A keyboard is an absolute must for me. I hate touch screen keyboards. This is the reason I never bought any of those fat iphones. The best phone till today with 5 row keyboard is the htc g1. The other full keyboard ones are running stupid windows os. Droid and Nexus have impressive specs but does not have the basic functionality where I can type numbers without any additional effort. And yes I do type numbers very often. So G1 still beats all the phones out in the market as of today.

That is exactly the point, there is no such technology (which we have invented) which already doesn't exist in nature. In fact, it exists in nature at a far superior level. There is infinitely superior technology even within a blade of grass. What we do is just emulate the technology in nature on a human scale(large) but in a very crude form. For example human body converts a variety of food into energy and we convert some crude forms(crude oil) in a very inefficient way. We all were once part of a ball of fire(lava).

Invention is nothing but discovering nature's technology and replicating it in a crude form on a human(larger size) scale. Infinitely superior technology already exists in the tiniest of particles. He who thinks we are technologically advanced is nothing but an Ignorant idiot.

I was a slackware guy in 1997/8 then Redhat and now Fedora. I am a sysadmin and some one requested me to troubleshoot nfs service on Ubuntu and I figured that it was a dhcp issue and fixed it by restrating the network service and thus nfs. But still have no clue where it stores the ip info. I was busy so gave up after about 15 mins of googling. Nfs service was also way different than on Fedora. Ubuntu service organization kind of looked old school 1997's Slackware type. I may be wrong but one thing is for sure I too don't want to try Ubuntu. I am a command line guy, so I judge distros on how well their files are organized, so I would say Fedora's file system organization is the best.

I am in a similar 24/7 sysadmin position. I am an hourly contractor and this is the best for such positions. Any call received after working hours will trigger my billing meter. July like a taxi meter the minimum for even a 5 mins call is 1 hour. If you are an employee then you are screwed.

Last recession taught me it doesn't matter how skilled you are, it is the "demand and supply market" that decides your fate. If you happen to be at the wrong company at wrong time, you will just get laid off. Skills do not matter at all. I work as a contractor, till 2007 I was with a city government, and I knew budget cuts are coming. Once you get laid off due to budget cut there will simply be no openings. So I switched early in May 2008 so that I have a contract through the recession. Recession is learning time, all your arrogance and ego at being skilled will vaporise. I am not sure if my contract will get renewed this year. But I have gone through one recession, if needed I will work at a gas station from day one but will not dip into savings, err. have no savings but have no loans either :-) Last recession taught me not to use credit cards and to prepay loans. Pre-Paid my 20000 car loan in 2 years(2007-2008). Installments were 400 but I paid 1500 a month. Sure I would have had savings if I had not done that but also more worries. No debt no worries. It would be a good time to take a vacation to third world countries where living is dirt cheap. For around 300 usd a month, you will get house, food, clothing and some entertainment too.

Belief is nothing but accepting some one's lie as truth. That is lieing to self.

"Long-term backup media is currently DVD"
ha, you got to be kidding, one scratch or a bad player and it is trash. I hope you are not an sys admin for any company.

Example: 2+3+5 = 10
So MS would come up with this brilliant idea 2+3+5 = 11 -1 = 10 and then patent it.

May be you can patent - triple mouse clicks to open porn.

My office latop was left on by me(it has been on since 6 months) as I never carried it home. Today morning when I came to office the screen saver was frozen. I run xfce and xscreensaver, screen saver freeze is common on my fedora 9. So I tried ssh and ping from another machine but none worked. It was very hot too,(i never found it hot in the past even after a return from 4 days of vacation). I had to hard reboot. From the cron log messages it seems to have died around 7 pm on Dec. 31st.
Dec 31 16:01:01 linlap CROND[14254]: (root) CMD (run-parts /etc/cron.hourly)
Dec 31 17:01:01 linlap CROND[16688]: (root) CMD (run-parts /etc/cron.hourly)
Dec 31 18:01:01 linlap CROND[19115]: (root) CMD (run-parts /etc/cron.hourly)
Jan 2 08:43:39 linlap crond[2461]: (CRON) STARTUP (1.0)
Jan 2 08:43:41 linlap anacron[2518]: Anacron 2.3 started on 2009-01-02
Jan 2 08:43:41 linlap anacron[2518]: Will run job `cron.daily' in 65 min.

Nokia must have forgotten to pay the cops.

I agree, I grew up in India, it would take one whole new generation, that is another 50 years for an average indian administrative officer's mind set to evolve. Cops are most idiotic because that profession pays very very low salary, no housing(quaters will have a 20 year waitlist) and lots of risk. A city cop must take bribes just to afford rent. Lack of courts in india is a very big handycap, trials can simply go on forever. So normal citizen can't even think of going to court against corruption. It is so bad that I could not get my driver's license on my own, they just made me run around from one officer to another but when I paid an agent, no tests were taken and just went to the agent's shop two days later and collected it. No ethics, no right/wrong nothing, only money rules.