From an interview with Maj. Gen. Dale Meyerrose, CIO of the U.S. Northern Command:

Q: You said in your presentation that you see Unix as the "Betamax of software." Does that mean it has no place in your IT environment?

A: It currently has a place, and in fact we do use Unix on several of the DOD systems. My thought behind Unix is the march of technology is what has made Unix less and less relevant. The Y2k rollover, in fact, killed lots of Unix. There are a finite number of Unix engineers and software writers in the world, and it is not big enough to support the information technology demands not only of our society, but of the world's economies in general. It costs a lot to train somebody; it takes many years to get them educated. It takes even more for them to get experience so that you can use them, when in fact a lot of software engineering and design is a lot less complicated and in my view will outpace Unix.

Huh? A finite number of Unix engineers? Are we to believe that Windows developers come from some alternate, infinite species? Not to mention the simple-minded implication that more developers is somehow equated with better developers.

Call me conservative, but if the lives of people depend on an operating system being stable, I'd prefer one that doesn't throw screen rendering, web serving, and whatever else needs speed in some silly marketing-driven benchmark result directly into the kernel space.

But I must be some kind of a zealot.