Windows machines in recent years have become extremely bottlenecked by drive performance, especially in the case of laptops which are so popular in companies. Laptop hard drives are slow, capable of only about 80 IOPS which is about the same speed they were 10 years ago, whereas mainstream SSDs by comparison, can typically deliver 80,000 IOPS. Since once you get Windows loaded up with all it's random messy software it's disk access ends up being tons of tiny reads, IOPS is a much more important number than transfer rate, and SSDs are literally 1000x faster. It can mean the difference between a 20 minute operation and one that takes a few seconds.

If you are in any way in control over your corporate purchases, never *ever* buy another laptop without a SSD. It's false efficiency, wasting very expensive time to save a relatively cheap expense. 256GB SSDs are under $100 and will handle most corporate work just fine. Up to 1TB, the expense is almost negligible and it will pay for itself almost immediately. Your IT department will be happier, your workers will be happier, your machines will be more secure because scanning them is a lot less intrusive and can happen more often. Your IT department should have a pile of SSDs ready to be deployed into any machine that needs to be re-imaged or where the user needs the speed. Not doing so is wasting money.

> I recently reinstalled Windows 7 Home on a laptop. A factory restore (minus the shovelware), all the Windows updates

No you didn't. You *thought* you installed all the updates because Windows lied to you and said you had. Windows Update has a horrible habit of checking to see what updates are available **for the state of your machine right now** and then telling you that it's done installing updates when those are installed, when in truth there are pending updates that required previous updates to be installed before they could subsequently be installed that Windows Update won't tell you about until you re-discover what updates are available. After an install, force re-scan after every reboot to see what new updates are now available and when you reboot and re-scan and it says you are done, you are actually done.

NAT was not designed with security in mind. The security it does offer is a side effect.

Oof. I've never seen that, but can imagine it happens with more regularity than would be good.

If they only used NAT? Sure, but I didn't say that.

You seem to be confusing the benefits of NAT with what it was designed to do or what other security features are available. I guess I can't help you with this either.

I never said it had anything to do with security. I said it has security benefits. If you can't understand the difference than I can't really help you beyond that.

*facepalm*

Exactly why NAT has some security benefits. Set it and leave it alone as a part of other security processes at the OS layer.

Security is a process. If that process is made easier for some users by using NAT, then it's a benefit. Home users can't manage firewalls effectively. NAT is a good method (even if flawed) to protect some classes of users. Is it perfect? No. But that's why you also have other protections at other layers (host-based firewall, virus scanners, etc.)

*facepalm* Ok, you go with whatever you think.

It is a security benefit. It might not be the intended purpose, but that doesn't change the fact.

Incorrect. NAT does have a security benefit. Unless ports are opened, there is no direct inbound access into the backend subnet. Yes, firewalls exist and can protect IPv6, but having a NAT simplifies security for most home users.

In one sense I disagree of the need for solid Linux skills. The rise of short term systems (in general, DevOps) means that you don't need to be concerned with the inner workings of the system and you just use something like chef to configure the system on an as-needed basis. You won't care how long the system is stable because it'll only be around for a few hours. After that it's destroyed only to be recreated later on. You can build entire systems without even enabling SSH and having interactive access.

On the other hand, there is still a need for qualified people since not everyone has bought into DevOps. They want systems that exist for years with little to no unexpected downtime. I see this as a bit of a pendulum swinging back at some point. Not sure when.

Saying no to google is like saying no to a card catalog. That's all Google (search) is - a way to look information up. Determining how to find information is a very useful skill.

I don't think it was their intent - it's just how things progressed.

In return for getting a monopoly in a town, the cable company set up local access channels, gave free cable TV to schools and town offices, likely gave free Internet to all those areas too. The money to pay those things needs to come from somewhere - either you pay more taxes or you pay more on the cable bill. We're now at the point where all these things have been established for years and the cable companies have contracts with towns granting them monopoly status for the length of the contract. My town now has competition since I can choose between Comcast and FIOS but you can't realistically have a brand new cable company come in and offer service - there's limited amount of space on telephone poles. Maybe we move to a model where Comcast offers the physical layer as some sort of Ethernet-like protocol and customers get to choose their Internet/Cable/phone from one of multiple providers.

I think it says that because he doesn't have a realistic shot at the candidacy.