Added my vote ...

I gave you a 5 for your public honesty...

I used to work at an engineering R&D company, so I got used to a lot of acronyms that also have "real", "acceptable", or at least "non-vulgar" uses. But this one is the toughest to get rid of, and since some clients deal with POS systems that involve our software, it's really messing up my ability to keep a straight face in meetings. Especially since in my previous job we talked about the POS systems our competitors produced... :laugh:

I need to read POS and think "Point Of Sale". Not what I currently think it means ...

Sigh .. I'm living that right now. It's just like an email program, only not quite what you'd expect an email program to be (or do) :(

Why are the letters in "alphabetical" out of order?

Arcade games aren't the first thing that springs to mind when I see that domain name...

When I lived in Canada, I worked with a guy who had figured out how much of his taxes went to support the Defense Department (aka the war machine). He would then make a monetary gift to the Province of Prince Edward Island. The amount he gave was calculated to generate a tax refund equivalent to the money that would have been his contribution to the Defense Department. PEI didn't have any industries doing war-related stuff. So he figured he was then neutral on contributing to the war effort. Same guy quit when the product we developed got purchased by a foreign military aircraft company. It was used in a lot of industries, but once the first sale went into a military application, he was done. I had to respect him for holding true to his stance, I guess...

Have to agree. I work for a company that makes software used in public space signage. Burn-in was the biggest problem with plasmas. We've managed to burn LCD screens in testing, too - leave an image on over a long weekend and you get burn-in. If you watch a lot of the same TV stations, you can even start to get hints of the little "bug logo" in the corners. A lot of stations have started bouncing that around now to prevent this, I think. I bought an LCD for home. Wouldn't touch a plasma. I find plasmas are really hot, too - put your hand in front of the white areas on a plasma screen and feel how warm it is. We had a test room with a couple of plasma screens in, and we never had to have the heat on in there in the winter. And it could get a tad unbearable at times in the summer.

Or Windows SteadyState [^] might help

I think of it as the "Optimistic Pessimist": Half of the glasses are full.

hieroglyph wrote:

"Quite a bit of interest"? Oh, come on now, they only achieved that because it is being pushed out by windoze update. If it was left to peeps to download the numbers would be a lot lower

Flash came pre-installed on the last 6 PCs I bought. Does wonders for your market penetration...

You want extra holidays in the US? Work for the government. They get all sorts of days off, like Presidents' Day and Lincoln's Birthday. So there's no postal service, and many of the schools are closed, too. So then you've got day-care issues for your kids when you have to work, but the government doesn't. Canada was trying to get to a point where they had one day off a month. There's one month without a day off, and there was a "populist movement" (which was started and backed by one of the large breweries, funnily enough) to get an extra day off. They kept citing that some place in Europe gets 6 weeks of vacation a year...

I saw something like this many years ago. And the response was basically "That's like complaining that there's a shortage of $10,000 Ferraris". There's a shortage of workers for the pay ranges, mainly, is the big complaint. That said, we were trying to find some intern types for a period of time and couldn't get any bites. Location plays a part in that case, though.

The interest isn't the _what_, it's the _who_. People love Google, for some reason. I'm not sure if it's some sort of "David vs. Goliath" thing, because neither Google nor Microsoft qualify as a "David". But there's a lot of interest in the MSFT vs. GOOG battle, be it the new browser war or the previously insanely-covered "impending search war" when MSFT was going to buy Yahoo!.

There's apparently a NASA webcast at http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEmono/TSE2008/TSE2008.html[^]