There is a difference between immigration and hiring US citizens then there is to hire foreign workers from another country...

If there is a problem, then maybe fix the immigration and citizenship process rather than doing an end run around the whole process and makes what is essentially an "exception" to the rules to allow for it. As it is, the American Dream (TM) is being killed, where immigrated US citizens can't get a job in IT because all the work has been farmed out to cheap foreign imports.

Also, it will allow dramatically hopeful crew to tap the gauges as they edge towards criticality...

I had my house broken into this past year and was robbed a few months ago. I was only gone from the house for about 4 hours.

They took my 40" LCD TV. They took my Xbox 360 and all my games. Then even took my fscking Kelvin Kline cologne.

The one thing they didn't take? My desktop. It was easily worth more money than anything else I had, and in fact if you added up everything else they took, it wouldn't have equaled what my PC was worth (data and sentiment aside also).

Why? Because A) It is difficult and confusing for idiot robbers. There is a rats nest of cables plugged into everything that all need to be taken apart, and you need all the pieces. B) It is large and unwieldy (mine is even an ITX build!), big components, and multiple things to carry, and C) Ever bought a PC used or second hand? Not much of a market for it, and they are not worth much, particularly if you do not know what is in the guts.

If that was a Laptop, or a Tablet, or a Ultrabook (particularly anything recognizable as Apple) it would have been one of the very first things stolen. Easy to identify, easy to transport, easy to sell, worth money.

So there you go:
6) Theft Deterrent!

I think my next build will either be some super expensive system in a massive full tower case, or I'll find a nice bland beige box circa 1995 to put it in... Call it thievery camouflage...

Upgrading really hasn't made much sense in some time. About the only upgrades that make sense, is if you build your system wrong initially, you *might* be able to upgrade to fix it. i.e. you underestimated RAM usage, or gaming VS video card etc... The problem is players like Intel change their standards every 2-3 years. So if you are trying to upgrade anything beyond that, good luck as it won't be compatible anymore. It will use a different socket, it will use a different DDR, it will use a different power cable, etc... which would force you to replace so many things, you might as well just buy a whole new boxen.

Not so sure of all the influence of those milestones, however years ago our organization went from a 3 year lease cycle to a 4 year one, and over time that would slow the market, but ultimately it would level off again so that makes sense.

I'm sure that there were also a bunch of people that jumped on the Tablet bandwagon thinking that was all they need only to find out it wasn't quite as useful as they thought it might be. Everyone has already mentioned also how much of a drag Windows 8 was also.

Well I don't use Firefox anymore other than as another alternate browser for weird instances... However I remember two things both good and bad:

1) Memory management in Firefox was terrible (at least in the last version I used).
2) Some Firefox extensions were very useful for certain things... Like Firebug and debugging JavaScript.

considering that Google is by far the largest contributor to Mozilla, it would actually be in the best interests NOT to compete with Google.

Though upon reading the wiki, it seems they are now getting the Money from Yahoo, of which MS takes a 12% cut as it actually goes though Bing, so it may not be in the best interests to compete with anyone really! :)

In a secure enterprise environment, users typically cannot download and install anything. It should have been addressed in testing, and deployed with proper patches, drivers, etc... However because it wasn't, and they didn't, it caused issues later (which have since been addressed, but made the transition unnecessarily fraught with issues).

That might work when the user has a specific application. In the two instances I saw, it was the fact that the print servers were not compatible (nothing user can do), so it was a matter of IT installing the 64 bit drivers. Ditto with the remote in software IT uses to network with users computers, which caused them some support headaches. However that works now also. Were they to go with 64bit initially, test it first, and address the issue then, none of it would have been an issue.

But someone somewhere made the decision that the entire org should stick with 32bit forever...

Windows 7 works fine here. The transition was mostly painless. About the only thing that has caused some issues, is that they decided to go with 32bit as the standard, likely for compatibility reasons. However some power users fought and won to get the 64bit version because of a requirement for more then 4GB of RAM (hardly surprising). The 64bit does have a few compatibility issues, particularly with some of the IT remote applications (and some print drivers). Should have just went with 64bit to begin with, updated the few incompatible applications as required, then you're not supporting two different OS versions for years and years to come.

It might, but then again you are then trying to use it in an enterprise environment, deploying it on thousands of computers, etc... fraught with potential issues. I mean everyone is supposed to be using the same template images, yet even that gets screwed up all the time, then network deployment, with seems piecemeal half the time etc...

Even in Canada, we have had some crazy political appointments that made little sense, and are pretty embarrassing.

Off the top of my head we've had a Education Minister that never graduated from High School, a Science and Technology Minister, who was a creationist and believed the world was 5,000 years old, a Minister of the Environment that was a a right wing business talk show host, etc... Though some of that might be a mix of both Federal and Provincial governments.

We just started preliminary testing of 8.1, which I foresee having many problems. Rollout and compatibility aside (which will be huge issues no doubt), there is the fact that a great deal of "normal" users can barely function in a Windows 7 environment. Windows 8.1 will be like giving an iPhone to a caveman in many cases. Help desk is going to love that transition I am thinking...

i am pretty sure it was went they went back in time or whatever, and when they used the old version of the Neuralizer it made that sound. Hence the possible gag, in that it was old and obsolete...

Or they just do not care. I think it is a situation where ideology trumps common sense in most cases.

Most laws and the like are not written by politicians, but the direction and marching orders are.
The bureaucrats that drafted it up, probably knew all about the issues, and told the politicians all about them.

However when you are told to do it, get it done, and get it out, I am pretty sure any nay saying falls on deaf ears. That and the patented, we'll fix it later once implemented, or we'll see what happens, or lets risk manage that, etc...

As far as incompetent goes, I would say that because they rammed it through it does show they are incompetent politicians, as they should have saw this coming, underestimated the greed of the media groups, and foresaw that this is going to cause a real political issue when Little Jimmy or Grandma gets a letter saying that they are going to get sued into oblivion, with an election coming up.