I've been using 9.1-RELEASE since SVN was tagged 2012-12-04 on both my home and work desktop. ZFS root is awesome, and userland is pretty much the latest bleeding edge upstream, I've had absolutely no issues running a full-fledged XFCE-4.10, Firefox ESR 10.x with Flash, 3D accel, everything desktop.

I've used freebsd-update to go from both 9.1-RC3 and 9.0-RELEASE to 9.1-RELEASE also switching to pkgng.
I'd recommend folks to look at the following guides if they want to use ZFS root or create a nice, full-featured desktop OS.

http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=31662 (ZFS ROOT)
https://cooltrainer.org/2012/01/02/a-freebsd-9-desktop-how-to (good desktop guide)

Great job BSD devs, keep it up.

You can easily tie external program views for attachments, for example when I receive vendor quotes (always in .pdf) I just hit "v" to view attachment list and then hit enter and it spawns evince. Same goes for HTML email or any attachment.. libreoffice for documents, spreadsheets etc. Simple edit of a mailcap entry

== snip ==
# set mailcap_path = ~/.mutt/mailcap
text/html; lynx -display_charset=utf-8 -dump %s; nametemplate=%s.html; copiousoutput
# PDF wth evince
application/pdf; evince %s;

# spreadsheets
application/vnd.ms-excel; oocalc %s;
application/vnd.openxml; oocalc %s;
application/excel; oocalc %s;
application/msexcel; oocalc %s;
application/x-excel; oocalc %s;
application/x-msexcel; oocalc %s;
application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.spreadsheet; oocalc %s;

# slide decks
application/powerpoint; ooimpress %s;
application/vnd.ms-powerpoint; ooimpress %s;
application/x-mspowerpoint; ooimpress %s;
application/mspowerpoint; ooimpress %s;
application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.presentation; ooimpress %s;
application/ppt; ooimpress %s;
application/pptx; ooimpress %s;
== snip ==

I'm still using mutt here, and vim as my editor plus offlineimap + notmuch (for indexing/searching).
Once you learn the hotkeys it's much more efficient than any GUI MUA, and the notmuch indexing
functionality is worth it's weight in gold to me. I tend to get several hundred emails a day, the bulk of
which are neatly filed into IMAP folders inside offlineimap and nicely indexed by notmuch.

mutt itself is endlessly configurable, for people who are intent on sending HTML email
there are numerous ways to dump it back to TXT (which all email should be in). Say NO to HTML email, people.

http://notmuchmail.org/
http://offlineimap.org/
http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2011/01/how_to_use_Notmuch_with_Mutt/

Work for yourself, leverage the finer points of capitalism and charge less than those jokers. It's easier than you think, if you know helpdesk type stuff start with that and build up. If the opportunity isn't there with some established entity become an established entity.

FTA, looks like it was a Microsoft Windows infrastructure, all the vectors were Windows servers.

We primarily use IRC on an internal SSL-enabled ircD (ratbox). We're about 5,000 employees. The great thing about IRC is there are so many clients to choose from. I prefer weechat but a lot of folks use xchat or pidgin. Email is also very heavy, but for instant communication IRC is the preferred medium.

For the least amouint of effort, you could simply use git and keep the same name. That'll let you have revision control of the single document.

http://rogerdudler.github.com/git-guide/

While this isn't a permanent solution it's better than what you have and pretty damn easy to setup.

devops agile programming, yeah. stuff like this might reenforce the need for proper QA and testing and less rapid delivery agile mumbo crap people seem to be adopting nowadays. acceptable from a start-up perhaps, not a now tradeable social media giant.

It's very rare. I've worked in IT infrastructure for 13years, and closely with varous Infosec groups. I've only met one person who can easily fit that role of security expert + kickass developer (of security related tools, software etc).

This is very accurate, the number of specializations, sub-specializations and disparity between low/entry-level to upper-end architect varies drastically.

Also remember VMWare isn't the only game in town, it just happens to be the most expensive. Red Hats RHEV (Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization) is a contender along with XEN, KVM, Hyper-V etc. (I've only used the first three, can't speak for Hyper-V).

While I think outsourcing is generally a byproduct from the papermill MBA doctrine of the 90's, I wholeheartedly agree with you on the arrogance bit. The days of the BOFH-all-users-are-stupid mentality has no place today. If you don't communicate early and often to your users and generally act like an arrogant ass someone else will do your job for you. Granted, technically they could be inferior but at that point does it really matter? I'm sick of the arrogant fiefdoms some IT pros and SA's think is cool to promote. I can't stand the negativity that mentality creates. I'm a Sr. SA in a small, global team of Linux sysadmins supporting a fortune 50 - negativity and 90's-esque god-complex BOFH has no place in an environment where things just need to get done and things have to stay up and running (and improving).

The military justice system is a whole different world than that of civilians, it will be interesting to see if any of the circumstantial evidence will even matter.

I can't help to think this is why more emphasis on QA and staging changes appropriately and testing thoroughly and less focus on agile, devops type methodology would have helped. It's a well known fact that Facebook developers work on live production data.

Reboot a webserver nightly?
You must be doing something wrong I'd that's required.