Likewise. I've worked for a company using BPOS for the past month and a half now, and I can recall off the top of my head maybe a total of a day and a half of outage across half a dozen or so different outages. "Mail's down" is a common sentiment. When people are working out of their mailboxes (documents, correspondence, and so on) - such as in a 'business office' - that really, really hurts.
So-called "cloud" computing has been around for many years in one form or another, but mainly as 'hosted services'. The only difference now is that it's really, really popular (beyond what $9.95/year can do) because it looks like another computer out there on the internet, not some minimalist service. It also costs more, as you'd expect. The only thing that hasn't changed
99.999% uptime was acquirable years ago. How do you think they did that, exactly? Magic? No - the same schemes employed now with cheaper servers. 18 days a year of downtime is astoundingly bad for something like this, IMO.
No. And No. The former is uncommon at best; the later is frustrating difficult if there's a possibility that the user profile is infected (due to the 'store shit everywhere, lots of binary files' nature of a profile).
Windows PCs are disposable. If it's important, assume that the PC is a kiosk. It's not such the case now as in later years, thank god, but it used to be that a Windows reinstall was more time and effort to get 'back up to snuff' as a Gentoo build.
At first I thought this was an acknowledgement of the poltical season being in full swing. Thankfully, this does not yet hold true, and we're actually talking about monkeys.
Nuclear energy's cost, particularly in the US, is as high as it is due to the stupid requirements on spent fuel and the moratorium on modern facilities which can use it. It's as simple as that. China, for instance, seems to be doing just fine creating newer, modern nuke plants. If 'other methods' were sufficient at this point in the game, the pragmatic government of China would have quite obviously chosen them over nuke power, but no: nuke power has a bit of a green light.
If my 40-year old car has the engine seize because I forgot to change the motor oil at 2,000 miles, I don't say "oh, obviously cars suck. I'm going to only take the bus and ride my bike" - as is happening here by many countries. I say "oh, I think I'll buy a new car, because driving older cars is quite prone to failure, and they need a lot more
Explain to me this: if hydro power, one of the 'alternatives' to nuclear power, is such a great thing (or at least better than nuclear), explain to me how the constant water supply required to make them run effectively could be counter-balanced by the 'prevent flooding and maintain commerce' requirements competing with it, if done on a large scale?
I laughed at your last one, because you pretty much just left North and South Dakota in your exclusion list. (North Dakota is having flooding right now, too, by the way.)
Funny, there is no such issue in the Black Hills region of South Dakota. But don't tell anyone, they might go to live there, and then it'd be ruined (see "big cities"). I think stupid people in large cities are more likely to be your cause of death than some 'catastrophe', but that's just me.
I believe the point here is that if it weren't for existing 'environmental policies' within the Corps of Engineers, and the dams and dikes had been used as designed, a 100 or 1000 year flood would not be nearly the issue, because there would not be nearly as much water to contend with as there is now. Sure, there'd be flooding - just nothing like this. Farmers won't be able to plant next year because the ground will still be water logged from this flooding (never mind flooding which may occur next year). There will be standing water through August throughout much of Iowa/Nebraska.
If the FBI has taken a full rack or more of equipment (as the article suggests), and they're a small shop, it would seem to me that a day or more is not an unreasonable recovery time.
Also, a hosting company may not actually do backups for customers, they may just 'rack and manage' on an exigent basis, leaving day-to-day to the customer.
Look, it's more than possible for a single guy to manage a half dozen racks of equipment on his own w/o much issue. Two, three guys, done right with good infrastructure, could do a couple dozen. We're not talking about anything complex, just simple single servers running an application or three. In this situation we're talking about a web hosting company, where they're constantly doing piddly 'little' things but almost always running short staffed. Switching is done by one guy/group, and the server maint by others. There is no room for 'disaster recovery in an instant' here. It'll be all up-hill, in the snow, in January, on Mars.With a higher than expected gravity.
Those same three guys are going to be hard pressed to rebuild their own infrastructure in day, too, backups or no backups. Figure it's noon before they even get chassis from Dell/IBM/HP to replace the ones stolen by the FBI that had their infrastructure on it, and then they've got to rebuild the racks, too - cabling, racking, and hardware RAID (like that doesn't take forever to perform). Considering it takes, what, 10 minutes? on some of these newer IBM servers to boot, this is hardly surprising. Add to all that the fact that their tape backup system, their disk backup system, and/or infrastructure switches may have been taken, and you've got a huge, huge headache. It takes, what, a day for two guys to simply install, cable, and rack a single rack chassis (guessing here) to all 40+ Us? And realistically, you can't have many more than 2-3 guys doing the work.
I'd be surprised if they got back up to 'fully operational' within 2-3 days. I'll be impressed if they don't go out of business.
The only time you'd need it is if it's lost - in which case it's somewhat a moot point, due to lack of storage encyption. Otherwise, the device is in your pocket, on your person, or otherwise in your 'immediate' control (such as on a bedside next to your girlfriend, who would otherwise be tempted to see if you're still sleeping around).
Personally, I prefer the 'swipe' functiononality available on Android. Less secure, mathematically, but quite a bit more functional.
How does that make any difference? Decreased sun making it to the planet's surface is the same thing, regardless of whether it's due to decreased solar activity or increased sedimentary interference.
The problem, as I see it, is that the proponents of global warming pretty fucking quickly change their color when it gets really, really cold (or trends towards such) and say "well, it's climate change, not global warming!"
Here's a hint. We have seasons. Some years have more drastic seasons than others, and some decades have more variation than others.
Global warming proponents are pretty quick to say "damn global warming" on any day even remotely over 80F or so (depending on your region of the planet), or blame climate change if there's an abnormally severe winter storm. I've never heard so much bitching as from "the sky is falling" proponents - unless, maybe, it's Prius drivers ironically bitching about bad drivers.
Besides the fact that you got the facts horribly wrong, you miss the point.
What Carter did almost two generations ago is essentially inconsequential. It was a token gesture at the time to try to point people towards the technology and to think in that direction.
Today, we're still thinking and looking in that direction. When it's a reasonable expenditure and will have a net energy return, most people will do it (even if the 'energy return' is only made viable through government funding, and the actual lifetime energy cost of the devices are never likely to be paid off).
The problem is that these technologies do not scale, more often than not, and they are not a 24/7 solution. What's needed are large scale regional/local energy sequestering for night use: winds die at night, and solar power does as well. Then you've got the peak use hours, and the problems of night hour hydro being able to do anything about that, currently. Regional seasonal energy use? Check. So, what's really needed is a system to more effectively sequester the wasted energy for later, as well as to help even out the highs and lows. Systems like this obviously exist; however, the infrastructure at the local level isn't really available to deal with it. Power networks, like IT networks, are more costly to maintain in man hours and materials as you distribute functionality across more points of failure (why does NOBODY understand this? and yes, I include most sysadmins in this category). Sure, you're distributing load more effectively, reducing over-arching symptomatic failures, and so on... but there IS a cost. Doing this won't be cheap!
It's all a delicate balancing act and takes more than some stupid political move like putting solar panels on the White House (which, IIRC, were removed for practical reasons involving maintenance costs, IIRC, not any sort of evil alignment with big oil). (What's more, if you don't think the power companies aren't already doing what they can to improve their systems to increase their profits in competitive industries, you'd best go back and look at how the power grid actually works. Hint: it's a market.)
I think you somehow missed the point of what I was trying to say.
Outside sales is usually pretty much as I describe it, from what I've seen. They prey on ignorance, get technical things wrong, and upsell even when told by the engineers "this and this only". Then they go ahead and sell completely outlandish deliverables without consulting the people who will actually be doing the work.
Yes, IT sales have to know something about what they're doing. But more often than not, it's a topical scratch of the surface - of many surfaces. They did something technical at one point (probably not competently) and are great at blowing smoke and moving the mirrors around - I'll give you that. But they're not trustworthy individuals by any stretch of the imagination, in my experience. "Friends"? Maybe. Good to go out for drinks with? Certainly. However, I've yet to meet one who truly knows when they're lying, and when they're telling the truth. They aren't the kind of people you can trust, and in IT, where trust is more important than in other industries, that's a killing blow in my mind.
Get ready to fucking fail. Your customers will start looking at your competition. Short term gains will be up, but long-term, you're fucked.
Why do you think the salesmen are mistrusted and the engineers are trusted? Ever bother thinking of that? It's probably due to salesmen lying only slightly less than politicians for their bread and butter, and engineers being about as factually oriented as you can get. Sales types are hated by engineers for this very reason: sales will commit engineers to one lie after another without second thoughts, making things difficult. It's just a lie to the salesman, but it's actually something the engineer has to perform.
Furthermore, competent 'engineers' don't need to be told to "upsell" products. They'll recommend the most technically appropriate (per their knowledge/experience/etc.) product to the customer. This is not only why they are called engineers, it's why they are trusted. If you try that to try and 'improve the bottom line' you're a fool and don't understand your customers or your employees.
Furthermore, the competent engineers will become disatisfied with falsifying things or pushing products, and look elsewhere. I've seen it happen. If they don't become dissatisfied and look elsewhere directly, they're going to start asking for larger and larger raises because they dislike the work. I've seen it happen time and time again.
On the other hand... getting rid of sales outright might improve the bottom line, as well. It really depends on what you'll be having the engineers do. (Broadly speaking your requirements do not sound that broad.) Overall, I'd say axing 'sales' is a good idea. Keep marketing, kill sales.
Ya know, this lost me a lot of respect for RMS. I can understand his need to make a living through speaking engagements (assuming that's what he's doing here), but for a man who's visible life and career has been almost completely focused on "free as in speech", this is somewhat of a backwards move.
Israel, an atomic state with military hardware which rivals anything in the rest of the west and with one of the best military forces to boot, is bombarded on an almost daily basis by rockets and attacked by "Palestine"/Muslim extremists intent on killing Israelis. Yes, the Israelis retaliate, but given their capabilities it is, at best, "measured".
The Palistine promoters are trying to silence RMS speech in Israel for political reasons. RMS succumbed for financial/prestige reasons. Isn't this precisely the issue behind RMS's ranting and raving?
Then the CS programs are horribly flawed, obviously. You're not allowed to take 2nd-year courses before you finish first year; why allow someone to do the rough equivilent of taking graduate level courses in a topic before at least proving competency in prerequisites?
By "prerequisites" I'm talking about proving a basic core competency. You need the mental facilities to even approach most CS or IT principles, just as an engineer has to understand structural properties of a myriad of materials before he's able to effectively engineer something - permeability, rigidity, compression rating (and so on and so forth, depending on the specific discipline). For CS, it should be something along the lines of: more advanced algebra (linear algebra?), geometry, statistics, and so on. Importantly, they need to be able to think orthogonally. These are important for IT oriented study too, though physical engineering/material sciences are more appropriate here as well. Unfortunately, what's learned in middle school is often forgotten.
CS is a 'hard' discipline, unlike the 'soft' disciplines where "eh, OK, he took Freshman English and has two other language courses under his belt" is a sufficient intellectual qualifier for admittance. If you want to make a click-and-design developer, sure, go the humanities route. If you need someone who's able to do something hard, by the book, and to think like an engineer... you'd better not. Honestly, there are too many people who enter IT/CS because they want to make video games (or like playing them) to the exclusion of knowing anything about the techncial side of things. If professors try the "trial by fire" approach it hopefully prevents them from fucking up someone's project to the point of not being salvagable 6, 7 years down the line. With a "science" field, the degree should mean something fairly discreet. That's what you're working with, after all -discreet principles, mostly.
That was my thought too - until recently, when I first really 'tried' two monitors. I've been an awesome window manager user for some time now, so the whole "tiling by default" thing is somewhat old hat. It works well, and really does speed up workflow (until i forget where I tagged something... then it's time for a break).
With awesome and two monitors, my workflow seems to be a little bit slower for most things, because 4+ tiled terminals on a monitor is more than enough real estate, though it did come in handy for having multiple side/side browser/terminal setups.
Well, the absolute requirements may be different, but we're dealing with the same principle for anything you buy when you're dealing with a supply that is smaller than the what would be needed to create an excess on the demand side.
Basically, it comes to "make what you have, last longer, and what you replace, make sure it will last without significant capital outlay". That's the reasoning I use when I buy new equipment (sink more into my computer PSU, because it will decrease the likelihood of failures), or when I buy a vehicle (a diesel with 150-200k isn't a problem if everything else is mechanically sound; rust, not such an issue.) An older house has solid walls, firm floors, and a dry, solid roof, but needs some aesthetic pickups? It's a better deal than a new house for the same amount... and so on.
For instance, buying an old but reliable gas guzzler van or truck or a slower computer with more RAM have the same principles behind them. It'll be useable longer -both in relative as well as absolute terms - without substantially more investment. Unless prices rise significantly, spending $1500 on a vehicle that gets 18mpg is a better proposition unless you put on 1000 or so miles a week (or something similarly crazy) than getting a $35k vehicle that gets 35mpg. Each will 'last' probably 2-5 years before you need to replace them (the newer vehicle, because you can't afford the payments anymore), and with the new vehicle you'll be fucked on payments, still.
Based on what evidence? A single widely used, but old (40+ years?) and defective, nuclear plant design? Yes, aside from 'background' radiation and the chance of secondary spillage, modern plant designs are (close to) 100% safe from 'failure from neglect'.
Wind power, on the other hand... why does anyone buy into it for mass production? It's not event effective, is most costly than nuclear, and is just as (proportionately) destructive to the environment as nuclear can be.
What if one car is completely build and works 'well enough' and has good factory support, but the other one offers 30% more performance, has all-wheel drive (VT), and twice as much+ storage space (8-16GB RAM support) - though it needs new glow plugs (you can start it, but only in warm weather).
That's the dichotomy of Atom vs. Bobcat, not what you propose.
Slashdot Mirror
It's one of my favorite books, and a large motivator in getting me into sysadmin work.
I hate you, Cliff Stoll. :P
Likewise. I've worked for a company using BPOS for the past month and a half now, and I can recall off the top of my head maybe a total of a day and a half of outage across half a dozen or so different outages. "Mail's down" is a common sentiment. When people are working out of their mailboxes (documents, correspondence, and so on) - such as in a 'business office' - that really, really hurts.
So-called "cloud" computing has been around for many years in one form or another, but mainly as 'hosted services'. The only difference now is that it's really, really popular (beyond what $9.95/year can do) because it looks like another computer out there on the internet, not some minimalist service. It also costs more, as you'd expect. The only thing that hasn't changed
99.999% uptime was acquirable years ago. How do you think they did that, exactly? Magic? No - the same schemes employed now with cheaper servers. 18 days a year of downtime is astoundingly bad for something like this, IMO.
That would explain Los Angeles and Shanghai, at any rate.
Yet most "Enterprise" uses Windows. You're not going to get a year-old not-yet-updated version to be supported.
(It's not like Firefox has support to begin with, being a free product. Eesh.)
No. And No. The former is uncommon at best; the later is frustrating difficult if there's a possibility that the user profile is infected (due to the 'store shit everywhere, lots of binary files' nature of a profile).
Windows PCs are disposable. If it's important, assume that the PC is a kiosk. It's not such the case now as in later years, thank god, but it used to be that a Windows reinstall was more time and effort to get 'back up to snuff' as a Gentoo build.
At first I thought this was an acknowledgement of the poltical season being in full swing. Thankfully, this does not yet hold true, and we're actually talking about monkeys.
Nuclear energy's cost, particularly in the US, is as high as it is due to the stupid requirements on spent fuel and the moratorium on modern facilities which can use it. It's as simple as that. China, for instance, seems to be doing just fine creating newer, modern nuke plants. If 'other methods' were sufficient at this point in the game, the pragmatic government of China would have quite obviously chosen them over nuke power, but no: nuke power has a bit of a green light.
If my 40-year old car has the engine seize because I forgot to change the motor oil at 2,000 miles, I don't say "oh, obviously cars suck. I'm going to only take the bus and ride my bike" - as is happening here by many countries. I say "oh, I think I'll buy a new car, because driving older cars is quite prone to failure, and they need a lot more
Explain to me this: if hydro power, one of the 'alternatives' to nuclear power, is such a great thing (or at least better than nuclear), explain to me how the constant water supply required to make them run effectively could be counter-balanced by the 'prevent flooding and maintain commerce' requirements competing with it, if done on a large scale?
I laughed at your last one, because you pretty much just left North and South Dakota in your exclusion list. (North Dakota is having flooding right now, too, by the way.)
Funny, there is no such issue in the Black Hills region of South Dakota. But don't tell anyone, they might go to live there, and then it'd be ruined (see "big cities"). I think stupid people in large cities are more likely to be your cause of death than some 'catastrophe', but that's just me.
I believe the point here is that if it weren't for existing 'environmental policies' within the Corps of Engineers, and the dams and dikes had been used as designed, a 100 or 1000 year flood would not be nearly the issue, because there would not be nearly as much water to contend with as there is now. Sure, there'd be flooding - just nothing like this. Farmers won't be able to plant next year because the ground will still be water logged from this flooding (never mind flooding which may occur next year). There will be standing water through August throughout much of Iowa/Nebraska.
That's ridiculous. For instance, has anyone seen Duke Nukem Forever? Plenty of women in there.
What are we talking about, again?
If the FBI has taken a full rack or more of equipment (as the article suggests), and they're a small shop, it would seem to me that a day or more is not an unreasonable recovery time.
Also, a hosting company may not actually do backups for customers, they may just 'rack and manage' on an exigent basis, leaving day-to-day to the customer.
Look, it's more than possible for a single guy to manage a half dozen racks of equipment on his own w/o much issue. Two, three guys, done right with good infrastructure, could do a couple dozen. We're not talking about anything complex, just simple single servers running an application or three. In this situation we're talking about a web hosting company, where they're constantly doing piddly 'little' things but almost always running short staffed. Switching is done by one guy/group, and the server maint by others. There is no room for 'disaster recovery in an instant' here. It'll be all up-hill, in the snow, in January, on Mars.With a higher than expected gravity.
Those same three guys are going to be hard pressed to rebuild their own infrastructure in day, too, backups or no backups. Figure it's noon before they even get chassis from Dell/IBM/HP to replace the ones stolen by the FBI that had their infrastructure on it, and then they've got to rebuild the racks, too - cabling, racking, and hardware RAID (like that doesn't take forever to perform). Considering it takes, what, 10 minutes? on some of these newer IBM servers to boot, this is hardly surprising. Add to all that the fact that their tape backup system, their disk backup system, and/or infrastructure switches may have been taken, and you've got a huge, huge headache. It takes, what, a day for two guys to simply install, cable, and rack a single rack chassis (guessing here) to all 40+ Us? And realistically, you can't have many more than 2-3 guys doing the work.
I'd be surprised if they got back up to 'fully operational' within 2-3 days. I'll be impressed if they don't go out of business.
It's almost a non-point.
The only time you'd need it is if it's lost - in which case it's somewhat a moot point, due to lack of storage encyption. Otherwise, the device is in your pocket, on your person, or otherwise in your 'immediate' control (such as on a bedside next to your girlfriend, who would otherwise be tempted to see if you're still sleeping around).
Personally, I prefer the 'swipe' functiononality available on Android. Less secure, mathematically, but quite a bit more functional.
How does that make any difference? Decreased sun making it to the planet's surface is the same thing, regardless of whether it's due to decreased solar activity or increased sedimentary interference.
The problem, as I see it, is that the proponents of global warming pretty fucking quickly change their color when it gets really, really cold (or trends towards such) and say "well, it's climate change, not global warming!"
Here's a hint. We have seasons. Some years have more drastic seasons than others, and some decades have more variation than others.
Global warming proponents are pretty quick to say "damn global warming" on any day even remotely over 80F or so (depending on your region of the planet), or blame climate change if there's an abnormally severe winter storm. I've never heard so much bitching as from "the sky is falling" proponents - unless, maybe, it's Prius drivers ironically bitching about bad drivers.
Besides the fact that you got the facts horribly wrong, you miss the point.
What Carter did almost two generations ago is essentially inconsequential. It was a token gesture at the time to try to point people towards the technology and to think in that direction.
Today, we're still thinking and looking in that direction. When it's a reasonable expenditure and will have a net energy return, most people will do it (even if the 'energy return' is only made viable through government funding, and the actual lifetime energy cost of the devices are never likely to be paid off).
The problem is that these technologies do not scale, more often than not, and they are not a 24/7 solution. What's needed are large scale regional/local energy sequestering for night use: winds die at night, and solar power does as well. Then you've got the peak use hours, and the problems of night hour hydro being able to do anything about that, currently. Regional seasonal energy use? Check. So, what's really needed is a system to more effectively sequester the wasted energy for later, as well as to help even out the highs and lows. Systems like this obviously exist; however, the infrastructure at the local level isn't really available to deal with it. Power networks, like IT networks, are more costly to maintain in man hours and materials as you distribute functionality across more points of failure (why does NOBODY understand this? and yes, I include most sysadmins in this category). Sure, you're distributing load more effectively, reducing over-arching symptomatic failures, and so on... but there IS a cost. Doing this won't be cheap!
It's all a delicate balancing act and takes more than some stupid political move like putting solar panels on the White House (which, IIRC, were removed for practical reasons involving maintenance costs, IIRC, not any sort of evil alignment with big oil). (What's more, if you don't think the power companies aren't already doing what they can to improve their systems to increase their profits in competitive industries, you'd best go back and look at how the power grid actually works. Hint: it's a market.)
I think you somehow missed the point of what I was trying to say.
Outside sales is usually pretty much as I describe it, from what I've seen. They prey on ignorance, get technical things wrong, and upsell even when told by the engineers "this and this only". Then they go ahead and sell completely outlandish deliverables without consulting the people who will actually be doing the work.
Yes, IT sales have to know something about what they're doing. But more often than not, it's a topical scratch of the surface - of many surfaces. They did something technical at one point (probably not competently) and are great at blowing smoke and moving the mirrors around - I'll give you that. But they're not trustworthy individuals by any stretch of the imagination, in my experience. "Friends"? Maybe. Good to go out for drinks with? Certainly. However, I've yet to meet one who truly knows when they're lying, and when they're telling the truth. They aren't the kind of people you can trust, and in IT, where trust is more important than in other industries, that's a killing blow in my mind.
Get ready to fucking fail. Your customers will start looking at your competition. Short term gains will be up, but long-term, you're fucked.
Why do you think the salesmen are mistrusted and the engineers are trusted? Ever bother thinking of that? It's probably due to salesmen lying only slightly less than politicians for their bread and butter, and engineers being about as factually oriented as you can get. Sales types are hated by engineers for this very reason: sales will commit engineers to one lie after another without second thoughts, making things difficult. It's just a lie to the salesman, but it's actually something the engineer has to perform.
Furthermore, competent 'engineers' don't need to be told to "upsell" products. They'll recommend the most technically appropriate (per their knowledge/experience/etc.) product to the customer. This is not only why they are called engineers, it's why they are trusted. If you try that to try and 'improve the bottom line' you're a fool and don't understand your customers or your employees.
Furthermore, the competent engineers will become disatisfied with falsifying things or pushing products, and look elsewhere. I've seen it happen. If they don't become dissatisfied and look elsewhere directly, they're going to start asking for larger and larger raises because they dislike the work. I've seen it happen time and time again.
On the other hand... getting rid of sales outright might improve the bottom line, as well. It really depends on what you'll be having the engineers do. (Broadly speaking your requirements do not sound that broad.) Overall, I'd say axing 'sales' is a good idea. Keep marketing, kill sales.
Ya know, this lost me a lot of respect for RMS. I can understand his need to make a living through speaking engagements (assuming that's what he's doing here), but for a man who's visible life and career has been almost completely focused on "free as in speech", this is somewhat of a backwards move.
Israel, an atomic state with military hardware which rivals anything in the rest of the west and with one of the best military forces to boot, is bombarded on an almost daily basis by rockets and attacked by "Palestine"/Muslim extremists intent on killing Israelis. Yes, the Israelis retaliate, but given their capabilities it is, at best, "measured".
The Palistine promoters are trying to silence RMS speech in Israel for political reasons. RMS succumbed for financial/prestige reasons. Isn't this precisely the issue behind RMS's ranting and raving?
Then the CS programs are horribly flawed, obviously. You're not allowed to take 2nd-year courses before you finish first year; why allow someone to do the rough equivilent of taking graduate level courses in a topic before at least proving competency in prerequisites?
By "prerequisites" I'm talking about proving a basic core competency. You need the mental facilities to even approach most CS or IT principles, just as an engineer has to understand structural properties of a myriad of materials before he's able to effectively engineer something - permeability, rigidity, compression rating (and so on and so forth, depending on the specific discipline). For CS, it should be something along the lines of: more advanced algebra (linear algebra?), geometry, statistics, and so on. Importantly, they need to be able to think orthogonally. These are important for IT oriented study too, though physical engineering/material sciences are more appropriate here as well. Unfortunately, what's learned in middle school is often forgotten.
CS is a 'hard' discipline, unlike the 'soft' disciplines where "eh, OK, he took Freshman English and has two other language courses under his belt" is a sufficient intellectual qualifier for admittance. If you want to make a click-and-design developer, sure, go the humanities route. If you need someone who's able to do something hard, by the book, and to think like an engineer... you'd better not. Honestly, there are too many people who enter IT /CS because they want to make video games (or like playing them) to the exclusion of knowing anything about the techncial side of things. If professors try the "trial by fire" approach it hopefully prevents them from fucking up someone's project to the point of not being salvagable 6, 7 years down the line. With a "science" field, the degree should mean something fairly discreet. That's what you're working with, after all -discreet principles, mostly.
That was my thought too - until recently, when I first really 'tried' two monitors. I've been an awesome window manager user for some time now, so the whole "tiling by default" thing is somewhat old hat. It works well, and really does speed up workflow (until i forget where I tagged something... then it's time for a break).
With awesome and two monitors, my workflow seems to be a little bit slower for most things, because 4+ tiled terminals on a monitor is more than enough real estate, though it did come in handy for having multiple side/side browser/terminal setups.
Well, the absolute requirements may be different, but we're dealing with the same principle for anything you buy when you're dealing with a supply that is smaller than the what would be needed to create an excess on the demand side.
Basically, it comes to "make what you have, last longer, and what you replace, make sure it will last without significant capital outlay". That's the reasoning I use when I buy new equipment (sink more into my computer PSU, because it will decrease the likelihood of failures), or when I buy a vehicle (a diesel with 150-200k isn't a problem if everything else is mechanically sound; rust, not such an issue.) An older house has solid walls, firm floors, and a dry, solid roof, but needs some aesthetic pickups? It's a better deal than a new house for the same amount... and so on.
For instance, buying an old but reliable gas guzzler van or truck or a slower computer with more RAM have the same principles behind them. It'll be useable longer -both in relative as well as absolute terms - without substantially more investment. Unless prices rise significantly, spending $1500 on a vehicle that gets 18mpg is a better proposition unless you put on 1000 or so miles a week (or something similarly crazy) than getting a $35k vehicle that gets 35mpg. Each will 'last' probably 2-5 years before you need to replace them (the newer vehicle, because you can't afford the payments anymore), and with the new vehicle you'll be fucked on payments, still.
Based on what evidence? A single widely used, but old (40+ years?) and defective, nuclear plant design? Yes, aside from 'background' radiation and the chance of secondary spillage, modern plant designs are (close to) 100% safe from 'failure from neglect'.
Wind power, on the other hand... why does anyone buy into it for mass production? It's not event effective, is most costly than nuclear, and is just as (proportionately) destructive to the environment as nuclear can be.
Where's groklaw when you need it?
What if one car is completely build and works 'well enough' and has good factory support, but the other one offers 30% more performance, has all-wheel drive (VT), and twice as much+ storage space (8-16GB RAM support) - though it needs new glow plugs (you can start it, but only in warm weather).
That's the dichotomy of Atom vs. Bobcat, not what you propose.