People interested in this topic may wish to read Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. In my opinion Pinker does a more convincing job of documenting that violence has declined rather than why, but it's a fun read.

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We used to name servers after planets in our solar system. Then in 2006 the name space shrank by one and we had to make some hard decisions about which services to shut off.

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He might have said it. A search on German Google finds a lot of hits attributed to him (and not Saxe) for variations on "The less the people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they sleep."

Why? Because he's self-satirizing! He's never had a real IT job, yet he condescends to lecture those with decades of hard-earned "lessons learned" who have seen this plan go belly-up before.

This is just another pendulum swing. Another 7 years and it'll be swinging the other way due to some highly publicized lawsuits and jail terms.We'll see ol' Galen eat crow then. In the mean time just grin and bear it; it' can't be stopped.

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Look at his biography over on Infoworld. He ran a desktop publishing company. He wrote some books about it. He's a journalist. But he has no real IT experience. He's clueless about what it really takes to manage thousands of users in a regulated industry. He's just an armchair quarterback.

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In the absence of someone doing proper analysis, it's safest to assume it does require all those things. Because if you assume the other way around and your guess is wrong, the whole company can go under. Or maybe you've only ever worked on trivial stuff?

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You might enjoy the book by Regina Barreca, "They Used To Call Me Snow White, But I Drifted... Women's Strategic Use of Humor."

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Fine for bits and pieces, but read Isaacson's biography of Jobs. Yes your parent quote was exaggerating, but Jobs's philosophy was very, very closed source, with the purpose that Apple could control the consumer experience from end to end. The bits and pieces you cite were things Jobs would have opposed.

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Blackberry Playbook - Same price and it doesn't do email

Mine does email just fine, tethered to my corporate BB Bold via BlackBerry Bridge. And at long last there's a Citrix client for it, too.

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Blackberry Playbook. Seriously. We evaluated one a month after its release. Fully updated system, but the built-in Adobe reader was unable to open and reliably render or scroll two basic, Acrobat-generated PDFs (less than 500kB, text with some images, no fancy stuff). No background apps were running to slow things down.

It's working OK now.

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I keep a command prompt window open and use DIR a lot. Or, if you prefer, you can have a bash prompt (e.g. using Cygwin).

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Don't just get off my lawn. Get off my neighbour's lawn too.

Fluffeh, if you haven't done so already, I think you would enjoy taking John Zachman's course in Enterprise Architecture. If one were building an addition on one's house, would one just start hammering things in place or would one look at the existing plans first? Too many IT projects just look at their own plans and don't look at the larger plans they should fit into. And in most IT shops those larger plans don't exist anyway. So we just hammer things into place and wonder why the data doesn't work out.

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I'm off topic, but fyi stigmata is the plural of stigma.

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That's not the way it works. Religion is one of many things that societies use to figure out who is "us" and who is "them". It's called tribalism and it's a corollary of being a higher primate. We higher primates split into groups and subgroups at the drop of a hat, forging temporary alliances with erstwhile enemies when threatened by a third, more distantly related party, and then returning to our mutual violence when there's nothing to distract us. Sometimes we get along for a while, and then something will happen to put us at each other's throats for a while. Youngsters & those who don't pay attention to history tend not to see the big pattern. But sure as shootin', one of the social functions of religion is to teach the youngsters who is "us" and who is "them". I'm not being reductionist, but you can't dispute that that's one of the things religion does. It keeps people apart and ready to go at each other's throats at a moment's notice.

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