If only there were some sort of pocket-sized device one could use to test for voltage.

Alternative solution: build the thing with the flash drive protruding from a transparent acrylic box/panel.

I like spreadsheets, and Excel absolutely has its place, but I'm not going to use a garden shovel to dig a quarry.

The problem is if they cede the home/consumer market, the average non-IT staff member will become familiar with something else from their personal use. Now as an IT manager or CIO, you can decide to either gravitate toward what's more mainstream (assuming software vendors fill in the necessities, which is typical), or increase training spending to keep end users on the legacy platform nobody uses at home anymore. You can't make that kind of organizational switch overnight, but eventually the IT staff will also migrate toward the new popular platform, and then staff expenses will go up (I'm often tempted to learn Cobol to soak up maintenance programming contracts). It's just not feasible to turn your back on mainstream consumers and expect to maintain growth in enterprise when talking about these kind of horizontal markets.

I've got Crohn's disease, so my ping times are faster.

Unencrypted volumes can be easily modified when mounted on a different system; film at 11.

The UX for old VB6 apps is bad enough even with a full keyboard and mouse.

Mac Operating System X operating system system?

This is a new record for redundancy records.

It just sounded like he was lumping it in with a list of things he was scoffing at. I agree that we're probably at a point where spontaneous building collapses are at an acceptable level of (in)frequency.

...But somehow I don't have a problem with less-frequent building collapses.

Unify them by making them totally separate functional modes. Interesting strategy, that's for sure.

I think the problem is that their unified vision is anything but unified. Hell, they can't even make up their minds about what Windows 8 is supposed to be.

I don't fully disagree with you, but I don't think it's fair to lump SQL Server in there. They've done so much development on it that it has almost nothing in common with Sybase anymore, save for a few object names.

Having self-serving motives is not cynical. Suspecting people of having self-serving motives is cynical.

You're going to have to "cure" starvation due to crushing population growth first.

Bags that big are too expensive. We usually just dig a big hole.