I use a 3550 at home too, specifically for its layer-3 capabilities. Of course, if you want a gigabit switch that does layer-3, you're talking about $$$$, even on eBay.

Other than that, Cisco gear all the way. It's overpriced, and for the most part, you're going to be limited to 100 megabit, even on eBay, for a reasonable price, but it's rock solid gear.

I run a 2D3 myself, and it's rock solid (actually running CentOS/iptables). A tad on the expensive side, particularly considering how relatively low-powered it is by modern standards, but it's x86 compatible with full serial console access.

And it really is solid--I keep all my networking gear at home on a UPS, and it's still far more solid than any standalone Linksys router was (and uses far less power than it's predecessor--a Celeron 366 MHz box that had ~1400 days of uptime before I killed it).

While I generally agree with your points, as a 28-year-old who still lives at home, despite a well-paying job, there are some reasons for all this.

First off, a fairly high percentage of kids going to college are just throwing their money away to begin with. How many kids are going to college now who have no business going? How many graduate without being able to think or analyze anything? They graduate with a diploma that means next to nothing, and yet, they're either in tons of debt, or mom and dad paid for it all and, in any case, there's little to be had from it. The value of a degree has gone down, and the price has skyrocketed. And, more so than ever, kids are told right from their freshman year of high school, that they need to go to college. This topic has been discussed endlessly here, and I don't want to rehash it more than is necessary to prove a point, but it's a big part of the problem that exists today with an entire generation.

Though I'm living at home, I'm more than able to cover my living expenses. I choose to do so, because as much as I want to move out, it would take quite a while to save up for a house between paying rent, utilities, and said student loans. I made some very foolish choices straight out of high school, and I'll be paying for my degree for a number of years, when it has proven entirely unnecessary in my line of work (IT systems engineering/administration). They're my own mistakes, and no one else's, but tons of people keep making these mistakes because of societal expectations and job "requirements" that are hardly requirements. And then they're surprised when they can't find a "real" job. The kids carry a good portion of the blame, but they can't carry all of it.

Want to be a doctor or lawyer? OK, go to college? Want to cure cancer? Go to college. Want to fix the horribly deficient infrastructure throughout the country? Go to college (but don't expect to find a job, since there's no funding for this). Want to party for 4 years and live at home for the rest of your life? Don't bother going to college, you can do that without a diploma. The distinction needs to be accepted by employers, but I doubt it ever will again.

For the record, since I'm sure the natural inference people will make is that I'm knocking the business majors, the humanities majors, etc., I'm not. Necessarily. I think they're well worth studying, and we're all well served by doing so, but going to college to do it just for the sake of having a degree is rather pointless. Also for the record, I graduated with a "BS" in business, and not once has it proven relevant on the job. Lastly, and again for the record, I am a bit bitter about it. :-)

It depends on what you're doing. I'm sitting here, using my desktop with two 24" monitors, a Core i5 3570K, 32 GB of RAM, a SSD, and a 7200 RPM platter, with a browser, e-mail, and a few VMs for work open, and the Kill-A-Watt tells me the whole shebang is using a whopping 84 watts.

More than a laptop? Sure. Substantially more than a laptop? Not really. Especially if you were to add the screens and peripherals in. And while I'm sure you can find laptops with 32 GB of RAM, I doubt you'll find them as cheaply as I built this setup ($1500, roughly).

You're right, but the difference really isn't that large. And when I'm at my desk, I'll take this setup over the 13" MBA that also lives there any day.

No, it wasn't, but there's no way Woz could have sold what he built. Certainly not with the success that Jobs did, anyway.

I'm not the world's biggest fan of Steve Jobs, and I respect Woz's talents far more than I do the other Steve's, but they would have been no Apple if it weren't for both Steves.

AC seems exactly right to me, based on what I remember of "Apple Confidential." In fact, if memory serves me right, Jobs was trying to get Sculley fired when Sculley was out of town, and Jean-Louis Gassee warned Sculley of the attempted coup.

So when Apple was looking to buy a company for the next generation Mac OS, Jobs had a very personal motive to get Apple to buy NeXT instead of Be (as Gassee was the president of Be, and in negotations to sell Be to Apple). That, and he got Apple to buy NeXT at a time when he was considering investing his own (and Larry Ellison's) money to take over Apple. Instead, he got paid to do it, and got the guy who executed the move fired.

Jobs was great at many, many things... but he wasn't exactly a nice guy, or--from everything I've read--the kind of guy you'd want running anything when he was forced out of Apple. I think even Jobs would admit it was probably good for him (and Apple) in the long run.

There are also the cases where upgrades intended to fix a problem actually make matters far worse. We had a lot of issues rolling out FCoE, and a firmware upgrade intended to fix some of our issues actually made matters far worse.

Of course, we were sane, and didn't blindly apply these updates to all our systems. We tested it out on one or two lab boxes first, and once we noticed the upgrade was problematic, we yelled-and-screamed at the vendor.

Point being, some firmware upgrades are bad, and some are good. Blindly applying all or blindly applying none at all are equally stupid system administrator philosophies. If you're not testing these sort of upgrades in a lab or testing environment prior to doing your production gear, you're doing it wrong.*

* - Yes, I know not everyone has the luxury of a test/lab environment. But you almost always have critical systems and non-critical, and it should be pretty obvious where you'd want to try upgrades first.

Excellent point, and a practice I've already seen at my current job (tracking service availability instead of server uptime--in fact, since I started, we've tracked nothing but service availability).

That said, this has led us down the path of constantly increasing availability requirements, for things as (relatively) insignificant as an internal company blog. We're currently doing work between two new data centers, and one of the goals is to provide near 100% availability of all systems. It becomes very easy to sell such an idea to the business at little incremental cost (compared to the cost of building out two DCs in the first place), but the actual work involved in making it happen can be tricky at times. Not to mention the real incremental benefit is questionable at best, at least for a lot of the applications in question (IMHO, and given that many systems aren't tied to money-making endeavors).

Sure, it's theoretically possible to have two DCs, and when you want to do patching, you flip to your secondary site, patch your primary, flip back, and patch the secondary. It's a practice I'd certainly expect to see in an environment like NASDAQ. The business likes it, and the technical minutiae are workable (most of the time), but it is a substantial amount of added complexity (and work... and time) for little added benefit, in a lot of cases.

In short, I agree completely with what you said, but it can have the side effect of increasing the "required" availability numbers to the point where it becomes little different than simply looking at uptime (depending upon the environment).

I agree completely. I started hosting my own e-mail server when I was in college (~6 years ago now), and I've been running it ever since. I did a lot of learning as I went along, and the setup has been about as stable as you can possibly expect it to be running over a home connection. Just in case though, I threw in a VM from Linode earlier this year (initially acting as my primary MX and forwarding to my home server, but now acting only as my backup MX), which brings the reliability up to a pretty good standard for personal e-mail. Plus, it gives you a public IP with reverse DNS, which can easily cost you another $10-15/month with cable or DSL, if they even offer it on a residential package (and it's a huge boon for a sending mail server, beyond simply using your ISP's mail server as a smarthost).

That Linode VM is only about $30/month, and it comes in handy for lots of other things. If it's a hobby, it's well within the realm of affordability. Can't recommend them enough for something like this (their competitors are probably good too, but I only have personal experience with Linode).

All in all, if I spend 2 hours a month maintaining the setup (generally upgrading ClamAV), that'd be a lot. I use CentOS+Sendmail (been running Sendmail since the get-go, don't have much motivation to swap it out) out of the box, with custom compiled (latest-and-greatest) versions of SpamAssassin and ClamAV.

There's a few things you can do for outbound mail. The cheapest/easiest solution would be to use your ISP's e-mail server as a smart host (i.e., DSmail.comcast.net in sendmail.cf). What I would do is get a "virtual private server" or similar (with a static IP), and set that up as your smart host/relay. It doesn't have to be incredibly powerful or anything--a bare bones configuration would be enough these days.

As a side benefit, you could also use the same system as your primary or secondary *inbound* mail server, by configuring it to simply relay mail to your primary mail server as long as it can connect to it. Otherwise, if your cable connection goes down for whatever reason (they aren't T1 lines, after all), your e-mail will be queued up on a system you control. Well worth the $20-30/month a VM from someone like Linode will cost you...

While you're absolutely right, you grew up in an area where they had to deal with this regularly enough that they *planned* for as much snow on the ground in advance. In CT, not so much, particularly in cities like New Haven, where their plan has always seemed to be move the snow off to the side, let it melt (within a few days), rinse, and repeat.There was no considering the possibility that it won't melt, that there'd be multiple feet of snow on the ground, and that there'd be no place to plow it to.

Are things far worse than they need to be? Absolutely. But with the way things are now, in some places, it seems like all we can do is wait for spring (and hope the floods aren't too bad, hah).

My MacBook Pro (the last generation of discrete models) is a very well-built machine, but in some ways, it's a step back from the PowerBook G4 I had prior to it (very little things, like the speakers audibly turning on and off after listening to something, the wi-fi introducing a bit of background noise while on, etc.). The unibody ones are obviously very solid too, but I really hate the new touchpad, and the bezel bothers me a bit too. Little things for sure, but it used to be all the little things that added up to make Macs that much better.

And not all Wintel machines are built like garbage. ThinkPads are still world-class, even if they aren't much to look at. I got a X60s on eBay a few weeks ago to carry around with me, and it's built even better than my Mac.

In all fairness, I doubt Bush Jr. was the first politician to enact a popular measure (i.e., tax cut) and then force the next guy to clean up after the mess he made. And, like some other folks have said, it almost certainly wasn't Bush's design either, it just ended up happening that way.

Either way, I'm sure that within a term or two, a Republican will be back in the White House, and the same type of conversation will be had in reference to the Republicans having to scramble to pay for Obamacare. (And just to be very clear, I'm not criticizing either political party, nor am I criticizing or supporting any policies mentioned so far. Just making an observation that both parties love nothing more than to enact policies the public supports when they can make the other party "pay" for it later...)

I certainly wasn't claiming that other smartphones on the market at the time the iPhone was introduced were on par with the iPhone, from a casual user's perspective. The iPhone was incredibly polished compared to what else was out there, and countless amounts of work went into it, but does that alone make it revolutionary? It was still mostly polish (along with a web browser that made it possible to view desktop web pages, while helping to hinder the mobile web movement, kind of, but that's another story).

It's not blindness, nor is it denial. It's bewilderment. I have a Mac, and I get it. I love all the little things that they polished long before Microsoft or the Linux community started even trying to pay attention to the same things (and they're still not quite to the point where Apple is). I also have an iPod Touch and a BlackBerry. And there, I just don't get it. I use my BlackBerry far more than the iPod (yes, even for web browsing), which mostly sits in my car, plugged into the stereo. The iPhone and iPad have helped changed things, but again, I just don't think the jumps they made are as big as so many have made them out to be.

Revolutionary technology in the past three or four years? I can't think of any. You're exactly right, my standards for revolutionary technology are high. I expect revolutionary technologies to change people's lives, the way they go about their daily business. I just don't see the iPhone/iPad as having done that. Cell phones did that long before the iPhone and iPad came along. Smartphones before the iPhone were an evolved combination of cell phones and PDAs. The iPhone was the next evolution of that. Revolutionary? As I said elsewhere, most would consider it so, I'm not denying that. I just disagree with the general notion is all. It's not right, it's not wrong, it's an opinion.

You're right, no revolution is completely sparkly and new. But at what point does something become revolutionary, as opposed to evolutionary? Ultimately, it's a subjective thing. And as I said elsewhere in this thread, I *own and use* many Apple products (two laptops, iPod Touch, iPod Shuffle, AirPort Express, etc). I'm not hating on Apple, necessarily, I'm just making a point that the iPhone and iPad were logical evolutions of long-existing products. Don't be so quick to assume that I must be the stereotypical Slashdotter simply because I don't agree with the notion that the iPhone and iPad have changed everything.