And as a somewhat full-time server admin (who made his money on the Windows side of the house and is only a somewhat okay Linux guy in his less than humble opinion) - your comment makes me cringe and reach for the Tums. The phrase you are looking for is "single point of failure". Faster boot times for servers that you don't have to reboot (we're talking Linux, remember - the Windows systems are the ones you have to reboot with security updates, although they've gotten better) - it is a non issue. When you spend more time waiting for the raid controller to spin up the hard drives and the memory count to finish than the server to get to a point where you can log in, boot speed is not that much of an issue.

Unfortunately, I don't qualify for the Long family - only one side is long lived, and only had one grandparent alive when I was married. If I had married at the age Maureen did, however I would have just made it. :)

gweihir - the GP could actually be in their late 20s and worked straight through to their doctorate. 2086 - 2014 = 72 years. Rough estimate using average high school graduation at 18, bachelor's at 23 (5 year plan), doctorate at 29 (6 years). That puts him/her at age 101 in 2086 which would be well within the range of possibilities. Move any of those numbers down (graduated high school early, did bachelors in 4 years, doctorate in 4) and that puts him/her in their late 90s. Life expectancy in their family may be longer (a for instance - my grandmother died when she was 100, her younger sister and brother are in their 90s and oldest daughter is in her 80s - and this is all for people who were born and lived before we had things like x-ray machines and vaccines) so it is plausible.

Vellmont - it isn't that we aren't all adults (or pretend to be adults) - it is the various filtering software of the places we may be reading from might flag the whole site (or at least the content we are trying to look at) as inappropriate for our location if it is riddled with the uncensored versions of what is considered profanity. That is the main reason you see the self-censoring of messages.

Actually for most people in the U.S., the cost of gasoline at $4.50/gallon is the tipping point - this was proven the summer before the market went boom - gasoline consumption dropped. As far as boycotting - it is going to have to be something besides price pressure, unless you are able to start nailing the providers who are doing this sort of thing for monopolistic practices.

There's a simple answer to this one from Oglaf:

http://oglaf.com/ornithology/

(note - while this particular entry is safe enough, in general this comic is *highly* NSFW - and may flag depending on which blockers your employers use)

This move means that the Security staff is now Google employees. It would not be in a Google employee's interests to sell company secrets, inside information or other things that might make the company not be able to keep Google employees on the payroll. This increases shareholder value because employees have a vested interest in seeing the company succeed whereas contractors do not have that impetus. In addition, it actually makes it less likely that the Security staff will unionize, which in turn also benefits the company. Finally, the increased community goodwill is an intangible factor but it does make the bottom line in that Google will now be able to say the company demographics more closely match the community (see the stats in the article regarding ethnic makeup of Security staff).

Slaves weren't their intended customers. Chains and whips appealed to 90% of slave owners. (Keep this in mind when you consider Facebook and end users aren't the intended customers....) :)

Can't call it Windows X - too easily confused with X Windows.

Weird Al already has this covered. :) Even has an instructional video...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I must be missing something - you are unable to provide the bandwidth you advertise to your end users and you are complaining that the companies they are requesting data from are at fault? This is the same as saying that the concert at the stadium is at fault for the traffic backups. Wouldn't the fault be more with the road providers? Especially when the concert people are saying "Hmm, we know this is possibly a problem - we can put a live hologram local to your people so they don't have to get on your roads" and instead of saying "yes", you say "no, it's all your fault we can't provide it". Your end-users are your customer - and should you start throttling because you're unwilling (or unable) to provide the bandwidth, they are well within their rights to nail you to the wall for failing to provide SLA data throughput if it is correctable by you.

You beat me to it - thanks. (posting because my mod points expired yesterday so giving you props this way.)

The thing you aren't taking into account is things like reorgs and reductions in force. You have the process and procedure - and a distribution list is set up for domain-renewal@mycompany.com which has as members the manager Jane and the senior sysadmins John, Jill and Juan. Jane gets promoted and the group gets put under a different manager - Scott from Business Systems. Scott says "why am I getting all this junk from this address -- take me off the list" - he's the new manager and they follow instructions. Juan moves to a different group with different responsibilities and is not replaced. John and Jill are both laid off because they became redundant with the staff from the Bangledesh office. Now the list is an empty list that no one sees the mail going to it. Mail administration *might* catch this, or they might not - or it may get removed automatically because company policy has some silly rule like "no lists with less than 4 members" or "empty lists are removed if they remain empty for 30 days". So through policy, you've now shot yourself in the foot and don't even realize it.

I am still laughing at all this because people forget to go back to the basics and remember that this is government/corporate and not your home mailbox. This is not Google's mail where it was revolutionary when they offered unlimited storage space. This isn't a technology company that treasures email communication like gold. This is a place that still is operating under late 90s/early 00s rules.

1) Storage is expensive - so (assuming) that they are running Exchange and somewhat recent (2003 - switching to 2007 would have taken too long when everything is working fine and made more sense to wait to 2010), they don't have a lot of storage space on the back end. Yes, I know you're bragging about terabyte drives and the like but the equipment on the back end is going to be circa 2005 and enterprise storage would be sitting around 72gb or 144gb SCSI, or maybe a NetApp or EMC device to allow clustering but it will still be limited.

2) Mail box sizes are going to be dictated by that same ancient policy - which means that they are going to be set at something like 100 MB or maybe even 250 MB. If they were *really* progressive, they'll be at 500 MB maximum size.

3) Standard IT procedure when the mailbox is full - archive the older messages to a PST file.

4) Standard IT policy is going to forbid putting PST files on home drives or any other networked drive because they are going to take up needed space. (remember, storage is still expensive in corporate/government world - we can't go down to Fry's and just get a few disks and pop 'em in a server without killing anything that resembles a support contract)

From here, all it takes is a crashed hard drive, a virus infected system (wipe and restore), moving to a new computer and doing a less than good job of moving the files from the old one to the new one or even PST corruption and that stuff is just gone.