Wow, you experience mirrors my own to large degree. Right down to the slackware on floppy. I remember the 24 hour kernel compiles, that would take 36 for me because my GF at the time would trip a breaker with her hair drier, with frightening consitency.

These days I work in IT and have a few servers at home running Debian, but never really seriously thought about running Linux on my desktop. I ran Windows 2000 until there were no more patches, then grudgingly switched to XP.

Christmas 2008 found me back in Canada visiting my family. A very strong Yen combined with a few Walmart Specials meant that I could grab a laptop, for what felt to me like 300 Bucks. It
even came with Vista Home version at that price. It was an AMD64 machine with 3GB of Ram and an ATI GPU. I had bought my wife a Magazine for the flight (she's a computer geek too) that had an Ubuntu install disk with it and figured let's go full 64bit and see how Ubuntu shapes up.

I was incredibly impressed with the install and have been using the computer as my primary workstation ever since. It is meeting my needs 100%. Sure there have been issues, but there are always issues even with Windows.

Anyhow, you may have no incentive to switch now, but at some point you will have to switch to something. As another old fart in here I'd recommend giving Linux a try. Especially if it's free as in beer.

That's what I have been doing wrong!

Name 1 virus that can hack a Windows PC, from there hack a Citrix console, from there Hack a Redhat web server, from there hack an AIX application server, and from there hack a DB2 or Oracle database on a mainframe...

Sorry, but, err, can you include version numbers please...For my ...research project.

Thanks ;)

Are the Lawyers the only ones in here that don't ANAL?

Nice! The phone companies have promised 10 Gig to the home by 2010, but I don't know if they will make it.

Are you already on Fiber, or are you on ADSL or cable?

Living In Japan and having 100MB Fiber for over 7 years, I can say a couple things about this matter.

1) I am pretty sure fiber is more popular than cable. It definitely had a first mover advantage over cable. ADSL was held back because getting phone lines here used to be so damn expensive (you had to basically buy the line from the phone company and it was around $800). Plus the fact that the majority of the lines here used to be ISDN. ADSL got around this by allowing a rental line that was used specifically for ADSL, but it couldn't compete in terms of fiber for speed.

2)Trenching cable? TRENCHING in Tokyo? LOL Tokyo is pole city. Overheard cables everywhere! Perhaps this is why the cost is $20/house. Japan, home of the modern and backwards living in perfect harmonious discord. But at least its fast!

This is the first step, as it could have already been done.

http://www.google.com/patents

http://www.uspto.gov/main/profiles/acadres.htm

If it hasn't already been patented and you are confident of the acceptance of the invention in the the targeted area then by god man find an investor to fund the patent for a percentage of the potential licensing fees.

Patents were originally created specifically for people like you, to encourage and reward people who provide useful inventions by allowing them a limited monopoly on the sales of the invention in return for making the knowledge public.

Heck, if you are that sure, and you can sell me on the idea, I will fund your patent.

An MBA managing tech is a waste of time. You already know how to manage tech. Even if you aren't a manager, you know what it takes to manage tech.

What you need to do is manage the business stakeholders. Get a Finance MBA, or a Marketing MBA. Then you will speak the language of the Business and the language of Tech. You will also learn that the business is not neccessarily as dumb as a lot of techies make it to be. You will also learn that is simultaneously exactly as dumb as a lot of techies make it out to be.

Anyhow I went from tech to manager and then got an MBA. I miss the tech, but love the money.

I can do tech on my own time!

EXECUTIVE: Hmm.... So let me get this straight... we have a 95% percent chance that the answer is somewhere between 45.1 and 52.8, with our point estimate being 49.0.

So essentially your team has used a month of resources to assure me (quite accurately assure me) that we are 95% sure that rather than the odds being 50/50, they are 49/51.

Thanks for that! Now fuck off! :)

Part of the cost of doing business is preparing proposals. You will win some deals and lose others, but to try and play the game shrouded in secrecy is ridiculuos. You are competing for the customers money, you do that by investing time, and ensuring you have something to offer that differentiates you from the competition. If you have no differentiating factors, then you are with the wrong company. A small IT company needs an edge, and if it doesn't have it, it can't very well make up for that by hiding behind "You can't talk about the details of our proposal."

The big companies try to play this game to lock out vendors and so that no one really knows what their products cost.

The small crappy companies do it because they haven't figured out how to compete in a competitve market.

I would trust neither.