Won't someone please think of the children?!?

Seriously, though the U.S. will always lag behind, due to it's large expance, it's a bit sad for our broadband options to be so sorry. Maybe it's worth it if it reduces our risk of becoming a country Internet gaming addicts? Mine's the one with the slingshot in the pocket.

Heh...

"Sold as a novelty only."

@Duncan

There's a bit of difference between the compatibility issues of different version of Word documents and those of Word documents used with another word processor.

Much of the time, we can forgo the half-baked features of a new version of the Word document format and simply back down to an older version that's a better common denominator. We shouldn't be surprised that an older version of Word has issues with rendering or even opening a Word document that's in a newer format. Much of the time, the need to cope here is due to the fact that not everyone upgrades to the latest version of MS Office. Even within the same company, there may certainly be situations where there's a mixed deployment of different versions of MS Office.

The nature of the compatibility issues when opening a Word document in another word processor are more complicated and lead to more frustration. Some of these issues are due to fact that this compatibility is reverse engineered, or due to fundamental differences between the implementations and so on. Coping with these types of issues isn't necessarily as simple as using an older format.

Nevermind that most of the alternative office suites you mentioned are still jokes in comparison to MS Office.

"The reality is that you don't need to pony up to anyone to get a desktop operating system and a full-featured office suite. Why not acknowledge that?"

That's true. However, even so it's not as cheap as using Google Docs. It doesn't matter that you can get it for free, if you have to deploy and maintain it, there's some cost associated with it. So, Ted's point still stands, IMO.

To those of you that jumped all over that statement: Did you stop to think that it might just be flame bait? Enjoy your worm, little birdies. ;)

It's not exactly cut-and-dry

Some key points:

1) The cars were MADE TO ORDER.

2) Two employees turned a blind eye to outrageous numbers.

3) Renault ***PROFITED*** from the abuse.

Look at it this way. You supply some goods to me. These goods happen to be below some agreed upon quality standard. However, I can still make a profit doing whatever it is that I'm doing with these goods. So, I don't say a thing, and allow you to continue selling me these sub-par goods. Then, some time later, I decide to turn around and sue you because you didn't supply goods of the quality we had agreed upon.

I agree that a lie is a lie, no matter how little that white lie may be. However, that's not the entire issue here.

Sure...

But, where's the Paris Hilton angle?

Seriously, though in response to the two older guys:

I totally agree that some standardization is necessary to drive technology forward. However, I'm not convinced that it requires one monolithic provider. Of course, this doesn't mean that we're ready to do that yet, as the Linux market shows.

Business people writing applications, don't make me laugh.

People have been sounding the death-knell of the programmer since COBOL, at least.

While we've come a long way with programming languages, the type of thinking needed to be a good programmer hasn't changed substantially. Neither has the skill set of the good business person.

While there may be some that are good at both, the rest are good at either one or the other. The right tool for the right job, I say.

It must be said.

I for one, welcome our new bacterial overlords.

Not an easy fix?

As if. One of the standard troubleshooting steps is to try known working parts in a "dead" PC. If you can afford a memory tester, even better, as you don't risk blowing your good stick(s) of memory in a possibly fault motherboard.

However, any tech that didn't -- at least -- try a good stick of memory in the PC isn't worth his/her rate.

I do agree that not all of them are necessarily bad techs, just inexperienced. Blame the companies first for not training them correctly, and the techs second for not learning off the job. If you're merely a "9-to-5" tech, you don't belong in the business.