Assuming the schema matches. Which, by the way, is an extremely bold assumption when you're dealing with pulling data out of a custom Access solution cobbled together over the past decade and pushing it into an out-of-the-box solution.

Having seen a few custom Access jobs in my time, I can tell you first-hand that, more often than not, you're lucky if the data is normalized, much less organized in any sane, sensible way. I've seen tables where there are "Serial Number 1", "Serial Number 2", and "Serial Number 3" fields, for example, because "nobody has more than three pieces of equipment". So, now you're faced with having to get that data halfway normalized, or at least document how you could normalize it, and then you have to map it up against the new solution's schema and hope and pray they have a set of tables that are designed to hold the data you're looking for.

You wouldn't - but you'd really prefer to not use NetBIOS names under any circumstances. Otherwise, SERVER1 is always going to have to resolve somewhere, regardless of domain, regardless of network topology, and that somewhere better be where the database expects to find useful data.

Having worked for a smaller company that could only afford a one person IT department, I agree that it doesn't make sense paying for a second full time person to sit around and stare at the primary sysadmin while they do their job. Frankly, in most companies with one person IT departments, work load is somewhat inconsistent to begin with - oftentimes there's just enough work to do where it would cost more to bring in a part-time consultant to do 4 hours of work that day than to pay the full time sysadmin to do 4 hours of work and then read Slashdot for the other 4. That problem would only get worse if you had to pay for an "understudy".

Thankfully, there's a really easy way to manage that, even for smaller companies. Bring in a part-time consultant periodically (say, for a couple hours every month) as an insurance policy. For the brief period they're there, have them focus on documentation and chatting up the sysadmin. As an added bonus, maybe have them check backups, server logs and the like to ensure the sysadmin isn't falling asleep at their desk. Another bonus is that, if the sysadmin has a large project planned that they could use some additional temporary headcount on, you have someone else with some institutional knowledge lying around.

At least in my experience, RunAs in XP only works tolerably well (i.e. more than 50% of the time) if you RunAs a cmd prompt first, then execute whatever you need to from there. Even then, Windows Explorer won't let you run in a different user context, which basically means that, if you need to move or copy a file, or install a printer, you're either doing it through the command line or not at all. This also often meant that, if you needed to install a program from a CD (looking at you, HP drivers), they'd detect that they were in a "RunAs environment" if you used the GUI RunAs, and then proceed to error out on you. Of course, the workaround for that was to launch an escalated cmd and run whatever program Autorun.inf was configured to call and hope for the best. If you became really good at cmd, you could get around most of that, though I always felt I had other, better things to do with my time than to learn every single option for rundll32 printui.dll,PrintUIEntry, much less netsh.

For the record, I just tried to RunAs appwiz.cpl from my PC and it worked just fine. Of course, the nice thing about Windows 7 is I don't even have to RunAs my Control Panel widgets - if I need administrative access, it will ask for an administrator user name and password when I open it and then escalate for me, saving me from having to remember what options require administrative access and what ones don't. Y'know, like a proper gksudo-type tool should.

I won't miss XP, is what I'm saying.

Different use cases for different folks, I suppose. Personally, I love being able to hit the Windows key and start typing out the name of whatever utility I need without hitting 'R' first and hoping that "Run..." is the first application on the Start menu that starts with an 'R' today. It really speeds things up, especially if I need something from the Control Panel. Don't get me wrong, some of Microsoft's "simplifications" leave a lot to be desired - looking at you, Control Panel, at least when you're not in icon mode, and even then, what is up with the Network control panel? - but I'll take Windows 7 and its interface over Windows XP any day of the week. And I didn't even touch on the actually usable "Run As..." feature - yes, it was there on XP, too, but it only worked half the time. It took Microsoft way too long to add proper sudo-like functionality, but I'm glad they finally did it.

The argument of "But...But...But... Polio!" is not a valid argument for a Chicken Pox vaccine.

No, but Shingles is. Vaccinate against Chicken Pox (which is usually fairly mild) and you get a two-for-one deal out of it.

Only in the military, and only under certain circumstances. This is to protect against weaponized smallpox since the US and Russia are the only two countries with labs containing the original virus.

Yes, because if there's one thing that keeps Big Pharma rich, it's selling everyone quick, cheap, effective vaccines instead of expensive, slow-moving treatments to long-term side effects of diseases like measles, polio, and so on.

Want to know what's profitable? Iron lungs. They're expensive and you're hooked on them for, if you're lucky, only a month or two while your body recovers from polio. If you're unlucky, you're hooked on them for life. Know what's less profitable? A single prick in the arm containing a vaccine that, even at the highest markup, costs less than 1/10,000th of a modern day life support system and prevents the disease that lands you in the iron lung in the first place.

Critical thinking - how does it work?!

Right. That's why I only get my news from reputable sources, like WorldNetDaily, InfoWars, Mother Jones, Russia Times and The Blaze. Oh, and occasionally The Onion, too, because sarcasm is for the sheeple.

Contrary to popular myth, precious metals are not a guarantee of sound money. For starters, governments could - and did - routinely change the peg rate, which precious metals would back the currency, and plenty more. Also, even with a nominally precious metal-based currency, it was quite easy for governments to debase the currency, either by changing the alloy mix (when coinage was in use) or just by overprinting gold certificates (France did this just before the first Revolution; Germany tried this during World War 1). This doesn't even throw capital controls into the mix, or even local inflation, like what happened in California during the '49 Gold Rush.

Pretty much this. There are three ways to handle disagreements:

1. Engage in a respectful, carefully thought out conversation weighing the pros and cons of each position, then achieving some sort of consensus.
2. "Agree to disagree", then passive-aggressively do your own thing or otherwise lobby with others to follow your path over the other person's path.
3. "Be a dick", call the person out, and make it clear that, since you're the one making the decisions, you are the one making that decision, not them.

Option 1 is great when you have nothing but time on your hands and/or when you're dealing with someone whose opinion you trust. It's also only useful when there's a clear definition of "right" and "wrong" regarding the topic at hand - more often than not, choices in life and engineering pretty much boil down to "which trade-offs suck less for the domain we're working in", which are more subjective than not in most cases. Option 2 is the default position drilled into our heads during school, which is a useful default when you're dealing with equals or people who you have no authority over - I mean, sure, you can yell and scream at them, but it's not like they're required to listen. The catch with option 2, though, is that, though it leads to less hurt feelings in the short run, you're as liable to have different factions competing against each other to prove who's "right", which can lead to some major issues down the road.

Option 3, meanwhile, is useful when you're in a hurry, a decision needs to be made now, and it needs to be made decisively. The goal here is to nip a problem in the bud before it metastasizes into something serious and political. In this case, Linus wants to enforce some discipline on the code review process because his time is finite and the deadline is near for 3.10 to get out the door, and "receive lots of crap code and reject it" doesn't solve that problem. He needs to not receive non-essential code in the first place. The only way to do that is by convincing those committing code to make only meaningful commits, either through well-defined requirements (tried; apparently that's failing), polite warnings (what Slashdot picked up here tonight), or "being a dick" (Linus will continue the beatings until morale improves if his warning isn't heeded).

Personally, I've found that the sort of people that claim "being a dick" is the sole refuge of people that enjoy being dicks are the sort of people that have a reflexive inability to defend their opinions under any sort of sustained criticism and just assume that, if their "brilliance" needs to be defended, it's because it's being witnessed by simpletons that just "don't get it". From where I'm sitting, that's a pretty dickish and passive-aggressive position to adopt and I... well, come to think of it, I actually do enjoy being a dick to people that think like that. Seriously, screw them.

Huh. Guess I pretty much proved the grandparent's point right there, didn't I?

Sure you can. Heck, if you have the right version of Windows, you can even eschew the GUI entirely and go straight to the command line. Or, if you're looking for a lightweight DE, you could opt for the Minimal Server Interface.

Granted, it's not quite fvwm, and it's certainly not available on consumer-grade Windows, but it's out there if you really want it and are willing to fork out the money for it.

The SMB space is where cloud adoption is going to spike. Truth is, a lot of smaller shops really have no business hosting their own email, much less some of the other stuff out there (document management servers, etc.). Sure, the "cloud" isn't going to be for everyone - dentists and doctors want their x-rays to show up on their screens now, not when it's done uploading to their EMR and downloaded back to their terminal; forget "data security", THAT'S the big holdup there. But, for smaller construction shops, legal, insurance, and the like? You mean to tell me that they can't convince an auditor (if they ever see one) that their cloud setup is more secure than a server sitting under someone's desk or in an unlocked closet somewhere? Truth is, most of the changes coming to IT from the "cloud" will have little bearing on larger corporations; they're big enough to hire enough IT people to get the job done right internally, and they have been forever. Where the big change is coming is for your SMB IT consultants and lone wolf "IT Directors" who will suddenly find themselves spending much less time idling in front of Event Viewer and swapping backups, and more time implementing SharePoint portals or looking for career changes. Bear in mind that Microsoft has already told the SMB space to stop self-hosting their own email; Windows SBS (with Exchange) is now officially a thing of the past.

Pretty much this. I'm dual-booting Ubuntu 12.04 and Windows 7 on my cheap Acer (AMD CPU + Radeon Mobile) and the difference in performance is galling. Framerates and CPU loads on Windows 7, at least once I get past boot and the usual start-up virus check, are consistently lower in Windows 7 than Ubuntu for comparable programs. This even holds true for basic software like Firefox and Chrome(-ium, on the Ubuntu side). Much of this, I suspect, has to do with Radeon Mobile's use of "HyperMemory", which Windows seems to actually call from and pull from system RAM, while Linux just keeps the BIOS fixed at 256MB of "VRAM" and puts everything else in CPU-addressable RAM instead.

Granted, Ubuntu has Unity, which is an absolute hog, so that might not be an apples-to-apples comparison; then again it's not like Aero is "low impact". It also doesn't help that a lot of internet-facing applications (Flash, most browsers) are either giving up on Linux entirely (Flash) or are primarily optimized against Windows graphics calls since Linux browser programmers aren't sure whether OpenGL will really be there for them or not, and in what capacity.

Those who are throwing out the "tool for the job" line I think have it about right - Linux was always optimized for server workloads first and everything else second. It makes an excellent server in most circumstances and a poor desktop, almost like a backwards Mac OS X. There's nothing wrong with that - we need good server operating systems. However, there's no shame in admitting that a favored tool isn't the best tool in all circumstances.

To be fair to kids, assembly really isn't the "basics" for their computing world anymore. I guarantee you kids interested in computers these days know more about markup and scripting languages than most greybeards knew about them back in the early '80s, which is as it should be - the only thing most kids in the '80s knew about punch cards, if they knew anything about them, was that they made excellent bookmarks. You also didn't see a lot of kids picking up COBOL, either.