As an MIT alum, I can assure you that there was no "Media Lab" in 1979, so there almost assuredly was no "Media Lab" in the 60's.
Your cost point is valid, except that the buildings replaced by the Stata Center were in pretty rough shape themselves. The old Building 20, which I remember well, was a series of three-story wooden structures built as "temporary lab space" in the war years (WW II). It had to be replaced with SOMETHING. You can love Stata or hate it, but if you're going to have an Architecture Department (which MIT does), you're going to try something new and different if you have the chance. So they did.
With regard to picking up the Polaroid buildings, historically it hasn't been so easy for MIT and other Cambridge, Massachusetts educational institutions to move outside their current boundaries. The Cambridge City Council, long dominated by blue-collar types, has always wanted Cambridge to retain its light manufacturing roots, and has always resisted (through zoning, the real power in all city government) the expansion of the colleges. That's why Kendall Square was a FNML (fucking no-man's land) for 35 years, until the battle finally turned MIT's way.
There are other examples of this -- the button factory on Amherst Street that finally became MIT's, Building E40, the apartments on Vassar Street that MIT wasn't allowed to own until a 20 year period had elapsed, and so on.
So it isn't always that easy to just move into empty buildings, especially in the People's Republic of Cambridge.
How about Bank of America? That a big enough web site for you? Requires IE. Maybe it's just the Fleet Bank subsection, dunno, don't have access to anything else.
Maybe it's time for that Anger Management class, eh?
In fact our company was quite profitable, and the innovative software product we created is still being sold today, over 10 years later. So, I'm proud of our engineering, especially since the overall design (and a chunk of the code) was mine.
The parent company sold us because we were an asset that could be monetized quickly. They were in serious trouble and needed to weather a cash crisis. The people who bought us got us at a very reasonable price, and continued to operate our company profitably as one of their divisions. I decided to leave for my own reasons, to start what was ultimately another successful business.
But back to the point: do you really think that uninformed people should undertake a technology acquisition without asking well-informed in-house resources to do a sanity check? Seems pretty silly to me. Seems to me if everyone in a company wears blinders, and focuses solely on their own job responsibilities, then the company loses out on opportunities to exploit its own knowledge base.
Hey, but what do I know. Maybe you're right. Next car I buy, I won't ask anybody who knows a lot about cars, I'll just make an uninformed decision based on what some sales guy tells me.
Vendors have "relationships" with buyers in companies. They wine 'em, dine 'em, hassle 'em, etc. That's what they do. It's ALL they do. They try to do this in secret. Why let the competition know?
I remember when I was VP Engineering for a company, and I showed up one morning and there were all these drones from Compaq installing those idiotic "non-expandable crapola PC inside a 14" monitor" boxes that they used to sell. They were putting them EVERYWHERE.
Yup, you guessed it, the Controller just decided on his own to go buy about 50 of these useless things. Never asked anyone for advice, even though he had about 40 engineers including me he could have consulted, any one of which would have told him that his decision was nuts.
I got the Compaq sales guy alone in my office. I told him never to set foot in the building again. I told him Compaq would never, ever, sell us anything again as long as I was there. And they didn't. It didn't stop them from calling me. At the end, they were offering to rip every single PC out and put in some other hunk of crap. for like $200/station.
But then we sold the whole company, so that was that.
Exactly, there are plenty of brilliant programmers who wrote brilliant stuff and did brilliant things whom nobody will ever hear of -- Don Eyles comes to mind, the guy who saved Apollo 11 when a bug was discovered in the LEM while it was in orbit around the Moon. Eyles got a medal. He fixed the bug, but those were the days of plated-wire memory, where you could only turn bits off. Now try fixing the bug.
Another guy saved an out-of-control Air Force weather satellite by pulling nights and weekends to recode the guidance system to use the one remaining nitrogen thrusters and the two remaining reaction wheels.
Dumb, dumb, dumb idea to try to pick any kind of "top 20." Insulting, too.
The problem is, bake-offs and third-party testing are supposed somehow to differentiate product A from product B. Scores on some matrix developed by the testers are supposed to tell us which product to buy.
Here are just a few of the problems with this approach:
1) Everything's at the same "level" of importance. Reminds me of when I was applying to college. There was a computer program that was supposed to help me select a place to go. It had hundreds of questions, ranging from course of study preference to living arrangements to climate. The program ultimately decided that I should apply to the University of Miami, a cheerleader party school at the time (sorry if that's no longer true). What I really wanted was Cal Tech, CMU, MIT, Stanford. Fortunately I ignored the program and ended up at MIT. But obviously the program "weighted" my answers to those questions in some stupid and random way. How are buyers supposed to weight the apparently equal categories created by the tester? Same problem.
2) If anyone has a truly innovative program or approach, the testing can't show that. Instead, everyone gets rated on some set of lowest-common-denominator problems. Of course some asshole big company is going to score better on a feature matrix, they've been pissing in the same code for ten years, with nothing better to do than add YAF (yet another feature). The small company that really has something new and different? Screwed.
3) Intangibles. Your service is amazing. Your training is legendary. Your app is incredibly easy to use. You answer your goddamn telephone, and you don't charge $200 every time somebody calls. You fix bugs. You fix them right away, not six months later in "the next release." It's all washed out in the "testing." You're fucked; you look the same as everyone else.
No thanks. Anybody invites me to a bake-off, I'll tell them to stick it up their ass. In fact, if I get invited to a bake-off, I'll run for the hills. Nothing could be worse for my company, and nothing could be less appropriate to our value proposition.
Most of the resume pages have been pulled, but too bad there's a Google cache, eh? What fun, this is worth a thousand laughs. One guy puts a certificate from Evelyn Wood Speed Reading beside his "PhD" from Trinity Southern University. He also lists a certificate from a tractor trailer training school.
Throw everything against the wall, I guess. You never know what might stick.
Bingo. I'm an MIT graduate, but the two worst hires I ever made sported MIT degrees (OK, there was one CMU guy who maybe would get a top spot, too).
The best hire was a guy from Southeast Indiana State, or something like that, I can't remember, who not only worked his way through school (nearly full time) at a career-relevant job, but had a fine record of solid accomplishment afterwards.
So I learned that lesson a long time ago. Slugs graduate from "name" schools as well as unknowns. If you can somehow wangle your way into a name school, you can usually find a way to get out with a degree, as long as you're prepared to do all the homework, go to all the tutoring sessions, suck up to the TA's, and get your "gentleman's C" as a reward for all the obvious effort you put in.
I don't support mistreating workers, but that doesn't mean I'm opposed to companies having positions where you work 80-hr week jobs.
Therefore you support mistreating workers. You can't have it both ways.
My grandfather worked in the textile mills in Lawrence, MA, circa 1905. You worked every day for 12 hours including Saturday, and you worked hard, and if you were sick and didn't show up or you didn't work as hard as you were supposed to, then they fired you, and there were a zillion immigrants standing outside shivering waiting to take your job.
You got paid by how much cloth you wove. If your loom broke, you sat there idle, thinking about how you were going to put food on the table that evening if the loom fixer didn't come by in time.
The foreman would actually walk up and down the line of weavers and put his hand on their backs to see who was sweating and who wasn't, and God forbid you weren't a sweaty bastard like the rest of the slaves, because you were gone instantly.
I have a problem with this. So should you. There is nothing conceptually different between the Lawrence mills and the environment people are describing at EA. Just wait for EA to open its "Bangalore technology center," if it hasn't done so already and I missed it.
That's why there are labor laws. That's why unions were formed. If you let businesses make people work like slaves, pretty soon everyone will be working like slaves, and then we'll all be slaves.
So it has to be stopped, and this HR asshole can whine all he wants about EA "discovering" that it is understaffing its projects and overworking its employees (after developing how many games, now? Come on. What a crock of shit). Anyone who didn't know whose side HR is on should read this guy's memo carefully. He promises nothing. He pretends surprise. He cajoles. He soothes. He's worried about the process. He's got great ideas for the future. The labor laws on the books are obsolete, and just don't apply to EA or other high tech jobs. Because high tech "creative" people are special. They need to work 80 hours a week. California should recognize this. It's a good thing, not a bad thing.
Yeah right. The guy makes me puke, as does every other HR asshole I've ever worked with, both in senior management and as a programming grunt.
Back in the 70's, CP/CMS on the 360 architecture was open-source. CP originally was a pure emulator: privileged machine instructions caused interrupts and were then emulated by CP. So we used to debug entire CP/CMS operating systems on top of CP, which was pretty cool. IBM eventually released a commercial version of CP/CMS called VM370.
Meanwhile a bunch of independent companies, mostly time-sharing outfits, figured out that emulating privileged instructions was, well, dumb and slow. Instead, if you modified CMS to use traps instead of executing emulated privileged instructions, it could run many times faster.
Which is why commercial timesharing outfits like National CSS, etc., were routinely able to support 250+ users on 370/168's, roughly three times the user load that IBM could support with VM370. That, and the fact that National CSS bought up every single drum drive they could find as paging devices. Ridiculously fast for the time -- nearly zero seek time, and delightfully high RPM's -- but when the bearings froze, those suckers would often burst right out of the glass case and blow holes in concrete walls.
Anyway Xen is not a new idea. It's a very old (and good) idea.
Lots of people don't want perfectly good and useful products, for reasons that aren't always clear, even to marketing geniuses. The fact that nobody wanted the product says very little about Stone. And, the fact that he scrambled to try to save his company when it turned out that people didn't want his product is laudable, not laughable.
Dude, chances are only 1 in 10 that any new company is going to make it. Dissing Stone because his dot-com failed is neither insightful nor interesting. I've started three companies and worked for four more. I've seen good times and I've seen bad. So Tilion didn't make it. Big deal.
How about giving us some perspective on the man? Was he technically astute? Did the product work? Was it cleverly designed? Was he able to motivate people and get them excited? Was Tilion a good place to work, or a shitty place to work, and how much of that was due to Stone?
If you know the answers, share them, please. Otherwise you are indistinguishable from some random troll who happens to know somebody who knew somebody who worked at Tilion, or something.
Thanks, this is interesting. So the distillation system ought to be two-stage, I take it -- heating the fluid to, say, 80C, waiting a bit, then flushing the system -- then heating the fluid to 100C, wasting a bit of that as well, and then collecting everything else. I wonder if home distillers go to all that trouble, or if they err and simply collect everything? Maybe the grandparent poster knows the answer from his/her product literature.
I believe I read somewhere that distillers don't really do the trick, because many of the volatiles that you really need to get rid of have roughly the same or lower boiling point than water, which means you aren't really filtering them out by distilling.
I have no doubt these people have patented their ideas, too. You'll see that hit in a couple years, muzzling everyone else's ability to use these fairly simple concepts.
This is a really important point. Our app has to choose between record-by-record flutter-fill and dump/load functionality. God help us if dump load was slow. Thank God for MySQL.
Sometimes you have to be a Neanderthal. If I want my hand held, I'll ask. Or I'll hold it myself. There are plenty of ways to implement transactional integrity with MySQL, you just have to do it yourself with code. Which means it is enormously faster, usually, than someone else's best guess at what you wanted.
Finally, with all the wailing about transactional integrity and how much better this or that DB is than My, I wonder how many of the wailers have actually tried to RECOVER from a rollback? It ain't duck soup, people. Scary shit, replaying a 6-hour log file and holding onto your ass, praying. And sometimes, guess what? Some weird error occurs halfway through playback. Like the old joke, "Now you're fucked." I've seen it, lived it.
PJ "expressed surprise" that SCO would comment on ongoing litigation.
This is disingenuous, though. As PJ and every Groklaw reader knows, this behavior is typical and wholly unsurprising. SCO are idiots, and their lawyers at this point are merely scrambling to avoid malpractice censure.
My only regret is that when this is all over, and McBride is just a humorous case study at every B-school in America, a great source of daily entertainment will be no more.
Bingo. Nothing clears the mind better than unloading old boxen, laptops included.
I always have 2 boxen in reserve -- one is a Linux firewall, the other is a backup Linux firewall. Which is probably the most useful end-of-life for an old box, period.
Unfortunately those are pretty sloppy measures -- how many speeding tickets you got, basically, combined with whether you're male and under 25 (in which case, according to them, you automatically suck).
Slashdot Mirror
Argue with his math if you want, but why slap him around?
I think his lawsuit point is interesting, and his cargo carrying point is valid, too. The Fedex guy who posted earlier did the numbers to prove it.
As an MIT alum, I can assure you that there was no "Media Lab" in 1979, so there almost assuredly was no "Media Lab" in the 60's.
Your cost point is valid, except that the buildings replaced by the Stata Center were in pretty rough shape themselves. The old Building 20, which I remember well, was a series of three-story wooden structures built as "temporary lab space" in the war years (WW II). It had to be replaced with SOMETHING. You can love Stata or hate it, but if you're going to have an Architecture Department (which MIT does), you're going to try something new and different if you have the chance. So they did.
With regard to picking up the Polaroid buildings, historically it hasn't been so easy for MIT and other Cambridge, Massachusetts educational institutions to move outside their current boundaries. The Cambridge City Council, long dominated by blue-collar types, has always wanted Cambridge to retain its light manufacturing roots, and has always resisted (through zoning, the real power in all city government) the expansion of the colleges. That's why Kendall Square was a FNML (fucking no-man's land) for 35 years, until the battle finally turned MIT's way.
There are other examples of this -- the button factory on Amherst Street that finally became MIT's, Building E40, the apartments on Vassar Street that MIT wasn't allowed to own until a 20 year period had elapsed, and so on.
So it isn't always that easy to just move into empty buildings, especially in the People's Republic of Cambridge.
How about Bank of America? That a big enough web site for you? Requires IE. Maybe it's just the Fleet Bank subsection, dunno, don't have access to anything else.
Maybe it's time for that Anger Management class, eh?
In fact our company was quite profitable, and the innovative software product we created is still being sold today, over 10 years later. So, I'm proud of our engineering, especially since the overall design (and a chunk of the code) was mine.
The parent company sold us because we were an asset that could be monetized quickly. They were in serious trouble and needed to weather a cash crisis. The people who bought us got us at a very reasonable price, and continued to operate our company profitably as one of their divisions. I decided to leave for my own reasons, to start what was ultimately another successful business.
But back to the point: do you really think that uninformed people should undertake a technology acquisition without asking well-informed in-house resources to do a sanity check? Seems pretty silly to me. Seems to me if everyone in a company wears blinders, and focuses solely on their own job responsibilities, then the company loses out on opportunities to exploit its own knowledge base.
Hey, but what do I know. Maybe you're right. Next car I buy, I won't ask anybody who knows a lot about cars, I'll just make an uninformed decision based on what some sales guy tells me.
Vendors have "relationships" with buyers in companies. They wine 'em, dine 'em, hassle 'em, etc. That's what they do. It's ALL they do. They try to do this in secret. Why let the competition know?
I remember when I was VP Engineering for a company, and I showed up one morning and there were all these drones from Compaq installing those idiotic "non-expandable crapola PC inside a 14" monitor" boxes that they used to sell. They were putting them EVERYWHERE.
Yup, you guessed it, the Controller just decided on his own to go buy about 50 of these useless things. Never asked anyone for advice, even though he had about 40 engineers including me he could have consulted, any one of which would have told him that his decision was nuts.
I got the Compaq sales guy alone in my office. I told him never to set foot in the building again. I told him Compaq would never, ever, sell us anything again as long as I was there. And they didn't. It didn't stop them from calling me. At the end, they were offering to rip every single PC out and put in some other hunk of crap. for like $200/station.
But then we sold the whole company, so that was that.
Exactly, there are plenty of brilliant programmers who wrote brilliant stuff and did brilliant things whom nobody will ever hear of -- Don Eyles comes to mind, the guy who saved Apollo 11 when a bug was discovered in the LEM while it was in orbit around the Moon. Eyles got a medal. He fixed the bug, but those were the days of plated-wire memory, where you could only turn bits off. Now try fixing the bug.
Another guy saved an out-of-control Air Force weather satellite by pulling nights and weekends to recode the guidance system to use the one remaining nitrogen thrusters and the two remaining reaction wheels.
Dumb, dumb, dumb idea to try to pick any kind of "top 20." Insulting, too.
The problem is, bake-offs and third-party testing are supposed somehow to differentiate product A from product B. Scores on some matrix developed by the testers are supposed to tell us which product to buy.
Here are just a few of the problems with this approach:
1) Everything's at the same "level" of importance. Reminds me of when I was applying to college. There was a computer program that was supposed to help me select a place to go. It had hundreds of questions, ranging from course of study preference to living arrangements to climate. The program ultimately decided that I should apply to the University of Miami, a cheerleader party school at the time (sorry if that's no longer true). What I really wanted was Cal Tech, CMU, MIT, Stanford. Fortunately I ignored the program and ended up at MIT. But obviously the program "weighted" my answers to those questions in some stupid and random way. How are buyers supposed to weight the apparently equal categories created by the tester? Same problem.
2) If anyone has a truly innovative program or approach, the testing can't show that. Instead, everyone gets rated on some set of lowest-common-denominator problems. Of course some asshole big company is going to score better on a feature matrix, they've been pissing in the same code for ten years, with nothing better to do than add YAF (yet another feature). The small company that really has something new and different? Screwed.
3) Intangibles. Your service is amazing. Your training is legendary. Your app is incredibly easy to use. You answer your goddamn telephone, and you don't charge $200 every time somebody calls. You fix bugs. You fix them right away, not six months later in "the next release." It's all washed out in the "testing." You're fucked; you look the same as everyone else.
No thanks. Anybody invites me to a bake-off, I'll tell them to stick it up their ass. In fact, if I get invited to a bake-off, I'll run for the hills. Nothing could be worse for my company, and nothing could be less appropriate to our value proposition.
OK, end of rant.
Most of the resume pages have been pulled, but too bad there's a Google cache, eh? What fun, this is worth a thousand laughs. One guy puts a certificate from Evelyn Wood Speed Reading beside his "PhD" from Trinity Southern University. He also lists a certificate from a tractor trailer training school.
Throw everything against the wall, I guess. You never know what might stick.
Bingo. I'm an MIT graduate, but the two worst hires I ever made sported MIT degrees (OK, there was one CMU guy who maybe would get a top spot, too).
The best hire was a guy from Southeast Indiana State, or something like that, I can't remember, who not only worked his way through school (nearly full time) at a career-relevant job, but had a fine record of solid accomplishment afterwards.
So I learned that lesson a long time ago. Slugs graduate from "name" schools as well as unknowns. If you can somehow wangle your way into a name school, you can usually find a way to get out with a degree, as long as you're prepared to do all the homework, go to all the tutoring sessions, suck up to the TA's, and get your "gentleman's C" as a reward for all the obvious effort you put in.
I don't support mistreating workers, but that doesn't mean I'm opposed to companies having positions where you work 80-hr week jobs.
Therefore you support mistreating workers. You can't have it both ways.
My grandfather worked in the textile mills in Lawrence, MA, circa 1905. You worked every day for 12 hours including Saturday, and you worked hard, and if you were sick and didn't show up or you didn't work as hard as you were supposed to, then they fired you, and there were a zillion immigrants standing outside shivering waiting to take your job.
You got paid by how much cloth you wove. If your loom broke, you sat there idle, thinking about how you were going to put food on the table that evening if the loom fixer didn't come by in time.
The foreman would actually walk up and down the line of weavers and put his hand on their backs to see who was sweating and who wasn't, and God forbid you weren't a sweaty bastard like the rest of the slaves, because you were gone instantly.
I have a problem with this. So should you. There is nothing conceptually different between the Lawrence mills and the environment people are describing at EA. Just wait for EA to open its "Bangalore technology center," if it hasn't done so already and I missed it.
That's why there are labor laws. That's why unions were formed. If you let businesses make people work like slaves, pretty soon everyone will be working like slaves, and then we'll all be slaves.
So it has to be stopped, and this HR asshole can whine all he wants about EA "discovering" that it is understaffing its projects and overworking its employees (after developing how many games, now? Come on. What a crock of shit). Anyone who didn't know whose side HR is on should read this guy's memo carefully. He promises nothing. He pretends surprise. He cajoles. He soothes. He's worried about the process. He's got great ideas for the future. The labor laws on the books are obsolete, and just don't apply to EA or other high tech jobs. Because high tech "creative" people are special. They need to work 80 hours a week. California should recognize this. It's a good thing, not a bad thing.
Yeah right. The guy makes me puke, as does every other HR asshole I've ever worked with, both in senior management and as a programming grunt.
Back in the 70's, CP/CMS on the 360 architecture was open-source. CP originally was a pure emulator: privileged machine instructions caused interrupts and were then emulated by CP. So we used to debug entire CP/CMS operating systems on top of CP, which was pretty cool. IBM eventually released a commercial version of CP/CMS called VM370.
Meanwhile a bunch of independent companies, mostly time-sharing outfits, figured out that emulating privileged instructions was, well, dumb and slow. Instead, if you modified CMS to use traps instead of executing emulated privileged instructions, it could run many times faster.
Which is why commercial timesharing outfits like National CSS, etc., were routinely able to support 250+ users on 370/168's, roughly three times the user load that IBM could support with VM370. That, and the fact that National CSS bought up every single drum drive they could find as paging devices. Ridiculously fast for the time -- nearly zero seek time, and delightfully high RPM's -- but when the bearings froze, those suckers would often burst right out of the glass case and blow holes in concrete walls.
Anyway Xen is not a new idea. It's a very old (and good) idea.
Slow, booming female voice: "Place your (pause) 'Comfort Shit hemorrhoid cream' (pause) on the belt."
Slow, booming female voice: "Please place your (pause) 'Comfort Shit hemorrhoid cream' (pause) on the belt."
Slow, booming female voice: "Please make sure that your (pause) 'Comfort Shit hemorrhoid cream' (pause) is on the belt."
Slow, booming female voice: "Please call the attendant to clear your (pause) 'Comfort Shit hemorrhoid cream' (pause) from the scanning area."
Right. It's gonna take some work, at least in my local Stop & Grope.
1971: when men were men and women were keypunch operators.
Lots of people don't want perfectly good and useful products, for reasons that aren't always clear, even to marketing geniuses. The fact that nobody wanted the product says very little about Stone. And, the fact that he scrambled to try to save his company when it turned out that people didn't want his product is laudable, not laughable.
Dude, chances are only 1 in 10 that any new company is going to make it. Dissing Stone because his dot-com failed is neither insightful nor interesting. I've started three companies and worked for four more. I've seen good times and I've seen bad. So Tilion didn't make it. Big deal.
How about giving us some perspective on the man? Was he technically astute? Did the product work? Was it cleverly designed? Was he able to motivate people and get them excited? Was Tilion a good place to work, or a shitty place to work, and how much of that was due to Stone?
If you know the answers, share them, please. Otherwise you are indistinguishable from some random troll who happens to know somebody who knew somebody who worked at Tilion, or something.
Thanks, this is interesting. So the distillation system ought to be two-stage, I take it -- heating the fluid to, say, 80C, waiting a bit, then flushing the system -- then heating the fluid to 100C, wasting a bit of that as well, and then collecting everything else. I wonder if home distillers go to all that trouble, or if they err and simply collect everything? Maybe the grandparent poster knows the answer from his/her product literature.
I believe I read somewhere that distillers don't really do the trick, because many of the volatiles that you really need to get rid of have roughly the same or lower boiling point than water, which means you aren't really filtering them out by distilling.
Anyone else know the real story on this?
Um, read the parent post to which I was responding, maybe?
If you want to replace TCP,
IT HAS TO BE FREE. It isn't. Read their license.
I have no doubt these people have patented their ideas, too. You'll see that hit in a couple years, muzzling everyone else's ability to use these fairly simple concepts.
Actually, it was "control-meta-mumble", back in the days when men were men, and words had 36 bits.
This is a really important point. Our app has to choose between record-by-record flutter-fill and dump/load functionality. God help us if dump load was slow. Thank God for MySQL.
Sometimes you have to be a Neanderthal. If I want my hand held, I'll ask. Or I'll hold it myself. There are plenty of ways to implement transactional integrity with MySQL, you just have to do it yourself with code. Which means it is enormously faster, usually, than someone else's best guess at what you wanted.
Finally, with all the wailing about transactional integrity and how much better this or that DB is than My, I wonder how many of the wailers have actually tried to RECOVER from a rollback? It ain't duck soup, people. Scary shit, replaying a 6-hour log file and holding onto your ass, praying. And sometimes, guess what? Some weird error occurs halfway through playback. Like the old joke, "Now you're fucked." I've seen it, lived it.
PJ "expressed surprise" that SCO would comment on ongoing litigation.
This is disingenuous, though. As PJ and every Groklaw reader knows, this behavior is typical and wholly unsurprising. SCO are idiots, and their lawyers at this point are merely scrambling to avoid malpractice censure.
My only regret is that when this is all over, and McBride is just a humorous case study at every B-school in America, a great source of daily entertainment will be no more.
But I will deal. Somehow.
Sorry, wrong. He's slashdotted thoroughly.
Bingo. Nothing clears the mind better than unloading old boxen, laptops included.
I always have 2 boxen in reserve -- one is a Linux firewall, the other is a backup Linux firewall. Which is probably the most useful end-of-life for an old box, period.
Unfortunately those are pretty sloppy measures -- how many speeding tickets you got, basically, combined with whether you're male and under 25 (in which case, according to them, you automatically suck).