But not all of them are connected at the same time.

2 phones
2 tablets
2 Chumbies (yes, still)
1 desktop PC
3 ThinkPads, one in daily use, one being prepped to ship off to my father, one currently only occasional use. I'll get another back from my dad after he switches over to the new one - he's using a loaner from me right now.

Also connected are a second desktop PC, a Linux desktop/backup server, and a printer/multifunction.

Christ, no wonder the local power utility tells me my electricity usage is 25% higher than the average for the neighborhood.

Kolab is a "groupware" server bundle, including an IMAP based mail system, calendaring, etc. The UI is Roundcube, a browser-based mail client (PHP on backend, lots of AJAX in the browser). Some of what you're seeing here is enhancements and extensions to Roundcube to bring it closer to the capabilities of a "fat" mail/groupware client.

If you need in-house email/groupware on a budget, it's not a bad choice - it's actively developed and hasn't had some of the drama and ownership shuffles of similar products such as Zimbra and Scalix. My (possibly incorrect) understanding is that Kolab is an open source project/product with a supported enterprise version available rather than an enterprise product with a "community" open source version available.

If writing (or getting people to write) user documentation is hard, perhaps you can put together good video tutorials on how to use many/most/all of the features in each module. You can even get developers to actually do the video demonstrations, because it gives them a chance to show off their cool new accomplishments. You can probably get people to do replacement narration as well, both for developers who don't do a good job narrating (language issues, accents, mush-mouth mumblers, etc.) and for alternative languages.

Put those videos up on Youtube or Vimeo, perhaps even annotate them with links to the official docs (such as they may be), with notes about features not demonstrated in that video, or with links to related training videos.

Then you can point to those videos not just for training materials, but as marketing/demo items.

Good god, is the delta-T why my coffee keeps getting cold?!? I thought it was ice gremlins peeing in it!

I have no particular knowledge of or attachment to any particular energy storage method. Heck, if you want to use Scotsmen and inflatable sheep and can make it work, go for it. I'm very sorry I didn't mention flywheels as well, though I have to admit they always make me think of an article I read once on "spin testing to destruction" and the subsequent launching of a spin test chamber lid through multiple floors of a building and out to a parking lot. As a result of that, I'd like to add in materials fatigue as a factor you should be keeping in mind for your infinite charge cycles. I'd also be curious about the energy storage density per cubic meter of the containment vessel.

I couldn't begin to give you numbers for construction of any of these, though I imagine that air- or vacuum-insulated containment vessels for molten materials probably wouldn't be that different in cost from containment vessels for very heavy flywheels spinning at thousands of RPMs in vacuum. The details and costs of the storage medium in either case would likely be dwarfed by all of the other costs associated with building an energy generation or storage facility of any sort.

Is thermal storage inefficient? Absolutely! Are there ways to reduce that inefficiency? Absolutely! Are there possible synergies (e.g. can you combine thermal with building-size molten salt batteries)? Maybe!

If I had all the answers to what was the best energy storage option, would I be dinking around on Slashdot on Sunday afternoon?

Straight conversion efficiency isn't the only factor that matters by a long shot, and might not even be the most important factor. Maximum charge cycles / lifespan strikes me as important. Cost of materials. Safety. Regulatory complications. A 10% loss in efficiency is probably worth it to go from 3,000 charge cycles to 10000.

There's a lot of research going on, but I'm not sure what's current. Some of the things I've seen mentioned include compressed air (pumped underground - old oil or natural gas wells I think), molten-salt batteries of various types, simple molten salt (similar to what's used for solar thermal) and later steam generation, pumped water (gravity storage), etc. Any of these could be appropriate depending on location, geography, etc.

PV (photovoltaic) won't benefit much from scale, but some of the solar thermal options that use mirrors for heat that's then used for steam generation certainly do.

Well, my customers have traditionally used servers until they're mostly beyond being repurposed, and the same with desktop PCs. The only ones with anything in datacenters are ones using hosted solutions, and we and they don't have any access to the vendor's setups. That said, for retired SATA drives they'll likely get scrubbed and shelved as possible future spares - an old enterprise 250GB SATA drive will work just fine for reimaging a local PC.

For desktop machines, we don't image or wipe them before replacement, and we let them sit in a storeroom for a couple weeks just in case we need to retrieve something, but after that we're not hooking them back up just to wipe, we just yank the drive and send the machine out for recycling. This year they've tended to be old Pentium 4 boxes that were running XP acting as remote desktop terminals. It's very unlikely that there's anybody's medical data on any of the drives, but it's not a chance that we want to take and physical destruction of the drive is the quickest and therefore cheapest way to do it that I'll trust.

One special situation here is that I'm part of a small enough group that we don't really have low-paid PFYs or interns to do this - if I had someone available being paid $10-15/hour for basic technical tasks it might change things, but right now any time spent wiping drives on obsolete PCs for donation could be much better spent on billable tasks.

It's not worth my time to hook up old PCs or removed drives so I can wipe someone's 40/80/120/160 GB IDE drives for reuse. A nail punch in a few places makes it not feasible for someone to try to recover potential legally protected from possible temp files saved on an old desktop system. My concern is generally that I'm not sending used drives from medical offices out to end up "recycled" to Africa where someone might actually try to recover data from them.

I was never a user of justin.tv (and don't use Twitch either), but the impression I've gotten was that this has been coming for a long time - basically anything with more than 10 views was archived off elsewhere, and they killed a bunch of background stuff back in June I think.

Shouldn't this be titled "Justin.tv completes its scheduled shutdown on schedule"?

Some of the offices in the building I work in have "high-tech sensors" that tell them when the door opens inward by ringing a little bell. They're dangling pieces of metal that hit a momentary switch tied to a doorbell ringer. Are those the "high-tech" devices described in such detail in the article?

Given the cost (as an annual subscription no less!) and the fact that I found <b>nothing</b> about compatibility with 2008R2, 2012R2 or Remote Desktop Services, I'm probably better off spending half the money one time, to get another 2012R2 Standard license good for 2 VMs, then using the RemoteApp functionality in 2008R2 and 2012R2.

Agreed that Citrix doesn't guarantee anything about security, but they've been the forefront of sharing only specific applications on Windows for some time. If FroggyMed requires that users be on IE8 with Flash 10.2 and Java 1.4.2 I can put that in place and lock things down so that terminal server cannot access anything not on the specific provider's ip blocks.

A lot of hospitals have started doing that for their physician portals - they don't have to worry about client VPNs, which version of Java is installed on PCs, those weird Mac-using doctors who want to review charts from the couch every evening, etc. Their portal works on every platform for which there's a current Citrix client.

The most recent one I'm dealing with is an IE-specific browser-based EMR (electronic medical records) package that apparently has some issues with newer Flash versions, and by "newer" I mean "released within the past 3 years." They want us to roll back to some version of Flash 10.x (the product mostly works with newer, but has some very annoying delays).

My basic take on this is to go to the practice manager and say "According to the EMR vendor, their requirements are that we run an incredibly insecure configuration. I can do that, but my recommendation is that if we do so, no computer should be able to use both the EMR and other parts of the Internet." It makes me wish we were a Citrix shop; I'd set up a terminal server/app server running that insecure configuration, then just share direct app access via desktop icons for the end users.

Hasn't Google been moving more things under the umbrella of their much more restrictively licensed Google Play Services? Basically building much of the face of Android on things no longer/never part of AOSP?