Amen. I've avoided using MySQL on hobby projects because, on the off-chance any of them actually go on to make any money, I have absolutely *no clue* when, where, how, and even whether I need to start paying for it instead of using the open source version. Well, that, and their hostile attitude towards fixing bugs in some of their supporting projects (like MySQL Query Browser.)
Ooo free advertising to a load of people who have no compunction about stealing your product... that's a valuable demographic! That's why Target and Sears specifically target shoplifters in their ad campaigns, you know.
Shush, you're destroying the delicate fantasy that The Pirate Bay is run by hep cats who are fighting against The Man, and not just assholes who want free content without paying for it!
Seriously, I hate those guys. The fact that Sweden doesn't have far more important things to worry about, though, that's pretty much a sign that we've arrived as a civilization. Food? Got it. Clean water? Done. Medical care? Yup... I guess the only problem left is these jackasses who steal stuff.
Are the two options mutually-exclusive? Ask the PC Games industry whether copy protection is needed or futile. It's needed because retailers/publishers won't sell the game without it. It's mostly futile for the obvious reason (although I'm sure it snags some casual copiers.)
A more interesting question would be to ask a PC game maker if they'd release their game with no copyright, if their publishers/retailers allowed them to. Right now, they have no choice-- given the choice, which would they make?
The argument "no one forced" the purchase of Microsoft products is patently and provably false. Go to Best Buy or Staples and buy a P.C. laptop without Windows. Just go ahead and try. The barriers put in the way are amazing.
First of all, Best Buy sells Linux laptops.
Secondly, then why is Microsoft being sued and not Best Buy and Comcast? Is the EU now holding Microsoft responsible for the behavior of other retailers? That's ridiculous.
Wow, if it ever occurred to them to, you know, make a UI equivalent for all of its features, then I might have known that and not bashed their product just now.
This is the kind of thing that just shows how out-of-touch most Linux users are:
It actually is trivial. One word: Porn-popup-blocker.
You have no idea how embarrassing a pornographic pop-up (or pop-under) window is for your mum.
I agree it's a good feature-- then it's a good thing IE7 does the exact same pop-up blocking by default that Firefox does. That's not going to tip anybody in Firefox's direction when IE7 has the same feature.
There are some things Firefox definitely does better, for instance, not letting Quicktime stomp all over it. Or the plug-ins, if the layman can actually find and install them. But IE7 is just as stable, has tabs, has pop-up blocking, uses less memory, and runs the same speed or faster than Firefox. (And both are slower than the Safari beta for Windows, which has all those features and is much faster than both IE7 and Firefox. Too bad Apple can't make iTunes as good.)
Also, development in Firefox with these two extensions has made my life immeasurably easier: Web Developer Toolbar by Chris Pedrick, and Firebug (in which I am always managing to discover new features that have been there all along). I shudder and groan when it's time to make it work in IE, because I know that javascript debugging, or CSS debugging, or just "Operation Aborted" errors are going to keep me unproductively busy for hours.
Blockbuster.com has the same selection of non-censored videos as netflix.com. The Blockbuster retail stores and Blockbuster.com operate more or less entirely independently-- which is quite annoying, since you can't just walk into one and ask them to look up your coupon online, you have to print it out.
In any case, if Blockbuster didn't ask for "family friendly" videos, as you seem to think they do, Wal-Mart would. I don't see the problem, frankly. If you don't like it, don't buy there. If enough people don't like it, they'll go out of business.
I hate to break this to you, but only Slashdotters care. I installed XP, activated it once in like 4 seconds, and used the computer for 3 years. That's not a big deal.
- When people are having problems with IE, I promote Firefox.
The problem is that while Firefox is definitely better than IE6, it's a hard sell against IE7. Firefox crashes on my Vista PC more than IE7 does.
- When someone wants to do some photo editing, but can't afford to shell out the cash for Photoshop, I suggest they try the Gimp. Nobody seems to like it, but they get their work done.
First of all, GIMP is only about equivalent to Photoshop Elements, which is something like $80. So there's that.
Secondly, if you promote GIMP people are going to hate you when you actually trying using that pig. Promote Paint.NET. It does nearly everything GIMP does, but the interface doesn't suck ass. (This is assuming the people you're talking to are on Windows.)
In short: Paint.NET = GOOD, GIMP = BAD
- When people complain about the loud ads in AIM, or having to run 4 different programs for AIM, Google Talk, MSN and Yahoo, I promote Pidgin.
Pidgin has a lot of bugs, has a complicated installer, and doesn't support voice or video chat. Or MSN's 'viral' emotes, nudge, and drawing IM features. Also file transfers don't work. Pidgin is a crappy example. Sadly, it's about the best there is on Windows, but it's still kind of crummy.
It's a hard sell to convince a layman that Firefox is better than IE7, if those are the choices. I know this is Slashdot "Firefox rah rah rah" but IE7 really is an awesome browser.
Kind of makes US reliance on space based technological dominance in the theater of war into a bit of a joke, doesn't it.
No, it just shows that satellites need to be protected against it. "People being shot" doesn't make the US reliance on human beings a bit of a joke, it just means we develop body armor and armored vehicles to cope with it.
If some dumb nation were to weaponize space, this is how easily they and their efforts could be shut down.
If it's so easy, why didn't China do it in 1957 (when the threat of satellites was first made real) instead of 2007? I call BS on this one, this technology is obviously very difficult and very expensive for any nation to develop, and the fact that it took China this long to pull it off only proves that.
How many nations on earth could launch packages like this? Maybe 5, maybe a couple more, that's about it. For comparison's sake, how many nations on earth can maintain armored vehicles? All of them can.
Kind of makes the whole idea seem really stupid.
Maybe it makes the idea of war seem stupid to say "technology A upstages technology B, so we develop technology C", but a lot of mankind's progress has been made that way. And war's been working that way for thousands of years now, so expecting it to stop anytime soon might be foolish.
It's called "abstraction." Think of police not as a police officer, but as an abstraction representing all law enforcement-- beat cops, highway patrol, even the detectives working on the white collar stuff. You're getting caught up in the word "police" and missing the big picture; everything in the game is an abstraction.
For those of you unfamiliar with programming, a 'bug' is an actual coding error. This was NOT a bug. This was a conscious choice made for where to place files.
What possible advantage does placing the cache files have? Whoever made that "conscious choice" was obviously not aware of how corporate networks work, was not following Microsoft's file location recommendations, and considering how long it remained a bug, was mule-headed to boot.
Most bug databases contain a lot more things than "actual coding errors," BTW. I don't know where you work, but I think it's safe to say the word "bug" has evolved to represent just about any shortcoming in a product.
And, it had an easy solution. TURN OFF BROWSER CACHING. Alternatively, setting Firefox to delete the cache upon close in the Security preferences would decrease the problem significantly, if not eliminate it.
Yes, but without a group policy equivalent, both of those operations are a huge pain to do for 10,000 installations. (Or however many installations your particular company has.)
For those actually familiar with managing and administering roaming profiles, you'll also be aware that you have some degree of control over what is, or is not, permitted to sync when roaming.
Well, der, but why should I have to fix my setup to fix Mozilla's bug? The attitude in the parent post communicates more clearly than anything else how far Firefox's culture is away from mainstream corporations.
That's great, but Microsoft had that running in IE version 3. What's the hold-up?
It also only talks about customizations for ISPs/computer vendors, it doesn't address things like Group Policy-type functionality for corporate networks at all.
Ok, well, then you've moved the problem from: "Firefox doesn't have an easily-configurable group policy equivalent" to "Firefox is too expensive because you have to replace every computer in the office with a Linux OS." Guess which problem is easier to fix.
It's a reply, but it's not a useful reply to anybody actually in this thing we call "the real world."
Failing that, I think the ideas pointed out in the article are legitimate reasons that IE, albeit an inferior product in most reguards (or maybe all reguards), is dominating the corporate market.
Yup. For the longest time, Firefox had a bug where it put its cache in the "Application Data" directory instead of the "Local Settings" directory. For those who are unfamiliar with Windows, what this means it that Firefox was saying that the web cache was important data that should be migrated to follow the user, instead of disposable data that could be flushed with no penalty. As a result, for an extremely long time, Firefox was utterly, 100% useless for companies/organizations that use roaming profiles. It took ages for this bug to be fixed; IIRC it was reported around version 0.6 and finally fixed in version 2.0, but I can't find it on Bugzilla anymore so I can't be certain.
I think just the fact that it is a free product hurts them on some level.
That's true, but the blatant, long-standing bugs (like above) that show that Mozilla never bothered to even test the product in a corporate environment hurts them a lot more.
Needless to say, I think Mozilla has their work cut out for them. Even if they do end up offering a superior enterprise class product, I think it's gonna be hard to get a lot of companies that have been partnered with M$ for years to move away from IE.
It doesn't help that Mozilla purposefully makes it harder. Would it kill them to map "innerText" to "textContent?" Would they suffer and die if they made a global "window.event" object and aliased it to the last event object made for an event handler? Those two minor things alone would "automagically" make legions of IE-only pages work in FF.
You'll have to deal with a lot of people who actually know the difference between "their", "there", and "they're". And you might even have to learn a whole new language to deal with those who don't.
It's pretty easy to get that right when you learn English from a (printed) textbook. If they were learning from spoken English, like everybody in the US does, they'd make the mistake just as often.
Don't plan to get rich - Even billionaires have to pay taxes here.
As opposed to the US, where the top 5% pay 58% of the total income tax collected, and the top 10% pay 71%.
Gun-toting rednecks are few and far between, so don't expect much interesting company. And forget about monster trucks!
Yeah, the US has the South. But Europe has Greece, so let's just call this one a wash.
The Germans, Russians and Italians are just waiting for their chance - Don't let all this openness, good food/drink, and friendly faces fool you!
Germans, (most) Russians and Italians are all Europeans... so... yeah. But in the US column, we haven't had a war with any of our (immediate) neighbors since 1812, so we're doing pretty good on that front.
Most people prefer Belgian or Swiss chocolate to Mars bars, Belgian, Polish, German or Czech beer to Bud, and pasta, sauerkraut, fondue or smoked salmon to a Big Mac.
Smoked salmon? I live in Washington State, come on!
In rural places a lot of people don't even lock their doors, so naturally theft, rape and murder are rampant.
In rural places in the US, a lot of people don't even locks their doors. Hell, I'm in a city (albeit a small one) and I don't lock my doors.
The taxpayers' money is spent on lots of useless stuff - Schools, health insurance and those too lazy to work.
The US has all of those, sadly. I'd much prefer our money didn't go to those too lazy to work, and I'd also like it if the money currently going to health insurance did so in a more rational fashion. But at least I don't troll message boards and post about the US like our shit don't stink.
That's not freedom for consumers. And that's why the North American offerings are garbage. Thiat "freedom" makes companies free to screw over their customer base and rape us for every nickel they can wring out of us.
You think phone companies would be any better if they had to share the same wireless network? Let me ask you this: ATT and T-Mobile share the same network, does that mean I can switch from one to the other at will? Or take a device from one (like an iPhone) and use it on the other without having to hack it or pay a fortune? Please! It's just as hard to go from ATT to T-Mobile as it is to go from ATT to Verizon, despite the "compatible" networks.
I agree that standards can make things better, but I think they should be voluntary standards decided by the industry, not arbitrarily decreed to be standards by a government. For example, do you think the FCC should have told movie studios which HD DVD format to back, killing off the other one by governmental decree?
"We believe in freedom". God, what smug self deluding bullshit.
The US did have non-standard power for several decades. Some power companies put out 50hz, some put out 60hz, some in cities even put out DC-only systems.
Well, they ping you when somebody tries to grab a credit report about you. Unless you're in a auto dealership at the time, there's a good chance that that ping means someone's trying to steal your identity to get a fraudulent credit card or such.
I'm not sure how easily you can act on this information... for instance, can you block the credit report from going though?
We believe in freedom here in the US. If Verizon wants to make their own standard and ignore the one that exists elsewhere, they're free to do so. Tends to work out pretty well for us most of the time.
These older IBM keyboards (both the 84-key and 101-key models) were also ultimately repairable, if you had the time. We'd strip them down to their springs and "flip-tabs", wash off the pieces in a bath, wipe down the underlying pcb, then rebuild them after a nasty coke-or-meatball-sub accident where I used to work.
I've done that with every keyboard I've ever owned, and they all work just fine. I actually go further sometimes: If they're really messed-up with soda or something sticky, I'll run them through the dishwasher (no soup.) Works beautifully, just make sure you give the keyboard a couple days so it's FULLY 100% dry before you plug it back in.
In short, that's not that amazing, and it doesn't require an expensive or old keyboard to do.
Comfort Curve 2000 from Microsoft. Probably the best-laid-out Microsoft keyboard, as well as one of the cheapest. I like the calculator button right next to the keypad. As an added bonus, it's "spill proof" (or at least very spill resistant; the circuitry is supposed to be sealed in a waterproof fashion, but I haven't spilled on it to test that yet.)
Slashdot Mirror
Amen. I've avoided using MySQL on hobby projects because, on the off-chance any of them actually go on to make any money, I have absolutely *no clue* when, where, how, and even whether I need to start paying for it instead of using the open source version. Well, that, and their hostile attitude towards fixing bugs in some of their supporting projects (like MySQL Query Browser.)
Ooo free advertising to a load of people who have no compunction about stealing your product... that's a valuable demographic! That's why Target and Sears specifically target shoplifters in their ad campaigns, you know.
Shush, you're destroying the delicate fantasy that The Pirate Bay is run by hep cats who are fighting against The Man, and not just assholes who want free content without paying for it!
Seriously, I hate those guys. The fact that Sweden doesn't have far more important things to worry about, though, that's pretty much a sign that we've arrived as a civilization. Food? Got it. Clean water? Done. Medical care? Yup... I guess the only problem left is these jackasses who steal stuff.
Are the two options mutually-exclusive? Ask the PC Games industry whether copy protection is needed or futile. It's needed because retailers/publishers won't sell the game without it. It's mostly futile for the obvious reason (although I'm sure it snags some casual copiers.)
A more interesting question would be to ask a PC game maker if they'd release their game with no copyright, if their publishers/retailers allowed them to. Right now, they have no choice-- given the choice, which would they make?
The argument "no one forced" the purchase of Microsoft products is patently and provably false. Go to Best Buy or Staples and buy a P.C. laptop without Windows. Just go ahead and try. The barriers put in the way are amazing.
First of all, Best Buy sells Linux laptops.
Secondly, then why is Microsoft being sued and not Best Buy and Comcast? Is the EU now holding Microsoft responsible for the behavior of other retailers? That's ridiculous.
pidgin supports nudge, just type: /nudge
Wow, if it ever occurred to them to, you know, make a UI equivalent for all of its features, then I might have known that and not bashed their product just now.
It does support MSN's ghastly animated emotes
Well, then it doesn't work for me.
This is the kind of thing that just shows how out-of-touch most Linux users are:
It actually is trivial. One word: Porn-popup-blocker.
You have no idea how embarrassing a pornographic pop-up (or pop-under) window is for your mum.
I agree it's a good feature-- then it's a good thing IE7 does the exact same pop-up blocking by default that Firefox does. That's not going to tip anybody in Firefox's direction when IE7 has the same feature.
There are some things Firefox definitely does better, for instance, not letting Quicktime stomp all over it. Or the plug-ins, if the layman can actually find and install them. But IE7 is just as stable, has tabs, has pop-up blocking, uses less memory, and runs the same speed or faster than Firefox. (And both are slower than the Safari beta for Windows, which has all those features and is much faster than both IE7 and Firefox. Too bad Apple can't make iTunes as good.)
Also, development in Firefox with these two extensions has made my life immeasurably easier: Web Developer Toolbar by Chris Pedrick, and Firebug (in which I am always managing to discover new features that have been there all along). I shudder and groan when it's time to make it work in IE, because I know that javascript debugging, or CSS debugging, or just "Operation Aborted" errors are going to keep me unproductively busy for hours.
Just FYI, there is a Developer Toolbar for IE, but I agree it's not as good as the version for Firefox: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=e59c3964-672d-4511-bb3e-2d5e1db91038&displaylang=en
Blockbuster.com has the same selection of non-censored videos as netflix.com. The Blockbuster retail stores and Blockbuster.com operate more or less entirely independently-- which is quite annoying, since you can't just walk into one and ask them to look up your coupon online, you have to print it out.
In any case, if Blockbuster didn't ask for "family friendly" videos, as you seem to think they do, Wal-Mart would. I don't see the problem, frankly. If you don't like it, don't buy there. If enough people don't like it, they'll go out of business.
I hate to break this to you, but only Slashdotters care. I installed XP, activated it once in like 4 seconds, and used the computer for 3 years. That's not a big deal.
- When people are having problems with IE, I promote Firefox.
The problem is that while Firefox is definitely better than IE6, it's a hard sell against IE7. Firefox crashes on my Vista PC more than IE7 does.
- When someone wants to do some photo editing, but can't afford to shell out the cash for Photoshop, I suggest they try the Gimp. Nobody seems to like it, but they get their work done.
First of all, GIMP is only about equivalent to Photoshop Elements, which is something like $80. So there's that.
Secondly, if you promote GIMP people are going to hate you when you actually trying using that pig. Promote Paint.NET. It does nearly everything GIMP does, but the interface doesn't suck ass. (This is assuming the people you're talking to are on Windows.)
In short: Paint.NET = GOOD, GIMP = BAD
- When people complain about the loud ads in AIM, or having to run 4 different programs for AIM, Google Talk, MSN and Yahoo, I promote Pidgin.
Pidgin has a lot of bugs, has a complicated installer, and doesn't support voice or video chat. Or MSN's 'viral' emotes, nudge, and drawing IM features. Also file transfers don't work. Pidgin is a crappy example. Sadly, it's about the best there is on Windows, but it's still kind of crummy.
It's a hard sell to convince a layman that Firefox is better than IE7, if those are the choices. I know this is Slashdot "Firefox rah rah rah" but IE7 really is an awesome browser.
Kind of makes US reliance on space based technological dominance in the theater of war into a bit of a joke, doesn't it.
No, it just shows that satellites need to be protected against it. "People being shot" doesn't make the US reliance on human beings a bit of a joke, it just means we develop body armor and armored vehicles to cope with it.
If some dumb nation were to weaponize space, this is how easily they and their efforts could be shut down.
If it's so easy, why didn't China do it in 1957 (when the threat of satellites was first made real) instead of 2007? I call BS on this one, this technology is obviously very difficult and very expensive for any nation to develop, and the fact that it took China this long to pull it off only proves that.
How many nations on earth could launch packages like this? Maybe 5, maybe a couple more, that's about it. For comparison's sake, how many nations on earth can maintain armored vehicles? All of them can.
Kind of makes the whole idea seem really stupid.
Maybe it makes the idea of war seem stupid to say "technology A upstages technology B, so we develop technology C", but a lot of mankind's progress has been made that way. And war's been working that way for thousands of years now, so expecting it to stop anytime soon might be foolish.
It's called "abstraction." Think of police not as a police officer, but as an abstraction representing all law enforcement-- beat cops, highway patrol, even the detectives working on the white collar stuff. You're getting caught up in the word "police" and missing the big picture; everything in the game is an abstraction.
For those of you unfamiliar with programming, a 'bug' is an actual coding error. This was NOT a bug. This was a conscious choice made for where to place files.
What possible advantage does placing the cache files have? Whoever made that "conscious choice" was obviously not aware of how corporate networks work, was not following Microsoft's file location recommendations, and considering how long it remained a bug, was mule-headed to boot.
Most bug databases contain a lot more things than "actual coding errors," BTW. I don't know where you work, but I think it's safe to say the word "bug" has evolved to represent just about any shortcoming in a product.
And, it had an easy solution. TURN OFF BROWSER CACHING. Alternatively, setting Firefox to delete the cache upon close in the Security preferences would decrease the problem significantly, if not eliminate it.
Yes, but without a group policy equivalent, both of those operations are a huge pain to do for 10,000 installations. (Or however many installations your particular company has.)
For those actually familiar with managing and administering roaming profiles, you'll also be aware that you have some degree of control over what is, or is not, permitted to sync when roaming.
Well, der, but why should I have to fix my setup to fix Mozilla's bug? The attitude in the parent post communicates more clearly than anything else how far Firefox's culture is away from mainstream corporations.
That's great, but Microsoft had that running in IE version 3. What's the hold-up?
It also only talks about customizations for ISPs/computer vendors, it doesn't address things like Group Policy-type functionality for corporate networks at all.
Ok, well, then you've moved the problem from: "Firefox doesn't have an easily-configurable group policy equivalent" to "Firefox is too expensive because you have to replace every computer in the office with a Linux OS." Guess which problem is easier to fix.
It's a reply, but it's not a useful reply to anybody actually in this thing we call "the real world."
Failing that, I think the ideas pointed out in the article are legitimate reasons that IE, albeit an inferior product in most reguards (or maybe all reguards), is dominating the corporate market.
Yup. For the longest time, Firefox had a bug where it put its cache in the "Application Data" directory instead of the "Local Settings" directory. For those who are unfamiliar with Windows, what this means it that Firefox was saying that the web cache was important data that should be migrated to follow the user, instead of disposable data that could be flushed with no penalty. As a result, for an extremely long time, Firefox was utterly, 100% useless for companies/organizations that use roaming profiles. It took ages for this bug to be fixed; IIRC it was reported around version 0.6 and finally fixed in version 2.0, but I can't find it on Bugzilla anymore so I can't be certain.
I think just the fact that it is a free product hurts them on some level.
That's true, but the blatant, long-standing bugs (like above) that show that Mozilla never bothered to even test the product in a corporate environment hurts them a lot more.
Needless to say, I think Mozilla has their work cut out for them. Even if they do end up offering a superior enterprise class product, I think it's gonna be hard to get a lot of companies that have been partnered with M$ for years to move away from IE.
It doesn't help that Mozilla purposefully makes it harder. Would it kill them to map "innerText" to "textContent?" Would they suffer and die if they made a global "window.event" object and aliased it to the last event object made for an event handler? Those two minor things alone would "automagically" make legions of IE-only pages work in FF.
Wow I'm really starting to hate Europeans.
You'll have to deal with a lot of people who actually know the difference between "their", "there", and "they're". And you might even have to learn a whole new language to deal with those who don't.
It's pretty easy to get that right when you learn English from a (printed) textbook. If they were learning from spoken English, like everybody in the US does, they'd make the mistake just as often.
Don't plan to get rich - Even billionaires have to pay taxes here.
As opposed to the US, where the top 5% pay 58% of the total income tax collected, and the top 10% pay 71%.
http://www.hoover.org/research/factsonpolicy/facts/6771827.html
Gun-toting rednecks are few and far between, so don't expect much interesting company. And forget about monster trucks!
Yeah, the US has the South. But Europe has Greece, so let's just call this one a wash.
The Germans, Russians and Italians are just waiting for their chance - Don't let all this openness, good food/drink, and friendly faces fool you!
Germans, (most) Russians and Italians are all Europeans... so... yeah. But in the US column, we haven't had a war with any of our (immediate) neighbors since 1812, so we're doing pretty good on that front.
Most people prefer Belgian or Swiss chocolate to Mars bars, Belgian, Polish, German or Czech beer to Bud, and pasta, sauerkraut, fondue or smoked salmon to a Big Mac.
Too bad there's no gourmet chocolate in the US: http://www.ghirardelli.com/
Or good beers: http://www.nwmicrobrews.com/
And I forgot that Belgium and Switzerland don't have any McDonalds: http://www.mcdonalds.be/ http://www.mcdonalds.ch/de/Default.asp?flash=true
Smoked salmon? I live in Washington State, come on!
In rural places a lot of people don't even lock their doors, so naturally theft, rape and murder are rampant.
In rural places in the US, a lot of people don't even locks their doors. Hell, I'm in a city (albeit a small one) and I don't lock my doors.
The taxpayers' money is spent on lots of useless stuff - Schools, health insurance and those too lazy to work.
The US has all of those, sadly. I'd much prefer our money didn't go to those too lazy to work, and I'd also like it if the money currently going to health insurance did so in a more rational fashion. But at least I don't troll message boards and post about the US like our shit don't stink.
That's not freedom for consumers. And that's why the North American offerings are garbage. Thiat "freedom" makes companies free to screw over their customer base and rape us for every nickel they can wring out of us.
You think phone companies would be any better if they had to share the same wireless network? Let me ask you this: ATT and T-Mobile share the same network, does that mean I can switch from one to the other at will? Or take a device from one (like an iPhone) and use it on the other without having to hack it or pay a fortune? Please! It's just as hard to go from ATT to T-Mobile as it is to go from ATT to Verizon, despite the "compatible" networks.
I agree that standards can make things better, but I think they should be voluntary standards decided by the industry, not arbitrarily decreed to be standards by a government. For example, do you think the FCC should have told movie studios which HD DVD format to back, killing off the other one by governmental decree?
"We believe in freedom". God, what smug self deluding bullshit.
Let me guess, you're from Europe?
The US did have non-standard power for several decades. Some power companies put out 50hz, some put out 60hz, some in cities even put out DC-only systems.
Well, they ping you when somebody tries to grab a credit report about you. Unless you're in a auto dealership at the time, there's a good chance that that ping means someone's trying to steal your identity to get a fraudulent credit card or such.
I'm not sure how easily you can act on this information... for instance, can you block the credit report from going though?
We believe in freedom here in the US. If Verizon wants to make their own standard and ignore the one that exists elsewhere, they're free to do so. Tends to work out pretty well for us most of the time.
These older IBM keyboards (both the 84-key and 101-key models) were also ultimately repairable, if you had the time. We'd strip them down to their springs and "flip-tabs", wash off the pieces in a bath, wipe down the underlying pcb, then rebuild them after a nasty coke-or-meatball-sub accident where I used to work.
I've done that with every keyboard I've ever owned, and they all work just fine. I actually go further sometimes: If they're really messed-up with soda or something sticky, I'll run them through the dishwasher (no soup.) Works beautifully, just make sure you give the keyboard a couple days so it's FULLY 100% dry before you plug it back in.
In short, that's not that amazing, and it doesn't require an expensive or old keyboard to do.
I got one of these: http://www.wolfmanzbytes.com/pc/mscomfortcurve2000/mscomfortcurve2000lg.jpg
Comfort Curve 2000 from Microsoft. Probably the best-laid-out Microsoft keyboard, as well as one of the cheapest. I like the calculator button right next to the keypad. As an added bonus, it's "spill proof" (or at least very spill resistant; the circuitry is supposed to be sealed in a waterproof fashion, but I haven't spilled on it to test that yet.)