Replyng to undo faulty moderation

It's funny, you speak of "no meaning" as if you have a scientific basis for this. Unless you do, your opinion is no more valid than the guy strapping a bomb on himself to get 72 virgins, and no less dogmatic. Not everyone defines "meaning" is as narrow a manner as you.

For starters, deism isn't a religion, which makes the rest of the comment not worth bothering with.

I've been deistic for decades. It discounts the idea that god is an old man on the mountain, but maintains the idea that there is purpose and meaning to everything, not just man.

Yes they do, because ergonomics require decent keyboards, screen and mouses. They may not need fat clients and would be off just as well with thin clients, but laptops or that form factor do *not* replace desk top systems since they still need the keyboard, mouse and screen and will essentially be used as a desktop almost all of the time.

They need access to their individual applications and data too. While it may be possible migrate all those to web applications or some client-server model, I doubt Turin has managed to finalize that sort of thing yet. Most EU cities have over a thousand custom applications that often run on antiquated proprietary systems and they will still have a burden of those for a long time.

Getting people the cheapest computer possible sounds like an easy way to save money, but in the end the price of the hardware is only a fraction of the costs and often the extra costs incurred by buying cheaper will make it more expensive. Starting with migrating just the desktops to linux and running the proprietary cruft on things like Citrix servers will save them a lot of money without a significant down side.

Oh, because they're not running windows, they can probably use their older systems a bit longer too, if electricity costs don't make it cheaper to upgrade anyway to more energy efficient devices.

We've done everything we can in our Active Directory network to overcome roaming profile issues. Even with folder redirection, you have a huge fat ntuser.dat for prone to corruption. Users' home folders on a server, with discrete text-based configuration files would be a dream.

Did you know that in 2014 you still can't safely put risking profiles on a DFS share?

Metro is dying before our very eyes. It has been deemphasized in Windows 8.1 and by Windows 9 will be little more than a fancy start menu.

For chrissakes, most suppliers if enterprise systems I deal with still happily ship you Windows 7 Pro machines, or at least heavily advertised downgrade rights. "Business class" systems still ship with Windows 7 preinstalled. The enterprise customers never bloody wanted Metro to begin with, and so act as if Windows 8/8.1 didn't exist.

OpenLDAP, NFS and home folders on a file server.

Jesus Christ, Microsoft junkies well and truly believe there's no alternatives.

As you point out, not all birds of a feather stick together. I'm not a Tea Party guy. I'm just not closed minded enough to judge a friend by their politics. If you only have friends that agree with your politics, you are probably narrow minded or take politics too seriously.

It's my firm belief that one cannot write any software of any moderate to large size without inevitably running afoul of some software patent. There are only two things that protect any developer:

1. Distribution of their software is sufficiently small that it escapes the notice of patent trolls.
2. Being a large company with a legal department capable of dealing with patent threats, and a bank account big enough to buy them off.

The client isn't great, but it does work. We have a few Android and iOS devices that use the apps, and it works once you get it configured.

I build these critters all the time. Our entire multioffice infrastructure is based on Debian-based routers with OpenVPN. OpenVPN is pretty simple to get running, and I use Webmin to build my iptables rules.

Has the United States of America become a member of The Totalitarian Club ?

Yes. Each President has been moving in this direction more and more, but Obama has managed to overreach even more than those before him. Take the IRS, for instance. I personally know of people who have been getting involved with Tea Party politics and now are getting audited. Like their politics or not (it doesn't matter), that is totalitarianism, which means the next time a GOP'er gets in, he can do the same thing. It isn't a good time to be an American.

However, it takes a really fast car to stay on the other side of the planet.

That's because Apple still has meaningful market share.

This whole notion of ratios has you a bit confused I see.