These have been around for ages. I started working in semiconductor layout circa 1993. General Instrument was one player who had tons of these "doodles". Rumor was that it was so they could see which chips people were inspecting (for cracking) by the mention of the doodles.

I/we (my team) at my company used to put them on chips until one bozo (hello Kurt...) put an lvsmask tag on his doodle which cause the LVS tool (layout vs. schematic) verification tool to ignore his doodle which was shorting the power and ground rails on the chip. After that fiasco, we were told "no more of that" :(

There are 100 keys as it's known in the industry - aka 100 rooms, not 200.

It's a 45 hour experience, of which a large portion takes place in DHS where you can purchase entry for ~$150/person and experience the same stuff.

The value just is not there when you consider that you:
1) Check-in at 4:00pm on day one.
2) Spend a large chunk of day two at DHS, which you could purchase much cheaper even with ILL for Rise of the Resistance.
3) You check-out by 10:00am on the last day.
4) In between, you're sleeping

Looking at that 'schedule' above, is it any wonder that it's not worth the money?

That's definitely Waymo money!

I could see that. What we take for "modern living" is not always better than the simpler days your grandfather remembers. There's a reason that books/movies like Swiss Family Robinson have a certain appeal for some of us -- living to live, not to race with your neighbor.

I remember a joke/parable/whatever it's called I heard many years ago. I won't write the whole thing, but it basically involved a New York stock broker talking to a local native fishing on the beach in Mexico for food. The broker asked the guy why he had no ambition and why didn't he work harder, get a job, move around, back stab people, and climb the corporate ladder for the next 40 years. When the native asked him "why?", the guy said "so you can get rich, retire to Mexico and spend your days fishing on the beach."

Sometimes, people already have what they need, but just don't see it.

They aren't that hard to find:

http://www.belkin.com/IWCatProductPage.process?Product_Id=377018

http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=643

http://www.trendnet.com/products/proddetail.asp?prod=160_TEW-673GRU&cat=137

They just aren't the el cheapo models...

And, that would boost the airline revenue thanks to checked baggage fees! Win! erm... nevermind...

Reading all of these comments on these 00ber-worms really parallels a book called Zero Day that I'm reading. It's fairly entertaining so far, just in case anyone else is interested in a story revolving around Stuxnet/Duqu type stuff. It's probably old news around here, but anyway...

Yes, because PC doesn't necessarily mean Wintel -- it means Personal Computer as well. One particular flavor of the Personal Computer happens to be the IBM PC, which features the xxx86 architecture. Remember, the concept of a "personal computer" came from the days when the big iron was locked-up in universities and companies, so it was a revolution to make a computer one could own personally, hence the phrase. This "2006" Atmel based computer is very certainly a "personal computer" since you build and own it.

BootCamp does work well, but let's not forget the $150+ Winbloze license that's required. That's what's keeping me from installing BC on my new MBA. :(

However, if you have the license/KMS/MAK/whatever to make Winbloze function, I do recommend BC to play games if nothing else.

Thanks for the tip - I've been considering getting a new router and your comment gave me a good starting point for digging around. Got a WNDR-3700 on the way!

He was 99.99% likely referring to migrating a live VM to another host, not imaging your desktop to another hard drive. In the enterprise, downtime is often not well tolerated (not something I agree 100% but whatever) and live migration (aka VMware VMotion for example) enables you to take a virtualization host and vacate all of the *still running* VMs off to another host when you need to do maintenance or whatever else to the physical hardware. In the case of VMotion, there is a loss of about one ping on the network while the VM execution is cut-over to the new host, but otherwise, all network connections/etc. remain persistent.

It's very handy stuff, but not something someone who's only familiar with home user or individually installed boxes may be familiar with. It's definitely not just using 'dd'.

Here's a guy who's written-up a simple way to hack one of the files using Perl so that TRIM will work on any drive. I would prefer this over the application (see his page for info on why):

http://digitaldj.net/2011/07/21/trim-enabler-for-lion/

Looking at my current queue, I have 106 DVD-only movies, and 60 streaming (streaming may have TV series condensed whereas DVD shows them as multiple entries).

That's not a great ratio IMO and many of the movies on my DVD list are not that "oddball" at all. Things like Leverage, Burn Notice, the new Wall Street, Inception, The Unit, The Social Network, Transformers (new), etc. (and no comments about the quality of the movies listed -- they're in my queue because I haven't seen them...)

Of course, I have a couple dozen educational documentaries and the other 'oddball' stuff which I had in mind when I submitted the head article as well.

Until they can at least get 90% coverage on streaming, I can make the case for still needing the occasional disc. After all, part of the enjoyment I get out of Netflix is *NOT* having to rent only the "top 10 new releases" and other crap like Walletbuster used to be packed with...

If CNN is accurate, that's a 10X increase in their costs, which presumably Netflix would have to pass-on. There's no way that anybody would pay $79.99 for streaming ($7.99 * 10) and the content industry will be like a parasite that gets too greedy and kills the host that feed it...