Yeah, I think I'd go with you on that one. The hidden danger with women is the fact that the way a woman interprets things can vary in extremes. Generally most men I've worked with from the nicest smartest guy you'll ever know to the most idiotic asshole you'll ever meet are still going to end up getting the same message with the same words. With a woman? Sometimes yes, sometimes no, sometimes something totally way off in left field. In this way it seems that women are FAR more sensitive to their work environment in that a hostile environment can degenerate into rabid backstabbing, while in a more friendly open environment things seem to be just fine.
Console games also just tend to be more complicated. Anecdote: My ex-wife's little brother is around 4 and of course wants to do whatever we were doing, including playing the PS2. Now for me it didn't seem like a big deal because I recall playing video games on a Nintendo a long time ago as well. But look at the old Nintendo controller - two buttons, select, start, and d-pad. Look at your typical PS2 controller - buttons everywhere, dpad, multiple joysticks. The other interesting thing was that he couldn't reach all the buttons because his hands were too small, and most ps2 games just required too many different combinations of buttons. Now obviously we weren't playing kids games, but I've seen kids quickly pick up kid oriented titles on a PC. Most kids can figure out a mouse and clicking a button fairly fast. Even so, I give the kid credit for doing surprisingly well at Shinobi. I would actually think that in the future the Wii will gain much more traction in the young kids market - but we'll see.
As for the educational thing, I think a lot of parents put too much emphasis around that mantra. While I feel that I would indeed feel guilty having a kid play the same sort of stuff I rot my own brain with, I think most any puzzle type game would be fine. Not just stuff like tetris, but games like Sheep Raider are a total blast and make you do "simple" problem solving.
Heh, they had cool CD cases for a while too. I think I still have the tin ones. I got a weird wooden one from my boss who didn't want it. So I use that to carry around my "action pack" CDs to unfuck people's computers. The look on peoples faces when I bring out that case is priceless: "Dude I asked you to fix my computer. You're going to fix my computer with AOL 9.0?"
At the $10 to $15 level, do you REALLY need a T-shirt as an incentive to donate to the EFF? I was actually wondering if Taco actually saved any of the old slashdot servers, and this is an interesting way to get something unique for a bit more money. In that case I would think someone might spend more cash then they otherwise would.
I'll pass on both though. I'd rather have a really cool UID (ala 666, 1337) than a really low one. I actually still have my first computer and I continually think it's a waste of space to keep but nostalgia gets to me even still. It's well hot-rodded now going from a P133 to P200 and from 16Mb RAM to 96. Next upgrade will be a solid state disk when the 8Gb comes down.
Bin Laden and his cohorts are probably laughing* in their cave at how they've succeeded in their first goal of undermining our society.
Perhaps he is, but he'd be wrong. He didn't undermine our society. We did it to ourselves. Where are the mass protests in the streets every time they infringe on our freedoms? Nowhere to be found. Hardly even a quip. In fact many people are GLAD to see our freedoms thrown to the pyres so that they can feel safer.
Bin Laden was just a catalyst. We honestly lost our right to freedom when we were willing to simply give it away.
Actually I wasn't testing the datacenter (which uses vastly more power even when idle). I was testing desktop PCs. Many people at the company I work for tend to leave their PCs on all the time. Generally that bothered me as being wasteful, so I started to set many PCs to turn themselves off an hour or so after everyone left. I started to get some resistance when people complained that they had to turn their PC back on in the morning (yeah, tough life I know).
So I started probing into how much power we were actually burning for no reason in order to back myself up. After a few complaints everyone just dropped the topic. I was also doing some testing in order to get ballpark figures on how long a computer should last on a ups backup.
As for the data center... I gave up. They just burn a lot of power. For every process I manage to streamline and consolidate some function, they go and drop yet ANOTHER windows server that "MUST have its own machine". I have however dropped some regular backup (redundant process) servers to something like the Soekris net5501 that draws something like around 10W.
"it takes more energy to power it on than to just let it run"
I'm not sure where people get that from (I've heard it myself). Most of my tests on a run of the mill PC (onboard VGA) shows a computer drawing around 80W. There is a small spike when booting, but I honestly have a hard time believing you save money letting the thing run over 10 minutes. As someone else said, get a kill-o-watt and test it out. It's actually really interesting to see how much power stuff like TVs draw, as well as the difference between CF and incandescent lighes.
Of course my testing was extremely informal so take that with a grain of salt. For some reason using an SSD hard drive with FreeBSD on the same hardware (instead of Win2k) dropped the power usage to around 58W. I have no idea why that is.
It depends on what you are using them for. SSD are going into laptops first. Mainly for durability and power requirements, but also because there are speed gains to be had there. Most laptop drives perform rather poorly. Random reads are good in SSD drives, but SSD drives also excel in sustained throughput. Modern hard drives still have good bursting capability but that boost goes down the toilet rather quick. If you ever have the need to test some of this out, try derik's boot'n nuke on a regular hard drive and you can see a ways into the process that the sustained speed of most hard drives really isn't that great. I've been testing some SSD drives and was actually pretty surprised at a noticeable improvement in responsiveness, although stuff like boot times remained about the same.
Still I don't see how this would improve desktop performance. I'd think two WD Raptors in a mirror would still kick any SSD configuration. Personally I think scsi is still the performance king, but views on that vary.
Re:I don't care how good it is
on
Cracking Go
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· Score: 1
Well I don't care how good the computer is, or how good the posessed kid is. I'd like to be beaten by Yukari Yoshihara who did the 5 minute commentary on how to play go at the end of each anime (according to the wikipedia article).
Ah Japan. The country that can get hot girls to dress up like cats, perform porn feats like bukkake, and even play board games professionally. Where's my passport?!?
If that includes the same Tie Fighter edition as the one that used the graphics engine as "X-Wing vs Tie Fighter", here's a fun fact about THAT fucking game. It REQUIRES something like Direct X 6. Not a later version, NOT the version that Windows 2000 comes with UNUPGRADED, no it must be a specific version of Direct X. And no you cannot downgrade. Oh yeah, if you do manage to get it to run (on win98) you'll most likely have no graphics acceleration. Have Fun!
Seriously, this is the kind of garbage that made me give up PC gaming. If PC vendors want to know why people are abandoning PCs for consoles, it's because the games are often buggy garbage that has to be patched to hell, often doesn't work in a few years, and quite often is crippled if you even CAN get it to work.
And you know what? My Pentium 133 was so vastly overpowered for the DOS version that with all options turned on there was NO slowdown and I had a freaking blast. There have been a few weekends I was going to attempt to get dosbox up and running on Linux just to play Tie Fighter (my favorite game of all time).
You know why I don't need a remake of Final Fantasy 7? Because I can still play it on my PS3. Oops, no I can't. Sony just took backwards compatibility away. Note to Sony: Nintendo may be about to school you big time once you jilt PS2 owners with massive libraries that have been waiting for PS3 prices fall to where they can afford them.
The usual equivalent in windows-land is you spend days searching for stuff and getting dumb meaningless error messages ("please check that the domain controller is both locatable and contactable" - hey I know, Mr Paperclip, why don't YOU tell ME whether it was either unlocatable or uncontactable or both..), then eventually you find the answer on someone smug bloke's blog with a mugshot of him in the corner and 1000s of thankyou messages, rather than anywhere on MSDN. (incidentally, that error was nothing to do with the server being unlocatable or contactable, but being windows, I couldn't do a trace on it to find out where it was breaking, I just had to click "OK" and try something else).
Oh man, that's just WAAY too true. And I truly feel the pain setting up an Exchange server right now (where the click here for more information link in the Exchange control panel conveniently does NOTHING).
Whenever I see text file argument come up with Apache I always think the same thing to myself - I'm glad I don't use Apache. No seriously, the text configuration is like a non nonsensical text barf compared to what it ought to be, but I think that is partially due to the way most distros lay out the default configuration. Using Lighttpd is like a dream in comparison when dealing with the text configuration. This is one area that I wish Apache (and most defiantly Xorg) should work on.
"In the days"? Heh, I still find all sorts of sites with broken DNS in this way. Typically these are mis configured IIS sites that display "no website configured at this address" or something similar. Add www and presto it works. In college I saw many people scratch their heads trying to get websites to work. Whenever I suggested they add or remove www they all thought I was crazy. Usually the problem was just a matter of lazy DNS setups.
Actually I was sort of thinking along similar lines when this type of thread came up before. Would I rather have a low ID or the username I wanted? In the end I'm glad I got the username I wanted. It might be great to have a low uid for whatever reason, but there is something to be said for not looking like you're from AOL wherever you go.
That's actually the nice thing about the OASIS format, it's already documented and standardized. Other office suites, such as Koffice; already use OASIS so the standard already has more weight than any office suite. In the end I would think that the fork will probably go nowhere, but if it does gain momentum then we can probably only benefit from the competition. A lot of people like to bitch any time effort is duplicated and any fork (or competition) is a waste of time, but those people only need to look at XFree86 (remember those guys?) vs Xorg. From what I understand, Sun drives away a considerable amount of support by wanting to be in total control instead of a steward of the project, so maybe a fork will produce results.
Does it? If one thing Apple works hard for, it's a good user experience. They charge more for hardware of moderate performance. They WANT customer loyalty.
Gamers by contrast love to upgrade video cards and screw with bios settings. Gamers also have NO loyalty. They'll drop anyone to go to a next big thing in performance and gaming. The PC world there are plenty of vendors competing in all spaces. Who is Apple going to compete against? Apple? The entire chasing gamers trail of thought is basically in the same vein as "why doesn't Apple make their OS for all PCs".
If apple should be concerned with anything right now it would be having the biggest PC game available on a Mac. Last I checked World of Warcraft worked just fine, so I don't think they're too worried.
Slightly worse than 'knee jerk' I would think. This appears to be very much a solution looking for a problem to solve. In other words it's going through the same motion as the other guy without having a clear objective or understanding what they are trying to do, nor actually solving the problem they address.
The monks appear to be acting as a spearhead to dissidence, initially over a small squabble over gas prices it has escalated pretty far - and I believe all the monks wanted was an apology. The monks are perfectly aware at how much they are revered, and people know what while the government can dismiss any regular person as some whack job that deserved to be punished, people know for a FACT that holds no water when the police beat monk down. The monks actively tell people NOT to join them in their march. But you'll notice that while all the marchers are monks many of the people at the sides are actually shielding the monks from the police/government. In a world of senseless violence this is actually pretty moving stuff. Someday I hope that Burma will open not only for them, but so I can see pictures of the masses of monks robed in red peacefully marching in protest.
Also, I think there have been regular people protesting where the monks were actually blocked by the police, but I can't recall where I read that. Many reports seem sketchy at best.
Yeah, I'm just counterpointing in what I see some people championing in the holy grail of this massive wealth they can live off of. I most certainly agree that true freedom comes from total financial independence, but when we're talking freedom in per portion to how well you can survive with no job income, then you have this sort of gray-area with freedom. Until you're totally free, then yeah the gun is to your head technically, it just gets farther away. Generally I'm alright with that.
I always assume I can do something to get by because I've never seen a situation where I couldn't. I mean when you talk to people from Poland who literally just can't get a job because there are NONE you start to take a different perspective. If I look in the paper I can be a garbage man or whatever. And seriously America is almost comical in how many good jobs you can get just because people don't want to do them. And if I'm smart NOW, then eventually my financial independence will just take longer in life then it may have if I ride the gravy train I'm on now.
Anyway, my main point is that if your type that squirrels everything away (and I know a lot of people who did and live high on the hog today) then that's not a bad thing. However I've had a lot of crap just arbitrarily taken from my life. Seen people bite the bullet randomly. Missed chances that only come around once. If it comes down to something that will result in a truly cherished memory, then I won't hesitate to spend a few bucks on such an expenditure. Within reason of course.
I'm at around 30 and I just sort of got this epiphany myself while reading a self help book and the government destroying my marriage. I realized that although I have money that I wonder what to do with that I should start investing it. HOWEVER there is a balance there. I've seen people work themselves to death for "F you" money and have a heart attack like 5 years after they got to that point. If you enjoy your job and have a decent amount of money then you should enjoy some of that while you can. You aren't going to live forever, and you won't get any younger. Eventually you may have the money to go all over the world but may not have the youth to enjoy many such trips.
Honestly I don't want or need to be completely financially independent. If I got enough stowed away that I can live off of dividends for a year or two then that's pretty awesome in my opinion. Just take a year or two off with no pressure if you get fired and learn a new programming language or go backpacking - THAT is real power. If you become single minded in your goal of having that boat load of cash you enslave yourself to a salary as much as the person who is the definitive wage slave - just over different periods of time. Anyway, it's always good to invest money for a rainy day regardless, just don't let it consume you.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I think I'd go with you on that one. The hidden danger with women is the fact that the way a woman interprets things can vary in extremes. Generally most men I've worked with from the nicest smartest guy you'll ever know to the most idiotic asshole you'll ever meet are still going to end up getting the same message with the same words. With a woman? Sometimes yes, sometimes no, sometimes something totally way off in left field. In this way it seems that women are FAR more sensitive to their work environment in that a hostile environment can degenerate into rabid backstabbing, while in a more friendly open environment things seem to be just fine.
Console games also just tend to be more complicated. Anecdote: My ex-wife's little brother is around 4 and of course wants to do whatever we were doing, including playing the PS2. Now for me it didn't seem like a big deal because I recall playing video games on a Nintendo a long time ago as well. But look at the old Nintendo controller - two buttons, select, start, and d-pad. Look at your typical PS2 controller - buttons everywhere, dpad, multiple joysticks. The other interesting thing was that he couldn't reach all the buttons because his hands were too small, and most ps2 games just required too many different combinations of buttons. Now obviously we weren't playing kids games, but I've seen kids quickly pick up kid oriented titles on a PC. Most kids can figure out a mouse and clicking a button fairly fast. Even so, I give the kid credit for doing surprisingly well at Shinobi. I would actually think that in the future the Wii will gain much more traction in the young kids market - but we'll see.
As for the educational thing, I think a lot of parents put too much emphasis around that mantra. While I feel that I would indeed feel guilty having a kid play the same sort of stuff I rot my own brain with, I think most any puzzle type game would be fine. Not just stuff like tetris, but games like Sheep Raider are a total blast and make you do "simple" problem solving.
Heh, they had cool CD cases for a while too. I think I still have the tin ones. I got a weird wooden one from my boss who didn't want it. So I use that to carry around my "action pack" CDs to unfuck people's computers. The look on peoples faces when I bring out that case is priceless: "Dude I asked you to fix my computer. You're going to fix my computer with AOL 9.0?"
At the $10 to $15 level, do you REALLY need a T-shirt as an incentive to donate to the EFF? I was actually wondering if Taco actually saved any of the old slashdot servers, and this is an interesting way to get something unique for a bit more money. In that case I would think someone might spend more cash then they otherwise would.
I'll pass on both though. I'd rather have a really cool UID (ala 666, 1337) than a really low one. I actually still have my first computer and I continually think it's a waste of space to keep but nostalgia gets to me even still. It's well hot-rodded now going from a P133 to P200 and from 16Mb RAM to 96. Next upgrade will be a solid state disk when the 8Gb comes down.
Bin Laden and his cohorts are probably laughing* in their cave at how they've succeeded in their first goal of undermining our society.
Perhaps he is, but he'd be wrong. He didn't undermine our society. We did it to ourselves. Where are the mass protests in the streets every time they infringe on our freedoms? Nowhere to be found. Hardly even a quip. In fact many people are GLAD to see our freedoms thrown to the pyres so that they can feel safer.
Bin Laden was just a catalyst. We honestly lost our right to freedom when we were willing to simply give it away.
Actually I wasn't testing the datacenter (which uses vastly more power even when idle). I was testing desktop PCs. Many people at the company I work for tend to leave their PCs on all the time. Generally that bothered me as being wasteful, so I started to set many PCs to turn themselves off an hour or so after everyone left. I started to get some resistance when people complained that they had to turn their PC back on in the morning (yeah, tough life I know).
So I started probing into how much power we were actually burning for no reason in order to back myself up. After a few complaints everyone just dropped the topic. I was also doing some testing in order to get ballpark figures on how long a computer should last on a ups backup.
As for the data center... I gave up. They just burn a lot of power. For every process I manage to streamline and consolidate some function, they go and drop yet ANOTHER windows server that "MUST have its own machine". I have however dropped some regular backup (redundant process) servers to something like the Soekris net5501 that draws something like around 10W.
"it takes more energy to power it on than to just let it run"
I'm not sure where people get that from (I've heard it myself). Most of my tests on a run of the mill PC (onboard VGA) shows a computer drawing around 80W. There is a small spike when booting, but I honestly have a hard time believing you save money letting the thing run over 10 minutes. As someone else said, get a kill-o-watt and test it out. It's actually really interesting to see how much power stuff like TVs draw, as well as the difference between CF and incandescent lighes.
Of course my testing was extremely informal so take that with a grain of salt. For some reason using an SSD hard drive with FreeBSD on the same hardware (instead of Win2k) dropped the power usage to around 58W. I have no idea why that is.
Sometimes you wonder what the difference is...
User: Man this sucks, can't you do anything about the spam?
Admin: I vill be taking care off eet...
Now THAT is freaking dedication!
It depends on what you are using them for. SSD are going into laptops first. Mainly for durability and power requirements, but also because there are speed gains to be had there. Most laptop drives perform rather poorly. Random reads are good in SSD drives, but SSD drives also excel in sustained throughput. Modern hard drives still have good bursting capability but that boost goes down the toilet rather quick. If you ever have the need to test some of this out, try derik's boot'n nuke on a regular hard drive and you can see a ways into the process that the sustained speed of most hard drives really isn't that great. I've been testing some SSD drives and was actually pretty surprised at a noticeable improvement in responsiveness, although stuff like boot times remained about the same.
Still I don't see how this would improve desktop performance. I'd think two WD Raptors in a mirror would still kick any SSD configuration. Personally I think scsi is still the performance king, but views on that vary.
Well I don't care how good the computer is, or how good the posessed kid is. I'd like to be beaten by Yukari Yoshihara who did the 5 minute commentary on how to play go at the end of each anime (according to the wikipedia article).
Ah Japan. The country that can get hot girls to dress up like cats, perform porn feats like bukkake, and even play board games professionally. Where's my passport?!?
If that includes the same Tie Fighter edition as the one that used the graphics engine as "X-Wing vs Tie Fighter", here's a fun fact about THAT fucking game. It REQUIRES something like Direct X 6. Not a later version, NOT the version that Windows 2000 comes with UNUPGRADED, no it must be a specific version of Direct X. And no you cannot downgrade. Oh yeah, if you do manage to get it to run (on win98) you'll most likely have no graphics acceleration. Have Fun!
Seriously, this is the kind of garbage that made me give up PC gaming. If PC vendors want to know why people are abandoning PCs for consoles, it's because the games are often buggy garbage that has to be patched to hell, often doesn't work in a few years, and quite often is crippled if you even CAN get it to work.
And you know what? My Pentium 133 was so vastly overpowered for the DOS version that with all options turned on there was NO slowdown and I had a freaking blast. There have been a few weekends I was going to attempt to get dosbox up and running on Linux just to play Tie Fighter (my favorite game of all time).
You know why I don't need a remake of Final Fantasy 7? Because I can still play it on my PS3. Oops, no I can't. Sony just took backwards compatibility away. Note to Sony: Nintendo may be about to school you big time once you jilt PS2 owners with massive libraries that have been waiting for PS3 prices fall to where they can afford them.
The usual equivalent in windows-land is you spend days searching for stuff and getting dumb meaningless error messages ("please check that the domain controller is both locatable and contactable" - hey I know, Mr Paperclip, why don't YOU tell ME whether it was either unlocatable or uncontactable or both..), then eventually you find the answer on someone smug bloke's blog with a mugshot of him in the corner and 1000s of thankyou messages, rather than anywhere on MSDN. (incidentally, that error was nothing to do with the server being unlocatable or contactable, but being windows, I couldn't do a trace on it to find out where it was breaking, I just had to click "OK" and try something else).
Oh man, that's just WAAY too true. And I truly feel the pain setting up an Exchange server right now (where the click here for more information link in the Exchange control panel conveniently does NOTHING).
Whenever I see text file argument come up with Apache I always think the same thing to myself - I'm glad I don't use Apache. No seriously, the text configuration is like a non nonsensical text barf compared to what it ought to be, but I think that is partially due to the way most distros lay out the default configuration. Using Lighttpd is like a dream in comparison when dealing with the text configuration. This is one area that I wish Apache (and most defiantly Xorg) should work on.
So tell, me what will happen the day you catch the secretary account in bed with the administrator account???
Answer: Unaccounted for, child processes
"In the days"? Heh, I still find all sorts of sites with broken DNS in this way. Typically these are mis configured IIS sites that display "no website configured at this address" or something similar. Add www and presto it works. In college I saw many people scratch their heads trying to get websites to work. Whenever I suggested they add or remove www they all thought I was crazy. Usually the problem was just a matter of lazy DNS setups.
Actually I was sort of thinking along similar lines when this type of thread came up before. Would I rather have a low ID or the username I wanted? In the end I'm glad I got the username I wanted. It might be great to have a low uid for whatever reason, but there is something to be said for not looking like you're from AOL wherever you go.
That's actually the nice thing about the OASIS format, it's already documented and standardized. Other office suites, such as Koffice; already use OASIS so the standard already has more weight than any office suite. In the end I would think that the fork will probably go nowhere, but if it does gain momentum then we can probably only benefit from the competition. A lot of people like to bitch any time effort is duplicated and any fork (or competition) is a waste of time, but those people only need to look at XFree86 (remember those guys?) vs Xorg. From what I understand, Sun drives away a considerable amount of support by wanting to be in total control instead of a steward of the project, so maybe a fork will produce results.
It boggles the mind.
Does it? If one thing Apple works hard for, it's a good user experience. They charge more for hardware of moderate performance. They WANT customer loyalty.
Gamers by contrast love to upgrade video cards and screw with bios settings. Gamers also have NO loyalty. They'll drop anyone to go to a next big thing in performance and gaming. The PC world there are plenty of vendors competing in all spaces. Who is Apple going to compete against? Apple? The entire chasing gamers trail of thought is basically in the same vein as "why doesn't Apple make their OS for all PCs".
If apple should be concerned with anything right now it would be having the biggest PC game available on a Mac. Last I checked World of Warcraft worked just fine, so I don't think they're too worried.
Slightly worse than 'knee jerk' I would think. This appears to be very much a solution looking for a problem to solve. In other words it's going through the same motion as the other guy without having a clear objective or understanding what they are trying to do, nor actually solving the problem they address.
If you want something built well, look into Panasonic. They're not cheap because they're not built cheap.
Just be thankful you didn't have to endure the "Enter random binary crap into regedit" type fix =P
The monks appear to be acting as a spearhead to dissidence, initially over a small squabble over gas prices it has escalated pretty far - and I believe all the monks wanted was an apology. The monks are perfectly aware at how much they are revered, and people know what while the government can dismiss any regular person as some whack job that deserved to be punished, people know for a FACT that holds no water when the police beat monk down. The monks actively tell people NOT to join them in their march. But you'll notice that while all the marchers are monks many of the people at the sides are actually shielding the monks from the police/government. In a world of senseless violence this is actually pretty moving stuff. Someday I hope that Burma will open not only for them, but so I can see pictures of the masses of monks robed in red peacefully marching in protest.
Also, I think there have been regular people protesting where the monks were actually blocked by the police, but I can't recall where I read that. Many reports seem sketchy at best.
Yeah, I'm just counterpointing in what I see some people championing in the holy grail of this massive wealth they can live off of. I most certainly agree that true freedom comes from total financial independence, but when we're talking freedom in per portion to how well you can survive with no job income, then you have this sort of gray-area with freedom. Until you're totally free, then yeah the gun is to your head technically, it just gets farther away. Generally I'm alright with that.
I always assume I can do something to get by because I've never seen a situation where I couldn't. I mean when you talk to people from Poland who literally just can't get a job because there are NONE you start to take a different perspective. If I look in the paper I can be a garbage man or whatever. And seriously America is almost comical in how many good jobs you can get just because people don't want to do them. And if I'm smart NOW, then eventually my financial independence will just take longer in life then it may have if I ride the gravy train I'm on now.
Anyway, my main point is that if your type that squirrels everything away (and I know a lot of people who did and live high on the hog today) then that's not a bad thing. However I've had a lot of crap just arbitrarily taken from my life. Seen people bite the bullet randomly. Missed chances that only come around once. If it comes down to something that will result in a truly cherished memory, then I won't hesitate to spend a few bucks on such an expenditure. Within reason of course.
I'm at around 30 and I just sort of got this epiphany myself while reading a self help book and the government destroying my marriage. I realized that although I have money that I wonder what to do with that I should start investing it. HOWEVER there is a balance there. I've seen people work themselves to death for "F you" money and have a heart attack like 5 years after they got to that point. If you enjoy your job and have a decent amount of money then you should enjoy some of that while you can. You aren't going to live forever, and you won't get any younger. Eventually you may have the money to go all over the world but may not have the youth to enjoy many such trips.
Honestly I don't want or need to be completely financially independent. If I got enough stowed away that I can live off of dividends for a year or two then that's pretty awesome in my opinion. Just take a year or two off with no pressure if you get fired and learn a new programming language or go backpacking - THAT is real power. If you become single minded in your goal of having that boat load of cash you enslave yourself to a salary as much as the person who is the definitive wage slave - just over different periods of time. Anyway, it's always good to invest money for a rainy day regardless, just don't let it consume you.
Also check out how to disable spotlight. Knocking those two out of the picture has gained my machine considerable agility.