Better for whom? Engineers? Scientists? Developers? No, no, and no. It's good for the *company*, and only then for managers and secretaries who do nothing more than email, presentations, and spreadsheets. For everyone else, the restrictions a large corporation puts on the standard disk image are counter-productive. In my company, we all just shake our heads and waste time with it, knowing there's nothing to be done about it.

I'd argue that the only thing that's REALLY holding back a corporate move to Linux is PowerPoint and Excel, specifically. And THAT'S why Microsoft won't make them for Linux, no matter how much they say they "love" it.

This is clearly a corporate thing. What are employees going to use to access these virtual desktops? A PC? You're sure not going to use a smart phone!

And to do what? Run Excel? Who's going to be happy with a remote display to run Excel?

I'm really missing the value proposition here.

> Emails demanding deletion of the memo contained "pixel trackers" that notified human resource managers when their messages had been read, recipients determined.

How's it feel to have the shoe on the other foot?

I wonder how much of this is driven by a lack of vision, and simple inertia. I've used Rails as my main tool for 10-11 years, since the 2.x days. In the company I work for now, the one app I had written has been mothballed, and I was told I could no longer use it.* My choices were either .NET or Java, and that's simply because we had been an "IBM/Oracle shop" for 25 years, until we became a "Microsoft shop" since transitioning to O365. Because what I'm integrating with is all Java, I chose Java, but these days, to even try to compete against modern stacks, that implies Spring, and either Angular or React.

My theory is that old, manufacturing-based companies are just locked into a mindset of "this is what we do," and that comes from an answer from 20-30 years ago. They don't care to optimize for IT tools, because it's not their expertise, and they're throwing money down the drain because the C-levels just play the game of hiring consultants to implement whatever Microsoft pays to put in the trade magazines. So we get H1-B's with, and outsource for, that skillset. And then the consulting industry educates and trains for this skillset, and it becomes a self-perpetuating legacy situation, a little like Cobol and mainframes. We just can't get away from it, because it's too hard to switch everything to something else.

* The person responsible for the decision told me, "You're the only person in the company who knows it." I asked, "Rails is the most productive thing I've seen in 15 years; why wouldn't we hire for that?" I didn't get a response.

I've come to the conclusion that I hate using Java for web apps.

This, on the web site that I was first maliciously redirected to tub girl. I use filters and blocks for my family, AND have the conversations and the monitoring and the trusting, thank you very much.

I ran Linux on the desktop (and LOTS of servers) for 19 years, but finally got Mac religion about 4 years ago. As I had used Gentoo for about 5 years over this time, I was wondering how they had handled this. Found this: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/G.... Looks like it's just as straightforward as I would have hoped, and the documentation was just a clear as usual for the project. It actually makes me want to emerge a new desktop system, just for old time's sake.

Note that "people" are probably CIO's of Fortune 500's.

As an engineer who was doing programming and systems work in engineering, I evangelized Linux for a decade and a half at a Fortune 250. When someone in IT finally took a look at it, they, of course, demanded that it have a virus scanner. (To be fair, this was near one of the really big Windows outbreaks.) One of the AV companies had actually released a Linux version, so I just calmly told him about it, and stroked his notion that Linux was actually ready for the desktop, even though I thought the whole idea a complete waste of time. In my opinion, cleaning up whatever MIGHT have been caused by a Linux infection would never have been worth the traded performance and administrative overhead of installing it and keeping it updated.

Seems to me that this scenario might be playing out again, as OS X is actually a viable corporate desktop now. Again, I don't think the level of risk warrants the level of cost, but that's not my call. Having a "corporatized" AV (like the Symantec monstrosity that frequently stalls this high-end Dell mobile workstation) is a checkbox that would open the door to corporate deployments of Macs.

I always felt that the domain model was basically a copy of NIS (or yp, depending on your age).

All these arguments go in this direction. But what about the crazy homophobe who wants to make an example of having a gay-owned bakery make a cake that says "HOMOSEXUALS ARE GOING TO HELL" on it? Now the shoe is on the other foot, and I wonder, if people are really being honest, if they would support forcing -- under the threat of exertion by the State -- THIS couple to make THAT cake?

Regardless of who "wins" this argument, one side will have pushed their "personal beliefs" on the other. If "pushing your beliefs on someone else" is the basis of your argument against, that's hypocritical. I'm not defending the proposed law here; just pedantically pointing out the logical flaw.

There's a cutoff where it's useful to say that "you can do it yourself." I *am* a programmer, and have been for 35 years or so. One thing that annoyed me -- "back in the day" -- was Evolution's spotty support for Palm Pilot synchronization. I was fiddling with Gentoo's portage versions of the program and the various libraries so much that I finally downloaded the source for Evolution, and started to look at where the code that governed this problem lived. I recall asking someone a question about the source on some forum (or maybe IRC), and was told by one of the developers that what I was after was so deep that I probably be better off not fooling with it. I looked at it a little longer, and concluded he was right. It would have taken me hundreds of hours to find and fix the problem I was seeing, and then I'd have to apply the patch to a version that had been updated underneath me while I worked on it, leading to other hassles. The process would have been quite elaborate, and this is my point: Waiting for the person who knows, roughly, WHERE the problems are, and already has a good idea of HOW TO FIX IT is usually worth the time savings, even if you DO know how to code.

Palm died not too long after, and I finally got an iPhone.

Hello. My name is Dunkirk, and I have a problem.

Yep, and the "local" Penske Honda dealership in Carmel, Indiana was one of the top-3 worst dealership experiences of my life. All the usual tricks, but the best one was when the salesman actually got offended when I asked about one of the cheapest cars on the lot, which was advertised on their web site. He said I was trying to buy a hamburger at a steak house, and got up to leave. So I got my keys, and left.

I wound up buying a used Civic for thousands less than book at a REAL local Honda dealership, where it turns out that I knew the manager, the sales manager, the office manager, and 2 of the salesman, and I just didn't know it. I know that's cheating, and not many people have such an option, but I'll likely try this again soon.

It would seem that their stock was never higher than around the end of 1999, when they were finally affirmed to be a monopoly by the federal government in their anti-trust action. Strange.

I see a lot of people talking about how much cash Apple has on hand these days. You know what? Microsoft had that much in their "war chest" about 10 years ago. Now where are they? Apple better USE that money to DO something game changing, or they're going to become a shell of their former selves, just like Microsoft has. Licensing their OS might be exactly what they need to do to take over the world. Let the market proliferate with cheap Apple knockoffs driven by 3rd-party peripherals. It's what allowed Windows to take over the world! They can keep making their own, premium hardware, and tell people up front that their the ones with the best user experience.