#1 - There's really only two games in town for Linux. Either you publish an RPM for use on RedHat derived distros or you publish DEB style for Debian derived distros. If you service those two markets, you cover maybe 80-90% of the Linux systems in use. The outliers are SUSE and Mandriva, followed by the source-based distros like Slackware or Gentoo.

There's also the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) which your installer should adhere to, which smooths away most issues.

On the UI side, you really only have Gnome or KDE, and most apps run as-is on either because they use things like Qt.

#2 - "Chef" or "Puppet" or some other configuration management. Those tools have existed for a few years now and are stable and used.

#3 - Generally a solved problem, some of it is covered by configuration management tools like Chef/Puppet. Others have to be adapted from the cloud solutions. With a good cloud setup (private, hosted, or whatever) you can create and boot a new server in 10 minutes or less. On the desktop side, install a standard image, then let your configuration management software take over.

And a techie's definition of 'working', i.e. drinking coffee and reading slashdot is still the same too.

Which tends to involve reading about technologies that you are not already familiar with, or getting information about finer points explained. In sales-speak, just another form of "continuing education".

It used to be much better. Someone would post an article about new technology X (such as Xen or KVM or HyperV) and you'd get 50-100 modded-up posts detailing what it is good for, why to use it, why not to use it, and anecdotes about how well or poorly it works in reality.

These days, I only read 10-20% of the articles, and only briefly browse the comments (usually at 3+ or 4+ scores).

IM is strongly suited to information that needs to be conveyed exactly in written form. Such as a list of commands that need to be run, or a code fragment. In a crowded environment, it's also more private and less obtrusive then a voice conversation. It can also be slightly delayed, you can finish up your thought before dealing with the conversation.

Voice is better for inflection and topics where exact spellings don't matter. It has a higher rate of back and forth (as long as one party does not monopolize the conversation). But trying to convey technical information such as "type XYZ" is frustrating over voice connections (you end up having to use a phonetic alphabet to get the other side to enter the right information). Sometimes you need the high synchronicity of voice communications, sometimes it gets in the way.

Both are synchronous, both have their place.

EMail, on the other hand, is asynchronous, where replies can be measured in minutes / hours / days. Very good for long amounts of information which need detailed thought and replies. The other person is not sitting there twiddling thumbs (or should not be) while waiting on you to compose your message.

Wildstar has legs and is still a bit of a sleeper. It was one of the better releases of the past decade, minimal server / stability / bug issues. It's gotten better too in the two months since launch, they finally killed off most of the harvesting bots and in general, things are in a pretty good shape.

Enterprise quality SSDs are still $1.00 to $2.50 per GB.

The Intel DC S3500 is only about $1/GB for a 600GB version. Which is not bad for a drive suitable for use in a server. The S3700 series is closer to $2/GB.

(Both of those drive series have the capacitor inside to enable the SSD to shutdown cleanly in cases where the drive loses power.)

Exactly. The magic price point for business use was when $150 would buy you a big enough drive to meet the needs of 90% of your office workers. The cost is small enough that it's worth spending the extra amount of money in order to get a machine that performs much better then a traditional drive. It means less twiddling of thumbs of your employees while they wait on a slow hard drive. (More common then a lot of people think, they've just grown used to the slowness.)

Personally, I think that happened at the $1.20/GB mark. It made 80-120GB SSD drives cheap enough for office machines that you'd recoup the savings in a year or two. Either through improved productivity, or not having to replace the machine for another 2-3 years.

As the price gets lower and lower, unless you need >500GB of raw storage, it makes more and more sense to just go SSD instead of traditional. And maybe by next year, that break point will be 1TB, then 2TB.

If you have to cram a long term storage device into a small package then SSDs may win that battle

Depends on how you define "long term". A powered off SSD only retains data for as little as 6 months up to a few years (and as cell sizes get smaller, that will get worse).

Traditional magnetic media is still going to be better for 5-15 year lifespans on a shelf.

Even my SMTP server lets you talk TLS to it if you try. Not everyone who emails me tries, of course, but it will let you do it so my "end" is secure.

I just checked our server logs for the last month. Out of the connections, less then 4-5% negotiated TLS.

Now, granted, about 90% of those connections were probably spam, so maybe as much as half of legitimate mail servers now negotiate TLS.

(Anyone got better data? I didn't feel like trying to figure out whether a particular connection was or was not a spam connection.)

If it gets stored as a hash of the values, and is salted properly with a random 32bit salt (unique per user), then even if a thief steals the database of hashes, they don't gain much. They can't use that hash to attack another system. There are ways to protect against replay attacks like this.

Biometrics (something you are) will never work on their own as a sole source of authentication, you're still going to have to have passwords (something you know) possibly combined with something you carry (something you have).

Maybe. Let's assume that all of the words in the sentence are within the 4096 most common words. That's 12 bits of entropy per word. So a six word sentence would, at the upper end, have 6x12 bits (72).

However, you can probably count on "the" and a few of the other 32 most common words being at various positions. So for those words, there's only 5 bits of entropy. And if it is a grammatically correct sentence, then markov-chaining or other tricks like n-grams might reduce your search space from 12 bits per word down to 8-10 bits per word.

Real quickly we're down into the 50-60 bit range... which is not very promising. Still enough to prevent the $10 of CPU time attacks, but vulnerable to the $1000 ($10k?) of CPU time attacks. And CPU costs do get cheaper over time...

That being said... password input forms should allow lengths of up to 100 UTF-8 glyphs. Let the user decide how long they want to go.

How well does it work for project-based businesses. Most ERPs seem to be designed around inventory management and manufacturing - which is not a good fit for businesses where what you are providing is expertise.

The problem is that people move around... a lot. Ebola has an incubation period of up to 21 days so that gives an infected person lots of symptom free time to travel to visit his neighboring village or go to the city or get on a plane to visit relatives anywhere in the world.

From doing a layman's reading... you are not infectious until you start showing symptoms around day 21. This is, fortunately, not like influenza where you are infectious before showing frank symptoms. It is also, again fortunately, difficult to transmit only through casual contact.

Scary yes, but not end of the world scary.

That's what Cisco does, they do regular bottom 5% cuts where those who are ranked in the bottom 5% on their performance reviews are let go.

And as a result, Cisco keeps putting out crappier and crappier products and their brand is swirling the drain.

The 5% cut of the bottom is not something that you do more then once. Because the second, third, and fourth round of cuts means that employees will start throwing each other under the bus, just so that they aren't in that 5%. Inter-department cooperation takes a shitter and your teams of very good employees constantly get gutted instead of being left alone. Just because there has to be a sacrifice.

If you're in a company that does that every year... it's time to find a new job. Or become a psychopath and enjoy throwing your co-workers under the bus each year.

I don't own a tablet - I use a desktop machine for every day work, a laptop around the house and an Android smartphone. I wouldn't really want to read books on my smartphone except in an emergency - screen's too small to be comfortable. And I don't want a bigger smart phone because then it wouldn't be convenient to carry around and I honestly can't think how a higher resolution display would make my phone better.

I took my HTC One (m8) smartphone on a long flight a month or three ago. Ended up reading almost an entire fiction book on the flights on a little 5" screen. This is a 1920x1080 display packed into a 5" screen.

It actually worked quite well - far better then I was expecting. The higher DPI on the modern phones (441ppi on the HTC) makes for easy reading.

Meanwhile, other game developers have stated that discrete soundcards just don't matter in terms of performance. A lot of the game developers need to do special processing on the audio files in the CPU before handing them off to the sound system to be played. Because the Windows API doesn't allow them to do that special processing on the card (and nobody wants to go back to the days of supporting a dozen different cards).

The "advanced functionality" of the add-in cards is mostly mythical these days, hardly any developers are willing to jump through the hoops to support it.

(It used to be true that your PC would offload a lot of the audio work to the soundcard, lessening the demand on the CPU. But that is no longer true.)

So these days, it boils down to whether the add-in cards have better S/N ratios for your analog speaker / headphone / microphone jacks, or work better with whatever you are outputting audio to then the built-in solution. And while I'm a happy ASUS Xonar user, I feel that built-in audio on most motherboards is good enough for most of the time, so it's a shrinking market. I don't even recommend an add-in card unless there is evidence that the on-board audio is just pure shite.