Nonsense.

It depends on what the data is, and what and how it's being used. There is no "correct" organization, and no "one true way" to deal with data. I would not recommend going around cramming documents into some set organization without understanding where the data is coming from and what people hope to do with it.

Your organization may work for your purposes, within the constraints of the company or organization you work in. I've supported a lot of different types of companies over the years, and personally, I've never found a one-size-fits-all solution. In each case, it really pays off to start off with no assumptions, and figure out what will work for that specific situation.

As an IT person, I hate questions like this. There's not enough information to give a solid answer. For example:

* What kinds of documents are you talking about? Text? Photos? Spreadsheets?
* What is the source of the documents? Are these currently printed out documents that need to be scanned back in? Are they currently digital, and in a particular file format?
* What will people need to do with them when these documents are retrieved? Do they need to be able to edit the documents?
* How much does formatting matter? If someone retrieves the document in 5 years, will it be important that all the line breaks and page breaks are in the same place? Does it need to have all of the correct fonts? Or are you more interested in being able to have access to the information itself?
* When you say that the application will need to allow ".docx, doc, .pdf, etc", what formats are in "etc"?

There may be many other relevant questions, my point is that there just isn't enough detail here. In general, if the most important thing is that you have a printable document that you want to be able to print out from any machine, maintaining the formatting as much as possible, then PDF is a pretty good choice (be sure to embed the fonts and include searchable text!). If you already have a bunch of Word documents and you want the formatting unchanged, and would like the capability to edit the document after it's retrieved, then I'd typically just recommend keeping it as a .docx. It keeps things simple, will be widely supported, and prevents the risk of something going wrong while you're converting to another format. If you like the idea of using .docx because of what I just said, but want something more "open", then ODF is probably worth looking into.

Really, there are only so many choices, and each have advantages depending on your specific needs.

There's no subways to JFK either, really. Yes, yes, you can transfer to the Air Train, which is better than the bus. But honestly, there's no subways to any of the airports. No matter what, you have to transfer to some other train or bus or something, or else take a car.

And sure, JFK may be more convenient for you, but it's less convenient for other people. I can spend over an hour transferring trains trying to get to JFK and pay $2.50 for the subway and $5 for the air train, or spend $50 for a car to JFK and take god-knows-how-long depending on traffic, or I can spend $20 on a car to LaGuardia and be there in 20 minutes. Guess which option I prefer.

Or, hopefully, it means Dropbox has more money to pour into development, improving the services they provide. Unfortunately, it usually just means that some billionaire will be billionairier.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. My understanding is that the NSA officially claims not to collect information on US citizens when the data resides solely in the U.S. However, they do monitor data going in and out of the U.S., so if you're an American located in the U.S., then storing data outside of the U.S. seems to open you to monitoring.

On the other hand, I also thought part of what Snowden released showed that they didn't exactly stick to their own rules, and they were collecting all kinds of data that they weren't really supposed to. I could be wrong about that, though. Reporting on the issue has been terrible.

To play the devil's advocate, have you considered that maybe younger people always are "whiney, lazy, idiots," and older people are the ones with enough experience to see it.

More likely this is a feature that people want so that they can easily/automatically spin up Linux VMs in Hyper-V environments, without having to make use of a bunch of different scripts in a bunch of different languages.

What about an IDE for formulating normal scripts that mere mortals can even remember?

I don't see what the objection to an IDE is. If I'm writing anything more than the simplest script, I find it helpful to have some kind of debugging tools.

It's not really fair to say that Powershell is, "a kludged attempt to bring CMD.exe to something closer to bash.... 20 years later." You can argue that it's kludged (I don't think it really is) or that it's late to the game (it is), but it's not really like Bash. Bash treats everything like text, whereas Powershell treats everything as an object. Bash relies on a lot of stand-alone applications being chained together, whereas Powershell tends to have more built-in functionality which is supplemented by various extensions.

Whether you like those differences or not is a different issue, I suppose, but it's not like Bash. It's not even trying to be like Bash.

That's cool. Sounds about like what I said: We don't really know if warp drives would be possible, or if they are, exactly how they could work. We don't really know that this drive does anything (though it seems to), and if it does, quite how it's doing it.

But if this drive does work, and it works the way some people suspect it does, and warp drives are possible, and they would work the way some people suspect they would, then this drive might be doing something like what a warp drive would do, supposing that the measurements are all accurate.

Or any number of other things could be going on. We don't know.

That would be a great argument if you're talking about measuring programmers' attitudes, or maybe even the quality of their code. It seems that what's being talked about here is "talent", which is often (generally?) thought to mean a kind of innate ability.

The summary makes it sound like Microsoft is suspicious just because there are hundreds of activations from the same IP, but I don't think that alone would have attracted the same kind of attention. Because you're right, it could simply be a company with incompetent IT people, or even just a computer fix-it shop that is installing and activating Windows for people. The article says:

So it's not an issue of "Microsoft thinks these activation are suspicious because they all come from the some IP address," but rather, "Microsoft knows these activation are suspicious because they're using faked/stolen license keys. A lot of them are coming from the same place, which makes Microsoft want to know what that place is."

I don't know. The first article I read quoted some scientist saying something to the effect of, "The effect is consistent with what we might possibly see if it were a warp drive, according to what we guess a warp drive might possibly do, which is all kind of cool. But I don't actually know what's going on here." I thought that's where all the talk of warp drives came from.

But it didn't sound to me at the time like the guy who said it, whoever that was, was even really positing that it was a warp drive. Just more like, "Well the whole thing is kind of neat. We don't really know how warp drives would work, if we assume they're possible, and we also don't know how this thing is working, if we assume it's not experimental error. However, with as little as we know about warp drives and as little as we know about this thing, this thing could technically be a warp drive. It's total bullshit speculation, but fun to think about."

I guess you're right in the sense that if we don't know what's generating the thrust, it's premature to declare it to be *not* much of anything. It's premature to declare it not-a-time-machine or not-a-perpetual-motion-machine. It might be premature to declare that it's not witchcraft. But on the other hand, it's a pretty safe bet that it's none of those things. If it really does work, it probably works via some very reasonable mechanism.

The author is right: we should reserve judgment until there's something more substantial. From what I've read so far, it sounds more like a couple of scientists played with it and said, "Huh, this is actually pretty cool. It does seem to generate thrust, and we're not sure how. Wouldn't it be cool if it was a primative warp drive? Yeah, that'd be cool. Oh well, we need to test it more before we're even sure that it's generating thrust." The whole warp-drive thing is wild speculation, picked up by fanboys who desperately want it to be true.

What exactly are you saying here? Are you saying that this article is silly because nobody really thinks this is a warp drive? Because get ready: this discussion is about to get flooded with people who think that this is a warp drive.