I used to believe in loser-pays, but here's where it falls down.

Giant movie studio sues you. You're completely in the right, but perhaps due to a technicality, an idiot jury, or "the winds of fate," the decision goes against you.

Your legal fees were 5-10K or so. The movie studio points to its team of 85 lawyers all billing at $1K an hour for the last six months.

Kinda makes you long for simple student loan debt...

This may be due in part to the way github integrates social networking and coding-- I'm unaware of anything similar for SVN, Perforce, Bazaar, Mercurial, etc...

That'd definitely not fly in the US. "You destroyed the drive, so it obviously contains evidence of insider trading. And tax evasion. And pictures of you buggering a horse..."

I'll take "getting fired" versus "going to jail" any day of the week.

Unfortunately, it's never quite that simple...

This is very much what I want to know. Destroy your drives, shred your papers, I'm with you this far-- but then ADMITTING to having done it? This isn't like the situation of a thug bragging about a store he robbed for ego points; nobody's going to praise you for operating a shredder, so where's the value in yammering about it?

Exactly. If you've got evidence that you've committed murder on a drive, and you destroy the drive, the penalty for obstruction is orders of magnitude less than the penalty for a successful murder conviction.

Depends on whether they actually cracked the drives open and pulled the platters. The article is unfortunately ambiguous on this point; it just refers to them "tearing apart external drives" which may well be them simply pulling the drive from its enclosure.

No, I truly get that-- it's not a hard concept.

My point is that that was their last product "hit." I don't think we can find another viable electronic manufacturer that hasn't come out with something droolworthy in half a decade?

Sure, but look at the platform. It's five years old, and despite its new form factor it hasn't really been updated since release.

I realize they don't want to change things around on game developers, but I'd like to think that we can get better performance today than we could five years ago...

Well, there's certainly that risk. :-p

Hence the wise man hedges his bets and picks something he actually likes first!

Actually, if you're going to be blamed if it doesn't work out just right, endorse an option you KNOW they won't go with. That leaves you in the (enviable) position of being able to say "Well, I recommended $VENDOR_X but you shot it down" should things not work out going forward, rather than being the chump who suggested the failing equipment.

Actually, CentOS is the free version of RHEL; Fedora has an 18 month lifecycle.

You'd have to be some kind of masochist to deploy that as a server to an environment of more than a few servers.

Nice to see that Symantec is continuing its tradition of buying terrific products solely to bloat them, screw them up, and effectively turn them into shit.

BackupExec, Norton Utilities, Brightmail... it's like they've got some kind of bizarre scatological alchemy going on.

I do hope that the whole disk encryption solution that PGP was offering for Mac and Linux will continue to be supported; IIRC Symantec tends not to focus overly much on non-Windows solutions.

Oh man. This, a day after Atlassian itself got breached:
http://blogs.atlassian.com/news/2010/04/oh_man_what_a_day_an_update_on_our_security_breach.html

Their fault or not, having their name linked to two breaches in as many days has gotta be unpleasant at best for Atlassian.