You do realize that commercial jet airliners are for the most part flown via a software program, right? The pilots have manual overrides which I'm sure a self driving car in the future would as well - and I realized roads/expressways are much more congested than at 30,000+ ft but the point is that we have a metallic tube with wings, flying around the globe that is mostly computerized these days, and the most dangerous thing about that is getting inside a human controlled car to drive to get to said plane.

You forgot to mention Slashdot :)

If you have a lot of static content, eg, css/js/gpf/gif/swf/png/bmp, etc and do not have access to CDN, at least put an nginx proxy in front of it that loads it all, and forwards the rest off the content to apache (or better yet, just migrate completely to nginx if possible). Does your app have any caching at all? Would memcached be beneficial? Running a stack trace on all http/php processes should give you an insight as to what is going on. Sometimes it;s lacks of resources, sometimes it's something as simple as a buffer needing to be increased somewhere.

I miss downloading "fixpack" disks onto floppies and inserting them one at a time... not really :P

I had no idea, thanks for the info.

OS/2 was XP a decade earlier, IBM just dropped the ball in their marketing department. I have fond memories of dual booting Warp with Slackware. Good to see eComStation is at it still. I might just have to pay the $159 or whatever it is for a personal license now that it can be ran inside VirtualBox.

My situation was a little different. When Linuxworld.com launched back in '98 or so, it was it's own site and didn't redirect to networkworld.com. Not too long after launch they made user registrations available. For some reason I was screwing with the URL in the address bar and accidentally hit enter.. they had left 'directory browsing' enabled and stored the username/email/password list in clear text inside the webroot. I emailed them and didn't get a response. The next day I emailed them the list and within an hour they disabled all user registrations, the feature was completely removed from the website but still didn't ever get a response. I never visited the site that much so I have no idea if they ever went back to it, but I still can't believe someone would develop something that stored passwords, email adresses and usernames in clear text in a flat file, inside the webroot.

When I first created my account on /. I remember getting excited about the sequel that was going to be released soon.

Unabomber manifesto comes to mind.

i let mine lapse for a good 5 years i think and was able to recover it later

Not too many of us still around I'll bet!

Easiest way is to get into the hosting industry for somewhat low pay (~$40k in the Chicago area). You get experience and exposure to other technologies and you can always get certs in the meantime. You may have to start off doing Level 1 Tech Support over the phone or DC stuff, rebooting and making cat5 cables to start, but this is a very common gateway to the IT industry.