Asus (and a lot of other manufs) had trouble with bad caps all the way up until ~2007 give or take. When they go, it is a very loud pop (along with the smell of electricity arcing) that will make you jump if you are in the same room.

I've had quite a few fanless video cards with bad capacitors, along with a few motherboards from the mid-2000s.

EVE seems to be doing OK, and while there's war to participate in if you want to, there are plenty of people making money from mining, research, logistics, and so on.

All activities in EVE (other then agent-driven mission running) are PvP. Selling on the market? You're PvPing against the other sellers who want to undercut you and sell their product faster. Mining? You're competing to harvest before someone else comes and harvests the resource.

One unit per tile (1UT) sucks on the Civ5 maps because the hexes are way too large for the scale. The only way 1 unit/tile would have worked well would have been to subdivide the hexes into 7 smaller hexes while keeping the cities the same size (taking up multiple hexes).

The other major issue with the series is that instead of simply improving upon the Civ4 series (by adding hexes and fixing the stack of death issues and doing work on the AI), they brought in a brand new designer who threw out all the lessons of the past in order to put his mark on the product.

The result was a poor product with numerous bugs and many balance issues and a definite downgrade from Civ4's quality.

Any suggestions - ideally for models that let you lower the alert volume or disable the audible alert entirely? And have USB port protocols that work with Linux?

Give it a SSD and 8GB of RAM and useful life might approach a decade. It might add $100 to the cost, but will definitely make it into something that will be useful for more then 2-3 years.

Java is going to be the COBOL of modern languages - it will be around 10-30 years from now or more.

And if you learn to use AspectJ and a good code generation tool like Spring Roo, a lot of the pain points about Java go away. Sprinkle in a good framework along with things like Maven and JUnit testing. At this point it's a very mature language with a fully fleshed out ecosystem.

Or can we ignore IE/XP and Android 2 (whose TLS stacks don't support multiple certificates on port 443 of an IP address) by now?

Well, WinXP is out of support and Android 2 is ancient at this point - both have less then 15% market share and are dropping reasonably quickly. So overall, you might only impact 1 in 10 visitors for a project that launches in a few months.

In another year, that will probably be 1 in 25. In terms of development dollars spent vs projected income, trying to support that under 10% market share which will vanish within 2-3 years is probably not worth it.

#3 should be "only allow public key based authentication"

#4 would then be "enable two factor"

(Not using passwords for SSH logins can be done out of the box with a simple config file change. Enabling two-factor is a good bit more complex.)

Moving services like ssh to a higher, non-default port is not done for "security". It is primarily to reduce the noise written to logs.

A reduction of 2-4 orders of magnitude. Which brings benefits to the security side because you have far less false positive reports to wade through. So it's not primarily done for security, but every little bit helps.

I still can't follow his logic; but, it doesn't bode well for (what I assume is) the common Russian understanding of Science.

Replace "Russian" with "80% of humanity" and you'd be closer to the mark. The average person has barely enough critical thinking skills to get by in life. They'll believe anything that makes the world into a simpler place so that they can have the delusion of understanding it all.

Mechanical keyboards only require more force to use if you are using them wrong. As you depress the mechanical switch, there is a tactile click as the switch engages but before the key bottoms out. A proper touch typist will begin to let up on the pressing down motion as soon as that click is felt. There's no need to mash the keys all the way to the bottom.

The other reason that mechanical keyboards can feel tiresome is that people do not position their wrists properly (keep them off the desk!), or fail to tilt the keyboard.

If your mail system doesn't strip out executable content from attachments (especially the low-hanging fruit like EXE, DLL, SCR, etc.) -- then your IT folks need to be beaten with a clue bat.

Heck, that rule should have been in place almost two decades ago at this point once the various VBS / SCR trojans first started hitting mail user's inboxes.

Modern versions of Linux - you don't need "noatime" for ext4. The "defaults" uses "relatime" by default, which does a fake atime and doesn't break applications that are looking for atime.

I've taken vendors to task for making changes to their site that required that I allow dozens of sites. They had a simple choice - fix things, or I take my business elsewhere.

If you don't complain - then they will keep doing what they are doing.

You're young. Early PCs cost 4-5k. Individual hard drives were in the $1000 range back in the 80s.

For someone who absolutely needs 10TB of zero-wait storage in a 2.5" form factor, 4-5k is not a big deal. Because pretty soon it will be $2000, then $1000, then $500.

Inexpensive enterprise SSD is having a big impact on how you spec out servers now. Do you build something with a bunch of 15k RPM drives in a RAID 0+1 array, short-stroked and end up with about 1TB of useful space? Or do you simply put 2x1TB in a RAID-1 array in a much smaller unit?

I paid about $650 per drive last week for 1TB enterprise quality SSDs. I expect them to be below $400 by this time next year. By 2016, I suspect you will not be able to buy a 15k RPM SAS drive as the enterprise SSDs are crushing them from above on price/performance.