On the requires Windows side:
  - garbage CRM uses ActiveX
  - Exchange

Doesn't work with Linux:
  - the iPhone

On the tired of Linux side (used linux from ancient days):
  - developers keep fiddling with my interface
  - hardware support still uneven and unreliable, especially graphics and (surprisingly) network
  - inconsistent copy/paste behavior
  - Netflix, espn3

I used to have time to fiddle with this sort of thing. I don't want to do that anymore.

C (and for that matter unix) reflect a very specific aesthetic. C was by no means inevitable - there were plenty of other languages forty years ago, some of which are more "modern" than C. It is the aesthetic of the language that makes it so beloved (and despised), and that we owe to a very few people.

The direction of the T4 has been set for some time. It's overdue - the single thread performance on the T series is basically miserable and has barely improved since the original T chips. My job involves doing a lot of single thread activities on T series hardware, and that makes me a sad panda.

It is simply easier and less fiddly to manage applications when they are all totally isolated from each other. I've found that it's pretty damn complicated (especially if your dumb ass sales guys haven't negotiated a proper maintenance window) to negotiate downtime across multiple customers or constituencies. Applications step on each other, have subtly different requirements and expectations, and generally expect to be the only thing running on a system. For instance you stick multiple applications in that one database - and then one application requires you to upgrade and one requires you to not upgrade. And the same goes for web servers - suddenly you find yourself stuck on Apache 2.0 because you require some crufty plug in.

All of this can be worked around with a bit of cleverness and perseverance but hardware is cheap and good IT guys aren't.

Enjoy providing free computer support to your family and friends. I have other priorities.

I'm sure he has. I don't know about your post's parent, but Gnome suffers from random imperfections and features moving or disappearing at inapt moments. I used to be 100% Gnome / Linux, but by day's end the only place where I'll have it installed is in a small VM I keep for "picture" web browsing.

I've been using cygwin for almost its entire lifetime. It has pluses and minuses. For the most part using the rxvt shell lets me feel like I'm on a proper computer, except when I do some file operation that hangs cygwin for 30 seconds, or windows is under load and it takes 30 seconds to get a command prompt. Maybe mintty will solve some of the cygwin problems I have - I'll try it when I go to work tomorrow. But as a person who spends all day at work every day logged into multiple random customer servers via SSH, putty just works for me. It's stable. It's light weight. The selection behavior is almost always right. It's self contained and small, so I don't have to worry about some piece in the chain of cygwin breaking and stranding me at an inconvenient moment.

It's in Chicago. There's so much haze and light pollution here that you can't even see real stars.

Magnet links, how do they work?

That's not really the point. The reason you buy the Solaris/SPARC combo in the enterprise is to get a fully supported platform for running specific applications. Alternate OSes break the center out of that. The OS isn't supported by one vendor on the hardware, the application isn't supported on the OS. It turns an enterprise platform into a toy for geeks. Nothing against toys for geeks - I've done a lot of tinkering on random hardware at the edges of the organizations that have employed me. But there aren't many Libraries (my customers) who would be willing, let alone able, to move their operations onto FreeBSD.

vi is the one true editor. vi is the forever changing and unchanged. vi is the eternal virgin. vi is the foulest whore.

Seriously, the farther you get from twiddling text files in a text editor over SSH, the more vulnerable you are going to be to having your vendor yank the rug from under you, or just wander off and abandon you.

Hey you kids! Get! Off! My! Lawn!!!

1920 x 1080 = 1080 x 1920 . It's a bit narrow, but it works surprisingly well.

Or, to use another media contemporary with the CD, around 6666 Double Sided, Double Density 8" floppy disks.

In a different direction... over and over and over again. He's not the only hard line Linux geek to throw up his hands and go to Windows.