actually that should not be considered. That prior investment in Windows/AD experience is what accountants would call a sunk cost. Its time and money already spent regardless of how you move forward. If it is used as a justification to never change vendors or technology than its denying you opportunities for other cost savings, efficiency, and value.
Unless you can't afford to make the investment in learning something new, already knowing Windows is a bad argument for staying with the platform if it would otherwise make sense to switch. Keep in mind M$ technology is developing all the time too and you are making a constant investment in continuing learning of those things, Exchange 2k7 and 2k10 certainly sent a lot of 2k3 and prior Exchange admins back to school so to speak. Sure lots of their prior knowledge was applicable but lots of the old rules were broken as well, in fact most of what was transferable is true about mail in general; so if there was a reason to look at a competing groupware product it should have been considered.
Or instead of limiting the birth rate, we can do what we have always done in the past and have us a little war, or just let nature deal with it and let a little plague run ramp-it for a while.
Truly I think either are actually better I don't trust humans to wisely manage the gene pool or administer a system in an equatable way. Wars and plagues are probably more fair than anything government could "give" us and likely better for the long term survival prospects of the human race, as both select for the fittest individuals in a way.
The trouble is the smartphone, netbooks, what have you are not very useful at all without massive data plans. Without that they are just PDAs and those were never very popular with consumers. The issue here is the carriers need to upgrade the networks.
I don't what you can do with a smart phone if you are not able to use more than Gb or so transfer a month. You will use that up in just e-mail, web, downloading apps, and maybe some music these days. Lord help you if you want to use video or web radio. Most applications need to be able to do webservice calls and such.
Really you need to use lots of bytes to have anything like the experience they advertise. Even if they can control device useage to an extent well beyond what most consumers would regard as fair, I can't imagine it will help them. The only control that will is to price it out of reach of all but the least price sensitive customers again, and that is putting a genie back in a bottle; not an easy task.
Your right its not a "debt" I don't know why the TFA is trying to confuse everyone with that term. It is a liability and often an poorly recognized and accounted for one; but it is not a debt.
The problem is collateral damage. What is more likely the nation of Elbonia is attacking the United States by DOSing an airport reservation system? or a competing airline hired some crackers to harm the competition, and those crackers have rooted some machines at the national ISP of Elbonia, that they do it with?
So we respond by routing the entire nation via 127.0.0.1, which is great in that it solves the problem but it probably denies all sorts of services to innocent people, and I am not talking about Mohamed's Netflix subscription, what about that X-Ray the surgeons there wanted a consult on, and the nations telephone system which is IP based at least for international calls. Oh and hey the assembly plant GM is trying to operate there, etc etc. All this is going to do is make small problems big ones.
Given the D- and F grades our government usually gets for security its more likely the platform used to attack will have a.gov or.mil extension; and hey the terrorists might figure gee if we look to rooting those boxes we might get some collateral damage from friendly fire.
Seriously I thought this whole retaliatory stuff got dropped by the computer security professions years ago once they realized that to be effective the systems would mostly need to be automatic because whatever you do is time critical, and if we have automated systems attacking each other the feedback is going to almost always just make the trouble worse.
When it comes to traditional killing people and breaking things; I am can be a believer in the old "the best defense is a good offense" arguments. We are talking about IT systems here though, if things get really bad although it might be inconvenient and expensive it should be possible to just turn them off or pull the network cable. If its not possible because that box controls the Reactor well that is a problem, and the problem is it should not have been "online" in the first place.
If they do this all that is going to happen amplification.
A is attacked by B, who has been unknowingly rooted, B sees the counter attack for A as and attack and retaliates against A with a second attack; or worse A decides to be cleaver and counter attack B via C, who now thinks they need to attack B. So rather than one small corner of the Internet A down we have potentially B,C down as well. Where B and C might even be our political allies; only adding to the panic, and cost.
EXACTLY!! Region codes should be illegal! or if not region coding itself it should be illegal to ban or attempt to block control the import or export of players and media coded for any given region. We have laws against anti competitively practices because the break capitalism! The idea is the market should set prices and wages, the whole market not some part of it. Price discrimination can be a component of fair market practices, for example selling plane tickets cheaper to those willing to purchase in greater advance, and raising the price as the flight time approaches makes sense; selling tickets to people in New York for more than people from Maine is wrong an silly.
We should not be codifying the right to engage in monopolistic practices to content companies, or if we do we should regulate them they way we do utilities and form a public commission that decides what they get to charge, see how they like that....
I don't think this is Hollywood accounting so much as pretty common accounting. Business setup "independant" corporations all the time to executie projects. Its a stupid practice you really should not be able to market services to a subsidiary that you have whole ownership of and book it as transaction between entities; it really should just be sub accounts.
I don't think it needs to be called GNU/Linux either but Linux is not an operating system. Just saying Linux is perfectly reasonable short hand most of the time because those talkin about it either can make the distinction you are speaking about the operating system or platform from context or don't know enough about the subject to understand there is a difference between the kernel and an operating system.
Operating systems manage resources and provide some method for the user to interact with the computer with a focus on loading and running other processes, and moving data; but not processing data. The kernel only manages resources.
The name Windows for instance is alot more like calling GNU/Linux GNU than it is calling it Linux. If you apply the same reasoning that you call GNU/Linux to Windows you would call it Executive, or maybe NTKernel.
Frankly I think the only likely workable solution and really the only fair solution is to give each nation control over their own DNS. The USA should be able to act on entries in the.com,.org,.us,.edu,.mil,.gov, and.us tlds acording to our laws as they would on any other property. Kentucky should be able to do that ti.ky.us and.ky.gov. China should be able to apply their laws to.cc and the UK to.uk domains. I (as an American) would not favor handing over control of the root zone to any internation body; but I would favor a policy of hands off when it comes to using privielge of controling the roots to pressure the bodies administering their national tlds.
Real shame too Northgate systems were always top notch. I am typing this on a Northgate Omnikey Ultra keyboard right now; best keyboard ever (sorry model M fans).
There is no such thing as hate speech only speech and its supposed to be free. Even advocationg violence I do not think meets the clear and presant danger test. As to hate crimes laws; its those laws that are biggoted. There is a very specific enumerated list in every state of when you are permitted to use violence against other citizens. Those are mostly when they are endangering your life or that of family member.
The rest of the cases its boolean matter or it should be. The issue is you beat someone half to death without one of the few good reasons we have listed. Why you specifically did it does not matter, it was wrong and equally so no matter weather it was because you hate gays or the guys dog defecated in your yard. It is an in excuseable crime. I don't think as a society we should go down the path deciding when its more or less ok to hurt someone. Its ok because you had not other legitimate choice or its not ok. Its unforgivable and you should be kept away from society forever if it was premeditated, and if it was a crime of passion well made some reform and you can rejoin the rest of us at some point.
not quite all C code is objective-C code but not all objective-C code is C code. So you can certainly write some C code feed it to the objC compiler and faithful in the technical sense call it an objective-C program; if not in spirit.
I am getting a bit tired of everyone dumping all over coal. Anthracite coal is probably the biggest supply of accessible fuel this country has. If you care about energy independence coal IS part of the picture and should be a big part. Yes there are problems like what to do with the ash but nuclear has the problem of hazardous waste as well; and I am confident both can be solved.
Coal can be used directly for heat in industrial processes as well and does not always have to be first used to generate electricity. You can't do that with hardly any of the renewables. I say put our energy in to figuring out how to scrub and sequester carbon efficiently and burn the heck out of our coal supplies; can't use them up if we try.
That is not an issue at all or at least not the issue. The grand partent wanted the operator of the device to be informed imediately when when their location is being reported or accessed. That could be something as simple as the words "Location tracked" printed on the cell phones display. Its your location that is being remported and you who needs to be informed of this fact. If you want the fire department to break down your neighbors door because you see smoke, they don't need to inform your neighbor his location is being tracked at all because its not being tracked!
I agree with you to a degree but there is a moral difference between Nintendo and Sony. Nintendo never advertised running your own software as feature, and in fact from the very outset mostly insisted you can not. Sony by contrast did exactly the opposite.
Its fair to say anyone who bought a Wii did so either expecting not to be able to do home brew or knowing that the ability to do that might be interrupted in the future. You certainly can't say that about PS3 owners. Sony did a bit of Indian-giving Nintendo did not.
Educators need to stop thinking that some how another computer or faster connection is going to some how be a panacea for their problems teaching. The computer is just a tool and nothing more, it might help when properly employed but its not going to do anything but harm in the hands of someone who does not know how to use it. Primary school is a case where the computer and Internet are simply not needed, possibly useful but NOT needed.
The basics of mathematics, English, physical science, and history are all easily contained and since they don't often change maintained in books. Over the course of the better part of two centuries many in this country have successfully gained a good liberal studies background using only books, face time with instructors, and where appropriate hands on experience. The reasons for the achievement gap, at least at the primary school level, don't have much to do with access to technology. Learning is a discipline. It takes work to learn, even for those who don't need as much drill an practice they still have to be willing to invest the mental energy in thinking about the subject they are studying in a critical way and attempting to relate that information to what they are learning in other subjects.
The problem is the underprivileged class in our society is largely surrounded by a culture which does not value discipline, work, or even simply curiosity. In many cases it glorifies failure and dependence. Its no surprise to me that technology makes scores worse in such an environment. There is little you can wrong with a book on mathematics except fail to read it, and maybe if these kids get bored enough they give a problem or two a try, get a sense of some achievement if they have any success. The computer on the other had provides an infinite amount of distraction and virtual assures they never give algebra a second look.
If we want to plow tax dollars into education than we should focus properly. We should get these kids some good text books. We should attack the culture of failure and dependence. We need to be politically incorrect enough to tell these kids its bad to be on the dole because you are not in control of your life someone else is and if you have any dreams at all you need to be self reliant. Lets read Ralph Waldo Emerson in the second grade rather than high school even if we have to read it to them. Lets get some teachers hired who are paid well enough to spend some serious time with a small enough number of kids that they can use the Socratic method and are proficient in the subjects they teach. Lets stop advancing kids to the next grade when they have not mastered the material. That is how you fix primary education, high school yes kids need to learn to use tools at that point but they first have to understand what the tools are for and that is where we have been failing.
The lesson is Google and possibly Facebook(remains to be seen) are the exceptions. Most Web Sensations are just a flash in the pan. If it seems like its getting to the point where just about everyone you know has heard of it (assuming you know at least a few non slashdot readers), than it can only go down hill from there.
If you own a part of it, its likely time to sell, if you were thinking of buying in its likely to late to turn a profit. Again that is to say unless the company is actually doing something unique that normal people would actually find valuable. They might be some oppertunities yet to simply do something better the way Google did; but if you get into one of those it better be something the incumbents can't use their supperior resources to just leap frog. I doubt even if someone builds a better Facebook at this point they could reach critical mass before being passed by again.
You do realize that even polygraph supports don't claim its truth detector right? The polygraph can at best detect the physiological changes that happen when a person is fabricating a response. If you really think the truth is however you answer that question as far as the polygraph is concerned you are being truthful, so I am not sure I understand what the point of your proposed exercise would be.
Well the truly paranoid but still polite person will download the software from the mirror and the check hashes. (S)He would then also download the hashes from the projects main site. First the hashes would be checked to make sure they match and then then if they do you validate the package hashes to that same value.
Bandwidth has gotten cheap enough these days that most projects can afford to transfer at least the checksums to end users.
The thing is nothing has changed its just more visible than before. We always see the last price. In the 80's paper stock certificates were still very common. A great deal more swaps took place off the exchanges. The little guys did it over their kitchen tables the big guys still do it close conference rooms on the umpteenth floor of Goldman Sacs. The SEC disclosure rules do make sure things are either done on the exchange or reported soon after the fact though today.
When things happen like some hedge fund has to dump a quality stock to cover a margin call for way below market because the buyer knows he has them over a barrel the market knows people see the low price herd mentality kicks in and you get BIG sell offs and on the other side you get BIG short squeezes and Bull runs.
The market is more volatile now because there is more information and most of the players even the pros don't know how to use it; they just know they have to something because some else will.
Ghost32 has existed for years and I don't know any serious imaging (ones that use Ghost anyway) shops that are not starting a WinPE from PXE boot and running the windows version of ghost with it. Nobody serious is using DOS edditions of ghost now.
Right the brain is fairly plastic and certainly can and does orient itself around certain work loads. It even at least while we are fairly young seems able to reorient iteself. IE if you change jobs from something high interrupt to something more focus oriented after a few months you can adapt. I went from Network Admin to programming for instance and than back.
Each of those transitions tooks some some. In my personal experience I do not think my brain could arrange itself into a form that would be good at both at the same time; good enough perhaps but not as good as doing one or the other.
I think the fundamental mistake your making is indulging the likes of Gizmodo and Gamespot by calling it journalism. Its not journalism at all. They are at best infomercials that on rare occasions make a weak attempt at balance just to grab a little credibility here and there.
Slashdot Mirror
actually that should not be considered. That prior investment in Windows/AD experience is what accountants would call a sunk cost. Its time and money already spent regardless of how you move forward. If it is used as a justification to never change vendors or technology than its denying you opportunities for other cost savings, efficiency, and value.
Unless you can't afford to make the investment in learning something new, already knowing Windows is a bad argument for staying with the platform if it would otherwise make sense to switch. Keep in mind M$ technology is developing all the time too and you are making a constant investment in continuing learning of those things, Exchange 2k7 and 2k10 certainly sent a lot of 2k3 and prior Exchange admins back to school so to speak. Sure lots of their prior knowledge was applicable but lots of the old rules were broken as well, in fact most of what was transferable is true about mail in general; so if there was a reason to look at a competing groupware product it should have been considered.
Or instead of limiting the birth rate, we can do what we have always done in the past and have us a little war, or just let nature deal with it and let a little plague run ramp-it for a while.
Truly I think either are actually better I don't trust humans to wisely manage the gene pool or administer a system in an equatable way. Wars and plagues are probably more fair than anything government could "give" us and likely better for the long term survival prospects of the human race, as both select for the fittest individuals in a way.
The trouble is the smartphone, netbooks, what have you are not very useful at all without massive data plans. Without that they are just PDAs and those were never very popular with consumers. The issue here is the carriers need to upgrade the networks.
I don't what you can do with a smart phone if you are not able to use more than Gb or so transfer a month. You will use that up in just e-mail, web, downloading apps, and maybe some music these days. Lord help you if you want to use video or web radio. Most applications need to be able to do webservice calls and such.
Really you need to use lots of bytes to have anything like the experience they advertise. Even if they can control device useage to an extent well beyond what most consumers would regard as fair, I can't imagine it will help them. The only control that will is to price it out of reach of all but the least price sensitive customers again, and that is putting a genie back in a bottle; not an easy task.
Your right its not a "debt" I don't know why the TFA is trying to confuse everyone with that term. It is a liability and often an poorly recognized and accounted for one; but it is not a debt.
The problem is collateral damage. What is more likely the nation of Elbonia is attacking the United States by DOSing an airport reservation system? or a competing airline hired some crackers to harm the competition, and those crackers have rooted some machines at the national ISP of Elbonia, that they do it with?
So we respond by routing the entire nation via 127.0.0.1, which is great in that it solves the problem but it probably denies all sorts of services to innocent people, and I am not talking about Mohamed's Netflix subscription, what about that X-Ray the surgeons there wanted a consult on, and the nations telephone system which is IP based at least for international calls. Oh and hey the assembly plant GM is trying to operate there, etc etc. All this is going to do is make small problems big ones.
Given the D- and F grades our government usually gets for security its more likely the platform used to attack will have a .gov or .mil extension; and hey the terrorists might figure gee if we look to rooting those boxes we might get some collateral damage from friendly fire.
Seriously I thought this whole retaliatory stuff got dropped by the computer security professions years ago once they realized that to be effective the systems would mostly need to be automatic because whatever you do is time critical, and if we have automated systems attacking each other the feedback is going to almost always just make the trouble worse.
When it comes to traditional killing people and breaking things; I am can be a believer in the old "the best defense is a good offense" arguments. We are talking about IT systems here though, if things get really bad although it might be inconvenient and expensive it should be possible to just turn them off or pull the network cable. If its not possible because that box controls the Reactor well that is a problem, and the problem is it should not have been "online" in the first place.
If they do this all that is going to happen amplification.
A is attacked by B, who has been unknowingly rooted, B sees the counter attack for A as and attack and retaliates against A with a second attack; or worse A decides to be cleaver and counter attack B via C, who now thinks they need to attack B. So rather than one small corner of the Internet A down we have potentially B,C down as well. Where B and C might even be our political allies; only adding to the panic, and cost.
EXACTLY!! Region codes should be illegal! or if not region coding itself it should be illegal to ban or attempt to block control the import or export of players and media coded for any given region. We have laws against anti competitively practices because the break capitalism! The idea is the market should set prices and wages, the whole market not some part of it. Price discrimination can be a component of fair market practices, for example selling plane tickets cheaper to those willing to purchase in greater advance, and raising the price as the flight time approaches makes sense; selling tickets to people in New York for more than people from Maine is wrong an silly.
We should not be codifying the right to engage in monopolistic practices to content companies, or if we do we should regulate them they way we do utilities and form a public commission that decides what they get to charge, see how they like that....
I don't think this is Hollywood accounting so much as pretty common accounting. Business setup "independant" corporations all the time to executie projects. Its a stupid practice you really should not be able to market services to a subsidiary that you have whole ownership of and book it as transaction between entities; it really should just be sub accounts.
I don't think it needs to be called GNU/Linux either but Linux is not an operating system. Just saying Linux is perfectly reasonable short hand most of the time because those talkin about it either can make the distinction you are speaking about the operating system or platform from context or don't know enough about the subject to understand there is a difference between the kernel and an operating system.
Operating systems manage resources and provide some method for the user to interact with the computer with a focus on loading and running other processes, and moving data; but not processing data. The kernel only manages resources.
The name Windows for instance is alot more like calling GNU/Linux GNU than it is calling it Linux. If you apply the same reasoning that you call GNU/Linux to Windows you would call it Executive, or maybe NTKernel.
Frankly I think the only likely workable solution and really the only fair solution is to give each nation control over their own DNS. The USA should be able to act on entries in the .com, .org, .us, .edu, .mil, .gov, and .us tlds acording to our laws as they would on any other property. Kentucky should be able to do that ti .ky.us and .ky.gov. China should be able to apply their laws to .cc and the UK to .uk domains. I (as an American) would not favor handing over control of the root zone to any internation body; but I would favor a policy of hands off when it comes to using privielge of controling the roots to pressure the bodies administering their national tlds.
Real shame too Northgate systems were always top notch. I am typing this on a Northgate Omnikey Ultra keyboard right now; best keyboard ever (sorry model M fans).
There is no such thing as hate speech only speech and its supposed to be free. Even advocationg violence I do not think meets the clear and presant danger test. As to hate crimes laws; its those laws that are biggoted. There is a very specific enumerated list in every state of when you are permitted to use violence against other citizens. Those are mostly when they are endangering your life or that of family member.
The rest of the cases its boolean matter or it should be. The issue is you beat someone half to death without one of the few good reasons we have listed. Why you specifically did it does not matter, it was wrong and equally so no matter weather it was because you hate gays or the guys dog defecated in your yard. It is an in excuseable crime. I don't think as a society we should go down the path deciding when its more or less ok to hurt someone. Its ok because you had not other legitimate choice or its not ok. Its unforgivable and you should be kept away from society forever if it was premeditated, and if it was a crime of passion well made some reform and you can rejoin the rest of us at some point.
not quite all C code is objective-C code but not all objective-C code is C code. So you can certainly write some C code feed it to the objC compiler and faithful in the technical sense call it an objective-C program; if not in spirit.
I am getting a bit tired of everyone dumping all over coal. Anthracite coal is probably the biggest supply of accessible fuel this country has. If you care about energy independence coal IS part of the picture and should be a big part. Yes there are problems like what to do with the ash but nuclear has the problem of hazardous waste as well; and I am confident both can be solved.
Coal can be used directly for heat in industrial processes as well and does not always have to be first used to generate electricity. You can't do that with hardly any of the renewables. I say put our energy in to figuring out how to scrub and sequester carbon efficiently and burn the heck out of our coal supplies; can't use them up if we try.
That is not an issue at all or at least not the issue. The grand partent wanted the operator of the device to be informed imediately when when their location is being reported or accessed. That could be something as simple as the words "Location tracked" printed on the cell phones display. Its your location that is being remported and you who needs to be informed of this fact. If you want the fire department to break down your neighbors door because you see smoke, they don't need to inform your neighbor his location is being tracked at all because its not being tracked!
I agree with you to a degree but there is a moral difference between Nintendo and Sony. Nintendo never advertised running your own software as feature, and in fact from the very outset mostly insisted you can not. Sony by contrast did exactly the opposite.
Its fair to say anyone who bought a Wii did so either expecting not to be able to do home brew or knowing that the ability to do that might be interrupted in the future. You certainly can't say that about PS3 owners. Sony did a bit of Indian-giving Nintendo did not.
Educators need to stop thinking that some how another computer or faster connection is going to some how be a panacea for their problems teaching. The computer is just a tool and nothing more, it might help when properly employed but its not going to do anything but harm in the hands of someone who does not know how to use it. Primary school is a case where the computer and Internet are simply not needed, possibly useful but NOT needed.
The basics of mathematics, English, physical science, and history are all easily contained and since they don't often change maintained in books. Over the course of the better part of two centuries many in this country have successfully gained a good liberal studies background using only books, face time with instructors, and where appropriate hands on experience. The reasons for the achievement gap, at least at the primary school level, don't have much to do with access to technology. Learning is a discipline. It takes work to learn, even for those who don't need as much drill an practice they still have to be willing to invest the mental energy in thinking about the subject they are studying in a critical way and attempting to relate that information to what they are learning in other subjects.
The problem is the underprivileged class in our society is largely surrounded by a culture which does not value discipline, work, or even simply curiosity. In many cases it glorifies failure and dependence. Its no surprise to me that technology makes scores worse in such an environment. There is little you can wrong with a book on mathematics except fail to read it, and maybe if these kids get bored enough they give a problem or two a try, get a sense of some achievement if they have any success. The computer on the other had provides an infinite amount of distraction and virtual assures they never give algebra a second look.
If we want to plow tax dollars into education than we should focus properly. We should get these kids some good text books. We should attack the culture of failure and dependence. We need to be politically incorrect enough to tell these kids its bad to be on the dole because you are not in control of your life someone else is and if you have any dreams at all you need to be self reliant. Lets read Ralph Waldo Emerson in the second grade rather than high school even if we have to read it to them. Lets get some teachers hired who are paid well enough to spend some serious time with a small enough number of kids that they can use the Socratic method and are proficient in the subjects they teach. Lets stop advancing kids to the next grade when they have not mastered the material. That is how you fix primary education, high school yes kids need to learn to use tools at that point but they first have to understand what the tools are for and that is where we have been failing.
The lesson is Google and possibly Facebook(remains to be seen) are the exceptions. Most Web Sensations are just a flash in the pan. If it seems like its getting to the point where just about everyone you know has heard of it (assuming you know at least a few non slashdot readers), than it can only go down hill from there.
If you own a part of it, its likely time to sell, if you were thinking of buying in its likely to late to turn a profit. Again that is to say unless the company is actually doing something unique that normal people would actually find valuable. They might be some oppertunities yet to simply do something better the way Google did; but if you get into one of those it better be something the incumbents can't use their supperior resources to just leap frog. I doubt even if someone builds a better Facebook at this point they could reach critical mass before being passed by again.
I am curious as to why such legislation would get proposed.
Is there massive tax evasion by freelance IT workers, that is far an about other industries?
Are the problems of quality or fraud that would lead the government to want to discourage freelance IT work?
You do realize that even polygraph supports don't claim its truth detector right? The polygraph can at best detect the physiological changes that happen when a person is fabricating a response. If you really think the truth is however you answer that question as far as the polygraph is concerned you are being truthful, so I am not sure I understand what the point of your proposed exercise would be.
Well the truly paranoid but still polite person will download the software from the mirror and the check hashes. (S)He would then also download the hashes from the projects main site. First the hashes would be checked to make sure they match and then then if they do you validate the package hashes to that same value.
Bandwidth has gotten cheap enough these days that most projects can afford to transfer at least the checksums to end users.
The thing is nothing has changed its just more visible than before. We always see the last price. In the 80's paper stock certificates were still very common. A great deal more swaps took place off the exchanges. The little guys did it over their kitchen tables the big guys still do it close conference rooms on the umpteenth floor of Goldman Sacs. The SEC disclosure rules do make sure things are either done on the exchange or reported soon after the fact though today.
When things happen like some hedge fund has to dump a quality stock to cover a margin call for way below market because the buyer knows he has them over a barrel the market knows people see the low price herd mentality kicks in and you get BIG sell offs and on the other side you get BIG short squeezes and Bull runs.
The market is more volatile now because there is more information and most of the players even the pros don't know how to use it; they just know they have to something because some else will.
Ghost32 has existed for years and I don't know any serious imaging (ones that use Ghost anyway) shops that are not starting a WinPE from PXE boot and running the windows version of ghost with it. Nobody serious is using DOS edditions of ghost now.
Right the brain is fairly plastic and certainly can and does orient itself around certain work loads. It even at least while we are fairly young seems able to reorient iteself. IE if you change jobs from something high interrupt to something more focus oriented after a few months you can adapt. I went from Network Admin to programming for instance and than back.
Each of those transitions tooks some some. In my personal experience I do not think my brain could arrange itself into a form that would be good at both at the same time; good enough perhaps but not as good as doing one or the other.
I think the fundamental mistake your making is indulging the likes of Gizmodo and Gamespot by calling it journalism. Its not journalism at all. They are at best infomercials that on rare occasions make a weak attempt at balance just to grab a little credibility here and there.