I'm in OKC. I had offers for some other areas for more money, but the what I make here compared to cost of living is pretty damn good. My co-workers are ALL proficient, its a pretty good gig.

This is why the growing approach is the combination of the two. RTP in North Carolina, Austin, New Orleans, Oklahoma City... All places people are willing to live, with stuff to do, much cheaper in terms of real estate / utilities / taxes, and a talent pool available. For a start up Cali or NYC make sense, but for an already established company? For example if Cisco will pay you the same amount of cash to work in RTP, Herndon, or San Jose why would you not go to RTP?

I'm a tech guy in Oklahoma... And well, they are moving here (and recently moved here because of this). Google just built its largest data center in the US, Farmers / 21st Century built their largest data center here, Cox, Dell, AT&T moved HQ here... Not a bad place for a network engineer / developer / sysadmin type.

Make no mistake, this had nothing to do conscience and EVERYTHING to do with getting killed on pre-orders. That they came up with this in the first place proves they have nothing in the way of conscience about what the consumer wants.

I am a reformed PC gamer that plays console games exclusively now. I play predominantly online, and the reason behind the departure were three fold. 1.) Being able to play with multiple people in the living room. Yea, I did LAN parties back in the day, but that really is inconvenient. 2.) Cheating - I'm very competitive and I know it still happens on consoles (took awhile for the PS3), but there are far less people with modded games on consoles then PC. I need Valve and Steam and Pipe or whoever have helped rectify that to an extent, but its still far more common on PC 3.) And last, and probably the biggest... Everyone's console is the same. If I'm getting smoked at an FPS, its because the foul mouthed 12 year old on the other end is better then me.. Not because I didn't shell out $600-1000 on a video card and his mommy and daddy did. Kind of like Tom Curise in Days of Thunder "stock cars are built to run equal. I won't be beaten by a car, only by a driver". Or the game that comes out 3 years from now will work on my console without needed X Y or Z. So for the 50 people in this thread that keep saying just do PC gaming... That's why not.

While I use Google docs / Libre Office for personal stuff all the time and can't justify the cost of MS Office for personal use, you are going to require expensive third party software and more complex management to meet PCI / FIPS / SOX / etc... for the corporate world to migrate to Google Docs environment. Sure its let another chink in Microsoft's armor, but I wouldn't be holding off for the going out of business sale from this.

I bought a 360 for a deployment to Iraq where we played in some of the rare moments of downtime we actually got. I got a RROD a month before the end of the deployment, but I didn't care. The couple hundred for console was well worth it in a place where entertainment was nonexistent. I got another 360 for a deployment to Afghanistan, this one made it the whole year, but I sold it to another marine before I returned to the states. I have another 360 at my house. I have spent a significant amount of time in undeveloped counties or field environments over the last decade. I can not be alone in this situation, and I can guarantee I won't be buying 3 720's.

I work in a data center in New Orleans, and so I am fairly familiar with this topic. Of course they're vulnerable. If you live in a region like this you better have a well thought coop/dr plan. We have a hot Site an actually migrate production services there several times before hurricane season and testing services there is part of our development/test process before things go into production. Outside of that, our building was designed to withstand a category 5 storm but the biggest problem is power. We are good for 72 hours on fuel for our generator, but if a Katrina size storm hit again refueling could become problematic. Also, there are personnel issue (evacuation orders, etc). If im at a small data center (relative to amazon/fb/etc) I would have to guess they are already all over this.

I would look to pattern some of the many programs out there already. * Cover the highlights from A+ - Going over the highlights of hardware and actual function is a good place to start. Explain the basics, and potentially let them build a computer From the roll into the OSI / TCP-IP models - After learning how a computer works physically, rolling into the logical is well... logical. * Cisco ICND1 - This covers basic routing and switching, IP addressing, DNS, protocols, packets, frames, and a host of other stuff. * BASIC programming - I took this class in 10th grade 20 years ago, and probably took more away from it that I use now than any other class from high school. This provided the foundation to lead to analytical problem solving and understanding computer logic. I haven't written a program in BASIC since then, and it is still one of the best classes I've taken. I would also agree with one of the previous posters, I don't see the value of a hard text on this, it would definately be easier to keep current, as well as being more relevant if it was available online.

packetnews.com... My favorite irc search engine. Not quite as user friendly as bit torrent, but gets the job done, and has irc has been relatively unchecked with all the latest in copyright infrigement. Sad, still relying on the same program I used a decade ago.

For those of us who live in the desert (outside of Palm Springs). When its 120 in the summer, the already enjoyable experience of sitting at stop light can be coupled with the AC kicking out smoldering hot air. I'm sure those with small children won't mind...