Much cheaper: you get less bills

• BIND
• jQuery
• Firefox, Chromium
• Webkit (Safari, Android, iOS)
• Darwin
• Android

So, you're not a father then...

Now I have a mental image of Steve Balmy jumping up and down somewhere in Kenia... Thanks a lot!

Oh boy. Language semantics :)

You apparently need a central server in your particular situation according to your perception. But using Git does not make it necessary to have a central server (nice for tiny projects, experiments, initial stages of a project) however the main point is you can be offline when you do have a central server, you're not depending directly on the central server most operations are local and changes are available locally.

And since you do not need that central server, you can start using small local repositories for tiny projects that would go un-versioned otherwise.

If you look at the original question you see that system administration in this case is very bazaar like ("Taming a wild, one-man code base"), traditionally it was like that too: a sysadmin hacking together glue-scripts, writing terse perl scripts nobody else dares to touch... I agree you have to move away from that. And yet again, a distributed VCS offers more ways to do that, you can have a workflow with a gatekeeper that allows only one person or a few people to release changes to the central repository from which others update or to the one from which test/production builds are done. Try that with SVN.

Check in changes (actually commits) can be done often without involving the server, pulling changes from the central repository and pushing the result of the merge back, need networking. But I suppose you could even replace that with a scenario involving sneakers and a USB stick when sneakernet is the only connection available. Try that with SVN.

Edit /etc/init.d/networking sure, why not? Before they are in production, or offline for maintenance. It was just an example for breaking networking (could be /etc/interfaces or whatever). I was doing this on a test setup with VM guests connected via VNC (so no, not production servers that are online).

The master CD is hardly a typical situation. And without more information, in general it is generated from source files and should be reproducible from that and therefore does not belong in the VCS.

The point is that - while in most professional environments you do want some central place to store the history of your code, you are not depending on that.

The central server might be offline, the network might be down, you're on holiday at a tropical island without internet, the server crashed and will never be restored, the company you work for goes bankrupt - but you can still access the history, check out older versions, check in new stuff. And if/when the revered central server is finally available again you can push these changes..

If need be you can even merge stuff between individual devs without the central server being available. I use that sometimes for small projects to sync stuff between laptops/desktop or in the initial stages of a project when experimenting a lot and want to share stuff with somebody else. Instead of copying a zip-file clone a repository and you can easily merge/branch stuff...

A lot. (as does bzr, mercurial or any other distributed versioning system)

• You don't need a central server (but you can have one).
• You don't need to have a network available to check in changes.
• You don't need to have a network available to roll back or switch to another branch. E.g. you could edit /etc/init.d/networking break stuff and roll back...
• It is really fast - it is mostly local stuff.
• ...

There is stuff like Puppet (for declaratively deploying "services") and Vagrant to provision Virtualbox guests.

Downsides:

• It's only really efficient when your production environment can be provisioned with Vagrant/Puppet as well and no manual work is done on these guests. The way the question is formulated, I suppose that is not the situation.
• Virtualbox is only usable for desktop usage. I would love something similar and simple for KVM

I was provided with a Dell i7 on a new project, installed 11.10 on it and had frequent freezes as described (mouse pointer still moving, other virtual terminal working although the lid was never closed) about 3 times a day, completely unacceptable. Didn't happen with KDE or Gnome classic. I've tried for 4 weeks and then switched to KDE and later tried Gnome. Same thing on a Lenovo ultrabook with 12.04 when testing it, within an hour it froze.

I think it has more to do with Unity than anything else: once I switched to another DE it did not happen again. (and it might depend on screen saver/power management/compiz)

Besides the frequent freezes, Unity seems completely unusable on several levels too. I've used Ubuntu since 2005 and am not happy with the latest "innovations" at all. I'll probably switch back to Debian if anything else about it gets "improved" in the same manner as the last 2 years...

Perhaps we are seeing the first attempts at monetizing what until recently was the most practical, usable, lovable operating system?

Pro tip: don't put your recently purchased phone in the same pocket as your recently acquired fine concrete granulate.

For the Europeans amongst us: That's what you get in return for the freedom to bear arms.

For the US citizens amongst us: See your hard earned tax dollars at work.

Terrible privacy track record?

Besides, it's not only about problems. Does FB do anything exceptionally well? I see an evolution from ICQ, MSN, Skype, Second Life, Facebook, so I expect something else will pop up in the next 2-3 years that will absorb most of the attention of the consumers.

I don't think FB will be replaced by something that does the same thing like Google+ but it just might if FB continues to blatantly disregard users privacy rights.

If only they listened to me: I recommend Micro Phone as a trademark. Goes superbly with the other generic words like Windows, Word, Excel, Access, SQL Server... MSNokia! sounds! more! like! a! Yahoo! brand.