I think short term rewards help more than long term.

For my team when you're above your execution rate for a week you are eligible to work from home one day the next week. In general, no one does anything when they work from home but to be eligible, they have to get their work done in the office. It's effectively getting people to work harder 4 days a week for an extra day off.

Obviously, this may or may not work with your environment.

1. Send out resumes.
2. Start taking 8-10 minute breaks every couple hours. Force the issue. Let them call you out on having irritable bowels. Sometimes it's good to make everyone uncomfortable.

Realistically, though: I worked in a call center for a really really big company here in the states and they never tracked bathroom time. I'd say it's borderline illegal because of what you can infer from the data but I don't know that there's legal precedent one way or the other.

If your company is like mine you have an anonymous phone/e-mail line for inappropriate behavior or concerns. I'd leave a message that the new policies make you feel uncomfortable because you need to use the facilities fairly frequently due to a medical condition. (doesn't matter if it's true).

That's not an e-mail problem, that's a communication problem. I get spam snail-mail that pretends to be important and from my insurance company. I get voicemails that start with, "This is an important message for ..."

The problems with e-mail are the same problems we have with phones, texts, snail-mail and any other type of communication (photo-bombing, anyone?). Part of the population will always try to take advantage of the rest of the population. Ignore that then look at the rest.

E-mail is a good form of communication because it lets you communicate non-immediatly. Some users may expect immediate responses but that's a user issue--not an e-mail issue.

Why do these stories continue to come up? How about this one, "Moore's law will stop this year!". Yeah, never heard that one before...

I'm sure they're thinking is Thunderbolt docks. Full speed for all devices including displays. (not that I agree, just saying it's not a huge headache)

To answer the actual question: IOMeter. It's a load generator / benchmark. You can generate loads to test a storage device for your specific requirements and see if performance is up to snuff. You can also generate loads to stress a device until you halt it.

As someone else mentioned, throw bunches of read/writes at a drive for a couple days then put it into production with a reliable system to gracefully handle failure. You want to find drives that would fail in the first couple weeks and keep them from hitting your production environment.

Not if you like mods...

Most sensors don't have a linear response. Signal strength is almost certainly logarithmic.

With a company the size of dell, a finite number of e-mails is effectively 'anecdotal'.

That's why Intel is coming out with 2 sockets. 1155 and 2011. The 2011 is the non-IGP socket, 1155 is for IGP use.

The situation isn't changing. Intel will make an IGP and a non-IGP solution. Same as now. Same as it's been for quite a while.

If you don't want integrated, then don't use it.

AMD/ATI has started a new open source driver project for their video cards (http://www.anandtech.com/show/2338). AMD is at least working for good linux support though it may not necessarily be up to snuff today (I haven't looked at benchmarks between win/linux on AMD/ATI's cards).

At least they're trying?

Contrary to what most basic users think, they can make the switch to Win7 or Ubuntu pretty easily. Especially for basic internet and e-mail (which realistically is the extent of most people's computer use). I just switched my parents to Windows 7 and asked them what they thought. Their comments: "We didn't really notice anything".

The problem with switching family to a *nix solution is still going to be software. There are certain programs that your family will want to use that is simply unavailable. First that comes to mind is TurboTax. If you plan on switching family's OS, make sure you're not making more work for yourself down the road.

And really, with the Win7 family pack (3 upgrades for $149), Win7 is a realistic alternative to Win XP.

The higgs is sort of the measureable side effect of the physics that 'give' particles mass.

Think of it this way. The Electro Magnetic field "gives" particles charge. (or the charge in a particle interacts with other charges through the EM field).

There are some particles that sorta 'show up' in the equations when you're dealing with the EM fields (photon, W & Z bosons).

The same sort of things happens with mass. Some physicists came up with an addendum to the current equations that would explain how the mass of particles interacts. These equations have in them (depending on version) 1 or more particles (Higgs bosons).

So it's not so much that the Higgs gives particles mass, but by detecting the Higgs, we prove the existence of the Higgs field which allows mass in particles to interact.