Let me guess, you're a holocaust and climate change denialist too. Same hyper-selective use of facts to "prove" your point, while pretending the huge number of facts you excluded don't completely destroy your argument.

Point of fact, a nuclear war in Sagans era wouldn't have been about cooking off 500 devices over two decades or so, it would have been about slinging 50,000 devices over a day or two.

It's really maddening, because it's not possible to know if you're trolling or you really believe your steaming pile of shit.

Of course, if you want a gigabit switch that does layer-3, you're talking about $$$$, even on eBay.

I've had excellent luck with Dell L3 Gig switches off eBay. You can usually pick up an older 6000-series for around ~$300 and much less if your patient.

Also, if you can do fiber gig, the Cisco 3550-12G and 4912G can be had for much less than $100.

I'm using used Cisco, Nortel and Dell gear purchased off eBay at home extensively. YMMV.

I've picked up Cisco 7200 and 3600 routers for less than $250 with a couple of 100baseT interfaces that can route and basic firewall at wire speed. Even a 4700 with 2 100baseT interfaces can keep up (barely). Just make sure that you get the software image you need, as you have to pay to upgrade (or steal it).

I'm pretty 'meh' on Cisco switches. They command a premium, and really aren't superior. I'd never pick up a Cisco chassis switch for the house; too loud and too much power draw. The Cisco gigabit switches generally are wildly overpriced. Almost anybodies gig copper managed switch can handle the home load. That said, if you have access to fiber NICs (dirt cheap), GBICs and fiber cables, things like a C3550-12G, C4812G and C3508G are going for dirt and are solid switches.

Dell switches are a tremendous value, especially considering the feature set (VLANs, QoS, LAG/LACP, etc). They upgrade the lines quickly (creating turnover on the secondary market), update even old ones and the software updates are free.

Nortel BayStack switches go for basically pin money because Nortel is no more and enterprise users are dumping them as fast as they can. They're every bit as good as the equivalent Cisco. Avoid the Nortel firewall/VPN gear; you really need to be able to get software updates on those, and you won't.

There's a vast amount of enterprise WLAN gear being dumped for pennies because most everyone is upgrading to 802.11n. I see keeping my 11a gear for years, as 54/108Mb is enough for almost everything an end-point needs short of 1080p streaming and 5GHz keeps you out of baby monitor and cordless phone hell. Just don't pick up anything that needs a controller to be useful.

P.S. - What everyone else said...get a UPS. Seriously.

P.P.S - Look at things like Vyatta and Linux/BSD based alternatives. Other than switches, I've pretty much ditched my enterprise options for these. I'm running them on retired, last generation, enterprise Dell servers. Loud, but rock solid.

True. The vast majority of postmortems my team has done show the compromised server was "low hanging fruit", usually because of poor patching. I wait patiently for the day that IT Ops people learn that the bullshit "why patch the box, it's stable?" attitude is going to screw them in the end. I may not live that long, however.

It has been done before.

AT&T donated many, many millions of dollars of infrastructure to Georgia Tech in the 80s under that theory. Since we don't seem to be using 3B2 decendants, DMD & BLIT terminals, running StarLAN or Datakit networks, and even the "Unix" we use is more often than not Linux, I don't think they'd do that again.

Let me Google that for you: $2m.

Because AT&T has been providing "generously" to Georgia Tech for decades? Because West coast money tends to go to West coast schools like Stanford and Berkeley? This isn't a surprise around here.

[Sad anti-SV screed deleted]

Back in the day, when a Silicon Valley entrepreneur didn't like how the world worked or his place in it, did he take time out of numbly browsing the web to piteously vent his spleen on some meta-news site?

Hell no. They start their own company. BTW...they still do that.

Look at the big brain on characterZer0. I couldn't mod up...sorry

Generally unaccountable agencies, able to predict with unknown precision that an individual might, at some point in the future, commit another crime? How could this possibly not end well?

AOL was running mostly IRIX and HP/UX in that era. No, I didn't work there.

Let me guess...control processors for Erricson or Lucent GPRS or CDMA cell switches? Do I know you?

Meh...time was, planes weren't going to need guns, either. I mean, after all, planes were too fast and maneuverable to be able to aim a cannon, and a missle will be able to do everything a gun could do and more, so why put the weight and expense in? Turned out, they were wrong.

> Nobody uses anything anymore that won't work a 486 build and thus requires 386, aside from someone with a 20-year old PC.

This is factually untrue. The chip was in production until 2007 and shows up in all sorts of odd/interesting things. There's an entire ecosystem of STD-BUS and Multibus 386 systems that are still supported and could run Linux, not to mention things like the Nokia 9000.

With impartial sources and impeccable anecdotes like that, how can we possibly argue.

I did read the article, thanks. He's claiming that there's a solution to that problem that isn't being pursued. That's false. Visibility is a red herring, which you nicely went after.