The games I play - and the only reason I am still on windows:
-Everything Blizzard makes (WoW, Diablo, Starcraft, Hearthstone, Heroes of the storm and Overwatch when it becomes available.
-Battlefield (and derivatives, including Star Wars Battelfront)

Blizzard should be able to do something since they already have support for OSX.
EA could be a bigger problem.

I spend a lot of time in steam games - and welcome all they have done for gaming on Linux. I loath wrappers though as they have a tendency to cost on perfomance an example is Civilization V on Linux is painful compared to windows on trhe same machine.

Reclaiming the early A class subnets and similar allocations would not give us that much extra addresses - maybe just enough for us to burn through in a year or two - it does not solve the fundamental proble: that the IPv4 address space is too small for the size the internet has grown to.

Reclaiming is impossible by the way. Much of that space is in use in those corps. Some internally - some externally. Migrating to a smaller address space is going to be a huge and very complex and expensive project ie. it is not going to happen - there is no incentive. IPv6 enabling services is easier and has a lot more future perspective.
Forcfully taking it back and distributing it anew will only break stuff both for the new and the old holders.

If you are not smeared across the pavement but only hit hard enough to be thrown a few meters the helmet will protect you and avoid the your scull cracks open if your skull is first when you hit the curb. (or a signpost or anything else that is not flat road)

Safe bicycle infrastructure promotes faster speeds and more confidence and feeling of ownership of the road by cyclists. These are all components that speak FOR the usage of helmets. Speeds on the danish bicycle lanes are often high enough that if you get graced by another cyclist going past you you will fall (and the curb will be very close)

In Denmark, if you get hit by a car it is by default the drivers fault - it is also an integral part of drivers education to be very much aware of cyclist when making turns - especially right turns.

I do not think helmets should be mandatory, but they should be heavily promoted and maybe even subsidized to make them more easily available. Laws could also be passed to ensure that every bike has to come with a free helmet bundled. "Use it if you like, but we are obligated to give it to you. And please read this flyer on bike safety."

Its like insurance - you don't need it until you do - and at that time it is too late to buy it (or in the case of helmets - put them on)

If you are unable to recycle old equipment into your testlab you should go virtual.

For Cisco routers, GSN3/Dynamips (www.gns3.net) is your friend. Any recent PC or laptop will allow you to build a large and complex topology that will satisfy most experiments and even support you when doing certification preparation. It will only work for routers so switch-based platforms are out (like the 3570,6500 and 7600). The good news is that the features are more or less the same and they more or less behave the same way. If "more or less" is not close enough you need a replica of your production network or at least a few devices of each to test what can be labelled as critical.

For Juniper routers, google juniper Olive. It will run a juniper router the same way dynamips runs a Cisco router.

In both cases a proactive partnership deal with the vendor will be a good idea. Both Cisco and Juniper (and I am sure all other major network vendors) have programs where they will more or less advise, test and prepare the configurations for you. If you run a critical network this is money well spent.

In the end it comes down to the level of risk your management is willing to take. Ask them if they will allow the network to be less up since you are unable to properly test your changes before implementation.

*erh* Hit the post button too fast...
Now - the price for the on call service and the work performed outside normal business hours CAN in some cases be used to dial down the amount of work. If it doesn't - well - at least you get paid well...

There is more - but I forgot...

I get paid for 40 hours of office time (or equivalent home office time) a week. Anything beyond 40 hours is extra. My hours are flexible, so I can leave two hours early one day and "earn them back" doing scheduled work during the evening or nights. If the 40 hours are already used up during the normal work week, the scheduled work outside normal business hours is extra. Extra in this case means an hourly rate of 200% of your normal rate. Minimum is 2 hours.
Our on call system means aprox. 25% of your hourly rate when you are on call and idle.
If called, the 25% falls away and you are paid similar to scheduled work (meaning 200% of the normal rate). In other companies I've been in touch with, the 25% on call compensation has also been seen as a fixed weekly base pay for the week you are on call or as a on call compensation in 6-8 hour slices that makes smaller on call lumps cheaper for the company.

It might sound much bit here is why it is a good idea to have a high pay for out of hours work:
If you work more than 40 hour weeks you become less productive, less creative and generally more prone to stress as a direct result of the amount of work
Your time away from your loved ones should really cost a lot - I mean - you are already paid to be away from them 40 hours a week - about or more than half of your time awake.
Cheap on call service from the employee will mean that management will use the on call service more often out of hours. If it is expensive - all other things being equal - management will learn to plan better. Remember that management primarily looks at cost - not employee happiness or stress levels.

I work at AT&T and was insourced from IBM a year ago where I had been for 9 years. This is Denmark - Now you know why Oprah thinks we are the happiest on the planet.

What they could do is to ship a license and copy of XP/95/98/ME/3.11/DOS with every copy of windows 7. Rework the compatibility feature to start up a new virtual machine as a wrappper for the program that doesn't work properly in windows 7. Auto detection mechanisms or white lists could remove the manual selection from the user. Repeat for every new version of windows and you can cut legacy code support and start looking forward for every new version. It is even more elegant than what apple did when they went from OS9 to OSX.

When sending your email to a large group where a large cc: list for information is not required (like corporate announcements, birthday invites and the likes) you have the option of putting everyone(!) on the bcc: list instead of the to: or cc: list and putting yourself in the to: list. This has the added bonus that the receivers cannot see the other receivers address (which I have been quite fond of during some of the mail-worm-thingies a few years back)

I installed SP1 a few hours ago The download and install took about 45 minutes in total (with lots of long pauses in the download that took nearly 25 minutes for the 65 Mb) Windows UI seem snappier. The UAC screen pops up and goes away faster World of Warcraft now has improved framerates (about double or more)