Knowing how to run has made a big difference for me. I was a cross-country track runner in High School, but fattened up for about a decade afterwards until about 30 before becoming a runner again. I've always ran with good quality shoes, etc. but ran the way I was taught in High School: rolling off your heels and lengthening your stride as long as possible in order to maximize speed.
Over the years, I picked up some injuries (ankle, foot, hip, knee) that bothered me while running until I decided to run decidedly on my toes. Mind you, I still have the expensive, therapeutic running shoes, I just run off my toes and shorten my stride somewhat.
The difference has been rather startling. People should NOT run on their heels!
Comparing airliners to cars is a terrible, terrible comparison, and not for the reason that many would think.
Airliners are just ridiculously safe. Statistically speaking, you are safer on your standard 737 jet than you are sitting on your couch, in your living room. Comparing their safety to a car is like comparing the safety of going for a walk in a park to playing with hand grenades.
In this environment, *any* kind of problem is just intolerable. As much as anything could be, airliners demand perfection, and given peoples' general fear of flying (damn the numbers) it makes sense why.
BTW: The reason why a jetliner is statistically safer than sitting on your couch is because people near death due to age/disease don't typically fly but they are likely to sit on their couch.
Do you know why Microsoft only releases patches once a month for its operating systems? Because corporate environments can become violently ill when something is updated without it being tested first.
We even offered to have a "stable" release version with updates only every 1 to 6 months, and have every released version have a 30 day trial period so that they could preview changes. We asked a 5% premium for this service. We thought as much as half of our client base would go for it based on the loud verbal feedback. But as soon as our clients found that they were choosing between having last year's product, totally stable with no updates or getting the new one with all the latest new features, bells, and whistles, guess how popular this option was? How many clients do you think signed that contract?
Not one.
My "narrow-mindedness" comes from my past experience... so now we listen to the whining carefully, and try to identify ways to better disseminate our change logs.
And for the record, a product that doesn't need to be updated is something some programmers strive for: It means they've made something that does its job so well there's no need to change it.
It's also a sign of a stagnant industry/marketplace. Needs change as circumstances change, and if the software doesn't change with the customer, it tends to disappear.
Firefox is following a standard open-source style policy of release early, release often and as a vendor following this exact mantra, I see that although I do hear a lot of whining from some of our (typically more backward) customers, we are able to evolve to meet new needs better than our competitors which has allowed us to grow at a sustained rate better than 50% per year for years on end.
Many of our meetings with clients start with whines about how they have trouble keeping up with all the changes, followed up by hours of specifying new changes and additions that they'd like, closing with my pointing out that all the changes that they requested will be released as developed and them having to keep up with them as they are made available.
Perhaps it's necessary for some people to see improvements in a bad light, but if you really don't like it... leave! Go use some product that doesn't update at all if you want. I hear you can still find Firefox 3.6 binaries if you look hard enough. Even Chrome updates constantly.
But instead, we have reams of exemptions and exceptions for religion which give them a free pass on things that other organizations have to deal with. I find this to be as much a law respecting a religion in that it serves to actively promote the religion by default, since everybody *else* has to pay taxes that effectively promote the religion.
I object to having my tax dollars actively promoting something as repulsive as a stone-age book that promotes rape, slavery, killing babies, and other forms of murder by "holy men" in an abortive effort to define morality.
Apple TV has existed for quite some time now. Despite this, it has yet to become much of a success. Apple probably makes some money on it, but it's just not getting all that much reach. Its integration with an ipad is pretty slick. There's also Google TV which is embedded into other players.
So far, the winner for the alternative TV seems to be gaming devices, like Xbox or PS3.
I also wanted to point out that the difference between full and partial backups disappears when you do backups using file-level hard links as your backup solution.
Doing backups disk-to-disk with rsync, using the hard links option, the difference between partial and full backups disappears. All backups are full AND partial; you get the benefits of both.
We do an "incremental" backup daily, in that only the files changed in the interim transfer as part of the backup, and only the changes occupy additional disk space, but the result is a "full" backup in that we end up with a complete snapshot of the file system that can be copied or used on demand.
Personally, I am positively fanatic about frequent, full, tested, and redundant backups. More than once I've seen a recovery fail when an otherwise frequently performed, frequently tested backup failed at the worst possible moment.
My rule of thumb is that if you ever get to where there are no remaining recovery options in the event of a failure, it's time to add another. Thus, we have redundant points of failure after a failure in (almost) every direction.
Among my other duties at our ASP software company, I perform the system administration, which includes backing up a few hundred databases daily and perhaps few dozens of billion files. To give you some example of our backup size, we currently have about 20 TB of data in redundant, consumer drives in RAID1 fashion, for about 10 TB of effective storage space.
I've gone through dozens of WD consumer drives with nary a failure, while I've had 2 out of 3 consumer Seagate drives fail within a few months, over several model lines.
For the past few years, I've more or less stayed clear of Seagate, although I had a number of their SCSI 10K drives in production with no trouble.
And everywhere you go, you get wildly conflicting results like this. (shrug)
... which works fine until she "needs" to run Sims3, or some obscure compiled video tool used at the University to encode videos. Suddenly, she'll feel betrayed, and those brownie points turn into brown stains in your pants.
Wow. $1,500 per house sounds expensive at first, until you compare average cost/benefits analysis. Spread out over 3 years gives you a ROI price of $41.66 per month. (If you charged $41.66 for 3 years, you'd get your money back)
Spread over 10 years is $12.50/month. Suddenly that's not so expensive, and interest rates are at all time lows. A company with AA+A+A+++ credit should be able to easily support this kind of expense with a 10 year term at 8% or less.
Investors are SCREAMING for anything "sure" more than 5% ROI, this is a pretty simple case to make.
I've used the inflight wifi numerous times, and while latency is what you'd expect on a satellite connection, the bandwidth was decent and usable. For me, it's a pretty simple equation: if I'm in a mood to work, will the work I perform be worth significantly more than the cost of the wifi? In most cases, it is.
Came here to say this, was not disappoint. Spread spectrum technology is not yet on the horizon.
Speaking of it, why hasn't there been a spread spectrum wifi 802.11SS that uses this technology? It would be nice to have a wifi hotspot that you don't have to dicker with channels to get working in a busy area....
Conspiracy or no, the Air Force did what NASA could not: demonstrate a PRACTICAL, reusable space plane.
NASA had a "designed by committee" project that threw in everything including redundant kitchen sinks and ended up with a bloated whale of a project that was highly impractical and utterly a failure at what it was intended to do: reduce costs. Instead what we got was something designed by committees of non experts that ended up with something like Homer Simpson's badly designed car that has been an utter failure in the marketplace.
This is a classic White Elephant development that simultaneously bankrupted NASA while disabling the development of any more feasible technologies. So we're stuck with it while NASA tries to regroup and come up with a strategy that doesn't suck.
Meanwhile, belief in NASA's proficiency is at an all time low, so even though they are, in fact, doing some really cool stuff, the fact is that the worlds wealthiest nation has one of the world's least useful space programs.
So the USAF built their own. Is anybody surprised?
Free markets are largely fictitious. They can only be maintained through heavy government intervention *cough* anti trust laws *cough* and require strong public infrastructure and an educated population. In short, there is not and never has been a "free market" except that which has been fostered and tended by a government relatively free of corruption. Without this government oversight, a "free market" quickly gets taken over by privately held monopolies that are then leveraged against other markets. The market then degrades into a highly capitalized form of fascism, as is happening now in the USA.
Today, anybody can afford to board a high speed aircraft and travel at 350 MPH at 40,000 with safety that rivals our living rooms. Think about that. A chair, 40,000 feet in the air, travelling 350 MPH, affordable to nearly everybody, complete with magazines to read, and we mostly complain about the noise.
More choices typically work out better for consumers. Sure, you can game on your WinPC, or OSX, or your Dreamcast or XBox or whatever, but arguing that enabling Linux gaming is a bad idea is terribly short sighted. More choices = more competition = better value for consumers.
I, for one, will likely sign up for steam/Linux and make sure to buy a game or three to see how it goes as I support this development. I sincerely hope Valve gets plenty rich doing this as it finally proves a business model that Loki Games (remember them?) couldn't do a decade or so ago. (I bought all their games)
I think where Microsoft did wrong with Windows 8 is in leaving their core strength: that of copying successful people with something cheaper that's passably good. Unfortunately, for MS, they've been upstaged in their core strength by Google's Android.
Lived with one for years. So far, no breakage. My laptop, on the other hand... Bzzzt!
they don't have a DVD drive
You still use them? I haven't used or missed mine in years... Bzzzt!
they're harder to type on
Agree with you there.
the screen is tiny
Tablets come in various sizes. I don't like the 10", preferring the 7" size myself. Bzzzt!
they get dirty with fingerprints
Never noticed this as a problem. I typically just rub against my shirt every so often. Bzzzt!
they don't run 99% of software ever written
If you want MS Office, buy a PC. They run enough stuff that it's rare for me to think "Geez I wish it had that". I'm more likely to experience the opposite - the tablet/phone doing stuff I didn't think was even possible. Point your phone at a plane going by and get an instant read out of what flight it is? Really?!?!? (Bzzzt!)
the browsers don't display pages correctly
Some pages, perhaps. It was worse a few years ago. Nowadays, not so much. Bzzzt!
the battery life is a lie
My 7" Android tablet comfortably gets about 6 hours in continuous use, the iPad typically lasts a few days between charges. Neither is annoying. Bzzzt!
most don't have USB flash drive capabilities
Depends on the model you buy. My tablet has room for a micro flash card which fits nicely into a USB adapter. (Bzzzt!)
it's difficult to do meaningful work on them in any way shape or form
Here is the point of tablets. I don't *do meaningful work* on a tablet. It's a consumer device, it's a replacement for the newspaper or magazine. Don't view them as a replacement for a "full on computer" because they aren't. But as they get refined, expect them to creep up the food chain as their clear advantages overwhelm the PC.
For example, many (most?) tablets support bluetooth, and [bluetooth keyboards have long been available](http://www.amazon.com/s/?rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Abluetooth+tablet+keyboard&keywords=bluetooth+tablet+keyboard&ie=UTF8&psrk=bluetooth+tablet+keyboard) at prices that compare roughly to "normal" keyboards.
So even here, it's a draw, depending on what you call "meaningful work". They aren't a desktop replacement. I don't write software on a tablet, I do it on a Fedora laptop. But it's silly to suggest that simply because it's not a desktop, that they are worthless.
They aren't. (Bzzzt!)
Oh, BTW, your score appears to be about 1:10 against.
In a literal sense, taking time to learn new stuff is only worthwhile when the new stuff you learned is at least more valuable than what you already know.
Knowing mechanical skills is valuable. But I'm a software engineer, and I get paid significantly more than I pay my mechanic. So, learning how to fix cars would be antiproductive two-fold; I would not only waste time learning something less valuable than what I already know how to do, I would also spend time learning to do this that I could be spending to earn money.
Engineers as well as skilled workers of many different fields face this exact dilemma. It's not so much a problem as it is reality.
That said, I take the time to learn stuff (including mechanical skills) anyway because I invariably come away from it with a point of view that I didn't previously understand and that makes me more valuable in all terms, near and far, and I simply enjoy understanding stuff, from piloting a plane to rebuilding an engine to understanding canvas manipulation algorithms in javascript.
Just for starters, it needs to allow people to view others' calendars, easily schedule meetings in other peoples' available time, allow booking of resources like rooms, etc
Zimbra does all this easily and well. Also, there's an open source version of it, though we pay for the connectors for Android/iPhone/Exchange/etc.
Came here to say this. Unfortunately I have no mod points. Enterprise drives are more expensive, but if you need the performance, are an excellent option.
My wife recently bought a new ultrabook from Dell. She loves the laptop. It's sleek, lightweight, fast, and has excellent battery life. She tolerates Win8. As she puts it "It randomly does stuff that takes you out of what you were doing, and then I have to go to start and bring back Windows".
There you have it, folks! A version of Windows that likes to randomly hide itself!
When you have a board that is flaky, that works "most of the time" and fails intermittently, 10 seconds in a microwave is a wonderful way to make sure that the part fails as expected without causing any of the visible damage that might get your RMA rejected.
Few things suck worse than sending in an RMA and getting the same item back. (I've verified that this was happening by putting a few very discreet marks on the edges of the card with a permanent marker)
No, it doesn't have nearly the satisfaction of a hammer, but you can still cackle inwardly while you count to 10...
Slashdot Mirror
Knowing how to run has made a big difference for me. I was a cross-country track runner in High School, but fattened up for about a decade afterwards until about 30 before becoming a runner again. I've always ran with good quality shoes, etc. but ran the way I was taught in High School: rolling off your heels and lengthening your stride as long as possible in order to maximize speed.
Over the years, I picked up some injuries (ankle, foot, hip, knee) that bothered me while running until I decided to run decidedly on my toes. Mind you, I still have the expensive, therapeutic running shoes, I just run off my toes and shorten my stride somewhat.
The difference has been rather startling. People should NOT run on their heels!
Comparing airliners to cars is a terrible, terrible comparison, and not for the reason that many would think.
Airliners are just ridiculously safe. Statistically speaking, you are safer on your standard 737 jet than you are sitting on your couch, in your living room. Comparing their safety to a car is like comparing the safety of going for a walk in a park to playing with hand grenades.
In this environment, *any* kind of problem is just intolerable. As much as anything could be, airliners demand perfection, and given peoples' general fear of flying (damn the numbers) it makes sense why.
BTW: The reason why a jetliner is statistically safer than sitting on your couch is because people near death due to age/disease don't typically fly but they are likely to sit on their couch.
Do you know why Microsoft only releases patches once a month for its operating systems? Because corporate environments can become violently ill when something is updated without it being tested first.
We even offered to have a "stable" release version with updates only every 1 to 6 months, and have every released version have a 30 day trial period so that they could preview changes. We asked a 5% premium for this service. We thought as much as half of our client base would go for it based on the loud verbal feedback. But as soon as our clients found that they were choosing between having last year's product, totally stable with no updates or getting the new one with all the latest new features, bells, and whistles, guess how popular this option was? How many clients do you think signed that contract?
Not one.
My "narrow-mindedness" comes from my past experience... so now we listen to the whining carefully, and try to identify ways to better disseminate our change logs.
And for the record, a product that doesn't need to be updated is something some programmers strive for: It means they've made something that does its job so well there's no need to change it.
It's also a sign of a stagnant industry/marketplace. Needs change as circumstances change, and if the software doesn't change with the customer, it tends to disappear.
Honestly, your whining is counterproductive.
Firefox is following a standard open-source style policy of release early, release often and as a vendor following this exact mantra, I see that although I do hear a lot of whining from some of our (typically more backward) customers, we are able to evolve to meet new needs better than our competitors which has allowed us to grow at a sustained rate better than 50% per year for years on end.
Many of our meetings with clients start with whines about how they have trouble keeping up with all the changes, followed up by hours of specifying new changes and additions that they'd like, closing with my pointing out that all the changes that they requested will be released as developed and them having to keep up with them as they are made available.
Perhaps it's necessary for some people to see improvements in a bad light, but if you really don't like it... leave! Go use some product that doesn't update at all if you want. I hear you can still find Firefox 3.6 binaries if you look hard enough. Even Chrome updates constantly.
Another parallel study showed that 96.45% of all statistics posted in blogs and other social media were, in fact, made up.
Points, all of which, I find making laws with respect to religions nauseating. The exact first ammendment is that
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
But instead, we have reams of exemptions and exceptions for religion which give them a free pass on things that other organizations have to deal with. I find this to be as much a law respecting a religion in that it serves to actively promote the religion by default, since everybody *else* has to pay taxes that effectively promote the religion.
I object to having my tax dollars actively promoting something as repulsive as a stone-age book that promotes rape, slavery, killing babies, and other forms of murder by "holy men" in an abortive effort to define morality.
Apple TV has existed for quite some time now. Despite this, it has yet to become much of a success. Apple probably makes some money on it, but it's just not getting all that much reach. Its integration with an ipad is pretty slick. There's also Google TV which is embedded into other players.
So far, the winner for the alternative TV seems to be gaming devices, like Xbox or PS3.
I also wanted to point out that the difference between full and partial backups disappears when you do backups using file-level hard links as your backup solution.
Doing backups disk-to-disk with rsync, using the hard links option, the difference between partial and full backups disappears. All backups are full AND partial; you get the benefits of both.
We do an "incremental" backup daily, in that only the files changed in the interim transfer as part of the backup, and only the changes occupy additional disk space, but the result is a "full" backup in that we end up with a complete snapshot of the file system that can be copied or used on demand.
This is really the way to go, and our particular solution is free and open sourced long ago.
Personally, I am positively fanatic about frequent, full, tested, and redundant backups. More than once I've seen a recovery fail when an otherwise frequently performed, frequently tested backup failed at the worst possible moment.
My rule of thumb is that if you ever get to where there are no remaining recovery options in the event of a failure, it's time to add another. Thus, we have redundant points of failure after a failure in (almost) every direction.
Backups of backups, as it were....
I grind through lots of hard drives.
Among my other duties at our ASP software company, I perform the system administration, which includes backing up a few hundred databases daily and perhaps few dozens of billion files. To give you some example of our backup size, we currently have about 20 TB of data in redundant, consumer drives in RAID1 fashion, for about 10 TB of effective storage space.
I've gone through dozens of WD consumer drives with nary a failure, while I've had 2 out of 3 consumer Seagate drives fail within a few months, over several model lines.
For the past few years, I've more or less stayed clear of Seagate, although I had a number of their SCSI 10K drives in production with no trouble.
And everywhere you go, you get wildly conflicting results like this. (shrug)
... which works fine until she "needs" to run Sims3, or some obscure compiled video tool used at the University to encode videos. Suddenly, she'll feel betrayed, and those brownie points turn into brown stains in your pants.
Wow. $1,500 per house sounds expensive at first, until you compare average cost/benefits analysis. Spread out over 3 years gives you a ROI price of $41.66 per month. (If you charged $41.66 for 3 years, you'd get your money back)
Spread over 10 years is $12.50/month. Suddenly that's not so expensive, and interest rates are at all time lows. A company with AA+A+A+++ credit should be able to easily support this kind of expense with a 10 year term at 8% or less.
Investors are SCREAMING for anything "sure" more than 5% ROI, this is a pretty simple case to make.
WTF AT&T?!?!?
I've used the inflight wifi numerous times, and while latency is what you'd expect on a satellite connection, the bandwidth was decent and usable. For me, it's a pretty simple equation: if I'm in a mood to work, will the work I perform be worth significantly more than the cost of the wifi? In most cases, it is.
Came here to say this, was not disappoint. Spread spectrum technology is not yet on the horizon.
Speaking of it, why hasn't there been a spread spectrum wifi 802.11SS that uses this technology? It would be nice to have a wifi hotspot that you don't have to dicker with channels to get working in a busy area....
Conspiracy or no, the Air Force did what NASA could not: demonstrate a PRACTICAL, reusable space plane.
NASA had a "designed by committee" project that threw in everything including redundant kitchen sinks and ended up with a bloated whale of a project that was highly impractical and utterly a failure at what it was intended to do: reduce costs. Instead what we got was something designed by committees of non experts that ended up with something like Homer Simpson's badly designed car that has been an utter failure in the marketplace.
This is a classic White Elephant development that simultaneously bankrupted NASA while disabling the development of any more feasible technologies. So we're stuck with it while NASA tries to regroup and come up with a strategy that doesn't suck.
Meanwhile, belief in NASA's proficiency is at an all time low, so even though they are, in fact, doing some really cool stuff, the fact is that the worlds wealthiest nation has one of the world's least useful space programs.
So the USAF built their own. Is anybody surprised?
Free markets are largely fictitious. They can only be maintained through heavy government intervention *cough* anti trust laws *cough* and require strong public infrastructure and an educated population. In short, there is not and never has been a "free market" except that which has been fostered and tended by a government relatively free of corruption. Without this government oversight, a "free market" quickly gets taken over by privately held monopolies that are then leveraged against other markets. The market then degrades into a highly capitalized form of fascism, as is happening now in the USA.
For example, even the USA at its height had much of its "private enterprise" industrial strength funded by public entities. here is an excellent example, makes for a fascinating read.
Uh, yeah. Let me guess. It should be on the market in five years, just like every other solar technical wonder.
Oh please. If only you knew what was really going on, you'd have trouble breathing. Prices for solar power have dropped so rapidly and so consistently people are calling it "Moore's Law for Solar". A quote from the article: Solar modules prices have dropped from $300 per watt in 1956 to $50 per watt in the 1970s to $10 in the 90s to $1.05 a watt today. Just what did you think this should look like?
Approximately half of all the generating capacity last year was from renewable energy sources. The miracle of having an actually usable smartphone was a pipe dream just 5 years ago. Now, even most poor folks have one.
Today, anybody can afford to board a high speed aircraft and travel at 350 MPH at 40,000 with safety that rivals our living rooms. Think about that. A chair, 40,000 feet in the air, travelling 350 MPH, affordable to nearly everybody, complete with magazines to read, and we mostly complain about the noise.
Sheesh.
More choices typically work out better for consumers. Sure, you can game on your WinPC, or OSX, or your Dreamcast or XBox or whatever, but arguing that enabling Linux gaming is a bad idea is terribly short sighted. More choices = more competition = better value for consumers.
I, for one, will likely sign up for steam/Linux and make sure to buy a game or three to see how it goes as I support this development. I sincerely hope Valve gets plenty rich doing this as it finally proves a business model that Loki Games (remember them?) couldn't do a decade or so ago. (I bought all their games)
What use would it be to invent something that duplicates iOS or Android?
Those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it
I don't know. Why don't you ask the guys who blatantly copied somebody else's interface or maybe perhaps the the guys who blatantly copied those guys to make billions of dollars?
I think where Microsoft did wrong with Windows 8 is in leaving their core strength: that of copying successful people with something cheaper that's passably good. Unfortunately, for MS, they've been upstaged in their core strength by Google's Android.
Taking the points one by one:
They're too fragile
Lived with one for years. So far, no breakage. My laptop, on the other hand... Bzzzt!
they don't have a DVD drive
You still use them? I haven't used or missed mine in years... Bzzzt!
they're harder to type on
Agree with you there.
the screen is tiny
Tablets come in various sizes. I don't like the 10", preferring the 7" size myself. Bzzzt!
they get dirty with fingerprints
Never noticed this as a problem. I typically just rub against my shirt every so often. Bzzzt!
they don't run 99% of software ever written
If you want MS Office, buy a PC. They run enough stuff that it's rare for me to think "Geez I wish it had that". I'm more likely to experience the opposite - the tablet/phone doing stuff I didn't think was even possible. Point your phone at a plane going by and get an instant read out of what flight it is? Really?!?!? (Bzzzt!)
the browsers don't display pages correctly
Some pages, perhaps. It was worse a few years ago. Nowadays, not so much. Bzzzt!
the battery life is a lie
My 7" Android tablet comfortably gets about 6 hours in continuous use, the iPad typically lasts a few days between charges. Neither is annoying. Bzzzt!
most don't have USB flash drive capabilities
Depends on the model you buy. My tablet has room for a micro flash card which fits nicely into a USB adapter. (Bzzzt!)
they don't work with the majority of printers
Strange that I haven't noticed, being as cloud printing works fine... (ahem... Bzzzt!)
it's difficult to do meaningful work on them in any way shape or form
Here is the point of tablets. I don't *do meaningful work* on a tablet. It's a consumer device, it's a replacement for the newspaper or magazine. Don't view them as a replacement for a "full on computer" because they aren't. But as they get refined, expect them to creep up the food chain as their clear advantages overwhelm the PC.
For example, many (most?) tablets support bluetooth, and [bluetooth keyboards have long been available](http://www.amazon.com/s/?rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Abluetooth+tablet+keyboard&keywords=bluetooth+tablet+keyboard&ie=UTF8&psrk=bluetooth+tablet+keyboard) at prices that compare roughly to "normal" keyboards.
So even here, it's a draw, depending on what you call "meaningful work". They aren't a desktop replacement. I don't write software on a tablet, I do it on a Fedora laptop. But it's silly to suggest that simply because it's not a desktop, that they are worthless.
They aren't. (Bzzzt!)
Oh, BTW, your score appears to be about 1:10 against.
In a literal sense, taking time to learn new stuff is only worthwhile when the new stuff you learned is at least more valuable than what you already know.
Knowing mechanical skills is valuable. But I'm a software engineer, and I get paid significantly more than I pay my mechanic. So, learning how to fix cars would be antiproductive two-fold; I would not only waste time learning something less valuable than what I already know how to do, I would also spend time learning to do this that I could be spending to earn money.
Engineers as well as skilled workers of many different fields face this exact dilemma. It's not so much a problem as it is reality.
That said, I take the time to learn stuff (including mechanical skills) anyway because I invariably come away from it with a point of view that I didn't previously understand and that makes me more valuable in all terms, near and far, and I simply enjoy understanding stuff, from piloting a plane to rebuilding an engine to understanding canvas manipulation algorithms in javascript.
Just for starters, it needs to allow people to view others' calendars, easily schedule meetings in other peoples' available time, allow booking of resources like rooms, etc
Zimbra does all this easily and well. Also, there's an open source version of it, though we pay for the connectors for Android/iPhone/Exchange/etc.
Came here to say this. Unfortunately I have no mod points. Enterprise drives are more expensive, but if you need the performance, are an excellent option.
My wife recently bought a new ultrabook from Dell. She loves the laptop. It's sleek, lightweight, fast, and has excellent battery life. She tolerates Win8. As she puts it "It randomly does stuff that takes you out of what you were doing, and then I have to go to start and bring back Windows".
There you have it, folks! A version of Windows that likes to randomly hide itself!
No, I'm rather serious!
When you have a board that is flaky, that works "most of the time" and fails intermittently, 10 seconds in a microwave is a wonderful way to make sure that the part fails as expected without causing any of the visible damage that might get your RMA rejected.
Few things suck worse than sending in an RMA and getting the same item back. (I've verified that this was happening by putting a few very discreet marks on the edges of the card with a permanent marker)
No, it doesn't have nearly the satisfaction of a hammer, but you can still cackle inwardly while you count to 10...