Would be ideal if we could have the money without the war.
It's kind of a sad truth that the governments of the world really open their pocket book the widest when they're trying to kill people.
And I'd say "willing to" and "happy to" are very far from each other. And the whole nation is already uncompetitive.. because we implement more worker protection. If we really want to compete... we need to do away with minimum wage and health/safety standards. Personally I'd rather go the other way and find some way (say, eliminating international commerce.. for the extreme example) of fixing the uncompetitive issues.
And it would require a very fundemental change in the way things are done, which I readily admit I have no idea how we even start. It kind of involves getting away from money, or at least changing how money is implemented. At the end of the day it's paper. It serves the required purpose of rationing out real resources and services... but lately it seems like it does a very poor job of this. Too much skim off the top.. too much effort spent maintaining it.. whatever the reason, it has become very inefficient for this purpose.
We have the skilled people and the actual resources to do some awesome things... but we are preventing ourselves from doing them because of a completely ficticious element. Yes, these people and resources need to be regulated.. but when you have skilled people doing nothing and excess resources.. and people in other countries doing work those people in your country could be doing.. and using those extra resources.. something is very broken.
I think a chunk of the problem is that a lot of that boring, repetative work was how people got into various industries. Seems like most industries, people have to slog it out doing some chore for a few years before they build enough experience to get into the cool stuff.
People are now seeing that work vanish. Hopefully employers will realize this and find ways to get new people into their respective industries without the use of "shit jobs". There is probably gonna be a huge period of suck before that happens though.
We don’t need less skilled and educated people. What we need are more skilled jobs to put them in. Obviously way easier said then done. As technology advances, certain jobs, even entire trades, are going to become obsolete. I don’t think technology is even close to a point where we can’t come up with something for the more intelligent chunks of society to do.
The whole damn system is broken! Everything has to be immediately profitable or at least have demonstratable potential for future profitability. We are very good at improving on the stuff we already have because of this, but we seem to suck at coming up with completely new stuff. A lot of the cool stuff we have now came out of the cold war, because the powers were throwing money at scientists in the hopes of getting something cool before the “other guy” did. We need some more of that. We need ridiculous amounts of money thrown at scientists and engineers with no stipulations or requirements to show progress. You’ll have some serious waste.. but I think you’ll come up with some neat stuff as well.
I also think as a society it’s time to move away from the 5+ day work week. We have enough technology now that there is no reason for the majority of the population to spend 8 hours a day, 5 days a week working. How we get the ball rolling on this one I don’t know. The economy seems to be geared more towards people working more than less. Remember back when having a two income family really put you on top. Then everyone started to do it and the economy adjusted. Now you need that just to get by. We need to do that in reverse then keep going!
Star Trek has it's own wiki... and I really think that's the answer.
I don't agree with any decent article being deleted.. I just don't see the point.. however I think if articles are going to be deleted by some arbitrary line of what's notable to enough people.. the answer is for various communities to start up their own wiki where they can be as nauseatingly detailed as they want while wikipedia can be as general and abridged as it wants.
Personally I never understood the whole "notability" thing. If someone takes the time to put together a decent article.. who cares if it's notable. If no one cares.. no one will search for it/read it. This is especially true with people and places.. which are unique enough that they arn't going to clutter search results. Having it there incase someone does want to read it does no harm in my view.
The only issue I see with the shadowwiki idea is what do you do about linking? If articles are popping on and off the "real" wiki.. links would be breaking.. or when the article is re-added.. useful links to it would be missing.
This is unrelated, but while on the subject, I think a big issue with wikipedia is they don't really know what their audience is any more. This leads to a severe problem of articles written for people at a different level of expertise. Medical articles are the best example of this. The other day I was looking at a scab on my leg and though.. "I wonder what the hell scabs are even about". Look it up on wikipedia, and it reads like it came from a med school textbook. The simplified english wiki is too simplified to. The problem of course is that this line is going to be different for everyone.
I think the solution is for wiki to get more restrictive and appeal more to the "general population" and let niche topics and advanced information go to specialized wikis (memory alpha is a good example of how this model works... the star trek geeks can have their downright terrifyingly detailed articles.. while wikipedia remains relatively sane).
It really does take me a while to build a computer. If I really had to then yeah, I could build one fairly quickly.. but I tend to take my time.
I tend to spend most of the time on the case and power supply (which is of course why I order these first). I'm more into functional(ish) mods than appearance mods. The thing that takes me the most time is the wiring. I tend to shorten/lengthen the various PSU wires as necessary.. building a custom "wiring harness" of sorts... and connect it up through junction boxes.
Popping in a motherboard, and putting all the bits on it only takes an hour or so.
I guess I figure if I'm dropping serious money down.. I may as well enjoy the experience of putting it all together.
I do agree with not buying components one at I time. I tend to buy in batches that I can actually use. As said in my original post.. case/psu/other stuff that falls into the "needs to be cut/soldered/mutilated" category is usually the first batch.. followed by the mobo, proc, ram, drives, etc. My main motivation for ordering separately is I don't like having a few thousand dollars in parts floating around "out there". Makes me nervous that it's gonna get lost/damaged/etc. The whole "get it working" jitters thing is secondary.. though real. If I have all the parts.. I'm less inclined to spend a few days carefully soldering wires together and more inclined to say "to hell with it" and just put the thing together.
Now we need to pack the box in another box to protect it during shipping/
Given the state most packages I receive come in this seems somewhat impractical.
Also.. who orders a motherboard before the case? That seems kind of backwards to me.
I tend to order the case, power supply, and various fans/controllers/anything else I’m cramming into it first as I tend to do a little light modding. This gives me time to play without the “just want to get it running” jitters. Also I don’t like having too much stuff floating around “out there” makes me nervous. I usually order things in batches.. and wait for each batch to arrive before ordering the next.
That analogy seems kind of backwards in this case.. because what's important (and why re-imaging seems to be more popular) is uptime. The same could be said with cancer.
If a doctor told you.. "ok.. we have this drug that'll fix that right up for you.. but I'd really like to know why this happened so I'm gonna dig around and try and fix it myself" you'd probably tell him to give you the damn drug.
Actually it's an interesting analogy because the sys admins are kind of like the pharmaceuticals here. It's in a sysadmins best interest to spend hours doing skilled work to fix a problem, and to push that as the best option, rather than let people know there is a magical button that gets you back up and running in an hour.
I’m not a system admin but I don’t see how this is a bad approach.
I see value in finding out what the problem is and why it happened.. if you just blindly re-image then the problem might pop up again at a less opportune time.
But if you know what the problem is... and you have an image of the server in a working state, or a documented procedure on how to set up the server in it’s intended configuration then why would anyone waste time trying to repair it.
I think you have this kind of problem in most jobs. New approaches that make more sense but require less skill (and imply less e-pene) are always hated by people who have already learnt how to do it “the hard way”.
I see this as a programmer all the time and have been a victim of it. I’ve seen a huge chunk of my chosen industry migrate from meat and potato problem solving to gluing libraries together and sprinkling in business logic.
I’ve been fortunate to land in a job where there’s still a lot of “from the ground up” work, but these jobs are getting scarcer as even the components that everyone uses are made from other components. And executable UML (or something of its ilk) is probably going to be the next thing to cut the legs off us.
I’d call Drupal a tool with a framework for extending said tool rather than a straight framework.
Why? Just what my gut tells me. At the end of the day it doesn’t really matter (save for contest qualification purposes I guess). Use what does the job for you.
I did kinda pause... but being a programmer I can see how stuff like this (even crazy "how the hell did that get by review" stuff) can make it out the door. Their explanation seemed perfectly reasonable, and the fact that they co-operated with all the investigations and didn't appear to be hiding anything gave them a lot of credibility in my opinion. I also could never come up with a reason why they would want to do it maliciously in the first place.
This isn't meant to be a troll.. I'm legitimately curious. What do people think an evil google (or any other company) would do with this kind of data? Seems like a lot of work for information people are already providing them en-masse.
I admit I’m not a ubuntu fan, but I don’t take the fact that the entire FOSS community hasn’t immediately dropped everything to fall in line with Ununtu as a sign of hate.
Ubuntu seems to be as popular as ever. In fact a lot of my fellow die hard “ew, ubuntu” friends are now using it (not me though.. never.. NEVVERRRR!!!).
I think much like the google article earlier, ubuntu has gone from young upstart to just “there”. Still strong and doing it’s thing.. but everything they do is no longer news worthy, and they have attracted the usual amount of criticism and people who just plain don’t like them. This is normal.
Lets assume evil. I'm of the opinion that it really was a mistake, but just for the heck of it, lets say that google was totally doing this on purpose. What _could_ they do with the data. This was never really talked about (at least not that I saw). What could an evil google do with the data they collected?
This isn't meant to be a troll or even an argument... but a legitimate point of discussion. Nothing which would be of much value really comes to my mind that they couldn't easily collect or are not are already collecting through all their other services. What would google do with the occasional username/password or fragmented data that would financially make sense?
Certainly I think google and bing are going to go at it bare knuckle.. but I think google stands a good chance at staying on top.
That said, I think that #1 is probably going to get a lot smaller. Lots of those no-name search engines are becoming practical, and you are seeing a lot of people saying "I use x for y specialized reason" these days. duckduckgo will probably never get to the top, but it can certainly nibble on it.
They are no longer the cool new guys tearing up the internet and being a company for the people. They are big, diversified, making money hand over fist, and have attracted the requisite controversy, criticism, and bad press that comes with being big and diversified and making money hand over fist.
Despite everything, I still see them as one of the good guys. I think there’s always a severe whip back when you suddenly discover something that you thought was awesome is now merely ok. Google looks terrible when compared to what it was, but compare it to everything else and it looks pretty damn good.
And (flamewar time) I continued to be baffled over all the flack they got over the stupid wifi thing. They came clean, admitted everything, co-operated with the investigations and people still tore them 12 new ones. Personally I think they should have been commended for admitting they made a mistake rather than going into full on cover up mode.
To get back to the topic, it really required a definition of “Best”. Are they ever going to be the cool trendy upstart they once were: probably not. Are they going to continue making money hand over fist and growing like a spider until you shave with google razor blades: entirely possible.
As for not innovating I still think they’ve got it in them. They’ve had a string of bad luck, and they’ve failed in the social area but I suspect they’ll pull something killer out in the next little bit.
These days if you buy >4 consumer grade hard drives... you are almost guarenteed _one_ of them will be bad right out of the box. Yes, I know this is why you can buy the same spec drive for twice the cost with an "enterprise edition" tacked onto it... and I know this is the cost of the awesome $$ to GB value we have these days... but still!
Correct, this was at home not work (at work I'm a programmer.. being good sysadmins they wouldn't let me anywhere near the servers!)
But I have to say, I've seen some pretty damn dicey stuff in production systems. Wouldn't surprise me one bit if some multi-million dollar operation was running through some old 486 cause they used it for a prototype and just left it in place.
I meant mains power.. due to a hurricane actually (hurricane Juan).
The machine came out fine (and actually still runs.. though I don't use it as a router any more). Those old drives are surprisingly robust..
But yeah.. I was actually surprised.. and I did it more for the sake of the doing (the only reason I even left the machine going was because of the uptime). I'd never pull a stunt like that with a real machine:D
Maybe true if the box is set up then never touched. If anything new has been installed on it.. or updated.. I think it's a good idea to verify that it still boots while the change is still fresh in your head. Yes you have changelogs (or should), but all the time spent reading various documentation and experimenting on your proto box (if you have one) is long gone. There's lots of stuff you can install and start using, but could easily not come up properly on boot.
And why are reboots bad. If downtime is that big a deal, you should have a redundant setup. If you have a redundant setup, rebooting should be no issue. I've seen a very common trend where people get some "out of the box" redundancy solution running... then check of "redundancy" on the "list of shit we need" and forget about it. Actually verifying from time to time that your system can handle the loss of a box without issue is important (in my view).
I once had to move my router (486 running slackware and with a multi-year uptime) across the room it was in. It was connected to a UPS, however the cable going from the UPS to the computer was wrapped through the leg of the table it was sitting on.
I actually _removed the table leg_ so I could hawl the 486 still plugged into the UPS across the room and quickly plug it in before it powered down!
and then we had the first real substantial power failure in years like a few months later.. and the thing had to go down:(
But yeah.. now I reboot frequently to verify that everything still comes up properly.
Slashdot Mirror
Would be ideal if we could have the money without the war.
It's kind of a sad truth that the governments of the world really open their pocket book the widest when they're trying to kill people.
And I'd say "willing to" and "happy to" are very far from each other. And the whole nation is already uncompetitive .. because we implement more worker protection. If we really want to compete... we need to do away with minimum wage and health/safety standards. Personally I'd rather go the other way and find some way (say, eliminating international commerce .. for the extreme example) of fixing the uncompetitive issues.
For the record, I'm Canadian!
And it would require a very fundemental change in the way things are done, which I readily admit I have no idea how we even start. It kind of involves getting away from money, or at least changing how money is implemented. At the end of the day it's paper. It serves the required purpose of rationing out real resources and services... but lately it seems like it does a very poor job of this. Too much skim off the top.. too much effort spent maintaining it.. whatever the reason, it has become very inefficient for this purpose.
We have the skilled people and the actual resources to do some awesome things... but we are preventing ourselves from doing them because of a completely ficticious element. Yes, these people and resources need to be regulated.. but when you have skilled people doing nothing and excess resources.. and people in other countries doing work those people in your country could be doing.. and using those extra resources.. something is very broken.
I think a chunk of the problem is that a lot of that boring, repetative work was how people got into various industries. Seems like most industries, people have to slog it out doing some chore for a few years before they build enough experience to get into the cool stuff.
People are now seeing that work vanish. Hopefully employers will realize this and find ways to get new people into their respective industries without the use of "shit jobs". There is probably gonna be a huge period of suck before that happens though.
We don’t need less skilled and educated people. What we need are more skilled jobs to put them in. Obviously way easier said then done. As technology advances, certain jobs, even entire trades, are going to become obsolete. I don’t think technology is even close to a point where we can’t come up with something for the more intelligent chunks of society to do.
The whole damn system is broken! Everything has to be immediately profitable or at least have demonstratable potential for future profitability. We are very good at improving on the stuff we already have because of this, but we seem to suck at coming up with completely new stuff. A lot of the cool stuff we have now came out of the cold war, because the powers were throwing money at scientists in the hopes of getting something cool before the “other guy” did. We need some more of that. We need ridiculous amounts of money thrown at scientists and engineers with no stipulations or requirements to show progress. You’ll have some serious waste.. but I think you’ll come up with some neat stuff as well.
I also think as a society it’s time to move away from the 5+ day work week. We have enough technology now that there is no reason for the majority of the population to spend 8 hours a day, 5 days a week working. How we get the ball rolling on this one I don’t know. The economy seems to be geared more towards people working more than less. Remember back when having a two income family really put you on top. Then everyone started to do it and the economy adjusted. Now you need that just to get by. We need to do that in reverse then keep going!
Star Trek has it's own wiki... and I really think that's the answer.
I don't agree with any decent article being deleted.. I just don't see the point.. however I think if articles are going to be deleted by some arbitrary line of what's notable to enough people.. the answer is for various communities to start up their own wiki where they can be as nauseatingly detailed as they want while wikipedia can be as general and abridged as it wants.
This approach makes a lot of sense to me.
Personally I never understood the whole "notability" thing. If someone takes the time to put together a decent article.. who cares if it's notable. If no one cares.. no one will search for it/read it. This is especially true with people and places.. which are unique enough that they arn't going to clutter search results. Having it there incase someone does want to read it does no harm in my view.
The only issue I see with the shadowwiki idea is what do you do about linking? If articles are popping on and off the "real" wiki .. links would be breaking.. or when the article is re-added.. useful links to it would be missing.
This is unrelated, but while on the subject, I think a big issue with wikipedia is they don't really know what their audience is any more. This leads to a severe problem of articles written for people at a different level of expertise. Medical articles are the best example of this. The other day I was looking at a scab on my leg and though.. "I wonder what the hell scabs are even about". Look it up on wikipedia, and it reads like it came from a med school textbook. The simplified english wiki is too simplified to. The problem of course is that this line is going to be different for everyone.
I think the solution is for wiki to get more restrictive and appeal more to the "general population" and let niche topics and advanced information go to specialized wikis (memory alpha is a good example of how this model works... the star trek geeks can have their downright terrifyingly detailed articles.. while wikipedia remains relatively sane).
It really does take me a while to build a computer. If I really had to then yeah, I could build one fairly quickly.. but I tend to take my time.
I tend to spend most of the time on the case and power supply (which is of course why I order these first). I'm more into functional(ish) mods than appearance mods. The thing that takes me the most time is the wiring. I tend to shorten/lengthen the various PSU wires as necessary.. building a custom "wiring harness" of sorts... and connect it up through junction boxes.
Popping in a motherboard, and putting all the bits on it only takes an hour or so.
I guess I figure if I'm dropping serious money down.. I may as well enjoy the experience of putting it all together.
I do agree with not buying components one at I time. I tend to buy in batches that I can actually use. As said in my original post.. case/psu/other stuff that falls into the "needs to be cut/soldered/mutilated" category is usually the first batch.. followed by the mobo, proc, ram, drives, etc. My main motivation for ordering separately is I don't like having a few thousand dollars in parts floating around "out there". Makes me nervous that it's gonna get lost/damaged/etc. The whole "get it working" jitters thing is secondary.. though real. If I have all the parts.. I'm less inclined to spend a few days carefully soldering wires together and more inclined to say "to hell with it" and just put the thing together.
Now we need to pack the box in another box to protect it during shipping/
Given the state most packages I receive come in this seems somewhat impractical.
Also.. who orders a motherboard before the case? That seems kind of backwards to me.
I tend to order the case, power supply, and various fans/controllers/anything else I’m cramming into it first as I tend to do a little light modding. This gives me time to play without the “just want to get it running” jitters. Also I don’t like having too much stuff floating around “out there” makes me nervous. I usually order things in batches.. and wait for each batch to arrive before ordering the next.
That analogy seems kind of backwards in this case.. because what's important (and why re-imaging seems to be more popular) is uptime. The same could be said with cancer.
If a doctor told you.. "ok.. we have this drug that'll fix that right up for you.. but I'd really like to know why this happened so I'm gonna dig around and try and fix it myself" you'd probably tell him to give you the damn drug.
Actually it's an interesting analogy because the sys admins are kind of like the pharmaceuticals here. It's in a sysadmins best interest to spend hours doing skilled work to fix a problem, and to push that as the best option, rather than let people know there is a magical button that gets you back up and running in an hour.
I’m not a system admin but I don’t see how this is a bad approach.
I see value in finding out what the problem is and why it happened.. if you just blindly re-image then the problem might pop up again at a less opportune time.
But if you know what the problem is... and you have an image of the server in a working state, or a documented procedure on how to set up the server in it’s intended configuration then why would anyone waste time trying to repair it.
I think you have this kind of problem in most jobs. New approaches that make more sense but require less skill (and imply less e-pene) are always hated by people who have already learnt how to do it “the hard way”.
I see this as a programmer all the time and have been a victim of it. I’ve seen a huge chunk of my chosen industry migrate from meat and potato problem solving to gluing libraries together and sprinkling in business logic.
I’ve been fortunate to land in a job where there’s still a lot of “from the ground up” work, but these jobs are getting scarcer as even the components that everyone uses are made from other components. And executable UML (or something of its ilk) is probably going to be the next thing to cut the legs off us.
I’d call Drupal a tool with a framework for extending said tool rather than a straight framework.
Why? Just what my gut tells me. At the end of the day it doesn’t really matter (save for contest qualification purposes I guess). Use what does the job for you.
I did kinda pause... but being a programmer I can see how stuff like this (even crazy "how the hell did that get by review" stuff) can make it out the door. Their explanation seemed perfectly reasonable, and the fact that they co-operated with all the investigations and didn't appear to be hiding anything gave them a lot of credibility in my opinion. I also could never come up with a reason why they would want to do it maliciously in the first place.
This isn't meant to be a troll.. I'm legitimately curious. What do people think an evil google (or any other company) would do with this kind of data? Seems like a lot of work for information people are already providing them en-masse.
I admit I’m not a ubuntu fan, but I don’t take the fact that the entire FOSS community hasn’t immediately dropped everything to fall in line with Ununtu as a sign of hate.
Ubuntu seems to be as popular as ever. In fact a lot of my fellow die hard “ew, ubuntu” friends are now using it (not me though.. never.. NEVVERRRR!!!).
I think much like the google article earlier, ubuntu has gone from young upstart to just “there”. Still strong and doing it’s thing.. but everything they do is no longer news worthy, and they have attracted the usual amount of criticism and people who just plain don’t like them. This is normal.
What is google planning?
Lets assume evil. I'm of the opinion that it really was a mistake, but just for the heck of it, lets say that google was totally doing this on purpose. What _could_ they do with the data. This was never really talked about (at least not that I saw). What could an evil google do with the data they collected?
This isn't meant to be a troll or even an argument... but a legitimate point of discussion. Nothing which would be of much value really comes to my mind that they couldn't easily collect or are not are already collecting through all their other services. What would google do with the occasional username/password or fragmented data that would financially make sense?
Dunno if I'd say they're finished as the #1.
Certainly I think google and bing are going to go at it bare knuckle .. but I think google stands a good chance at staying on top.
That said, I think that #1 is probably going to get a lot smaller. Lots of those no-name search engines are becoming practical, and you are seeing a lot of people saying "I use x for y specialized reason" these days. duckduckgo will probably never get to the top, but it can certainly nibble on it.
I think Google probably learned a bad lesson from the whole ordeal
Yup. And anyone watching as well. I have a feeling no one is going to be as open as they were about a mistake again for quite some time.
My perception:
They are no longer the cool new guys tearing up the internet and being a company for the people. They are big, diversified, making money hand over fist, and have attracted the requisite controversy, criticism, and bad press that comes with being big and diversified and making money hand over fist.
Despite everything, I still see them as one of the good guys. I think there’s always a severe whip back when you suddenly discover something that you thought was awesome is now merely ok. Google looks terrible when compared to what it was, but compare it to everything else and it looks pretty damn good.
And (flamewar time) I continued to be baffled over all the flack they got over the stupid wifi thing. They came clean, admitted everything, co-operated with the investigations and people still tore them 12 new ones. Personally I think they should have been commended for admitting they made a mistake rather than going into full on cover up mode.
To get back to the topic, it really required a definition of “Best”. Are they ever going to be the cool trendy upstart they once were: probably not. Are they going to continue making money hand over fist and growing like a spider until you shave with google razor blades: entirely possible.
As for not innovating I still think they’ve got it in them. They’ve had a string of bad luck, and they’ve failed in the social area but I suspect they’ll pull something killer out in the next little bit.
Good point.
These days if you buy >4 consumer grade hard drives... you are almost guarenteed _one_ of them will be bad right out of the box. Yes, I know this is why you can buy the same spec drive for twice the cost with an "enterprise edition" tacked onto it... and I know this is the cost of the awesome $$ to GB value we have these days... but still!
Correct, this was at home not work (at work I'm a programmer.. being good sysadmins they wouldn't let me anywhere near the servers!)
But I have to say, I've seen some pretty damn dicey stuff in production systems. Wouldn't surprise me one bit if some multi-million dollar operation was running through some old 486 cause they used it for a prototype and just left it in place.
Good grief...
I agree it shouldn't be relied upon as a troubleshooting step (you need to know what broke, why, and why it won't happen again).
Second sentence man. Not even buried... it's the start of the main paragraph. Less knee-jerk please.
Oh man.. no word of a lie.. I actually _winced_ when I read DigiBoard!
So.. much.. pain...
I meant mains power.. due to a hurricane actually (hurricane Juan).
The machine came out fine (and actually still runs.. though I don't use it as a router any more). Those old drives are surprisingly robust ..
But yeah.. I was actually surprised.. and I did it more for the sake of the doing (the only reason I even left the machine going was because of the uptime). I'd never pull a stunt like that with a real machine :D
I recommend you actually read my post ;p
I clearly said.. right there in the second paragraph.. that I agree with him on not using reboot as a troubleshooting mechanism.
Maybe true if the box is set up then never touched. If anything new has been installed on it.. or updated.. I think it's a good idea to verify that it still boots while the change is still fresh in your head. Yes you have changelogs (or should), but all the time spent reading various documentation and experimenting on your proto box (if you have one) is long gone. There's lots of stuff you can install and start using, but could easily not come up properly on boot.
And why are reboots bad. If downtime is that big a deal, you should have a redundant setup. If you have a redundant setup, rebooting should be no issue. I've seen a very common trend where people get some "out of the box" redundancy solution running... then check of "redundancy" on the "list of shit we need" and forget about it. Actually verifying from time to time that your system can handle the loss of a box without issue is important (in my view).
I once had to move my router (486 running slackware and with a multi-year uptime) across the room it was in. It was connected to a UPS, however the cable going from the UPS to the computer was wrapped through the leg of the table it was sitting on.
I actually _removed the table leg_ so I could hawl the 486 still plugged into the UPS across the room and quickly plug it in before it powered down!
and then we had the first real substantial power failure in years like a few months later.. and the thing had to go down :(
But yeah.. now I reboot frequently to verify that everything still comes up properly.