Seconded. I’ve worked with far too many near-savants who may or may not be brilliant, but their output is so opaque as to be useless. It may work like a charm, but no one can understand it other than the other, making it unsupportable.

When I started university in 1980, there was a public outcry about the poor language skills of engineers. Therefore, when starting first year science or engineering, there was a mandatory English test. If you got under 75%, I think it was, you had to take a non-credit “English for Science and Engineers” course.

I’m often astounded by the sheer inability of high-ranking technical people to convey their thoughts to others. My company routinely gives people mandatory online training seminars with followup quizzes, and the majority of the problems people have is not the material, but the fact that the questions are often…

For years, a friend who is a professional photographer, used hercompanyname@herISP.com. I kept on trying to get her to change it, even registered hercompanyname.com, but she was worried that all her business cards had the @herISP domain, as well as all her friends and customers.

It depends on the type of business.

Pretty much the same as my story.

I'd not heard of Astonishing Reader, so I just downloaded it and gave it a spin. There are some nice touches in there, and it shows promise. But compared to Perfect Viewer, it was very slow, it ignored the already existing directory hierarchy, and it didn't obviously support Samba shares (a must for me, since I've…

Agree with Fables (and Jack of Fables and Fairest, the spinoffs). I've read a few of the Buffy and Angel books, but I never really got into them. Other Vertigo books you may want to consider are Astro City (v4 is now Vertigo; previously published by Image, then by DC's main imprint, then by Homage, and finally DC's…

Part of the benefit of Vertigo when it started was that it was starting fresh. Another benefit is that most of the books aren't part of the DC continuity, so they avoid a lot of baggage.

I have a huge collection, due to (a) being old and collecting for 40+ years, and (b) having been on complimentary lists from various publishers for years (I was peripherally involved in the industry for quite a while, and know lots of creators; Steven Grant even made me the villain of Deathstroke #22 back in the…

Unless you're reading a Roy Thomas series from the 1980s, where the footnotes would reference readers back to events in books that had been published in the 1940s, four decades earlier :-)

Ah, things were so much easier back in the 1960s when I started. There was pretty much one comic per character or team, unless it was Superman or Batman, who got two titles each (Action/Detective), and the teamup books like Brave and Bold. The other thing then was that stories were mostly self contained. There was the…

Perfect Reader (https://play.google.com/store/apps/det…).

World War IV wasn't that popular up here in Canada. I started off with RCP/M (originally Remote CP/M, later CRS) probably around mid-1981 after seeing them at a monthly computer flea market in Toronto. I was user 435, if I remember correctly. They were one of the largest and most stable of numerous BBSes, back in the…

You left out the ubiquitous "but it feels like I wasted it" argument you hear when trying to convince someone to use their tax refund/work bonus/inheritance/other windfall to start paying off their $6,000 in credit card debt (at 22% interest) rather than buying a new designer handbag and pair of shoes. And yes, that's…

The two elephants in the room are expectations and responsibility.

Agreed. This is especially true when upgrading products. I've used product X for years, and it either dies, or version X+1 or X+2 comes out, which addresses some shortcoming issue Y. Model X+2 looks great on paper, I buy it, and I find that although it addresses issue Y, it unfortunately also removes feature Z, which…

Bell Canada. They provide TV and internet services, so I'd say they qualify as a cable company in terms of this discussion.

The original Beta tapes were only good for an hour. Originally, they were viewed as TV recording devices, so an hour would cover any show. After VHS came to the market, and the movies became the driving force, Beta tapes of 3 hours (actually, I believe it was 3h5m or 3h10m) were released to market, but by then, the…

It was a place of death in 1944. It isn't in 2014.