate it on it's merits, and then facilitate it's execution because he's actually on-board with it.
(Contrast this to what you know about how Apple works, for example)
I've got a handful of squeezeboxes, and occasionally listen to last.fm streams on them. Since I'm only an occasional listener, I won't be subscribing. Conversely, the likes of somafm are far more suited to occasional use - you just pay them a few bucks whenever you feel like it.
For all of last.fm's blustering about helping me find new music, I've 'loved' hundreds of tracks, but haven't actually bought much of it - they're actually not that great at actually pushing you towards albums or artists that you might want to buy. So in that respect, last.fm is no better than someone like somafm.
So my point is that whilst this doesn't preclude listening on my werk PC, it polarises mobile/squeezebox customers into "properly engaged (or too rich)" and "not too bothered". I fall into the latter category, and who knows... maybe I'll drift off entirely eventually.
Unfortunately, all that openness has lead to a phone that has crappy rough-edged core applications, few useful 'apps' and zero street-cred.Conversely, the iphone has no openness, good core apps (not perfect, but good), loads of 'apps' and oodles of street-cred.
Now. if you were a phone company, which would you prefer?
I see what you're saying, but the actual logic goes like this:
35,000 accidents, with (say) 32,000 causes versus 10000 accidents with one cause.
Whilst you and I would say "yeah, but we can concentrate on the one cause, and fix it, and besides, we've had a net-gain", the world says "I want no part of that one thing". No one said it was logical, but it's how things will go.
I've read the comments on here with some interest - I'm guessing almost all of them are from Americans. Why? Because something about American work culture seems to think that it's perfectly okay to work all day and all night.
Here in the UK, we sympathise quite a bit. We're far more American than our European counterparts, and even we would, generally, dislike anything more than 8 (or maybe 9) hour days. In France, Italy or Spain, this sort of proposal would result in the most extreme responses. You simply wouldn't even get to say the sentence without a very strong response from your staff.
I know many people look at (say) France and think it's a bit of a joke (commercially). Stories such as managers being taken hostage, and road blockades and the like don't help. But the French do "standard of living" really, really well. The French really respect the simple act of hanging out with each other. A lunch break less than an hour is an affront to many, because they want the opportunity to just "hang out". The suggestion that they may get home so late that their kids have already gone to bed is disgusting.
I'm not going to say which of the European and American approaches are better. However, you only get one life, and even though you may be young and single, and really just spending time in bars or whatever - that has a value, which cannot simply be substituted by money (or stock). When I was single, I valued my personal time much less than I do now, and honestly, that was a bit of a mistake. I should have been doing more with it, but at the time, instead of thinking for myself, I used work as a way of defining what I should do with my time. Now I'm married, and I can't put a price on a couple of hours just hanging out with my wife. If my employer wanted to take that away from me for more than a couple of weeks, I'd be thinking very seriously about the suitability of that employer. Whilst I understand the need to get things done for a deadline, no amount of money substitutes actual life experiences.
Lastly, if your boss is asking for more hours to get the company profitable, you need to figure out why. If your company is working, but not yet profitable, then can it not simply demonstrate this to an investor, and have that investor subsidise the company for a year or whatever? If the company can't convince investors to do this, why on earth would you want to do it? (That's essentially what you're being asked to do, after all). Is it in fact that the company is not working, and the product not selling, and the customers are not happy, and that the company will fail in a years time? If the latter, then no amount of extra hours is going to stop that happening.
Anecdotally, I can recommend a 'rate limiter' on the front end as well. Essentially, something that challenges the viewer if they view too many pages in too short a time (again, something unexpected that a human can do easily, but a computer cannot - the simplest challenge would be "please click here to continue", but you can go as crazy as you like). In my meagre experience, putting something like that on my sites has reduced my bandwidth costs, hit counts, and comment spam. In my case, Mollom gets the rest.
Of course, the Big Boys all do this sort of thing already (albeit with far more generous limits than I have), and it's not working for them. Ultimately, if you're a target, then you're going to get hit. However, small sites actually have lots of options available to them. In your case specifically, putting (and checking for) an extra field in the submit form (even if it's just a hidden field) would probably help.
I'm (now) with you. I've been getting to this point for a while, but today's done it for me. By coincidence, I just got a bill. I got billed more for "outside of contract" things than I did for the contract, which of course they don't break down into line items unless I pay them to do so.
As soon as this is up, I'm either just going to keep the phone, or else buy another outright. I'm then going on a 30 day contract, or maybe PAYG.
Read your contract? Are you kidding? Mine was 2 pages of A4, all printed in a font about 1-1.5 mm tall. Hell, I'd need to scan it and double size-it just to be able to make out any characters on it for more than 5 seconds.
My computer (Fedora 12) already does this. It involves putting a boot strap image onto the harddisk of my laptop. I then boot it up, and it downloads the bits of the OS it needs. It caches these parts to disk, for faster booting next time. Now I come to think of it, even Windows does this. I don't have any Apple computers, so what do they do? ;-)
Right - and a lot of corporates probably downgraded it to XP, pending doing the upgrades en-masse later in the year. I'm not sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if the upgrades double-count those machines (but as someone's already answered, this is "online usage share", so that isn't immediately relevant here).
However, this doesn't explain where 10% of all the computers on the desktop are ChromeOS. That would suggest that one in 10 computers use it, and yet, apart from maybe seeing people trying out the Chrome browser, I don't think I've ever seen a machine actually running ChromeOS. Either all of Google has switched, or else something fishy is going on...?
1) Fax the Wikileaks cables to public service office
2) Wait n days
3) File a Freedom of Information request for the contents of the Wikileaks cables
Of course, if thousands of people/computers do (1) and (3), then you could indeed cause a problem. Not sure not-your-Pal and the like would respond to FoA requests, although some UK companies do because they're public/private partnership.
My plan has more holes than a block of Swiss cheese, but it still amuses me ;-)
Actually, the Wookie are particularly sensitive about their weak bladders. It's one of the reasons they don't drink pints. I wouldn't mention WookieLeaks if I were you.
Diplomatic cables aren't "speaking in private". They're something akin to a diplomatic version of an online forum. The US's own policies (as an example) ensure that these cables are stored, categorised, shared (via secure internal websites) to a vast number of other government branches and generally munged into all kinds of other forms. That's how this stuff was leaked in the first place - it wasn't by over-hearing someone's private conversation they'd taken steps to create, it was copied off something like a diplomatic intranet.
If a diplomatic cable says "the entire government of Durkadurkastan are a bunch of crooks" then that's perfectly quotable material (provided you have clearance to read it, and you don't violate the classification of it). This stuff is essentially the professional opinion of the diplomatic offices themselves. What they say - goes. In extreme cases, it may form supporting material in foreign policy (either trade or military agreements, or on some occasions, deciding to invade someone else's country).
Diplomats have plenty of private conversations, either in private clubs or offices around the world, over lunch or over a boardroom table. None of those things is being leaked, and nor should it. What we're talking about here is the specific intelligence that results from those private meetings. IMHO, diplomats need to think about the consequences of their, hitherto, unfettered actions. Just like the rest of us have to.
Whilst it's not necessarily easy to see how this fights injustice, what is clear is that it's beginning to "level the playing field" for citizens and their governments. I don't believe that instantly makes anyone more in control or more upstanding, but it does start ordinary people asking questions of their elected officials. There is probably some 'collateral damage' while this takes place, and I'm mixed about whether I agree with it or not. However, personally, I can't argue with the benefit of transparency.
Back on topic: As for PayPal, they're probably worried because they've got so much dirty laundry that Wikileaks might publish ;-)
I don't disagree with you, but I'd love your "bug" idea to become mainstream...
"Critical bug in Internet Explorer boosts performance by 10%"
"Microsoft keen to develop more bugs in the hope they boost performance in other products"
"Mozilla unavailable for comment on how come they persist in reducing bugs when everyone else seems to want more of them"
...and in Google's case specifically, you provide lots of bright coloured rooms and toys, a "flat hierarchy" and reduced requirements for professionalism or social skills, all of which helps ensure you never grow up and become useful to anyone else.
All I can say is that my wife's NORCS [sic] are definitely a source of some economic power, and the envy of some (me, in particular) for their reserves of natural resources.
(if that link is being slow, try the google cache instead)
I have to say that virtualising was the best thing I ever did too. I actually only do it server-side, and looked at a few options before plumping for KVM. It's taken a good deal of reading snippets of forums, documentation and even bugs to figure out how to do all the things I wanted to do, but now it's all working, I have to say it's really great. I had some networking problems (with some really sucky performance), but got that nailed by doing some not-well-documented stuff with taps. I run a "mysql VM" that uses an NFS mount for the database store, so networking matters. I'm not a huge DB consumer or anything, but it works at least as well as the old dedicated machine it replaces. One thing I really love about KVM (which may be in the others too) is that a VM gets a VNC server of it's own, by default, so you get to see the console of the box booting up via VNC. I don't have a windows VM at the moment, but this is really useful if you do.
I've used vmware and a bit of xen at werk. Vmware particularly seems like a "full product", in so much as it's got all the tools you need, has GUIs and so on. KVM's getting these things, but some of them are definitely quite young at the moment.
Having said all of this... I do none of it on my laptop, although actually, I'd like to in the future. When I do, I'll definitely be looking at tools and GUIs, and the suggestion of virtualbox above looks like it might just meet my requirements.