If you can afford it, this always seems to work well. There's been a number of very successful designs based on this in the last 40 years, actually.

Basically, you have your two lead sysadmins and a senior sysadmin in the lower, central section. Surrounding them are secondary (usually unmanned) workstations and displays. Directly in front of them is the master display.

As I say, a lot of successful designs based on this one. That's why there's a complete set of blueprints online

-- damned thing's practically open source.

Awesome. Truly awesome.

Personally, I can't wait for the US Federal Government to require all individuals to have these types of IDs. They think they're going to exert control over me by always being able to track me.

But I know that hackers will figure these things out, and ultimately no door that needs an ID will be safe from me.

Oh, sure, the non-technical people will suffer. But me? I'm going to do the things none of the other serfs will be able to do. For them, the ID will be a prison. For me, it will be my ticket to go anywhere I feel like.

Bring it. :D

Um ... who cares?

I'm writing this on Lucid beta1, and my window controls are in the upper right where I want them. As usual, my first download post-install was Ubuntu-Tweak, which has a handy configuration section that lets you order and position the window controls to your liking.

Open Source isn't a democracy, it's Open Source. That's kind of the point. With the source, you can write an app like Ubuntu-Tweak to overcome anything that you think is a deficit.

• An extraordinary amount of time is spent walking, mostly to kill time. Fat chance dictating that people walk faster.
  This is a phenomenon I've observed repeatedly in the IT infrastructure field. When I have to get off my ass and actually go somewhere, it's at a sprint because something broke so badly I couldn't remote it and it's probably frakking important. This has caused me to increase my walking speed in general over the years, to the point where the average employee's gait drives me insane when I run across them in the halls.
• Another time-waster is just sitting at your desk pretending to be working but really just zoning out. See the movie Office Space for details. Fat chance dictating that people not zone out when there's clearly a spreadsheet sitting in front of them.
• And finally, they're going to discover that the overwhelming majority of women in the workplace kill time chatting and socializing.
  Fat chance getting a member of a protected class to do anything useful. The moment someone comes out with conclusive proof that most women spend three to five hours a day doing exactly nothing worth paying for, the Feminists will crawl out of the woodwork to blame men for it, and the entire science will die a quick death.

Not that I think this is a moral application of science, mind you. In fact, I see it as a huge opportunity to make money selling software to feed bogus accelerometer data to the monitoring program.

Subscribe to my service, and as far as your boss is concerned, you arrived at the office at 7am; had a 15-minute lunch and no coffee breaks; took one 2-minute bathroom break; and left work at 7pm.

Premium users have access to the AI engine, which generates topic-appropriate emails to co-workers to make it appear that you work and play well with others.

For a surcharge, you can even rent an illegal alien to actually sit at your desk while you lounge at home. This is my real money-maker, because I can hire illegals at $0.50 an hour, but I rent them out at $3.00 an hour. So for $36.00 a day, you can stay home and kick back while your phone and a body says you're at work.

And I know, you're saying, "But I'm a six-foot Aryan -- how will some Mexican illegal pull it off?" Oh, ye of little knowledge! There are far more than just Mexican illegals out there. U.S. immigration laws leak like a seive, and I can get you a six-foot blond Norwegian illegal just as easily as I can a hispanic. You just have to know where to look.

There's not a single newspaper in the United States worth paying for. Period. And that absolutely includes the New York Times.

The argument they're having is pointless. As long as the press continues to distort reality the way it has ever since my first experience with it over 20 years ago, it's not worth a dime. They can make up any kind of "fair" price they want, but the market has spoken: journalism is dead, and everyone knows it.

In 45 years on planet Earth, there has been no story with which I've been personally involved that was accurately reported. I assume that if they can't get it right with me once a year or so, they're probably never getting it right.

There's only one way for the American press to save itself, and that's by stringently limiting its reporting to verifiable facts. No editorializing, no emotionally loaded language, no half-truths or only telling one side of the story. No angles, no viewpoints. Just the facts, ma'am.

As long as I can report the facts more accurately than the press, the press is doomed. And that's a damned good thing.

Nah, this is the Internet, just not the stuff hanging off of it like Web servers ...

I'm not sure how they'd even notify the Internet of its having won, assuming that it does. The most reliably way I can think of is to ping the entire supply of public IPv4 addresses. Once they have, say, 50% replies back, they can consider the Internet to have accepted.

But perhaps you'd need to make it a super-majority. After all, given the historic importance of the Nobel Prize, there should be as great a number of devices and computers as possible to make it representative.

Then there are all those pesky firewalls rejecting UNDP ... how will we know if those devices can accept on behalf of the Internet?

I've got it. They get the most recent winner of the award to get a bill introduced in his nation's Congress requiring UNDP to be turned on for any device carrying a public IP addresses, including LinkSys home routers. Make it a Federal crime to fail to turn on UNDP, with a minimum sentence of ten years in prison and a $50,000 fine. Create and hire a whole new batch of flunkies whose job it is to hunt down those who've not turned on UNDP.

I mean, come on, it's for the children.

Well, after exposing themselves for the utter frauds they are after the last winner, I'd hardly put it past the Committee.

There's no reason to give a Nobel Prize of any kind to an inanimate collection of circuits. You give the prize to people who built the circuits.

I mean, you know ... duh.

I wondering if my knowing this particular tidbit of sanity would qualify me for a Nobel Prize of my own ... ?

Uhhh ... anyone with training in physical security. Any decent CISSP with even a modicum of training in physical security can tell you why what they've done is a pointless waste of time.

Nobel laureates or not, these people are dimwits.

For over sixty years these guys have been messing with this clock, and for sixty years they've been wrong every time. Why do they think anyone cares what they have to say now?

I agree except that the West's money is about to be hyper-inflated beyond all value and the world economy will drop like a rock for a long, long time.

China only survives because the West buys its products, thereby keeping its billion citizens working just enough to keep revolution in check. When we can no longer afford even inexpensive Chinese products, their economy is going to drop out from under them, half a billion people are going to start starving, and the Chinese Government will have a revolution on their hands.

If the US is very, very lucky, defaulting on all the money it owes the Chinese won't trigger World War III.

Sadly, with the timing, this is only going to antagonize a relationship that's doomed in the first place because of US financial policy.

I would really have ignored this the way it's been ignored as long as I've been in ITSec. There's nothing to be gained by antagonizing China at this time except to strain relations shortly before they're broken entirely. The break itself may trigger a nuclear exchange, after all: no reason to exacerbate things.

Sadly, no longer feasible. The modern Western woman only uses love as a tactic.

This isn't news to anyone.

Indeed, this is what I've aspired to my whole life. What I discovered after four decades' experience with Western women is that they do not, in fact, want what you're suggesting they want.

Western women want a free ride. They want to be able to do anything they like at someone else's expense. They use tactics that can only be called abuse to achieve this end. It's unnecessary to go into any details about this, but you can easily see it in pop culture trends.

Western women consider men to be foolish children incapable of achieving anything without female guidance. This leads them to look down on men, degrade them, and treat them like incompetents.

These two attitudes lead Western women to use psychologically damaging tactics to achieve their goals. This includes witholding affection or love (sex being a separate issue), verbal and emotional abuse, and occasionally even physical abuse. Men, in turn, are conditioned by women to see this as normal behavior and not kick the woman to the curb the way they should.

A real gyndroid (which this isn't) will allow us to kick women to the curb with the exception of procreation. That's an extremely good thing because it will require women to alter their behavior to at least the minimum standards of an unfeeling, uncaring robot. Failure to do so will mean that they'll end up alone and childless -- and there appears to be little that terrifies a woman more than that.

Bottom line: I've always treated women respectfully as human beings. The overwhelming majority of men treat women this way. However, the overwhelming majoring of Western women do not treat men this way.

I'm utterly thrilled that I'm going to live to see this change. It's too late for the men of my generation or the one that followed to have a loving, supportive relationship with a woman. The men of my grandchildren's age, however, will inherit a kinder, gentler woman.

I think it's actually a lot simpler than that:

If a real gyndroid (which this isn't -- the folks at AndyDroid are making a far more sophisticated device) ever became popular with men, the free ride is over for women.

There appears to be little that terrifies a woman more than the thought of living alone her whole life. I don't understand it, but I've certainly observed the behavior often enough.

If a real gyndroid hits the market, men will discover that they can, in fact, have a significantly less expensive artificial female around that provides the same or better emotional support than a human woman.

This means that a lot of women are going to be alone. Forever.

This frankly scares the shit out of them. They react with hostility toward anything that might upset the current status quo (i.e. being abusive toward a man while simultaneously getting him to buy expensive trinkets for her).

I hope the real gyndroid comes soon. Its widespread adoption is the only thing that will convince Western women to change their behavior.