We've already made the decision to upgrade organically -- as new hardware comes in with 7, we'll run it, but otherwise, we will not upgrade. There's absolutely ZERO benefit that we can see to our company and the potential for immense costs, so it's a no-brainer. It's a good product, there's just no increase in benefit.

I have yet to see a business analysis of Windows 7 citing the points that should make an upgrade appealing for a business -- stability? We have that with XP already. Rarely does it crash or have issues. Security? We're not open to the outside and we have good protection with a low infection rate. Hardware compatibility? Easily navigated for now -- none of the standard issue workstations require fancy hardware anyway. Flashy animated windows and icons? Yes, clearly we missed the ROI on that one.

Pfft. Wake me when there's something significant, hrm?

...and still just as useless. Well, ok -- non-realtime collaborative efforts, perhaps. Brainstormings. Things like that.

But after it takes you 3 years to get everyone on Google, set up, working right (damned ad-block), etc. and THEN you can start working together -- oh, but wait, half the people don't know how to use Wave, so you have to teach them how to use it -- yes, dammit, it's more than just IM, it's all sorts of...oh, read the docs, won't you? -- THEN you can finally get down to working on the pro....

What? You have to go? Oh, I guess we DID spend the entire 2-hour meeting setting this crap up. Fine, reschedule for another day. AND ON A PHONE THIS TIME.

Why does this strike me that this is more about a bunch of so-called, "developers," who are getting all huffy about not being able to easily whack out Whack-A-Mole and Fart apps for the i(Pad|Touch|Phone), than about a true fight for a "right" to develop as you please? So develop stuff in Flash -- you just won't be able to publish it via these devices. Why is this a big surprise? It's not as if Apple's hidden the fact that Flash isn't supported. It's not like you USED to be able to use it and now you can't -- they've been VERY open about their dick-waving with Adobe.

Hey -- I want it to have Flash, too. I'd like to have a Ferrari, but it's just not in the cards, ya know?

A million baby entrepreneurs thought that the iPad would SURELY have to allow the use of Flash and they were already counting the stacks of bills in their minds garnered from the various apps they were going to whack out in a hurry using Flash; now that dream has been shattered and they're getting all surly about it. Wah.

Beowulf cluster of Gopher servers, naturally. RAID-6 with 8" floppies.

These people have clearly not visited my house. Or any of the houses of the other geeks I hang with. Come back when you have 100+ machines in a single basement and we'll talk.

Clark: Where's Eddie? He usually eats these goddamn things.
Catherine: Not recently, Clark. He read that squirrels were high in cholesterol.

Pay less in taxes? No, but time is money, too, and a simplified system would allow me to do something -- anything -- else other than trying to make sure that I get back every penny of my money that I'm entitled to.

I stand by my statement, however; if it was financially beneficial for the government, they would make the tax code simpler. The fact is, it earns them more money through mistakes or people like yourself who don't care to try to grep out every cent they are owed, so it's a win. I never said it was more financially beneficial to the taxpayer -- but, as you did point out, it is...in certain ways. With our pet projects and pet exemptions, some of us make off with a lot more in our pockets than others.

A simplified code would probably mean that there'd be more evenness across the board; a person earning 100K in L.A. would pay the same as a person earning 100K in Iowa because there'd be no odd-this or special-that exemption.

A nice thought but most of the printouts/copies are secure data that is sent into the shred bin and doesn't get re-routed as scratch. Since I keep my particular office down to a minimum on printouts, there isn't much to have. Plus, sticky keeps it up off the desk where it might very well run away or get buried. :) I'm not anti-green, but it's not clearly obvious in my particular place of biz.

Well, it comes up quickly, but first I have to reach for the phone, press the home button to wake it up, slide to unlock, enter in my passcode, then swipe to the screen with the Notes application, touch that, and then read what my note is. By that point, I need to get a cup of coffee. :)

This beats shifting my eyes 6" to the left to read the post-it note without my hands leaving the keyboard/rodent. Win!

You're right as far as it applies to all "standard" deductions, but not to things like mortgage interest, charitable donations, itemized medical expenses, etc...the IRS knows none of that -- or not natively -- and THOSE are what people who are clueless will miss, resulting in more income for the government. In fact, I'd bet they count on it.

I'm saying this for the folks who look at the fees assessed by TurboTax and H&R and so forth and go, "No, I'm going to do it myself because I refuse to pay another $60+ to have my taxes done when I can do them on paper" and then promptly screw themselves without knowing it.

Maybe, maybe not...I have no numbers to back me up. But the government's not completely stupid -- if it was more beneficial, financially, to make the tax code simple, they would have done it years ago, IMHO.

I wonder how much the IRS figures into its revenue stream the profit obtained via people filing taxes and not knowing what they're doing. Folks who use professional preparation services no doubt get them correct most of the time and owe the correct amount (or get the right refund), but how many people are just doing it via paper and submitting, and, due to the arcane, maze of rules and regulations, overpay and don't claim the exemptions they should?

Leave it up to the IRS -- they probably have it figured out that if they pre-fill items on forms, that means less error and less money. Plus, this gives them more opportunity to audit and assess fees. Whee!

A good suggestion; I have an iPhone and do keep a few things in there. The problem is that the information I take down is only for my convenience and it is infinitely easier to glance over to a notepad or sticky note on my desk as I'm typing or on the phone than it is to spend the half-minute it'll take to pull the correct note up on my phone. That being said, you're right for things more long-term and needing to be mobile, and I do use the phone for those, including taking lots of pictures of wiring, servers, etc. It's the combination of tools that makes everything run smoothly.

I'm going to dissent from the typical opinion here and say that I'd love this, even in its current form. In my duties as a programmer and sysadmin, I'm constantly jotting down things on sticky notes that I need to remember for one, two, maybe 5 days and then never again. A user's password so I can set up an account, a table schema so I can refer to it easily, a network diagram until I get it put into Visio, an IP, a telephone number, an IMEI, any number of things. I am always and forever using a sticky note and then trashing it. This would simply allow me to replace them with something functionally the same but without waste.

Yes, I agree -- it would be awesome to have the ability to save and have multiple pages. But let's not overlook what good it has already, which I'd say is quite a lot.

While I certainly agree with a lot of your philosophies (protecting your network, avoiding having to clean up the mess, etc.) as I work in IT myself and am on the sysadmin AND helpdesk side (we're a jack-of-all sort of department), besides obvious issues like viruses, spyware, and the like, it comes down to two main philosophies: Is managing your users' time on the network an IT issue or an HR issue? At our site, it's split but definitely in favor of HR. If there is someone abusing the bandwidth and clearly doing things other than their work, we'll notice and often we get requests from HR to investigate a particular user here or there. It's easy enough to handle. But most of the time we don't bother and we really don't care if people take a few minutes during their day to catch up on FB, read the latest scores, check the weather, etc. We figure it's no different than allowing them some watercooler time, a bathroom break, or a chat in the hallway. We want everyone to feel that we trust them to do what they've been hired to do and if they're not -- well, that's an issue for HR to work out with them, not IT. Perhaps your site is less trustworthy and you get far more abuse of work time than we do, but I would estimate that out of 200+ employees we probably have a 0.25% abuse rate, if that. Coupled with a far, far more simple IT infrastructure that doesn't require hardly any of my time to manage and I think our solution is working very nicely by simply assuming that most people we hire are going to do their jobs and we only need a few things in place to catch the ones who insist on not doing so. YMMV, naturally.

You miss my point. The point is that an appropriate level of documentation is always correct, but at some level, the system should explain itself to some degree. No programmer worth their salt goes through and writes comments like, "This is a function. The function "get_an_integer" gets an integer." That's inane, because any programmer taking over should be able to look at the system and figure it out, because there are industry/practice-standard ways of writing and doing things that are meant to make such knowledge transferable.

Hence with documenting the network -- some of it should simply explain itself. Yes, if there's specific, custom ways it is configured, it should be documented, but those custom configs should be few and far between to keep the need for documentation low. I only say all this because the way the OP phrased his question made it sound like the entire contraption was this Rube Goldberg machine of networking components that would require some complex PhD to understand, and that sounds like a problem with implementation, not with documentation.