I've always thought that the way to make the electoral college useful is to ditch the idea of "winning" a state, and instead require that a proportion of the state's votes equal to the proportion of voters endorsing a particular candidate go to that candidate. So if Missouri is split 48%/46%/6%, the first party would get 5 votes, the second 5 votes, and the third 1 vote. My reasoning for this is that it takes away the ability for candidates to largely ignore issues in "safe" states, and makes a vote in any state count. It also gives minority parties a better chance of getting some votes, without making it likely that they will win.
It might be beneficial to accompany this measure with a change in the number of college votes per state, possibly simply increasing them all by a factor of 10 to make dealing with rounding easier (there would need to be hard and fast rules on rounding!).
Amusingly enough, I finished my law degree and went into IT... and I'm still not rich. You may be onto something! On the other hand, "do what you love" has definite merits.
It really bothers me that most of the threads in this story are either "we should let employees piss on his corpse" or "he's not dead!". Assuming that he is in fact dead, aren't we forgetting something? Irrespective of what he presided over and did, he was a human being. He doubtless had people who cared about him, who will be mourning his death. As a human, no matter what sins he committed in life, we should show some respect - if nothing else for the sake of his family and loved ones.
We're in a similar boat, and taking it very slowly. For existing systems that don't fit well with new.NET 2 setups (some ASP.NET apps), for now they are running as.NET 1 apps. Fortunately, it's easy to host multiple sites with different.NET versions. We are gradually planning to update these as they come due for replacement/refreshing.
All new development is using.NET 2, with APIs using either the old.NET 1 assembly or being updated as necessary. We have a couple of critical APIs that have been branched, with the.NET 1 version in maintenance mode and active development in the.NET 2 tree (bugfixes being backported as necessary).
For actually updating.NET 1.1 setups to 2.0, we are following Microsoft's advice: start by porting each component, and then port the application itself. It can be a little tedious, but most of the time it goes pretty quickly. It helps a LOT if you've been anal about keeping things loosely coupled in APIs, I think it could be a lot more painful with tons of closely intertwined libraries - but that's true of any setup.
Finally, fear the ASP.NET project conversion wizard. It does horrid things sometimes!
Not just in banks. A couple of my clients still have OS/2 boxes sitting quietly running voicemail systems, attached to a PBX. They just run and run, occasionally needing replacement drives but otherwise pretty flawlessly. The only systems we have that match their uptime are running FreeBSD.
I wonder how this will affect other projects using the BDB back-end (for example, OpenLDAP and Subversion). I imagine Oracle can't pull the source for already open versions, and it might be possible for a free fork to emerge if it is needed - but it could put a cloud over those projects while they arrange alternative back-ends.
These things can have horrible cascading effects, especially if you are stuck with one local phone company who suck - SBC in my case.
When I first moved to the USA, I signed up for an MCI international-calling plan.
At the time, $3/month to reduce the fees to call England (where my family, and many friends remain) to $0.05/minute was great. The phone rep assured me that I was all set, and could start enjoying the rate - so I called my mother. It was her birthday, she wanted to know all about my new home, etc. making it a long call, around two hours. At the MCI rate, $6 was hardly going to kill me. Somehow, MCI's computer system failed to add me to the plan for another week - and I was landed with SBC's "you don't have an international plan, but we'll let you call me anyway" rate at $2/minute - $480! I bitched at MCI, they agreed that it was an error, and promised to get it taken care of. SBC, meanwhile, disconnected my service immediately - and wouldn't reconnect without a $1,000 deposit. MCI mailed me a credit for $480, leaving me with a +480 MCI balance - and owing SBC $1,480 (plus some fees they came up with) to be able to use it. Days of complaints came to no naught, and I ended up ponying up the cash, cancelling my MCI service (resulting in a cheque for $480). The deposit at least meant I didn't actually pay anything on my phone bill for most of the rest of the year.
Does anyone know if the free edition includes good replication support? I have a project that relies on asynchronous multi-master replication (Merge replication in SQL Server), and they have been looking for a 'real' database platform. They are a non-profit, and full editions are expensive even with non-profit discounts. I can't seem to find this in IBM's copious documentation on their website!
Someone who is on foot or on a bike is still responsible for safely interacting with other traffic.
This is very true. I walk almost everywhere (my eyesight is such that while I can legally drive, I prefer not to because I feel very unsafe to both myself and other road users doing so), and the vast majority of times I'm safe as long as I take basic precautions when crossing roads. Back when I did drive, I was actually hit by a pedestrian once. I was pulled up at a blind intersection, and my car (crappy, 1983 Vauxhall Cavalier) had stalled. As I tried to restart the beast, a jogger ran around the corner, saw the car, and leaped into the air - landing on my windshielf. He actually threatened to sue me, but the fact that my car was placed normally on the road with the engine off finally persuaded him that maybe his scuffed up knee wasn't my fault.
It works both ways, though. I was hit by a car last year, even though I was on the sidewalk (its driver misjudged a corner, and mounted the sidewalk - fortunately, I wasn't hurt beyond minor scratches. The driver sped away anyway).
I think the problem with the 'Brit' term is that the only people who don't mind it tend to be the English. My Welsh relatives are adamant that they are Welsh first, and British second. Same goes for some Scottish friends. Sadly, I don't know many Irish people right now.
I also make a point of instinctually typeing WHERE immediately after a DELETE statement in SQL, then using the arrow keys to add the information between the two. Nothing like someone distracting you, and hitting return when your SQL statement says "delete from reallyImportantTable"
I learned that one the hard way, too, with an UPDATE query. Nothing says professional website like one in which you accidentally replace every headline with the word "quilting" 10 minutes before a demonstration....
We had a Dell tech come out to replace a RAID card, and decide to replace the whole server motherboard - with a different model. He also helpfully rearranged all the PCI cards, just to ensure that Win2k Server wouldn't know where to find anything. He then powered the system up, couldn't get the server working, and - on the client's advice - called me. For some reason, he asked me what an IP address was (my first thought was he wanted to know the IP address for the server, but giving him that just made him ask again). I dashed to the client's site, and found Win2k Server not talking to the network because it could no longer find any working network cards (the one that the OS still recognized didn't have a cable in it), and the server bluescreening every few minutes. Amazingly enough (I wish I knew what the client said to get them to agree!), Dell actually agreed to pay 50% of my fees to get the server working again!
I second this. We have SVN setup for a lot of sites, and a home-built series of scripts/web apps lets us checkout versions to staging servers or live servers from a web manager. Developers, content people and artists all use their preferred set of tools (and many have their own local webserver - and in some cases database server - for testing during development). Everyone works concurrently, and other than the occasional conflict (which sometimes requires someone other than a content person to fix) it works very smoothly.
The only problem we've had is with initial client adoption. For some content-oriented users at client sites, the paradigm shift towards everyone having their own checked out copy of a site and not just copying into other user's foldeers required some training (SVN does some odd things when you start copying folders including.svn folders into other people's copies!). Once that's smoothed out, clients tend to really appreciate being able to revert, and not trip over each other and us during site development.
(In many cases we use a CMS, but there are clients who prefer doing things the old fashioned way with lots of small files - so we support it!)
Waiting lists are a problem in most free-at-the-point-of-use healthcare systems (Britain, France, Canada, etc.). It does suck to have to wait for medical care (although life threatening conditions are expedited sufficiently that the side effect of the wait is discomfort rather than death). On the other hand, it sucks a LOT less than being uninsured in the USA (my current status, after growing up in the UK). Even in the worst times for the National Health Service under Thatcher, healthcare worked well and was a million times more accessible than uninsured/poorly insured US care.
Some examples from my own life, and those of my friends/relatives:
My granny needed a hip and knee replacement (in the UK). She had to wait two months, had the operation, a long hospital stay, and some really powerful medicine. Total amount paid to the NHS when the care was needed: 15 UKP.
I have a very rare medical condition that can lead to high fevers (sometimes requiring emergency medical intervention) for no obvious reason. Fortunately for me, it's effects have diminished with age. Throughout my childhood and college days, I would have to see a doctor regularly. I never waited more than two weeks for pediatric care in the UK, and it cost my parents nothing upfront. Conversely, while on the Student Death plan at SMSU a fever of 105F requiring an evening in an Urgent Care clinic cost me well over $800 (drugs included).
A friend of mine's mother over here had a heart attack. She was insured, but the healthcare provider found an excuse to drop her. The heart attack had complications, and she is now $50,000 in debt from it. An ex-girlfriend of mine's mother had a heart attack (albeit with fewer complications) back in England, and received similar care at no upfront cost whatsoever.
You'll note I carefully say "upfront cost" in reference to UK charges. The NHS isn't free: you pay National Insurance on paycheques, effectively an NHS tax (it is free to under-18s, students, the elderly and the unemployed). Below 4800UKP/year, it's free. After that, you pay 11% of income falling between the 4800UKP/year and 32700UKP/year bands, and 1% above that. So for someone earning about 30k/year (UKP - that's around 58k/year USD) you're paying 2,520 UKP annually for insurance or about 210UKP/month. There are also some additional charges for prescription medicine.
This compares rather favourably with my old Student Death insurance: $400/semester, a $500 deductible, and rules everywhere to ensure that they didn't have to pay for things. On student rates, my UK costs are: $0 for $0 deductible, full coverage, potentially crappy service. US rates for a painful (on student income) deductible, crappy service and not actually being able to claim half the time: $1,200/year.
It compares quite well with a small-business plan we had last year. I was earning enough that in the UK I'd have been paying around 2,288 UKP/year for full coverage. I had to pay $120/month, my employer matched that. $2,880 IS less than 2,288UKP - but I had a large deductible again, couldn't see any doctor free for any reason, and had to pay the first chunk of any prescription costs. I wasn't even guaranteed coverage if the insurance company decided that it wasn't strictly necessary. The 'we cover everything' plan would have cost me a LOT more than the UK rates.
So it's easy to bitch about national healthcare. I did, before I lived without it.
I program in Visual Studio many hours a week, and I don't think it has had a negative effect on me. IntelliSense is very handy, even when doing top-down design (it works wonderfully on the.NET Framework, and I'm not going to expect it to guess a method name I haven't written yet - but it's never replaced my typing without my consent!), but it's easy to ignore if it isn't useful (you can even switch it off, I believe, although I've never wanted to do so). The autogenerated code is handy for quick projects, and it is easy enough to not use it when I want something more sophisticated. In other words: VS is an IDE like most others; it comes with a bunch of features that you are free to use or not use.
The junior programmer who works under me has a similar opinion: Visual Studio is a great tool, very helpful (especially for those times you need to produce something in a hurry), and easy enough to ignore when it isn't helpful.
I also do a fair amount of programming under FreeBSD, with vim as an editor, and any number of languages (C, C++, PHP, Python, Perl...). Vim has a lot of great productivity features, although I sometimes miss Intellisense. Overall, while it makes me think about what I'm doing, I don't find the cerebral effort much more or less than when I'm in Visual Studio (Intellisense for solving the momentary "what was that method called?" moments aside). I still have to understand what I'm writing, still need to produce API documentation, etc.
Onto the subject line: I don't think your tools rot your brain, unless you were suffering from rot anyway and overuse the tools as a crutch (similar to "cookbook programmers" who know recipes but don't understand what they do). These same "programmers" tend to be the same ones who blame their current tool of choice when it doesn't have a wizard for the exact implementation they need.
If they are trying, that's an improvement! About a year ago, I was looking at making a license purchase for a non-profit client of mine. I talked with a Novell sales representative (via their webchat) about nonprofit pricing, and was met with great reluctance to even give a price quote (or point me to someone who could). I tried again later, and the second rep. grudgingly gave me price quotes but actually said something like "our non-profit prices aren't very good." (The client switched to an MS platform)
With sales teams like that, it's no wonder that they are in trouble.
I work with a similar setup, only rather than plain Qmail we use Qmail-LDAP. It works wonderfully, and has some nice (but really not amazing) clustering capabilities.
We have account data stored in an LDAP store, mirrorred to a second (read-only) store for redundancy/scaling when busy. LDAP scales wonderfully for read-heavy tasks such as this one.
As has been mentioned separately, separating recipient (edge), storage, and outbound mail servers is really important. Our edge servers perform RBL checks, greylisting (on some domains that want it), SPF (ditto), reject various attachment types, perform a reverse-MX check to try to accept from valid addresses only, and perform a recipient address check to quickly reject incorrectly addressed messages. That cuts down 80% of incoming mail (with very few false positives). Mail is then forwarded to a second set of edge servers that run SpamAssassin (set to flag spam, not stop it) and ClamAV on attachments. Finally, it goes into the storage servers. POP3/IMAP/Webmail points at the mail directories on these servers. Our outgoing servers are quite a simple setup, with SMTP Auth (also hooked to LDAP). We also have a few listservs setup, but they are a side issue.
Qmail is a bear to setup, and asking the author for advice is a good way to get flamed. Other than that, it works very well, we haven't had any security issues, and it's adequately fast - especially if you apply the "silly qmail todo" patch, fixing concurrency problems under high load. It's part of the Qmail-LDAP distribution (as is almost everything else I listed).
For servers, we use FreeBSD. I'm sure other OSes would do a fine job, but FreeBSD has been rock solid for us.
The vaccination isn't 100% effective. I received my MMR vaccination, and developed measles anyway. It happens occasionally. From experience, it isn't a fun thing to experience, and I hope those affected feel better soon.
You are absolutely right about most military types, and their attitude towards the use of force. It isn't just the US military - I've known people from militaries ranging from the US to Turkey (via the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Greece!) who would agree with the sentiment. Very few civilized people actually like war, sometimes you're stuck with it.
Einstein's position is actually quite a common one in Liberal (not the capital L, Liberalism rather than the wierd modern-American meaning) circles. It is very consistent with a laissez-faire society to say that in general you oppose the use of force, but when something as major as your way of life is threatened you will resort to it (assuming there is no other way). It is a realistic approach, really - while you'd love to have a peaceful world, you accept that sometimes not everybody plays the same ball-game.
My family bought me a (by 1992 UK standards, cheap) laptop when I started sixth form college (ages 17-18, pre-college). It was invaluable for my computing classes, as I could work on projects at school (with access to the teachers), but without having to tie up the relatively scarce lab computers for hours on end. It was also helpful in the library for storing research data. I enjoyed a game or two of Doom at lunchtime, too! That laptop lasted me part way through college, and helped out a bit with Law/Political Science research - but a dying battery (and no money to replace it) meant that it was useless for taking notes in class.
For my Master's (Defense and Strategic Studies), I picked up an HP clam-shell palmtop with a keyboard (HP320LX with WinCE 1). It was wonderful for taking notes in class; I could type fast, and have very detailed searchable text notes. Diagrams weren't a problem because I could whip out the stylus and draw straight into text documents. I had hand problems (stupid soccer injury!), which made pen/ink painful - and the stylus was also painful, but at least I didn't have to use it for every word. The huge benefit was that all of my notes were synced to my desktop PC (in my graduate assistant office), making them instantly searchable; I hacked together a simple cross-referencing system and bibliography database, and between the three tools I was very, very productive.
It's important not to get kids using laptops all the time too early: kids need to learn to write, and manage note taking the hard way - but for higher level classes, they can be a good tool if - and only if - the kid has the discipline to not play games in class!
If I were doing my Master's now, I might have purchased a Tablet PC. I know a couple of lawyers and private investigators who find them invaluable for logging case details, taking diagrams in the field, and so on. As much as I hate to promote a Microsoft product, but OneNote rocks their world for this.
Brummies come from Birmingham -- a city in the Midlands that isn't famous for anything at all as far as I'm aware.
Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, The Moody Blues, UB40, Duran Duran, etc., etc.
Not to mention that Birmingham is widely credited as inspiring some of Tolkien's anti-industrialisation themes (it was his home, and he often complained of watching the city spread into beautiful countryside), the Mini (car, not Mac!), Bird's custard, Bourneville/Cadbury's chocolate, Joseph Priestley (chemist, discovered oxygen), Matthew Boulton & James Watt (inventors of the steam engine), William Murdoch (inventor of gas lighting), the building of the first four-wheel petrol car (F W Lancaster, 1895), and a few others.
Birmingham is England's second city, and a city I truly love - so I figured I'd throw in my 2p.:-)
It is really hard to tell for sure. I noticed that I was less motivated to work, the quality of my work wasn't what it was, and I was definitely a bit crabbier with my coworkers than I had been. I initially flagged it as age/boredom, too. Taking a week off (if possible), and not doing ANYTHING work related is a good start; if you come back and feel refreshed - but feel like you are really just used to being there, it's probably not burnout. If you come back and more or less immediately slip into the 'oh man, not ANOTHER lost email' mindset, you may want to look at lightening the load a bit if possible.
The thing to watch out for with this setup is burnout. I really love my job, but several years of throwing myself into 60+ hours/week was really taking its toll last year. I'm lucky enough to have a very understanding boss, who considers me vital to the company - so he restructured my department a bit, gave me an assistant, and helped me setup a home office. Now I work a more comfortable 35-40 hours per week, from a spare room in my house converted into an office. My productivity has actually gone up, and life is a lot happier.
So no, you aren't an exception (I've known plenty of people with similar feelings), but I recommend keeping an eye out for overdoing it!
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I've always thought that the way to make the electoral college useful is to ditch the idea of "winning" a state, and instead require that a proportion of the state's votes equal to the proportion of voters endorsing a particular candidate go to that candidate. So if Missouri is split 48%/46%/6%, the first party would get 5 votes, the second 5 votes, and the third 1 vote. My reasoning for this is that it takes away the ability for candidates to largely ignore issues in "safe" states, and makes a vote in any state count. It also gives minority parties a better chance of getting some votes, without making it likely that they will win.
It might be beneficial to accompany this measure with a change in the number of college votes per state, possibly simply increasing them all by a factor of 10 to make dealing with rounding easier (there would need to be hard and fast rules on rounding!).
Amusingly enough, I finished my law degree and went into IT... and I'm still not rich. You may be onto something! On the other hand, "do what you love" has definite merits.
It really bothers me that most of the threads in this story are either "we should let employees piss on his corpse" or "he's not dead!". Assuming that he is in fact dead, aren't we forgetting something? Irrespective of what he presided over and did, he was a human being. He doubtless had people who cared about him, who will be mourning his death. As a human, no matter what sins he committed in life, we should show some respect - if nothing else for the sake of his family and loved ones.
I noticed the sudden spike in "optimistic" on Tax Day (April 15th). I wonder if that's coincidence?
All new development is using .NET 2, with APIs using either the old .NET 1 assembly or being updated as necessary. We have a couple of critical APIs that have been branched, with the .NET 1 version in maintenance mode and active development in the .NET 2 tree (bugfixes being backported as necessary).
For actually updating .NET 1.1 setups to 2.0, we are following Microsoft's advice: start by porting each component, and then port the application itself. It can be a little tedious, but most of the time it goes pretty quickly. It helps a LOT if you've been anal about keeping things loosely coupled in APIs, I think it could be a lot more painful with tons of closely intertwined libraries - but that's true of any setup.
Finally, fear the ASP.NET project conversion wizard. It does horrid things sometimes!
Not just in banks. A couple of my clients still have OS/2 boxes sitting quietly running voicemail systems, attached to a PBX. They just run and run, occasionally needing replacement drives but otherwise pretty flawlessly. The only systems we have that match their uptime are running FreeBSD.
I wonder how this will affect other projects using the BDB back-end (for example, OpenLDAP and Subversion). I imagine Oracle can't pull the source for already open versions, and it might be possible for a free fork to emerge if it is needed - but it could put a cloud over those projects while they arrange alternative back-ends.
These things can have horrible cascading effects, especially if you are stuck with one local phone company who suck - SBC in my case.
When I first moved to the USA, I signed up for an MCI international-calling plan.At the time, $3/month to reduce the fees to call England (where my family, and many friends remain) to $0.05/minute was great. The phone rep assured me that I was all set, and could start enjoying the rate - so I called my mother. It was her birthday, she wanted to know all about my new home, etc. making it a long call, around two hours. At the MCI rate, $6 was hardly going to kill me. Somehow, MCI's computer system failed to add me to the plan for another week - and I was landed with SBC's "you don't have an international plan, but we'll let you call me anyway" rate at $2/minute - $480! I bitched at MCI, they agreed that it was an error, and promised to get it taken care of. SBC, meanwhile, disconnected my service immediately - and wouldn't reconnect without a $1,000 deposit. MCI mailed me a credit for $480, leaving me with a +480 MCI balance - and owing SBC $1,480 (plus some fees they came up with) to be able to use it. Days of complaints came to no naught, and I ended up ponying up the cash, cancelling my MCI service (resulting in a cheque for $480). The deposit at least meant I didn't actually pay anything on my phone bill for most of the rest of the year.
Does anyone know if the free edition includes good replication support? I have a project that relies on asynchronous multi-master replication (Merge replication in SQL Server), and they have been looking for a 'real' database platform. They are a non-profit, and full editions are expensive even with non-profit discounts. I can't seem to find this in IBM's copious documentation on their website!
This is very true. I walk almost everywhere (my eyesight is such that while I can legally drive, I prefer not to because I feel very unsafe to both myself and other road users doing so), and the vast majority of times I'm safe as long as I take basic precautions when crossing roads. Back when I did drive, I was actually hit by a pedestrian once. I was pulled up at a blind intersection, and my car (crappy, 1983 Vauxhall Cavalier) had stalled. As I tried to restart the beast, a jogger ran around the corner, saw the car, and leaped into the air - landing on my windshielf. He actually threatened to sue me, but the fact that my car was placed normally on the road with the engine off finally persuaded him that maybe his scuffed up knee wasn't my fault.
It works both ways, though. I was hit by a car last year, even though I was on the sidewalk (its driver misjudged a corner, and mounted the sidewalk - fortunately, I wasn't hurt beyond minor scratches. The driver sped away anyway).
I think the problem with the 'Brit' term is that the only people who don't mind it tend to be the English. My Welsh relatives are adamant that they are Welsh first, and British second. Same goes for some Scottish friends. Sadly, I don't know many Irish people right now.
I learned that one the hard way, too, with an UPDATE query. Nothing says professional website like one in which you accidentally replace every headline with the word "quilting" 10 minutes before a demonstration....
We had a Dell tech come out to replace a RAID card, and decide to replace the whole server motherboard - with a different model. He also helpfully rearranged all the PCI cards, just to ensure that Win2k Server wouldn't know where to find anything. He then powered the system up, couldn't get the server working, and - on the client's advice - called me. For some reason, he asked me what an IP address was (my first thought was he wanted to know the IP address for the server, but giving him that just made him ask again). I dashed to the client's site, and found Win2k Server not talking to the network because it could no longer find any working network cards (the one that the OS still recognized didn't have a cable in it), and the server bluescreening every few minutes. Amazingly enough (I wish I knew what the client said to get them to agree!), Dell actually agreed to pay 50% of my fees to get the server working again!
The only problem we've had is with initial client adoption. For some content-oriented users at client sites, the paradigm shift towards everyone having their own checked out copy of a site and not just copying into other user's foldeers required some training (SVN does some odd things when you start copying folders including .svn folders into other people's copies!). Once that's smoothed out, clients tend to really appreciate being able to revert, and not trip over each other and us during site development.
(In many cases we use a CMS, but there are clients who prefer doing things the old fashioned way with lots of small files - so we support it!)
Some examples from my own life, and those of my friends/relatives:
You'll note I carefully say "upfront cost" in reference to UK charges. The NHS isn't free: you pay National Insurance on paycheques, effectively an NHS tax (it is free to under-18s, students, the elderly and the unemployed). Below 4800UKP/year, it's free. After that, you pay 11% of income falling between the 4800UKP/year and 32700UKP/year bands, and 1% above that. So for someone earning about 30k/year (UKP - that's around 58k/year USD) you're paying 2,520 UKP annually for insurance or about 210UKP/month. There are also some additional charges for prescription medicine.
This compares rather favourably with my old Student Death insurance: $400/semester, a $500 deductible, and rules everywhere to ensure that they didn't have to pay for things. On student rates, my UK costs are: $0 for $0 deductible, full coverage, potentially crappy service. US rates for a painful (on student income) deductible, crappy service and not actually being able to claim half the time: $1,200/year.
It compares quite well with a small-business plan we had last year. I was earning enough that in the UK I'd have been paying around 2,288 UKP/year for full coverage. I had to pay $120/month, my employer matched that. $2,880 IS less than 2,288UKP - but I had a large deductible again, couldn't see any doctor free for any reason, and had to pay the first chunk of any prescription costs. I wasn't even guaranteed coverage if the insurance company decided that it wasn't strictly necessary. The 'we cover everything' plan would have cost me a LOT more than the UK rates.
So it's easy to bitch about national healthcare. I did, before I lived without it.
The junior programmer who works under me has a similar opinion: Visual Studio is a great tool, very helpful (especially for those times you need to produce something in a hurry), and easy enough to ignore when it isn't helpful.
I also do a fair amount of programming under FreeBSD, with vim as an editor, and any number of languages (C, C++, PHP, Python, Perl...). Vim has a lot of great productivity features, although I sometimes miss Intellisense. Overall, while it makes me think about what I'm doing, I don't find the cerebral effort much more or less than when I'm in Visual Studio (Intellisense for solving the momentary "what was that method called?" moments aside). I still have to understand what I'm writing, still need to produce API documentation, etc.
Onto the subject line: I don't think your tools rot your brain, unless you were suffering from rot anyway and overuse the tools as a crutch (similar to "cookbook programmers" who know recipes but don't understand what they do). These same "programmers" tend to be the same ones who blame their current tool of choice when it doesn't have a wizard for the exact implementation they need.
If they are trying, that's an improvement! About a year ago, I was looking at making a license purchase for a non-profit client of mine. I talked with a Novell sales representative (via their webchat) about nonprofit pricing, and was met with great reluctance to even give a price quote (or point me to someone who could). I tried again later, and the second rep. grudgingly gave me price quotes but actually said something like "our non-profit prices aren't very good." (The client switched to an MS platform)
With sales teams like that, it's no wonder that they are in trouble.
We have account data stored in an LDAP store, mirrorred to a second (read-only) store for redundancy/scaling when busy. LDAP scales wonderfully for read-heavy tasks such as this one.
As has been mentioned separately, separating recipient (edge), storage, and outbound mail servers is really important. Our edge servers perform RBL checks, greylisting (on some domains that want it), SPF (ditto), reject various attachment types, perform a reverse-MX check to try to accept from valid addresses only, and perform a recipient address check to quickly reject incorrectly addressed messages. That cuts down 80% of incoming mail (with very few false positives). Mail is then forwarded to a second set of edge servers that run SpamAssassin (set to flag spam, not stop it) and ClamAV on attachments. Finally, it goes into the storage servers. POP3/IMAP/Webmail points at the mail directories on these servers. Our outgoing servers are quite a simple setup, with SMTP Auth (also hooked to LDAP). We also have a few listservs setup, but they are a side issue.
Qmail is a bear to setup, and asking the author for advice is a good way to get flamed. Other than that, it works very well, we haven't had any security issues, and it's adequately fast - especially if you apply the "silly qmail todo" patch, fixing concurrency problems under high load. It's part of the Qmail-LDAP distribution (as is almost everything else I listed).
For servers, we use FreeBSD. I'm sure other OSes would do a fine job, but FreeBSD has been rock solid for us.
The vaccination isn't 100% effective. I received my MMR vaccination, and developed measles anyway. It happens occasionally. From experience, it isn't a fun thing to experience, and I hope those affected feel better soon.
Oops - yes it should!
You are absolutely right about most military types, and their attitude towards the use of force. It isn't just the US military - I've known people from militaries ranging from the US to Turkey (via the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Greece!) who would agree with the sentiment. Very few civilized people actually like war, sometimes you're stuck with it.
Einstein's position is actually quite a common one in Liberal (not the capital L, Liberalism rather than the wierd modern-American meaning) circles. It is very consistent with a laissez-faire society to say that in general you oppose the use of force, but when something as major as your way of life is threatened you will resort to it (assuming there is no other way). It is a realistic approach, really - while you'd love to have a peaceful world, you accept that sometimes not everybody plays the same ball-game.
For my Master's (Defense and Strategic Studies), I picked up an HP clam-shell palmtop with a keyboard (HP320LX with WinCE 1). It was wonderful for taking notes in class; I could type fast, and have very detailed searchable text notes. Diagrams weren't a problem because I could whip out the stylus and draw straight into text documents. I had hand problems (stupid soccer injury!), which made pen/ink painful - and the stylus was also painful, but at least I didn't have to use it for every word. The huge benefit was that all of my notes were synced to my desktop PC (in my graduate assistant office), making them instantly searchable; I hacked together a simple cross-referencing system and bibliography database, and between the three tools I was very, very productive.
It's important not to get kids using laptops all the time too early: kids need to learn to write, and manage note taking the hard way - but for higher level classes, they can be a good tool if - and only if - the kid has the discipline to not play games in class!
If I were doing my Master's now, I might have purchased a Tablet PC. I know a couple of lawyers and private investigators who find them invaluable for logging case details, taking diagrams in the field, and so on. As much as I hate to promote a Microsoft product, but OneNote rocks their world for this.
Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, The Moody Blues, UB40, Duran Duran, etc., etc.
Not to mention that Birmingham is widely credited as inspiring some of Tolkien's anti-industrialisation themes (it was his home, and he often complained of watching the city spread into beautiful countryside), the Mini (car, not Mac!), Bird's custard, Bourneville/Cadbury's chocolate, Joseph Priestley (chemist, discovered oxygen), Matthew Boulton & James Watt (inventors of the steam engine), William Murdoch (inventor of gas lighting), the building of the first four-wheel petrol car (F W Lancaster, 1895), and a few others.
Birmingham is England's second city, and a city I truly love - so I figured I'd throw in my 2p. :-)
See the Wikipedia entry on Birmingham for details of most of this!
It is really hard to tell for sure. I noticed that I was less motivated to work, the quality of my work wasn't what it was, and I was definitely a bit crabbier with my coworkers than I had been. I initially flagged it as age/boredom, too. Taking a week off (if possible), and not doing ANYTHING work related is a good start; if you come back and feel refreshed - but feel like you are really just used to being there, it's probably not burnout. If you come back and more or less immediately slip into the 'oh man, not ANOTHER lost email' mindset, you may want to look at lightening the load a bit if possible.
The thing to watch out for with this setup is burnout. I really love my job, but several years of throwing myself into 60+ hours/week was really taking its toll last year. I'm lucky enough to have a very understanding boss, who considers me vital to the company - so he restructured my department a bit, gave me an assistant, and helped me setup a home office. Now I work a more comfortable 35-40 hours per week, from a spare room in my house converted into an office. My productivity has actually gone up, and life is a lot happier.
So no, you aren't an exception (I've known plenty of people with similar feelings), but I recommend keeping an eye out for overdoing it!