Let's get Torvalds to do it!

It's a funny thing though, isn't it? When Matt Dillon began the fork, multi-core technology was only just getting started. If you had multiple cores or multiple CPUs, it was in a server. These days, just about every laptop or home desktop has more than one core. An OS written to scale across multiple CPUs certainly has an advantage on those platforms.

Another nod to Limoncelli. "Time Management for System Administrators" really helped me handle the stress. Turns out, I needed a method to help me pick one thing to focus on at a time. He provides that. Now I don't go anywhere without my planner.

I had considered that possibility too but I believe POTS is different. It was designed to power ringers on the customer ends of a call path.

I have no mod points today but I feel I needed to tell you what a fabulously penned rant that was. You Brits... bravo, sir!

I appreciate all you've written. In fact, I agree with it. However, I'd like to point out that places like the one described by the submitter... well, they don't use DHCP. They use a spreadsheet of IP addresses... in Excel format.

This doesn't appear to exist on FreeBSD systems. I did check out a linux system though and found that I had it. It's a shell script that basically performs exactly what Ecks and I do to install our keys.

If your computer runs Windows it is probably using SNTP to simply set the clock. PCs are notoriously bad timekeepers and so the skew that you're describing is quite commonplace. The beauty of a full NTP implementation like ntpd is that, while it can be made to sync your clock, it's mostly about calculating your clock's drift so that tick intervals can be adjusted in order to obviate "hard" time synchronization. This eliminates those very wrong time readings in the hours/days before SNTP re-syncs.

Looks like 11 nines but I do agree that ATT doesn't have uptime problems.

[snip incredibly accurate account of working in healthcare IT

Almost creepy to hear you describe the situation. Your experiences so exactly match what I face each day that I had to check the userid to make sure it wasn't me who wrote that comment. I suppose I can take some solace knowing that I'm not alone.

I believe the expression is "Damn the torpedoes!"

Yeah, this is *exactly* the sort of hardware that the "cloud" providers run.

I get a kick out of the vendors that have been running control and acquisition systems on bulletproof UNIX boxes forever and now they're switching Windows XP but *leaving* the Motif user interfaces in place.

Sure, and the referring physician can drive across town to the lab and sit right in front of the blood gas analyzer to see his patient's results.

In many regions, it varies by municipality. My tap water is "blegh" as you say. Tap water in the town five miles down the road is fairly palatable. Both test within health limits but mine fails the taste test.

On a related note, most folks agree that coffee from that other town's coffee shops tastes better than from our shops.