Except as a tool of mischief, this type of laser isn't that useful. Think it through:
. Laser display - not so good, as you'd have to mount it behind some scanners, etc. and the beam probably isn't that great in quality.
. Laser pointer - not so good either, unless you want to point out things pretty far away. Perhaps as an astronomy pointer, but green works just as fine here at much lower powers.
. Cat toy - no, unless you like blind cats
. Cutting tool - not nearly enough power to be useful here.

What's left? Nothing I can think of besides the "Hey George, see how bright this sucker is!" I certainly wouldn't want a 1W laser that I couldn't absolutely control where the beam was, and hand-held would be right out. I like my eyes.

(Yes, I own several lasers in the 500mW-1W range and operate them safely, with interlocks and keys, etc. They're not toys, but you can do fun things with them if you know how to do them safely.)

If the Chrome OS could act as a VM host, and just host the "legacy" OS as a virtual machine. Use VNC like technology sure, but put it all in one box.

I agree that throwing old hardware all over the room is excessive, but some of us "collect" these old machines. I collect them for a mixture of history and as a way to remind myself "Don't do THAT again!" I even write about them and their history: http://codeslave9000.blogspot.com/ for anyone interested in following along at home. Parts is parts, but keeping old machines in running order is much more challenging and rewarding.

Agreed - The OP is missing the point completely. I don't want to work with you if you don't know how to write a linked list or a hash table. CS isn't that different from other career paths - you need to master the basics before they let you on the big machinery. Pascal isn't a terribly useful language today (at least in it's "pure" form - I haven't used derivatives like Delphi), but its enough to get through the basics. I learned in BASIC and assembler (PDP-11), but who cares today?

If we're talking introductory courses like Data Structures, then it's pretty hard not to look like everyone else. I don't code most of the basic data structures anymore, but I expect that anyone I hire would have been through the basics at least, so I see the value in teaching these things. But I can imagine that if I were to write basic code to manipulate a hash table or binary search it would look a lot like everyone's else code.

We've managed to avoid the question so far due to the nature of the data we've put into AWS. We won't be able to avoid it forever, and I suspect that some kind of decision support DB will be needed not too far into the future. Where that will live, I don't have an answer yet.

Turns out, yes and no. We're distributed already, so it would have entailed setting up another DB anyway, and all the management infrastructure around that. AWS also seemed like a good fit for things that were essentially document-oriented and it seemed that it would be efficient for this kind of data model.

I can answer why WE decided to in this case: Cost and flexibility. For our application, there is a traditional PostgreSQL DB for things that ACID does well. For places we didn't think we'd need that level of transaction we decided that it wasn't cost effective to manage another DB instance, and instead move it to SimpleDB. Scalability wasn't the major driver at the moment, as we're already a distributed system.

FTA:
"In the meantime, DBAs should not be worried, because any company that has the resources to hire a DBA is likely has decision makers who understand business reality."

Bad English aside, I just don't agree. Money != Reality. I have worked both sides of this coin - Startups with plenty of money but don't see the value in proper maintainance of the data store (one almost was put out of business by a disk failure), and very smart startups that are running lean but do understand the risks.

That said, on the deeper level, why does business reality == SQL? Sure I can scale Oracle to support massive DB's (and have), but I could probably get more value from using Amazon's SimpleDB for things that don't require massive scaling. Use the right tool for the job - Hammers are for nails, etc. Do the design work up front, decide how its gonna work, and the right tool should present itself.

We're using both - about five days from our "go-live", and things look good. We just use what makes sense for each part of our application.
For us, this means PostreSQL for the parts that must be transactional ACID, and Amazon's S3 and SimpleDB for parts that don't. In practice, for the 1.0 release, this means things like notes, user accounting, and documents are in S3 and SDB. The rest is plain ole SQL.

Not that there wasn't a learning curve with our developers - we're a bunch of old-time enterprise type developers, so "letting go" and moving out of the traditional SQL world took a little thought and proving time. We'll use the first few months to learn more about doing architecture this way.

We've had the language wars - lets avoid the SQL/NOSQL wars please. I'm tired.

1. Open the browser and navigate to the page you are interested in.
2. Press the "Print" button.
3. Take your new printout, and tape it across your TV. Larger TV's might require bigger printouts.
4. ???

  Web on your TV!

I can see how this might be interesting in that it's related to a "writing class", but it's an on-line writing class! It is good to see that they are stressing some of the basics that may be somewhat lacking in some on-line (esp. non-journalistic) writing.

We had assignments to write articles for Wikipedia for several years as part of an electronic music class - each student submitted several articles (totals in the hundreds over the years the class ran) on music or music technology to Wikipedia. See http://wayneandwax.blogspot.com/2006/06/electro-class-of-06.html for more details.

Interesting - what WOULD happen if you stood in front of the Large Hadron Collider beam? Does it cut/burn like a laser, or something else? Just wondrin'...

Larry said he wrote the software to do the combining of the primitives for the trench, but what was the hardware? I've used E&S consoles similar to those, but those were VAX driven, which wasn't an option in 1976. The terminal looked similar to a VT05, but that was just an impression while watching.