Utilities can really only have neutral or negative reputations.

Think about it, how often do you go "Wow, that was some amazing electricity I used this morning! It came right out of the socket when I needed it and didn't electrocute me at all"? You don't, because you expect those things as a basic requirement of the service and there aren't really many added extras they can provide to help you view them in a positive light. On the flip side, if there are outages or faults you almost automatically acquire a negative view of them and again there isn't really a lot they can do to counteract it.

That still doesn't excuse shoddy IPMI implementations and not fixing vulnerabilities when they're discovered.

But apparently blindly repudiating it is fine.

Pocket change for them, maybe, but it's slightly more significant for the people having to pay it.

That explains why the government is always trying to defund them.

Wow, really can't tell if this is sarcasm or not (from the linked MSDN Blog entry)

It has a Start *button* but still uses the Start Screen from vanilla Win 8.

Anything that requires a 64-bit OS and, by extension, anything that needs more than ~3.5Gb of RAM to run (well) as well as anything that needs DX10+ and any new hardware that doesn't ship with XP drivers. This might not be that much now, but it will start to increase dramatically from today onwards.

And no, XP 64-bit does not count, it's a bastard hybrid of XP & 2003 Server and nothing really supports it properly.

No, they won't, at least not in statistically significant numbers. The cost and hassle of an XP->7 upgrade is much less than the cost and hassle of an XP->Linux upgrade due mostly to the retraining costs for both IT and users (deny it all you like but Linux is not similar enough to Windows that average users will just be able to run with it, most of them panic & phone support when one of their desktop shortcuts disappears) as well as the fact that most of the desktop hardware currently running XP is too old to run a modern Linux distro comfortably - a bunch of Celerons with 256Mb of RAM might be fine if you're running a stripped down install with XFCE and don't want to run any intensive applications, but Linux is not a magic bullet that makes old PCs run like new ones.

On top of all that, you lose integration with all the Windows-based server side systems you already have in place, which leads to either whole-sale replacement or lots of fudging things so they sort of work like before.

I honestly don't think most people advocating businesses should switch all their machines to Linux instead of upgrading from XP really appreciate just how much work would be involved in doing so. Home users are a different matter and it's much more practical for them to take that route, in theory.

Because, like he said, iptables is easy to screw up without realising it and you don't really want to take that approach on a machine you care about and are using day to day, you ideally want kind of abstraction layer to break you in gently where there's less chance of fucking it up and you can learn how it works at a sensible pace.

Well, there are lists of ranges known to be used by malware, etc. such as this: http://www.spamhaus.org/drop/ - it's not that it's a list of *all* ranges used for those things, just that these ranges are known *only* to be used for those things and so can safely be blocked outright.

Most of the rest of it comes from random compromised residential machines or hosted boxes and so is hard to block other than when you find a really shitty host like Nobis/Ubiquity who just don't care about shutting down compromised machines on their networks.

Wrong country, please attempt troll again.

Presumably because of a deal struck with one of those weasel-word named "industry associations" like the "Really Helpful Consumer Notification Group" that represent shitty companies that do shitty things and who probably went to Microsoft and said "we need X amount of time to make sure our products meet your new standards so they don't get blocked" for which you can read "we need some time to find a way around your blocking so we can continue being shitty".

In situations where it's not blatantly trying to kill the competition, it's usually that someone unrelated to the industry in question buys a fairly popular but financially struggling service figuring "how hard can it be to make it profitable?" only to find out after a year or so that actually it's quite hard to make it profitable, which is why the previous owners couldn't do it, and now their options are to close it down or find some horribly insidious way to force money from its users, which invariably leads to a fairly quick death anyway a few months down the line.

"You Won't Believe What This Chinese Internet Policeman Did For Money"

"14 Cool Posts Deleted By Corrupt Chinese Official"

"The Amazing Secret To Censoring Unwanted Blog Posts"

Except that's how it was and not only did every manufacturer have their own proprietary charger, but they tended to change them every couple of handsets just to keep things interesting. Your options were either to carry your charger everywhere with you (which somewhat defeats the point of having a mobile phone) or just hope that if you needed to charge your phone outside of your house that someone nearby had exactly the same charger as you so you could borrow it.

That's on top of the extra waste generated when you can't keep your old charger for use with your new phone.

There's nothing to stop the standard from being changed in the future as technology advances, it just means that you won't have 30 different proprietary cables to pick from.