Cool. I'll grant you *all* the best sites for wind generation in the US, 80% utilized, running at maximum efficiency. How close does that get to providing as much power as the current operational coal plants in the US?
How much the power costs is *entirely* the whole issue. It's no coincidence that the last 300 years of progress in Western Civilization has been the single 300-year period where energy became cheap and plentiful. The concept of steam engines was not new at the beginning of the industrial revolution, but burning coal and getting usable mechanical energy back was new, and being able to do it for pennies per pound was an amazing increase over the cost of human or animal labor, away from the water sources where you could previously construct mills.
And it's not just making do without luxuries. What happens if the cost of milk, eggs and bread suddenly jumped by 2, 3 or 10 times what they cost now? The entire distribution system for everything that people eat and drink (for folks who don't grow their own food) depends on cheap energy. So does the construction and housing market. And large-scale industrial agriculture. Corn, soybeans and rice don't grow themselves, at least not at rates that are profitable to harvest and truck over hundreds of miles to sell and refine into food products.
Don't get me wrong, there's a lot more that could be done to make burning coal environmentally friendly - adoption of clean-coal tech is one of the arguing points between industry, the Bush administration and environmentalists - but cheap energy doesn't just mean that you can afford a yearly vacation to the beach, cheap energy is what makes our civilization possible.
I don't want my kids to get cancer either, but I certainly don't want them to live in a world without the benefits of a working economy and civilization.
While there are games where the online play is the whole reason to buy the game (Halo 2), for the vast majority of games sold, it's just a "cool feature", as in:
"Wow, lookit this! GweenZow 5 has split-screen support!" "Yeah, and online multiplayer co-op!" "And I can use my driving wheel and pedals with it!"
It might sell a few more copies of the game, and in some genres it's simply expected to be there, but I'd argue it doesn't make a huge difference to your average gamer with your average game.
I think console-based MMORPGs will probably be the wedge that drives larger-scale online play for consoles, much as first-person shooters (Doom, Quake, TeamFortress, CounterStrike, etc.) drove larger-scale online play for PCs.
Much as it's really really hard to forsee a future minus oil that looks anything like the present, it's really really hard to forsee a future minus coal. The problem isn't so much that there aren't alternatives, it's that they're not economically viable and the requirements to set them up and run them are... lots of cheap energy. From coal. And oil.
A few questions for those who think "nuclear power is fine": exactly how much energy is required to get uranium into a usable form to generate steam and spin turbines? And where does *that* come from? And exactly how efficient are nuclear plants at generating energy anyway? Most answers you get from official sources are there to provide a justification for running enough nuke plants to keep a strategic nuclear weapons stockpile going.
Dollar for dollar, coal is simpler better than any other alternative for generating electricity. If you'd like to see wind, solar and hydro power reign supreme, be prepared to pay several dollars per kilowatt-hour instead of the 8 to 20 cents you're paying now.
Want to see an economic shock worse than the Great Depression? Mandate a switch away from oil and coal starting tomorrow. You'd be lucky to have enough broken pieces of Western Civilization 20 years later to make a country equivalent to 16th-century Britain.
Be careful. The last thing anyone needs is a more *effective* government. The power available to a modern state is a dangerous, subtle, almost inherently evil thing, and should under all circumstances be controlled, slowed, diffused and decentralized wherever possible.
Nazi Germany was effective. Stalin's USSR was effective. So was Mao's PRC.
Democracies aren't, by nature, terribly effective. That's rather the whole point of them.
History is filled with terrible examples of citizens clamoring for a "more effective" government and then getting exactly what they asked for, which is hardly ever what they actually wanted.
The Secretary for the agency gets grilled by Congress-critters on why their agency is failing, again. The Secretary doesn't really care about IT security, but (s)he does care about not getting grilled by Congress-critters.
The secretary authorizes some obscene amount of dollars to go towards "improving IT security" and signs off on some plans that purport to do this. Often these are bundled together with initiatives for IT centralization, better management practices, the yearly re-org plan, etc. If you're lucky, some fair portion of the obscene dollar amount actually goes towards something that might really help IT security.
Various political appointees (Deputy Secretaries, Assistant Deputy Secretaries, Associate Deputy Assistant Secretaries, etc.) get shuffled around in the post-Congressional-snitfit era and engage in vicious political battles that make Imperial ascension politics in the Roman Empire look like a shuffleboard tournament. This of course immensely helps the prospects of improving IT security.
Meanwhile, various Beltway contractors propose all sorts of interesting things the agency can do with the money. The ones who are already working with the agency make recommendations to steer the dollars towards projects they can successfully bid on and ways they can increase their headcount, and the outsiders try to weasel their way in. Vendors make extravagent promises about their gear and generously distribute dinners, trips, tickets and job offers in desperate attempts to land a multi-million dollar sale.
Somebody (no one ever admits to this later) actually buys off on some subset of these promises and signs a PO to Make This Happen.
The money eventually filters down to the GS-15s and 14s (career employees) and contractors who Actually Do Something instead of going to meetings all day and answering email. They often emulate the successful political appointees above them by holding lots of meetings and sending lots of email. However, they get to Actually Do Something as well. Lucky them.
Some random collection of program managers, unwitting new subcontractor hires, and government support employees are thrown together to Make This Work. If they're lucky, enough of the people on the task have worked together before to know how to navigate through the bureaucratic, corporate and technical obstacles to have something to show for their efforts after 6 months. If not, well, the government paid for Yet Another Jobs Program.
3 times out of 10, the proposed solution fails so miserably that they can't even convince the other contractors and govvies to put it into production.
6 times out of 10, it works just well enough to shoehorn the "solution" into production, as long as the duct tape holds and they can hire enough bodies for the Mongolian Horde approach to IT ("quick, get more people for the overnight shift, the ticket count's escalating again!"). But that's okay, 'cause the same contractors and govvies will get to fix it again next year when the problem still isn't solved.
1 time out of 10, they actually Make It Work. Wow. People stumble around in shock, awe and amazement at what they have created. Users are happy, management is off their backs. But don't worry. Something will change in another 6 months to bring completely new requirements into the picture, and you get to roll the dice again.
Specifically, you should save your anger for these people (just going from the past 40 years of American history):
Henry Kissenger Robert McNamara Donald Rumsfeld Richard Cheney
As much as Gen. Westmoreland was to blame for many of the mistakes of Vietnam, it was the first two goddamn SOBs who were most responsible.
Ditto for the last two. CENTCOM generals may be at the top of the military command structure for the US forces in Iraq, but we wouldn't be there in the position we're in now except for number 3 and number 4 on the above list.
Long declines in something as critical as oil are not typically smooth.
Look at the decades-long economic disruption brought on by OPEC's embargo of the West and the oil shocks of the 1970s. It took until Reagan's second term (1985-1989) for the US economy to really recover, and you didn't see sustained economic growth in most sectors until after the first Gulf War in 1991.
Don't mistake the reactions of consumers to a steady increase in oil prices ("oh geez, gas went up by 5 cents a gallon, oh well") to what happens if it jumps up significantly ("OMFG gas is $4 a gallon quick fill up fill up!"). Panic buying alone will then bump prices higher.
Add in the effects of just-in-time inventories by large resellers and the importance of transportation costs for, well, anything that doesn't involve shoving bits across a communications line, and suddenly it's not just $40 to fill up your Honda Civic's gas tank, you're paying $8 for a gallon of milk. And everything at your local Wal-Mart (or le Target, or your retailer of choice) is going to cost 5 to 20% more. If it's sustained long enough, FedEx, UPS and the USPS will bump up their rates for cargo and freight first, then for moving bits of paper.
I, for one, do not wish to live in a world where the Peak Oil theory is true. Whole civilizations have collapsed for lesser reasons.
No problem - my civilization will research Future Tech, and will discover ways to re-populate exhausted resources, along with getting a score and happiness bonus....
My first system was a TI-99/4a that my dad got in the early early 80s (1982 or 1983). He's a EE and was doing some amount of microcontroller programming @ work, and thought this would be a cool toy computer. We had a tape drive hooked up so we could use the BASIC interpreter and run programs from tape... I remember typing in programs from magazines and even whole books of code ("BASIC games" and stuff like that, it's still sitting in my parents' basement), and getting hooked on programming that way.
We had some game cartridges too (Parsec, woo woo!), and my dad & brother & I all spent time playing those, but it was the idea that you could type in your programs and RUN them that amazed me. We got an NES later, but the idea of programmable computers stuck with me. Guess that's why I like using Linux/BSD/open-source operating systems instead of Windows.:)
We later got an IBM Model 8180 PC (with CGA graphics!) in 1985 that my mom used to run her own business, and a bastard 386 clone with a VGA card around 1991 or 1992. The first computer that was actually mine, all mine, was a Compaq Presario CDS 524 - all-in-one box, 14" monitor, 4MB RAM, Cirrus Logic VGA chipset with 512K VRAM - took it to college, and had all sorts of fun with it until I bought a Gateway Pentium Pro box a few years later.
Don't feel too bad. He has the brains, the political cunning, and (had) the respect of enough people to stop this train wreck if he wanted to.
Powell's gotten a lot of good PR over the years, and had made good use of it prior to his UN speech, but don't make the mistake of believing everything (good or bad) that's said about him. He's a smart guy, most importantly in keeping quiet and allowing others to project their ideals of The Good General onto himself, but don't for a moment think that he's not as tainted as anyone else is in Washington.
Games released Jan 2003 - Jan 2006 that provided > 3 months of replay value for me:
Civilization IV (November 2005): Booyah. 3 months might be stretching it, but this is the best Civ game in a long time, and I've already logged 80+ hours playing this so far.
World of Warcraft (November 2004): No, I don't want to think about how much time I've spent playing it, but I've had an active account for the past 14 months, for whatever that's worth, and I keep logging in and playing "just another hour...".
Neverwinter Nights - Shadows of Undrentide (June 2003), Hordes of the Underdark (December 2003): Two expansion packs for NwN. While I didn't spend a lot of time playing the single-player campaign, I don't know how much time I spent building modules, playing games online, or playing through 3rd-party modules. I keep going back to the game because it provides so many opportunities.
Civ III Conquests (November 2003): Expansion pack for Civ III, but as with Civ IV above, I got my money's worth out of this purchase with hundreds of hours total play time on this expansion.
Now, I've bought other games during the past 3 years that I haven't played that much (The Sims 2 and Sid Meier's Pirates! in the past year), but I've found a few enjoyable ones to come back and play, and that's just the best out of the 2 genres I spend time playing. RPGs and, um, Civ. Yes, it *is* its own genre.
For consoles, I could probably add Halo + Halo 2 on Xbox, Madden , and Mario Kart on the GameCube to round these off, since those are the "social" games I play with other folks that I keep coming back to. Plus Final Fantasy Tactics on the GBA for downtime like plane flights, public transit, waiting for people, etc.
Maybe these don't float your boat, but I have fun with 'em.
If a grocery store starts selling VoIP hardware, that surely means that it's a commodity. Commoditization means that consumers will choose services based on prices first and features later (think bargain-basement $399 PCs from Dell or Wal-Mart). Commoditization means that there are products that are "good enough", and the winning suppliers will win on best value and lowest price.
It's time enough for the telcos and other lumbering pseudo-government regulatory-era dinosaurs to shape up and actually compete for consumers or die.
Speaking as a low-5-digit ID, the whole ScuttleMonkey + BeatlesBeatles shit makes me want to get the (fixed) slashcode that runs Plastic and make a Slashdot2. Moderated submission queues + writeups (no need for editors), karma systems that work, etc. Not like Plastic doesn't have its issues, and some days I'm surprised that Slashdot actually works at all, but I don't even read stories anymore. Just comments starting at +2.
240:1 servers:admins. Admin = me. I did have a backup, but only in the sense of "help help everthing's on fire and he's out can anyone help?". Elsewhere, I've done 20:1 users:admins w/ mixed NT + Unix workstations, 100:1 users:support staff (30 staff = 8 server admins, 14 helpdesk staff, 8 managers; and yes, that's too many managers), and 10:1 servers:admins in an overstaffed gov't Unix shop. Right now it's something like 50:1 servers:admins for the boxes I'm dealing with.
Automation is your friend. If you don't know a scripting language, learn one. Hell, spending an hour reading the output of 'help' from an NT command prompt and going through each command to figure out what it does and doesn't do is a good starting point if you're not already familiar with Windows batch files. You're going to have to learn some combination of shell scripting, Perl and Expect in the *nix world. PHP + MySQL are good to know too, for being able to throw up a quick web-based solution to a business problem, or to modify an existing open-source LAMP application to suit your purpose.
It's doable, and I still have time to spend hacking on side projects, doing additional automation + scripts for other people and departments, writing/customizing reports and reading Slashdot.:)
Look at ways to reduce or completely eliminate time spent on repetitive tasks. Fewer bigger servers > more smaller servers. Consider your architecture in terms of what users need to do and how to do that for the least possible effort and cost. If you have a fast, reliable network and users don't need to run local I/O intensive apps (2D/3D manipulation programs like Photoshop or AutoCAD are classic examples) on their desks, look at using Citrix or Tarantella or NoMachine or SunRays to serve desktops remotely and cut down on admin costs for supporting apps. Put data in a central location and BACK IT UP. Databases are good. Performance monitoring is good. Centralized management is good. But remember that not all solutions work for all environments, remember to be flexible and aware of your organization's needs because the Gods of Good IT Practice won't pay your rent at the end of the month.
Look at possible points of failure and figure out what it would cost to eliminate or reduce them, and come up with a cost/benefit picture for management. There will be times when management says no, but as long as they recognize that not spending $2k now could lead to a weeklong network outage, then you've at least let them know the consequences.
Dell, Dell, Dell. The customer at one site decided to buy into Dell's 'home-grown'mid-tier SAN offering in that brief period of time around 2001 after Dell and EMC had parted ways and before Dell came back to its senses and re-partnered with EMC. The re-badged EMC Clariion controllers + arrays on a Brocade fabric had not given us a single issue in the year they'd been in use, but this new demonic half-breed SAN shows up as part of the "new Win2K SAN" (yes, this customer ended up with 4, I kid you not, 4 different and non-connected SANs in the same physical server room).
Dell techs came, and Dell techs went. We had a former field-circus clown who was "certified" on this new storage system sitting in our server room, leafing through the product manual and scratching his head while customers were ranting and raving about not being able to get to their files. The cluster software didn't work. Various bits of the hardware routinely committed seppuku rather than operate with that demon of a storage system. The Dell-trained installers ran the cables backwards between the disk trays and the controller (gee, I wonder where all these fiber-channel errors are coming from). Files mysteriously disappeared. Various VPs within Dell called and made weekly pledges of earnestness in an effort to not get their product thrown out of the server room.
I'm happy to use their laptops and desktops as long as someone else pays for it:), and their entry-level to midrange server offerings aren't significantly worse than anyone else's, but may I be damned to the foulest depths of Hell if I ever recommend their storage systems and professional enterprise services to anyone. Ever.
i burned all my mod points already, but someone needs to mod the parent post up to at least +3. this is just sad sad sad, and while most gamers i know would not at all qualify as addicts, some folks will latch onto games (muds and mmorpgs more than other types, perhaps) and do nothing else with their lives.
Lotus Notes *is* a hodgepodge of contact management and e-mail software. Have you used it? More importantly, have you used it and not run away, screaming in terror?
It's like IBM decided to add email functionality to a decent groupware product, but hired programmers who read Mandarin Chinese to implement the design specs written in Hungarian. And the only translator they could talk to had really bad reception on their cell phone.
Googling for "lotus notes worst user interface" gives about 97,200 results. Go figure.
Um, yeah, I can really see a "family-friendly" magazine carrying strips like this, or this, or even this (one of my favorites). Even the Washington Post got flack back when For Better or Worse ran a storyline with about a gay character. Can you imagine the uproar generated from just a *week* of Gabe and Tycho's standard fare?
Don't get me wrong, PA makes me laugh more than any other gaming comic out there, but it's not something that I would want my baby daughter reading on the Sunday comics page.
Slashdot Mirror
Cool. I'll grant you *all* the best sites for wind generation in the US, 80% utilized, running at maximum efficiency. How close does that get to providing as much power as the current operational coal plants in the US?
How much the power costs is *entirely* the whole issue. It's no coincidence that the last 300 years of progress in Western Civilization has been the single 300-year period where energy became cheap and plentiful. The concept of steam engines was not new at the beginning of the industrial revolution, but burning coal and getting usable mechanical energy back was new, and being able to do it for pennies per pound was an amazing increase over the cost of human or animal labor, away from the water sources where you could previously construct mills.
And it's not just making do without luxuries. What happens if the cost of milk, eggs and bread suddenly jumped by 2, 3 or 10 times what they cost now? The entire distribution system for everything that people eat and drink (for folks who don't grow their own food) depends on cheap energy. So does the construction and housing market. And large-scale industrial agriculture. Corn, soybeans and rice don't grow themselves, at least not at rates that are profitable to harvest and truck over hundreds of miles to sell and refine into food products.
Don't get me wrong, there's a lot more that could be done to make burning coal environmentally friendly - adoption of clean-coal tech is one of the arguing points between industry, the Bush administration and environmentalists - but cheap energy doesn't just mean that you can afford a yearly vacation to the beach, cheap energy is what makes our civilization possible.
I don't want my kids to get cancer either, but I certainly don't want them to live in a world without the benefits of a working economy and civilization.
While there are games where the online play is the whole reason to buy the game (Halo 2), for the vast majority of games sold, it's just a "cool feature", as in:
"Wow, lookit this! GweenZow 5 has split-screen support!"
"Yeah, and online multiplayer co-op!"
"And I can use my driving wheel and pedals with it!"
It might sell a few more copies of the game, and in some genres it's simply expected to be there, but I'd argue it doesn't make a huge difference to your average gamer with your average game.
I think console-based MMORPGs will probably be the wedge that drives larger-scale online play for consoles, much as first-person shooters (Doom, Quake, TeamFortress, CounterStrike, etc.) drove larger-scale online play for PCs.
Much as it's really really hard to forsee a future minus oil that looks anything like the present, it's really really hard to forsee a future minus coal. The problem isn't so much that there aren't alternatives, it's that they're not economically viable and the requirements to set them up and run them are... lots of cheap energy. From coal. And oil.
A few questions for those who think "nuclear power is fine": exactly how much energy is required to get uranium into a usable form to generate steam and spin turbines? And where does *that* come from? And exactly how efficient are nuclear plants at generating energy anyway? Most answers you get from official sources are there to provide a justification for running enough nuke plants to keep a strategic nuclear weapons stockpile going.
Dollar for dollar, coal is simpler better than any other alternative for generating electricity. If you'd like to see wind, solar and hydro power reign supreme, be prepared to pay several dollars per kilowatt-hour instead of the 8 to 20 cents you're paying now.
Want to see an economic shock worse than the Great Depression? Mandate a switch away from oil and coal starting tomorrow. You'd be lucky to have enough broken pieces of Western Civilization 20 years later to make a country equivalent to 16th-century Britain.
Version numbers. Don't forget the version numbers.
If it's not high enough, then it's not even worth booting.
Be careful. The last thing anyone needs is a more *effective* government. The power available to a modern state is a dangerous, subtle, almost inherently evil thing, and should under all circumstances be controlled, slowed, diffused and decentralized wherever possible.
Nazi Germany was effective. Stalin's USSR was effective. So was Mao's PRC.
Democracies aren't, by nature, terribly effective. That's rather the whole point of them.
History is filled with terrible examples of citizens clamoring for a "more effective" government and then getting exactly what they asked for, which is hardly ever what they actually wanted.
The House Government Reform committee does some investigation and gives an agency a poor grade.
The Secretary for the agency gets grilled by Congress-critters on why their agency is failing, again. The Secretary doesn't really care about IT security, but (s)he does care about not getting grilled by Congress-critters.
The secretary authorizes some obscene amount of dollars to go towards "improving IT security" and signs off on some plans that purport to do this. Often these are bundled together with initiatives for IT centralization, better management practices, the yearly re-org plan, etc. If you're lucky, some fair portion of the obscene dollar amount actually goes towards something that might really help IT security.
Various political appointees (Deputy Secretaries, Assistant Deputy Secretaries, Associate Deputy Assistant Secretaries, etc.) get shuffled around in the post-Congressional-snitfit era and engage in vicious political battles that make Imperial ascension politics in the Roman Empire look like a shuffleboard tournament. This of course immensely helps the prospects of improving IT security.
Meanwhile, various Beltway contractors propose all sorts of interesting things the agency can do with the money. The ones who are already working with the agency make recommendations to steer the dollars towards projects they can successfully bid on and ways they can increase their headcount, and the outsiders try to weasel their way in. Vendors make extravagent promises about their gear and generously distribute dinners, trips, tickets and job offers in desperate attempts to land a multi-million dollar sale.
Somebody (no one ever admits to this later) actually buys off on some subset of these promises and signs a PO to Make This Happen.
The money eventually filters down to the GS-15s and 14s (career employees) and contractors who Actually Do Something instead of going to meetings all day and answering email. They often emulate the successful political appointees above them by holding lots of meetings and sending lots of email. However, they get to Actually Do Something as well. Lucky them.
Some random collection of program managers, unwitting new subcontractor hires, and government support employees are thrown together to Make This Work. If they're lucky, enough of the people on the task have worked together before to know how to navigate through the bureaucratic, corporate and technical obstacles to have something to show for their efforts after 6 months. If not, well, the government paid for Yet Another Jobs Program.
3 times out of 10, the proposed solution fails so miserably that they can't even convince the other contractors and govvies to put it into production.
6 times out of 10, it works just well enough to shoehorn the "solution" into production, as long as the duct tape holds and they can hire enough bodies for the Mongolian Horde approach to IT ("quick, get more people for the overnight shift, the ticket count's escalating again!"). But that's okay, 'cause the same contractors and govvies will get to fix it again next year when the problem still isn't solved.
1 time out of 10, they actually Make It Work. Wow. People stumble around in shock, awe and amazement at what they have created. Users are happy, management is off their backs. But don't worry. Something will change in another 6 months to bring completely new requirements into the picture, and you get to roll the dice again.
Specifically, you should save your anger for these people (just going from the past 40 years of American history):
Henry Kissenger
Robert McNamara
Donald Rumsfeld
Richard Cheney
As much as Gen. Westmoreland was to blame for many of the mistakes of Vietnam, it was the first two goddamn SOBs who were most responsible.
Ditto for the last two. CENTCOM generals may be at the top of the military command structure for the US forces in Iraq, but we wouldn't be there in the position we're in now except for number 3 and number 4 on the above list.
May God have mercy upon their souls.
Ummmm....
Long declines in something as critical as oil are not typically smooth.
Look at the decades-long economic disruption brought on by OPEC's embargo of the West and the oil shocks of the 1970s. It took until Reagan's second term (1985-1989) for the US economy to really recover, and you didn't see sustained economic growth in most sectors until after the first Gulf War in 1991.
Don't mistake the reactions of consumers to a steady increase in oil prices ("oh geez, gas went up by 5 cents a gallon, oh well") to what happens if it jumps up significantly ("OMFG gas is $4 a gallon quick fill up fill up!"). Panic buying alone will then bump prices higher.
Add in the effects of just-in-time inventories by large resellers and the importance of transportation costs for, well, anything that doesn't involve shoving bits across a communications line, and suddenly it's not just $40 to fill up your Honda Civic's gas tank, you're paying $8 for a gallon of milk. And everything at your local Wal-Mart (or le Target, or your retailer of choice) is going to cost 5 to 20% more. If it's sustained long enough, FedEx, UPS and the USPS will bump up their rates for cargo and freight first, then for moving bits of paper.
I, for one, do not wish to live in a world where the Peak Oil theory is true. Whole civilizations have collapsed for lesser reasons.
No problem - my civilization will research Future Tech, and will discover ways to re-populate exhausted resources, along with getting a score and happiness bonus. ...
Erm, isn't this Civ 4?
Darn.
IMDB entry for 'Gunhed' says it was released in 1989, after a story-writing contest in 1986.
Neuromancer was published in 1984.
Prob'ly happened the other way around.
My first system was a TI-99/4a that my dad got in the early early 80s (1982 or 1983). He's a EE and was doing some amount of microcontroller programming @ work, and thought this would be a cool toy computer. We had a tape drive hooked up so we could use the BASIC interpreter and run programs from tape... I remember typing in programs from magazines and even whole books of code ("BASIC games" and stuff like that, it's still sitting in my parents' basement), and getting hooked on programming that way.
:)
We had some game cartridges too (Parsec, woo woo!), and my dad & brother & I all spent time playing those, but it was the idea that you could type in your programs and RUN them that amazed me. We got an NES later, but the idea of programmable computers stuck with me. Guess that's why I like using Linux/BSD/open-source operating systems instead of Windows.
We later got an IBM Model 8180 PC (with CGA graphics!) in 1985 that my mom used to run her own business, and a bastard 386 clone with a VGA card around 1991 or 1992. The first computer that was actually mine, all mine, was a Compaq Presario CDS 524 - all-in-one box, 14" monitor, 4MB RAM, Cirrus Logic VGA chipset with 512K VRAM - took it to college, and had all sorts of fun with it until I bought a Gateway Pentium Pro box a few years later.
Don't feel too bad. He has the brains, the political cunning, and (had) the respect of enough people to stop this train wreck if he wanted to.
Powell's gotten a lot of good PR over the years, and had made good use of it prior to his UN speech, but don't make the mistake of believing everything (good or bad) that's said about him. He's a smart guy, most importantly in keeping quiet and allowing others to project their ideals of The Good General onto himself, but don't for a moment think that he's not as tainted as anyone else is in Washington.
Games released Jan 2003 - Jan 2006 that provided > 3 months of replay value for me:
Civilization IV (November 2005): Booyah. 3 months might be stretching it, but this is the best Civ game in a long time, and I've already logged 80+ hours playing this so far.
World of Warcraft (November 2004): No, I don't want to think about how much time I've spent playing it, but I've had an active account for the past 14 months, for whatever that's worth, and I keep logging in and playing "just another hour...".
Neverwinter Nights - Shadows of Undrentide (June 2003), Hordes of the Underdark (December 2003): Two expansion packs for NwN. While I didn't spend a lot of time playing the single-player campaign, I don't know how much time I spent building modules, playing games online, or playing through 3rd-party modules. I keep going back to the game because it provides so many opportunities.
Civ III Conquests (November 2003): Expansion pack for Civ III, but as with Civ IV above, I got my money's worth out of this purchase with hundreds of hours total play time on this expansion.
Now, I've bought other games during the past 3 years that I haven't played that much (The Sims 2 and Sid Meier's Pirates! in the past year), but I've found a few enjoyable ones to come back and play, and that's just the best out of the 2 genres I spend time playing. RPGs and, um, Civ. Yes, it *is* its own genre.
For consoles, I could probably add Halo + Halo 2 on Xbox, Madden , and Mario Kart on the GameCube to round these off, since those are the "social" games I play with other folks that I keep coming back to. Plus Final Fantasy Tactics on the GBA for downtime like plane flights, public transit, waiting for people, etc.
Maybe these don't float your boat, but I have fun with 'em.
what would you do in this situation?
If a grocery store starts selling VoIP hardware, that surely means that it's a commodity. Commoditization means that consumers will choose services based on prices first and features later (think bargain-basement $399 PCs from Dell or Wal-Mart). Commoditization means that there are products that are "good enough", and the winning suppliers will win on best value and lowest price.
It's time enough for the telcos and other lumbering pseudo-government regulatory-era dinosaurs to shape up and actually compete for consumers or die.
I say 312 pigs, or the equivalent value in drachmas!
Speaking as a low-5-digit ID, the whole ScuttleMonkey + BeatlesBeatles shit makes me want to get the (fixed) slashcode that runs Plastic and make a Slashdot2. Moderated submission queues + writeups (no need for editors), karma systems that work, etc. Not like Plastic doesn't have its issues, and some days I'm surprised that Slashdot actually works at all, but I don't even read stories anymore. Just comments starting at +2.
240:1 servers:admins. Admin = me. I did have a backup, but only in the sense of "help help everthing's on fire and he's out can anyone help?". Elsewhere, I've done 20:1 users:admins w/ mixed NT + Unix workstations, 100:1 users:support staff (30 staff = 8 server admins, 14 helpdesk staff, 8 managers; and yes, that's too many managers), and 10:1 servers:admins in an overstaffed gov't Unix shop. Right now it's something like 50:1 servers:admins for the boxes I'm dealing with.
:)
Automation is your friend. If you don't know a scripting language, learn one. Hell, spending an hour reading the output of 'help' from an NT command prompt and going through each command to figure out what it does and doesn't do is a good starting point if you're not already familiar with Windows batch files. You're going to have to learn some combination of shell scripting, Perl and Expect in the *nix world. PHP + MySQL are good to know too, for being able to throw up a quick web-based solution to a business problem, or to modify an existing open-source LAMP application to suit your purpose.
It's doable, and I still have time to spend hacking on side projects, doing additional automation + scripts for other people and departments, writing/customizing reports and reading Slashdot.
Look at ways to reduce or completely eliminate time spent on repetitive tasks. Fewer bigger servers > more smaller servers. Consider your architecture in terms of what users need to do and how to do that for the least possible effort and cost. If you have a fast, reliable network and users don't need to run local I/O intensive apps (2D/3D manipulation programs like Photoshop or AutoCAD are classic examples) on their desks, look at using Citrix or Tarantella or NoMachine or SunRays to serve desktops remotely and cut down on admin costs for supporting apps. Put data in a central location and BACK IT UP. Databases are good. Performance monitoring is good. Centralized management is good. But remember that not all solutions work for all environments, remember to be flexible and aware of your organization's needs because the Gods of Good IT Practice won't pay your rent at the end of the month.
Look at possible points of failure and figure out what it would cost to eliminate or reduce them, and come up with a cost/benefit picture for management. There will be times when management says no, but as long as they recognize that not spending $2k now could lead to a weeklong network outage, then you've at least let them know the consequences.
Dell, Dell, Dell. The customer at one site decided to buy into Dell's 'home-grown' mid-tier SAN offering in that brief period of time around 2001 after Dell and EMC had parted ways and before Dell came back to its senses and re-partnered with EMC. The re-badged EMC Clariion controllers + arrays on a Brocade fabric had not given us a single issue in the year they'd been in use, but this new demonic half-breed SAN shows up as part of the "new Win2K SAN" (yes, this customer ended up with 4, I kid you not, 4 different and non-connected SANs in the same physical server room).
:), and their entry-level to midrange server offerings aren't significantly worse than anyone else's, but may I be damned to the foulest depths of Hell if I ever recommend their storage systems and professional enterprise services to anyone. Ever.
Dell techs came, and Dell techs went. We had a former field-circus clown who was "certified" on this new storage system sitting in our server room, leafing through the product manual and scratching his head while customers were ranting and raving about not being able to get to their files. The cluster software didn't work. Various bits of the hardware routinely committed seppuku rather than operate with that demon of a storage system. The Dell-trained installers ran the cables backwards between the disk trays and the controller (gee, I wonder where all these fiber-channel errors are coming from). Files mysteriously disappeared. Various VPs within Dell called and made weekly pledges of earnestness in an effort to not get their product thrown out of the server room.
A few months after all this, Dell quietly discontinued their 'home-grown' SAN products and went back to EMC.
I'm happy to use their laptops and desktops as long as someone else pays for it
i burned all my mod points already, but someone needs to mod the parent post up to at least +3. this is just sad sad sad, and while most gamers i know would not at all qualify as addicts, some folks will latch onto games (muds and mmorpgs more than other types, perhaps) and do nothing else with their lives.
Lotus Notes *is* a hodgepodge of contact management and e-mail software. Have you used it? More importantly, have you used it and not run away, screaming in terror?
It's like IBM decided to add email functionality to a decent groupware product, but hired programmers who read Mandarin Chinese to implement the design specs written in Hungarian. And the only translator they could talk to had really bad reception on their cell phone.
Googling for "lotus notes worst user interface" gives about 97,200 results. Go figure.
Find as many un(der)employed college graduates with English degrees as you can. Pay them to check your grammar. Problem solved!
Um, yeah, I can really see a "family-friendly" magazine carrying strips like this, or this, or even this (one of my favorites). Even the Washington Post got flack back when For Better or Worse ran a storyline with about a gay character. Can you imagine the uproar generated from just a *week* of Gabe and Tycho's standard fare?
Don't get me wrong, PA makes me laugh more than any other gaming comic out there, but it's not something that I would want my baby daughter reading on the Sunday comics page.
War Is Peace.
Freedom Is Slavery.
Ignorance Is Strength.
-1984, George Orwell-