So how does it taste?

At the University I work for no one cares except HR. Most of the time I'm taking off for Christmas is sick time and my boss knows and doesn't care.

The school where I work has a layer 7 firewall implemented that just blocks all P2P traffic (BT, Kazaa, etc.). If a teacher has a legit/teaching use for it we can unblock it for their IP/computer lab. Yeah, it's annoying since I can't update WoW from work anymore, but it's mostly been a "set it and forget it" solution for us.

My office is on the tail end of a loop. Everyone else in the loop freezes to death and runs electric space heaters during the summer. I have a couple of file servers in my office and would kill to be the first in the loop. When I first started I called our central plant to get the A/C turned down but they had to do it for the whole loop so I ended up freezing 6 other people out of their offices. So I just get to bake instead.

How about the fact that there was never really any serious tension? The Star Wars prequels made telling the backstory mildly interesting (Jar Jar Binks not included) even though you knew what was ultimately going to happen. It's not like anyone thought Obi Wan Kenobi wouldn't survive his fight with Anakin at the end of Episode 3. Caprica had too much existing backstory to deal with. You knew that no matter what happened there would be a decades-long peace with the Cylons and then they would destroy the colonies. They never built up any tension and the show got boring.

I seem to recall Apple getting a lot of flack over the fact that Snow Leopard shipped with an out of date version of Flash. Now they're getting crap for not shipping Flash and encouraging people to download the latest version themselves.

Pick a complaint already.

I was actually talking to my wife about this last night. I'd print out the Wikipedia pages on some of the largest tech companies in existence today, then go back to 1982 and go nuts buying stock.

I should clear some things up. 1000 computers is the total supported. At any given time only a few are being replaced. That $1000 includes a pretty generous warranty and monitor. The warranty is pretty much a given with Dell as they don't sell parts for their computers very long on their website. We get about 5 years out of a computer and the 18 month reference was so we minimize the number of configurations floating around. If a machine breaks, we can say it's config 2010 and pull a part from that shelf. Also, consider that we already have staff and it would be considered "soft time."

It really depends on what kind of volume you expect to come through your shop. I work for a university where we have an on-campus shop that builds our desktops and it definitely has its ups and downs. One significant problem we have is in build quality we see during summer when our orders ramp up. That's when lab managers across campus plan lab replacements and the problem is that if we don't put our orders in starting in March/April they just can't build fast enough to deliver the machines in time for us to have them installed and setup for fall semester (secondary problem is that they delivered 70 machines to me in June, when I wouldn't be able to put them in place until mid-August, I had to find a place to put 70 full desktops with monitors, mice, etc). The reason the build quality slips is that the shop manager hires extra help during the summer to try and cope with the additional demand. Warranty-wise we're typically okay and we've got about 1,500 of our on-campus built machines deployed.

The other issue we have is that we often can't sit on hardware for too long. Hard drives, processors, and RAM aren't typically a big deal but we have real issues with staying on the same motherboard for more than about 6 months. Hardware gets revved, or something else stupid happens and we can't get the board we've standardized on, then it takes us about 6 weeks if we fast track our testing. Motherboard changes sound like they're not a big deal, but we've gotten boards in that we couldn't image with our imaging software, or other strange issues that are specific to the model (as opposed to a one-off bad motherboard). Also don't forget that you're going to have to start handling your own RMAs versus having Dell do it for you.

So, it's generally worked fairly well, but some of the lab managers (myself included) have sworn off any more mass orders from our on-campus shop. The main reason being that they can't keep up with the demand when we switch out our labs. We're looking at keeping 1 to 10 machine orders on campus, but anything larger than that we might divert to Dell as they have a lower failure rate on the few large orders we have done with them, and their next business day service is straight up better than anything our on-campus shop can hope to match - that's a logistics and manpower issue for them, they just can't respond as quickly to repair requests as our local Dell depot can.

For longevity, current backup systems are just silly. They are simply just not abstracted enough. For REAL archival what's needed is an active system like the Internet but one that guarantees n redundancy. Perhaps a p2p like system with nodes backing up files. This abstracts away whether they are going on SATA, IDE, SCSI, Tape, whatevs. The local machine handles all the hardware details. When newer, better, cheaper technology comes along, the old data is automatically able to propagate onto the new storage mechanisms. I see this all the time working in the IT industry. I have backups from 10 years ago I can not read because we no longer have a working tape drive to read it. We need to separate ourselves from the hardware.

I live in Utah. I have for most of my life. I have never...ever...voted for Orrin Hatch. The man is an idiot. It's gray haired straight part ticket republicans that are keeping him in office. No one under 40 wants him to be reelected yet it keeps happening. He doesn't represent my interests, or the interests of most of his constituency any more. He's bought and paid for by the RIAA/MPAA.

That totally did not occur to me. That actually makes a lot of sense.

I'd love to see the total price of goods reflected on the price tag instead of the check stand. Gasoline is sold that way, but I don't think it has sales tax, there are state and federal taxes that apply specifically to gas. It's a percentage tax, so I don't see why they can't put tax on the tag. Probably some stupid marketing thing. I know they do it at movie theaters where I live - the concessions and tickets have taxes already included in the price.

It depends on your situation. Your average home user is probably behind a router that SHOULD protect against most casual attacks, and an enterprise user SHOULD be behind an enterprise-class firewall. In theory you don't need a desktop firewall in either situation. But let's look at a real world example now:

I work for a university with ~32,000 students and we've got roughly 3,000 computers on campus that are owned by the school. We have an excellent firewall protecting our network from the Internet. We also have a wireless network with a few VLANs set aside for it that the students, faculty, staff, guests, etc are free to use. Now let's assume that none of the computers on campus are running a firewall since "Hey, we've got one protecting the whole school." A lot of faculty and staff also have laptops with docking stations and they move freely from wireless to wired networks, not to mention using these computers at home, on trips, in coffee shops, etc. Now lets say that someone gets infected with a virus - pick any of those people, it doesn't really matter. Then their machine connects to the wireless network and manages to infect a bunch of machines since they aren't running firewalls and have out of date AV definitions (happens a lot more than you think). Some of those machines then end up being put into docking stations and start pushing the virus out on their subnet as well as any others they can manage to get to. Internal security isn't as much of a concern so traffic between subnets doesn't have to get through the firewall. Suddenly one student computer with a virus turns into an infection that affects the whole campus.

This sounds like some sort of made up perfect storm situation but we had almost EXACTLY this issue crop up a few years ago. An infected thumb drive spread a virus (don't remember which one off the top of my head) to half the campus in less than a day.