I HATE BASH

It's so shit. Shittier than PHP by at least 10 orders of magnitude.

Link related, it's the nigger who wrote it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Fox_(computer_programmer)

>>78
> is really 1> (stdout), 2>&1 redirects fd 2 (stderr) into fd 1's stream. So if the program produces any output on stderr you need to redirect that as well, and this is how.

It's not important whether you redirect them separately to /dev/null, but if you want to capture both streams as one (into a file, say), you have to do it that way... and in that order last I checked.