Maybe this wouldn't work for the OP, but my first solution would be to use an IDE CD-ROM drive in an external USB enclosure if SATA CD drives are the cause of the problem. The external USB enclosures should be cheap and relatively easy to find.

As far as CD ripping, before it was faster to simply download an already ripped copy of an album vs rip it yourself, I know Plextor and Kenwood had some of the hot drives. Specifically Kenwood had a drive line called True X with claimed speeds of up to 72x I believe, and everyone that ripped music wanted one of them. If you could find one that still works, that would probably be a pretty safe bet as I don't think much of anything related to reading CDs has changed in the past 20 years.

If an external enclosure won't work, I'm sure you could probably find a SATA to IDE adapter. As I understand, the problem is with the caching mechanism in SATA drives and not with SATA itself, so this should work.

The real tipping point will not come when Linux supports all of the games people want to play today. The tipping point will be when Linux supports all the games people want to play on release day. When I know I can reliably and easily download and play the latest Blizzard or Valve game the day it's released, then Linux will be in a much better position to be a serious contender for gamers.

But the bigger question is why would I want to switch to Linux when I'm content with Windows 7. As far as I know, Windows 7 does everything I need it to do and I'm not left feeling like I'm missing out on any huge features, so...why invest the time and effort to switch to something that arguably is more difficult to use and less compatible if I'm not one of the geeks that has near religious zeal for it?

Sure, it's free, but the Windows tax is what, maybe $150 when you buy a new PC? That's $50/year assuming you'll use that computer for three years, and $50 is WELL worth paying vs investing my personal time to learn a new OS. Sorry, but there needs to be a compelling reason to switch. Just having working games is not a compelling reason, I already have that.

The pronunciation of "GIF" is specified in the GIF specification to be "jif", as in "jiffy", rather then "gif", which most people seem to prefer.

http://www.olsenhome.com/gif/

You can't think of any application that requires five nines? Telco, utilities, emergency room, 911 dispatch, just a few right off the top of my head. Did you mean you can't think of a salesforce app that would require five nines? If so that makes a bit more sense.

A city with a population over 30k doesn't have cable? WTF. We have cities around here with populations under 5k that have cable.

I must be right because I gave more examples that you did. GIF
Gibs
Giblets
Giraffe
Gem
Ginger
Gentle
Gigolo
Gym
Gyro
George
Germany
Giant
Gin

So police record their activities while serving warrants, patrolling, and investigating crime scenes. In other words, 80% of their day (they didn't say anything about wearing them at the donut shop). I don't know how many officers they have, but I'm guessing they probably have 100-150 on duty at any given point, and maybe 50 of those would be recording at a given time. So that's 50 video streams x 24 hours a day = 1200 hours of video a day. Let's say they recording at 240p because that's probably the lowest resolution that can be in any way useful, so that's about 3 MB per minute of video, 1200 hours of video a day means 72000 minutes of video a day and at 3 MB per minute, that's 211 GB of video a day. Assuming their retention period is at least 60 days (it's probably longer), that means they have to store almost 13 TB of video at an absolute minimum for the previous 30 days. That's a fair amount of data for a single police department, and if you think about retaining video for longer than 60 days it gets even larger. Some videos will probably be retained longer if they're related to an active case, or someone thinks they may be needed in the future. Then there's the issue of actually getting the video off of the glasses and on to some sort of centralized storage. It sounds like this is shaping up to be a job that justifies another FTE.

Sure we have CAN-SPAM and all the various state level spam laws that spell out the rules advertisers have to abide by, but the huge problem with these laws is that a private individual cannot initiate an action against someone, only the government can sue someone using these laws. Of course the government can't devote resources to chase down all the little spammers (my local car dealership is the worst, I've e-mailed, called and finally stopped by in person in hopes of getting them to take me off their e-mail list) but I still get e-mail from them and there isn't anything I can do about it.

I talked to two different lawyers and was willing to spend my own money to sue them and get them to respect people's wishes to not receive their junk advertising, but both of them told me there was nothing I could do about it. So, yeah, thanks government. If you made these laws actionable by anyone the world would have a lot less spam in it.

For downgrade rights, you need to be purchasing under a volume license agreement (either select or open), retail and OEM products don't come with downgrade rights. Also, you advise to purchase a Win 2012 Standard license and downgrade to Win 2008 Enterprise. I think you have a typo in there. You would need to purchase Win 2012 Ent to downgrade to Win 2008 Ent.

It depends on what you want to do with it. VMware has the advantage of working well, being easy to learn, and arguably being the industry standard for virtualization software. KVM is more popular if you are on the *nix side of things, and I believe has the added advantage of being free, but if you look at software vendors providing virtual appliances, 95% of what they will give you is a VMware image, so to me that tells me VMware is the way to go.

Companies are afraid to hire older people. You raise their insurance rates and they worry about you deciding to retire at inopportune times. Consulting avoids those concerns since everything is based on contracts. You may have to find your own health insurance, but with C# and Java experience I suspect it won't take you very long to land some consulting work billing at $75-100/hr.

There's literally no point in getting a degree in network administration if you already have a degree. The only reason to get any degree at all in that field is for those places that absolutely won't hire someone without one, otherwise you can get plenty of work with no degree at all. The network administrator classes teach you only the very basic material, most of which you probably already know and only a small amount of what they teach you is applicable in the real world anyway.

The best way to learn networking is by doing. Especially if you are talking about getting into Cisco, etc. There are so many specialized things out there, they may teach you basic stuff but the interesting stuff you learn OTJ. If you want to get into networking what you need to do is get a job for a consulting company that does only networking. It's hard, but if you're willing to accept low pay for a while the experience you get will allow you to jump to higher paying positions inside of a year or two.

This is horrible advice. You should use velcro, never zipties. Zipties require tools and are "once and done". Velcro allows flexibility to adjust as your needs change. Also your advice about a bigger box is only useful if all the storage is sitting in one place. Also, one of the primary selling points of USB storage is portability.

Start by labeling both ends of every cable. You can use heat shrink tubing around the cable and then write on the heat shrink with a sharpie. Use different color heat shrink to distinguish cables. Use snagless cables when available. Use cables of the appropriate length when possible. If you have more than one of a particular type of cable, get them in different colors if possible. Always use velcro and never use zip ties to bundle cables.

This problem has already been solved, Google "Knox Box". The FD has a universal key to open the knox box (which are all keyed alike) inside of which are the keys to the individual premise. If you look at commercial buildings such as retail, restaurants, etc, you'll probably see a knox box next to their front door. As far as I know nobody has managed to steal a master key for the knox boxes, but I'm not sure how they manage to keep such tight control on them considering every FD has at least one of them.