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My sister's a fashion maven. I'm a geek. She once told me: "You could pull off a hat. But first you'd have to change your whole personality." YMMV :)

Honestly I'm surprised to see so little sympathy for the publishers on a site like this. Aren't most of us making a living (or trying) by selling bits? What would you do if you were creating software for a market where piracy was easy and rampant? I dislike DRM as much as anybody. I'm not trying to say DRM is good. I'm a casual PC gamer, and I avoid titles with DRM schemes I can't live with. I'm annoyed when that means I'll miss out on a good title. But I can certainly understand the plight of the publishers in an age when piracy has gotten ridiculously easy. I don't want to see PC gaming disappear completely. But when even fellow software creators can't put themselves in the shoes of PC game developers, I fear it's inevitable. Building a profitable PC game business was difficult even when most people paid for them.

Flying cars first, please.

Summary: Direct communication with users yields better software. Dedicated tech support often translate poorly from user issues to feature requests.

"'As the speed increases you're starting to look at 50, 60mph; there's a considerable amount of power consumed by each additional mile an hour,' Dowling said. 'There's a trade off between energy and time.' To determine how best to expend the vehicle's energy budget, including the power in its batteries, the team has developed software that models the vehicle's performance."

This /was/ written 11 years ago. The market for Linux consultants is a little different today.

Part 2 here: http://archive.salon.com/21st/feature/1998/05/13feature.html

"'The rational brain can only take in seven pieces of information at one time,' Lehrer says. 'When it gets more than that, it’s like an old computer trying to run Vista.'"

Zing!

Will Vista's legacy be a pop-culture simile for an overburdened machine?

I'm ridiculously anal retentive about the quasi-ink-dust that comes off the whiteboard on my wall. I think my productivity would dramatically decline if I was faced with the same situation on the surface of my desk.

Neat idea though, for those who are less obsessive-compulsive.

Touché. That'll teach me to only read the first few definitions (http://dictionary.reference.com/dic?q=cohort)

I see it now, all the way down at number 5! Everything they said about my generation was true. :)

Here's an amusing coincidence. I was a student at JJ Hill Elementary school in St. Paul, MN in the late 80s. This was the gifted/talented magnet back then, I don't know if it still is. I see you're affiliated with Minnesota's gifted/talented educational program. Can I somehow blame you for my inability to read all the way to the fifth definition? :)

Same as it ever was. I narrowly miss the Gen Y cut-off, but was popular to bag on my generation's failings when we were first entering the workforce. Whatever.

(Aside: You don't even need a Kindle to spot this author's crutch words. Am I the only one who thought the repeated use of "cohort" was unusual? Dude, where's your thesaurus?)