Filing jointly worked out well for me. I make nearly five times what my wife makes. Without her I would pay significantly more in taxes.

The DoD has put the most thought into the subject of co-locating equipment, but the entire Federal government is embracing this model as well. The company I work for provides legal technology solutions to the DoJ and the SEC. Over the last year, every single RFP has had at least some question about our willingness to co-locate hardware in their facilities.

The same thing is happening in the private sector, especially the financial industry. People are so paranoid about data breaches that they are unwilling to trust server providers, no matter how secure the application stack might be.

YMMV with Sprint. Based on feedback from people who have Sprint here in southern California, the suck is less but it is by no means nearly as good as Verizon.

I was on the grand fathered plan until corporate made me switch. I rarely use more than the data cap, but when I travel I prefer to use my cell phone instead of hotel wifi. I have already run into problems with forced disconnects and throttling. They say that they do not do it but my experience tells me otherwise.

I am still waiting for the call from the accounting drone about overage charges. Of course I saved the email where I told them that when I go over, I tend to go WAY over and that by forcing me off of the plan they are going to end up paying more.

Not to defend the original AC, but me thinks you did not read his entire post. It opens with: "We used to run linux in the server room because it was lean and easy to admin. Windows was slow, mousy, and dependencies were hellish."

Stating that he claims the new headless developments in Windows Server are new (in general, obviously new to Windows) or revolutionary is disingenuous at best. What I get from what he is actually writing is that while Linux has been moving towards bloat and cr@p, or moving towards becoming Windows-y if you will, Windows has been doing the opposite, trying to become more Unix-y. That is clearly the case, isn't it? Even Linus thinks Linux is bloated.

Microsoft was never a real Server-OS vendor so that they took a while to "get it" shouldn't be surprising. The fact that they are now eating their own medicine (in Azure) probably has a lot to do with it. Heck, it isn't that long ago that all of microsoft.com ran on Sun. Once it stopped, unsurprisingly both IIS and Windows Server suddenly received significant improvements - for those of us who prefer low-footprint server operating systems.

exaggerating slightly for comic

I agree with changing jobs.

At a certain point, you have to realize that you are in a no win situation and move on. The only way to affect change in your current organization is to leave. If enough people follow your lead, senior management will realize that your manager is a problem and deal with them. That will be too little, too late in your specific case, but the company will be better in the long run.

If you really are a good programmer, you can go to work anywhere. There is a serious shortage of good programmers in the world. By good programmers I mean people who inherently get programming. I do not mean people who happen to be able to develop apps in a single language.

Once you get burnt out with programming, aspire to be the manager or executive that you always wished that you could work for. Cultivate an environment in which other programmers can thrive and succeed. Find a company that needs good programmers and reap the rewards of being the person, or the team leader who builds the product that generates the revenue.

This is one of those religious things I find quite funny. For the record, I have used Linux since 0.97 and Slackware. I grew up on SunOS and thought that Sun moving the System V with Solaris was a tragedy. I even once ran a home-written BBS (you wouldn't know) on a dual-floppy x86 machine running Minix. I know Unix. Standard Unix Operating system architecture is an archaic, abhorrent monstrosity that we should have left behind computer-eons ago. The Linux OS architecture is bad at its core level, and it isn't really fixable. The Windows NT core is a much better architecture, but Microsoft has made some serious mistakes on the user end.

Oh, and let's not forget X. It was a reasonable idea back when we had big-ass servers running X clients talking to "cheap" X terminals with X servers on them (yeah, X terminology is kinda backwards). I theory. In practice it became a pig. A monster pig. Sure, you can smear any kind of lipstick on the X pig, whether that lipstick is called KDE or GNOME, but it is still just a monster pig smeared with (what is now monster) lipstick. Leave it to the OS community to take what amounts to lipstick and make it a huge unwieldy monster in it self!

If you want to see Unix-like operating systems with a decent architecture, look at Minix 3 and QNX. The concept "Unix base" is not a good thing (TM) per se. Quite the opposite. Monolithic monstrosities are never a good thing. Think about it, the entire core of Minix 3 has plenty of room to run inside the L1 cache of your CPU.

Which is to say to someone who would like a stroll on a hilltop (99% of all users) that it is easier to climb K2 than Mount Everest.

Firstly, that's utter bullshit, but if you are talking about Word 2.0, sure. You forget one thing though. The following part of the sentence: "for the vast majority of the population". For the vast majority of the population, including about 99% of the business document producers, even Word 2.0 is still plenty good (missing some cloud integration etc, but you get my point - for writing documents that 99% of the population does.

That was not a problem. The problem with WP was not that it got tripped by Microsoft, the problem with WP for Windows was that it functioned completely different than all other Windows applications. The WP teams insisted on following their own GUI Guidelines rather than following the "standard" GUI functionality. The development team and the architects plus their managers were all incompetent fools. They were so full of them selves that they didn't start changing WP in sensible ways until it was way too late.

None of the problems with WP had anything to do with Microsoft APIs.

It was a bullsh*t trial, IMnsHO. The basic tenet of the trial was absurd. The fact that Microsoft bundled a browser with their operating system was not anti-competitive in any way. Netscape would have been able to out-compete IE if it was in any way a useful product. Netscape never became half-way decent and even though Firefox started out OK it quickly spiraled into oblivion due to it being crap. It still is. Chrome would have been almost at the market share of IE right now if it hadn't been for the dumb asses clinging to the bloated monster that is FF.