I like easy but slightly thought provoking reads. Things that take a time and place in history, start with known facts and spin off into a what if this happened. There are many books about what could have happened if Hitler had found certain religious artifacts he was looking for and if they really did what he thought they did. Spy novels and ocean exploratory books (Clive Cussler, etc) where you take the same basic premise - a ship sank, it had X on it, what happens if it is found... Here's some fun authors - Robert Ludlum, Clive Cussler, Matthew Reilly, James Rollins, Brad Metzler. Depending on reading speed these could be finished on a very long flight. Check the New York Times lists and skip the chick flicks and biographys.

If you're running a 32bit OS like older WinXP setups, unless you monkey around with it you can only see 3.2GB of RAM anyway. I bet there's way more legacy 32bit desktops and laptops out there than the newer Vista and Windows 7 boxes where 64bit became the standard. In this scenario it really doesn't matter if you installed 4GB because the OS can only touch the first 3.2GB of it.

I've recently discovered that okay deals can be found on the gift card secondary market. Where you sell the gift cards Aunt Rosie bought you that you won't ever use, and turn around and buy one (at an 8% or so discount to face value) for a place that you do shop.

So if I got one of these gift cards, sold it on plastic jungle or one of the other places, and an unsuspecting person bought it, would the person who gave it to me end up getting a report stating what that third party bought? Isn't that an invasion of that third parties entitlement to privacy?

Although this scenario is a bit of a stretch, I bet swapping gift cards and using them to pay off debts to friends is pretty common for college kids.

There's no way this should be legal. Your own children have no real right to privacy in the home that you provide them with, but everyone else does have a right to privacy. Privacy aside, that third party person should in no way be restricted to how they spend the money unless there's some big flashing light on the gift card that says it can only be used to buy books.

I can't speak to many of your questions. However, I can provide small insight into your networking question. The industry I work in is application monitoring, and it's often an afterthought added only if there are problems. If you go with Infiniband, your choices for capturing and monitoring packets in order to help you analyze application issues will be extremely limited. However, if you go with the more widespread adoption of 10GbE you will have many vendors you can pick from with very advanced features to help monitor how your app is performing across your internal network. This entire supercomputer is nothing without its network or its application, so if it were me, I would spec in a very robust solution to monitor how the application is performing on the network. The most robust solutions are packet capturing appliances tapped or spanned in from the switches (taps are preferred). This is greatly superior to capturing traffic inside a server node itself because the OS and NIC will alter the speed and form of the packets when they are sent out onto the network.

This is actually huge news for the financial companies.

Most people don't really understand what these companies do. Ethics aside, these prop shops do largely automated trading based on extremely propietary software that monitors market conditions, news, weather, politics, etc all at the same time. It would have to be a huge hedge fund (not a smaller prop shop) to shell out $100M unless they thought they would have an advantage because nobody else could afford it. But yes, the basic premise of cuting 6ms off the time and having financial companies beating down their door to sign up for service is absolutely correct. If you can make a large trade 1ms before your biggest competitor so that you buy in cheap and they buy in higher or cancel their trade, then you can make big money. There's a whole industry creating products for these low latency trading firms with specialized switches, routers, software, etc that is tuned to support extremely low latency networks and zero dropped UDP packets.

I used to work for a large insurance company in Chicago. The director charged with building our NOC in 2000 basically traveled throughout the country visiting other large IT organization's NOC's and took the best ideas and made them work for us - and it did resemble 24.

Take a large crescent shaped room with a 30' or more ceiling. The video wall was three different sections (this is important for separation of displays and multiple tools at the same time). The display units were high end rear projection systems that were each hooked up to computers that drove the display and were roughly 3'x5' each. Of course there's no seam or separation between the screens. Any group of screens can be used to display anything you want (1 screen, 2, 4, 6, all, etc). Pretty basic stuff nowadays, but it was great ten years ago. The left and right banks had three screens stacked on top of eachother, by either 4 or 5 wide. The center bank was 3 high by either 8 or 10 wide.

Three rows of crescent tables with low walls in front separating them, and minimal separation between workspaces - you want people in a NOC to work very closely with eachother, especially in case of an outage. Each station had two or three LCD screens mounted on articulating arms, but not to be stacked on top of eachother like those trading desks you see with 6 or 8 LCD screens at them. That would be too tall, and you couldn't look over the top to see the main video wall without standing. The room sat close to 50 people. Around the edges of the room are various cabinets, printers, personal storage for the three shifts of employees that work in the NOC, etc. Of course high end chairs are important as others have noted. Lighting is also equally important. You have to be very careful with making sure it is as close to natural lighting as possible. The lighting we used was recessed and inset so that no lightbulb shone directly out or down on the people - it made it less harsh, but still very bright in the room based on a good design. Wireless headsets are important, and also minimizing speakerphones and any other distracting noise.

Behind the rows of tables at the back of the crescent in the donut hole section if you will is an enclosed room large enough to sit 30 people comfortably with power, phones, and network connections to cover it. The walls facing the NOC are floor to ceiling glass, and it has connectivity to the videowall of the NOC so that displays from their can be sent to the meeting room as well. It has every high end normal conference room tool you could need - multiple video conferences, smartboard, integrated microphones and speakers, etc. Everything was hidden inside builtin cabinets made of high end wood. This main room is the situation room. During a large outage, 2nd and 3rd level staff will work out of the room in conjunction with the NOC teams. Directly upstairs from the situation room is another identical room, also with floor to ceiling glass walls looking out to the video wall of the NOC. This upper room was reserved for senior and executive management use during a large outage. Engineers and Executive management have different needs during an outage and require separate spaces and separate functions, although constant information does need to feed between the two. The upper room was more of the showpiece room. It had a motorized curtain that you could press a button on the wireless control panel to open and close. The entrance from the building going up to the second floor board room does not give anything away for what the NOC itself looked like, so once everybody was assembled in the room and the button was hit, it never failed to impress first time visitors. They would always leave their chairs at the conf table and walk right up to the glass wall to look down at the people working in the NOC and see what was displayed on the board.

It was an extremely impressive setup. I am now in sales and visit customer sites on a daily basis and I have yet to see something that even approaches what this director designed at my old employer.

You can't forget to include cable or satellite to display weather and headline news. For fun, don't forget to include a high end stereo system and a blu-ray player so you can watch movies or the occasionaly superbowl game since you already have cable service anyway.

I use secure #'s from my Discover card for every purchase I make online that I can - I have however come across a few that won't accept Discover, and then I think twice before I purchase on a non-secure card. This feature is available on every Discover card of every persuasion and has been for a few years. It's not technically one time use. My understanding of it from experience is that if the same company charges the exact same amount to your number at a common interval (1 month, etc), then the charge will be accepted. It has worked for me before - I believe with Tivo. However, many times companies will process the first payment themselves, and subsequent recurring payments will go through a clearinghouse. The different payment info is enough to get the payment denied, which can be both good and bad depending on if you really wanted to setup a recurring payment.

I used to have a Visa credit card from MBNA and they offered secure numbers as well. They probably still do, but check into it before making the plunge. Unfortunately I got rid of MBNA and now just use Chase, and they do not offer secure credit numbers, so I have no backup if Discover isn't accepted. Maybe they paid too much for Bank One and Bear Stearns.

This is really how it works? Come on, what decade is this? I've been on the user side and now I'm on the vendor side of packet based application performance products. Think wireshark or the defacto standard certain brand name that jumps into your head. A primary part of the job is showing people how inefficient their database calls are when they either ask for everything every time and don't cache it, or they get tiny bits and pieces a few bytes at a time instead of larger more efficient downloads.

So Twitter can't bundle multiple requests into the same stream? It's not exactly rocket science - even SNMP can do this now. It saves processing power, bandwidth, time to load, etc. Pretty crazy.

This is all pretty much common knowledge to anyone who has had an kicked a caffeine habit. And yes, certain soda's have much, much more caffeine than coffee which generally has much less than 100mg per cup. My habit started in High School with a two liter of coke on the way to school and through the first period or two (band, not real class). It soon moved up to a peak of 1800mg per day by way of no-doz and other generic caffeine pills. I couldn't function without it. I finally woke up one day, stopped cold turkey all pills and all liquid forms of caffeine, and after a week or so I was fine again. It is a real addiction, and there are real symptoms. You also will get accustomed to it like any other drug and build up a tolerance.

I'll drink 3 or 4 cans of pop a week, and I'll have coffee 2 or 3 times a week, but that's nothing compared to most of my coworkers. I do it more for the liquid than the caffeine as I believe I have all but killed the possibility of caffeine affecting me for a decade or two. Also, I had a science teacher who taught us in school that caffeine will take up to an hour to ingest into the body, so the immediate effect on most people of perking them up within the first few sips is pretty humorous to me. The pills never did that - it would take a while after I took them to do anything. I would like to find out if that is true, but I think it is.