You haven't traveled very far in the US, I'm guessing. There are no stations in Cedar Falls or Waterloo, Iowa that I can tell that aren't on a highway that sell diesel. Even some of the ones the highways go right past, don't.

The idiot who poured coffee in her lap did not and should not have anticipated that the coffee would be served at temperatures that would be dangerous for anyone to handle, and well above what anyone in the food industry should have been serving. In fact, it was even above what the manufacturer of the machines that prepared the coffee intended for use.

The coffee was so hot that when it soaked into the material of her clothing, it stuck to her skin and caused third degree burns over 6% of her body.

Source: http://www.caoc.com/CA/index.cfm?event=showPage&pg=facts

I'd mod you up if I had the points. A tool's a tool, and if your employees work best with one brand over another and it's such a small cost, you're wasting your time.

This all goes back to the post a while ago about specing out 1000 PCs for a governmental department, and some people earnestly thought it would be worth it to build your own. Insane! Find out what you really need and buy the right tool for the job and be willing to pay for it to work well. If you buy shoddy tools, expect them to hurt your bottom line in more ways than one.

It's the same as how you constantly hear about how the latest Firefox fixes The Dreaded Firefox Memory Leak.

I figure they'll get it eventually.

I'd switch your antivirus to something like Microsoft Security Essentials, which doesn't seem to have the nasty egregious behavior yours does.

It's a running joke that Symantec's goal is to choke your system for resources so bad the virus will [delete itself, be unable to accomplish anything, &c.]

Microsoft actually thought otherwise, and found that if your fragments are sufficiently large (on the order of >64MB) then you can buffer and seek between consecutive reads in a way that makes it largely irrelevant. As a result, the NTFS defragger no longer attempts to consolidate files to chunks larger than 64MB.

But you know, I think I might actually test that theory out myself if I get around to it. I'd really like to know if what they were getting at was accurate with today's hard drives, given how long seek times can be. Considering Microsoft uses NTFS for all of its needs, from the user OS to SQL Server and other "enterprisey" products, I'd say they may have some experience in the matter. I mean, even in the case of large database objects, if you're incrementally adding entries to a table, how likely is it that it and all its indexes are going to remain consolidated on disk even if the filesystem does its best to keep the database file intact?

Ah, so the solution is just to not run the most common of all user desktop scenarios (not to mention laptops), the single hard disk PC.

I see where you're getting at, very clever.

But the wealthy don't spend on goods and services proportionately to their wealth. They end up with extra left over, and the greater your income, the greater the disparity.

This would mean that in order for a sales-tax only system to work, the tax rate would have to be at least 30% or more, which would be utterly crippling to the poorest in the nation.

The Office Web Apps, for what they do, work on Chrome/FireFox/Opera just fine at work. Sharepoint also works fine on all of those now, too.

Yes, because that's completely a reasonable comparison to make. Buying Microsoft is really just buying yourself into slavery.

The Russian government treats copyright law as a criminal, as opposed to civil matter. The Russians would ask Microsoft if they were all licensed up, and Microsoft's people in the area were saying "no", probably because they didn't have enough pull to say "yes" within Microsoft.

It's typical bureaucracy. When the negative PR reached Redmond, they were like, "Whaaaaaa?" and responded by saying all NGOs in Russia are licensed, period.

Microsoft is now expanding the program in other countries where they suspect similar tactics may be used. How shameful.

Previously the "blanket" license applied in Russia. They're adding it to more countries.

That's not deceptive. That's you calling it deceptive.

And a place I worked with tried to migrate a tenth as many users and it was nothing but frustration, as everyone else in the industry *doesn't* use OpenOffice, and OpenOffice compatibility and ease of use was far below Office.

And on top of that, you still had to pay for Outlook because there simply isn't a free client that's anywhere near competitive. Thunderbird is, eh... It's ok. It's not nearly as good as Outlook though.

Err... C++ is not functional, C++0x will perhaps be able to claim that, but functions are not yet there, and certainly there are a large number of differences between C++ and the classic functional languages in the ML family and others.

Your transactions per second won't scale as well as your IOPS because with spinning disks, there's still a significant latency before your data actually gets written to disk.

RAID just increases the number of in-flight IOs, widening the throughput but not decreasing its latency per disk.