DISQUS

You mean they can get away with calling it a "bar" without serving drinks ?
Hey, now that's an idea. Set yourself up in the local drinking hole with a sign saying "Will provide tech support for beer."

Mostly agree...but pure spam comments get a quick dump from my blog. But then I'm not popular enough to have many.

"I do expect that new hardware will offer the choice of OS X. "
In small groups maybe. I don't see a big bank or government department setting half its accounting department up with OSX while the other half have Windows.
"Compatibility issues are not really a problem anymore"
Mileage may vary. I have problems with Outlook Web Access in Linux or Windows Firefox (or at least limitations), though I don't know if Safari is better. Depends how tied up your firm is with the MS Stack or legacy apps. And if your Accounts app does work exactly the same on Windows and OSX, then how much is the Apple experience worth.

I can see Apple in niches and upper echelons, and in customer facing places for a business that wants a 'look', but I won't hold my breath for mass adoption

I think that Corporate IT will have a few questions to ask before it puts Macs as standard equipment on the desks of a large proportion of the desks.
Firstly, you don't replace all the PCs in an organisation at once, so it will be introduced over several years. So you are looking into compatibility issues. One solution would be to be buying Mac hardware but running (mostly/solely ?) Windows on them for a couple of years. Especially if you've already got Windows licenses. The question is will Apple sell the hardware at a suitably competitive rate (or let its hardware manufacturers sell the same box without the Apple logo/OSX).
Secondly, if you do go for OSX, which OSX ? Businesses are reluctant to upgrade OS at MS pace, let alone Apple's (or even worse, Ubuntu's). They'll want an OSX version that will still be up to date in five years time.

Sounds like a joke.
An Englishman, a South African and an Australian were on a bus....

Honestly, the only way I see Chrome getting significant market share off IE is if they get Microsoft (or for consumers Dell/Asus/...) to include it so it comes pre-installed on Windows.

The bit that gets me is whether the manager wants an estimate of effort time, or calendar time. It may take a week of coding to do a module, but you have to wait for an API spec to write one call, or for a db refresh to run a test, so there's two or three weeks between start and end.
Any estimate that doesn't come in a format like "About x hours for the first week, then y for the next two and another z at the end for sign-off, but only after Fred is back" is too simplistic

Its good for me.
With the regular feeds, is it possible to get a feed of new feeds. By that I mean, a feed where we can see that 'so and so' has been added to the aggregator.
There's some blogs where I subscribe to the comments as well as the main feed, so it would be nice to be alerted when someone new is added to the fold, so I can decide what i want to do about them,

"makes it tough to work from home."
I've got two kids (6 and 3). THEY make it tough to work from home :)

Here is Oz, most internet plans are limited/pay per use. I pay for a 1Gb limit per month with usage above that 'shaped' (slowed down to about dialup speeds) or I can buy extra at about $5 per Gb. Some plans offer extra 'off-peak' usage.
The economics can get complicated. I don't have a problem with businesses offering whatever terms they (and consumers) agree to. Slowing users, charging more or otherwise limiting peak use, or charging higher prices so they have a high enough capacity/user ratio and don't have to limit.
Tightening down on illegal (copyright violation) downloads may be generally beneficial, if anyone can work out how to do it.

"The cost of a barrel of oil has risen $100 dollars in 8 years. Is that due to a 300-400% increase in demand?"
Guess you never studied economics. Simple example of why that logic doesn't hold true. A company produces 10 doses of a life-saving drug for a disease. There are 10 very rich people with the disease. No excess demand, so the company charges the cost of producing the drug (plus some profit). If 11 very rich people suffer from the disease, the 10 doses suddenly become 'scarce'. The drug company can increase its charges ten fold (or even a million fold), until it becomes too expensive and one of those individuals drops out. Even a 10% (or 1%) increase in demand without a corresponding increase in supply means scarcity, and the price will increase until demand is forced to drop.
With petroleum, there's been increasing demand from China and India. There hasn't been a corresponding increase in supply. The price will increase, not in proportion to the increase in demand, but until it reaches a point where demand falls.
Quite simply, the price of gas will go up until it reaches the point where enough people can't afford it.

The same will happen with bandwidth. The price will rise until people stop using it or the extra income pays for more capacity to meet the demand.

"A rise in core costs negatively impacts the web worker’s business because it must either absorbed into the business or passed on to customers. Neither is ideal."
Welcome to the real world. Demand for petrol (or diesel) outstrips supply, so the price goes up to curb demand. Users have to absorb the cost or raise prices.
In fantasy land, you can get unlimited broadband cheaply, or even free. In the real world, some has to pay for cable, routers and other hardware, for men to go out and fix stuff when it breaks. it is perfectly reasonable to expect users to pay for the resources they are using.
"bandwidth policing has been squashed in favor of a more equitable solution."
Whole schools of political thought have been built on 'equitable' distribution of limited resources. Unfortunately, most break down as people want to be more equal than others.

"Ironically, the monitor usually takes the brunt of any beatings that frustration elicits."
I don't think that is ironic. It is the bearer of the bad news. The monitor is the bit of the computer that talks to us.
And its a lot safer taking out your frustrations on the monitor. It is easily replaced, much more so than the system box itself. Even on a laptop, a broken monitor could be bypassed with an external monitor and data or applications accessed.
These iMacs are a different story, with all the important bits squeezed behind that screen. Maybe the famed OSX 'friendliness' is natural selection at work, a survival mechanism to protect that valuable hard drive.

When you've got essential web apps that don't support IE7, you stick with IE6. Google "TestDirector IE7" for an example of the problem.
Maybe we need a separation of rendering engine and browser UI, like the IETab extension for Firefox.

Having the invite appear to originate from the inviter's email address is a good start. Some filters may pick up on the fact that it originated from a different location and mark it as junk though.
I'd still see a minimum requirement where, if someone tells you they don't want to receive email generated by Mix, then you can ensure that Mix will never send them another email.
I'd feel Mix is in a different category to a purely social network. Firstly, its target is as much professional rather than social (remember, you initially required email addresses to be in proper domains) and has a 'common ground' of products offered by a software company (most of them requiring payment). Secondly, Mix groups could be established to support commercial activity. Even user groups that charge membership may be considered commercial. Also, this isn't a 'no-money' startup, but an international company with large assets.
I suspect Mix invites would be considered 'commercial email' in many jurisdictions and, as such, have legal requirements for opt-outs.

Personally I don't get enough spam to find it annoying. However when I've told an organization that I don't want to hear from them again, I'd see no problem in holding them to account if they ignore that request.

"There’s a problem here because I can’t unsubscribe people from a non-existent list"
The obvious solution to that is build a list of people (and domains) who have requested not to receive Mix email, and validate against that before sending out any email.
And you'd need to record who's requesting invites for people to make sure no-one is using it to repeatedly target individuals.
To be honest, all this should have been thought out and controls put in place before the 'invite' facility was added.

The 'embedding complex SQL into PL/SQL' argument is flawed. If you have to change the view, it will still invalidate the dependent objects (ie the package) which will then be recompiled when next invoked.
You've also got two objects to deal with. Not necessarily a bad thing if the view can be re-used. But you are likely to be faced with the choice of putting filter conditions within the view itself, or as part of the query against the view.

"more money in Web 2.0 should signal a rise in student seeking CS degrees". That's a bit short-sighted. Yes, there might be more money this year or next, but what about a few years down the track after you graduate ? What about ten years after that when there's a new paradigm ? And when your product is a stream of data, how sure are you about where the jobs will be ?

I'm not sure I'd recommend IT as a long-term career path. Plumber, electrician, engineer, architect.....

Is it just me, but I don't see any of this. The Groups page looks just like it did last week. There are RSS feeds on Ideas and Q&A, but not on Groups.

Oldie here. My first browser was Lynx, through a telnet session from a CompuServe account. Graphics ? Who needs 'em ?

[That looks odd - looks like it did something to the asterisks - try again /../]

The /.../ style comments are much better if you ever have to dig SQL out of the V$SQL views

Much appreciated.

Well Howard's is pretty much spot on, just outside Sydney. Only if you go REALLY close and switch to Satellite, it looks like he's logged on from the middle of a paddock.

What, no Oracle ACE's in India ? Something is seriously wrong with that.