In my personal experience, the FTC's Do Not Call list has actually worked pretty well. I used to get considerable numbers of telemarketing calls every night, but about 6 months after adding all my numbers to the list, they've almost completely stopped. And on the very, very rare occasion that I do get one, a quick mention that this number is on the Federal Do Not Call list sends them into a near panic state, scrambling to hang up.

CNN hadn't picked it up? I guess no one had tweeted about it yet.

Or, you could read the article, where he mentions his suggestion to the brass to buy Google in the late 90s, and Yahoo's complete disinterest in doing so because they considered the search business to be mostly irrelevant.

Really, though, the same could be said of any company that size and age. Very large companies nearly always, over time, develop into unwieldy mega-bureaucracies, comprised of individual fiefdoms solely concerned about their own headcount and perceived influence. They become microcosms of nations. They have well-defined class structures, their own culture, sometimes even their own currency internally.

Replacing Ballmer isn't going to change any of that. A new CEO might excite the board and top investors a little, perhaps shuffle some HR/management policies around a little. But in the end, the same issues that are inherent in being a company of that size are still going to be there.

If aliens were to observe us and read nothing but YouTube comments, they'd probably assume humans are non-sentient.

Economy of Scale

The mass-produced Model S is expected to price in at BMW and Audi levels.

Gartner also recently claimed that by 2012, 20% of enterprises (not just "companies" in general, but Enterprises) will hold NO IT assets anymore, as everything will be cloud-based. Wonder which Cloud Computing vendor payed good money for that "prediction".

Personally, I miss Slot 1. So easy to upgrade/replace processors. Just a little bit too bulky, though...

Or, you know, you could get an actual Scrabble board, and not have to spend a couple thousand dollars to play to play a $20 game with three friends. You can even flick the tiles at the board, if you want. For free!

CompTIA certs only impress people who don't know anything, and are helpful to get you through the HR screening by pasting it on your resume.

That accurately describes most college IT degrees, actually.

Well, their brand was pretty tarnished in the enterprise market when they just decided to abandon their (fairly popular) product lines because they didn't want to have to try and compete with Cisco.

Interestingly, most all of their advances in server technology are directly descended from Compaq.

IMO, keeping the ProLiant line was the one single smart thing that HP did after the Compaq acquisition.

I think most people would blame Carly Fiorina. She effectively took HP out of the hands of the engineers who made the company great, and put it squarely into the hands the shareholders who were concerned only with short-term stock price during the dotcom bubble. She spurred a massive shift in culture that killed off the innovation that they were famous for, obliterated morale throughout the company, and generally made it an undesirable place to work. The Compaq acquisition was just one aspect of her failure.

Because it's not their job, or their area of expertise.

As a case in point, here's an example I dealt with a while back. One of the best developers in the company was having issues with Remote Desktop on his XP machine. He got tired of it, so he installed VNC server instead, so he could remote into it from his other workstation. And he set it up without a password, because he didn't want to be bothered to enter it every time he connected. And in order to get it to work, he disabled Windows Firewall. Oh, and this was a laptop, that he occasionally took on the road and connected to public WiFi, like in hotels, airports, and such.

Now, on the one hand, you can say he was very competent in operating his workstation. He knew how to install software. He knew how to configure said software the way he wanted. He knew how to change OS settings to make sure his software worked the way he wanted. He did all this without having to contact anyone else for support. On the other hand, he completely opened up his laptop to attack because he didn't understand security concepts and didn't see the bigger picture beyond his own needs. But he was a fantastic developer, and one of the top performers in the company.

Any developer who can't competently administer his own machine is incompetent.

You'd think that would be the case but, in my experience, I've known a lot of extremely talented developers who had absolutely no clue about how to manage their own desktops. Didn't understand basic networking principles or basic OS functions and dos and don'ts. That being said, I still would give them admin rights to their own workstations. Otherwise I'd be spending my whole day installing a billion apps for them that they need to test or develop with, and that also ends up being a waste of their time having to wait for me. But I also have the expectation that they're probably going to need some additional care when they mess something up.

But admin access to production servers, absolutely not. I've seen way too many scary, scary things happen when developers are given unrestricted access to production systems.