Although I never made it as far south as Salerno, in Positano the buffalo mozzarella pizza was the best thing I have ever tasted.

Yep that's right - base, sauce and buffalo mozzarella, that's it I was in heaven! Okay sometimes with some parma ham also, but seriously it didn't need it!

Oh and worst pizza ever: Rome. Enough said.

Hang on, um I'm no expert on the topic but don't millions of teenagers each year dye their hair with peroxide to make it a lighter colour?

That would make it a perfectly reasonable question as undoubtedly some of that would end up in your ear and any reasonable person would want to know if there are any adverse affects??

I have to agree with all the other posts; Super Talent, Transcend? Who? I bought an Intel X-25, and after 4 months it's still going strong, though we'll see how it holds up in the next year.

Regardless I was not at all surprised by your statistic, and considering the relatively new age of SSD drive technology not at all surprised by your failure rate! I remember back in my days (many many days ago) of being a PC builder we would be surprised if we got less than a quarter of the IDE drives back within the first three months of sale! And these were not all the cheapest drives, we were using; Maxtor, Seagate, Fujitsu and the like (standard consumer drives).

You may find it also surprising that in my later years as a server engineer we expected roughly similar statistics from our server drives! To get a HP or Dell server with a 4-8 drives and not have at least one or two failures in the first few months was a BIG surprise!

SSD doesn't have to go very far to improve on those stats..

I mean seriously compare your average westerner's eco-print to those figures quoted here for our loved ones. I for one believe we find far better places to "make savings" when it comes to our combined foot print!

And yes, this is sarcasm. (maybe)

You have stated very well the real and often unstated issue that Vista faced, nobody understood it!

I remember waiting in the customer service line of a big computer shop a few months back, and there was this lady at the counter screaming about getting a refund for her new HP laptop, why? Because she didn't understand this "Vista" thing? She wanted "Windows" and "Office" and nothing else.

Sometimes it's easy to forget that most people don't know or care a bit about operating systems and interfaces, they likely believe that frankly if they had to go through how many boring hours of Windows and Office training back in the day, who's going to be paying them to do it all again!?

Personally I think any steps towards a more intuitive and usable OS (in particular the IU) is a good thing, so go Microsoft, go Apple, keep up the good work. But change like this is not going to sell new computers by itself. Fortunately however for Microsoft and Apple, the previous versions of Vista and OSX have now been out for long enough that a good number (20% according to Vista stats) of people have been exposed to it, this can only help ease that learning curve. So one could argue that on that point alone Windows7 will have a better time that Vista ever could have!

I'm very interested in this Kindle because I live in Australia where we are so lucky to have a thriving protectionist policy that results in ALL books costing 50-60% more! If I can buy them even at 40% more via Amazon on a Kindle then I'm winning!

But I too am trying to understand the 40% book markup comment? I can't see any different prices on Kindle titles on Amazon.com, but I can see the fine print which says all books are priced in US dollars, which actually suits me find.

Currently I often use Amazon.com and pay the $20-$30 shipping to get my books, and even including that cost it's cheaper than sourcing them locally!

Kindle / Nook - bring it on!

Sounds like you need some consulting love..

Anyone can "install" any system, but do you think anyone can do it properly? If you got your 15 year old "techie" nephew to install SAP for your mid-sized company do you think you'd get the best result?

Some of the best MOSS deployments I've worked on are the ones that most people don't know that they are working on SharePoint at all! Of course in order to do that you cut out a good portion of the functionality, but how is that new, does ibm.com have a wiki on the front page letting anyone who comes by make changes? Why would they? And why would you enable such features on a corporate intranet page that is designed with a well defined purpose (that usually is not to give everyone a website they can "play" with).

I was thinking just that!

Why Apple, Asus, Toshiba, etc?

Why not Intel, AMD, Reaktek? You know company's who actually make ethernet chips?

Sure many of them wouldn't based in the US, such as Realtek, but seriously how many consumer boards out there these days don't use integrated Intel or VIA (AMD) chips?

Maybe I just don't pay too much attention to these patent-trolls and so don't understand their "blatantly" obvious tactics involved?

Spot on!

Wish i saw your post before posting my own in iproute2, this howto was the bomb a few years back when I had to solve this exact problem, our custom iproute2 based solution beat a number of commercial options when we had to get a working load balanced connection solution that needed to support 150+ IPSEC vpn's with full seam-less failover between 3 ADSL connections!

Ahhhh, the memories, all this iproute / ipf talk takes me back to my NetBSD / Linux ipchains days.. :)

A few years back I did this with a colleague, we actually investigated 3 solutions; 2 commercial and one linux script based, in the end the one that won easily was the Linux script.

Basically using iproute2 and some nice scripts gives you the ability to load balance your outbound packets and then using some relatively simple scripts to monitor each remote peer for automatic failover.

A quick google turns up this blogger who sounds (from a quick skim) like he's doing the same thing: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/how-to-load-balancing-failover-with-dual-multi-wan-adsl-cable-connections-on-linux/

Unfortunately I can't remember the commercial solutions we tested (this was 4-5 years ago!), but although they did exactly what you wanted perfectly, our problem was that we were doing this for a managed services company who ran 150+ IPSEC VPN's over those (at the time) 3 bonded ADSL connections, needless to say the commercial solutions had never imagined anyone trying to statefully balance that many VPNs! However with some tweaking (to be honest a LOT of tweaking) we got the Linux solution working a treat, even with nearly seamless failover.

Google is your friend on this one.

Wow, I almost thought you were joking there with that one, I mean about the bit on address books and calendaring..

Did you notice how you sounded exactly like a 1998 Microsoft Exchange add?

Damn makes you think doesn't it?

Interestingly your own idea of "having your body not die" is pretty much exactly what the originally referenced author described.

But as someone who makes a living off selling fiction it was not enough to as you say just "make shit up", instead he invented a procedure in which the body is effectively replaced cell by cell effectively "transferring the mind into a new body".

I think it's brilliant, and maybe even not such a stretch. I mean if the mind is already known to do things like re-route functions around damaged areas, as has been observed in numerous stroke victims, then is it such a stretch to use such natural resilience to rebuild parts of the brain?

It depends very much on your definition of "aliens", if by that you mean any "living" green goo that we might find at the bottom of Europa's oceans or on the nth planet of XYZ star, well that's pretty much a given. If however you more refer to the more traditional definition of alien, i.e; little green men or some other sci-fiction envisioned 'intelligent' being, then I would encourage you to read about what Sir Arthur C. Clarke termed Apes or Angels:

http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3aa.html#apesorangels

It makes you wonder just how likely we are to actually meet those little green men. When you imagine the sheer improbability that we would meet another alien race who is roughly (+/- a few hundred years) as developed as we are then it makes answering some of those questions like "if Aliens exist then why haven't we met them yet?" quite simple.

Also you really have to drop the assumption that any aliens more advanced than us would be recognizable by us. I mean when today's futurists predict that *we* won't be recognizable by us today in twenty to thirty years, then following such a though really does further confine those possible aliens who we could meet (and notice when we meet them)!

While I agree with your notion that most of us are generally speaking co-operative, social beings. I think the original poster is also quite right, however perhaps he should have used a more apt analogy rather than the skull crushing monkey one.

Actually an analogy is not even necessary to make this point:
"It comes from the fundamental understanding that humans are a insatiable hoard of money hungry capitalists. We are genetically programmed to accumulate the most money possible, even when that means making the money at someone else's expense."

Money of course could easily be exchanged with land, water or food, making the proposition of "world peace" far more optimistic than if it were only a matter of controlling our 'seemingly' barbaric tendencies.

Nope you missed nothing, "cloud" computing is not for you, Software as a Service (SaaS) which is this whole 'cloud computing' gimmick really is about, is not targeted at Joe Carpenter down the road.

SaaS is about outsourcing IT, increasing efficiency and downsizing IT in-house requirements. Yes that's right it's about taking your job and mine! (Although I work in the outsourcing market so I guess I'm the one taking your job - meh) No wonder it is something that provokes such interesting discussion here and in any forum where the topic comes up, we're human after all most of us understand what it means to outsource IT, it means no more BOFH!

Perhaps we should all form a union? Fight this Cloud - err SaaS thing in the good old fashioned way? Perhaps picket lines in front of Google's HQ would send the right message?

Hah, sarcasm is great isn't it.