There would be some advantages to that, but also some disadvantages. For example, imagine the negative PR that would occur if some update to OSX broke on Apple-approved Dell hardware and didn't break on Apple hardware. Whether it was intentional or not, conspiracy theories would abound. Plus, Apple would have to support a lot more drivers, and wouldn't be able to be as nimble about cutting off support for old stuff. Add that to the potential loss in hardware sales, and it might not be the best business decision. Even if they offered only very limited support (say, so you couldn't do certain things on generic hardware), it would give the impression of OSX as a limited OS that couldn't do everything.
I'm not saying I wouldn't like for OSX to be more open. I'd love for Apple to open all of their source code. I'd love to have the option of throwing OSX on every computer I own and every computer my company owns. But I understand there are probably a lot of reasons why Apple is hesitant or unwilling to do that.
Seriously, though, I've never met a decent IT pro who wouldn't welcome being made *a little* obsolete. I think we all generally understand that a lot of the stuff in our jobs could be easier, should be easier, and we'd prefer it if we didn't have to deal with that stuff. Most IT pros, or the good ones anyway, are people who really like for things to work "the right way". We get a kick out of slick solutions that actually work, especially when it makes our jobs easier.
Will it put me out of work? Somehow I'm not worried. Most likely, whatever the solutions are, there will still need to be someone implementing the solution. If humanity actually managed to make computer systems so powerful and intuitive that IT people were absolutely unnecessary, it'd be worth giving up my current career to live in that world-- but I don't see it coming anytime soon.
If anything, Apple is helping them sell content that would otherwise be pirated.
For me, this is certainly true. For all the music industry's complaining about Apple ruining their business, iTunes brought me back to buying music. I stopped buying music because Napster was easier and more convenient than buying. I stopped pirating because iTunes was easier and more convenient than P2P.
They were throwing large promo banners for another Universal movie right on top of the one I was watching.
Ok, this is going to be slightly off-topic, but WTF is the deal with these overlays they use now? It was one thing when they'd put a little semi-transparent logo at the bottom of the screen indicating which channel is was on. I thought that was a little annoying and stupid. But then they started making them less transparent, and then they started making them ads. Now, they overlay big-ass animated ads WITH SOUND. Big, loud, annoying, distracting sounds in the middle of what I'm watching. Really, now, WTF? Do these stations explicitly want to get rid of viewers?
Personally, I'm not so set on being able to rebuild and modify my machines. I used to be, and then I realized that it's pretty much a waste of time.
Sure, every once in a while it's useful to build something custom when you have specific needs. On the other hand, having owned a laptop for a while, I realized my needs aren't so custom and swapping individual parts isn't all it's cracked up to be. Looking at upgrades, if you want to upgrade your processor or motherboard, it's usually best to upgrade both, and memory while you're at it. And at that point, when you "upgrade", you're really just salvaging the case and hard drive.
The only time it ever really made sense for me to upgrade a machine in the past few years was when I bought a new video card back when I was playing a lot of games. But even that has limited value when they upgrade the port that the video card plugs into. When they went from PCI to AGP, buying that new video card meant buying a new motherboard, which meant buying a new processor and memory.
Anyway, since then, I've figured out that it just really isn't that helpful (for me, at least). I'd much rather buy a full machine that's sleek and well-integrated, and get support on it so it's someone else's problem if it breaks. If I want to "upgrade", I find someone who wants the old system, sell it for what I can, and buy a new system. It's definitely easier, and usually not much more expensive.
Haven't they been worredly obsessing over TiVo and other DVR's for years, which cost upwards of that much, along with a monthly service fee, "just to record shows using a single service while they ARE getting the same TV shows on cable/broadcast?"
Yeah, but at least TiVO is sort of self-contained. You buy it, and then it works on your normal TV signal. The problem with the idea of a Netflix set-top-box is that it ties you to Netflix content. If Netflix suddenly goes down the tube or something, the box is completely useless.
Besides, DVRs really took off when cable companies started offering them as part of the service. So people often aren't going out and spending hundreds of dollars on a TiVO, they're spending $10 a month for a better cable box. Sure, it might ad up to the same amount of money over a couple years, but it's not quite the same.
I think it's really weird that Amazon.com, Hulu, Netflix, and so many others think that I watch television on my computer....[snip]...A while back, I bought one of the AppleTV boxes.
And right there you've identified why they "think [you] watch television on [your] computer". They do not, in fact, believe that everyone watches TV on their computers. They just know that most people won't buy a $300-$400 box just to receive TV shows from a single service when they can generally get the same TV shows on cable/broadcast.
What I mean is, I don't want to have to pay hundreds of dollars to buy an Apple box to watch my iTunes stuff, another couple hundred dollars to get a Netflix set-top-box to watch netflix movies, another multi-hundred-dollar box to watch Amazon.com movies, a couple hundred more for Hulu, and then a TiVO on top of that.
IMHO, someone needs to create a set of IPTV standards that allow any service to deliver content. The standards need to be open enough and standard enough that Netflix, Apple, NBC, FOX, Disney, and anyone else with a server can deliver content to an AppleTV, TiVO, XBox360, or a Playstation. Or at least the content providers should try to strike a deal with the set-top-box companies to do it in a proprietary way.
Of course, it'll never happen because it threatens the control of cable companies and broadcast networks.
The fact is, at the moment, Gnome is ideologically flawed.
Can you say more about what the ideology of Gnome is, and what the flaw in the ideology is?
Because you assert that as a "fact", but then only go on to say that you don't like Gnome and don't like that people seem to use it and like it. I'd be interested in hearing some detailed criticisms.
Which trolls? Is your complaint about anti-Windows posts being modded up, or about anti-Apple posts being modded down? Because, in my experience, a valid criticism of Apple will get modded up, same as a valid criticism of Microsoft. The only difference is that there are many more valid criticisms of Microsoft.
It's not a very valid criticism of Apple because (assuming this is a problem with APE):
APE is not a commonly used or important piece of software. It's no Adium or Firefox, let alone Photoshop or MS Office. Unsanity's product line is basically a bunch of obscure UI hacks that lets you do skinning and add minor features.
APE is an unsupported hack of some pretty basic OS functions. Although Unsanity give lots of assurances that their program is safe, I've heard many people voice concerns. I wouldn't claim to be enough of an expert to tell you for sure how valid those concerns are, but it seems dicey enough that I definitely wouldn't have chanced the upgrade to Leopard on a system running APE.
Even in the worst case scenario, after the failed install, the user can still do an "Archive and Install" with losing very much. The user might have to set some preferences and reinstall some apps, but their data will still be intact.
Just remember, if windows got taken down by a third party app, not only would you be screaming and shouting...
Not under circumstances like this, we wouldn't. Some of Unsanity's programs are pretty invasive little things that fuck around with the OS in ways that Apple doesn't support. From their site:
What exactly is Application Enhancer? It is a combination of a Framework and a system daemon. Application Enhancer performs its task by loading plugins (Application Enhancer modules) containing executable code into the running applications. Once loaded, the APE module performs the needed modifications (such as redefining the minimize window action, or customizing the standard Apple menu) on the launched application memory space, never touching any files on disk, utilizing set of functions defined in the Application Enhancer framework.
So yeah, if you have even a vague understanding of what this product does, it shouldn't be any surprise that it could cause problems if you threw it on a new/unknown version of the operating system. This isn't just a "3rd party application". It's not like if Windows crashed when you installed Firefox (which Microsoft would get criticized for), but more like if Windows crashed when you tried to use an obscure and invasive 3rd party WindowsXP hack on Windows Vista (which Microsoft would not get criticized for).
And it's not even clear that OSX itself crashed (as in a kernel panic). For as few details are available, it could just be that Finder or the installer crashed, which wouldn't be surprising if APE is screwing around with those applications' memory space.
Does the fact that it's your handle mean you believe all that, or is your handle facetious?
Because things like Windows not being command-line oriented has been a bit of a problem for years. Sure, it's great to be able to do things through a GUI if you want to, but it's also very good to be able to do things through a command-line if you want to.
Take the focus on Remote Desktop for remote administration as an example. Sure, Terminal Services on Windows is a very nice tool. However, if I'm just going to copy a couple files around, it'd be less resource intensive on both the server and client end, as well as being less bandwidth intensive, to be able to do that through a remote shell.
I know that Microsoft has done a lot to improve their command-line support for the sake of scripting and all, but Remote Desktop just isn't a replacement for SSH. It's another tool with different strengths and weaknesses. So Remote Desktop does not make it a "better Unix than Unix". If they want to create a better Unix than Unix, they should at least provide a good remote shell, at least as powerful and versatile as bash, that can be accessed from a wide variety of operating systems. Because that's something that the Unix world already takes for granted.
Many people have a misunderstanding that PDF is completely proprietary. Although the standards is controlled by Adobe, it's still pretty open and anyone can write their own implementation.
Many people assume that PDFs can only be written with Adobe Acrobat and can only be viewed with Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Acrobat Reader. Since both of those programs are kind of bloated and slow, people assume that PDF is bloated and slow. And since Adobe Acrobat is expensive, people assume that you need expensive software to make PDFs.
OSX doesn't have transparent dockable menu bars with widgets. It has a "dock", which has a specific purpose and limited uses, and a manu bar which is essentially the same as the menu bar in the original Mac OS. It has "widgets" which have nothing to do with the dock, and are again an evolution of an old idea from MacOS
Sorry. I like KDE well enough and I'm very interested to see version 4, but I don't see how Leopard has "borrowed" most of their "new" features from it. Time Machine? Stacks? Quicklook? Coverflow? These things aren't exactly unprecedented, but are they simple rip-offs of KDE?
ALl of this done with what IMHO is the GREATEST window manager out there and it seems like apple agrees....they once again "borrowed" most of their "new" features from it.
Which window manager? And which features did they borrow?
I guess I would wonder how this was able to happen at all. The admins configured the service so that the update wouldn't happen, and it happened anyway. Why was the software built in such a way that an outside party could even have the option of pushing an update against the configured settings?
If the ends justify the means, and the desired end is to prevent neglect and misery, then why don't we just kill all the children of poor families and kill all sad people. It would end their suffering, right?
I'm not arguing that abortion is wrong, but the question is whether abortion is morally acceptable or immoral. The question is not as to the effects of abortion, unless you really believe that the ends justify the means.
I'm kind of a late-twentysomething, and I started a CS degree and didn't really like it, either. I realized pretty quickly that even though I was very interested in computers, the CS degree wasn't really for me. In what was perhaps a strange move, I ended up majoring in Philosophy and minoring in Literature. Go figure.
What might have been more surprising, though, was what happened when I got out of college. I took a job working as a helpdesk tech. Having worked with CS graduates and people with a bunch of certs, I hold my own with pretty much everything except the actual programming. I'm even fine with the logic issues, more or less, but I'm not a programmer and I don't want to be, so it's not really a problem. But what I've found is that all my years of fixing computers often helps me diagnose problems better and faster than people who've just studied computers. When something breaks, the CS majors sometimes focus too much on how they think computers are supposed to work, but don't always have a lot of experience in how computers tend to malfunction.
I did better doing helpdesk work than the others because, in addition to my real-life computer repair experience, I also had better people skills. Then I did well as a network tech because I had better research skills. Now I'm doing pretty well as the Director of Technology because I have a variety of skills that help me make decisions regarding computers, asset allocation, budgeting, personnel, and business strategy.
Now, admittedly, if you're concerned that there aren't enough people going the hard-core engineer route, I'm not a good example. I'm not an engineer. In fact, I wasn't even all that interested in an IT career when I started out. I just found that the helpdesk job was the best job I could find, and things took off from there. I'm just saying that, sometimes, what you studied in school isn't nearly as important as we tend to think.
This reminds me of an experience I had a couple years ago. My cousin (who is about 16 now) wanted to install some game on his computer. It was a Windows XP machine with a normal install wizard, and he was held up by some error or another. It wasn't a big deal so I don't even remember what the problem was, but it got me thinking.S
I remembered being a kid, trying to play the latest Space Quest game from Sierra, and having to figure out which sound card I should choose during the install. My actual soundcard wasn't on the list, so I had to guess which one was more compatible, and it was a bit of trial and error. I remembered having to write custom AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files for different games to load different TSRs, and use different options of EMM386 or HIMEM.SYS. I remembered how impressed I was with myself when I figured out how to use AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS to make a little menu system that allowed me to choose the configuration I wanted while it was booting. I remembered trying to write little BASIC and Pascal programs to do things because... well, computers didn't do that much. I wasn't using my computer to store my music collection or watch movies. The big thing for me to do with computers in those days (besides playing games) was just to screw around with the computer to see what I could get it to do.
And it kind of made me sad that my cousin would never go through that. Sure, he'll be more computer savvy than my grandparents because he's grown up with computers, but he'll probably never understand computers as well as he would have if he were a few years older. Working in IT for a few years, it seems like the most helpful people are those who are young enough that they had computers when they were kids (and therefore grew up thinking about them), but old enough to have experimented with computers back when they weren't so easy.
It's hard to say that some particular thing is not taught anymore. Taught by whom? A given school or a given set of parents might be doing a poor job of teaching "critical thinking", but that doesn't mean it isn't being taught anywhere by anyone.
Besides, part of the problem with geometry is that even when it was taught in the public schools I went to, it was taught so poorly that it didn't encourage critical thinking any more than learning your multiplication tables. Much of our public education system seems to be chasing down pipe-dreams and quick-fixes, obsessed with self-esteem and political correctness. Eh... I don't even want to get into it, it's so stupid.
Oh, I'm pretty sure Verizon will be offering 200 Mbps connections if this all works out. They'll probably have a 5 GB per month bandwidth cap, and if you break it your account will dialed down to 512kbps or some other similar nonsense. But certainly they'll be *advertising* 200Mbps.
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There would be some advantages to that, but also some disadvantages. For example, imagine the negative PR that would occur if some update to OSX broke on Apple-approved Dell hardware and didn't break on Apple hardware. Whether it was intentional or not, conspiracy theories would abound. Plus, Apple would have to support a lot more drivers, and wouldn't be able to be as nimble about cutting off support for old stuff. Add that to the potential loss in hardware sales, and it might not be the best business decision. Even if they offered only very limited support (say, so you couldn't do certain things on generic hardware), it would give the impression of OSX as a limited OS that couldn't do everything.
I'm not saying I wouldn't like for OSX to be more open. I'd love for Apple to open all of their source code. I'd love to have the option of throwing OSX on every computer I own and every computer my company owns. But I understand there are probably a lot of reasons why Apple is hesitant or unwilling to do that.
Seriously, though, I've never met a decent IT pro who wouldn't welcome being made *a little* obsolete. I think we all generally understand that a lot of the stuff in our jobs could be easier, should be easier, and we'd prefer it if we didn't have to deal with that stuff. Most IT pros, or the good ones anyway, are people who really like for things to work "the right way". We get a kick out of slick solutions that actually work, especially when it makes our jobs easier.
Will it put me out of work? Somehow I'm not worried. Most likely, whatever the solutions are, there will still need to be someone implementing the solution. If humanity actually managed to make computer systems so powerful and intuitive that IT people were absolutely unnecessary, it'd be worth giving up my current career to live in that world-- but I don't see it coming anytime soon.
If anything, Apple is helping them sell content that would otherwise be pirated.
For me, this is certainly true. For all the music industry's complaining about Apple ruining their business, iTunes brought me back to buying music. I stopped buying music because Napster was easier and more convenient than buying. I stopped pirating because iTunes was easier and more convenient than P2P.
They were throwing large promo banners for another Universal movie right on top of the one I was watching.
Ok, this is going to be slightly off-topic, but WTF is the deal with these overlays they use now? It was one thing when they'd put a little semi-transparent logo at the bottom of the screen indicating which channel is was on. I thought that was a little annoying and stupid. But then they started making them less transparent, and then they started making them ads. Now, they overlay big-ass animated ads WITH SOUND. Big, loud, annoying, distracting sounds in the middle of what I'm watching. Really, now, WTF? Do these stations explicitly want to get rid of viewers?
Personally, I'm not so set on being able to rebuild and modify my machines. I used to be, and then I realized that it's pretty much a waste of time.
Sure, every once in a while it's useful to build something custom when you have specific needs. On the other hand, having owned a laptop for a while, I realized my needs aren't so custom and swapping individual parts isn't all it's cracked up to be. Looking at upgrades, if you want to upgrade your processor or motherboard, it's usually best to upgrade both, and memory while you're at it. And at that point, when you "upgrade", you're really just salvaging the case and hard drive.
The only time it ever really made sense for me to upgrade a machine in the past few years was when I bought a new video card back when I was playing a lot of games. But even that has limited value when they upgrade the port that the video card plugs into. When they went from PCI to AGP, buying that new video card meant buying a new motherboard, which meant buying a new processor and memory.
Anyway, since then, I've figured out that it just really isn't that helpful (for me, at least). I'd much rather buy a full machine that's sleek and well-integrated, and get support on it so it's someone else's problem if it breaks. If I want to "upgrade", I find someone who wants the old system, sell it for what I can, and buy a new system. It's definitely easier, and usually not much more expensive.
Haven't they been worredly obsessing over TiVo and other DVR's for years, which cost upwards of that much, along with a monthly service fee, "just to record shows using a single service while they ARE getting the same TV shows on cable/broadcast?"
Yeah, but at least TiVO is sort of self-contained. You buy it, and then it works on your normal TV signal. The problem with the idea of a Netflix set-top-box is that it ties you to Netflix content. If Netflix suddenly goes down the tube or something, the box is completely useless.
Besides, DVRs really took off when cable companies started offering them as part of the service. So people often aren't going out and spending hundreds of dollars on a TiVO, they're spending $10 a month for a better cable box. Sure, it might ad up to the same amount of money over a couple years, but it's not quite the same.
I think it's really weird that Amazon.com, Hulu, Netflix, and so many others think that I watch television on my computer....[snip]...A while back, I bought one of the AppleTV boxes.
And right there you've identified why they "think [you] watch television on [your] computer". They do not, in fact, believe that everyone watches TV on their computers. They just know that most people won't buy a $300-$400 box just to receive TV shows from a single service when they can generally get the same TV shows on cable/broadcast.
What I mean is, I don't want to have to pay hundreds of dollars to buy an Apple box to watch my iTunes stuff, another couple hundred dollars to get a Netflix set-top-box to watch netflix movies, another multi-hundred-dollar box to watch Amazon.com movies, a couple hundred more for Hulu, and then a TiVO on top of that.
IMHO, someone needs to create a set of IPTV standards that allow any service to deliver content. The standards need to be open enough and standard enough that Netflix, Apple, NBC, FOX, Disney, and anyone else with a server can deliver content to an AppleTV, TiVO, XBox360, or a Playstation. Or at least the content providers should try to strike a deal with the set-top-box companies to do it in a proprietary way.
Of course, it'll never happen because it threatens the control of cable companies and broadcast networks.
The fact is, at the moment, Gnome is ideologically flawed.
Can you say more about what the ideology of Gnome is, and what the flaw in the ideology is?
Because you assert that as a "fact", but then only go on to say that you don't like Gnome and don't like that people seem to use it and like it. I'd be interested in hearing some detailed criticisms.
Which trolls? Is your complaint about anti-Windows posts being modded up, or about anti-Apple posts being modded down? Because, in my experience, a valid criticism of Apple will get modded up, same as a valid criticism of Microsoft. The only difference is that there are many more valid criticisms of Microsoft.
It's not a very valid criticism of Apple because (assuming this is a problem with APE):
Well there are going to be some trolls about anything... The nature of a real troll is not to even care if you're right, but just to get a response.
But a lot of the Windows criticism around these parts is pretty valid, and in at least this particular instance, the criticism of Apple isn't valid.
Just remember, if windows got taken down by a third party app, not only would you be screaming and shouting...
Not under circumstances like this, we wouldn't. Some of Unsanity's programs are pretty invasive little things that fuck around with the OS in ways that Apple doesn't support. From their site:
So yeah, if you have even a vague understanding of what this product does, it shouldn't be any surprise that it could cause problems if you threw it on a new/unknown version of the operating system. This isn't just a "3rd party application". It's not like if Windows crashed when you installed Firefox (which Microsoft would get criticized for), but more like if Windows crashed when you tried to use an obscure and invasive 3rd party WindowsXP hack on Windows Vista (which Microsoft would not get criticized for).
And it's not even clear that OSX itself crashed (as in a kernel panic). For as few details are available, it could just be that Finder or the installer crashed, which wouldn't be surprising if APE is screwing around with those applications' memory space.
Does the fact that it's your handle mean you believe all that, or is your handle facetious?
Because things like Windows not being command-line oriented has been a bit of a problem for years. Sure, it's great to be able to do things through a GUI if you want to, but it's also very good to be able to do things through a command-line if you want to.
Take the focus on Remote Desktop for remote administration as an example. Sure, Terminal Services on Windows is a very nice tool. However, if I'm just going to copy a couple files around, it'd be less resource intensive on both the server and client end, as well as being less bandwidth intensive, to be able to do that through a remote shell.
I know that Microsoft has done a lot to improve their command-line support for the sake of scripting and all, but Remote Desktop just isn't a replacement for SSH. It's another tool with different strengths and weaknesses. So Remote Desktop does not make it a "better Unix than Unix". If they want to create a better Unix than Unix, they should at least provide a good remote shell, at least as powerful and versatile as bash, that can be accessed from a wide variety of operating systems. Because that's something that the Unix world already takes for granted.
I don't know if they're building walls, but they don't seem to be building bridges.
OSX doesn't have transparent dockable menu bars with widgets. It has a "dock", which has a specific purpose and limited uses, and a manu bar which is essentially the same as the menu bar in the original Mac OS. It has "widgets" which have nothing to do with the dock, and are again an evolution of an old idea from MacOS
Sorry. I like KDE well enough and I'm very interested to see version 4, but I don't see how Leopard has "borrowed" most of their "new" features from it. Time Machine? Stacks? Quicklook? Coverflow? These things aren't exactly unprecedented, but are they simple rip-offs of KDE?
I think you may have just fallen for a very old troll. I'm not sure, but I'm think I've seen that exact message a few times before.
But otherwise, no real complaint with your post.
ALl of this done with what IMHO is the GREATEST window manager out there and it seems like apple agrees ....they once again "borrowed" most of their "new" features from it.
Which window manager? And which features did they borrow?
What ever happened to those "extra features" Steve promised way back when Leopard was announced?
Which features are those?
I guess I would wonder how this was able to happen at all. The admins configured the service so that the update wouldn't happen, and it happened anyway. Why was the software built in such a way that an outside party could even have the option of pushing an update against the configured settings?
If the ends justify the means, and the desired end is to prevent neglect and misery, then why don't we just kill all the children of poor families and kill all sad people. It would end their suffering, right?
I'm not arguing that abortion is wrong, but the question is whether abortion is morally acceptable or immoral. The question is not as to the effects of abortion, unless you really believe that the ends justify the means.
I'm kind of a late-twentysomething, and I started a CS degree and didn't really like it, either. I realized pretty quickly that even though I was very interested in computers, the CS degree wasn't really for me. In what was perhaps a strange move, I ended up majoring in Philosophy and minoring in Literature. Go figure.
What might have been more surprising, though, was what happened when I got out of college. I took a job working as a helpdesk tech. Having worked with CS graduates and people with a bunch of certs, I hold my own with pretty much everything except the actual programming. I'm even fine with the logic issues, more or less, but I'm not a programmer and I don't want to be, so it's not really a problem. But what I've found is that all my years of fixing computers often helps me diagnose problems better and faster than people who've just studied computers. When something breaks, the CS majors sometimes focus too much on how they think computers are supposed to work, but don't always have a lot of experience in how computers tend to malfunction.
I did better doing helpdesk work than the others because, in addition to my real-life computer repair experience, I also had better people skills. Then I did well as a network tech because I had better research skills. Now I'm doing pretty well as the Director of Technology because I have a variety of skills that help me make decisions regarding computers, asset allocation, budgeting, personnel, and business strategy.
Now, admittedly, if you're concerned that there aren't enough people going the hard-core engineer route, I'm not a good example. I'm not an engineer. In fact, I wasn't even all that interested in an IT career when I started out. I just found that the helpdesk job was the best job I could find, and things took off from there. I'm just saying that, sometimes, what you studied in school isn't nearly as important as we tend to think.
This reminds me of an experience I had a couple years ago. My cousin (who is about 16 now) wanted to install some game on his computer. It was a Windows XP machine with a normal install wizard, and he was held up by some error or another. It wasn't a big deal so I don't even remember what the problem was, but it got me thinking.S
I remembered being a kid, trying to play the latest Space Quest game from Sierra, and having to figure out which sound card I should choose during the install. My actual soundcard wasn't on the list, so I had to guess which one was more compatible, and it was a bit of trial and error. I remembered having to write custom AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files for different games to load different TSRs, and use different options of EMM386 or HIMEM.SYS. I remembered how impressed I was with myself when I figured out how to use AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS to make a little menu system that allowed me to choose the configuration I wanted while it was booting. I remembered trying to write little BASIC and Pascal programs to do things because... well, computers didn't do that much. I wasn't using my computer to store my music collection or watch movies. The big thing for me to do with computers in those days (besides playing games) was just to screw around with the computer to see what I could get it to do.
And it kind of made me sad that my cousin would never go through that. Sure, he'll be more computer savvy than my grandparents because he's grown up with computers, but he'll probably never understand computers as well as he would have if he were a few years older. Working in IT for a few years, it seems like the most helpful people are those who are young enough that they had computers when they were kids (and therefore grew up thinking about them), but old enough to have experimented with computers back when they weren't so easy.
It's hard to say that some particular thing is not taught anymore. Taught by whom? A given school or a given set of parents might be doing a poor job of teaching "critical thinking", but that doesn't mean it isn't being taught anywhere by anyone.
Besides, part of the problem with geometry is that even when it was taught in the public schools I went to, it was taught so poorly that it didn't encourage critical thinking any more than learning your multiplication tables. Much of our public education system seems to be chasing down pipe-dreams and quick-fixes, obsessed with self-esteem and political correctness. Eh... I don't even want to get into it, it's so stupid.
... and not to be confused with "the doctor".
Oh, I'm pretty sure Verizon will be offering 200 Mbps connections if this all works out. They'll probably have a 5 GB per month bandwidth cap, and if you break it your account will dialed down to 512kbps or some other similar nonsense. But certainly they'll be *advertising* 200Mbps.