Satya's blog - Digital fortress

I'm reading Dan Brown's Digital Fortress, which is all about computers and cryptohgraphy. It's Brown's usual mix of fact and fiction, only this time I know what's what. The story is good, but it has little grounding in reality. What kind of sysadmin performs maintenance and upgrades by soldering chips into a computer, on his back, in the 21st century? (Where the solder can fall onto his face, no less!) It's very interesting as long as I pretend it's all in a parallel universe.