Planetside lost some of it's original vision after heavily incorporating changes from forum complaints/suggestions. This had the net effect of removing strategic or skill based methods of achieving goals. Interestingly enough, with quick enough hands and some skill a BFR could be brought down from a hot drop mosquito. That of course was nerfed beyond recognition in the name of only equally classed entities should be able to really interact/combat with each other. No sir, your battle monger 5000 can't shoot the peons because the weapons weren't designed for that!

There are a good deal more examples of what drove away their community, but we don't really need to go into that. Sadly, PS2 is going to re-envision all the poor ideas they contrived throughout the first PS. It will be interesting to see if a vanity approach to sales will function with this game. In most cases, the combat isn't necessarily as face to face as other games which have found that route to be viable.

We tend to be fairly forgiving here so I'll let you off with a warning this time. Just be more cautious in the future and mistakes like this won't happen again.

*Hops back into the RTFM Patrol Car and speeds off down the information super highway.

If you've cut yourself at all in the course of these tests, you may have noticed that your blood is pure hydrogen- that's normal. We've been shooting you with an invisible micromotor that's supposed to turn blood into hydrogen, so all that means is it's working.

This makes reporting so much simpler because actual interviews and reporting won't be necessary. Interviews can be completely written on the spot! It will be a huge time saver and a win for the readers.

Distilled satire on an issue or simple gripe with a plain service make excellent candidates for cartoons. Penny-arcade is a wonderful example of satire in an industry I care about. The New Yorker has been doing much the same with political satire for years. However, both of these outlets do not represent their entire collection of view points with just simple quips.

As a format for a news journal I think it's fairly laughable, but may likely draw in some viewers. There is a niche for everyone!

My stock broker is advising me to invest heavily in canned foods and shotguns.

A parallel world would be one in which RMS advises on how to monetize on those gains.

RMS writes, "You did make a mistake when you chose Kazaa as the method of sharing. Instead, you should have created a web site using the cloud to sale your collection."

The next 10 or so lines would be quoting Ferengi rules of acquisition. Probably some good points like exploiting family and friends for more music.

I used to lock myself out of my car quite often. The good news was my friends father was a lock smith. (We'll consider this a trade out as I tended to do a lot of technical support for him.)

Probably around the third time he simply gave me the tool and explained the process. (I think that particular moment I was at his house).

Then I managed to lock myself out fairly far away, but in a sealed parking area. It just so happened the attendant had lock picks for loan to those who pulled such a stunt as myself. He was fairly surprised I picked the proper tool I needed and popped my lock in seconds.

Indeed, router configurations should be stored in git or similar rcs.

What hasn't really been mentioned is the use of cdp. If your switches and routers (both Cisco and some non-cisco) support this information it can be very useful to inventory connections. Checkin scripts can update an endpoint with the port information. Then simply tracking the physical location of resources by either asset id and mac address ties the network topology to a physical locality.

Labeling wall jacks to punch down block ports is handy for tracking cabling issues, but not mandatory for identifying port to port connectivity.

However, depending on the skill level involved it might not be trivial and the deployment itself could be time consuming. However, the whole package can be put together in a few days. I worked at one place where someone had the right idea and the implementation was mostly there. (albeit broken) It was fairly easy to fix it up and push out the changes via their deployment process. Physically performing inventory on the network did take some time, but we sent teams to each location for asset identification. If there had not been a desire to actually store rack unit ids we would have never had to perform physical scanning. (Completely worthless for our needs, but mother corporate wanted it down to the RU.)

Been running a Buffalo model with everything mentioned and OpenWRT. They have their stock firmware and you can always grab an OpenWRT binary or compile a tree.

Backlash?

They have been doing this with the dct dvr's they lease to subscribers for quite a while. The motorola dct 34xx and 64xx are quite capable of 30 second skip and it was an awesome feature that just wasn't. However, it wasn't exactly clever since they simply unmapped the button from the remote.

Since the remote itself is just a universal rebadge it's quite easy to restore the functionality.

The real sham was disabling the firewall port on their units. My MythTV unit was perfectly happy to ingest and control my the cable dvr once upon a time, but some others were not quite so lucky. I suppose you could say that 30 second skip functionality was really what made really want to do a lot more.

I use it to bury dead hookers!

I'm getting.

I.am.batman

Because Gilligan was the smoke monster... it wasn't a mistake... there were never any mistakes.

That is more of an issue of accounting.

At a shop I used to work out we broke out the cost per spindle and that purchase had to be paid by the org that need the resources. Absolutely everyone and their mother wanted completely horrendous amounts of resources for every 2 bit project. However, since we were in the business of actually ensuring there was a return on the investment we had to enforce resource allocation.

This translated to a few interesting things. Projects had to be approved and had to be assigned a budget. Resources were fairly well managed and projected utilization was also fed into the overall purchase. We could not actually purchase new hardware without funds and you can be damn sure we weren't dipping into our org funds to pay for someone elses project. If the PHB had enough power to say "do it" he also had the power to allocated resources.

Probably the only thing that made any of this actually work were that budgets were real. ie, this is the cash you get to fund your project... don't waste it all on licensing or else you get no hardware. (I also said a few things) Head count was also tied to this resource allocation. We had man hours to apply to given amount of staff and the only way to get more help was to ensure budgets were enforced. We were pretty good about ensuring budgets were enforced from even the lowliest tech because over expense could very well end that lowly guy on the food chain. (Being consciously aware of these makes helps to turn your most ineffective resource into the most effective!)

Now, I had one moronic group under-spec and over spend their budget. I had to knock on some doors, but I effectively managed to get them donated hardware from groups who way over-killed on budget planning. They were grateful and I brought costs down by not putting more junk on the dc floor. However, I sometimes think I should have let survival of the fittest win out there.

I would suspect C3 sleep states are supported on a majority of systems by now. Perhaps I was just lucky when I picked up the hackintosh board a few years ago. Now, I simply use a reasonably long idle timer and the system goes to sleep/power off. It takes a few seconds to come back out of that state and wholly beats a cold start.

I guestimate my home system gets about 3-4 hours of usage each day during the weekday. In addition, there are plenty of other device around the house which support other core services.

I don't know if it's so much about being green as it is the sensibility to turn a light switch off if it's not in use.