I got a broken case about six years ago. When that couldn't be returned I vowed, and stuck to never shopping there again.

Well, at least I'll have my memories of Chicago winter to keep me warm after I move there next week. It's way warmer than Seattle is cold right now.

True. And also true that I don't do or say anything much that would be substantially offensive. But keeping my private life apart from my work life is something that I do value. And even if I didn't value it, the problem isn't nearly so much the employer as the employer's customers. I've quite deliberately not friended even my friends at work, because that's a social network that could easily expand to a lot of people in front of whom I have an obligation to behave with a modicum of professionalism.

j(.*)mitchel(.*) is a common name, located in a large city.

Why would I have any problem working for a company that forced me to join a social network? I wouldn't join with the same profile that I used personally. I would keep my business activities with the site strictly segregated from my personal persona (if any). But if the cost of losing your privacy as an employee to a google or a Facebook accrues almost entirely to your employer, not to you.

Fuck all.

What could cause the corruption:
Cosmic rays, Bad sectors, Weird bugs

Why is this a problem:
"Unless it is very carefully done, this kind of format could lose a lot of logging data as the result of a relatively small corruption"
  (http://lwn.net/Articles/467892/)

You can script mysql databases, assuming the data files are intact, mysql is intact and runs on the server, and you have functioning tools and the skill to use them. ASCII logfiles will be readable in spite of spot corruption and can be processed with grep / head / tail -- if these primitives don't work it probably doesn't matter what's in the log.

The wise professional is intensely mistrustful of innovation. Innovation introduces new failure modes and deprecates tested methods and experience. Innovation is always born half baked, unreliable and unsupported. By the time all the problems are solved with a given innovation, it's design will typically prove to be just as compromised and unsexy as its predecessor - and then the cycle of "innovation" repeats. Some innovations have sufficient value to overcome their costs - many don't.

And who said that OSS was about innovation?

More power than an old line Cray, more like. Coolest gd'd thing.

What would you suggest instead? I used to run Linux on the desktop, but the $50 I paid for RAM is nothing next to the time and frustration of dealing with the user-hostility of the developer community. I've done Windows, but that's no fun. Mac OS X sucks worse than every operating system but the ones that exist.

I figured that Apple is using +/- standard chipsets now. So I looked up the memory spec for my laptop (DDR2-1NNN where N is a number I don't remember), and picked an inexpensive kit off newegg where there were some reviews reporting that it worked in macbooks. For the price I figured it was worth buying something that hadn't had the relevant dead chicken waved over it.

Good for you.

My late 2009 macbook would randomly beachball when I had it on Snow Leopard at 2GB. Maybe because of the combo of a largish itunes library and using Firefox (maybe not my best decision). By this release though 8gb slots in fine and didn't cost me much more than $50. Combined with a fast hard disk (and dumping firefox), it's back to being my favorite computer.

I barely got my new mini booted before running back to Microcenter to get an 8gb kit.

My experience is that a Mac with a recent OS rev is almost unusable with 2GB of memory. 8GB and it sings.