And yet they are up to $77 (and climbing) now. I'd hardly call them suckers.

It really seems like pretty much any tech IPO is going to be huge, even though history shows that most of the recent ones (last 20 years) are bad investments. Is Wall Street really just packing so much extra cash that they have nothing better to invest in than a Chinese company with no actual presence in the US? This whole thing just seems crazy to me.

Just curious. Is there some kind of unwritten rule that FOSS project names have to as crappy as possible? Is it just a translation thing, where maybe the name makes more sense or sounds better in the dev's native tongue? Has anyone been part of a FOSS project and was involved in the naming of it?

Ideally, that's a good thing because it just opens up opportunities for smaller competitors to offer the same service at a cheaper price, either because they have less overhead or have figured out a more efficient way of doing it. For industries that are near-monopolies, that's what happens.

The main problem is that the big companies know this, and so they are quick to purchase any upstart competitors, to keep actual competition from thriving. THAT is a problem that needs to be dealt with.

Not really. A government just "deccrees" it's income as a responsibility of doing business within it's borders. Unless you're talking about 3rd world dictatorships or warlords, Violence has nothing to do with it.

Based on my college experience (and comments from friends who went to different colleges), getting a BA in just about any field doesn't actually require critical thinking skills, much less imply that the person would have them. Professors love handing out A's, and there's never a lack of extra credit or makeup work, so about the only way you're not going to get a 3.4+ is by outright missing classes left and right.

Also make sure that whatever backup scheme you are using, that you somehow verify the data is actually good. You don't want to have to recover from a backup in 10 years, only to find out that "Grandma's 80th Birthday" video is corrupted.

Depends entirely what the "average office worker or bureaucrat" actually does. The ones I work with need Acrobat Standar/Pro, Office (because LibreOffice still doesn't do a great job formatting documents created in docx), plus at least one industry-specific application (of which very few support Linux).

As long as all the programs you use work, and are available, I agree.

These days the product is usually Windows 7. The thing is, it we're talking about Windows XP, we'll see a shit ton of people drawing lines in the sand ("It does what I need, so why change it!?") based on what amounts to outdated opinions and lack of understanding that what's *good enough* for them might not be for someone else. It's why I kind of have to take MS bashing with a grain of salt.

I honestly can't remember the last time I ran into an actual Windows problem that wasn't either the result of other programs (usually malware), or simply fixed with an "SFC /scannow" command. The problems I do run into, 9 times out of 10, are 3rd party issues. Stuff like contacts duplicating in Outlook and on their phone because iCloud and iTunes have sync issues when installed together. Or programs like Timberline, Lexus Nexus, or even Backup Exec, which manage to retain the same bugs and design problems over 5+ major versions.

As for Apple, I've come to the conclusion that their stuff is rock solid if you only use Apple products and solutions. The moment you step out of that garden, you're getting attacked by a gazebo.

Windows had these problems long before they tried unifying their OS UI. Cute theory, but it misses the mark.

I like Windows. (I also happen to like Linux). My clients all prefer Windows when it comes to PC's, except for a select few who are Apple fans. Most people I deal with, though (200-300), have no problem with it. I know it used to be trendy to hate microsoft and all that, but these days it seems very few people really care about brand identity, other than the REALLY hardcore fans.

If that's the case, just start the SSMS from the command line using "runas /netonly /user:domain\user"

Maybe I'm missing something here, but why can't you just specify the domain name before the user name when you attempt to login to the database from your laptop?

A lot of bash and *nix stuff is in PowerShell, which I think it's the point. I remember the first time I opened a session and instinctively typed "ls" without it giving an error.