...for standing up for the people in his state. It's bad when "doing your job right" gets you lauded, but that only means that other Attorneys General fail at that task miserably.
Re:Ubuntu influence on marketing materials
on
Fedora 12 Released
·
· Score: 0
The only amazing thing about that was it took RedHat so long to get their act together. rpm needed some way of searching package repositories for years. Mandrake had urpmi and Debian had apt-get years before RedHat had anything comparable.
And even then, they gave us utter crap like "up2date". yum is nice (but slow), but the repositories are really what keeps me on Ubuntu. Earlier this year I needed to work on some CentOS systems and EPEL is nowhere near as nice as Universe -- and please don't blather on about random 3rd party repositories. Canonical did the right thing by creating a framework of trust with the Multiverse and Universe repositories, and almost any package you want is there and mostly well-maintained.
EPEL is pretty good in the RHEL/CentOS/Fedora world, but nowhere near as large and well-maintained as Universe, IMHO.
Hear hear! I don't have any mod points to give or I would.
I used to like Glenn Beck a few years ago, lost interest in him, and then watched him again last year during the elections and was totally amazed at how he transformed from a reasonably sensible, mostly Libertarian pseudo-journalist to what he is today.
That so-called BETA implementation has been running flawlessly on 90% of our production servers for 3 years now, and as soon as the last of our Solaris 9 systems are replaced this year it will be 100%. I call that a success path.
Re:Niagara should have a future
on
Oracle Buys Sun
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It's interesting that you speak about that of which you have no idea. For the CoolThreads servers (T1 and T2), Sun redesigned every part of the server to be more energy efficient, from the fans to the power supplies. That then carried over to more efficient x86-based Sun servers as well. I know from experience that in our data center, a fully loaded Dell web server generates *far* more heat than a fully loaded T2 Oracle server. I've stood behind a rack of Dells and then a rack of Sun gear and the Dells are *insanely* hot.
Re:What about MySQL?
on
Oracle Buys Sun
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I concur with this assessment. We recently moved from a $300,000 SunFire 6900 (a system the size of a standard full-size 42U rack) with 12 dual core CPU's and 48 GB of RAM that drew massive amounts of power and cooling, to a $30,000 T2 blade with 64GB of RAM that runs cool and sips power. Our DBA's were amazed at the improvement. We need to upgrade the front end systems now to keep up with the increase in performance of the backend! We were able to trade in the 6900, and the savings on *support* for the 6900 offset the purchase price of 2 blade chassis, 10 blades and a SAN!
For our workload, the massive parallel architecture of the T2 really suits Oracle. For any type of multithreaded or multiprocessed throughput-based app (web serving, front-end app servers, LDAP server, database server), the T1 and T2 design is perfect.
Re:What about MySQL?
on
Oracle Buys Sun
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
btrfs is an attempt to recreate the features of ZFS. If Oracle releases ZFS under the GPL, then I would hope that it would be available as a first class filesystem under Linux as long as the Linux kernel maintainers don't get that "not invented here" syndrome. ZFS is a marvellous filesystem, but a lot of people don't understand it or how revolutionary it is because they haven't tried using it.
I was there in 2004 alongside the Marines (Army Infantry), and coalition psyops basically blanketed the city for weeks prior to the invasion with the message that all civilians needed to leave the city and any male over the age of 15 who stayed would be considered a combatant. We all but told them exactly when we were coming and "you want to fight, let's fight...you want to live, get the hell out of the town".
The civilian casualties that I saw were caused by bombing the city prior to the attack and bombing/artillery on specific buildings that insurgents were using as strong points that couldn't be taken any other way.
At no time did I or anyone in my company fire upon any civilian. In fact the only civilians that I saw were after the fact when they came out of their hiding places and surrendered. We sent them on their way with the MP's, safe and sound.
What I did see was a lot of AK and RPG's fired at my Bradley Fighting Vehicle. I took 4 within the span of 15 minutes. Thank $DEITY for that reactive armor.
Hello, this is Time Warner, as in Warner Brothers, you know, those people that produce and distribute movies and music and TV shows....they created the RIAA and MPAA!
Of course they want you to stop using Hulu and Netflix and downloading music from iTunes and Amazon (and those are just the legal things they want you to stop). They want you to watch TV for 6 hours a day so they get their precious ad revenue and purchase CD's at $18 a pop instead of buying the 1 or 2 good songs from that same CD for $0.99 each. That way their stock stays unrealistically high and they can reap huge bonuses. Remember, you are not their customer, the stockholder is....
The thing is, it's not like your service gets cut off after that 5GB/month limit. TW is more than happy to just let the meter keep ticking after 5GB is downloaded, you upload your 250GB and suddenly you get hit with a $300 bill next month.
Ummm, where is it said that Chewbacca lives on Endor? The Ewoks live on the forest moon that orbits the gas giant Endor. Chewbacca is from Kashyyyk. If he lives anywhere (i.e. has a home), it is on the Millenium Falcon.
We just got some T2-based blades in, but we can't play with them yet until the electricians come out to hook up the power in that row of the datacenter.:-(
IMHO, Sun has done things the smarter way (as far as going multi-core/multi-thread) than Intel/AMD. Intel has to take existing massive cores running at insane speeds and cram them into the same silicon to get 2 or 4 core CPU's, while Sun took their existing slower cores and put as many into the die as they can (8 right now), and focused on parallelism first, then speed later. They've already solved a lot of the problems that Intel/AMD are just starting on (memory access / multi-threading / execution optimizations) and now they can work on shrinking the die even more to get more cores/threads on each CPU.
A lot of little cores doing things relatively slower makes more sense than a couple of insanely fast cores sitting around waiting for memory or I/O to catch up. Intel needs to take their Atom processor and use that as their base for some massively parallel CPU lovin'....
I'm glad that you came up with that rational and reasonable argument for why you are opposed to abortion.
Disclaimer: I am a Christian as well and I do not believe in abortion. I am also an American soldier who has served my country and actually fought to uphold the rights and freedoms that a lot of Americans take for granted.
The pro-choice camp advocates *choice*. That's it. Most don't and never will advocate abortion. "Pro-choice" != "pro-abortion". Most pro-choice groups advocate choices that range through all of the options available pre-conception: abstinence, contraceptives, etc..., and the post-conception options of adoption or abortion.
The issue is that people who are pro-choice would like those out there to make up their own minds about the issue, to take the personal responsibility that such a choice entails, and not to be limited by moralistic government control. I find it anathema to the (historically) conservative Republican tenets of small government controls and personal responsibility that one of the primary issues that the "single-issue" voter uses to determine their vote is the issue of abortion. I also find it funny that Sarah Palin actually used the word "choice" when she announced that she had "chosen" to keep her Down's syndrome baby, yet she is against Roe v. Wade....
I don't and never will suggest abortion to anyone, and I will counsel them against it, but ultimately, it is the woman's (and her partner's) personal decision and always should be.
You mean like apt or yum or portage or pacman or the BSD ports system?? MS could learn a lot from the remote repositories / installers that the free software community takes for granted.
Uh, the original poster talked about persistent X11 sessions. The Sun Rays are perfect for this. The OP can even have one at home set up to connect to his Sun Ray server at work, detach from the session at the end of the day and reconnect to it from home.
Sun Rays are really one of the coolest technologies to come out of Sun in the last 20 years, but unfortunately, they are such a shift from the norm (and until recently needed Solaris on Sparc for the server) that most companies have no idea of their potential. Sun even has gateways to Citrix so that the same little desktop box can display Solaris, Linux, and Windows apps all at the same time.
> If enough voters want a tribute to the Flying Spaghetti Monster on city hall or the county court, then so be it.
I am impressed. Very well thought out response, not typical of the standard religious debate. I would point out that if cities in the the US were to follow this practice, then the vast majority of people in the US (who happen to be some form of Christian) would be able to simply vote to put Christian religious art/symbolism on public buildings, henceforth explicitly establishing a national religion (we are already implicitly a Christian nation).
In my opinion, Separation of Church and State actually should be interpreted as Sterilization of State from Church (note the slight re-ordering of words!). I wonder what would happen if enough people in a small town in the Midwest declared themselves Muslim and decided to run the town according to Shari'a law??
Another solution is (unfortunately) a commercial one. Tectia SSH from ssh.com has an option to prevent the user from cd'ing up out of their home directory.
I have no real idea why openssh doesn't have this same ability. Makes no sense to me, except the the openssh devs probably don't see a need for it.
Wow, look at that. I do an ls on/usr/sfw/bin and there are tons of GNU version of tools like tar and make, etc. Solaris 10 doesn't break if you change the root shell to bash or zsh (like Solaris 9 did). I also like setting the root homedir to/root instead of splatting dotfiles all over/.
I agree, saner defaults would be nice, and they are working on them. One of the great ideas that is being worked on is the concept of personalities, so that user A can set PERSONALITY=GNU and get GNU tar, while person B can set PERSONALITY=SUNOS and get old-fashioned tar, with no funky PATH issues.
I have been a linux user since 1995, and until I was hired at an all Solaris shop I never appreciated just how many cool things that Solaris 10 (and OpenSolaris) can do head and shoulders above Linux. I'm glad I got into Solaris when I did, though, because I really wouldn't have liked the 7,8, or 9 days (we are switching from 9 to 10 as fast as possible).
Yes, Solaris has its share of warts, as does Linux, but the primary gripes that a Linux admin always comes up with when introduced to Solaris are really very shallow (and usually based on an experience that the admin had with a Solaris 7 box 10 years ago). So what if you have to set a few things the first time you boot the system so root's shell is sane and the/root dir exists? The system itself is rock solid and has enough "killer features" that more than make up for it (ZFS, zones, brandz, dtrace).
Anyone who hasn't used Solaris in years or who hasn't actually researched the current state of OpenSolaris (what? someone on Slashdot posted without doing any research??), please download a current Solaris Express ISO and install it. You will be amazed at the fact that there is a current X.org (modern drivers, even one you can download from Nvidia!) and Gnome/Mozilla/Evince/etc... on the desktop, and some really cool server features that you never knew you needed, like zones or ZFS.
Educate yourself before you spout off on things that you don't know about.
It's their fault for not checking the "disable remote services" option on startup. Had they done so, then all but a handful of services would start automatically after install, and the ones that do start up listen only on localhost except for ssh. It's what Sun calls their "Secure By Default" stance.
He should have done some research and scanned both regular and Secure By Default, then we would have seen a big difference.
This is exactly the way I feel about the three companies.
A few months ago, my kids and I were discussing what they wanted for Christmas this year. They started going on about the PS3 (in the past, they have had used PS1, N64, and GC consoles, as well as a variety of gameboys). We had a really good discussion which ended up with me stating that I would pretty much only consider the Wii, simply because Nintendo has never tried to screw me over in any way (I paraphrased that part for the littler ones). I can't imagine Nintendo screwing me over in the future either.
Nintendo is all about selling me a console or a handheld that is fun to use, and has fun games to play on it. That's it. A simple transaction. I give the guy at the store some money, and he gives me a console and a game or two. I go home and play it with the kids, and we have a good time. What happened to a company doing one thing and doing it well?
I don't want a "media center" taking over my living room (which is what both the PS3 and the XBox360 are really trying to accomplish). Microsoft and Sony both want to rule my digital world and keep a steady flow of cash going from my pocket to theirs in a variety of ways, especially Sony. Sony, by the way, nows controls the entire media chain from the media creation, to the distribution, to the player, and now the HDTV (and you thought the PS3 was about the games?). The PS3 is really all about the Blu-ray and HDTV.
I hate them both. Forced upgrades from one crappy OS to the next from MS, vendor lock-in like you wouldn't believe, DRM out the wazoo. One part of Sony sells MP3 players and minidisks, and then another part sues people who rip music. Un-be-freaking-leivable.
The irony of the situation is that the online stores attached to the Xbox and PS3 don't interest me in the least (neither do the price tags), but the ability to plonk down $20 online and get 4 older games on the Wii (or 1-2 slightly newer ones) is just my cup of tea.
I've always been a PC gamer, but MS is making that harder on me every day, and I'm getting burned out by the hardware churn. It's getting tougher every year to justify replacing perfectly good computer parts because I want to play the latest and greatest. I've never actually purchased a brand new console before, but I just may find myself picking up a Wii for the kids instead of a new motherboard and CPU for myself this Christmas. I'm actually excited about a console for the first time, ever.
Ruby == pure heaven, everything is an object and iterable by default.
I was bored one day at home and recreated a class in ruby that I wrote at work in perl. Took me all day to do something in perl that it took about 1/2 an hour to do in ruby, and I added a couple of features as well. I also spent way more time looking up how to do stuff in perl that in ruby, event though I've programmed off and on in perl for years (a decade, in fact)....
Until the multitude of bugs in it caused it to die a horrible death, and it has never come back. I basically payed $54 USD for Steam.
Now it can't even load any levels on HL2 without some sort of errors about missing model files, memory that can't be "read" (their emphasis, not mine), and a bug where the level starts to load, but after two ticks of the progress bar it drops back to the main game menu and the only thing that can be clicked on is the exit button.
Slashdot Mirror
...for standing up for the people in his state. It's bad when "doing your job right" gets you lauded, but that only means that other Attorneys General fail at that task miserably.
The only amazing thing about that was it took RedHat so long to get their act together. rpm needed some way of searching package repositories for years. Mandrake had urpmi and Debian had apt-get years before RedHat had anything comparable.
And even then, they gave us utter crap like "up2date". yum is nice (but slow), but the repositories are really what keeps me on Ubuntu. Earlier this year I needed to work on some CentOS systems and EPEL is nowhere near as nice as Universe -- and please don't blather on about random 3rd party repositories. Canonical did the right thing by creating a framework of trust with the Multiverse and Universe repositories, and almost any package you want is there and mostly well-maintained.
EPEL is pretty good in the RHEL/CentOS/Fedora world, but nowhere near as large and well-maintained as Universe, IMHO.
Hear hear! I don't have any mod points to give or I would.
I used to like Glenn Beck a few years ago, lost interest in him, and then watched him again last year during the elections and was totally amazed at how he transformed from a reasonably sensible, mostly Libertarian pseudo-journalist to what he is today.
That so-called BETA implementation has been running flawlessly on 90% of our production servers for 3 years now, and as soon as the last of our Solaris 9 systems are replaced this year it will be 100%. I call that a success path.
It's interesting that you speak about that of which you have no idea. For the CoolThreads servers (T1 and T2), Sun redesigned every part of the server to be more energy efficient, from the fans to the power supplies. That then carried over to more efficient x86-based Sun servers as well. I know from experience that in our data center, a fully loaded Dell web server generates *far* more heat than a fully loaded T2 Oracle server. I've stood behind a rack of Dells and then a rack of Sun gear and the Dells are *insanely* hot.
I concur with this assessment. We recently moved from a $300,000 SunFire 6900 (a system the size of a standard full-size 42U rack) with 12 dual core CPU's and 48 GB of RAM that drew massive amounts of power and cooling, to a $30,000 T2 blade with 64GB of RAM that runs cool and sips power. Our DBA's were amazed at the improvement. We need to upgrade the front end systems now to keep up with the increase in performance of the backend! We were able to trade in the 6900, and the savings on *support* for the 6900 offset the purchase price of 2 blade chassis, 10 blades and a SAN!
For our workload, the massive parallel architecture of the T2 really suits Oracle. For any type of multithreaded or multiprocessed throughput-based app (web serving, front-end app servers, LDAP server, database server), the T1 and T2 design is perfect.
btrfs is an attempt to recreate the features of ZFS. If Oracle releases ZFS under the GPL, then I would hope that it would be available as a first class filesystem under Linux as long as the Linux kernel maintainers don't get that "not invented here" syndrome. ZFS is a marvellous filesystem, but a lot of people don't understand it or how revolutionary it is because they haven't tried using it.
I was there in 2004 alongside the Marines (Army Infantry), and coalition psyops basically blanketed the city for weeks prior to the invasion with the message that all civilians needed to leave the city and any male over the age of 15 who stayed would be considered a combatant. We all but told them exactly when we were coming and "you want to fight, let's fight...you want to live, get the hell out of the town".
The civilian casualties that I saw were caused by bombing the city prior to the attack and bombing/artillery on specific buildings that insurgents were using as strong points that couldn't be taken any other way.
At no time did I or anyone in my company fire upon any civilian. In fact the only civilians that I saw were after the fact when they came out of their hiding places and surrendered. We sent them on their way with the MP's, safe and sound.
What I did see was a lot of AK and RPG's fired at my Bradley Fighting Vehicle. I took 4 within the span of 15 minutes. Thank $DEITY for that reactive armor.
Hello, this is Time Warner, as in Warner Brothers, you know, those people that produce and distribute movies and music and TV shows....they created the RIAA and MPAA!
Of course they want you to stop using Hulu and Netflix and downloading music from iTunes and Amazon (and those are just the legal things they want you to stop). They want you to watch TV for 6 hours a day so they get their precious ad revenue and purchase CD's at $18 a pop instead of buying the 1 or 2 good songs from that same CD for $0.99 each. That way their stock stays unrealistically high and they can reap huge bonuses. Remember, you are not their customer, the stockholder is....
The thing is, it's not like your service gets cut off after that 5GB/month limit. TW is more than happy to just let the meter keep ticking after 5GB is downloaded, you upload your 250GB and suddenly you get hit with a $300 bill next month.
I'm calling AT&T this weekend....
Whoosh!!
That's the sound of that joke going right past you.
Ummm, where is it said that Chewbacca lives on Endor? The Ewoks live on the forest moon that orbits the gas giant Endor. Chewbacca is from Kashyyyk. If he lives anywhere (i.e. has a home), it is on the Millenium Falcon.
(My dog's name is Chewbacca, how lame am I?)
We just got some T2-based blades in, but we can't play with them yet until the electricians come out to hook up the power in that row of the datacenter. :-(
IMHO, Sun has done things the smarter way (as far as going multi-core/multi-thread) than Intel/AMD. Intel has to take existing massive cores running at insane speeds and cram them into the same silicon to get 2 or 4 core CPU's, while Sun took their existing slower cores and put as many into the die as they can (8 right now), and focused on parallelism first, then speed later. They've already solved a lot of the problems that Intel/AMD are just starting on (memory access / multi-threading / execution optimizations) and now they can work on shrinking the die even more to get more cores/threads on each CPU.
A lot of little cores doing things relatively slower makes more sense than a couple of insanely fast cores sitting around waiting for memory or I/O to catch up. Intel needs to take their Atom processor and use that as their base for some massively parallel CPU lovin'....
I'm glad that you came up with that rational and reasonable argument for why you are opposed to abortion.
Disclaimer: I am a Christian as well and I do not believe in abortion. I am also an American soldier who has served my country and actually fought to uphold the rights and freedoms that a lot of Americans take for granted.
The pro-choice camp advocates *choice*. That's it. Most don't and never will advocate abortion. "Pro-choice" != "pro-abortion". Most pro-choice groups advocate choices that range through all of the options available pre-conception: abstinence, contraceptives, etc..., and the post-conception options of adoption or abortion.
The issue is that people who are pro-choice would like those out there to make up their own minds about the issue, to take the personal responsibility that such a choice entails, and not to be limited by moralistic government control. I find it anathema to the (historically) conservative Republican tenets of small government controls and personal responsibility that one of the primary issues that the "single-issue" voter uses to determine their vote is the issue of abortion. I also find it funny that Sarah Palin actually used the word "choice" when she announced that she had "chosen" to keep her Down's syndrome baby, yet she is against Roe v. Wade....
I don't and never will suggest abortion to anyone, and I will counsel them against it, but ultimately, it is the woman's (and her partner's) personal decision and always should be.
You mean like apt or yum or portage or pacman or the BSD ports system?? MS could learn a lot from the remote repositories / installers that the free software community takes for granted.
Uh, the original poster talked about persistent X11 sessions. The Sun Rays are perfect for this. The OP can even have one at home set up to connect to his Sun Ray server at work, detach from the session at the end of the day and reconnect to it from home.
Sun Rays are really one of the coolest technologies to come out of Sun in the last 20 years, but unfortunately, they are such a shift from the norm (and until recently needed Solaris on Sparc for the server) that most companies have no idea of their potential. Sun even has gateways to Citrix so that the same little desktop box can display Solaris, Linux, and Windows apps all at the same time.
> If enough voters want a tribute to the Flying Spaghetti Monster on city hall or the county court, then so be it.
I am impressed. Very well thought out response, not typical of the standard religious debate. I would point out that if cities in the the US were to follow this practice, then the vast majority of people in the US (who happen to be some form of Christian) would be able to simply vote to put Christian religious art/symbolism on public buildings, henceforth explicitly establishing a national religion (we are already implicitly a Christian nation).
In my opinion, Separation of Church and State actually should be interpreted as Sterilization of State from Church (note the slight re-ordering of words!). I wonder what would happen if enough people in a small town in the Midwest declared themselves Muslim and decided to run the town according to Shari'a law??
Unless I get hit by a car, I will outlast you on /. !!!
I really wanted 1024, but I couldn't time it just right...
Another solution is (unfortunately) a commercial one. Tectia SSH from ssh.com has an option to prevent the user from cd'ing up out of their home directory.
I have no real idea why openssh doesn't have this same ability. Makes no sense to me, except the the openssh devs probably don't see a need for it.
The Gigabeat is a PlaysforSure/WMP11-only device, correct?
Wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.
Wow, look at that. I do an ls on /usr/sfw/bin and there are tons of GNU version of tools like tar and make, etc. Solaris 10 doesn't break if you change the root shell to bash or zsh (like Solaris 9 did). I also like setting the root homedir to /root instead of splatting dotfiles all over /.
/root dir exists? The system itself is rock solid and has enough "killer features" that more than make up for it (ZFS, zones, brandz, dtrace).
I agree, saner defaults would be nice, and they are working on them. One of the great ideas that is being worked on is the concept of personalities, so that user A can set PERSONALITY=GNU and get GNU tar, while person B can set PERSONALITY=SUNOS and get old-fashioned tar, with no funky PATH issues.
I have been a linux user since 1995, and until I was hired at an all Solaris shop I never appreciated just how many cool things that Solaris 10 (and OpenSolaris) can do head and shoulders above Linux. I'm glad I got into Solaris when I did, though, because I really wouldn't have liked the 7,8, or 9 days (we are switching from 9 to 10 as fast as possible).
Yes, Solaris has its share of warts, as does Linux, but the primary gripes that a Linux admin always comes up with when introduced to Solaris are really very shallow (and usually based on an experience that the admin had with a Solaris 7 box 10 years ago). So what if you have to set a few things the first time you boot the system so root's shell is sane and the
Anyone who hasn't used Solaris in years or who hasn't actually researched the current state of OpenSolaris (what? someone on Slashdot posted without doing any research??), please download a current Solaris Express ISO and install it. You will be amazed at the fact that there is a current X.org (modern drivers, even one you can download from Nvidia!) and Gnome/Mozilla/Evince/etc... on the desktop, and some really cool server features that you never knew you needed, like zones or ZFS.
Educate yourself before you spout off on things that you don't know about.
It's their fault for not checking the "disable remote services" option on startup. Had they done so, then all but a handful of services would start automatically after install, and the ones that do start up listen only on localhost except for ssh. It's what Sun calls their "Secure By Default" stance.
He should have done some research and scanned both regular and Secure By Default, then we would have seen a big difference.
This is exactly the way I feel about the three companies.
A few months ago, my kids and I were discussing what they wanted for Christmas this year. They started going on about the PS3 (in the past, they have had used PS1, N64, and GC consoles, as well as a variety of gameboys). We had a really good discussion which ended up with me stating that I would pretty much only consider the Wii, simply because Nintendo has never tried to screw me over in any way (I paraphrased that part for the littler ones). I can't imagine Nintendo screwing me over in the future either.
Nintendo is all about selling me a console or a handheld that is fun to use, and has fun games to play on it. That's it. A simple transaction. I give the guy at the store some money, and he gives me a console and a game or two. I go home and play it with the kids, and we have a good time. What happened to a company doing one thing and doing it well?
I don't want a "media center" taking over my living room (which is what both the PS3 and the XBox360 are really trying to accomplish). Microsoft and Sony both want to rule my digital world and keep a steady flow of cash going from my pocket to theirs in a variety of ways, especially Sony. Sony, by the way, nows controls the entire media chain from the media creation, to the distribution, to the player, and now the HDTV (and you thought the PS3 was about the games?). The PS3 is really all about the Blu-ray and HDTV.
I hate them both. Forced upgrades from one crappy OS to the next from MS, vendor lock-in like you wouldn't believe, DRM out the wazoo. One part of Sony sells MP3 players and minidisks, and then another part sues people who rip music. Un-be-freaking-leivable.
The irony of the situation is that the online stores attached to the Xbox and PS3 don't interest me in the least (neither do the price tags), but the ability to plonk down $20 online and get 4 older games on the Wii (or 1-2 slightly newer ones) is just my cup of tea.
I've always been a PC gamer, but MS is making that harder on me every day, and I'm getting burned out by the hardware churn. It's getting tougher every year to justify replacing perfectly good computer parts because I want to play the latest and greatest. I've never actually purchased a brand new console before, but I just may find myself picking up a Wii for the kids instead of a new motherboard and CPU for myself this Christmas. I'm actually excited about a console for the first time, ever.
Objects!
Perl == horrible bolted-on afterthought OO
Python == *much* better (real objects, finally!)
Ruby == pure heaven, everything is an object and iterable by default.
I was bored one day at home and recreated a class in ruby that I wrote at work in perl. Took me all day to do something in perl that it took about 1/2 an hour to do in ruby, and I added a couple of features as well. I also spent way more time looking up how to do stuff in perl that in ruby, event though I've programmed off and on in perl for years (a decade, in fact)....
Until the multitude of bugs in it caused it to die a horrible death, and it has never come back. I basically payed $54 USD for Steam.
Now it can't even load any levels on HL2 without some sort of errors about missing model files, memory that can't be "read" (their emphasis, not mine), and a bug where the level starts to load, but after two ticks of the progress bar it drops back to the main game menu and the only thing that can be clicked on is the exit button.