The GUI rarely helps me focus on my tasks, especially with files.

Finding a bunch of files, matching them to a set of parameters and then doing operations on them is not easiest to do with a GUI. It would be wonderful if it were, but its simply not.

There really should be a national (if not international) standard for minimum amber light timings based on speed of the road in question.

Local municipalities could of course increase it for accident-prone intersections.

Those kiosks have already been available in Canada at some Tim Hortons branches for years now. At least four or five years ago I used one to order my lunch in advance at a very busy downtown branch of the coffee chain in Toronto and it printed me a receipt, my number was called and I received my order before some people waiting in line.

Compile any Linux binary as static and it will include everything it needs to run -- although 64-bit binaries won't load on a 32-bit system of course.

In fact just the other day I was on an older system and I couldn't find iperf in its distro so I downloaded the pre-compiled 32-bit binary to do some quick bandwidth testing.

As a company that deals with industrial customers, we have dealt with plenty of Windows software that will not run on anything newer than XP, or sometimes 7, or 98 or 3.1 before those.

The Windows API is not a static target.

Sounds like a pretty good idea, except that I should be able to tell it I'm travelling soon to disable that country's block.

The red light camera issue is easily Googled, many municipalities have found that the companies installing these have turned down the timing between amber and red in order to catch more people running the red.

http://www.motorists.org/red-l...

Wait, there's only one Windows? I could've sworn there were at least a half dozen active versions out there with features that aren't all inter-compatible ... just like Linux. They don't even look alike, and it causes fragmentation.

Why is Windows on the desktop? Applications and vendor support (bribed or otherwise) which boils down to "because it has been around longer."

The difference with Linux is you get a choice, and you get to argue, and it makes a difference. There are far more on-line posts about people who do or don't like Windows 8's interface than about systemd, but that isn't the cause of Window's sudden failure on the desktop now is it?

This is an obviously beneficial security feature. Just use two-factor authentication and it will almost never come up.

Or did you want random hackers in other countries to guess their way into your account data?

Good for Google for protecting my logins.

How is adding an extra debugging step better than just not needing it in the first place?

This has NOTHING to do with binary vs shell scripting and you're a completely uneducated newb to coding if you think it is.

BASH itself is a binary and it is the problem -- your argument is ridiculous.

At no point are you not in control of the environment variables in question; unless you're allowing unsanitized input of course.

I've forbidden shell interactions from web servers forever on my client systems and I'm always in shock that online control panel systems allow direct shell access to the system. It just seems obviously wrong.

Aside from someone else already pointing out that you want to use different tools, that's exactly my point -- their minimal install is truly minimal -- there's no need to roll your own at all.

My basic install procedure is a CentOS minimal with a quick shell script that installs the packages and configs I need on top of that on a per-client basis.

If you're putting together your own optimized small footprint installs, you're not a sysadmin anymore, you're a distro maker. I spend way too much time actually administering working machines to be bothered to do someone else's job as well.

CentOS does a fantastic job of maintaining their minimal install for me (and anyone else who wishes to use it), what possible advantage is there to me putting together something else (not to mention learning a new filesystem and config layout for no reason).

As a frequent user of the CentOS-6.5-x86_64-minimal.iso install image, I can see that its still not *as* thin as the author describes but none of the unnecessary bits are included and its super-easy to customize.