Most businesses wouldn't have any major issue spending that little extra money; if they did, they wouldn't if they were slightly more efficient or if the CxO's got a few million dollars less.

Eg. Coca-Cola has 130k employees. Increasing their employee base by 50% (I assume an average cost of $100k/employee) would cost $6.5B/y or barely 15% of their yearly revenue.

You can make the same calculations for a number of companies, unless the company is severely mismanaged or inefficient (in which case it should fail anyway) you'll find that it is VERY affordable if only their CxO's would give up a few million of bonus or the shareholders wouldn't mind to throw in a penny.

Get two jobs. IF one really works 80 hours/week, then I hope they're not salaried but get paid 1.5-2.5x for any time over 40, the facts however are that most people working 80h/week only get paid to do "~40".

Backups can be cheap/free. With some imagination and extra work I ran a design department without any dedicated server or backup hardware (a large company where requisitioning a server needed board approval which only met once every 6 months - they failed shortly after I left).

The entire 'cloud' hype has shown us that you can run storage over hundreds of nodes with a large number of them that could suddenly fail. Desktops all have at least 50GB-1TB of free space and could thus act as a simple storage node.

The problem IS clueless IT people. These people that come out of school and have programmer jobs or IT administrative duties but couldn't code their way out of a box with LOGO.

Why do you need to replace the computers? Wipe them and reinstall them. They do have backups of their important data on non-Windows-systems don't they?

Reason #2 why you don't have your backup systems connected into Craptive Directory (#1 being that if your directory needs to be restored, you should be able to login to your backup system).

IMHO everyone should have that amount of time off. People working 40+h/w for 50+w/y is just ridiculous. Give everybody 2m/y off and work 30h/w, then we will have less unemployment and more efficient businesses.

Who has a 7 word phrase password (that's ~56 characters of random words that do not make sense). Most password systems won't even accept that and mistype one character and you have to start over again. As comparison 56 characters is the length of this string. The moment you start making sense between words, it gets even easier to crack.

The problem sits in the dictionary attacks. There have been crackers out there on GPU for years that combine wordlists and partial words to guess passwords. Few crackers (if you have a large amount of hashes to crack) will still guess all combinations from a to zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. They'll take existing dictionaries, recombine them in 1->n words where combined words 16 characters, even substitute leetspeak characters. If your password 8 characters you're pretty much screwed already, 12-16 characters is still acceptable if the words aren't too common, 24 is the new gold standard.

You're doing it wrong! Unless you don't care about data loss and calculated out that replacing the EVO's every few months is actually a cheaper option compared to a decent SLC (Intel, STEC, ...) or even RAM SSD over the lifetime of your server, then I would recommend re-examining your setup. SLC's are not only faster, but they're a heck more reliable. If you just care about speed on a single box, get a PCIe based SSD. Desktop drives for this kind of setup is asking for trouble.

I still have a set of 32GB SLC (Intel X-25-E) from 2009 which have digested several PB worth of data in their lifetime as well as a number of OCZ Deneva's with the same workload. Probably the best investment possible.

Women in any industry have long complained about an uneven playing field — lower pay for equal work, being passed over for promotions and a hostile 'brogrammar^H^H^H^H^H^H^H' culture

WigWag does SONOS, PHILIPS HUE, BELKIN WEMO, LIFX, CONNECTED BY TCP and their own (so far vaporware) potentially proprietary protocol. The Belkin WeMo is shit, Philips Hue is very specific about devices you can work with as is Sonos, the rest are non-players in the market.

Insteon/X10/ZWave already has a huge install base, if they were serious about it, they would've implemented those first. Want to develop your own? Here's a link to a "if you're interested, please wait until we bother releasing something"... well shit.

RadioShack doesn't operate (anymore) in Europe. In the US private data collection and resale is legal and encouraged.

The problem with these gadgets is that they're too small and proprietary to be taken seriously. Home Depot and Lowes both have competing products with different standards for example. Then there is a host of competing companies that do the same thing. Some use power line communications, some use custom 700MHz, 2.4 or 5GHz spectrum which all may interfere with each other, WiFi and other things.

There are open standards for this kind of stuff, some may be less open than others but at least they're available. Give me a 'gateway' or hub that I can replace myself with a custom implementation on a computer. I'd trust Linux/Mac, heck even Windows over one of these devices.

Yeah but who wants to live in the mid-west?

Because in most places, public transport is ran by the government and governments/politicians have a tendency to make businesses and contributors happy, not their constituents. Most public transport thus does not run where YOU want to go but rather where people go to spend money, where contributors have lobbied the thing to be built and whatever other decisions make the now privatized bus companies the most money (cutting lines, frequency and convenience while increasing costs and filling vehicles well beyond their capacity).

All you need is to load a 64 bit kernel by using a custom compiled 32 bit EFI that simply passes all 'foreign' calls to the hardware. The hardware is 64-bit.