Although it wouldn't work as a straight tax shelter, I vaguely recall speculation when he first announced the foundation that it was intended to provide him cover to liquidate his stake in Microsoft. If I recall correctly, the foundation's initial endowment was a ginormous grant of Microsoft stock from one Mr. W. Gates. The intent was for them to liquidate it and use the proceeds. Now, the market would panic if Bill himself dumped billions of Microsoft stock all at once, but if a charitable foundation does it, the price is more likely to maintain since it's not a sign of trouble at the top. Then while the Foundation is liquidating billions, that would provide cover (and price support) for Bill to dump a few hundred mill' of his own here and there.

For this to make any sense financially, we have to posit that Gates would suffer more loss in price collapse from directly dumping his stock than giving away a huge chunk of it to cover liquidating the rest. I don't know if that's true, but it didn't seem like a completely-out-to-lunch idea.

They're simply wrong on a number of points.

* The QuickTake 100 was in no way limited to just 8 photos (that was the limit at maximum resolution). I had a QuickTake 150 and it had a reasonable capacity. The 200 took SmartMedia cards, so capacity was basically unlimited as it is now.

* They compare the PowerPC to Intel, as though the PowerPC represented an expensive migration from Intel processors, but forget that Macs were coming from the m68k universe, not x86 -- they were already Intel-incompatible. PowerPC Macs could run 68K Mac software, so this was the natural choice at the time.

* Their criticism of OS 9's multitasking is a tad unfair unless OS 9 was particularly worse at multitasking than OS 8. I used MacOS from System 6.1 all the way to 8 and from 7.x on it worked fine for me.

As far as I can see, if your interest in overthrowing the government is purely recreational, you're not covered by this law.

There are a couple of managers I let make themselves look very, very bad in a conference call with a customer not long ago.

Basically we had two teams that worked closely together to serve a certain class of user requests. Team A was the team generally so tasked, and Team B (my team) was the admin team that backed them up in case of problems. Note that our duties as sysadmins were NOT to serve user requests, but to fix broken things and set up new things. Basically if it didn't involve server hardware or OS issues, it wasn't our job.

One of our guys, way, way back in the days before Team A existed and this stuff was our job, wrote himself a set of scripts to automate these tasks. When Team A was created, he handed them over, strictly out of a desire to be helpful and with absolutely no commitment to maintain them or guarantee that they even worked, with the understanding that Team A was responsible for doing things manually if needed. But over time and with high turnover, the stipulations were forgotten and Team A came to believe that if the scripts didn't work or they didn't have the appropriate script for the task, they were to refer the user request to us.

As it happened, this was becoming an issue right as a lot of our team were moving on to a new contract. So I stood up and said "hey guys, we don't have the bodies any more to do your jobs too". Team A's management got passive-aggressive -- they'd wait till the ticket clock was about to expire, then refer the tickets to us so we had to fill the request or provide a reason why we weren't able to in time. Ultimately I demanded and got a conference call in which Team A's management admitted (after it being made clear that the scripts were not an officially-sanctioned tool and did not absolve them of manual effort if needed) that they actually had no idea what was involved in serving these requests, so they couldn't do them manually.

Oh, by the way, Manager A, the customer's CISO is on this call. Oops.

Honestly, though, there was no good solution. We could just keep referring tickets forever, and both teams would look bad; I could do what I did, and piss off Team A; or I could have let them dump their work on our team, which then would have major impact on us and the customer. Ultimately option 2 had the advantage of both protecting my team and conforming to the documented procedures.

So much this. The latest virtual-desktop stuff from VMware is pretty spiffy. It really is now possible to run both useful virtual servers and useful virtual desktops, and at the same time simplify all the support infrastructure (backups, AV, server/desktop config control, etc.) considerably. A couple of 5U PowerEdge servers running vSphere can probably do everything a 230-student school needs quite handily.

It also would be nice in this instance especially as it would allow students to flip effortlessly back and forth between a Linux-desktop VM and a Windows-desktop VM -- because let's face it, Office and Windows are not going away anytime soon, and students need to be at least minimally conversant with them if they're going to survive in the modern computing world.

There's an easier way to create folder shortcuts on the desktop, which doesn't involve typing text paths: Right-click on the folder you want a shortcut to. Click "Make link". Drag the link to the desktop. Rename it if desired.

I'm not sure if the lack of "all users"-type functionality is a deficiency in Ubuntu, or an annoyance in Windows. For a single-user desktop, "All Users" is completely unnecessary, and on multi-user desktops I've more often seen it lead to annoyances than actually be useful. Google Chrome's Windows installer actually installs the program to the user desktop only by default, which will become more common as UAC-type enforcement on the Windows desktop becomes more common.

You guys mean Pope Benedict XVI, right?

Any flash drive whose "security" involves a required app running on the host system will not be suitable for cross-platform use even if the app is well-written. The only right way to do it is to encrypt the data written to the drive, using well-known secure encryption algorithms run on the host. And for that purpose a cheap, dumb drive works just as well as a super-expensive "secure, tamper-proof" drive.

That (plus plain old bureaucratic incompetence) was jwz's issue, at any rate.