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Has anyone ever heard of crap game competitions? That's where you find such games.

To summarize, while no-one may be playing bad games, the idea of bad games have certainly gained a cult following.

Am I the only one that actually likes telecommuting?

Seriously, there's a lot of things to not like about IBM, but telecommuting certainly rocks. For one, I get to skip an hour of traffic coming and going and save up on the money. My job as a sysadmin is very lax and easygoing, and I'm studying Computer Science simultaneously, which means that the free time that I'd spend in the office I can spend home studying or, God forbid, working naked in my bedroom, or outside in the backyard(you CAN take the laptop outside).

Socializing? You just coordinate your time telecommuting so that you have 2 days in the office so you can spend time with your team (assuming that your team is worth spending time with). I'd tell you, in a day with little stuff to do I'd rather do my own socializing inviting a friend over than spending in with a random coworker.

And sleep. Man, there is nothing better for your health than getting to sleep an extra hour because of not having to deal with the bullshit of getting dressed and driving. Better yet, you can get out and run or do exercise before tunring the machine on.

People who dislike telecommuting are simply not creative enough to know how to deal with it. A couple of weekly meetings in person with the rest of the staff suffices to kill the feeling of disconnection. The rest of the free time and benefits you get by being home are absolutely amazing if you use them right. I get to cook, watch TV, or read whatever I want. Yes, it does take personal discipline to lose the distractions when there's work to be done, but it's damn well worth it.

To say that simplicity or complexity on daily objects are mostly a matter of fashion and that complexity is "in" is, ironically, an oversimplification of the matter. Simplicity is good as long as it gets the job done. The one critique we have nowadays with it is that there is little choice of customizability or the possibility to do more complex things.

However, we do not like (or want) complexity by default. Check out the iPod. It's all ABOUT the "grandma factor"; being able to grab it, select the songs, and just grooving. The place where it falls flat on its face is that it's impossible to go beyond that, which is why more technically inclined users have opted for player with more features and clutters.

It is mostly impossible to design an object that is easy to use and yet is incredibly powerful by default. It will depend on the nature of the object and its features of course, but compromises are inevitable. And while I do agree that the whole mentality of "let's have on big button" is detrimental, the opposite extreme is too as long as the added complexity gives little in return.

An example of bad complexity: the sidebar in Konqueror. Absolutely useless 99% of the time. A perfect example where simplification would relieve us of clutter. Example of vital complexity: The cockpit of a 747.

KISS vs. TMTOWTDI should be all about having a full understanding of the use cases of the tool you're about to make and minimizing the number of compromises you have to make in your design, and knowing when to discard features to create a more appealing product for a smaller audience. It's about knowing that, while the perfect product for everyone doesn't exist,excellent products do.

Cosas de un sysadmin argentin: http://aosinski.phpnet.us/

But I frankly don't see any reversal of the outsourcing trend

As foreign workers acquire more and more skills, the gap between them and the first-worlders being replaced diminshes. Already we are seeing this: instead of outsourcing to places like India or China, many companies are turning to not-so-poor but cheap places like Easter Europe, Brazil, or Argentina. Countries where technically skilled people exist but were in low demand, but most importantly where the culture is extremely compatible with their clients'.

(Brazilians or Argentines DO have a language barrier, but their culture is much more similar to that of the US than other people in the globe, which makes their skill acquisition faster).

The problem clients have with outsourcing isn't about foreigners or incompetence. It's about managing a herd of cats through virtual teams and bonding with people with the same accent and interests as yours. I know that personally I've had much more success with my customers due to my American accent than my less linguistically skilled co-workers.

sig: Cosas de un sysadmin argentino: http://aosinski.phpnet.us/

Repeating again and again and again:

For backups and archival you need tape backups, stored offsite. If you want something with more capacity and faster recovery, a backup server with rsync and beefy hard drives. Nothing else will do. With the time and effort you'll spend searching and writing DVD media you could have already bought and set up a file server or bought that tape drive.

Unless you're going to be taking those backups with you and using them in high volume, backing up to DVDs is simply a waste of time and space, and when you get some dreaded CRC errors you'll be crying for not having done otherwise.

sig: Cosas varias de un sysadmin argentino: http://aosinski.phpnet.us/

The question is whether UWB will actually be as useful as it's being touted. I certainly know that I have no need or desire to have a home AP that whose signal goes beyond 100 meters. I'm sure most of us won't be using it for that either.

I can see a very practical use for this for quickly deploying an internet infrastructure under an emergency situation, as this would be perfect for creating relays to maintain connectivity to a distant area while covering a huge surface. I'm sure that as time goes on other more inventive applications will come to mind.

Las quejas de un sysadmin argentino: http://aosinski.phpnet.us/

Windows Media Player 10 supports far higher bitrates than 56kbps. See here. You might be thinking of Windows Media Player 7.1 or something like that, because WMP 9 didn't even support mp3 at all, not sure if 7.1 did either. Anyways, it doesn't hurt to know what you're talking about.