Just so you know, Windows Vista and newer have solved this problem. You can push updates AND drivers into offline images. You can put a base image on a server and just load drivers from a database. We cut our number of images from 26 to 1, and it never needs more than three months of Windows Updates.

And it's not just for corporate use, the tools are in the Windows ADK, you just need to script up a recursive driver add after you imagex the machine.

I had written up scripts that automatically took an XP install all the way to where I wanted it to be, and these new tools just blow mine away.

I've had much better luck finding out where they hang out (bars, usually) after a session, then I bring them a small check, made out to their campaign. Once that happens, they usually give you their -real- email address or phone number.

I bought a state rep about $50 in drinks one night, cut him a check the next day, and my ideas on Net Metering made it into the next revision of the bill. I did the same for a city councilman, who is now using a few of my ideas to save money.

The great thing about contribution limits, which are usually under $1,000 per-contributor, is that you get a lot of bang-for-your-buck for a $100 or $200 contribution.

I live in a state that's had 80 years of solid Democrat rule. The district I live in has a student:teacher ratio of 12:1 and we spend over $15K per student annually. Yet despite this, the buildings are literally falling apart, classes are fully-packed, supplies, computers, and books are hard to get.

The problem isn't spending. We spend plenty. The problem is that there's no incentive to produce better outputs. We tried raising salaries, spending more in general. It didn't help.

"I'd prefer it if they left the decision between me and my doctor...."

Just to be coy, that translates to me as:

"I'd prefer it if they left the decision between someone who won't have to pay for something and the guy who wants to get paid...."

Arguably, the insurance company (or the government, in single-payer) is the ONLY party involved with enough information to make the proper decision about what level of care you receive.

I've been saying this all along. The answer for these companies is not to cap or throttle, it's to behave like a good citizen on the internet and either peer with or colocate the data customers want.

Now imagine if Google, Apple, Amazon, and Netflix could host a few boxes inside the Comcast network. Everyone wins. Unfortunately, that's just not how higher-ups in most organizations think.

I have a fair number of pictures, but those are small. This guy has a multi-terabyte thing going; between that and his username, I assume he has a LOT of video. In the case of video, it's time to say 'I won't need all this raw footage in DV format again'. It's OK to compress the video of the birthday party down to 1080p h.264 at medium quality, toss the project files, and let history remember you that way.

I think it's time to admit that you're a hoarder. What exactly -is- your personal data that's so precious? I run a server just to keep my skill set up and run my side business, but I've only managed to accumulate around 600GB of data, only about 35GB of it is 'mine', the rest is client backups.

So first admit that you're a hoarder, then decide if you wan to address that issue or indulge it. If you choose to indulge it, you're going to want to build a small home server. Something with a low-end 64-bit CPU (i3?), a gigabit LAN port, and lots SATA ports and 3.5" drive bays. Buy a bunch of high-quality (WD RE4?) matching drives that fit your data needs times two (you're RAIDing space away). Once you have that, install Linux on it, build a software RAID-1 or 0+1 array (don't do RAID-5 unless you can handle days of rebuild time), and format it with something accessible (read: in the kernel, like EXT4). Create a share on the array with Samba and happily access it from all your machines (don't bother with Netatalk or NFS; CIFS is great on all platforms). As your data needs grow, you can add drives in pairs or replace drives with larger ones and grow the volume. If you need backup, you'll want another array, preferably on another low-end box (an enclosure on your desktop?) but it can be built on a RAID-0 or JBOD to save money.

Mac OS X programs mostly are 'fat binaries'. If you right-click and 'view contents' of an application you'll see that it's really just a directory filled with files. You'll often see that there are x86, x64, and PPC binaries in the same package, sharing the same 'resource' files (which are now actually files instead of HFS magic).

It would be trivial to add more architectures to Mac OS X. Basically all you need is a compiler (which already exists) and for developers to actually target it.

> a national network of bullet trains?

I'm not actually sure that would be of much use. A trip from the northeast to California would be at least 15 hours, and a trip from New York to Florida would be 8 hours. There is no price point that makes a trip that long 'worth it' to do.

Regional high-speed rail would be awesome, though. It would be awesome to be able to easily commute to/from New York City on a daily basis from Boston or D.C.. That would have very real positive economic consequences for the entire eastern seaboard.

Similar story if you could link San Francisco and Los Angeles in under two hours.

You basically have to beat planes on time AND price to make it work. And you obviously have to beat the pants off of cars, because people WILL drive if it's not much faster to take the train.

I have a friend who works at a facility that runs those very exercises. You make it sound like that was the end of the story. In reality, we re-ran the exercises again because you don't just walk away from expensive simulations like that; after a loss, you create a team to re-tool for a few years in the future that prevents that kind of loss again.

Today, that same strategy wouldn't work. We upgraded the anti-boat and anti-missile technologies. We have been running simulations against massive numbers of speedboats for a decade now, successfully.

I'm not saying we wouldn't take losses or that they wouldn't be significant, but I don't think the US Military would stand by and allow us to fall into utter complacency, there are a LOT of checks and balances preventing that. 'Safety' seems to be the one thing our government can do correctly, probably because we've established that it has an unlimited price ceiling.

Hey, give him a break. Most people who's job is to admin Windows systems don't even understand Windows.

I actually built a similar system, but you lost me at

"run a backup utility... Norton Ghost to wipe the drive"

ImageX is built-in to Windows (in the AIK) and it does a fantastic job of backups, it even does compression and single-instance storage to save time and space. To wipe the disks, you can run any number of free/cheap utilities (Active KillDisk?) or you can just run 'diskpart' with 'clean all' to write zeros (good enough for 99.5% of cases).

"Linux dd doesn't have a problem doing the backups of anything as long as it is mounted"

Linux DD will also save all your deleted data as gobbledygook and lead to GIANT image files. If anything, you want these backups at the file-level, not block-level. Bonus points if you can backup to something with deduplication or single-instance storage.

Here's what we do where I work:

You'll need a Windows Server 2008 R2 with Windows Deployment Services role. You basically want to set up an isolated network with PXE booting, load a Windows PE disk into the PXE server. Modify the PE image to mount a drive off the server (to store your backups), then run a wipe script. As soon as the backup is done, you can actually fire up the next machine, you don't need to be 'connected' to wipe the disk.

For our purposes, we use Active Killdisk to wipe, and ImageX to backup.

You'll need PXE-enabled NICs or a gPXE boot disk. You can also do the exact same thing with a Samba server, a PXE daemon, and a basic Linux boot drive being served-up over PXE, but the learning curve is steeper. Also, ImageX is pretty awesome because it allows single-instance storage. You can append ALL you computer backups to one image file and only the different files will be stored more than once, cutting a massive amount of time and space from your backups.

This. If you can MITM and decrypt 500MB of HDMI data on the fly, you may as well do some basic video compression before dumping out to disk.

Also, for high-data linear loads like video dumps, HDDs are still superior to SSDs.