Yes. Basically Java went the backwards compatible approach and C# went the "correct" approach.

Seeing how Java is a much more mature and widely used language, the decision made a lot of sense. Companies that were using old Java stuff wouldn't be very thrilled to learn that they couldn't use generics or any libraries that used generics.

.NET on the other hand was still rather young. They could afford to ditch backwards compatibility for long term gains.

Its not the compression ratio that gives you good engine braking. Think about it, although it may take a fair amount of energy to compress all the air in the cylinder; you get most of it back when the piston comes down on the power stroke. The exception to this is if you have an engine brake which opens the exhaust values early so the energy you stored up as compressed air gets shot out the exhaust instead of pushing the piston back down (it also makes a nice loud sound in the process).

What gives you decent engine braking in a gas engine is having to pull air past a mostly closed throttle. In diesels, there typically is no throttle so you get very poor engine braking. I'm not sure what kind of diesels you have been driving, but they're not typical.

Screw the Red Cross, I'm going to start selling my blood to rich old people!

I think you meant Theora, as Vorbis is an audio codec. Or maybe you'd like to go watch some MP3 videos.

How many times does this link need to be posted for people to stop the Theora/Vorbis FUD? http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html

Seriously, Ballmer? Have you read the part where the Chinese government has been labelled as the attacker of over 30 international companies by Verisign? Not just some guy in China, but the Chinese government. I would consider that pretty damn unusual.

IPv6 is only required for the VPN side. The Internet connection on both sides may still be IPv4 however. Read TFA for more details. I have a feeling Time Warner will be in no rush to upgrade my neighborhood to IPv6 no matter how many companies start using DirectAccess.

Such as...

What's so bad about NVidia's Linux drivers? Yes, yes they may be binary blobs but they work quite well.

They (Dell) are actually pretty friendly if you buy enough stuff from them as a mid-large business.

However Dell is quite different from the average teleco in that they actually have competition. Going off the example in the link, if Dell decided they didn't want to sell servers with virtualization solutions, I would leave and buy my stuff elsewhere. However, if Time Warner decided they didn't want to allow 3rd party VoIP I wouldn't have much choice but to accept it since I really need broadband and Time Warner is the sole provider in the area.

A Talari will do it. I'm using a pair now with 3 links and its been working quite well.

It certainly has a cost, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it retarded. On top of the cost it also has some very strong real world advantages such as write hole elimination(safer), variable block size (better performance), selective resilvering (faster recovery), in FS snapshots (snapshots are actually usable on a production system, unlike LVM).

Maybe you should try scripting a configuration change by manipulating a text file versus manipulating the registry. When fixing common issues remotely, the repeatability you get from a script is nice. When the script works reliably and it doesn't hurt your brain to look at, that's nice too.

If Office were written in pure .NET and all of the libraries were available everywhere, then it would run on the platform of your choosing. A Java application would have the same caveats. However Mono's primary goal is NOT portability to .NET applications. It's primary goal is to provide developers a top notch development platform on Linux (using native technologies like dbus, GTK, etc), which it does very well. Oh, and good luck making an office suite using nothing outside the POSIX standard.