Absolute Monarchy died in england when James II tossed his Royal Seal in the Thames and fled to the continent. The general outlines of the British constitution were drawn up 1688-1689 when William and Mary were offers the throne in exchange for granting assent to the Bill of Rights 1689. This act made lawful the notion of Parliament's supremacy. It would take another century or so, until George IIII's madness and the incompetency of Prince George as regent for the notion of "government of parliament" to come to fruition, but basically, since 1689, the Sovereign has only been allowed to use his or her still substantial royal prerogatives with the at least tacit approval of Parliament.

The number of instances since 1689 of a Monarch directly exercising prerogatives like delaying or vetoing legislation without the advice of their ministers is exceedingly rare. There are exceptions, such as the 2011 UK election where no party gained a majority in the House of Commons, and the Queen's reserve power to pick Her government became active.

Governments are not businesses.

Good grief. Eugenics on top of autocracy. Nazi Germany, here we come.

So at least we know one person we can blame for this catastrophe

Becaus closed source products never cease development and no one using closed source software has ever found it abandoned.

Can someone explain to me how, for a project like setting up exchanges for Obamacare, NoSQL database systems is a rational choice? There are SQL-based systems like Oracle and MSSQL that can certainly handle recordsets of that size,and with that level of activity, and give you dialects of SQL sufficiently close to the norm that anybody with a reasonable level of RDBMS experience should be able work with it.

So is SQL attached to any reasonably good content management framework.

No fucking kidding. K-rust, I can only imagine how gawdawful slow such a database would be in every possible operation. Even if the XML itself is merely a wrapper for binary blobs, it's still an entire extra layer an engine is going to have to push through.

Why would anyone design such a product? Why would anyone buy such a product?

Quick MBA books probably cut to the chase and tell you how you can dismember, cook and eat competing managers, creatively shit on subordinates from great heights, and how to fool semi-conscious boards into letting you set up your stock dumping scheme.

That's the first chapter. The rest of the books is phone numbers and email addresses of lawyers who can help you bury the bodies and elude indictment on RICO charges.

Start brushing up your resume, and if you own stock, start looking at getting rid of it now and be prepared for the day when you and anyone else with any skills is given the boot. You really don't want to be on this airplane when it crashes. You can be sure the MBAs won't be.

And then the MBAs will take over, fire the physicists, hire a bunch of equally vile and sociopathic marketing types, and will find ways to cut corners, move all manufacturing to low-tax cheap-labor cess pools, hire equally vile and sociopathic IP lawyers to sue anyone who ever had an idea that even vaguely resembled the company's, rob the company of every dime it has, drive it into the ground.

Rinse and repeat.

I got modded +5 because I'm not a sociopathic Redmond shill, shill.

In my organization, the initial answer would probably have been "No, we don't need it." Decent open source LDAP and calendar servers with discrete apps would have been fine. But Exchange was installed because it had been paid for as part of the Backoffice/Outlook suite, and it's like a drug. Once you've got it, you can't get rid of it, even if 75% of its features never really get utilized. I once raised the possibility of going back to discrete scheduling and email solutions, and the response was pretty negative. "You mean we wouldn't use Outlook, or Outlook wouldn't quite function like it does now?" And that was that.

But I'm done. I'm one of the managing directors of the company now, and I've put my foot down. This is the last version of Exchange we'll install. We'll either go with something like Gmail or with a managed Exchange service when we look at the next upgrade cycle in five years. This is the last time I build and manage any kind of in-house email system.

You've got the wrong map here. That's Stalingrad.

Exchange may, to the end user, do what it does well, but i can tell you right now the Exchange 2010 server I just installed is likely to be the last one. What a fucking nightmare. I'm so tired of installing groupware that is nothing more than a badly stitched together bunch of spare parts where every solution to a problem seems to involve uninstalling and reinstalling IIS, and praying to the Web Server Gods that your partially malfunctioning mail server doesn't completely crap out. Everything about Exchange is fucking awful, and if there are any Redmond engineers or programmers reading this, all I can say to you is that I hope you die of awful awful diseases.

It's fucking ludicrous how bad Exchange is, how resource hungry it can be, and how simple fucking things like setting up a fucking mailing list or putting in some decent anti-spam tech (which doesn't amount to a rolled up version of SpamAssassin with some proprietary web pages and costs a bazillion dollars a seat) turns into a fucking nightmare. Fuck I hate Exchange. Hate it... hate it... hate it... hate it.