For me, it strangely reminds me of Hypercard ... and thus of current Mac OS X Automator. If you want even easier, I'd even go to Quartz Composer. Yet again things pioneered by Apple. I wouldn't create a full 3D game using that scripting system, it's totally different and not meant for the same thing.

People simply don't understand high-level versus low-level; both has merits.

Is this the old geezer versus the new wet diapers yet again? (trying to be as evil on both sides ;) )

There are new technologies and we should embrace them. I am not a proponent of VMs, I don't like them in general, but I do see its uses and it's very effective. Like in C++, you got STL, with very similar and nearly interchangeable std::vector, std::list, std::deque and so on (and not talking about boost or 3rd parties here). You need to know when to apply them or else you'll get problems. Well, in the '10s, you have the same ridicule amount of technologies available to sysadmins, and you need to know when to apply it. That's the new Sysadmin job, not only know that you can code one in bash with grep, awk, echo, while read, pipes and rsync, but actually know there is a package all neatly made for you, available at your fingertips with a simple apt-get (or yum).

I keep my computer tidied-up, I love to know what runs where. Even then, I do a "spring cleaning" once every year, reinstalling everything. And incredibly, my computer runs faster and more efficiently. Why? new /etc defaults, new parameters, new software, old clinging software, things that are nearly impossible to update. Same for the files. Seriously, in today's computers, we get hundred of thousands of files, most of which have some arcane use we couldn't care less, but are necessary for some kind of weird reason. I'm a sysadmin, and I don't pretend to want to know all these files.

I read the article, and yes, there are things that are changing, and seriously, I do respect the One person who can understand the Sendmail configuration files... oh I'd even be impressed with the M4. :) And when there is a problem, I want to know why, because I love to learn. But then ... there are prerogatives, time constraints, servers need to be up, people need to work, and we have all these magnificient tools that will enable every computer to be segregated in their private little VM world (to return to that main article). So should be simply shrug, laugh and go back to The Ancient Ways? You can keep you "vi" editor, leave me my "vim", please. :)

It scales horribly
It takes more work
It takes more time down the end ... but then, I don't have a %(#)load of users sending me e-mails, calling me (off-site), coming to see me in real life, and I don't have to send a message to all the clients and users saying it's known, and I don't have the company managers telling me they're in a crunch or whatnot.

95% of users coming to my desk in these mere minutes a server is down:
- hi
- hi. Yes?
- how are you?
- not too bad, you?
- going well. I got a question for you?
- yes?
- Are you working on whatever server?
- yeah, it's down. Restarting it now, there might be further downtime later on if I see a solution, and it might require further downtime. Hopefully not.
- oh ... ok, thanks
- no sweat.

So I'm sorry, I'm really inexperienced I guess, I just work with active servers with users happily churning in them, and are to a point mission critical, for them at least. And FWIW, I'm merely a non-jerk and non-God-complex sysadmin that tries to answer to users with proper English and not shoving their little problems down their %/%/.

And yes, SVN might sometimes cause problems, especially when linked to these buzzwords: SASL, LDAP, NFS, VM and 1TB worth of data.

And I agree with you totally it should not require a reboot, reboots should not happen.

Like in Windows ...

But in real life, they do. And sometimes, once it's determined what the cause might be, it's much easier to do a "shutdown -r 0", wait for 30 seconds for the server to stop, wait for 2 minutes for the server to come back up, look at the log, see everything is peachy, and THEN solving whatever went wrong than taking 2 hours of my life with users poking me every 30 seconds because the server is down.

Example that just happened today: a NFS server was having problems with some actions... not all, but some very rare admin actions. We restarted the server because it was hung, with stale NFS mounts galore, and application hung because it was unresponsive.
Rebooting the whole system meant all processes at least tried to stop, and then they restarted correctly. After further investigation with whatever was causing problems, we understood one of our new servers needed nolock in clients due to a software glitch. We remounted with additional options, and it kept running along from that point on. Next step is to do the right thing and correct the NFS software bug ... and once we'll have the latest software update, we'll allow locks yet again.

Total downtime: 5 minutes. Caveat: for 2 hours, users couldn't do a particuliar Admin command. Now: fine ... Eventually: server will be back up and ok.

Quotes from stupid people:
You should never reboot a Mac, it's not like Windows.
You should never reboot Unix/Lunux, it's not like Windows.

Well, you shouldn't reboot Windows either. You reboot it when it goes sour. Our Windows servers seldom go sour, so we don't reboot them. Same for Mac or *nix.

Problem is when it starts to cause problems. Like our /var/spool partition deciding it has better things to do than exist... or the ever so important NFS or iSCSI mount that decides to Go West, and gives us the ??? ls we all dread ... with umounting impossible, so remounting impossible, and all these stale files and stuff. You either tweak these things for hours cleaning up all processes, or you reboot.

In fact, being a good sysadmin, all my servers are MEANT to be rebooted if something goes sour. One SVN project goes sour? check if it's not the repository itself that got problems, or if the system needs to save something to safely exist ... and if not, reboot the server. Everything magically restarts itself, does its little sanity check, and a quick look at a remote syslog to make certain everything is all right. 2 minutes lost for everyone, not 3 hours of trying to clean up mess left by some stray process somewhere or trying to kill the rogue 100 compression and rsync jobs that got started eating up all RAM, CPU and network.

Since all our servers are single processes and are either VMs or single machines, it's a breeze to do this. iSCSI will diligently wait before the machine is back up before trying to reconnect. NFS will keep its locked files up, and will reconnect to them. No, seriously, everything simply reconnects!

Of course, the idea is to minimize these occurences, so we learn from it, and we try to repair what could've caused this problem in the first place. And there's a place to do this in a server crash postmortem. But no need to make users wait while we try to figure out wth.

Technically, my computer will last between 2h of Minecraft, up to 5-6 hours or normal use... My Internet connection with VOIP phone, wireless router and stuff will work for 2 good hours. If I'm recording stuff on the boobtube or if the PS3/360/Wii are up, then it drops down dramatically to 20 minutes (But enough to save my game and kill everything ASAP).

At that point, I'll be able to tether to at least 2 different devices, so by being smart, I could work up the whole 6 hours of battery with Teh Intarwebz.

Then ... I'll have to resort to my iPad ... which can provide me quite a lot of time before it dies.

Finally, for the worst, I could still technically do Tweets or light Net browsing using Packet Radio (I'm one of these Radio freaks with their permits ... ;) ) with battery powered devices, although that device and the computer that could work this out are in boxes deeply buried underneath Cobblestone and Gravel. And for that, I have dozens and dozens of charged AA batteries everywhere, it wouldn't be such a problem.

But is it really final? Nope ... With some illegal electricity works, I could plug my Prius 2010 battery on the house, and have quite a lot of energy to start up some emergency stuff, including charging back the UPSes. And with the gas I have in my car, I expect to be able to get a good 6-10 hours more of emergency household energy, giving me that additional 6 hours, and a whole new cycle.

AND then is it YET final? Nope ... well ... yes for now ... but I'm currently in process of purchasing a house with 2KW solar panels. Not enough to have a fully working house, but enough to give emergency power to the most important thing: Internet and Computers! Screw the geothermal unit and hot water, screw the fridge. WE WANT INFINITE PAWAAAAAR!

HAHAHAH! Don't feed the troll :) But who said:
- my camera in 2004 took 20M pics? It went from 2MB JPEGS to 8MB RAW to 15MB RAW to 20MB RAW over the years.
- I don't have OTHER means to keep older pictures
- there's a real reason to keep very very old "crappy" pictures (1-2 years ago), and not only the good ones.

But obviously, the fact I didn't write a 3-tome novel with graphs and an accompanying DVD with examples of the process seems to be a problem :)

I once filled the full 750GB with a 1-week long event, taking a full 64GB load every night (before you call me bonkers on my math skills, consider there's intermediate files, work copies, and that I still need to keep the good ones from before anyways)

I am a semipro photographer. One raw picture is >20M, and I tend to take between 500 and 2000 pictures for an event.

I keep all pictures. All of them. With the usual exceptions of the black ones or a very blurry ceiling.

My computer is also a laptop. I removed the useless DVD drive to host a second hard drive, only for the pictures. That gives me 750gb for pics.

I also have a 2TB external hard drive, and a general backup 4TB drive.

The workflow I use is as follows:
- I put all my pictures on my computer.
- Once transferred, I plug and copy all the new pictures on my 2TB, never removing anything from there, only adding.
- I then process the pictures, adjust them, do whatever needs to be done. I sort them in 3 buckets (deleted, meh, good).
- I copy the working copies for the good ones to the 2TB also.
- I delete the deleted/meh from my laptop, only keeping the good ones.
- I do a general incremental rsync backup of my laptop to my 4TB.

For me that's enough protection, I always have my "good" pictures with me on my laptop, and have access to everything else on my dump drive.

For fires and burglars, I also have a second encrypted 2TB at work. I can safely recreate everything else from that part...

So far it has served me well, and I haven't lost anything. I've been burned badly in the past after crashing a HD while doing a backup, and having 6 HDD failing me in the same year (yeah, lan partys will do that to your gear) so I am very anal about my data.

I agree. I had to update eventually to get the latest PSN stuff... it took me 2 months before updating, in that time, I purchased a 360 and I bought most games I missed on the 360. Lost revenue. Now I got the choice and they just lost the equivalent of 50% of their revenues from me.

I am a game programmer, I code as a living, in fact I own part of a successful gaming company. I wanted to stay up front to PS3 development and have fun with it, to see what I could do with it (even with their stupid ganked environment). Now I can't ...

Then, the key, they kill its import rights ... now everyone and their moms can unlock them, with game loaders and stuff... Won't take long before emulation will be perfect and undetectable. Sorry for not losing sleep over that. Sympathy level = 0%.

I don't condone piracy, I never did and never will, I gain most of my pay because gamers purchase my games. But when companies are doing jackasses of themselves and are evil to their purchasers, I have no sympathy. Same that I don't have sympathy for RIAA/MPAA.

1 - If they were all open about their efforts on a day-to-day basis, the other companies would simply copy them, make a 90% "good enough" version just before them and then Apple would simply lose their creative edge.
2 - They have marketing campaigns to make us WANT a new product. Meaning gaining momentum until the product actually ships.
3 - All companies are doing that. Only because Apple is successful in making campaigns doesn't mean the other companies aren't doing it themselves. -- and if it was more profitable in advertising in advance, they'd certainly do it. Like they did for many Mac OS X releases. And yes, the latest Google Phone was also tight lipped ... the latest Palm was tight lipped ... and the developer in his basement developing the latest revolution in whatever he is doing is also (usually) tight lipped about his project.

I mean, it's business management 101.

I'll drink to that. At home, got a laptop, no other displays. At work, got one laptop, with one external display (req'd to do any kind of coding) and since I code console games, I have a HDTV screen on the side too, making it 3.

I am using IMAP from my various e-mail providers, including gmail, dreamhost, and other, depending on where the mails come from. Some are company-related, some are personal, some are from projects. I long gave up hosting my own email server when everyone is happy providing that service for either free or a small price.

But if he wants IMAP, he can still get any old netbook and install whatever he wants, like I said in the 2 other possibilities. Only telling it's USUALLY useless to host its own everything.

We went from having 2 computers with a server and a laptop to having 2 laptops, a base station and no cables. With today's 1TB 2.5 HDD and easy sharing through wireless N, it's relatively simple, efficient and in the past 3 years, we saved a crapload of money since we don't even come near a 500W power supply recent towers (nearly) require. When we wish to have access to our data from home without our computers, we leave them open and they are shared through our router. Otherwise, we have our computer with us, so we don't need to connect to them ;)

However, for your question, most vendors have small busyboxes with potential to plug a 2.5" USB-powerede external HDD, with hacking potential for more. If you want more (as you advertise), go to your local cheap used hardware store, get a netbook someone got tired of, and put additional HD. It should solve your problem.

I personally am very vocal about my hate of purchased anti-viruses for end users.

Most of the home user computers I've seen use some kind of outdated anti-virus technology that wasn't updated in ages. They purchase the computer, they got a 90 days free AV deal, then weeks before it ends up, they are asked to subscribe to this crap for some kind of amount, they say "later", next reboot "later", next reboot "later", next reboot GAAAH "never! there!", and they are stuck with that piece of crap that slows down their computer than gives them a false impression of security "because they got Norton installed", even if they totally forgot they even had to subscribe.

Even worse are the computers with some outdated version of the software that isn't even updated anymore, like they got this 3 year old version of (example) Symantec they purchased, asked for the year update, then got a message about that brand new (shiny) version with more features. They said no because they aren't doing anything fancy with their computers. Now they are stuck with some 3 year old solution that isn't updated anymore. How appropriate.

So my suggestion for all the computer users: don't use a bundled anti-virus unless you get explained what's the deal pay their due diligence everytime they are asking for it. Then, they are very good (usually vastly superior) products. -- Instead, use some free anti-virus, like AVG, that will automatically update everyday, and won't become outdated, and you won't have a popup message asking for money or else... Use spybot for the lesser evils. There, you are free of pains.

I will have to agree with you. My friend has a company branch there, and at first, all computers came with all illegal software, although the invoices were saying it came with Windows, it was a pirated version that couldn't even software update (talk about a bad hack :) ).

My friend had to go to the store, ask for "real" Windows, he got told multiple times it was real, it's not a copy, no one here never sold any "official and legal" Windows. They finally agreed to (get this) order 5 copies, that took 2 weeks to receive, and finally he got his real Windows.

That's the tip of the iceberg. Untold hardware changes ("But I asked for this", "this is the same" or "this is better"), specific requests for legal versions getting preinstalled cracked versions, and so on.

You know what, we're frowning today at this practice, but in Windows 3.1 times, it was always like this in here too, and that's not too far away. When you purchased a computer, you seldom had any official version of your software. Everyone I knew had some Autocad version dangling around (why, I dunno!), and the hardware was (and sometimes still is) a black box of arcane things.