Hurd is definitely a good idea, but so far it is only that: an idea.
I have been hearing about Hurd at least since 1992 or so, ever since Linus started his project. This is 12 years now, and nothing concrete has come up yet, that can be adopted by the masses.
Don't get me wrong, I like many of the ideas and design decisions they have. But my gripe is that their model does not allow hordes of programmers to join in and get things out faster, like the Linux model.
This kind of once a year on the calendar day for appreciation is not an appropriate way of recognition.
This day is now just like other obligatory days like: Mother's day, then Father's day (why is he left out), and even the other ones like the Office Admin day.
If it does not come sincere from the person doing it, then it is not that great. The only advantage I see is that it reminds those who are nice and appreciative, but forgetful.
The search is geographically sensitive in the sense that searching from work gets me the 503 error, but from home (Ontario, Canada), I get good results (albeit using w3m as a browser).
At work we are on a corporate network that makes the connection to the internet at large for tens of thousands of employees all from one IP address out of somewhere in the midwest in the USA.
Thanks for the info. It convinced me that the upgrade is still expensive.
If I were to increase my memory to 256MB, I will need to take out the 2X64MB that are already there, and put in 2X128MB @ 54$ each. That is 108$, which is about 140$Cdn.
This is not worth it for a laptop that cost me 225$Cdn used.
I will wait for a used PIII to turn up, and get a faster CPU to boot.
However, it is a laptop (nothing beats browsing from the recliner!), and a Pentium II, which means the SODIMM will be expensive, and it is not worth it to spend the money on it to make it 256MB (the maximum it can take).
Been looking for a used PIII laptop, but nothing decent so far turned up.
Although you are basically right that radical Islamists reject Western culture, often so pathologically, your (probable) conclusion is not.
Every society is overpretective of its own culture at some point, and it has nothing to do with religion.
When a society falls under a siege mentality, or feel that it is under attack, feeling insecure about its own culture, or is undergoing social upheavels, the result is often disdain for any form of culture that is important from a perceived "other".
That "other" could be one of many things, or a combination thereof, for example, a superior culture, an imperial colonist,...etc.
Nationalist governments that are anti-religion often express the same rabid phobia from foreign cultures, because the more diverse and varied the ideas are, the more it undermines the nationalistic basis of them being superior to everyone else.
If you recall, the Soviet Union at one point forbade (or frowned upon) Western icons such as the blue jeans, chewing gum, and Rock n Roll.
You also see this within the same country, e.g. rural conservative, vs. urban liberal. Remember when Rock n Roll was called the Devil's music?
Hassan El Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood was writing his books when Egypt was occupied by the British. So, his writings were about nationalist independance, with a religious tone.
So, what you are seeing is not related to radical Islam or religion. This is basically fear of importing culture, lest it changes the present one, that took religious overtones.
NonStop was Tandem's Operating System
on
Dell CEO Tells All
·
· Score: 1
Remember that DEC (DIGITAL) was acquired by Compaq some time ago.
As for NonStop, it is was the operating system that Tandem ran on for its highly fault tolerant systems, with hardware redundancy and software fault tolerance.
They run other high availability stuff as well, like ATM networks, Point of Sale,...etc.
Tandem was acquired by Compaq before they merged with DEC.
I switched recently from MS IE to FireFox 9.0, and Thunderbird.
I have never seen a popup ad since, and spyware is almost non-existent.
I have also switched my wife's computer to FireFox.
I even switched at work as well, and briefly tested Outlook Web Access from Mozilla, and it worked fine.
At work, I found two other people who switched on their own about the same time I did, after all the exploits in MS IE were publicized. I am talking to a third person about switching his mom because of spyware problems.
I am also talking to another development group that are doing ActiveX plugins for MS IE for a client, and advising them of the pitfalls and the headaches they are getting the client into.
It is not all rosy though, there are issues:
FireFox does not display the side menus on some web sites. For example, check Al Jazeera front page in MS IE and in FireFox, and see all the stuff that it misses (at least it does not miss the marquee on the top, yuck!). By the way, Konquerer on Mandrake 10.0 renders the same web site far better than FireFox. Kind of strange.
FireFox bookmark operations (adding a bookmark, organizing,..etc.) take forever to complete. I am talking minutes! Don't know why.
Thunderbird is a memory hog on my 128MB machine. I do not run my email program all the time anymore. Only when I need to check or write email. I do not know if it is memory leaks or its usage is too much. Anyway, the switch from Outlook Express is worth it, because the mail format is no longer hostage to Microsoft.dbx format, and I can copy the mail files to my server (which I do every week), and then grep in them for the info I need from the command line.
Overall, I am happy with FireFox from the functionality, features, and usability points of view. Can't say the same about Thunderbird due to the bloat and slowing my machine to a crawl.
So I am wrong in Linus' case. And by the way, I was not trolling, like the guy from Sweden a few posts down was saying.
However, I have seen corporations impose English only names in email addresses. So if someone does have a letter that does not exist in English, they approximate it to an English character. Whether it is an accented French letter, or double A for Dutch/Nodric,..etc. e.g. Jorgensen would have that stroke, but not in his email address.
Exactly the same thing happened in the early days of the net, where non English language letters are approximated to an English letter. Even in languages that do not use the Latin alphabet at all, like Hindi and Arabic.
But as technology gets to the masses, and native support for it is more widespread, we get less use of that, and things evolve to what I said.
You are right about Finland not being Scandinavian. The Finnish language belong to the Finno-Ugric group, which is more Asian than European.
But you are wrong about Linus Torvalds, because IS ethnically and linguistically Scandinavian.
That is because he is ethnically and linguistically a Swede, who form a considerable minority in Finland, from the heyday of when the Swedes were the dominant Empire in the area.
Unless you have a majority of the visitors / participants that are multilingual capable, you have to separate the content of a web site by language.
I say this from experience on several newsgroups, then forums over the years.
It starts out simple: people who are early adopters often speak English, and can read English (e.g. programmers,...etc. who know English anyway). Then as technology spreads among the less techno-elite, people who do not know English well want to express themselves in their native language.
In languages that use a non Latin character set, there is a phase where internet communication uses Latin characters to represent their own language. I have seen at least Hindi and Arabic written in Latin alphabet, with some modifiers. (Even some Euro languages lost some characters, like Scandinavian and Germanic languages, where the "O" in Torvalds lacks the stroke in the middle, and the "A" with the small circle,..etc.)
There are various "dialects" used in these Latinized alphabets, and people learn one version or the other depending on where they learn it first.
This becomes a transitionary phase on these forums, where people will express themselves using this Latin based alphabet to represent their own language.
Then later, as their own language becomes more wide spread and accepted, more people get to use computers and the internet, and they perhaps do not know any language other than their own. This leads to them demanding that only their native language be used in forums that are about their country/society/language/...etc.
Anyone who speaks a "foreign" language in those forums is reminded that the primary language is such and such, and not to confuse others. Some take this as a matter of national pride, some take it as mere courtsey, others take it as common sense, and yet others take it as a mere form of communication. Depends on who you are, your outlook, and your biases.
That is what I have seen in several newsgroups/forums over the years.
So, this is the phase that Orkut is at right now.
Eventually, they may have to separate the content by language. Although there are barriers here, because Orkut is about "networking", and not just "discussions".
It would be interesting to see how this turf war gets resolved eventually, at least for those who are like me who like to observe the new frontiers that the internet have defined/merged/melted/setup.
P.S. In Canada for example, where there are two large groups speaking two languages, a majority of web sites give the option on what language to use at the very beginning. Forums are separated into two languages on many sites. There is a minority who are bilingual and can (and do) participate in the two camps. I imagine Hispanics in the USA, and Spanish speaking Anglos do the same on some forums.
Outside North America, Japan and South Korea (perhaps Taiwan too), the world uses the GSM standard. Most of Europe, Africa, Asia and South America are just one huge area of a single standard.
Now that GPRS (data for GSM) is widespread, people are starting to use mobile phones in different ways. I know people who chat with me over Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger using Nokia 6600, or a SonyEricsson P900. The latest fancy models have Symbian in them and semi-decent color screens that can be used for browsing, chat,...etc. Free applications abound for Symbian.
The main points for GSM is that:
The end user gets to chose the phone from ANY manufacturer, not pick from a limited selection provided by the network provider. One can change phones without changing networks, and change networks without changing phones.
Roaming is much easier, since there is just one standard among these areas.
The person I know using Nokia 6600 is happy with it so far (he has been using it for a few weeks).
The downside? The person I know who uses the Nokia is almost exclusively a Linux user. He keeps Windows on his laptop to sync the phone to it! Darn!
Whatever runs from the bash command line is good enough for me.
No bloated fancy GUI needed, can run remotely over a secure ssh connection, and has all the raw power you need.
I am not a luddite. For some tasks, I will use the GUI tool (e.g. Mandrake Control Center, or Webmin) to do things, when it is faster to do so. But the bulk of what I do is command line.
When I read the description in the original post, that was the first thing that came to my mind.
They either bought whois.sc, or got in some sort of agreement with them.
However, when I went to the whois page listed in the original post at http://www.netsol.com/cgi-bin/whois/whois, this info is not available. What gives?
When upgrading Mandrake, e.g. from 9.1 to 10.0, make sure you delete the old hdlist.cz and synthesis.* files from the previous release, and use urpmi.addmedia to add the new release media (CD) to your machine.
Here is a list of commands to do that:
# Cleanup cd/var/lib/urpmi/ rm *
# Insert CD1 in drive mount/mnt/cdrom
urpmi.addmedia "Mandrake Linux 10.0 Final CD1 (x86)" removable://mnt/cdrom/Mandrake/RPMS umount/mnt/cdrom
# Insert CD2 in drive mount/mnt/cdrom
urpmi.addmedia "Mandrake Linux 10.0 Final CD2 (x86)" removable://mnt/cdrom/Mandrake/RPMS2 umount/mnt/cdrom
# Insert CD1 in drive mount/mnt/cdrom
urpmi.addmedia "Mandrake Linux 10.0 Final CD3 (x86)" removable://mnt/cdrom/Mandrake/RPMS3
After that, you can go ahead and add whatever ftp site you want in addition to what you have.
Doing this will save you a lot of confusion and error messages.
I have been a happy use of Mandrake since 8.2. I myself use it on the basement server in text mode using ssh and screen (yeah, I am old UNIX techie). I do not need desktop applications nor a GUI on it.
Two of my kids have their own computers each, and they run Mandrake. First they had 9.1, and lately I upgraded them to 10.0 Final.
I found that the upgrade is smooth, except that it sometimes "forgets" about devices. I had to reconfigure the Ethernet cards, and the Sound as well. One of them still does not have the sound working. These are used oldish Pentium II machines with ISA PnP.
My kids are happy with Mandrake. I am happy not to chase viruses and spyware, and just upgrade once a year to the latest Mandrake distro. This is less work for me.
My own computer is a laptop, and has Windows on it so far. But I migrated recently to all free software (FireFox, ThunderBird, OpenOffice, and even Grisoft AVG) in anticipation of a full move to Linux in the future. Had it not been for one or two applications that are Windows only, and more memory needed, I would switch today.
My wife's computer is dual boot. She is an occasional user (mainly email and some browsing. I have moved her to the free suite above on Windows.
All in all, I am happy with Mandrake, and apart from the stability issues with 9.2 (which I skipped totally), I find it is a perfect distro for both desktops and servers. It takes so little time to do the care and feeding, and upgrades are mostly painless.
I guess you can attribute that perceived confusion to two reasons.:
Ambigious Terminology
Many terms lose their meaning over time, or take a new meaning altogether. This is most often seen in Corporate Marketing speak, and in Politics. Someone will use a catchy term to mean a new thing they are trying to push (for economic or political gain). Think about "user friendly" for instance, or "N-Tier" in the marketing of IT. In politics, linguistics is also used this way, as Chomsky and others pointed out. Terms lost meaning over time or come to mean something else.
Blurred Boundaries
Think about what "convergence" was about. When two things eventually become the same by merging features from both. For example, the IP protocol used to be a data only packet protocol. Voice used to be on switched circuits only. Now this is all converging with VoIP and such. The same could be underway in journalism and opinion columns with blogs being a merged form of what we now use for blogs and what op-eds are.
So, it may not be confusion after all. It could be evolution as well.
I agree with everyone here who said make it optional, or better yet a plugin. We do not need bloatware.
As for my wishlist, here goes:
Restartable Saved States
What I mean here is you are browsing in multiple tabs, and perhaps have several windows open of FireFox as well. One for news, with tabs of various articles, the other for Slashdot articles, each in a tab, the third for "read later" kinda thing,...etc.
Now you need to exit your session for some reason. Make it easy to say : "load whatever I had open when I existed the last time, windows AND tabs"
Bookmarks
I agree with others here who say that Bookmarks are unmanageable. I often have to grep the file on my server to find what I want. Anything that would make them searchable, categorizable (like Gmail "labels"),...etc. would be a great help.
And it is not only RAID and Logical Volumes locally on the box.
Things get more complex when you have things like EMC Symmetrix storage with more degrees of indirection inside it.
I/O has become more complex over the years, and some things that were specifically done to avoid I/O contention in in UNIX/Linux and in databases (e.g. Oracle) are no longer relevant.
Most of the business aspects of tape backup has been covered by previous posts. Large data centers cannot live without tape libraries AND offsite tape storage and rotation.
Those advocating RAID and such have to consider the offsite aspect.
I have been backing up my personal stuff on tape for 15 years. I used to make copies of my home directory (on UNIX) to a QIC tape that had a whopping 60 MB capacity. Later, I would use 150 MB QIC tapes. Since QIC drives were expensive, this was out of my reach at home. But there were plenty of those at work, and my stuff was on my machine at work.
When I started having Linux at home, I bought an HP Colorado 2.5GB/5GB Travan IDE tape drive. It worked well and I backed up stuff on it when my hard drive was just 2GB.
My home was broken into and the PC stolen. Those tapes came in handy, when I bought a used Seagate 10GB/20GB Travan IDE drive off eBay. I restored my home directory and everything was good to go. If I had bought another hard disk and copied stuff to it, all my data would have been gone forever! Remember that next time you say buy another disk!
I use a set of 6 tapes for weekly backup and 3 for monthly backups. The monthly ones are offsite, at a friend/co-worker's house. Even with removable hard disks, you can't justify the cost of 9 hard disks!
I use cron to start the backup on the early hours of the weekend. I even have another cron job the day before to check that the tape is inserted in the drive and that it has been rewind to the beginning of tape. The entire process is unattended, only for an email to tell me the backup is done, and to change the tape.
My backup is about 7 GB now for the home server, which contains my kids homework, my files, digital pictures, CVS repository,..etc. So there still room on the tapes.
CD-Rs are too small, and so are DVDs (one would not fit my full backup). Maybe in the future things would change, but for the forseable future, it seems tapes are here to stay.
Slashdot Mirror
Hurd is definitely a good idea, but so far it is only that: an idea.
I have been hearing about Hurd at least since 1992 or so, ever since Linus started his project. This is 12 years now, and nothing concrete has come up yet, that can be adopted by the masses.
Don't get me wrong, I like many of the ideas and design decisions they have. But my gripe is that their model does not allow hordes of programmers to join in and get things out faster, like the Linux model.
This kind of once a year on the calendar day for appreciation is not an appropriate way of recognition.
This day is now just like other obligatory days like: Mother's day, then Father's day (why is he left out), and even the other ones like the Office Admin day.
If it does not come sincere from the person doing it, then it is not that great. The only advantage I see is that it reminds those who are nice and appreciative, but forgetful.
This hypothesis (it is not really a theory) reminds me of the Raelians, and their religion that is based on "aliens started life on Earth" thing.
Whether it is Francis Crick's panspermia or Rael's aliens, this hypothesis does not solve anything:
Try Mamma, The Mother of all Search Engines.
At work we are on a corporate network that makes the connection to the internet at large for tens of thousands of employees all from one IP address out of somewhere in the midwest in the USA.
Strange thing is, Google back end seems to be running fine.
If you go to http://search.earthlink.net, you will be able to search Google just fine.
Seems like there is an article on why Google is down now.
Haven't read it yet.
When trying to search Google, I got this:
So, I used Yahoo Search (http://search.yahoo.com), which worked, but the results were crap.
Now, 20 minutes or so later, Yahoo Search is down as well.
Any idea what is happening?
Thanks for the info. It convinced me that the upgrade is still expensive.
If I were to increase my memory to 256MB, I will need to take out the 2X64MB that are already there, and put in 2X128MB @ 54$ each. That is 108$, which is about 140$Cdn.
This is not worth it for a laptop that cost me 225$Cdn used.
I will wait for a used PIII to turn up, and get a faster CPU to boot.
Yeah, I know. You are basically right.
However, it is a laptop (nothing beats browsing from the recliner!), and a Pentium II, which means the SODIMM will be expensive, and it is not worth it to spend the money on it to make it 256MB (the maximum it can take).
Been looking for a used PIII laptop, but nothing decent so far turned up.
Although you are basically right that radical Islamists reject Western culture, often so pathologically, your (probable) conclusion is not.
Every society is overpretective of its own culture at some point, and it has nothing to do with religion.
When a society falls under a siege mentality, or feel that it is under attack, feeling insecure about its own culture, or is undergoing social upheavels, the result is often disdain for any form of culture that is important from a perceived "other".
That "other" could be one of many things, or a combination thereof, for example, a superior culture, an imperial colonist, ...etc.
Nationalist governments that are anti-religion often express the same rabid phobia from foreign cultures, because the more diverse and varied the ideas are, the more it undermines the nationalistic basis of them being superior to everyone else.
If you recall, the Soviet Union at one point forbade (or frowned upon) Western icons such as the blue jeans, chewing gum, and Rock n Roll.
You also see this within the same country, e.g. rural conservative, vs. urban liberal. Remember when Rock n Roll was called the Devil's music?
Hassan El Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood was writing his books when Egypt was occupied by the British. So, his writings were about nationalist independance, with a religious tone.
So, what you are seeing is not related to radical Islam or religion. This is basically fear of importing culture, lest it changes the present one, that took religious overtones.
Remember that DEC (DIGITAL) was acquired by Compaq some time ago.
As for NonStop, it is was the operating system that Tandem ran on for its highly fault tolerant systems, with hardware redundancy and software fault tolerance.
They run other high availability stuff as well, like ATM networks, Point of Sale, ...etc.
Tandem was acquired by Compaq before they merged with DEC.
I switched recently from MS IE to FireFox 9.0, and Thunderbird.
I have never seen a popup ad since, and spyware is almost non-existent.
I have also switched my wife's computer to FireFox.
I even switched at work as well, and briefly tested Outlook Web Access from Mozilla, and it worked fine.
At work, I found two other people who switched on their own about the same time I did, after all the exploits in MS IE were publicized. I am talking to a third person about switching his mom because of spyware problems.
I am also talking to another development group that are doing ActiveX plugins for MS IE for a client, and advising them of the pitfalls and the headaches they are getting the client into.
It is not all rosy though, there are issues:
Overall, I am happy with FireFox from the functionality, features, and usability points of view. Can't say the same about Thunderbird due to the bloat and slowing my machine to a crawl.
Thanks for the correction.
So I am wrong in Linus' case. And by the way, I was not trolling, like the guy from Sweden a few posts down was saying.
However, I have seen corporations impose English only names in email addresses. So if someone does have a letter that does not exist in English, they approximate it to an English character. Whether it is an accented French letter, or double A for Dutch/Nodric, ..etc. e.g. Jorgensen would have that stroke, but not in his email address.
Exactly the same thing happened in the early days of the net, where non English language letters are approximated to an English letter. Even in languages that do not use the Latin alphabet at all, like Hindi and Arabic.
But as technology gets to the masses, and native support for it is more widespread, we get less use of that, and things evolve to what I said.
That was my main point.
You are right about Finland not being Scandinavian. The Finnish language belong to the Finno-Ugric group, which is more Asian than European.
But you are wrong about Linus Torvalds, because IS ethnically and linguistically Scandinavian.
That is because he is ethnically and linguistically a Swede, who form a considerable minority in Finland, from the heyday of when the Swedes were the dominant Empire in the area.
Unless you have a majority of the visitors / participants that are multilingual capable, you have to separate the content of a web site by language.
I say this from experience on several newsgroups, then forums over the years.
It starts out simple: people who are early adopters often speak English, and can read English (e.g. programmers, ...etc. who know English anyway). Then as technology spreads among the less techno-elite, people who do not know English well want to express themselves in their native language.
In languages that use a non Latin character set, there is a phase where internet communication uses Latin characters to represent their own language. I have seen at least Hindi and Arabic written in Latin alphabet, with some modifiers. (Even some Euro languages lost some characters, like Scandinavian and Germanic languages, where the "O" in Torvalds lacks the stroke in the middle, and the "A" with the small circle, ..etc.)
There are various "dialects" used in these Latinized alphabets, and people learn one version or the other depending on where they learn it first.
This becomes a transitionary phase on these forums, where people will express themselves using this Latin based alphabet to represent their own language.
Then later, as their own language becomes more wide spread and accepted, more people get to use computers and the internet, and they perhaps do not know any language other than their own. This leads to them demanding that only their native language be used in forums that are about their country/society/language/...etc.
Anyone who speaks a "foreign" language in those forums is reminded that the primary language is such and such, and not to confuse others. Some take this as a matter of national pride, some take it as mere courtsey, others take it as common sense, and yet others take it as a mere form of communication. Depends on who you are, your outlook, and your biases.
That is what I have seen in several newsgroups/forums over the years.
So, this is the phase that Orkut is at right now.
Eventually, they may have to separate the content by language. Although there are barriers here, because Orkut is about "networking", and not just "discussions".
It would be interesting to see how this turf war gets resolved eventually, at least for those who are like me who like to observe the new frontiers that the internet have defined/merged/melted/setup.
P.S. In Canada for example, where there are two large groups speaking two languages, a majority of web sites give the option on what language to use at the very beginning. Forums are separated into two languages on many sites. There is a minority who are bilingual and can (and do) participate in the two camps. I imagine Hispanics in the USA, and Spanish speaking Anglos do the same on some forums.
Outside North America, Japan and South Korea (perhaps Taiwan too), the world uses the GSM standard. Most of Europe, Africa, Asia and South America are just one huge area of a single standard.
Now that GPRS (data for GSM) is widespread, people are starting to use mobile phones in different ways. I know people who chat with me over Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger using Nokia 6600, or a SonyEricsson P900. The latest fancy models have Symbian in them and semi-decent color screens that can be used for browsing, chat, ...etc. Free applications abound for Symbian.
The main points for GSM is that:
The person I know using Nokia 6600 is happy with it so far (he has been using it for a few weeks).
The downside? The person I know who uses the Nokia is almost exclusively a Linux user. He keeps Windows on his laptop to sync the phone to it! Darn!
Whatever runs from the bash command line is good enough for me.
No bloated fancy GUI needed, can run remotely over a secure ssh connection, and has all the raw power you need.
I am not a luddite. For some tasks, I will use the GUI tool (e.g. Mandrake Control Center, or Webmin) to do things, when it is faster to do so. But the bulk of what I do is command line.
Yes, interesting indeed.
Many people love that platform, and inertia has a lot of influence on many people. Why move if what you have works? "If it works, don't fix it".
In the future though, things will be different. The CPU speed or RAM capacity of those machines will not be enough. So they will move.
Until then, they are happy though.
When I read the description in the original post, that was the first thing that came to my mind.
They either bought whois.sc, or got in some sort of agreement with them.
However, when I went to the whois page listed in the original post at http://www.netsol.com/cgi-bin/whois/whois, this info is not available. What gives?
When upgrading Mandrake, e.g. from 9.1 to 10.0, make sure you delete the old hdlist.cz and synthesis.* files from the previous release, and use urpmi.addmedia to add the new release media (CD) to your machine.
Here is a list of commands to do that:
After that, you can go ahead and add whatever ftp site you want in addition to what you have.
Doing this will save you a lot of confusion and error messages.
I have to concur with this.
I have been a happy use of Mandrake since 8.2. I myself use it on the basement server in text mode using ssh and screen (yeah, I am old UNIX techie). I do not need desktop applications nor a GUI on it.
Two of my kids have their own computers each, and they run Mandrake. First they had 9.1, and lately I upgraded them to 10.0 Final.
I found that the upgrade is smooth, except that it sometimes "forgets" about devices. I had to reconfigure the Ethernet cards, and the Sound as well. One of them still does not have the sound working. These are used oldish Pentium II machines with ISA PnP.
My kids are happy with Mandrake. I am happy not to chase viruses and spyware, and just upgrade once a year to the latest Mandrake distro. This is less work for me.
My own computer is a laptop, and has Windows on it so far. But I migrated recently to all free software (FireFox, ThunderBird, OpenOffice, and even Grisoft AVG) in anticipation of a full move to Linux in the future. Had it not been for one or two applications that are Windows only, and more memory needed, I would switch today.
My wife's computer is dual boot. She is an occasional user (mainly email and some browsing. I have moved her to the free suite above on Windows.
All in all, I am happy with Mandrake, and apart from the stability issues with 9.2 (which I skipped totally), I find it is a perfect distro for both desktops and servers. It takes so little time to do the care and feeding, and upgrades are mostly painless.
Give it a try. You will not regret it.
I guess you can attribute that perceived confusion to two reasons.:
Many terms lose their meaning over time, or take a new meaning altogether. This is most often seen in Corporate Marketing speak, and in Politics. Someone will use a catchy term to mean a new thing they are trying to push (for economic or political gain). Think about "user friendly" for instance, or "N-Tier" in the marketing of IT. In politics, linguistics is also used this way, as Chomsky and others pointed out. Terms lost meaning over time or come to mean something else.
Think about what "convergence" was about. When two things eventually become the same by merging features from both. For example, the IP protocol used to be a data only packet protocol. Voice used to be on switched circuits only. Now this is all converging with VoIP and such. The same could be underway in journalism and opinion columns with blogs being a merged form of what we now use for blogs and what op-eds are.
So, it may not be confusion after all. It could be evolution as well.
Just a thought.
As for my wishlist, here goes:
What I mean here is you are browsing in multiple tabs, and perhaps have several windows open of FireFox as well. One for news, with tabs of various articles, the other for Slashdot articles, each in a tab, the third for "read later" kinda thing, ...etc.
Now you need to exit your session for some reason. Make it easy to say : "load whatever I had open when I existed the last time, windows AND tabs"
I agree with others here who say that Bookmarks are unmanageable. I often have to grep the file on my server to find what I want. Anything that would make them searchable, categorizable (like Gmail "labels"), ...etc. would be a great help.
I hear ya!
And it is not only RAID and Logical Volumes locally on the box.
Things get more complex when you have things like EMC Symmetrix storage with more degrees of indirection inside it.
I/O has become more complex over the years, and some things that were specifically done to avoid I/O contention in in UNIX/Linux and in databases (e.g. Oracle) are no longer relevant.
Things have come a long way.
Most of the business aspects of tape backup has been covered by previous posts. Large data centers cannot live without tape libraries AND offsite tape storage and rotation.
Those advocating RAID and such have to consider the offsite aspect.
I have been backing up my personal stuff on tape for 15 years. I used to make copies of my home directory (on UNIX) to a QIC tape that had a whopping 60 MB capacity. Later, I would use 150 MB QIC tapes. Since QIC drives were expensive, this was out of my reach at home. But there were plenty of those at work, and my stuff was on my machine at work.
When I started having Linux at home, I bought an HP Colorado 2.5GB/5GB Travan IDE tape drive. It worked well and I backed up stuff on it when my hard drive was just 2GB.
My home was broken into and the PC stolen. Those tapes came in handy, when I bought a used Seagate 10GB/20GB Travan IDE drive off eBay. I restored my home directory and everything was good to go. If I had bought another hard disk and copied stuff to it, all my data would have been gone forever! Remember that next time you say buy another disk!
I use a set of 6 tapes for weekly backup and 3 for monthly backups. The monthly ones are offsite, at a friend/co-worker's house. Even with removable hard disks, you can't justify the cost of 9 hard disks!
I use cron to start the backup on the early hours of the weekend. I even have another cron job the day before to check that the tape is inserted in the drive and that it has been rewind to the beginning of tape. The entire process is unattended, only for an email to tell me the backup is done, and to change the tape.
My backup is about 7 GB now for the home server, which contains my kids homework, my files, digital pictures, CVS repository, ..etc. So there still room on the tapes.
CD-Rs are too small, and so are DVDs (one would not fit my full backup). Maybe in the future things would change, but for the forseable future, it seems tapes are here to stay.