Excellent point, and a practice I've already seen at my current job (tracking service availability instead of server uptime--in fact, since I started, we've tracked nothing but service availability).

That said, this has led us down the path of constantly increasing availability requirements, for things as (relatively) insignificant as an internal company blog. We're currently doing work between two new data centers, and one of the goals is to provide near 100% availability of all systems. It becomes very easy to sell such an idea to the business at little incremental cost (compared to the cost of building out two DCs in the first place), but the actual work involved in making it happen can be tricky at times. Not to mention the real incremental benefit is questionable at best, at least for a lot of the applications in question (IMHO, and given that many systems aren't tied to money-making endeavors).

Sure, it's theoretically possible to have two DCs, and when you want to do patching, you flip to your secondary site, patch your primary, flip back, and patch the secondary. It's a practice I'd certainly expect to see in an environment like NASDAQ. The business likes it, and the technical minutiae are workable (most of the time), but it is a substantial amount of added complexity (and work... and time) for little added benefit, in a lot of cases.

In short, I agree completely with what you said, but it can have the side effect of increasing the "required" availability numbers to the point where it becomes little different than simply looking at uptime (depending upon the environment).

I agree completely. I started hosting my own e-mail server when I was in college (~6 years ago now), and I've been running it ever since. I did a lot of learning as I went along, and the setup has been about as stable as you can possibly expect it to be running over a home connection. Just in case though, I threw in a VM from Linode earlier this year (initially acting as my primary MX and forwarding to my home server, but now acting only as my backup MX), which brings the reliability up to a pretty good standard for personal e-mail. Plus, it gives you a public IP with reverse DNS, which can easily cost you another $10-15/month with cable or DSL, if they even offer it on a residential package (and it's a huge boon for a sending mail server, beyond simply using your ISP's mail server as a smarthost).

That Linode VM is only about $30/month, and it comes in handy for lots of other things. If it's a hobby, it's well within the realm of affordability. Can't recommend them enough for something like this (their competitors are probably good too, but I only have personal experience with Linode).

All in all, if I spend 2 hours a month maintaining the setup (generally upgrading ClamAV), that'd be a lot. I use CentOS+Sendmail (been running Sendmail since the get-go, don't have much motivation to swap it out) out of the box, with custom compiled (latest-and-greatest) versions of SpamAssassin and ClamAV.

There's a few things you can do for outbound mail. The cheapest/easiest solution would be to use your ISP's e-mail server as a smart host (i.e., DSmail.comcast.net in sendmail.cf). What I would do is get a "virtual private server" or similar (with a static IP), and set that up as your smart host/relay. It doesn't have to be incredibly powerful or anything--a bare bones configuration would be enough these days.

As a side benefit, you could also use the same system as your primary or secondary *inbound* mail server, by configuring it to simply relay mail to your primary mail server as long as it can connect to it. Otherwise, if your cable connection goes down for whatever reason (they aren't T1 lines, after all), your e-mail will be queued up on a system you control. Well worth the $20-30/month a VM from someone like Linode will cost you...

While you're absolutely right, you grew up in an area where they had to deal with this regularly enough that they *planned* for as much snow on the ground in advance. In CT, not so much, particularly in cities like New Haven, where their plan has always seemed to be move the snow off to the side, let it melt (within a few days), rinse, and repeat.There was no considering the possibility that it won't melt, that there'd be multiple feet of snow on the ground, and that there'd be no place to plow it to.

Are things far worse than they need to be? Absolutely. But with the way things are now, in some places, it seems like all we can do is wait for spring (and hope the floods aren't too bad, hah).

My MacBook Pro (the last generation of discrete models) is a very well-built machine, but in some ways, it's a step back from the PowerBook G4 I had prior to it (very little things, like the speakers audibly turning on and off after listening to something, the wi-fi introducing a bit of background noise while on, etc.). The unibody ones are obviously very solid too, but I really hate the new touchpad, and the bezel bothers me a bit too. Little things for sure, but it used to be all the little things that added up to make Macs that much better.

And not all Wintel machines are built like garbage. ThinkPads are still world-class, even if they aren't much to look at. I got a X60s on eBay a few weeks ago to carry around with me, and it's built even better than my Mac.

In all fairness, I doubt Bush Jr. was the first politician to enact a popular measure (i.e., tax cut) and then force the next guy to clean up after the mess he made. And, like some other folks have said, it almost certainly wasn't Bush's design either, it just ended up happening that way.

Either way, I'm sure that within a term or two, a Republican will be back in the White House, and the same type of conversation will be had in reference to the Republicans having to scramble to pay for Obamacare. (And just to be very clear, I'm not criticizing either political party, nor am I criticizing or supporting any policies mentioned so far. Just making an observation that both parties love nothing more than to enact policies the public supports when they can make the other party "pay" for it later...)

I certainly wasn't claiming that other smartphones on the market at the time the iPhone was introduced were on par with the iPhone, from a casual user's perspective. The iPhone was incredibly polished compared to what else was out there, and countless amounts of work went into it, but does that alone make it revolutionary? It was still mostly polish (along with a web browser that made it possible to view desktop web pages, while helping to hinder the mobile web movement, kind of, but that's another story).

It's not blindness, nor is it denial. It's bewilderment. I have a Mac, and I get it. I love all the little things that they polished long before Microsoft or the Linux community started even trying to pay attention to the same things (and they're still not quite to the point where Apple is). I also have an iPod Touch and a BlackBerry. And there, I just don't get it. I use my BlackBerry far more than the iPod (yes, even for web browsing), which mostly sits in my car, plugged into the stereo. The iPhone and iPad have helped changed things, but again, I just don't think the jumps they made are as big as so many have made them out to be.

Revolutionary technology in the past three or four years? I can't think of any. You're exactly right, my standards for revolutionary technology are high. I expect revolutionary technologies to change people's lives, the way they go about their daily business. I just don't see the iPhone/iPad as having done that. Cell phones did that long before the iPhone and iPad came along. Smartphones before the iPhone were an evolved combination of cell phones and PDAs. The iPhone was the next evolution of that. Revolutionary? As I said elsewhere, most would consider it so, I'm not denying that. I just disagree with the general notion is all. It's not right, it's not wrong, it's an opinion.

You're right, no revolution is completely sparkly and new. But at what point does something become revolutionary, as opposed to evolutionary? Ultimately, it's a subjective thing. And as I said elsewhere in this thread, I *own and use* many Apple products (two laptops, iPod Touch, iPod Shuffle, AirPort Express, etc). I'm not hating on Apple, necessarily, I'm just making a point that the iPhone and iPad were logical evolutions of long-existing products. Don't be so quick to assume that I must be the stereotypical Slashdotter simply because I don't agree with the notion that the iPhone and iPad have changed everything.

I somewhat agree with this. But the iPhone *was* an improvement (in general) over the smartphones available at the time. It did no more (and often less) than phones at the time it first became available, but almost everything it did, it did very well. Apple just *does* polish things to a very high standard, but at the same time, they aren't anywhere near as advanced--compared to their competition--today as they were 3 years ago. As I said in another post, I'd say the iPhone is revolutionary in the minds of most. I think it blurs the line between evolutionary and revolutionary. Everything ever since has been a rehash of some prior product, with increasingly minor advances. And I say all this as someone who got back into the Apple game with a PowerBook in 2004 (for college), and I'm still in the Apple game with a 2008 MBP. I'm not anti-Apple, I'm just against the conventional wisdom that Apple is *still* a revolutionary company.

I don't think there was anything wrong or disingenuous about that statement.

And, actually, I meant to specifically *include* the introduction of the iPhone in that time period, so my apologies for that, as that's the last Apple product that could be considered revolutionary (I still tend to think of it as evolutionary, as there were functional touch screen phones long before the iPhone, but I also realize most would disagree with my saying that). I really did mean to include the 2007 release of the iPhone there, I'm just still adjusting to the fact it's 2011. :-)

The iPad is nothing more than an evolution of the iPhone. Hell, you could even argue that it's nothing more than a large iPhone, minus the whole phone part. And I'd certainly argue it "changing the whole computing landscape." Yes, it's sold a lot of units, but is it really changing anything? Out of everyone I know who has one, no one has given up their computer for one. Even the most ardent Apple fan in my office claims to use his iPad all the time, but only for web surfing (admittedly a large part of modern day computing, but certainly not all of it). It's much less of a game changer than the iPhone was, and my belief is that tablets will fizzle sooner or later. There's a time and place for smartphones, there's a time and place for laptops, but the niche where tablets apparently fit between the two is just that: a niche. We can talk about the sales figures as much as we want, but until tablets are as ubiquitous as either of the other two types of devices, it's wrong and disingenuous (in my opinion) to say they've changed the computing landscape.

They aren't revolutions on a technical level, that's for sure. On a business level, the Apple app store has been a success, but I have to wonder what the landscape would look like if the traditional app sales model had been applied instead. I'm not saying it would have done better, but I'm not saying it would have done worse either. It's an honest question that I wish could be answered.

On a societal level, it's certainly revolutionized things, but not necessarily for the better. (And I'm only 25, so it's not like I'm an old guy who doesn't understand how easy smartphones and the like have made things). Now get off my lawn! :-)

Oh, come on. Yes, Steve Jobs helped Apple recover from the brink of bankruptcy, but from all I've read (and I've read a lot), I've gotten the distinct impression that Apple was so poorly run from the early 90s on that anyone would have been a huge improvement. That said, I also read in Apple Confidential (great book, for those who haven't read it) that Amelio's efforts near the end of his tenure helped pave the road for the turnaround Jobs orchestrated, but I don't have the book handy to see if that was something Amelio said himself, or if it was some a (relatively) independent observer. Jobs streamlined their terribly bloated product line, providing clear delineation between consumer and professional products, scraped numerous and bloated OS development projects, et cetera. You could argue that with hindsight, they were clear decisions, but I think they would have been clear to anyone worthy of managing a company of that size. This isn't to say that Jobs isn't great at what he does, but rather that Apple's success isn't dependent upon him. Jobs is a polisher and perfectionist, traits that aren't necessarily common, but they aren't hard to find either. And let's face it: over the past three years or so, Apple hasn't released a single revolutionary product. Everything's been an evolution over existing products, and it's worked well, but it can only work for so long, with or without Jobs at the helm (and no, I don't believe Jobs is the ultimate difference maker in Apple's ability to create great products).

You have a good point, but you have to keep in mind that "real" phone lines are hardly problem-free. The number of issues I've seen in the past year with real corporate phone lines (T1 and DS3) is seemingly unbelievable, and the response from various phone companies has severely lacked in expediency and ability to understand that the problem was, in fact, on their end. And I'm not talking about VoIP and SIP circuits yet... :-)

"The reason undergrads show up is they think it's going to help their grade by being present." Well, yeah, they don't just think this. It's been my experience that in classes where attendance is required (and about half of my classes did have required attendance), that attendance counts for somewhere between 5% and 20% of the grade in the class. 5% is significant, and 20% is huge, especially just for showing up. It essentially bumped everyone up a notch or two, and made it relatively easy for people to pass the class, even if their grasp of material meant that they shouldn't have passed. No mandatory attendance, and no brownie points for showing up. The high school-ification of college needs to stop, hah.

This. Once class sizes got down to the junior- and senior-level sizes (~30 students), the laptop distraction became most prominent in classes where attendance was mandatory. The one class that springs to mind is a PHP class I had to take, and the professor required attendance (it was something like 5% or 10% of the grade). The class was mind-numbingly boring for me (and at 8 AM to boot), and had it not been for my laptop and Slashdot, I probably would have fallen asleep. It didn't matter that I didn't pay attention during class--I still managed to get the attendance points, and still managed to upset the other students by destroying the curve (yes, there was actually a curve in a college-level PHP class that didn't even talk about sanitizing inputs, parameterized SQL, etc.). A discussion about banning laptops is one that might become worthwhile once/if colleges and universities can eliminate BS classes and requirements first.

Oh, absolutely. I can't remember for sure, but I don't think BeOS could even print when I tried it. It was also a single-user system, with no (or almost no) provisions for multiple users. That said, NeXTStep wasn't perfect at the time either. The big thing NeXT had for it was it was a lot (A LOT) easier to develop for, from what I heard. But from a user's perspective, BeOS had it beat, hands down.