The Computer Science department has been using its primary machine roomfor at least 25 years, and it's a proper machine room, complete with araised floor. (People with the right sort of experience are now wincing.)

The problem is best illustrated by an anecdote: we just recently tookout some hybrid 208V plus 120V power circuits that we believe were putin to power old Vaxes (which would make them obsolete for going on 20years). We didn'

WanderingThoughts has been pretty free of successful comment spamattempts for a while, so I think it's about time to write up all ofthe various things I'm currently doing to stop comment spammers.

(I'm not worried about comment spammers reading this and working past myprecautions, because I'm confidant that comment spammers don't botherreading the blogs they spam.)

First off, I get a big leg up by being neither popular nor using commonsoftware. This basically reduces the comment spammers

There's a widespread view that a good way of deprecating something isto have the new version of your project emit warning messages when itruns across code using whatever you're getting rid of. The theory goesthat this is pretty harmless; the people using the to be removed featurewill get notified about the situation but can fix their code at relativeleisure, because things still work.

As a working Unix system administrator, allow me to disagree violently.To sysadmins, a program's output or its lack