Yes, that makes perfect sense - because nothing good was ever accomplished in anything other than 1000 lines of easy-to-read C (an oxymoron if ever I've heard it)

Hey, you forgot to write your own web-based interface so that even a complete nufty can edit firewall rules nat port mappings etc ;-)

Because someone has already done the hard work for you.
Time to do what you want to do = 2-4 hours or more.
Time to dump an image to a CF card and boot it - 2 minutes.
Plus, if it's based on m0n0, it'll run out of the box on embedded systems like Alix and Soekris boxes, which are amazingly reliable embedded x86 systems with no moving parts. I've got Alix-based m0n0 firewalls out there that haven't been rebooted in years and they just keep going. It's also designed to run from flash media, so writes (for logs etc) are kept to a minimum.

JB Weld is an insulator - I've used it to successfully repair high voltage terminals on the coilpack in a VW VR6 engine.
http://www.jbweld.com/pages/fa...

I don't know if it is slightly magnetic though as it does have powered metal in it.

I'm not trying to troll, but am genuinely curious as to what you're doing if you've got several hundred servers running that are at enough of a risk of locking up hard enough that they need a physical power cycle to reset them?

If I understand what you're saying, each destination IP is behind a NAT, and so from the point of view of the laptop, there are, say, 16 IP addresses that are all NATted to the individual pumps, that all happen to have the same IP on the other side of the NAT.

The question for the submitter then, is seeing that every pump has the same IP, is this IP hard-coded into the software, or can you specify the IP that you push the firmware update to?

If the software is hard-coded to assume every pump it connects to has the same IP, then you're in trouble.

I don't know where you live, but here that's not the case. The last rental car I had was clean, 100% undamaged and had a full tank of fuel. They inspect rental cars quite thoroughly when you hand them back and you pay for any damage that wasn't noted when you picked up the vehicle, whether you caused it or not.
The last rental property I lived in was also clean and tidy. I had to pay a huge amount of money for bond and once again, unless the property was in a good state when I moved out, they would have been able to keep some or all of the bond to make it good. Public toilets, well I wouldn't exactly eat off the floor or anything like that, but they're bearable...

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

The Howard gun laws didn't do anything? How many mass shootings have there been in Australia since those laws were passed in 1996?

That's right. Zero.

I was going to type up a long and detailed rebuttal to your fantasy scenario outlined above, but Jim Jeffries said it better than I ever could.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

In Australia, we had the biggest massacre on earth, and the Australian government went: "That's it! NO MORE GUNS." And we all went, "Yeah, all right then, that seems fair enough, really."
Now in America, you had the Sandy Hook massacre, where little tiny children died. And your government went, "Maybe ... we'll get rid of the big guns?" And 50 percent of you went, "FUCK YOU, DON'T TAKE MY GUNS." ...
You have guns because you like guns! That's why you go to gun conventions; that's why you read gun magazines! None of you give a shit about home security. None of you go to home security conventions. None of you read Padlock Monthly. None of you have a Facebook picture of you behind a secure door. ...
By the way. Most people who are breaking into your house just want your fucking TV! You think that people are coming to murder your family? How many fucking enemies do you have?

From what I understand of it (which is very little) it's relatively easy to coax a crucible of pure, molten Si to grow into a single crystal - those long grey sausage-like boules are a single crystal of silicon, so are incredibly pure with a consistent crystalline structure. It's a lot harder to get gallium arsenide to do the same thing.

No, whilst rendering engines may not use GPUs, everything else that goes along with 3D modelling and rendering does - if you're designing a 3D workstation, you want a serious graphics card or three.
If you're designing a render node however, then CPU and RAM are your main requirements.

Pros use fast workstations for modelling and rough/low-res rendering. Even those machines have lots of cores and RAM and fast storage.

All the heavy-lifting however then gets handed off to a render farm - which is generally a stack of computers, also with lots of cores and ram and fast storage, and they do all the number crunching.

They can be connected in a more traditional cluster style configuration, or they can be largely independent nodes all rendering individual frames.

Rendering like this is embarrassingly parallel - you get close to a linear increase in speed with more cores thrown at the problem - i.e. 256 cores will render a job roughly twice as fast as 128 cores, all other things being equal.

For anyone hoping to jump straight in with the same tools that the pros use, note that this RenderMan is just the rendering engine, not a GUI for modelling.
You'll still need something like Maya or Katana to do the modelling in and then you use RenderMan for the final renders of your scene.

You want as many cores as you can get and as much RAM as you can fit in the system. That, and a very fast graphics card.
Whilst this makes for a very expensive machine, it can pale in comparison to the licensing costs of some commercial software!