How about the Internet Coke Machine?

http://www.livinginternet.com/i/ia_myths_coke.htm

Yeah, nobody uses it for anything useful or anything.

Except skype.
And Afilias (the guys what run the .org and .info tlds)
And Cisco.
And the USGS.

Wait, is that really a released, supported, and ready for production version? I thought mysql was still working on getting 6.x out the door. Cool if it is.

Enterprise DB implements a 95% or so solution to the oracle compatibility thing, including plsql.

http://www.enterprisedb.com/exposure/oracle-postgres_wp-1.do

eMachines D620, just bought a new battery.

acpi -i

New Battery:
Battery 0: Unknown, 99%
Battery 0: design capacity 6600 mAh, last full capacity 6514 mAh = 98%

Old Battery:
Battery 0: Charging, 38%, 11:43:18 until charged
Battery 0: design capacity 4500 mAh, last full capacity 3564 mAh = 79%

Runs ~1.5 hours on old, about 3 hours on new.

I run a small server farm that takes up all but about 2U of a full sized rack. In this rack we have lots of different drives. They're all rated for use in servers etc against vibration, for all the good that does. Here's the failure rate over time for most of them

32x Seagate 15K5 147G SAS drives 2 have failed in ~2 years
4x Seagate 2.5" 73Gig 10krpm server drives 1 failure in ~3 years
8x WD 7200rpm 2TB SATA drives (black models) 2 dead in ~1 year
2x WD 7200rom 1TB SATA drives (black models) 0 dead in ~1 year

8x Seagate 1TB SATA 5400 RPM drives. 2 failures in 6 months.
10x Seagate 500G SATA 5400 RPM drives 4 failures in 6 months.

Lots more different drives, but none have been as much problem as these shit-tastic 500G and 1TB Seagates of late. Those drives were trash and should have never left the factory.

That's like a car that comes with the airbags in the trunk and if you install them properly you'll likely not die in a collision. Is it really that hard to make it do that all the time? It's easy enough to be disabled by the client on mysql as well. Reminds me of Bill Gates blaming most Windows crashes on users.

If you are a GPL purist, you are almost certainly not running the BSD-licensed PostgreSQL...

Either is fine by me, as long as it keeps me from having to use Cisco.

I do, and I do it well. You'd be surprised how much setting things up on linux / vyatta is to a cisco router. BGP is BGP. Of course, if you're not smart enough to use the knowledge gained from testing on the free stuff, I understand. Not everyone is.

If your boss doesn't know that employees aren't cookie cutter replacements, then you made a mistake in accepting a position under him. My boss damned well does know this, and so does his boss. Same was true for the last company I worked for. Before that I worked at a company that had a lot of higher level execs who thought like that but we luckily had a lot of good middle managers who kept us from having to interact with the idiot CIO and his team of clowns.

s/could/couldn't/

You'd be surprised how many people we interviewed who could work with the most simple of pieces of tech. No idea how to form an SQL query, no idea how to use something like yahoo's web gui libs, no idea what the difference was between passing by reference and passing by value and on and on.

We weren't looking for someone with 20 years experience, hell a high school kid with a knack for simple procedural code would do, and we had a hard time finding that.

This very much mirrors my past experience. After being laid off twice, I've had two interviews and two new jobs both times. I was very careful of where I was interviewing, and only went to interviews at places I wanted to work.

Download an iso from Vyatta and build a test network with old PCs and spare NICs for testing. Sure, it's not the exact same as Cisco, but if they're too cheap to buy the real thing for a test lab then you'll at least be somewhat close.

Then, once you realize what you're not getting for your money with Cisco, you can buyt $1000 1U servers and build your own routers (or buy them prebuilt from Vyatta for about $2000) to replace the ciscos and make a profit selling the used Ciscos on ebay.

I do NOT work for nor am I affiliated with Vyatta. But their gear is pretty impressive, and open source.