The Mayan calendar is base 20 with the first place only going to 18. This year represents the end of the 13th "great cycle"(13.0.0.0.0). That means that there have been 12 "end of the world events" preceding this year. So the next real end of the calendar doesn't happen until 4000 something when we reach the 20th great cycle. But then it will just start all over with 1.0.0.0.0.0. In short this is NOT the end of the Mayan Calendar.

Yes! If your company does not have a change freeze in effect for at least some portion of December or November it should. Nearly all countries and religions observe significant national holidays during this time. It also tends to be a very significant or the most significant time of the year economically for many countries and companies. That said non-functional security patching and security related activities would be good exceptions to this rule. Large hosting providers, not wanting to single out customers, often have blanket change freezes in effect including patching.

The USA thanks you so that we may spend time with our families. The average USA private corporate worker only gets around 7 holiday days off a year. Know that we will gladly cover your holidays as well.

Step one put yourself in their shoes, challenge yourself and think outside the box. Nerds typically love challenges. INTP/INTJ nerds often have difficulties reading other peoples reaction. Given this, when you suspect you are coming off as arrogant find a subject that both you and the other person don't know very well and explore it together. You will find that you are far less arrogant and you will be able to read the other person better because there won't be a "right" answer. Also a fun fact to learn is that most of the time, especially with small talk the "answer" does not even matter. You could be completely bullshitting the other person and if they are not able to call you on it they are forced to take you for your word. Arrogance enters when you make people feel like they are either not important enough or knowledgeable enough. Show compassion with a little bit of self deprecation(admit to being wrong). Finally, you can't make everyone feel comfortable, relax and realize that nothing really matters.

Except for graduation. Good luck on your studies!

PS It is perfectly acceptable to be arrogant to your peers, IT folk have to be arrogant to offset the arrogance of the Business folk.

lookup cfengine, it takes a while to get setup right but it scales nicely once it is. If you are a hybrid shop look at what scom, Microsoft system center can do for you. Ya it is a microsoft product but it was designed to be an industry disruptive do all things tool. Might not be so bad if you were building a solution from scratch.

I've found that what can happen in the large corporate world is that you have Developer teams, Production run teams, various IT infrastructure teams, and the Systems Engineers. Networking gets blamed for every outage because well, they are the common thread that all the bits run over. Storage gets stressed out because it is the last thing anyone thinks about until they need it, and the Systems engineers well the Developers want to play all roles unless they don't want to. Production run sometimes lacks the deeper skills of either programming or IT infrastructure.

Enter Unix Engineers. We are expected to have general knowledge of all IT infrastructure, which we do, we program and script extensively, because our automation depends on it, and we have extensive production application run experience do to managing all the different back end services that everyone depends on. mail, dns, ftp, sftp, web server engines, monitoring, etc. Yes a good sys admin must know how to at least read code and ought to be able to code/script in at least one language even if that is Dos Batch. The problem in the end though is as others point out. The more you know the more production run teams may lean on you to solve their problems. "Just ask the Unix team", Not because it is their responsibility, but because they can solve the problem quickly as they have the widest berth of knowledge.

Coding as a Sys Admin is crucial. Just know when to say I can't(or won't), for your sanity.

Hold on a second,
The Mujahideen were in a way, the good guys. Everything Carter did was for the greater good but it was all spun in a light that appeared either negative or pointless. Carter also legalized home brewing and expanded freedoms that hurt no one except maybe mega corporations a little. Look at the last 100 years and the actions of the us government and then look at his 4 years in office. Then tell me how his net "inaction" caused less progressiveness in the US as a nation than other presidents in the last 100 years?

The leetist and best president ever!

Jimmy Carter, 39th President of the United States, signed the bill, H.R. 1337, into law in October 1978 legalizing home brewing. Bill 1337, can't make this stuff up folks. :-)

To expand on this, in new TDI's from Audi/VW at certain intervals raw diesel is injected into the cylinders post burn to heat up the particulate filter and burn off collected carbon. Because of this the raw diesel fuel mixes a little with the oil. For petroleum based fuels this is not a problem as the synthetic oil is designed to allow this to happen. Unfortunately biodiesel is a really great engine cleanser. The problem is that when biodiesel above 5-10% mixes with the synthetic oil the oil is diluted and loses its ability to adhere to the cylinder wall and prevent friction. I think most people understand the basic concept of running an engine without oil. My understanding is that a person could run up to 20% biodiesel if they are willing to make very frequent oil changes, say every 5k miles. But at ~$60 a change it may seem pricey for you.

Move all of Nasa's office and administrative staff to cheaper office locations. States such as Mississippi and Montana offer much lower salaries as well as cost of living. Incidentally they are also both "red" states. In fact it appears that all of the 10 lowest paid states are all red.

Google, Apple, and possibly to a lesser extent Microsoft already have better patterned info about your whereabouts and that information is largely private but still available to government agencies at their request. The license plate scans would be pretty useful for crime fighting. Police for many years have been allowed to at random run a plate to check for any problems. This program just automates that. My only hope is that a tiny Perl script pulls everything nicely together on the backend. :-)

Unless they should be. I live a few blocks from a police station in Minneapolis. So I am sure they have seen me driving around before. Though I am pretty sure they are not out to get me. A few years ago during a bad snowstorm a police officer knocked on my door. My elderly neighbor, bless his heart, called the police to say that he had not noticed my car move in several days. I take the bus to work so this is fairly normal. The nice officer apparently checked out my garage, walked around the house to ensure that it was "safe" and then knocked on my door. When I came to the door he politely asked if I was ok. After explaining that I take the bus to work and that I was perfectly fine he left, no more questions. Now if I had a drug lab setup in my garage, there might have been a problem, but I don't. Heck he didn't even mistake my beer brewing stand for a drug lab, which I guess in a sense it is a legal one. A quick thank you shout out to Jimmy Carter, best president ever. My point is that the police are not out to get you and though I may not agree with programs like automatic scanning and tracking databases, I believe that police serve much more of a positive service than an invasive one.

Shush, we voted into office Jesse Ventura!

I have seen a lot of upset posts by people that don't like US leadership over this issue. Furthermore others have mentioned that the two top individuals most likely to get elected in November are both unlikely to take this issue in a different direction. What I have not seen are suggested alternate candidate names that upset US citizens can or should vote for. I did see the name Dennis Kucinich mentioned though I don't believe he will be on the ballot in most states, if any. Does anyone else have some suggestions we can all get behind and vote for?

My estimates put the Die's per Wafer at:
300mm = 58615762400 DPW
450mm = 10228963043666936 DPW
If the newest 22nm process is used. By the time the factory gets up and running there may be even better efficiencies that could be adapted. It is an expensive venture but at some point either the economics work out or you need to build a new factory anyways. It is good to see progress.