It has a karaoke machine in there. I saw it on a commercial. They may have been singing to karaoke videos on YouTube, but goddam! Having a karaoke machine in there has to be worth something ;-)

Consider that every industry has niche needs. I'll give some examples, but remember that my examples are only from a single industry out of hundreds. I work at a court of law. We have several niche needs that only can be satisfied with Windows software. Possibly the best example is our "Jury Instructions" program. Instructions given to a jury at the beginning of a trial will be unique depending on the nature of the trial. If a judge gives the wrong instructions, then a mistrial or appeal or even the wrong verdict can result. To complicate matters, the legislature changes jury instruction laws quarterly. The only programs that allow a judge to select variables about the nature of a trial, and then spit out jury instructions are for Windows.

If you consider that I'm just one court in one state in one country, then think about what a massive endeavor it is to keep software such as Jury Instructions up to date, and for what a small handful of customers. Nobody's going to go make and maintain a Mac or Linux version. It wouldn't be worth the effort. Now remember that I'm just one small tiny industry in an ocean of hundreds if not thousands of other organizations with unique needs. This is why we don't see anything but Windows in the workplace (that's a generalization... there are obviously exceptions). The next evolution of court technology in my state is going to be a web based case management system. What do you suppose the dumbass developers did? They decided that people wouldn't want to install Java JRE, so the system is based in ActiveX. There goes any possibility of running it with anything other than Windows + IE.

[Rant]For the life of me, I can't figure out what the point of making a web based application is when you're locked into one browser/OS. Isn't the point of web based applications that they are platform independent? On the server side, I do run Linux/*BSD wherever possible. They run happy with 4 GB of storage. Windows Server 2008 typically needs 60 GB in my experience (due to WinSxS). You may think that storage is cheap, but not if you're running VMware Infrastructure on a SAN. I've literally had to quintuple my SAN storage in order to accommodate upgrading from Windows Server 2003.[/Rant]

As the announcement to submit questions suggested, I went to your home page before submitting a question. With all due respect, Mr. Shatner, your web page is a confusing collage of unnecessary graphics, random icons, and annoying things that blink and flash. I half expected a popup advertisement for Adult Friend Finder.

I know that they're hard links. I don't care. What I care about is that I used to run servers on VMware with 12 GB of storage each. I've had to quintuple that since Win2K8. SAN storage is not cheap.

Win 2k *was* great, wasn't it? I installed it, upgraded my domain, and said to myself, "Microsoft hit the nail square on the head with this one!" The thig would happily run on my desktop with 128K RAM. It was stable. Everything's been downhill from there. Now Windows 7 needs 2 GB, and I've got a 50 GB WinSxS folder.

Didn't Microsoft say that Windows Server 2008 (without "R2") was the last 32 bit OS that they'd make? It's likely that the vast majority of Windows 7 Home/Business edition users have a CPU that can handle 64 bits, but what about all those people running Windows 7 Starter on netbooks that can't do 64 bit? It seems to me that they need to come out and say whether there will be a 32 bit version of Windows 8 or not.

Just like when Slackware went from version 4 straight to version 7 just to keep up with Fedora's version numbers.

If my enterprise did not interact with other enterprises, then faster version numbers (be they major or minor changes) can be coped with. The problem is that we interact with other enterprises. My ADP timecard program still doesn't support Firefox 4. My Cisco Scan Safe proxy service *just* announced support for Firefox 4. My AT&T online trouble-ticket software is browser based, as is my internal Numara Track It trouble-ticket software. My customers (judges) are required by the state to use a browser based application for calculating child support rulings. All of these things have to work with my browser, and if one of my partners decides that Firefox 5 isn't supported while Mozilla isn't supporting Firefox 4, then I have a problem that drives me back to Internet Explorer.

Why do I always have to choose between two flavors of shit? Meg Whitman or Jerry Brown? Barbara Boxer or Carly Fiora? Ungh! Come on politicians... throw me a bone here.

It's too bad this isn't real. It could be done relatively easily, and people would buy it. I don't imagine that Apple would want MAME on their App Store, though. You'd have to do it for jailbroken iPads.

Maybe next, some teenager can sue movie theaters for charging 13 year olds "Adult" prices when they're not legally adults until they're 18. That always bugged the heck out of me.

We do actually do that. There is a listserv for IT staff throughout the state in this branch of government. I constantly talk about what we're doing with Open Source on that mailing list, especially when another netadmin writes that he's thinking of purchasing a commercial product where there are open source alternatives.