The decline is from the price point. My last place of employment had 1 HP UX server that costed upwards of 25K for software and specific HP hardware to run on. migrating to windows cost a fraction of that in OS licenses and hardware, even though it took 8 windows servers to do what the one UX server did, it was still cheaper.

Transparent Aluminum, I'm still waiting....

My entire infrastructure is virtualized.
I have transformed my entire data-center from 1to1 physical servers to large clusters hosting many virtual machines on both VMware and Hyper-V.
and a previous poster nailed it on the head

You would have to make your racks precise to 1/100000 of an inch for your robot arm to fit snugly a server, unlike the ones out now you jam your finger trying to get the damn square nut clips in. Every server would have to be identical, or very close in size. There would need to be some sort of back plane to handle all of your connections maybe dual or quad port 10G.

This means they people who are way more apt then me will try even harder to hack the Xbox One and turn it into something every one actually wants.

I was working with a company who signed a contract with dell to have people start implementing "private clouds" on the Microsoft platform. I think they realized that most organization need more control over their data due to regulations and solutions like this may not meet those needs.

sorry DERP is already taken http://www.derp.org/

With so many issues facing our nation, this is the retarded shit they are focusing on? Al-la-cart TV channels and Commercial Volume

No wonder we are a country of ignorant fat ass's and the rest of the world hates us.

graduating college ,going to work, getting girlfriends \ married, or dying of heart attacks would be the best guesses.

People tend to generalize however from what you said you should have no problems with your career. The over 40 issue in my experience is that programmers either get burnt out on doing the same thing for a long time, or refuse to keep up with current trends. You will get people that say they have been writing shell scripts on unix for the last 30+ years, well thats great, but what else can you do since not every thing is a unix shell. The fact that your actually looking to improve your knowledge makes you even more marketable and desirable as an employee. people that just want to do the same thing over and over again till they die will not make it in todays IT world.

i think some one forgot the 'B' at the beginning of the first word.

ill take Windows activation over RHEL activation any day.

This is actually a touchy subject. What the bill does is excludes smaller companies that make under $1 million in profits as to promote small businesses (the good). It forces larger company's to charge sales tax, from a business perspective this makes sense as to create fair competition (the bad). From a consumer perspective this sucks balls and I probably wont be able to afford all my newegg gear now (the ugly).