This article was rather pointless...

Reminds me of one of my favorite bash.org quotes:

"<erno> hm. I've lost a machine.. literally _lost_. it responds to ping, it works completely, I just can't figure out where in my apartment it is."

I'm sure as machines become smaller, such events will become more frequent. . . . That is, of course, right up until we start implanting our machines directly in our brains.

I've had that happen dozens of times in my years as a sysadmin. Servers in development shops, in particular, have a habit of hiding in strange places. I once found that a regular office that hadn't been in use for about a year, and the whole team that had worked in it had long since left the company, housed a server (really just a desktop that was used as a dev server, and then became the production server when they finished developing the application) that was running one of the companies customers website and database. No one knew where it was, but it was still working so nobody had gone looking for it. It only found its way into the server room when the whole company move to another location.

It's worse when it comes to figuring out which Windows workstation is infected with a virus (they're easy to see at the gateway box, if it's a machine that can run ethereal or tcpdump). I would just unplug the fastest flashing port on the network switch and yell out, "Alright, who can't connect to the Internet?" Whoever spoke up was sitting in front of the infected host.

We had a (passingly) similar situation at my office recently: a line of boxes that had been humming along happily for as long as I've been at the company. Someone (certainly not me, oh heavens no) needed a network connection and asked around "is this box hosting anyone's project"? Getting nos all around, I (er, I mean, someone) snagged that box's cable.

Turns out it wasn't hosting anyone's project, but it WAS acting as the gateway into our network that my boss used on a daily basis.

> Unlike the often-misplaced cell phone, it can't be called so you can locate it by ring

Am I the only one here who would just SSH into their computer and play a sound file? It does have wireless... although it might be asleep.

It's a bitch to enable SSH connections on the Mac. At least, I found it so on my girlfriend's Macbook.

And, of course, if the machine is off, as a laptop that is lost is very likely to be, ssh won't answer even if you do have it enabled and accepting connections.

Apple fanboy embarasses himself. Film at 11.

I couldn't get read past the author's picture. Impossible to take him seriously. He's like a self caricature.

Actually he's the most hacker-like journalist I've met. So it's just as well you can't see the people on this site, or you'd have the same problem with most of them.

I don't mind what he looks like in real life. But it's just silly to actively try to look like a stereotype in a professional photo. As a counter-example, look at his website. He looks nerdy but in a totally normal way. He'd be better off with the photo from his webpage on the article because the context sets off the oddness. My 2 cents.

Stephen Levy is extremely well-known among technical journalists, and a genuinely nice guy. Show a little respect. He wrote Hackers, Insanely Great, Artificial Life, along with hundreds or thousands of articles in dozens of technical magazines. I suspect many of your peers here at news.YC have, at the least, gotten some inspiration from something he's written. I certainly have.

Levy wrote Hackers and Crypto. He also introduced me to a whole bunch of neat Apple II video games via his writings in the 1984 Whole Earth Software Catalog. He's awesome.