I'm one of those guys that used to walk around with a boot diskette that had the original scan and clean on them.
There is no question that I'd use either Symantec's product or McAfee's product if they were actually better in my opinion. I find other products much better choices -- the free ones in particular. It isn't just price. The performance and the intrusiveness of those commercial programs is abysmal. They cram themselves into your systems so intricately to "defend themselves" that if anything goes wrong you have to blow away the whole stack and start over. Most viruses and spyware is easier to get rid of than the anti-malware software.
How many times have you found users unable to connect to the net, only to discover they (horror of horrors) they've installed a SECOND anti-virus without removing the first? Now the whole thing comes uncu__ed.
Look, I love linux for my servers, but at the desktop I still use Windoze. If there's one thing that will eventually drive me to switch, it's the way Microsoft and (and as a result all the others) have gone and built the thing in such a byzantine way. There's no way to even really know what needs to be fixed in Vista when something breaks -- and if it did, you don't have "root" access to go and do it. That means the problems caused by these anti-virus packages will now be all but irreparable.
We'll see. For now, desktops around here are xp with avast anti-virus and running quite well. If windows 7 doesn't turn out to be much better than vista for an ability to fix as much as for useability, it will finally push me to move to a linux desktop as well.
NIMS -- and programs like it -- seek to standardize and make interoperability more smooth. Before it, things happened because good people made them happen on the ground -- but it was less smooth.
Prior to the great Chicago fire, there were virtually no standards between departments on things like hose fitting sizes and thread types. You literally could not use one fire hose in another town.
The fire service has a long history of moving ever more in cooperation with its neighbors in new ways. It takes time, because there is never enough money. If it weren't for money, this would be a non issues. We'd all just move to a compatible radio system and be done. Money prevents that.
Fantastic post. I also remember that story from an elementary school reading book but didn't recall the title or author. I remember thinking the same thing when that episode aired.
As a fire officer, I work closely with several other nearby towns. We are all on different radio frequencies. There are strategies to work well that mitigate the potential issues:
1. For neighboring towns, we have each other's frequencies available on our own radios.
2. When operating more distantly, we use a state wide non-repeated frequency for larger incidents to cover the incident scene, while operations command will use their repeated systems to communicate out to dispatch or with other agencies.
Number two is very important -- span of control is optimally at "5" (meaning you shouldn't be trying to manage more than 5 direct reports). At anything above 7 you become very inefficient. When the number of people you're trying to work directly with grows above that number you should be subdividing that span of control and instead talking to a single representation of each sector or division. ** That means, not everyone on scene should be attempting to communicate back to a central point at all once.
The modern public safety sector is all trained (or being trained) on NIMS (National Incident Management System). As an officer, I'm required to hold three different certifications within that program. Firefighters, police, ems workers, town managers, and public service workers (the town guys who fix things and make your city work) are all part of the program. The purpose of NIMS is to define and common and understandable method of managing incidents from the smallest (where I may have incident command at a car accident with one or two responding units) but that also scale up as needed to the very largest (e.g. I arrive on scene to find the reported car accident was actually caused by a train derailing and landing on the car, spilling toxic material into a river which crosses state lines). NIMS defines common language, common command structures, and even common paperwork standards for doing things like leasing a bulldozer to build a dike or a bunch of outhouses to use at a work camp.
My point is that the radio technology is only one challenge, and one that can be solved by working together in a well coordinated manner. More important is building and practicing the strategies to manage incidents in a coordinated manner.
If you're in the public safety sector and haven't had NIMS training yet, you will. It is rapidly becoming a requirement for any organization receiving federal grants or other funding. If you've heard bad things about it, ignore them. NIMS is actually fairly simple and uses good common sense strategies (e.g. drop obscure 10 codes and speak in plain language) for most of what it does. It is based on an incredibly successful management strategy used by the teams that run the huge wildfire operations. Their system used something like 1/3 the number of back end support people for every front line person when compared with the military.
For our department, about 90% of what NIMS requires was already very similar to what we were already doing. Very little had to change.
I'm over 40, a volunteer firefighter, run my own IT business, have a second IT startup on the side and have three daughters. I still find time to get to Karate class 2-3 times a week (taking a shared class with one of my daughters).
You're not busier than I am. The only suggestion I have is -- get off your butt and go do something.
It seems to me that a usb ROM would make a ton of sense for things like this. If not USB than SD cards - as these are becoming fairly ubiquitous pretty quickly.
Clearly this is a flawed study. It doesn't take my personal use case into account and therefore has no validity whatsoever. I will, of course, begin to excoriate the authors of the study and make fun of anyone who agrees with it.
Despite all the common rhetoric, the welfare system, the social security system, and the medicare system do generally work fairly well.
There is of course, fraud. There are of course, abusers. Those cases make great news and are easily found and pointed out. What doesn't make the news much is what a small percentage of the overall programs that abuse and fraud actually represents.
I would be 100% in favor of specific funding for heath care and social security being held outside the general fund. I won't hold back support without that provision however.
It is my believe that the one thing we're best at in the country, is creating wealth through small business and the employment of our vast numbers through those start up ventures. Unfortunately, our health care system has held that power back for decades now. Small business owners (like me) will not hire people. Potential entrepreneurs cannot start businesses because they can't leave their big-corp jobs for fear of becoming uninsured.
Health insurance needs should not be driving the economic decisions of our entire workforce. If we can make health care equally available to anyone willing to pay at the same rate as anyone else willing to pay -- that alone would re-ignite the powerful economic engine our small business community. The only way to do that, is to make the pool truly universal. If you don't do that, then the "public" pool becomes tainted by virtue of having only the most expensive and difficult to insure. It creates two classes of citizen. Those who are insurable (which ties them to corporate jobs) and those who are not (which then must be taxpayer funded as a disproportionately high risk).
I can't say yet if I support the currently proposed plan -- because frankly nobody has read it yet. I do look forward to SOME plan.
If 25% of those who can afford to pay do not, it dumps their costs and a higher portion of the costs of those who cannot pay onto me. Why? Because in the end, you're going to get the care either way.
Your freedoms do not include the freedoms to burden others.
The only debate then, is over denying all care to those who do not pay their own way. As a society, we have long since decided that isn't acceptable. Show up at an emergency room, and you'll get care. It will be the most expensive, least long term successful kind of care, but it will be care.
Unless you plan to argue that this should also be stopped, my only response is quit whining and pay your part.
Oh -- and PLEASE don't give me the "nobody helped me, I'm a self made...." like of crap. We live in a society where it is POSSIBLE to be successful only as a result of the sacrifice of all those who came before and all those around you sharing in the building of such a society. Taxes are how you pay for the upkeep of that environment in which you excelled. Consider it greens fees.
The machines that protect democracy include jet fighters, naval warcraft, guns, rockets, bombs ---- and voting machines.
The US Government wouldn't buy a any of those other things without a massive effort to make sure they were secure, why not voting machines as well? If you can compromise those, the rest are easy.
To begin with, none of the executive team wants to live in any of those countries with super low labor availability. Sure, Western Europe, the UK -- you'll get lots of takers among management and plenty of good managers over there already. Try moving all those lifestyle employees living in the Seattle suburbs to India, Pakistan, Indonesia, or China, and you'll see a very different result.
So, now we're talking about really threatening to move the teams of "developers, developers, developers, developers" off shore. Companies that have tried this before have found that much to their shock, "developers, developers, developers, developers" are not bought and sold as commodities by the pound, but in fact are individuals who have creative ways to solve problems and work best when they can interact with the decision makers to improve the product.
The truth is, only the lowest tier of developer "meat" can be moved easily off-shore and away from the management and executive teams where decisions and management happen. If you ignore that, you get crappy product. You get crappy product because the offshore teams give you EXACTLY what you ask them for, instead of working with you to understand the goal and produce a result that makes more sense.
As it happened, I bought the MIFI at the same time I gritted my teeth and dove in headfirst on the BB Storm (which it turns out, I actually like -- though I can see where others may not). Both use the new Micro-USB connectors, and I'd purchased a car charger and second home charger for the phone (I keep one in my briefcase for travel). Now, between the two devices I have cables and plus wherever I need them. Synergy working for me for a change.
As others point out, it isn't a revolution in communication. It is, however, a very elegant implementation of a useful service at a price that is (for my needs) reasonable.
I've been using it a week or two now, here's what my take:
Summary: It does what it says it does, in the way it promises, without the slightest hassle. For electronics, that's a hell of an endorsement.
The GOOD:
1. Size - it's damn easy to carry It really is as small as the ads make it look. 2. Replaceable Battery - I have a spare right with it (spare was just under $40) 3. Runs on USB charger, laptop USB, or Battery 4. Good - maybe not amazing - battery life (2-3 hours in reality) 5. Micro-usb connector is compatible with my phone charger so I carry fewer blocks 6. Performance -> It out performs the EVDO Rev A. Mini-PCI card that I had in my laptop. 7. Reception -> Better than my best cell phone ---- Also, in poor reception areas like some hotel rooms, I can put it over by the window where the signal is good, and use the network anywhere in the room! 8. Ubiquity -> I don't have to pick what device I bring with me based on my connectivity needs. 9. Multi-Device support -> Laptop, Hand-held game, netbook, kid's laptop in the car, etc. 10. No need to use the crappy Verizon connection software on the laptop (or worse, Dell's bastard stepchild version)
Less Good / Room to Improve
1. It needs a signal level indicator on the outside surface. To check signal, you have to hit the router's config page with a browser. 2. The data sheet on this says it has a connector for an external antenna. I have yet to see such a thing. Maybe it is hiding. 3. It seems to be powered up any time you plug it in to charge. No way to charge with the wifi part off (you can tell it not to connect to the cell network)
Overall, I'm really impressed with this thing.
Sure, I could run a linux vm on my laptop and share the internal card over the wireless; I could get a router that's compatible with another evdo card, or some other solution -- but this just works and works well.
As far as the cost: If you travel on business and end up paying for hotel wifi, this quickly pays for itself. Better yet, is the ability to pop open the laptop or handheld pretty much ANYWHERE and pretty much ANYTIME and get connected. Airport baggage claim, taxi cab, doctor's waiting room, and most important at the park waiting for one of my kids to finish soccer practice. You could just find an open wifi, but I like knowing what I'm connected to.
there's a really long gulf from changing a pcv to replacing the piston rings. Even a valve job is relatively easy compared to that. I'd be 90% of shade tree mechanics haven't replaced their own rings in the last 20 years.
...until you tossed out 1970's era emissions gear assumptions. Most modern emissions control gear actually works by improving the efficiency of the engine. Not all of it (have to put that here because it's/. and someone will point out catalytic converters and a few other things) but mostly, all that computer control fuel metering and mixture controls, increased engine running temperatures and variable timing (and so on) serve to make the engine run more efficiently, which is why there are fewer artifacts of poor combustion left over. The "smog pump" pretty much went out with bell bottom pants.
"Enough is enough! I have had it with these motherfscking skypes on this motherfscking plane!"
but seriously: I've done some pretty serious coding and work with VoIP using several codecs and most are very bad at dealing with high latency connections -- variable latency is even worse. This has been pointed out several times in here already.
The pipe is big enough, but it's too long. {Insert your own joke here}
I've dealt with some bad teachers -- and in a few cases had to get pretty specific with schools to get changes made -- but generally they have been because the issues were real.
On the other hand, I know there are MANY of these so called "helicopter" parents who have made most of the teachers I know absolutely terrified of input. These parents see everything the teacher does that doesn't result in their perfect and brilliant little darling being the top recognized student as a direct threat. Every moral statement must agree, every method of teaching must match their kids' way of learning.
You've got type-a lawyers and doctors and accountants as parents who are intimidating as hell (on purpose) to these typically 20 something young women teaching fresh out of school. It isn't even a fair fight. By the time the teachers have 10 years experience, they've in full-on defense mode.
I'm not saying all teachers are good teachers. I am saying that if they didn't have pretty solid walls to stand behind they couldn't teach our kids without constantly being under threat from every parent who doesn't agree with them.
One of the most deadly things to longevity of hard disks and power supplies is poor power.
Using a battery backup that does AVR (automatic voltage regulation) will provide a sweet 60hz 120v (assuming you're in the US) current all the time, and will prove much less likely to fail hard disk motors and power supplies.
My experience with this stuff is over decades, and even cheapo equipment that other people see high failure rates on lasts much longer in this controlled environment.
The second thing to consider is a case designed to filter dust yet provide high amounts of air flow. You need to be able to keep the internals cool while not coating everything with dust (or in your father's case -- with pet hair and dander). Coating the vanes of cpu coolers and power supply heat sink fins will have a drastic long term impact.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm one of those guys that used to walk around with a boot diskette that had the original scan and clean on them.
There is no question that I'd use either Symantec's product or McAfee's product if they were actually better in my opinion. I find other products much better choices -- the free ones in particular. It isn't just price. The performance and the intrusiveness of those commercial programs is abysmal. They cram themselves into your systems so intricately to "defend themselves" that if anything goes wrong you have to blow away the whole stack and start over. Most viruses and spyware is easier to get rid of than the anti-malware software.
How many times have you found users unable to connect to the net, only to discover they (horror of horrors) they've installed a SECOND anti-virus without removing the first? Now the whole thing comes uncu__ed.
Look, I love linux for my servers, but at the desktop I still use Windoze. If there's one thing that will eventually drive me to switch, it's the way Microsoft and (and as a result all the others) have gone and built the thing in such a byzantine way. There's no way to even really know what needs to be fixed in Vista when something breaks -- and if it did, you don't have "root" access to go and do it. That means the problems caused by these anti-virus packages will now be all but irreparable.
We'll see. For now, desktops around here are xp with avast anti-virus and running quite well. If windows 7 doesn't turn out to be much better than vista for an ability to fix as much as for useability, it will finally push me to move to a linux desktop as well.
NIMS -- and programs like it -- seek to standardize and make interoperability more smooth. Before it, things happened because good people made them happen on the ground -- but it was less smooth.
Prior to the great Chicago fire, there were virtually no standards between departments on things like hose fitting sizes and thread types. You literally could not use one fire hose in another town.
The fire service has a long history of moving ever more in cooperation with its neighbors in new ways. It takes time, because there is never enough money. If it weren't for money, this would be a non issues. We'd all just move to a compatible radio system and be done. Money prevents that.
Fantastic post. I also remember that story from an elementary school reading book but didn't recall the title or author. I remember thinking the same thing when that episode aired.
There's no secret to starting one. The secret is getting it to make any money. ;-)
As a fire officer, I work closely with several other nearby towns. We are all on different radio frequencies. There are strategies to work well that mitigate the potential issues:
1. For neighboring towns, we have each other's frequencies available on our own radios.
2. When operating more distantly, we use a state wide non-repeated frequency for larger incidents to cover the incident scene, while operations command will use their repeated systems to communicate out to dispatch or with other agencies.
Number two is very important -- span of control is optimally at "5" (meaning you shouldn't be trying to manage more than 5 direct reports). At anything above 7 you become very inefficient. When the number of people you're trying to work directly with grows above that number you should be subdividing that span of control and instead talking to a single representation of each sector or division. ** That means, not everyone on scene should be attempting to communicate back to a central point at all once.
The modern public safety sector is all trained (or being trained) on NIMS (National Incident Management System). As an officer, I'm required to hold three different certifications within that program. Firefighters, police, ems workers, town managers, and public service workers (the town guys who fix things and make your city work) are all part of the program. The purpose of NIMS is to define and common and understandable method of managing incidents from the smallest (where I may have incident command at a car accident with one or two responding units) but that also scale up as needed to the very largest (e.g. I arrive on scene to find the reported car accident was actually caused by a train derailing and landing on the car, spilling toxic material into a river which crosses state lines). NIMS defines common language, common command structures, and even common paperwork standards for doing things like leasing a bulldozer to build a dike or a bunch of outhouses to use at a work camp.
My point is that the radio technology is only one challenge, and one that can be solved by working together in a well coordinated manner. More important is building and practicing the strategies to manage incidents in a coordinated manner.
If you're in the public safety sector and haven't had NIMS training yet, you will. It is rapidly becoming a requirement for any organization receiving federal grants or other funding. If you've heard bad things about it, ignore them. NIMS is actually fairly simple and uses good common sense strategies (e.g. drop obscure 10 codes and speak in plain language) for most of what it does. It is based on an incredibly successful management strategy used by the teams that run the huge wildfire operations. Their system used something like 1/3 the number of back end support people for every front line person when compared with the military.
For our department, about 90% of what NIMS requires was already very similar to what we were already doing. Very little had to change.
I'm over 40, a volunteer firefighter, run my own IT business, have a second IT startup on the side and have three daughters. I still find time to get to Karate class 2-3 times a week (taking a shared class with one of my daughters).
You're not busier than I am. The only suggestion I have is -- get off your butt and go do something.
It seems to me that a usb ROM would make a ton of sense for things like this. If not USB than SD cards - as these are becoming fairly ubiquitous pretty quickly.
Clearly this is a flawed study. It doesn't take my personal use case into account and therefore has no validity whatsoever. I will, of course, begin to excoriate the authors of the study and make fun of anyone who agrees with it.
Despite all the common rhetoric, the welfare system, the social security system, and the medicare system do generally work fairly well.
There is of course, fraud. There are of course, abusers. Those cases make great news and are easily found and pointed out. What doesn't make the news much is what a small percentage of the overall programs that abuse and fraud actually represents.
I would be 100% in favor of specific funding for heath care and social security being held outside the general fund. I won't hold back support without that provision however.
It is my believe that the one thing we're best at in the country, is creating wealth through small business and the employment of our vast numbers through those start up ventures. Unfortunately, our health care system has held that power back for decades now. Small business owners (like me) will not hire people. Potential entrepreneurs cannot start businesses because they can't leave their big-corp jobs for fear of becoming uninsured.
Health insurance needs should not be driving the economic decisions of our entire workforce. If we can make health care equally available to anyone willing to pay at the same rate as anyone else willing to pay -- that alone would re-ignite the powerful economic engine our small business community. The only way to do that, is to make the pool truly universal. If you don't do that, then the "public" pool becomes tainted by virtue of having only the most expensive and difficult to insure. It creates two classes of citizen. Those who are insurable (which ties them to corporate jobs) and those who are not (which then must be taxpayer funded as a disproportionately high risk).
I can't say yet if I support the currently proposed plan -- because frankly nobody has read it yet. I do look forward to SOME plan.
If 25% of those who can afford to pay do not, it dumps their costs and a higher portion of the costs of those who cannot pay onto me. Why? Because in the end, you're going to get the care either way.
Your freedoms do not include the freedoms to burden others.
The only debate then, is over denying all care to those who do not pay their own way. As a society, we have long since decided that isn't acceptable. Show up at an emergency room, and you'll get care. It will be the most expensive, least long term successful kind of care, but it will be care.
Unless you plan to argue that this should also be stopped, my only response is quit whining and pay your part.
Oh -- and PLEASE don't give me the "nobody helped me, I'm a self made...." like of crap. We live in a society where it is POSSIBLE to be successful only as a result of the sacrifice of all those who came before and all those around you sharing in the building of such a society. Taxes are how you pay for the upkeep of that environment in which you excelled. Consider it greens fees.
The machines that protect democracy include jet fighters, naval warcraft, guns, rockets, bombs ---- and voting machines.
The US Government wouldn't buy a any of those other things without a massive effort to make sure they were secure, why not voting machines as well? If you can compromise those, the rest are easy.
To begin with, none of the executive team wants to live in any of those countries with super low labor availability. Sure, Western Europe, the UK -- you'll get lots of takers among management and plenty of good managers over there already. Try moving all those lifestyle employees living in the Seattle suburbs to India, Pakistan, Indonesia, or China, and you'll see a very different result.
So, now we're talking about really threatening to move the teams of "developers, developers, developers, developers" off shore. Companies that have tried this before have found that much to their shock, "developers, developers, developers, developers" are not bought and sold as commodities by the pound, but in fact are individuals who have creative ways to solve problems and work best when they can interact with the decision makers to improve the product.
The truth is, only the lowest tier of developer "meat" can be moved easily off-shore and away from the management and executive teams where decisions and management happen. If you ignore that, you get crappy product. You get crappy product because the offshore teams give you EXACTLY what you ask them for, instead of working with you to understand the goal and produce a result that makes more sense.
In summation: "FSCK-OFF" Balmer.
As it happened, I bought the MIFI at the same time I gritted my teeth and dove in headfirst on the BB Storm (which it turns out, I actually like -- though I can see where others may not). Both use the new Micro-USB connectors, and I'd purchased a car charger and second home charger for the phone (I keep one in my briefcase for travel). Now, between the two devices I have cables and plus wherever I need them. Synergy working for me for a change.
As others point out, it isn't a revolution in communication. It is, however, a very elegant implementation of a useful service at a price that is (for my needs) reasonable.
I've been using it a week or two now, here's what my take:
Summary: It does what it says it does, in the way it promises, without the slightest hassle. For electronics, that's a hell of an endorsement.
The GOOD:
1. Size - it's damn easy to carry It really is as small as the ads make it look.
2. Replaceable Battery - I have a spare right with it (spare was just under $40)
3. Runs on USB charger, laptop USB, or Battery
4. Good - maybe not amazing - battery life (2-3 hours in reality)
5. Micro-usb connector is compatible with my phone charger so I carry fewer blocks
6. Performance -> It out performs the EVDO Rev A. Mini-PCI card that I had in my laptop.
7. Reception -> Better than my best cell phone ---- Also, in poor reception areas like some hotel rooms, I can put it over by the window where the signal is good, and use the network anywhere in the room!
8. Ubiquity -> I don't have to pick what device I bring with me based on my connectivity needs.
9. Multi-Device support -> Laptop, Hand-held game, netbook, kid's laptop in the car, etc.
10. No need to use the crappy Verizon connection software on the laptop (or worse, Dell's bastard stepchild version)
Less Good / Room to Improve
1. It needs a signal level indicator on the outside surface. To check signal, you have to hit the router's config page with a browser.
2. The data sheet on this says it has a connector for an external antenna. I have yet to see such a thing. Maybe it is hiding.
3. It seems to be powered up any time you plug it in to charge. No way to charge with the wifi part off (you can tell it not to connect to the cell network)
Overall, I'm really impressed with this thing.
Sure, I could run a linux vm on my laptop and share the internal card over the wireless; I could get a router that's compatible with another evdo card, or some other solution -- but this just works and works well.
As far as the cost: If you travel on business and end up paying for hotel wifi, this quickly pays for itself. Better yet, is the ability to pop open the laptop or handheld pretty much ANYWHERE and pretty much ANYTIME and get connected. Airport baggage claim, taxi cab, doctor's waiting room, and most important at the park waiting for one of my kids to finish soccer practice. You could just find an open wifi, but I like knowing what I'm connected to.
At least we're not longer in a country run by Dick, Bush, and Colon.
(apologies to Kurt Vonegut Jr.)
** Mod parent up: Funny, Informative, LMFAO **
For all the help the article has, it could very well be nylon fishing wire stretched tightly between some tin cans on opposite sides of DC.
there's a really long gulf from changing a pcv to replacing the piston rings. Even a valve job is relatively easy compared to that. I'd be 90% of shade tree mechanics haven't replaced their own rings in the last 20 years.
...until you tossed out 1970's era emissions gear assumptions. Most modern emissions control gear actually works by improving the efficiency of the engine. Not all of it (have to put that here because it's /. and someone will point out catalytic converters and a few other things) but mostly, all that computer control fuel metering and mixture controls, increased engine running temperatures and variable timing (and so on) serve to make the engine run more efficiently, which is why there are fewer artifacts of poor combustion left over. The "smog pump" pretty much went out with bell bottom pants.
I have a set of colored find point pens I use to draw out E.R. diagrams and then pseudocode on pads long before I sit at a keyboard.
"Enough is enough! I have had it with these motherfscking skypes on this motherfscking plane!"
but seriously: I've done some pretty serious coding and work with VoIP using several codecs and most are very bad at dealing with high latency connections -- variable latency is even worse. This has been pointed out several times in here already.
The pipe is big enough, but it's too long. {Insert your own joke here}
I've dealt with some bad teachers -- and in a few cases had to get pretty specific with schools to get changes made -- but generally they have been because the issues were real.
On the other hand, I know there are MANY of these so called "helicopter" parents who have made most of the teachers I know absolutely terrified of input. These parents see everything the teacher does that doesn't result in their perfect and brilliant little darling being the top recognized student as a direct threat. Every moral statement must agree, every method of teaching must match their kids' way of learning.
You've got type-a lawyers and doctors and accountants as parents who are intimidating as hell (on purpose) to these typically 20 something young women teaching fresh out of school. It isn't even a fair fight. By the time the teachers have 10 years experience, they've in full-on defense mode.
I'm not saying all teachers are good teachers. I am saying that if they didn't have pretty solid walls to stand behind they couldn't teach our kids without constantly being under threat from every parent who doesn't agree with them.
the theory of Agile is all well and good, but bears little resemblance to its actual practice other than in surface level features.
Real shops use the parts of it that justify what they want to do, and ignore the parts that don't.
The shops I know that use it, look exactly as described. You sir, can research to your heart's content -- it doesn't produce better code.
...a few more really big ice cubes floating around should help a great deal.
oh, and as the saying goes "Pictures, or it didn't happen."
One of the most deadly things to longevity of hard disks and power supplies is poor power.
Using a battery backup that does AVR (automatic voltage regulation) will provide a sweet 60hz 120v (assuming you're in the US) current all the time, and will prove much less likely to fail hard disk motors and power supplies.
My experience with this stuff is over decades, and even cheapo equipment that other people see high failure rates on lasts much longer in this controlled environment.
The second thing to consider is a case designed to filter dust yet provide high amounts of air flow. You need to be able to keep the internals cool while not coating everything with dust (or in your father's case -- with pet hair and dander). Coating the vanes of cpu coolers and power supply heat sink fins will have a drastic long term impact.