I think things are going relatively well in Tunisia at this point, if not Egypt/Syria/Yemen.

Possibly Twitter is buying into all the hype about how they're basically responsible for revolution and social change in the Middle East and is doing this to become further entrenched as the tool of choice for political dissidents? I'm pretty sure that's the type of business model that lands your products on trade restriction lists prettt quickly, but I can't see what else they want this for.

At work I have a Dell T7500 workstation with 4 monitors. I was running Fedora for a while on it, tried Ubuntu but when they moved to Unity it broke everything so bad I couldn't do any work. So I put Windows 7 Ultimate on it. I loaded RHEL6 and FreeBSD 8 in VMWare, connect to them with PuTTY and continue to run a combination of FreeBSD, OpenBSD, RedHat, CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, etc on various servers (bare metal and in ESX). This works out quite nicely for me.

I bought myself a Lenovo Thinkpad T420i, and it to runs Windows 7 Ultimate with RHEL and FreeBSD in VMWare. I could not be happier with this laptop or my workflow on it.

Shortly after I bought the Thinkpad, work bought me a brand new 15"MBP. The specs are nice -- 8GB of RAM, Core i7 processor, etc. I fucking hate it. Its mostly the fault of the hardware, honestly. I had replaced a 13" MBP with the Thinkpad for that very same reason. The keyboard is the worst thing ever, missing all sorts of keys that I actually use to do work. Sure, I know I can do Fn + Up to page up and Fn + Down to page down, but get this: if I'm in tmux in an Terminal window, I have to edit the keyboard preferences for the Terminal theme I'm using to send VT100 control codes to the shell, otherwise I can't use the scroll buffer in a tmux pane because Terminal intercepts the key request and uses it to move the scroll bar. If the answer to anything on a mac involves having to remember \033[~5 means page up, then I don't think Apple is really living up to the hype. Of course maybe that's a 1% vs 99% sort of thing. I don't have these issues on my Thinkpad or my T7500.

When I was in high school I ran FreeBSD, RedHat and Slackware on my desktop. In the last few years I have become so angry at every desktop environment for *nix, as well as shitty support for suspend/resume. I can't take it anymore. I have work to do, and I don't have time to let driver issues and poor design choices get in my way. It's the same reason why the control and data servers for my automated malware sandbox at work all run RHEL -- FreeBSD driver issues with the RAID cards and I didn't want to spend the time to do the work-around. I had deadlines to meet.

I used to hate me some Windows, but Windows 7 is such a breath of fresh air that its amazing. I don't have any issues with it at all, plus nothing on Mac or Linux comes close to Visio.

I guess it depends on the industry you're in and what type of military people you are attracting. My company is in the network security arena. We have many ex military people, especially in professional services. When you have large military/government contracts, having people who know the inner workings of your customer and can look at your own products/solutions from the perspective of their experiences with it as a user in that environment is incredibly helpful. The active or easily renewed security clearances is also a big plus.

I suppose what you get out of hiring ex-military people is the same as what you get out of hiring anyone -- what skills/experience/aptitude they have and how you can leverage it.

I heard the iconic Mac startup sound file was initially called "sosume" because of their lawsuit with the Beatle's company back in the day as they were afraid it might constitute music production or some such. I may have seen that article on hear a while back, actually.

Well, there is a big difference between talking to your phone and talking to another person using the phone. Talking to pretty much any inanimate object, and also some of your dumber animals, is going to make you look either dumb of crazy. Honestly, I suspect half the people I see with bluetooth headsets to be actually schizophrenic and talking to the voices in their head instead of having an actual conversation with a real person.

the file system hierarchy makes perfectly good sense -- the absolute basics are in /bin, distribution/system stuff is in /usr/bin and anything that an administrator installs for that particular box is in /usr/local/bin. Substitute sbin for sysadmin-y binaries. I guess maybe it doesn't matter as long as it doesn't take off, since I can just not use Fedora ever again, but frankly I like things just they way they are. The weird places that Ubuntu stashes things is already enough of a hassle when you have an extremely heterogeneous environment like I do at work.

Because of binary file formats, binary fonts, etc. All data is just data, including code. A is the same as \x41 which is the op code for INC EAX, for example. That's effectively a NOP as far as shell code is concerned, though. Others do other things, of course. It's the same reason you can do exploits in PDF or other file format attacks.

About half of the open petitions are calling for sacking the drug czar because she won't individually respond to each of other bunch of pot legalization petitions. The petitions that aren't about drugs are poorly written, probably by people on drugs. This attempt at "transparent government" and "opening the process" just throws fuel on the fire for everyone who thinks those are bad ideas. I'm not saying i'm against transparency and whatnot, just that this sort of thing chips away and what faith I have left in humanity to try and better itself. Maybe its just that the people who have time to fill out online petitions have a significant overlap with the people who want to get stoned all the time.

CentOS has really fallen behind the mark. It took them forever to get. out the door and by then rhel had already made a new release. The servers I put rhel on get base updates much sooner than the centos boxes and with epel and rpm fusion, im not for want of anything on those boxes. Then again I have an ungodly number of rhel licenses available and my company partners with red hat. I used to like CentOS but for a while it was looking like I would see mass deployment of IPv6 sooner than CenOS 6.

Support doesnt just mean getting a number to call. It means getting your security and bg fixes in a timely manner. If the OP communicates that sentiment and is still shut down then I hope this system isn't public facinbecause that's just going to be asking for it.