Or, even worse, a child! Those things last longer, cost more and cause more damage than those other things.

There are other options available. My company provides outsourced Linux/Windows IT support to small businesses. We have service agreements that say we'll respond to outages within a set time frame, and that with a few exceptions, all service is covered under the contract and not billed hourly, usually for the cost of hiring one relatively inexpensive IT guy. If you're even more worried about cost, we even do straight hourly billing, with no monthly fees or anything like that. I know several of our competitors do the same.

Apologies, I missed it. It must not have been expanded or something. *shrugs*

You've got an almost optimal setup. Most people have 2 GB RAM or (most likely) less. I'm a nerd with gobs of spending money after I pay my bills, and I still only have two gigs of RAM.

Swap is a failure mode, and although slow, a very graceful one. It's what happens when you have less RAM than your workload requires. Right now, a typical workload in Vista is enough to trigger that failure mode in a typical store-bought system.

You have a system that's specifically designed to be very far from that failure mode, while most people have systems that are only as far from it as they can afford. With Vista, the RAM available:RAM required ratio is much closer than it's been in a long time, so the cost of avoiding swap is higher than it used to be, and for the people that understand that issue, it's a problem. (Everyone else just says "My system's slower with Vista!")

Swap's going to happen for a lot of people, and it's arrogant to assume everyone can afford to avoid it to the level you can. Don't dismiss the fact that Windows' swapping methods are bad (or that Windows is bloated) just because you can afford to avoid them.

Almost everyone using Ubuntu 8.x is.

Sounds like somebody needs to patch in preemptable multitasking! :)

You can choose not to do business with them now, but what happens when they have guns, or they're large enough that even a few thousand protesters won't even slow them down?

Mmmm, i would kill for a bowl of Hitler...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Causes_of_the_disaster
Unfortunately, you can blame engineers here. While it most likely wasn't the immediate cause of the explosion, the way the reactor was built was highly unsafe. Check out the reactor's design flaws:

-The reactor had a dangerously large positive void coefficient. The void coefficient is a measurement of how the reactor responds to increased steam formation in the water coolant. Most other reactor designs produce less energy as they get hotter, because if the coolant contains steam bubbles, fewer neutrons are slowed down. Faster neutrons are less likely to split uranium atoms, so the reactor produces less power. Chernobyl's RBMK reactor, however, used solid graphite as a neutron moderator to slow down the neutrons, and neutron-absorbing light water to cool the core. Thus neutrons are slowed down even if steam bubbles form in the water. Furthermore, because steam absorbs neutrons much less readily than water, increasing an RBMK reactor's temperature means that more neutrons are able to split uranium atoms, increasing the reactor's power output. This makes the RBMK design very unstable at low power levels, and prone to suddenly increasing energy production to dangerous level if the temperature rises. This was counter-intuitive and unknown to the crew.

-A more significant flaw was in the design of the control rods that are inserted into the reactor to slow down the reaction. In the RBMK reactor design, the control rod end tips were made of graphite and the extenders (the end areas of the control rods above the end tips, measuring 1-metre (3 ft) in length) were hollow and filled with water, while the rest of the rod â" the truly functional part which absorbs the neutrons and thereby halts the reaction â" was made of boron carbide. With this design, when the rods are initially inserted into the reactor, the graphite ends displace some coolant. This greatly increases the rate of the fission reaction, since graphite is a more potent neutron moderator (a material that enables a nuclear reaction) and also absorbs far fewer neutrons than the boiling light water. Thus for the first few seconds of control rod activation, reactor power output is increased, rather than reduced as desired. This behavior is counter-intuitive and was not known to the reactor operators.

-The water channels run through the core vertically, meaning that the water's temperature increases as it moves up and thus creates a temperature gradient in the core. This effect is exacerbated if the top portion turns completely to steam, since the topmost part of the core is no longer being properly cooled and reactivity greatly increases. (By contrast, the CANDU reactor's water channels run through the core horizontally, with water flowing in opposite directions among adjacent channels. Hence, the core has a much more even temperature distribution.)

-To reduce costs, and because of its large size, the reactor had been constructed without any secure containment. This allowed the radioactive contaminants to freely escape into the atmosphere after the steam explosion burst the primary pressure vessel.

-The reactor also had been running for over one year, and was storing fission byproducts; these byproducts pushed the reactor towards disaster. As the reactor heated up, design flaws caused the reactor vessel to warp and break up, making further insertion of control rods impossible as the heat deformed them.

I'd mod you up if I hadn't started this thread.

(although it could not be called balanced)

Seriously. Screw Balance. Don't kowtow to some asshole who disagrees with you just because he says you're not reporting fairly. Know your biases, know them well, and know how to counteract them. As for the readers, know your biases and know or at least anticipate the author's biases.

"Balance" is for people who want to be heard, even when they know they're lying. It's for people with persecution complexes who have no business having them. "Balance" is reporting that Wall Street needs $700 billion, but auto workers are paid too much. "Balance" is promoting two sides as equal when they're not, or promoting two sides when an issue is more complex than that.

How many times have we IT people complained about unfair, ill-informed, hyped, or spun news articles about us? Why is this exact same tactic on the front page here? "Almost all the media coverage comes from the left and some of it is frankly conspiratorial." Marginalization and a thinly veiled ad-hominem attack? When did slashdot start culling from the mainstream?

"Balance" is bullshit, truth is paramount.

A couple years ago, Gizmodo had a contest to make music out of Hitachi dead hard drive sounds. :D http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/announcements/hard-drive-dying-dance-track-winner-151666.php

The point and the reality of it are two different things, unfortunately. At my last job, I was hired on as a desk monkey (not a help desk monkey, just a monkey with a copy of Excel) after I left the Marine Corps, since it was the only job I could get without any certifications or official education. I saw three guys get hired on as IT staff that didn't know jack shit, but they had piles of certs. Then again, at my current job, I totally gamed the system through a friend. He had a linux machine he had been using as a testbed/fileserver, and after a while, he was afraid to touch it because he didn't know enough about linux. I patched it up, showed him some nifty tricks, etc. Any time we hung out, I'd have some new idea or powertoy to play with. Eventually his company was looking to hire a linux consultant that could work well with the team. My friend vouched for my linux skills and how well I fit in, and I got the job on the first interview. :D