Oh, you mean I have to work at it?! Well, then, I'm not interested!

Just joking, I think that makes a lot of sense. I believe I actually witnessed this once: years ago, I went out to lunch with two co-workers. One, call him Fundie, was a fundamentalist Missouri Senate Lutheran; the other, call him Thinky, was a non-denominational Christian. Many of the comments I made in my original post apply to Fundie. Whereas, Thinky is someone I really respect: his faith is very important to him and his family, but he was extremely open-minded, and more than accepting of other viewpoints. To him, church was for being part of a community and providing some structure for his children.

Anyway, Fundie and Thinky started discussing their respective churches. Fundy asked Thinky, "Do you allow gays in your church?" Thinky said that they do allow gays, to which Fundie immediately replied, "But the Bible says it's wrong."

Thinky came back with, "Do you allow divorced people in your church?" Fundie replied that they do allow divorced people, to which Thinky replied, "The Bible also says that's wrong."

Fundie had no response, just sat in awkward silence. I had the tact to restrain myself, but in my mind, I wanted to jump up and hi-five Thinky.

My knee-jerk reaction says you're wrong, wrong! :)

But upon further reflection, though I'm a bit ashamed to admit it, you're right. Though perhaps a bit paradoxical, I suppose it's just as easy to be "blinded by rationality" as it is to be blinded by faith. That is, if you're usually in a rational mindset, you might tend to assume you're always rational. And I think it's inhuman to truly be in a perpetually rational state of mind.

So how do you approach it?

I think you are (at least indirectly) speaking to something that scares the crap out of me: the growing influence of Christian Fundamentalists in the USA. In other words, the people who refuse to believe anything that is incompatible with their faith. By definition, these people are incapable of rational discussion. And when you try to point out their logical errors, they basically say, "that can't be, because the Bible says so," or, as you say, write you off as a fancy pants intellectual. Either way, you are left in a situation where you might as well be speaking two different languages. Actually, if one person refuses to deal in facts and reason, you might as well be speaking to a crazy person, or a dog, or a tree, because the conversation will go nowhere.

I spent the first 27 years of my life in small-town, midwestern USA. I hate to be cliche, but "blinded by faith" quite literally describes a significant number of people I've encountered---within my family, at school, at work, and in the community.

So how do you approach these people, who are either unable or unwilling to communicate rationally? I've thought about this long and hard, but I can't come up with any solution. And I keep seeing suggestions that their numbers, power, and influence are growing. It's conceivable that they will eventually wield some real power (or you could argue they do already). And just as soon as they can, I guarantee you they will try as hard as possible to eradicate all the "fancy pants intellectuals".

I have a friend who teaches 7th grade math at a public school in a small town in central Illinois. She teaches there because, from a student quality and compensation point of view, it's one of the better schools. But the community is small enough that the overwhelming majority of the residents are fundamentalist Christians. Evolution is not taught at this school; school billboards have Christian propaganda all over them; Wednesday is "giving alms" day, and as such, there are no scheduled activities outside of normal classes. On the surface, it looks like a normal public school, but when you get in, you realize it might as well be a private Christian school. And that goes for the community as a whole---on the surface, it is a nice town, mostly upper-middle class residents, low crime, close to a bigger town with all the bigger-town attractions, etc. I always thought it would be a nice place to live until my friend told me about her school. I wonder how many unsuspecting non-Christians end up there, and are quickly run out because of their differences?

In my experience, I've found that what's available varies greatly, even within the same metro area or even city. I used to live in a Northwest Chicago suburb: there were several cable (tv/net) providers, but I lived in a multi-unit building, and Comcast actually owned the building's infrastructure, so they were literally the only option.

I now live in a house in a sparsely-populated part of the City of Chicago, and AT&T and Comcast are the only two options, even though other areas of the city have more options.

I had Comcast cable-based high-speed internet (HSI). I started in on a promo rate that was about $50/month (IIRC) for HSI and basic cable (very basic, effectively local broadcast plus religious, public access and shopping channels). I didn't want the cable, but the promo HSI rate only applied if I got some TV service, so it was actually cheaper to get HSI plus TV rather than HSI alone.

Eventually the promo ran out, and Comcast wouldn't negotiate. I tried calling several times, going straight to the "Cancellations Department", etc etc, and couldn't get them to extend the promo rate. The HSI+TV cost went up to $75/month, and HSI alone was $60/month. To Comcast's credit, the HSI service was generally fast and reliable. But I thought it was too much.

At the same time, AT&T happened to be offering their DSL service for $20/month for the fastest "Elite" tier (6 MB/s). Prices go down from there. I already have a land-line due to having a security system, but I read the promotional material very closely, at it sounded like you could get the same DSL deal without an actual phone line. I was hesitant, but found the DSLReports Forums to be very helpful. One, I was able to ping other forum users to see if there was anyone in my neighborhood with the service (an informal survey of sorts). Two, they have dedicated, private tech support forums where you can actually talk directly to a tech person about the service. In other words, at the cost of waiting a day or two for a response, you actually get a useful answer from someone who knows something, rather than taking your chances with the yahoos at the 1-800 number.

That $20/month is guaranteed for a year, but without any contract (cancel any time), and no setup or equipment fees. I was quite skeptical, but we've had the service for over two months now, and I haven't had any problems. It is slower than Comcast's HSI, but fast enough for streaming HD Netflix, which is our highest requirement.

By the way, my landline is about $16/month, bringing my total monthly outlay to AT&T to $36/month, still cheaper than Comcast. We use cellphones for everything, but need a landline for the security system. If you live in Illinois and have a similar requirement (basic land line service), check out the Citizen's Utility Board. They have negotiated an AT&T plan called "Consumer's Choice Basic", which is as cheap as possible for AT&T. When I signed up for this, it wasn't available online, and I had to call their 1-800 number to get it... and even then, they are shady and try to add services if you don't pay close attention to your order.

As another poster mentioned, there are now really only two chipset vendors for AMD CPUs, nVidia and AMD itself (at least in the desktop space, there may be others in the server space). I haven't done a detailed study recently, but last I checked, both were still sub-par compared to Intel's chipset offerings. nVidia had fairly widespread problems with the actual manufacturing of their chips; it tended to affect laptops more than desktops, but both were at risk. In general, the nVidia chipsets at least used to be quite power hungry.

The AMD chipsets just don't compete with the Intel equivalent. There was a website that benchmarked AMD's SATA 3 against Intel's SATA 2; the Intel won! Also, I don't know if they still exist, but AMD's SATA performance used to change depending on whether you used the native AMD interface or switched to AHCI mode. I forget the details, but you can google for it. AMD also doesn't produce their own ethernet chips. That's not a problem, but it means that AMD boards usually come equipped with an el-cheapo Atheros or Realtek ethernet implementation. I think that Intel makes the best ethernet hardware, hands-down. Yet, outside of the server space, it's impossible to find an AMD board with an Intel NIC on it.

Finally, while AMD's on-board graphics are some of the best you can get (definitely better than anything Intel currently makes), they don't support dual digital output. I have two monitors, and prefer to run them both digitally (i.e. HDMI or DVI). All of AMD's on-board GPUs allow only one digital device to be connected at a time. You can do two monitors with one digital and one analog, but I can see a quality difference; analog sucks.

Overall, though, I think AMD still offers a lot of value. The issues I pointed out will go unnoticed by the casual user. And the power user should understand his needs well enough to know if they make a difference. E.g., I know the Realtek NIC is inferior to the Intel, but is it going to make a difference in day-to-day usage? For the average desktop? Probably not. Another nice feature AMD provides is ECC memory support for all non-Sempron CPUs. With Intel, you have to shell out the big bugs for a Xeon-branded CPU to get ECC support. The unfortunate thing, though, is that most consumer motherboards don't actually provide the traces that allow you to actually use the ECC support! The Biostar A760-G M2+ is a noteable example that actually does let you use the ECC features of the CPU (though it's unofficially supported).

I don't disagree with the overall theme of your post, but just a bit of a nit: I often see people saying I run all these things on my computer, so I need as many cores as possible. The number of processes (or threads) really doesn't mean anything; it's how much work each of those processes are doing. My firewall/router computer is an OpenBSD system running on an AMD Geode processor (500 MHz I think). This is a single core CPU that's slower than even an Atom (I've seen people compare it to a 486!). On this machine, I run a name server, ssh server, time server, DHCP server, and a firewall. The Geode is plenty powerful for all these things for a small home network. Of course, if I was, say an ISP with 100s of customers, the Geode wouldn't be sufficient.

So, in general, any one of the processes you listed can be virtually no CPU load, or require a whole cluster by itself. Consider a mail server. If you're not doing virus scanning, I would guess that you can support 100s of typical users on a pretty wimpy computer, as it's really mostly I/O load. But to run, e.g. gmail.com, that requires a bit more power. The same goes for a web server: if you're serving mostly static pages or relatively simple dynamic pages with a limited number of users (for example, a hobby web development server), it's mostly I/O load, and doesn't take a powerful CPU at all. But, on the other hand, pick any high-profile site, and it's obvious you need a lot more horsepower. The point is, simply saying "I run a webserver" doesn't really actually say anything about the load you're putting on your system.

HTPC = every piece of media you have can be played from a single device.

And DVR capabilities as well, with something like MythTV.

...well, almost. I have the following requirements: streaming Netflix, DVR capabilities, and playback of large-ish DVD rip collection (x264 encoded, stored in MKV container).

A Linux-based HTPC (i.e. MythTV system) can do all of these, except Netflix. I have a PS3, which works for Netflix, but isn't as convenient (have to get up and put the Netflix disc in the PS3). Yeah, that's not a big deal, but the "HT" in HTPC is for "home theater", and to me, having everything accessible from one remote is part of the true HT experience.

I considered running Windows under a virtual machine on my Linux HTPC. While in theory that ought to work OK, it seemed like a "fragile" solution, as the remote control programming would have to be semi-complex to allow seamless switching between MythTV and the Windows virtual machine.

Given the cost (comparable to a Windows license) and ease-of-use of the Roku player, I opted for that.

On the other hand, perhaps a Windows-based HTPC is the real solution? Is there a MythTV equivalent for Windows? That is, a free and reliable DVR with a strong community behind it? Complete with commercial skipping/flagging?!

If I'm not mistaken, XBMC can be used as a MythTV frontend, and is available for Windows.

Now I'm starting to wonder if I was too quick to click "Submit" on the Roku purchase: existing Linux-based HTPC could be moved to the basement, and become a pure mythbackend. Instead of the Roku, I could buy a tiny, ION system for the front room. Install Windows, XBMC, and have the same functionality, but all in one box?

Has anyone else gone this route?

In some respects, I think that's what Gentoo is.

Massively off-topic now, but... does anyone know why there are city workers in downtown Chicago directing traffic when the automated signal lights are working just fine?. Every evening I walk through the intersection of Madison and Canal there is at least one person directing traffic. But their direction is exactly the same as the signal lights'.

So, how is this efficient? Maybe it's worse in other cities?

A lot of comments here are of the "scratch your own itch" or "just find a project and dive in" variety. I think those are great ideas.

But what about finding a mentor or coach? I've been a professional developer for about eight years now, spanning two jobs. In my first job, I had a mentor. Not so much for coding, but just someone to show me the ropes around the company, explain why things are the way they are, etc. I learned a ton from him; maybe stuff I could have learned on my own (or at least via asking lots of different people questions), eventually, but the frustration level would have been significantly higher. My mentor ultimately moved on, but by then I had gained experience and responsibility in that group. I knew what I was doing.

Another, experienced developer came into the group. I wouldn't call him so much a mentor, but a peer who was great just to bounce ideas off of. We could have easily worked in "silos", with a minimum of communication, and probably been reasonably successful. But, again, just having a willing cohort made things go a lot more smoothly.

All the above regarding my previous job has been underscored by my second and current job: no mentoring, total "trial by fire". Yeah, I know what I'm doing now, and can get by well enough. But I was miserable for a long time, given that there were simple things that someone could have helped me with and saved me a lot of time and frustration. And the "team" I'm on consists of me and one other guy. The other guy could have been a mentor, as he has several more years of experience in this field than me. But his communication skills are awful. And even though his code works, everybody who has ever looked at it cringes in disgust. So, if anything, he's an anti-mentor.

The point in all this: in coding, or even work in general, it's nice to have a mentor, or at least a teammate with whom you can have an intelligent conversation. I personally find myself learning more, at a faster pace, and less frustrated when working with someone who's at least in the same ballpark as me mentally. Especially with coding: I greatly lament my current lack of teammates with whom I can do "cardboard programming"---just talking through my work out-loud, or bouncing ideas off someone often results in better code or design, or in the worst case, a better understanding of the issue(s) at hand.

Citation or reference? I'm not doubting you---I honestly want to read more about this phenomenon.

I keep seeing new boards like this come out, hoping one will have all the features I want for an ideal NAS (network attached storage) build. Right now, there is always some trade-off for what I want. Show me the board that has...

• Support for ECC RAM. AFAIK, all modern AMD CPUs all support ECC RAM. Seems like AMD should be able to make something that competes with the Atom on the low-wattage side of things. A full-blown 4850e or even Sempron is overkill.
• At least six SATA ports. Eight to 10 would be perfect. Modern Intel (ICH10) and AMD (SB700) chipsets seem to max out at six SATA ports. And Intel likes to pair the Atom with even older chipsets (ICH7 I think) that support at most four SATA ports.
• A PCIe x16 slot. Not necessary if and only if the motherboard has everything needed integrated. This requirement is really just a stop-gap, assuming the board itself will lack some crucial feature. Or for providing for unforseen future expansion.
• A built-in compact flash slot. My understanding is that PATA and CF are closely related (one is a subset of the other maybe?)... in this day and age, I would imagine PATA controllers are dirt cheap. But the idea is to use CF as the system drive, i.e. the place to hold the OS and config files. (You could also use USB + thumb drive, so as a compromise I'd settle for an on-board USB socket into which a thumb drive can be directly plugged.)
• At least one Gigabit LAN port, preferably a high quality controller like Intel makes. Two Gigabit ports for bonding would be ideal.
• Super-low power CPU. The load on this machine will be virtually all I/O. Intel Atom, AMD Geode, or even ARM should suffice.
• Chipset with sufficient IO muscle and integrated video without the high power consumption. The chipset Intel is supplying with the Atom is awful from a power consumption perspective (actually, none of Intel's chipsets are particularly low-power). AMD's 740G and 780G look decent, but still have way over-powered video. Super old school, VGA only video is sufficient. I'd even be happy with serial console only.

One board comes close: the VIA NAS 7800, but it doesn't appear to be available to the general public. And I don't see anything about supporting ECC memory. For no reason other than hearsay, I'm not so sure I'd trust important data to a Via chipset.

The next best, IMO (and I actually have one of these), is the Gigabyte GA-MA74GM-S2. Check out SilentPCReview's writeup on this board. Only problem: I'm not sure if it supports ECC or not (AMD CPUs do, but I've heard it still requires the motherboard vendor to enable it). One annoying problem is that the PCIe x16 slot is for video only---you can't put a SATA controller card, extra NIC or anything else useful to a NAS in there. Still, while it's a very low-power board when paired with the right CPU, it's still overkill for a NAS. In general, I think the power draw for a NAS (excluding the hard drives) should be under 15 Watts.

The Point of View Ion/Atom board linked above looks promising. But, as far as I can see, no compact flash, and probably no ECC memory support.

I have two home-built servers: one is an always-on, live NAS; the other is a backup server that I power on only to do backups (or restores if it comes to that). First rule I go by: always use the slower 5400 RPM drives, such as the Western Digital "Green" or the Samsung EcoGreen. For both media streaming and backup purposes, these hard drives are still plenty fast. The biggest benefit, though, is that they use less energy (particularly important if your system is always on), and don't get as hot, making cooling much easier (which usually also translates to quieter).

My live server is currently 4 x 1TB drives in RAID-5, using Linux software RAID. (I know RAID is no substitute for backup, but I still consider it "quasi" backup. But I also have real backup.) This system is fairly un-interesting: it's your typical DIY NAS.

The backup server is housed in the Norco RPC-4020. For $300, you get 24 SATA hot-swap bays. That price is hard to beat. I haven't filled this case up with drives yet, and I have plenty of physical space going forward. The hardware is just some unused spare components I had lying around. Extra SATA ports are provided by the Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 (which works fine in "regular" 32-bit PCI slots).

This, IMO, is a pretty simple set up. I just power up the backup server whenever I need it, and turn it off when I'm done. I don't care about performance, since backups are always run as a batch job (typically over night).

Before I bought that Norco case, I was just using individual drives with a Thermaltake BlacX SATA-to-USB hard drive docking station. This is cheaper, just slightly less convenient. I did order 50 "zip lock"-style anti-static bags for $13. I ordered them from staticbags.com ("GRC Enterprises" was listed on my invoice). After I copied data to the drive and put it in an anti-static bag, I just added it to the stack of drives I had on my bookshelf. The Norco case definitely looks better! :)

All in all, I consider my system fairly robust. It's only semi-secure against my stupidity, and since its all housed in the apartment, does not safeguard against fire. But since the media rips are just copies of DVDs I actually own, my insurance policy becomes the ultimate backup.