I thought that newer Intel CPU's have three RAM channels, and that numbers like 6 and 12gb would be more common. I personally have 6gb in my desktop PC (3x2gb kit)

I was under the impression that us old UNIX guys are a sort of a secret society to begin with. I mean, i still work just like I did 20 years ago (true, all my servers nowadays are Linux of a sort and Solaris 10, and there are no traces of SunOS 4.1 and HP-UX 9.0 in my CR), i write scripts (perl and not ksh) that nobody understands except myself, and i still grow a beard :). Definitely a recipe for a secret society member.

hp 9000-730, running HP-UX 10.20 Got it back in 1991, and we already celebrated 20th birthday. Never broke down, or had a single problem. If there wasn't a scheduled electricity maintenance that included the UPS, the up-time would probably be around 11 years now. I still use it at work daily for routine tasks done in the shell.

For more broken Serbian look up "gradual report" on youtube. Hillarious for anyone who can do broken Srpski

I have a friend who lives in Hicksville, NY you insensitive clod!

1. grep
2. sed
3. awk
4. bc
5. lsof
6. strace
7. top
8. vim
9. perl

This would be my top 9, but not in this particular order. Proprietary tools used are ofcourse not listed.

That is the solution that i have implemented for our little environment that consists of about 50-ish solaris (8 and 10) servers, 80-ish windows servers, about 500 linux servers, and 40-odd cisco switches. Hobbit handles all host monitoring: availability, services, and a bunch of custom scripts written for it to check various aspects of our HPC grid, plus the SMS sending through an old nokia connected to the comm port of a solaris box. Smokeping is there to check latency, and cacti primarily for network traffic volume, and a custom module for FlexLM licenses. Works like a charm

My faithful Lenovo T60 running windows XP (preinstalled by the windows IT guys at work) with a 9 cell battery gives over 6 hours of work with all radios off and screen dimmed/cpu throttled.
On the other hand, my home (ex)-monster with 17" HD bla bla never ran without the power supply.
But here is a tip if you are a frequent flyer:
Ask for an emergency exit seat. After the take off flirt a bit with a hostess, and tell her that you would really appreciate if she would let you connect to the onboard 110 outlet (used mostly for vacuum cleaners) and if you are lucky she lets you, and you get juice for the whole 13 hour flight from Tel Aviv to San Francisco. Works for me every time (last flight was 13 hours of Seinfeld for yours truly). If you are not lucky - NO JUICE FOR YOU!

Even though i'm not a parent yet, i have friends who are, and i'm sure that they would opt for a snooze button around the back of the head. Useful when their kids jump into the bed at 6am.
Another useful feature would be a built in snot pump, or face wipes.

Dont know if anyone wrote about brief already, but even though i'm a sworn vim user i have very fond memories of brief, and i still claim that brief key mapping was the best and easiest to use (too bad the brief emulation in vim is lacking ...)