Often those sites are unwitting hosts to malware that are eventually cleaned up, so I'd hope that they don't start permanently blocking.

I don't think anybody had any idea how much developers were willing to take a cut on having a guaranteed delivery channel, and how much consumers were going to be willing to give up alternative means of acquiring applications.

Apple demonstrated to the whole world that if your release channel is solid, the vast majority of consumers won't bother looking elsewhere and won't care to. Steam is sort of the same way, and I sadly fall prey to it all too often. (Steam, please sir, will you take some more of my money?)

So run an older version of X in a Linux VM? All the current kernels run pretty well on all the hypervisors, so just download whatever current distro you like, put it in a VM, and store it for "legacy programs".

Likewise DOS, early Windows and Win9x all run in VMs fine.

It's a functional language following in the footsteps of the ML category of languages, but written for the .NET platform. It's open source with a patent grant, and the F# team has made sure each release has both a .NET and a Mono installer.

Ah, so frame dragging isn't a real phenomena?

I don't know if it solved all of their problems, perhaps they were also unhappy with the .NET system in other ways?

If it's anything like the NYSE is planning, they let the investment banks build their high speed trading server racks right next to the stock exchange racks. Literally.

Supposedly there's even ways to get your server physically in the same rack as one of the NYSE's exchange servers, but I think that might be taking it a bit too far, or maybe an overzealous reporting on the matter. But I don't think it's even disputed anymore that they're letting banks colocate with the exchange.

It's my understanding that it's also all new hardware.

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.