Tom's got nailed over the "burning" AMD Athlons. If you dig through the HardOCP forums from back in 2001-2002, Kyle Bennett and others managed to trace some not so savory relationships with Intel and the site.

I've never trusted Tom's since and they have a well established Intel bias. HardOCP is much more transparent in it's testng.

Until IT staff have the same power and ability to lean back on a state license like an engineer or architect and say "no" to dangerous, illegal, or just plain stupid demands from end user, management, and shareholders, this will not change.

Toms got outed years ago as being paid by Intel. If you want good, unbiased reviews of games and gaming hardware, go to HardOCP.

I thought NASA struck a deal with DOE back in March to do 2 kilos per year of Pu-238 back in March. Did it get de-funded or something? http://www.universetoday.com/100875/u-s-to-restart-plutonium-production-for-deep-space-exploration/

https://owncloud.org/

Keep the masters in a private cloud and sync to it from your PCs. Git and other multi-user SVN is an idea, too. Also, SharePoint is excellent (but lots of overhead).

Kevin Turner, Lisa Brummel, and Amy Hood are all despised within Microsoft... they are Ballmer yes-people and Lisa Brummel is directly responsible for destroying any shred of productive culture there. They all need to go.

The employees want Satya Nadella or maybe Tony Bates... although many say it has to come from the outside... Sinofsky ;-)

http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2013/08/steve-ballmer-is-going-to-frickin.html

Framemaker in structured mode is an alternative for technical and book publishing. It supports content management systems natively and is all XML under the hood in structured mode. Being Adobe and meant for professionals, it's fairly pricey as you can imagine. Lyx/Latex is a pretty decent alternative.

Snowden didn't seem to have a problem finding information. Maybe they just need a contractor to come in and do it for them...

When we set our budget this year, we researched and found that the national average for IT budgets according to CIO.com and couple of other sources (all self reported, though) was 5.2% of the company gross. I would sit down with the corporate comptroller or CFO and find out where you should be. It sounds like most of your expenditures are directly related to product (and if the use any form of cost accounting internally) should be able to trace directly to your expenditures. Remember, if after the analysis things look even better than 5.2% then promptly point out your exceptional leadership and ask for a raise...

Everyone is so terrified of a discrimination lawsuit that generally, you're never going to get a call telling you that you did not get the job let alone any feedback whatsoever from the interviewer.

Vyatta is owned by Brocade now. It's not in their best interest to support other hardware vendors. Cumulus is aiming to support all hardware. That's the piece that kills everyone: poor interoperability.

You are IT just at another section... try working WITH the rest of the team. You do realize that IT policy managers are the police of the corporation along with the safety manager, HR, legal, etc. They exist to keep employees from breaking the law and doing serious harm to the company. They work for the corporation, not you.

This is a Andreeson Horowitz funded startup founded in 2010. The principles are JR Rivers (formerly of Cisco and Google) http://www.linkedin.com/pub/jr-rivers/3/3b7/372 and Nolan Leake (formerly of Tile and 3Leaf) http://www.linkedin.com/in/nolan. They're pretty darn smart cookies.

That said, I wonder if they are trying to gain some momentum (there seem to be quite a few major players in the SDN crowd since they founded their company) or if they have run out of steam and are trying to get the Open Source crowd involved on the development side... worth keeping an eye on, I guess.

I was a contractor for over a decade as a "hatchet man" to come in when large projects were in serious trouble, fix the project and then usually do an after action report which many times included firing people.

My recommendations:
1.) Hire someone like me to do this and completely side step the politics and anger that will come with dealing with this. Trust me on this. Get as far away from this as possible.
2.) On the question of evaluating IT budgets... current thinking is about 5.2% of the yearly gross of the business goes to IT but that's an average.