I'll sound like the grumpy old man, but what's wrong with green text and a black background? I've used it for years and the voices in my head haven't complained once about it.
All works are written from a given perspective. Only in the US is the American Revolution not called "The Colonial Inssurection". What's important is can someone reason their own argument and then go out and find sources that support that belief. Too often, opinions and papers are written the other way around.
Critical Thinking is the skill missing from colleges. It was missing before wikipedia.
There are folks that take the word of Gartner like it is manna from heaven and it continues to amaze me. They've managed to position themselves a trusted source by putting products in a 2x2 square after they interview people using the software despite the fact that most of the time they end up being wrong. Like any good psychic, they only refer to their successes at predicting the future and hope people will forget when they missed the mark.
It's the first question in damn near every management interview and it's a good gut check to see if you'll be happy. If the answer is more money, you need to think twice about going in that direction.
IT Manager is a manager position in the IT department, not an IT position with more money. If you want to make more money in IT, it is far better to grow your skills and expertise in a technology that interests you and get certified as high as you can in that technology.
If you want to enter into management, you'll only be truly successful if it's because that's the work you want to do every day. The good part of it is you have a better say in the direction things are headed, the bad part is you have to make the tough choices: layoffs, hiring decisions, dealing with performance problems, and deciding where to spend your limited budget. You'll be placed in a position where you may have to fire a friend or former coworker and if you can't live with that, don't apply for the job.
I've seen the thoughtfulness of the engineering slip since IBM stepped away from the table. Example, the friggin wireless off switch is on the front of some of the new thinkpads. When I tested it, I caught myself turning it off when running the box on my lap. In the multinational corporate environment, it's impossible to say who owns a company and where the profits from that company benefit others. From a practical point-of-view, my suggestion is find the best machine and run it.
I would think you have a service contract for your power and mechanical systems but I would at least get:
- a drain snake and a drain cleaner. If you go to grainger, they have one that runs on co2 carts(like an air rifle uses). Condensation lines from air handlers will clog from time-to-time and the under-floor water detection system will alert you when you have a drain back up (you did get an under-floor water detection system?)
- a shop vac. to pull up any water should a drain back up.
- a multimeter with a big clamp. you can check if a whip is energized by just wrapping the clamp around the whip.
- POTS phones next to the cancel buttons on your fire system with a current contact list next to it. If you're alone in a data center using your finger to keep the sprinklers/air suppression from firing, you'll appreciate the phone being there.
- extra floor tiles & extra vents.
- install whips in your PDUs that match the longest length required that match up to your most frequently used connections (L5-20, L6-20, L6-30). Should you have a breaker fail on you in the PDU, you can run the spare whip anywhere on the floor and bring the rack back up.
- spare breakers in every size used in your PDUs
- a couple of big industrial fans. Helpful in any cooling system failure.
- an ir thermometer gun. To spot check temps around the data center.
My Outpost experience is tarnished by starting with 1.0 and upgrading through 1.5 to get a working program. At the time, it was a big jump in gaming to run inside of windows and not DOS so I admit my feelings are quite personal.
First, a good game is one that draws you into the storyline and doesn't require 30 keys to play the damn thing. Graphics are either enhancements or cat litter to cover the crappy code. Like the original poster, I had Oompute Magazine on my monthly list of purchases in the 70s-80s era and learned more about programming trying to fix the syntax errors to get a game to play than in any classroom since.
Second, there are some great old games out there. Master of Orion, Panzer General, the Mario franchise, etc. that are timeless and as enjoyable today as before.
However, there has been a tidal wave of crap over the years nobody wants to remember. My personal list of disappointments is below:
Outpost - I probably put $40 of long distance calls in to the sierra bbs(pre internet) to download 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5. I never got a monorail built and it never ran for more than 45 minutes without crapping it's pants.
The Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom Arcade Game - total crap. Indy frees the little kids, rides down the rail cart, steals a stone from the altar.......then goes back to freeing more kids, going down another rail cart,......
PacMan for the 2600 - While the audio is still used whenever anyone on TV is playing a video game, this was probably the most disappointing arcade port of all time.
ET for the 2600 - Painfully bad
Indiana Jones for the 2600 - Bad, bad, bad
The Star Wars Games for the original NES - George Lucas owes me $20 for ep1 & ep2, and $80 for these pieces of crap
The Coleco Adam - The entire platform and every game
Master of Orion 3 - WTF! How could you fall so far from grace?
My point is that what's good is good and what's bad is bad. Nostalgia puts a rosy spin on things, but pull down an emulator and try to play some of the games you loved as a kid. I got the Atari collection to play Star Raiders again and Jesus, Mary, and Joseph did I ever piss away a couple of years of youth on that game.
The only person that can get you the right answer is yourself. The three big options are RTFM, CBT, and onsite training. I use a combination of the three options. IEEE has some online training in around 800 subjects for $200/year. TestOut has a nice little certification training and exam prep package that will cover the OS side of what you need to cover. The Safari program from Oreily is one of the great deals in the industry for online documentation. I think the benefit of travel/in person training is more in networking and peer discussion than what the instructor has to say. Use the out of town trips for events where there's some roundtables or training on a topic you're struggling to grasp on your own.
Why pay $9 for movies that are in the $5 bin at Wal-Mart already? Scent of a F-ing Woman????? Al Pachino owes me $7 for seeing that in the theater.
I'd rather see the service go after recent 1st run movies at the same time the $1-$2 theaters get them. I'd pay $9 to download and burn a featureless DVD of a recent release(think X-Men 3) and still consider buying the commercial DVD is I liked the film enough. It would give the studios a revenue stream on a flick while they were working on the DVD title.
Redhate Enterprise support is aggressivly priced compared to other players in the enterprise (IBM(AIX), HP(HP-UX), Oracle, Microsoft, etc.). Staffing at most of these vendors can be split into sales, support, programming, r&d, and management. Redhat's income stream will dictate how fast they can grow and how many people they employ.
The danger is to grow faster than your organization can absorb (so you don't have former janitors as VPs of development). If you do, quality and customer satisfaction will suffer. Some great examples are Leading Edge(anyone remember these guys?), Gateway 2000(who knew signing 900 retail leases within a couple of years could kill you?:) ), and Dell(who's been able to overcome this of late).
So here's where it becomes interesting. You're potentially underfunded by your licensing model and you're seeing growth in the folks buying your service. Do you cut costs(layoff), finance expansion (go in debt to grow), or raise prices? These situations are when the CEO & CFO actually earn their paycheck. I'll be interested to see how Redhat responds.
I hardly think Western Union is a major funding stream for terrorism anymore. I'm sure you can find an exaple to the contrary, but in the era of paypal and other e-payment systems that allow peer-to-peer payments for minimal transaction fees I don't see people shuffling money with Western Union. This is just another example of companies and governments doing stupid things because of what's happened in the past instead of anticipating what will happen in the future and deal with it instead.
First, I can't say for sure if piracy lead to the death of the album as a desired purchase or downloading; but there is almost no artist out there that's producing albums. Instead, it's 2-4 singles and filler to get to 12 songs or so. Because of that reality, almost nobody wants to buy an entire cd. I frequent iTunes and have yet to click on the "buy CD" link on any record released after 1982. I think the "business model" that's come of piracy is pay-per song, which isn't really a new business model if you grew up in the age of 45's.
My real point is that few artists make their mark long enough to develop a genuine revenue from record sales. The "first deal" is heavily slanted towards the record company, and fairly so because they assume the risk of the 20 records that tank for every one that sells well. Compound that with the dwindling number of artists that actually write their own music and the result is most of the royalty income from the RIAA goes to the record companies and their staff of songwriters that are actually talented musicians that use the latest good-looking puppet to sing their songs for them. The issue with that is people don't see the artist as the victim in downloading, they see a faceless songwriter and a record company getting 95% of the royalties and their favorite artist getting squat.
So instead, kids will download the music for free and pay to see them in concert, thinking the artist will get more money that way; which is another false assumption for artists in their first record deal. Video did indeed kill the radio star.
In the 90's, Microsoft figured out how to out-Apple Apple in their marketing to colleges and universities. They used their market share to sell colleges that they're doing their students a dis-service if they don't run Office because that's what they'll be running once they graduate. The pricing for Campus is less than a Select or Enterprise agreement and it makes the act of being a software reseller for Microsoft a much easier enterprise for the campus bookstore if they don't go through a clearinghouse for that sort of thing.
Currently Apple markets mostly to primary-secondary education with the graphic arts programs being the big competition space for them in colleges. Most of the bargain is if you opt to finance through apple as an individual teacher or institution. If Apple had some bright sales reps, they'd be pumping dual-boot mac-minis across the desks of a number of IT departments in colleges and universities. With dual boot, they can sell flexibility at a marginal cost increase and set up the MAC OS for internet use and the Windows OS for corporate-life preperation.
On the ground, the Superman thing has been dealt with. But when dealing with an industry that hasn't changed their headphone ports in 30 years, I doubt they'd look at a packet shaper device on their freshman effort.
Plenty of people running the Hughes Satellite Internet service are using VOIP with minor issues, but nothing that keeps you from having a conversation. With laptops coming with built-in WAN capabilities nowadays; I think that's how most folks that want access will get access. I've seen plenty of folks on flights using their phone for data access without processing that they were still using cellular service to do it, so as WAN grows in acceptance (especially integrated instead of an aircard that's obvious)there's going to be a boatload of people running cellular traffic on the flights.
I'd rather see the airline folks spend some effort to get rid of some stupid regulations and unneccessary people instead of getting another mediocre service. We can eliminate the flight attendant costs on flights with a DVD player and a coke machine, so just do it. Let the folks that sit in the exit row get $50 off the flight in exchange for making sure the overhead bins are closed and everyone has a seatbelt on at takeoff. If the plane crashes, I'm sure everyone will get to the nearest exit or gaping hole in the plane to exit from.
Can you see the average flight attendant understanding that your bluetooth skype phone isn't a cell phone? Also, it only takes one wizzard that decides the flight from DC to Dallas is the perfect time to download Superman Returns instead of watching it like decent folks to screw everyone on the plane that paid for the service.
Did you drink the grape Kool-aide or the cherry Kool-aide at the education camp? Microsoft will never get past the patching and they've at least built a process (monthly patches) and tools (WSUS, SMS, Windows Update, etc.) to deal with this reality.
There's a simple formula to determine how secure and relaible any software is (OS or application). As you add to the total lines of code, regardless of who is writing the code, the opportunities for unexpected errors and security issues grows at a logorythmic scale. I loaded my VISTA DVD and the friggin OS takes 12 GIGs of HDD space. Office 2007 beta is out and it's install footprint is larger than Office 2003. As you add complexity and features, you add to the error rate on software, hardware, cars, etc.
I'm probably showing my age here, but the thing that was bashed into my head when I started programming was that the next version of software should be SMALLER and MORE RELIABLE than the last version. If Microsoft (and plenty of other folks including some of the current LINUX projects) embraced making what they've already tried to build and provide better instead of pushing for something new, we'd be in a hell-of-a-lot-better-shape than we are today.
As long as we live in the "bigger is better" and "people only buy the next version if there's more features" era of computing, then security and bugs are a fact of life we have to accept. Nobody's saying Microsoft won't try or isn't getting better, but the plain truth is they will never get rid of these issues if the driving force in their organization is to innovate and expand the feature set.
IMHO, we didn't need to get anything else into MSOffice after 4.1 was released. You could copy & paste, put an excel spreadsheet in a powerpoint presentation, and write a letter. Any Office 4.1 exploits released...ever?
Just upgrade to Windows VISTA (when it's out) and Office 2007 (when it's out) and all of these silly security issues will go away....
Oh wait, didn't they say that when they released Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003 Server, Office XP, & Office 2003? HMMMMMMM. This could be a pattern forming.
Look, you can't change the way you work because of what happens to you away from work. Having personal problems is no excuse to change the way you do your job. The company that pays you and the customers that pay them deserve the same effort while you're at the office regardless of what's going on in your life.
Everything on the market was already being made or 99% designed before Lenovo bought the brand. The true test of quality and innovation will be with the next flip of laptops. The R&D and design work is still being done in the USA by the old thinkpad team, but time will tell if they have the same budget and the same directives on what they're to build. It doesn't matter how great your design team is if you're told you've got to make a laptop for no more than $999 MSRP.
The big ole bag of ass that will become Vista someday is going to make good use of that 2nd core. The current preview version loves all the CPU, RAM, and Video processing you can throw at it.
Where I work, we're starting to use VMWare or VirtualPC to isolate troublesome apps so one crappy application doesn't kill a client's PC. Virtualization on the desktop will expand to get around the universal truth that while you can install any windows application on a clean windows OS and make it run, installing apps two and beyond aren't guaranteed to work together. Between virtualization and Vista, it's wise for business customers to OVERBUY for today so it's usable in 3-4 years.
Telco cabinets are DC and have been for some time.
The HP Blade chasis has an AC to DC PDU outside the chasis.
One thing to remember about DC VS AC cabling. DC requires thicker gaugue cable to push the same wattage. If you think the back of your server cabinet looks cluttered now, wait.
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I'll sound like the grumpy old man, but what's wrong with green text and a black background? I've used it for years and the voices in my head haven't complained once about it.
Well fuck. Who's going to call everyone on their bullshit now?
I wouldn't call that boneheaded. That probably kept a bunch of folks in their jobs.
All works are written from a given perspective. Only in the US is the American Revolution not called "The Colonial Inssurection". What's important is can someone reason their own argument and then go out and find sources that support that belief. Too often, opinions and papers are written the other way around.
Critical Thinking is the skill missing from colleges. It was missing before wikipedia.
There are folks that take the word of Gartner like it is manna from heaven and it continues to amaze me. They've managed to position themselves a trusted source by putting products in a 2x2 square after they interview people using the software despite the fact that most of the time they end up being wrong. Like any good psychic, they only refer to their successes at predicting the future and hope people will forget when they missed the mark.
It's the first question in damn near every management interview and it's a good gut check to see if you'll be happy. If the answer is more money, you need to think twice about going in that direction.
IT Manager is a manager position in the IT department, not an IT position with more money. If you want to make more money in IT, it is far better to grow your skills and expertise in a technology that interests you and get certified as high as you can in that technology.
If you want to enter into management, you'll only be truly successful if it's because that's the work you want to do every day. The good part of it is you have a better say in the direction things are headed, the bad part is you have to make the tough choices: layoffs, hiring decisions, dealing with performance problems, and deciding where to spend your limited budget. You'll be placed in a position where you may have to fire a friend or former coworker and if you can't live with that, don't apply for the job.
I've seen the thoughtfulness of the engineering slip since IBM stepped away from the table. Example, the friggin wireless off switch is on the front of some of the new thinkpads. When I tested it, I caught myself turning it off when running the box on my lap. In the multinational corporate environment, it's impossible to say who owns a company and where the profits from that company benefit others. From a practical point-of-view, my suggestion is find the best machine and run it.
I would think you have a service contract for your power and mechanical systems but I would at least get:
- a drain snake and a drain cleaner. If you go to grainger, they have one that runs on co2 carts(like an air rifle uses). Condensation lines from air handlers will clog from time-to-time and the under-floor water detection system will alert you when you have a drain back up (you did get an under-floor water detection system?)
- a shop vac. to pull up any water should a drain back up.
- a multimeter with a big clamp. you can check if a whip is energized by just wrapping the clamp around the whip.
- POTS phones next to the cancel buttons on your fire system with a current contact list next to it. If you're alone in a data center using your finger to keep the sprinklers/air suppression from firing, you'll appreciate the phone being there.
- extra floor tiles & extra vents.
- install whips in your PDUs that match the longest length required that match up to your most frequently used connections (L5-20, L6-20, L6-30). Should you have a breaker fail on you in the PDU, you can run the spare whip anywhere on the floor and bring the rack back up.
- spare breakers in every size used in your PDUs
- a couple of big industrial fans. Helpful in any cooling system failure.
- an ir thermometer gun. To spot check temps around the data center.
My Outpost experience is tarnished by starting with 1.0 and upgrading through 1.5 to get a working program. At the time, it was a big jump in gaming to run inside of windows and not DOS so I admit my feelings are quite personal.
First, a good game is one that draws you into the storyline and doesn't require 30 keys to play the damn thing. Graphics are either enhancements or cat litter to cover the crappy code. Like the original poster, I had Oompute Magazine on my monthly list of purchases in the 70s-80s era and learned more about programming trying to fix the syntax errors to get a game to play than in any classroom since.
......
Second, there are some great old games out there. Master of Orion, Panzer General, the Mario franchise, etc. that are timeless and as enjoyable today as before.
However, there has been a tidal wave of crap over the years nobody wants to remember. My personal list of disappointments is below:
Outpost - I probably put $40 of long distance calls in to the sierra bbs(pre internet) to download 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5. I never got a monorail built and it never ran for more than 45 minutes without crapping it's pants.
The Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom Arcade Game - total crap. Indy frees the little kids, rides down the rail cart, steals a stone from the altar.......then goes back to freeing more kids, going down another rail cart,
PacMan for the 2600 - While the audio is still used whenever anyone on TV is playing a video game, this was probably the most disappointing arcade port of all time.
ET for the 2600 - Painfully bad
Indiana Jones for the 2600 - Bad, bad, bad
The Star Wars Games for the original NES - George Lucas owes me $20 for ep1 & ep2, and $80 for these pieces of crap
The Coleco Adam - The entire platform and every game
Master of Orion 3 - WTF! How could you fall so far from grace?
My point is that what's good is good and what's bad is bad. Nostalgia puts a rosy spin on things, but pull down an emulator and try to play some of the games you loved as a kid. I got the Atari collection to play Star Raiders again and Jesus, Mary, and Joseph did I ever piss away a couple of years of youth on that game.
The only person that can get you the right answer is yourself. The three big options are RTFM, CBT, and onsite training. I use a combination of the three options. IEEE has some online training in around 800 subjects for $200/year. TestOut has a nice little certification training and exam prep package that will cover the OS side of what you need to cover. The Safari program from Oreily is one of the great deals in the industry for online documentation. I think the benefit of travel/in person training is more in networking and peer discussion than what the instructor has to say. Use the out of town trips for events where there's some roundtables or training on a topic you're struggling to grasp on your own.
Why pay $9 for movies that are in the $5 bin at Wal-Mart already? Scent of a F-ing Woman????? Al Pachino owes me $7 for seeing that in the theater.
I'd rather see the service go after recent 1st run movies at the same time the $1-$2 theaters get them. I'd pay $9 to download and burn a featureless DVD of a recent release(think X-Men 3) and still consider buying the commercial DVD is I liked the film enough. It would give the studios a revenue stream on a flick while they were working on the DVD title.
Redhate Enterprise support is aggressivly priced compared to other players in the enterprise (IBM(AIX), HP(HP-UX), Oracle, Microsoft, etc.). Staffing at most of these vendors can be split into sales, support, programming, r&d, and management. Redhat's income stream will dictate how fast they can grow and how many people they employ.
:) ), and Dell(who's been able to overcome this of late).
The danger is to grow faster than your organization can absorb (so you don't have former janitors as VPs of development). If you do, quality and customer satisfaction will suffer. Some great examples are Leading Edge(anyone remember these guys?), Gateway 2000(who knew signing 900 retail leases within a couple of years could kill you?
So here's where it becomes interesting. You're potentially underfunded by your licensing model and you're seeing growth in the folks buying your service. Do you cut costs(layoff), finance expansion (go in debt to grow), or raise prices? These situations are when the CEO & CFO actually earn their paycheck. I'll be interested to see how Redhat responds.
I hardly think Western Union is a major funding stream for terrorism anymore. I'm sure you can find an exaple to the contrary, but in the era of paypal and other e-payment systems that allow peer-to-peer payments for minimal transaction fees I don't see people shuffling money with Western Union. This is just another example of companies and governments doing stupid things because of what's happened in the past instead of anticipating what will happen in the future and deal with it instead.
First, I can't say for sure if piracy lead to the death of the album as a desired purchase or downloading; but there is almost no artist out there that's producing albums. Instead, it's 2-4 singles and filler to get to 12 songs or so. Because of that reality, almost nobody wants to buy an entire cd. I frequent iTunes and have yet to click on the "buy CD" link on any record released after 1982. I think the "business model" that's come of piracy is pay-per song, which isn't really a new business model if you grew up in the age of 45's.
My real point is that few artists make their mark long enough to develop a genuine revenue from record sales. The "first deal" is heavily slanted towards the record company, and fairly so because they assume the risk of the 20 records that tank for every one that sells well. Compound that with the dwindling number of artists that actually write their own music and the result is most of the royalty income from the RIAA goes to the record companies and their staff of songwriters that are actually talented musicians that use the latest good-looking puppet to sing their songs for them. The issue with that is people don't see the artist as the victim in downloading, they see a faceless songwriter and a record company getting 95% of the royalties and their favorite artist getting squat.
So instead, kids will download the music for free and pay to see them in concert, thinking the artist will get more money that way; which is another false assumption for artists in their first record deal. Video did indeed kill the radio star.
In the 90's, Microsoft figured out how to out-Apple Apple in their marketing to colleges and universities. They used their market share to sell colleges that they're doing their students a dis-service if they don't run Office because that's what they'll be running once they graduate. The pricing for Campus is less than a Select or Enterprise agreement and it makes the act of being a software reseller for Microsoft a much easier enterprise for the campus bookstore if they don't go through a clearinghouse for that sort of thing.
Currently Apple markets mostly to primary-secondary education with the graphic arts programs being the big competition space for them in colleges. Most of the bargain is if you opt to finance through apple as an individual teacher or institution. If Apple had some bright sales reps, they'd be pumping dual-boot mac-minis across the desks of a number of IT departments in colleges and universities. With dual boot, they can sell flexibility at a marginal cost increase and set up the MAC OS for internet use and the Windows OS for corporate-life preperation.
On the ground, the Superman thing has been dealt with. But when dealing with an industry that hasn't changed their headphone ports in 30 years, I doubt they'd look at a packet shaper device on their freshman effort.
Plenty of people running the Hughes Satellite Internet service are using VOIP with minor issues, but nothing that keeps you from having a conversation. With laptops coming with built-in WAN capabilities nowadays; I think that's how most folks that want access will get access. I've seen plenty of folks on flights using their phone for data access without processing that they were still using cellular service to do it, so as WAN grows in acceptance (especially integrated instead of an aircard that's obvious)there's going to be a boatload of people running cellular traffic on the flights.
I'd rather see the airline folks spend some effort to get rid of some stupid regulations and unneccessary people instead of getting another mediocre service. We can eliminate the flight attendant costs on flights with a DVD player and a coke machine, so just do it. Let the folks that sit in the exit row get $50 off the flight in exchange for making sure the overhead bins are closed and everyone has a seatbelt on at takeoff. If the plane crashes, I'm sure everyone will get to the nearest exit or gaping hole in the plane to exit from.
Can you see the average flight attendant understanding that your bluetooth skype phone isn't a cell phone? Also, it only takes one wizzard that decides the flight from DC to Dallas is the perfect time to download Superman Returns instead of watching it like decent folks to screw everyone on the plane that paid for the service.
It obviously doesn't excite the part of the brain that controls someone's ability to drive worth a damn.
Did you drink the grape Kool-aide or the cherry Kool-aide at the education camp? Microsoft will never get past the patching and they've at least built a process (monthly patches) and tools (WSUS, SMS, Windows Update, etc.) to deal with this reality.
There's a simple formula to determine how secure and relaible any software is (OS or application). As you add to the total lines of code, regardless of who is writing the code, the opportunities for unexpected errors and security issues grows at a logorythmic scale. I loaded my VISTA DVD and the friggin OS takes 12 GIGs of HDD space. Office 2007 beta is out and it's install footprint is larger than Office 2003. As you add complexity and features, you add to the error rate on software, hardware, cars, etc.
I'm probably showing my age here, but the thing that was bashed into my head when I started programming was that the next version of software should be SMALLER and MORE RELIABLE than the last version. If Microsoft (and plenty of other folks including some of the current LINUX projects) embraced making what they've already tried to build and provide better instead of pushing for something new, we'd be in a hell-of-a-lot-better-shape than we are today.
As long as we live in the "bigger is better" and "people only buy the next version if there's more features" era of computing, then security and bugs are a fact of life we have to accept. Nobody's saying Microsoft won't try or isn't getting better, but the plain truth is they will never get rid of these issues if the driving force in their organization is to innovate and expand the feature set.
IMHO, we didn't need to get anything else into MSOffice after 4.1 was released. You could copy & paste, put an excel spreadsheet in a powerpoint presentation, and write a letter. Any Office 4.1 exploits released...ever?
Just upgrade to Windows VISTA (when it's out) and Office 2007 (when it's out) and all of these silly security issues will go away....
Oh wait, didn't they say that when they released Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003 Server, Office XP, & Office 2003? HMMMMMMM. This could be a pattern forming.
Look, you can't change the way you work because of what happens to you away from work. Having personal problems is no excuse to change the way you do your job. The company that pays you and the customers that pay them deserve the same effort while you're at the office regardless of what's going on in your life.
Everything on the market was already being made or 99% designed before Lenovo bought the brand. The true test of quality and innovation will be with the next flip of laptops. The R&D and design work is still being done in the USA by the old thinkpad team, but time will tell if they have the same budget and the same directives on what they're to build. It doesn't matter how great your design team is if you're told you've got to make a laptop for no more than $999 MSRP.
The big ole bag of ass that will become Vista someday is going to make good use of that 2nd core. The current preview version loves all the CPU, RAM, and Video processing you can throw at it.
Where I work, we're starting to use VMWare or VirtualPC to isolate troublesome apps so one crappy application doesn't kill a client's PC. Virtualization on the desktop will expand to get around the universal truth that while you can install any windows application on a clean windows OS and make it run, installing apps two and beyond aren't guaranteed to work together. Between virtualization and Vista, it's wise for business customers to OVERBUY for today so it's usable in 3-4 years.
Telco cabinets are DC and have been for some time.
The HP Blade chasis has an AC to DC PDU outside the chasis.
One thing to remember about DC VS AC cabling. DC requires thicker gaugue cable to push the same wattage. If you think the back of your server cabinet looks cluttered now, wait.