I cancelled my subscription to another Linux magazine when they dropped paper. I figure I get fresher news from my RSS feeds and more up-to-date and more detailed technical info from blogs and project websites.

I truly do love my tablet for reading fiction and even the occasional reference manual, but the ability to randomly flip through a dead-tree magazine and idly learn about something that may someday become important is something I treasure and an e-reader just doesn't do it for me.

Larry wanted it to do something Sun never did - make a profit so he could build another yacht. He's been hoping to do that with other open-source acquisitions as well.

Unfortunately, people don't want to spend tens of thousands of dollars on open-source platforms, apps, and tools.

Poor Larry.

I'd say that you worked for the same company I did.

But at my company they waited until they'd exceeded Excel's row capacity and THEN they threw it over the wall. At which point they were having to break it up into multiple workbooks just to run the business while we scrambled to bail them out. Plus - yay! - critical corporate data existed on a laptop that they'd keep passing around (and occasionally taking out of town) and our IT department didn't backup files on desktops or laptops.

On the whole, I'm inclined to say that when you've gotten to the point that only 100% original Excel can do the job, you've probably reached the point where you shouldn't be doing the job in Excel anyway.

This. Absolutely, 100% this.

As I've alluded to in my other posts, as soon as I graduated from cowboy sysadmin to a "proper" sysadmin that files change requests and writes project documentation, I've come to love change managers for precisely the reasons above. Change managers are under continual bombardment from non-technical project managers and developers that might well have deep, deep insight into a certain area but can't see past the end of their nose. A good change manager will often trot up to us sysadmins and say "So-and-so has submitted this change but doesn't think it needs approvals from you guys, can you take a gander?" to be met with either a "yeah that's fine" or a "Holy crappingon what-the-fuck in a god-buggered handbasket NO!". Good sysadmins in a constructive environment see a bigger picture than the project managers and the developers and, as far as CAB is concerned, submit better change requests as a result - because risk analysis is such an innate part of our job that most of us don't even realise we're doing it. But change managers see a bigger picture still because they're exposed to the sysadmins, network admins, security admins, user admins, mail admins, storage admins, admin admins, admin users, sysadmin networks, bread, eggs and breaded eggs.

Change managers exist to protect the business. Sysadmins exist to run the business' IT. Change managers realise that sysadmins are often asked to do dangerous or even outright impossible things by powerful people with only an inkling of what consequences such an action might have; it's a change manager's job to communicate with and understand the sysadmin (and everyone else) in such repsects, just as it's the sysadmins' responsibility to communicate to the business why change X is crucial or dangerous. In a properly functioning IT dept, sysadmins and change managers protect both each other and the business from stupidity, mis-co-ordination and lack of oversight. As a sysadmin, change managers are almost always on your side - either pushing for that change that's so essential, or holding you back where there's a risk. They're a highly valuable ally. When something goes to shit, they're the first people to step in and say "no, the sysadmins had nothing to do with this incident".

I'm MrNemesis and in the last three years I've learned to love my change managers.

Well, if more people like you stopped saying "it's impossible" maybe some of your countrymen would stop thinking it was. Some might even start thinking about how to change it.

I've noticed many Americans seem to have a strange habit of dismissing or often completely ignoring (as you just did) anything that happens outside of the US. Clearly representative democracy must invariably result in two parties with an unshakeable grip on power! Except that most of the time it doesn't. Just in the USA.

Do what people in other places in the world have done. Get off your ass, stop saying it's impossible, and work for change. Go find a third party you can support and volunteer for them. Or run yourself. Sure you'll lose, today. Maybe not tomorrow.

No.

There have been several studies of tidally-locked planets around M-dwarfs which refute this.
Simulations of the Atmospheres of Synchronously Rotating Terrestrial Planets Orbiting M Dwarfs: Conditions for Atmospheric Collapse and the Implications for Habitability, M. M. Joshi, R. M. Haberle, and R. T. Reynolds , Icarus (1997)
A Reappraisal of The Habitability of Planets around M Dwarf Stars, Tarter et al. (2007), Astrobiology,

Basically atmosphere and ocean circulation transfer the heat, and you get a relatively habitable earthlike environment.

http://politics.slashdot.org/story/14/04/16/0221210/study-finds-us-is-an-oligarchy-not-a-democracy

No report of a Macdonalds franchise yet.

Your brain washing has been complete. You are now free to follow orders, citizen.

You have the same government that you started this century with.

They just changed spokesmodels - while you felt like you had a say in the matter... Your coup happened in many stages, over many decades - but defining moments happened with the Truman/Eisenhower/Kennedy years - with a decisive event in Nov 1963...

Call us back, after you acquire a few more orbits on this rock... ;-)

The "people" who own Obama, own the media.

One of the most important pieces of career advice I've received is to make sure that people who cause pain feel the pain. It is not my job to be a whipping boy who suffers for every bad decision I tried to warn someone about. If management insists that I do something really goofy, then they should not be spared from the consequences of their plans. Insulating them only enables them to keep making bad choices and inflicting them on codependent organizations.

You say "rubbing their nose in it". I say "making sure decision makers understand the results of those decisions".

And having succeeded, they continue to use those same computers to this day.