Yeah, it had nothing to do with the fact that Perl was one of the languages which more heavily influenced PS...

Perl is easy to write and, if written by someone who is lazy, difficult to read (due to how easy it is to write terse, functional code in perl). PS doesn't have this benefit; it's long-typed as well as cryptic/difficult to read.

Precisely! Adults are a bit more creative, too. We might say something hyperbolic like, "What kind of faggotry is this?!" instead, for instance.

Not to hijack this rant, but that's one of the problems with Google Talk: words have meanings. For instance:

* talk
* voice
* chat

See how someone might get a little confused by what "Google Talk" is? They've got a branding problem with the product, because many people still don't know what it is (as a product). Remember, we're talking about a population who probably, by and large, just thinks that a pop-up with a friend sending them a message in their email is just another email interface.

Now ask yourselves, do you think "What do you mean you've got to put this @jabber.org email address at the end of your hangout to talk?" would go over well? I've heard people (younger people, granted) communicate with each other and say "what's your gmail address?" and they just share the prefix in return. Many of these people don't seem to realize there is anything out there aside from gmail for mail, or that gmail is in no way exclusive. For younger people, it's all there has been for as long as they remember. (People who were 8 when Google came out are now 18...)

"97% of scientiss agree" makes a nice sound bite and article headline, but reality is somewhat different than this assertion. This assertion in and of itself is pretty demonstrative of the kind of science we can frequently see out of climatologists...

Look, it's pretty simple: a consensus of opinion does not mean a consensus or correctness of fact. You can have 3 people in a room of 100 saying things which get drowned out and castigated by the ignorant 97 - and this happens quite often.

What's ironic is that there's actually a lot of push back against all the PowerShell exclusivity MS is peddling. "Why would I pay huge gobs of money to have to use a command line? Wasn't that the whole point of Windows in the first point?" I'm sorry, but there is little point in removing functionality from a GUI just to put it back into an arbitrary and vague typed command you've got to dig through documentation to find. That's what MS has been doing.

The fact that PS "pipes" (not technically) arbitrary objects between themselves is interesting, but the implementation of the language is, for the most part, a clusterfuck. (And people say perl is difficult to learn/use/etc.).

Some of us saw this coming since the day it was announced.

a) This is big government we're talking about. We're lucky the costs aren't higher.
b) Since when has anything orchestrated by this administration been anything but the opposite of what claimed?
c) We're lucky they're actually telling us at this point.

$2k will buy you a pretty decent system, not just a "home NAS" box. If you've got 10TB of data already, chances are your use case is somewhat more esoteric than the "home NAS user" - for instance, you deal a lot in video. I understand your point, but 12 disks is quite a lot; you're looking at at least $3k for that, realistically.

Personally, I've got a lot of recycled equipment for my storage needs. I don't have more than 4TB of hot data, but I do have it duplicated across 3 systems right now using zfs snapshots - and the machines dual purpose as VirtualBox virtualization hosts, as well.

W7 was more an incremental upgrade from Vista. More like a parallel-developed version of Vista that never got released initially. It's just too different.

I'd say the curve should be closer to 5 or 6 years, depending on what it is we're talking about. If we're talking about a storage system, I'll start replacing disks sooner than later in the hopes of offsetting a catastrophic EOL failure.

Video cards are about 3 years for me, personally. But general computing equipment? I don't have a problem running it into the ground, as long as there isn't important data on it. 5 years is a good benchmark. If it starts to fail after 4, I just chuck it and start over. It's all about the cost potential involved.

Why are "IT decision makers" listening to anyone outside their organization when it comes to actual decisions?

I'm sorry, but they have many people in their organizations who have informed opinions on equipment - such as the people who have to work with them. Things like, "These NetApps are shit, let's go with someone else" or "we need new switches, these are dropping packets and are totally fabric saturated". Employees tell their bosses this stuff all the time; they know it amongst themselves as well.

What's more, it takes what, 15 minutes to get a feel for how bad a product is online before purchasing it - 30-60 if you don't really know what you're looking for or aren't too familiar with the technology?

Why are purchasing deciders making decisions in a vacuum when there is more than enough information available?

No, it's a direct hit to taxpayers.

Banks are insured FDIC. Do you know what that means?

I suspect that this trick would still work today on a great number of unconnected campus and library cards. In 2000, my campus had us use magstrip cards for lunch and lab printing - it was a shared pool you paid for once a semester, and when you ran out, you ran out. The printers weren't network connected, and in retrospect, that'd have to make the cafeteria "readers" also writers, unless they didn't actually count printing (I don't remember - it was an arbitrarily large amount for food, maybe $2500, and $0.05 per printed page didn't hurt that...)

I don't remember what happened if anyone lost a card, I never heard of it happening. But if it did happen, I'm guessing that the user, er student would receive a new card with total original amount minus whatever could possibly be used eating lunch every day until that point, if the above is true.

I suspect that number is wildly conservative. That's crazy, when you consider the costs associated with:

* Multiple FT "Exchange Admins"
* Needing people on-staff who actually understand email
* If they were using something like Forefront and/or additional spam services as well (additional $$$)
* Dozens of servers they no longer need to maintain maintain and replace
* Tens of terabytes of fast, redundant storage they no longer need to keep on-premises

Due to the cost of such a large migration (will they be migrating existing mail, I wonder, or just keeping it on a network-mapped share for archival access?) I have to wonder how long this will take.

I'd have thought the per-year savings would be closer to a million than a quarter mil, personally.

Don't fool yourself. What do you think the whole 'point' behind making smokeless powder the explosive during the Boston Bombing is? They're going to push up smokeless power (and thus firearm ammo) regulation on the agenda, because they're quite obviously failing on firearm regulation. It's the same reason that DHS has been buying up all available domestic ammunition (at over 260 million rounds now!) and they're trying to ban importation of ammunition outright.

Doesn't matter how many guns you've got if you can't get ammo for 'em.

What does this have to do with 'arms treaty exports'? As CAD files, absolutely nothing.

This is CAD files, blueprints. Don't let them fool you: it very much is about controlling firearm dissemination.