This makes me feel a bit better. Also makes me feel like a bit of an ass for being so lame about my computer organisational skills, both on my pc and on backups.

Actually, Australia has similar laws.

r.e. falling behind, yes that sucks.

My old employer fell so far behind on cisco call manager that the version they had were out of support and cisco would only touch their issues when billed at a T&M rate (i.e. it ran on windows). Their system was so big complex and unwieldy that it took the better part of 18 months planning to even update to a version of ccm that was even remotely current. I left shortly before that mess went live, that would have been a shitty teething period.

The magic words here are "accountability" and "Support contracts". Some people are willing to either do things with open source software and wing it with the potentially marginal support they get. Others do things in-house and have support agreements with their support teams, with virtual money flowing in between groups to provide the support. Others are happiest with support contracts so that they can lever the supporting groups to MAKE them find a solution if they have to.

I'm not saying "linux isn't for the big boys", there are versions of linux that are at the enterprise level (i.e. RHEL), but there are significant differences between those willing to fly by the seat of their pants, and those whom take these risks seriously.

This isn't just in business, most political decisions made don't consider looking past the next election, let alone looking into how it will impact ten let alone thirty years down the line. Smart decisions like that require someone to be brave, and brave doesn't win more votes than "shiny thing, here's money" that most political promises seem to have.

It makes the product sound like a steam "early release" rather than a production system and totally impractical for a live business environment. Some of this stuff is just too "seat of the pants" material.

I remember working in system admin and the product testing hoops that had to be jumped through by the testers was phenominal. They'd have products in test for three or more months before they'd even start raising notions of sending it out to get approval/review for sending to a live system. Hell I treat my mythtv system at home like a production environment as it isn't worth the wrath of my wife and two year old if it breaks and he cannot watch Peppa Pig.

That's it, I'm going back to watch it again. Curiosity has gotten the better of me here.

This just reminded me.

I've got a two and a half year old kid and he sounds so much more grown up now than he did when he first started trying to throw words together, he laughs differently now as well.

Record that shit. If you don't, one day you'll wake up and regret it. I ran across some recordings of our kid just yesterday that I'd forgotten I'd made, and he was babbling and trying to talk and laughing and I felt so happy that I had recorded it. I'm going to do it again shortly so that I've got him as he progresses.

When i was growing up our study was behind the living room and the tv & my computer sat on opposite sides of the same wall. If I degaussed my screen when someone was watching something I'd get yelled at as the tv image would shake a little.

Thusly this happened quite frequently when my sister was watching tv.

I work in the railway, those guys LOVE sending hard copies, even if we receive certain notifications by email, the "system" insists on sending our group hard copies, even if we just look at them and put them in a pile that is later shredded.

What about breaking the ring off of the zipper?

I've got an i5 Desktop at home, an i7 laptop that i use out and about. But the device I use more than any other is an atom based tablet as I can get 10-11 hours of continual use on the one charge and it's adequately fast for most lightweight things I do.

When I had a Dual Processor Power Mac I could turn the heaters in my house down a couple of notches as the G5 would act like a space heater. Heck that was its nickname in a number of forums.

I decided enough was enough when the temperature in front of the computer in summer was rivaling sitting out on the bitumen on the road. Almost immediately after turning the G5 off permenantly, my power bills went down $70 per quarter.

I know there's some humor intended here, but heck i figure it's worth mentioning that Dual/Quad core atom's rival if not beat the pants off P4 processors.
I mean, just look at This.

Times change, huh?