Sadly, my first thought when seeing these pictures was also "that is NOT a cleaver". It's really a sad day when my twin interests of geekery and knifery combine to make me anal-retentive.

I mean... if you're going to "score a line", for the want of a better phrase, a cleaver is good, but there are much better tools in the toolbox and ultimately any knife will do as this post proves.

Actually, that's not true - I have a Broadsword that wouldn't be any good for this, but it's not really an edged weapon ;o)

Most of the time I *do* bother.

Recently, I am working with a ticketing system and am writing a script that outputs GUI notifications via the FreeDesktop notification daemon. Unobtrusive and beautiful notifications of ticket status changes actually speed up my workflow as I increase my situational awareness about tickets that are being worked by others.

I could spend all my time in a terminal window (my first project was actually a cli for our ticketing system), but why bother when I have 2 x 1280 x 1024 and more than 16 colours to play with.

I use Python, because I can. ;o)

No, she doesn't. She's not in this league.

I understand what you are saying and I feel passionate about digital rights, but the choice of subject and telling of that ProPublica article are far far more important to Humanity than copyright law will ever be. Please feel free to ask Pamela if she agrees with that, but I think she might.

I'm a dispassionate geek. I understand logical and pragmatic choices. That's what I trained to do and to be honest, I'm extremely good at it.

This story still moved me.

I don't think I would be able to make the life and death choices outlined in the Article. I honestly hope to the Great Flying Spaghetti Monster that I will *never* have to make such choices. My significant other is a Dr - I don't know how she makes choices that are even slightly related to this, but thankfully I will never have to make them.

I understand that PJ has done fantastic work, but exactly how many people died for that? None? OK, lets move on then.

--
Sam

Ditto for the geodata.

I live in a reasonably affluent area of London, UK in a row of terraced houses (so the horizontal density is reasonably high). I currently see 9 APs, but have seen as many as 14.

If I compare that to where my parents live out in the country, there is no change in affluence compared to me, yet the housing density means the number of APs seen is pretty low in comparison.

--
Sam

... but still fail to notice that he is a she and hence the moniker of sadistic bitch would be more appropriate ;o)

(I should really post this as A/C just in case my other half reads Slashdot)

DISCLAIMER: We have about 10x more computers than you do and we buy "Business" series devices

We have a procurement deal with HP. We buy HP Servers, Desktops, Workstations, Laptop and Tablets. I have no idea what this is worth in monetary terms, but I would project our spending well into a $million each year.

For that business-business relationship, we get a couple of useful things:

1. Direct Ordering - our Business Systems generate orders direct with HP
2. Standard Configurations - and standard OS images pre-installed
3. Different Support Arrangements

(3) Seems to be your complaint, but my experience with HP is very different. One of our IT Support people will log a job in HP's "Support Case Manager - Professional Edition" web site, stating our organisations "ATS Customer Number" and we skip the rubbish troubleshooting questions and get parts in about 48hrs. I'm not sure which of those two ensures priority routing and it may be that neither is available to you, but it sure does work.

So I think my solution to your problem would be to find out what the cost, (to you) of establishing that kind of relationship with one or more of your Vendors is. It may be that it saves you time logging jobs, but the cost is prohibitive - only you and your colleagues can decide.

Fedora 8 EOL is 7th January, you should think about upgrading it to something newer...

Fedora 8 EOL Announcement

And FWIW, I've got a couple of hundred machines running varieties of Linux (but no Fedora 8) and I haven't seen any silly reboots. I think you might be making mountains out of a coincidental mole hill.