I've been using Ubuntu, Fedora, and OS X for the last 8 years here. Haven't had a windows laptop for any more than the first 2 months I was here when I got the okay to wipe it. about 60 Dev's here, all use OS X with only a few that use Linux.

It greatly depends on your job. Your seriously not going to miss out on much... and it's Windows, it's not like it's that hard to figure it out if you really need to.

We're still on 5.5. It's been rock solid, but some managers thought Cisco's UCS VMWare based platform would be the way to go, so now we're running both. UCS for most of the VMs, and XenServer for the ones we care to keep running when UCS dies. We've been running the free license and missing out on some of the cool features of the XenServer 6.x branches... this might actually get me to upgrade things.

If my wife could stick with XP for the rest of her life, she'd be quite happy. Too bad it doesn't get updates anymore and will soon fail to do various things on modern hardware.

Innovation is cool, Forcing users to use their desktops like tablets just because you want to reduce the differences between them isn't. I don't want to touch my desktop screen, it's generally >3' from my face, I don't have 3' arms. Nor is it ergonomic for me to move my hands to and from the keyboard over and over again.

It's also a pain in the neck for me to have to explain how Windows 8 isn't the most horrible thing in the world because a relative doesn't understand that the metro full screen start menu IS the start menu. I'm tired of making excuses for Microsoft's failings. If they don't fix things I'm going to have to start moving my relatives over to Fedora. So far, it's been easier to tell them how to use it than Windows 8.

I don't even have X installed on my CentOS and RHEL servers. It's so much easier to manage from the command line... especially remotely.

But then I'm the kinda guy MS had to come out with "Server Core" for, I suppose.

This is an interesting part. I've noticed recently there have been more and more places where the Cash price differs from the Credit price. It used to be this way growing up, and they're going back to it because of all the problems and costs associated with Credit. And yes, it's Cheaper to pay with Cash. (a few gas stations here charge 10 cents or more per gallon for credit over cash transactions.)

Might have a little competition from this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Meter_Telescope

25m is a bit less than 30m. Just saying.

I've got the same background and needs... and I've found more and more that Google Docs seems to work pretty well 98% of the time. It keeps getting better and better and for most interoffice stuff just works. Sometimes it hits a macro or something that it doesn't get and I have to download it, but the last time I did that was about 2 years ago (and it's improved a lot since then anyway).

I'm quite happy that I'll be able to completely ditch office software installs soon.

(Disclaimer, we have gmail for business here so if you open anything from the webmail client, it does it through Google Docs.)

Except that kids are much more likely to think nothing of wearing a helmet if the parents with them are also wearing helmets. My 2yo likes to wear hers, but only if we're wearing ours. It just becomes something you do as part of the activity. Just as much as wearing seat belts while in a car. If I put her in a normal car seat just to put her down to grab something while we're getting in the car, she starts saying "No, Dad! No, no, no, no..." until I put her in her seat and buckle her in. She's not used to a regular seat, and she's not used to biking without a helmet.

I was always brought up to wear a seat belt when I'm in a car, and if I don't now (like on a bus where there isn't one, or if I have to pull my car up the driveway a few feet to work on it) I just feel really weird not having it.

My 4S is definitely better than my 3G was, but then it was 3 years old when I traded up. I still get a days worth on either. The catch is that the 4S is so much faster and generally more useful that I end up doing more battery sucking things with it just because. It's smooth and does great transferring real time maps with GPS while streaming Pandora in the background, even over AT&T "4G".

If I leave both on the table and mostly ignore them for the day, the 4S gives me more battery life than the 3G ever did.
If I actually use them as I usually would have, the 4S loses... but I find I actually use it A LOT MORE. When I first got it I found myself thinking "Man, the battery life sucks on this" but then I realized I was bascially using it non-stop. Once I got over the "OMG NEW-SHINY" period, it's on par with what the 3G was.

In short, I think the batteries Have improved, but we now expect our phones to do more, and have found more and more ways to use them more on a more regular basis. We cram more powerful AND power hungry chips in the same package and then get annoied and act surprised when it doesn't last as long as the older ones did.

The same thing has happened to laptops... and because this is slashdot, cars. I mean, I remember in the 80's and early 90's when we had little civic hatchbacks that got 55+ MPG. Why don't we have that now? because the civic is huge in comparison, weighs almost twice as much (the old 90 DX was literally 1 ton), has A/C, power everything, huge beams and airbags for safety, etc. And everyone thinks we should have more MPG by now. Yeah. We should, except you wanted all this other crap in there too.

I'd Tap that... Strateghttp://www.xkcd.com/398/

We have fingerprint readers here. Sometimes, they don't recognize my finger. It's still my finger, but there's nothing i can do to convince it it's me, so I'm stuck and can't do my job until it decides to let me in. Face recognition is the same way. There's no way I can change my face, or alter my fingerprint to make it work, so I basically am just screwed. If there's any chance of that with this, there's no way I want it.