Because it's not their job, or their area of expertise.

As a case in point, here's an example I dealt with a while back. One of the best developers in the company was having issues with Remote Desktop on his XP machine. He got tired of it, so he installed VNC server instead, so he could remote into it from his other workstation. And he set it up without a password, because he didn't want to be bothered to enter it every time he connected. And in order to get it to work, he disabled Windows Firewall. Oh, and this was a laptop, that he occasionally took on the road and connected to public WiFi, like in hotels, airports, and such.

Now, on the one hand, you can say he was very competent in operating his workstation. He knew how to install software. He knew how to configure said software the way he wanted. He knew how to change OS settings to make sure his software worked the way he wanted. He did all this without having to contact anyone else for support. On the other hand, he completely opened up his laptop to attack because he didn't understand security concepts and didn't see the bigger picture beyond his own needs. But he was a fantastic developer, and one of the top performers in the company.

Any developer who can't competently administer his own machine is incompetent.

You'd think that would be the case but, in my experience, I've known a lot of extremely talented developers who had absolutely no clue about how to manage their own desktops. Didn't understand basic networking principles or basic OS functions and dos and don'ts. That being said, I still would give them admin rights to their own workstations. Otherwise I'd be spending my whole day installing a billion apps for them that they need to test or develop with, and that also ends up being a waste of their time having to wait for me. But I also have the expectation that they're probably going to need some additional care when they mess something up.

But admin access to production servers, absolutely not. I've seen way too many scary, scary things happen when developers are given unrestricted access to production systems.

6: Ability to run on future hardware. Say everyone ditches x86 and amd64 and decides to go to IBM's POWER architecture and emulate legacy stuff. The stuff in the VM won't care that is is actually isn't running on a different CPU.

This is not true. Hardware virtualization is not emulation, which is what you're talking about here. Processes in the VM are run directly on the host processor, they're just managed by the hypervisor. There's no emulation layer, since that would make performance pretty atrocious. So, the stuff in the VM absolutely will care about what processor you've moved to, especially if you've suddenly changed instruction sets. Binaries compiled for x86 won't magically run on PowerPC just because it's running on a VM.

A lot of the issues with OSS are the result of engineers being totally in charge of the direction of a product. Engineers tend to assume everyone else has, or at least should have, the same level of knowledge that they do. They don't have issues with tracking down oddball dependencies or navigating through cryptic and often counter-intuitive config files, so why should anyone else?

Commercial software companies, on the other hand, have teams of people to counterbalance the engineers. Marketing people to research how people want to use the product. Usability experts to make sure the product is actually accessible to the majority of people. OSS, for most projects, don't really have that. Just engineers doing what they do best, but without anyone to bring them down into the real world a little.

I think the real story here is that it outlines the downside to moving everything to The Cloud, as a lot of people are trying to promote these days. As you said, email outages are pretty common even at large enterprises. The difference is, CIOs like to be able to go and yell at someone in their office for an outage, and know that it's being worked on in some measurable fashion. They don't like it when your answer is, "I don't know what's going on. Ask Google."

The Cloud is great, as long as it always works. But, in my experience, downtime is far less tolerated in hosted solutions than it is in on-site infrastructure. And stories like this make executives nervous about this stuff.

Yes, that works fine. It'll modify the Windows boot loader to create a menu option for the Windows 7 install so you can dual-boot.

As I recall, Windows 95 was the last one to be distributed on floppy. I remember installing it, and it was a ridiculous number of floppies. Upwards of 20 I think.

Bankrupt you with costly legal fees. Which is why these conglomerates go after people who don't have the financial ability to defend themselves.

I guess that means more particles for the rest of us!

From what I can gather about this, it operates very similar to how VMware Fusion does on the Mac. A fully-booted, fully-functional XP build is running in a VM in the background, but individual apps that are running on that VM are presented and displayed on the host desktop like a native application. I.E, no nested desktop-within-a-desktop, like VMware Workstation.

Anyone who actually lives there, or anywhere in the Bay Area, calls it the City. Calling it "Frisco" or "San Fran" is the quickest way to identify yourself as a tourist.

Correct. And, some stations who are currently simulcasting their analog VHF channel in DTV over a UHF channel are actually moving back to their VHF frequency after the cutover. I believe they have to get special approval from the FCC to do that, though. Most are just going to stick with their UHF allotments and let the VHF go dark.

What's nightmarish about OpenLDAP, Kerberos and Samba? I run this combination on my home LAN. Couldn't be easier.

Key words being home LAN. In a corporate LAN, or even a mid-size company network, management of these alternatives quickly becomes a nightmare. Stuff just doesn't work quite right with the Windows clients, and you don't have key components of Windows management available, like Group Policy Objects. Might be good enough for your hobby network at home, but multiply that across a couple thousand clients and it's not exactly fun.

I'm all about cutting costs by going open source wherever I can, but Active Directory, when you're dealing with a Windows environment, just works. The headaches and time I'd waste trying to get the current LDAP/Kerberos/Samba "alternative" working well enough that we wouldn't be getting flooded with calls about stuff not working how the users expect, greatly exceeds the cost of just implementing and maintaining Active Directory.

There's some hope that Samba4 will fix a lot of that, and after it's released I'll look at it again.