Its more marketable than 'pure' linux because there is a large company supporting it, as opposed to an amorphous community which technically doesn't have anything really tying it together beyond the OS.
True.. "Pure" Linux is an amorphous mass. But just compare *ONE* Linux company (RedHat) to Sun in terms of market cap:
And RedHat just represents *ONE* Linux company. There are many out there. IBM and Oracle both support Linux. Linux has a much larger commercial support base than does Solaris or OpenSolaris.
Solaris is superior as a server OS. But for a desktop Laptop OS... Why?
I loved Solaris too. Knowing SunOS paid for my first house and first car. I used to maintain multiple enterprise systems all by my lonesome self. This included a mass of 450s and a couple 6500s.
Unfortunately, Sun seems to have lost their mojo. Solaris was once much better, much more reliable than Linux. When LVM was still trashing LVs under capacity loads, Sun had super-stable Veritas file systems. When Linux were marvelling at 4-processor systems, Sun was pushing out 64-way machines. At the time, Linux NFS was non-standard and failed under high load. Sun's NFS implementation was rock solid.
Then PCs grew up. And Linux grew up along with it.
There's a well-known chart that talks about the reason why Microsoft continues to add features (and bloat) to their products. The reason is competition. If they don't add features, then other products with fewer features can become "good enough" for what a user (er, consumer) needs. If Microsoft didn't continually add new features, users will ask themselves why they are paying a price premium for something they can do for free or at a much reduced cost.
But Sun went on another track. They decided they didn't want to court that rapidly advancing Linux horde. They missed out on the low-end server market by casting doubt on the future of their x86 Solaris product. They started hoarding their IP portfolio, forgetting their history. In all this time, Linux was getting "good enough".
Good enough, in fact, to steal away the web server market. Good enough to steal away the edge-of-network market. Good enough to steal away the low-end database market. Good enough to steal away the high-end workstation market. All these were Sun's markets. All gone. I know this because I used Sun boxes in these capacities.
At my company the last enterprise Sun box went away almost 18 months ago. We're pushing Linux to supplement our AIX systems now. And Linux excels. It's stable. It's supported. It's cheap. And it's doing what the Sun box did for $50,000 more.
I run Linux on the desktop and it works wonderfully for me. I edit my photos, create hdr images, watch DVDs, run Maple on occasion, test perl and java code for my job. I use Windows to do some video editing.
Every so often someone comes up to me and complains that they can't get some random Linux distro to work on their brand spanking new laptop. I help them out. But then they complain when they they can't understand Gimp or tell me that their Windows machine plays quicktime fine.
I really don't give a rat's ass if it doesn't work for them. It works like a charm for me. If Linux one day rules the computing world I won't stand in its way, but I can't stand these pundits and other idiots who think that the Linux community owes them a mass appeal desktop.
Years ago aluminum was more expensive than gold. The refining process was so difficult that, though aluminum was one of the most common metals, the yield was in grams. Then someone invented a new extraction process. Aluminum suddenly became cheap.
Carbon is not so rare. It may not happen soon, but there may be a time when common items such as ICs or even cell phones cases are made from diamonds. Instead of measuring by carat, they'll measure it by ounces or inches.
Soon the DeBeers of the world will start touting the benefits of their diamonds versus the Canadian diamonds. Maybe the Canadian diamonds are too pure, or too northern for diamonds to grow properly.. Or maybe traces of some rare element in the DeBeers mines leads to more beautiful diamonds. Or Canadians speak funny, so their diamonds are gauche.
It's so funny to see when an empire based on marketing slowly crumbles...
I personally think it's an awesome idea. Let me tell you why.
A few years ago I wrote a great book. It would have sold a billion copies, but alas, no one else thought it was worth reading. If we can set a precedent with this music business, then we can do the same for books. As an author and a published (because I self-published 20 volumes) I should be entitled to a cut of the proceeds when we start taxing universities for students that copy ebooks. It's the logical next step.
I'm also an amazing artist, the Michael Phelps of the art world. Alas, no one has bought my work "Ruled 8x11 Sheet of Paper" and instead, millions of so-called printers are infringing my copyrights.
I love zombie movies. Good zombie movies are great, once you find them every few years. Poor zombie movies are the norm. It's rare to find something as painful as JSVH.
I saw it last week. To support the parent post, the Netflix WatchInstantly selections are pretty bleak. Within a month (this is my first month, in fact), I've already exhausted everything that I wanted to see.
Re:Amen with the crashed systems.
on
Nmap Network Scanning
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I used to work at a (now defunct) flower company. My office was glass walled, overlooking the entire sales floor. One day I was testing Samba on a small desktop machine. I remember starting up nmbd/smbd. Then moments later, I looked into the sales pit and saw people getting up, the Win95 workstations had begun to bluescreen one by one. I didn't connect the two.
A half hour later everyone has rebooted. In that time I'd turned off Samba to work on something else. I restart Samba on that little machine (it was called Stargate because it would act as a gateway to some shares on a Sun E6500). The moment I press enter, the machines start bluescreening again. I realized just at that moment what happened and immediately shut it down.
Prices: Newegg consistently undercut CompUSA by huge amounts. At one point I was looking for a flash drive. Found one at Newegg for $40 with free shipping. At CompUSA it was $80.
Poor selection: Walked in to buy a Firewire card. None in stock. Needed a powered USB hub that can also operate unpowered. None in stock, not even in another store. Needed some SATA cables. None in stock. These are the types of items that should be there all the time to snag the walk-ins.
Clueless staff: Tried to buy a serial null modem cable (rs-232). The sales guy kept giving me various USB cables.
Useless staff: I needed a hard drive. The sales guy was busy checking out customers with a set of cheap binoculars.
Loss of focus: Cheap binoculars in a computer store??
(And no, the last item wasn't some attempt at clever word play. It happened to me at the Pembroke Pines store in South Florida. That day was my last visit to a CompUSA until that store closed and I went looking for closeouts.)
Funny thing.. I ordered an XP netbook and wiped it to put Linux on it.. Why? The XP version had more extras (memory, better webcam) because of incentives.
Truly a case where everyone wins. Microsoft gets to claim their OS dominance. The retailer gets a sale. I get better hardware and the knowledge that the Beast of Redmond subsidized my purchase.
That relationship has always kicked me. The realization that we can discover things about the physical universe by doing mathematics is earth shattering. I sometimes wish that I had the necessary mathematics to even comprehend what the summaries are talking about because I get the feeling that we are at the crux of something huge.
There's a (probably apocryphal) story about the US car manufacturing industry. When some Japanese companies decided to build over here the company execs wanted to make sure that the same level of quality from the Japanese plants were retained in the USA. To that goal they implemented a bunch of newer controls and QA methods. The result was that the USA factories ended up putting out better cars than the Japanese factories. The controls were then put in place across the entire company.
Code is not like cars however, but you can still use tools to gauge the aspects of the relative quality of the code.
Imagine a scenario with a karma system: the more veteran programmers get assigned to the more critical projects. Alas, because they are "vetted" their code is not scrutinized as often as someone else working on a lesser project. The potential for failure is increased which is opposite of what was intended.
I'm not saying that will happen; the idea of a karma system is good (hehe, a similar one exists called the "salary" system where better programmers get better pay), but there are pitfalls in any system.
Having had a couple years of getting my ass kicked in karate and kung fu classes, I've always wondered how some of the more ritualized exercises came to be. There are katas that seem completely bizarre and that would leave oneself open to injury both from the opponent and from the physical contortions required to perform them. But maybe some ancient master realized that the easiest way to remember certain moves was to attach it to a mnemonic.
It is quite effective to use physical and mental cues to recall a memory. Maybe dance could change the way we approach education. Instead of rote memorization, we could supplement it with physical movements. Imagine learning calculus this way... I could work with a classical ballerina and lie tangent to her curves. Or maybe demonstrate a saddle point with a rodeo-like demonstration. The possibilities are endless...
A computer with a good mouse-only interface works. The kids at the playschool and daycare center (around 3 yrs old) already can use this Mr. PotatoHead game (of course, they also have real Mr. PotatoHead games too). It's actually somewhat eerie to see them in front of the computer. They are enthralled by it. They look like the Borg sometimes.. monitor twice as big as them, mouse bigger than their hands...
If you prefer command line, try nmon. Originally for AIX, but there's a Linux port. Works well. On a large green-on-black terminal it looks pretty cool:D
Or remember that scene in Apocalypse Now! where they shoot the woman in the boat?
Or that scene in Heart of Darkness where they shell the coastline?
We can either subscribe to the notion that we can have a "civil" war, or dispense with that notion entirely and just bomb the mothers from orbit.
But we can't have both.
Trying to apologize for the killing of civilians is dastardly. Either be outright and say, "That's the price for waging war," or just stop sending missiles to residences.
Automated killing machines were banned at the Geneva convention. This is generally a good thing when we're sending real, live humans (versus the walking undead) to fight our wars. It would be completely inhumane (haha) and tilt the outcome of a war towards those who can afford to develop such technology. That is, if one country can afford killer robots and another can't, then the former has no deterrent to invading the latter.
But imagine if all wars were fought by proxy. Instead of sending people, we send machines. Let the machines battle it out. To be really civil we should also limit the power and effectiveness of our killer robots, and the number of machines that can enter the battlefield at once. Of course, at some point every country will be able to build to the maximum effective specification. At that point it will be a battle of strategy. The next obvious step is to do away with the machines entirely and just get a chessboard.
Virtualization is the way to go for dev/test. You can build out machines quickly, tear them down, revert to a previous configuration, etc.. Though you can do the same with physical hardware, it's not as resource efficient.
My test/dev environment consists of two AMD 64-bit machines with 6G-8G apiece and about 500G of hard drive space. The base OS is CentOS 5.2 running Xen machines. It allows me to build separate web/app/db systems to mirror what a production setup would look like. Also, for Oracle development you can get a better idea of how things like RAC will look. I'm also running DRBD volumes between the physical machines which allows me to experiment with HA clusters.
Nice things to have (whether virtual or not) is to set up a central build host and LDAP server. For this, I created a virtual machine on my production server with FTP and HTTP access. I loaded all my CentOS, RedHat and other distros there. For CentOS/RedHat, for example, I loopback mount the ISOs to/var/ftp/pub/centos_5.2_x86 and put all the kickstart images in/var/ftp/ks. I can then build out a VM machine from scratch with just a command by doing a network install. For the LDAP server I used Fedora DS (or CentOS DS). The kickstart is set to use LDAP automatically. Finally, just install the autodir package with a standard config. You can then login to a new virtual machine moments after it's complete.
The central server can also house your source code repository. I'm using CVS for some projects and Subversion for others.
Funny thing... The problem is often not draconian and overzealous IT, but alas, a small subset of users who abuse the system. Ninety percent of users may use the Internet at work responsibly, but there's that ten percent that will run a second business, browse porn, read slashdot (oh crap). For various reasons, a company may not be able to enforce rules on a subset of the userbase (for HR and technical reasons) so everyone must suffer.
Depending on how you define "soul", you could argue that machines are more likely to have souls. We're just meat, thinking meat, and once we die it's not provable that our consciousness can carry on. Machines, on the other hand, can more easily download their "mind" (if there is such a thing) to another vessel. They are, in essence, immortal.
The majority of the CPAN catalog works fine *ONCE* you install a GCC-built perl. If you use the XlC built perl then be prepared for a nightmare of troubleshooting Makefiles.
IBM supports AIX quite well. We have enterprise support here and it's pretty good.
SMITTY is ugly, but I think it's a good tool. The best feature is that it constructs the command line commands rather than trying to modify configuration files or re-write the tools. This means that anything that you can do via smitty can be easily scripted even if you don't have much AIX experience.
For some workloads Linux will kick the pants of AIX. For others, especially those that require high throughput, the story is different. AIX on pSeries can move massive amounts of data, more so than a similarly configured PC based server.
AIX has some awesome disk tools. I use Linux on a daily basis, but the Linux tools are not yet at the same level as AIX. The current state of LVM is about where Veritas was a couple years ago. This is still enterprise quality (and free, dammit), but generally not as easy to use as AIX.
And yes, I also administer AIX, but have been running Linux in production for more than a decade.
The new BSG Starbuck is kind of hot. She's not a guy.
I've watched every episode of TOS and TNG. I have a communicator lapel pin. I have a phaser to exercise my cat. The startup sound on my PC used to be "To boldly go where no man has gone before.. SWOOOOSH."
The problem is that there's so much cruft in it already. We already know that there are problems with timelines and plot devices. Would you rather they make up some nonsense about some freak event that changed how an alien race appears or start from scratch? Yes, the original canon is old and loved, but there are so many problems trying to please the rabid fan base that the STORY can no longer be told.
Slashdot Mirror
Its more marketable than 'pure' linux because there is a large company supporting it, as opposed to an amorphous community which technically doesn't have anything really tying it together beyond the OS.
True.. "Pure" Linux is an amorphous mass. But just compare *ONE* Linux company (RedHat) to Sun in terms of market cap:
Sun
RedHat
And RedHat just represents *ONE* Linux company. There are many out there. IBM and Oracle both support Linux. Linux has a much larger commercial support base than does Solaris or OpenSolaris.
Solaris is superior as a server OS. But for a desktop Laptop OS... Why?
I loved Solaris too. Knowing SunOS paid for my first house and first car. I used to maintain multiple enterprise systems all by my lonesome self. This included a mass of 450s and a couple 6500s.
Unfortunately, Sun seems to have lost their mojo. Solaris was once much better, much more reliable than Linux. When LVM was still trashing LVs under capacity loads, Sun had super-stable Veritas file systems. When Linux were marvelling at 4-processor systems, Sun was pushing out 64-way machines. At the time, Linux NFS was non-standard and failed under high load. Sun's NFS implementation was rock solid.
Then PCs grew up. And Linux grew up along with it.
There's a well-known chart that talks about the reason why Microsoft continues to add features (and bloat) to their products. The reason is competition. If they don't add features, then other products with fewer features can become "good enough" for what a user (er, consumer) needs. If Microsoft didn't continually add new features, users will ask themselves why they are paying a price premium for something they can do for free or at a much reduced cost.
But Sun went on another track. They decided they didn't want to court that rapidly advancing Linux horde. They missed out on the low-end server market by casting doubt on the future of their x86 Solaris product. They started hoarding their IP portfolio, forgetting their history. In all this time, Linux was getting "good enough".
Good enough, in fact, to steal away the web server market. Good enough to steal away the edge-of-network market. Good enough to steal away the low-end database market. Good enough to steal away the high-end workstation market. All these were Sun's markets. All gone. I know this because I used Sun boxes in these capacities.
At my company the last enterprise Sun box went away almost 18 months ago. We're pushing Linux to supplement our AIX systems now. And Linux excels. It's stable. It's supported. It's cheap. And it's doing what the Sun box did for $50,000 more.
I run Linux on the desktop and it works wonderfully for me. I edit my photos, create hdr images, watch DVDs, run Maple on occasion, test perl and java code for my job. I use Windows to do some video editing.
Every so often someone comes up to me and complains that they can't get some random Linux distro to work on their brand spanking new laptop. I help them out. But then they complain when they they can't understand Gimp or tell me that their Windows machine plays quicktime fine.
I really don't give a rat's ass if it doesn't work for them. It works like a charm for me. If Linux one day rules the computing world I won't stand in its way, but I can't stand these pundits and other idiots who think that the Linux community owes them a mass appeal desktop.
Years ago aluminum was more expensive than gold. The refining process was so difficult that, though aluminum was one of the most common metals, the yield was in grams. Then someone invented a new extraction process. Aluminum suddenly became cheap.
Carbon is not so rare. It may not happen soon, but there may be a time when common items such as ICs or even cell phones cases are made from diamonds. Instead of measuring by carat, they'll measure it by ounces or inches.
Heheh... I wish.
Soon the DeBeers of the world will start touting the benefits of their diamonds versus the Canadian diamonds. Maybe the Canadian diamonds are too pure, or too northern for diamonds to grow properly.. Or maybe traces of some rare element in the DeBeers mines leads to more beautiful diamonds. Or Canadians speak funny, so their diamonds are gauche.
It's so funny to see when an empire based on marketing slowly crumbles ...
I personally think it's an awesome idea. Let me tell you why.
A few years ago I wrote a great book. It would have sold a billion copies, but alas, no one else thought it was worth reading. If we can set a precedent with this music business, then we can do the same for books. As an author and a published (because I self-published 20 volumes) I should be entitled to a cut of the proceeds when we start taxing universities for students that copy ebooks. It's the logical next step.
I'm also an amazing artist, the Michael Phelps of the art world. Alas, no one has bought my work "Ruled 8x11 Sheet of Paper" and instead, millions of so-called printers are infringing my copyrights.
SO yeah, this is a good idea.
I love zombie movies. Good zombie movies are great, once you find them every few years. Poor zombie movies are the norm. It's rare to find something as painful as JSVH.
I saw it last week. To support the parent post, the Netflix WatchInstantly selections are pretty bleak. Within a month (this is my first month, in fact), I've already exhausted everything that I wanted to see.
I used to work at a (now defunct) flower company. My office was glass walled, overlooking the entire sales floor. One day I was testing Samba on a small desktop machine. I remember starting up nmbd/smbd. Then moments later, I looked into the sales pit and saw people getting up, the Win95 workstations had begun to bluescreen one by one. I didn't connect the two.
A half hour later everyone has rebooted. In that time I'd turned off Samba to work on something else. I restart Samba on that little machine (it was called Stargate because it would act as a gateway to some shares on a Sun E6500). The moment I press enter, the machines start bluescreening again. I realized just at that moment what happened and immediately shut it down.
I know why I stopped going...
Prices:
Newegg consistently undercut CompUSA by huge amounts. At one point I was looking for a flash drive. Found one at Newegg for $40 with free shipping. At CompUSA it was $80.
Poor selection:
Walked in to buy a Firewire card. None in stock. Needed a powered USB hub that can also operate unpowered. None in stock, not even in another store. Needed some SATA cables. None in stock. These are the types of items that should be there all the time to snag the walk-ins.
Clueless staff:
Tried to buy a serial null modem cable (rs-232). The sales guy kept giving me various USB cables.
Useless staff:
I needed a hard drive. The sales guy was busy checking out customers with a set of cheap binoculars.
Loss of focus:
Cheap binoculars in a computer store??
(And no, the last item wasn't some attempt at clever word play. It happened to me at the Pembroke Pines store in South Florida. That day was my last visit to a CompUSA until that store closed and I went looking for closeouts.)
Funny thing.. I ordered an XP netbook and wiped it to put Linux on it.. Why? The XP version had more extras (memory, better webcam) because of incentives.
Truly a case where everyone wins. Microsoft gets to claim their OS dominance. The retailer gets a sale. I get better hardware and the knowledge that the Beast of Redmond subsidized my purchase.
That relationship has always kicked me. The realization that we can discover things about the physical universe by doing mathematics is earth shattering. I sometimes wish that I had the necessary mathematics to even comprehend what the summaries are talking about because I get the feeling that we are at the crux of something huge.
Interesting idea..
There's a (probably apocryphal) story about the US car manufacturing industry. When some Japanese companies decided to build over here the company execs wanted to make sure that the same level of quality from the Japanese plants were retained in the USA. To that goal they implemented a bunch of newer controls and QA methods. The result was that the USA factories ended up putting out better cars than the Japanese factories. The controls were then put in place across the entire company.
Code is not like cars however, but you can still use tools to gauge the aspects of the relative quality of the code.
Imagine a scenario with a karma system: the more veteran programmers get assigned to the more critical projects. Alas, because they are "vetted" their code is not scrutinized as often as someone else working on a lesser project. The potential for failure is increased which is opposite of what was intended.
I'm not saying that will happen; the idea of a karma system is good (hehe, a similar one exists called the "salary" system where better programmers get better pay), but there are pitfalls in any system.
Having had a couple years of getting my ass kicked in karate and kung fu classes, I've always wondered how some of the more ritualized exercises came to be. There are katas that seem completely bizarre and that would leave oneself open to injury both from the opponent and from the physical contortions required to perform them. But maybe some ancient master realized that the easiest way to remember certain moves was to attach it to a mnemonic.
It is quite effective to use physical and mental cues to recall a memory. Maybe dance could change the way we approach education. Instead of rote memorization, we could supplement it with physical movements. Imagine learning calculus this way... I could work with a classical ballerina and lie tangent to her curves. Or maybe demonstrate a saddle point with a rodeo-like demonstration. The possibilities are endless...
A computer with a good mouse-only interface works. The kids at the playschool and daycare center (around 3 yrs old) already can use this Mr. PotatoHead game (of course, they also have real Mr. PotatoHead games too). It's actually somewhat eerie to see them in front of the computer. They are enthralled by it. They look like the Borg sometimes.. monitor twice as big as them, mouse bigger than their hands...
We use Ganglia (http://ganglia.info) at work.
If you prefer command line, try nmon. Originally for AIX, but there's a Linux port. Works well. On a large green-on-black terminal it looks pretty cool :D
Very good question...
Ever read Slaughterhouse Five??
Or remember that scene in Apocalypse Now! where they shoot the woman in the boat?
Or that scene in Heart of Darkness where they shell the coastline?
We can either subscribe to the notion that we can have a "civil" war, or dispense with that notion entirely and just bomb the mothers from orbit.
But we can't have both.
Trying to apologize for the killing of civilians is dastardly. Either be outright and say, "That's the price for waging war," or just stop sending missiles to residences.
Automated killing machines were banned at the Geneva convention. This is generally a good thing when we're sending real, live humans (versus the walking undead) to fight our wars. It would be completely inhumane (haha) and tilt the outcome of a war towards those who can afford to develop such technology. That is, if one country can afford killer robots and another can't, then the former has no deterrent to invading the latter.
But imagine if all wars were fought by proxy. Instead of sending people, we send machines. Let the machines battle it out. To be really civil we should also limit the power and effectiveness of our killer robots, and the number of machines that can enter the battlefield at once. Of course, at some point every country will be able to build to the maximum effective specification. At that point it will be a battle of strategy. The next obvious step is to do away with the machines entirely and just get a chessboard.
Whoever wins gets declared the winner.
Makes perfect sense.
Thanks for reading,
M B Dyson
CyberDyne Systems
Virtualization is the way to go for dev/test. You can build out machines quickly, tear them down, revert to a previous configuration, etc.. Though you can do the same with physical hardware, it's not as resource efficient.
My test/dev environment consists of two AMD 64-bit machines with 6G-8G apiece and about 500G of hard drive space. The base OS is CentOS 5.2 running Xen machines. It allows me to build separate web/app/db systems to mirror what a production setup would look like. Also, for Oracle development you can get a better idea of how things like RAC will look. I'm also running DRBD volumes between the physical machines which allows me to experiment with HA clusters.
Nice things to have (whether virtual or not) is to set up a central build host and LDAP server. For this, I created a virtual machine on my production server with FTP and HTTP access. I loaded all my CentOS, RedHat and other distros there. For CentOS/RedHat, for example, I loopback mount the ISOs to /var/ftp/pub/centos_5.2_x86 and put all the kickstart images in /var/ftp/ks. I can then build out a VM machine from scratch with just a command by doing a network install. For the LDAP server I used Fedora DS (or CentOS DS). The kickstart is set to use LDAP automatically. Finally, just install the autodir package with a standard config. You can then login to a new virtual machine moments after it's complete.
The central server can also house your source code repository. I'm using CVS for some projects and Subversion for others.
Funny thing... The problem is often not draconian and overzealous IT, but alas, a small subset of users who abuse the system. Ninety percent of users may use the Internet at work responsibly, but there's that ten percent that will run a second business, browse porn, read slashdot (oh crap). For various reasons, a company may not be able to enforce rules on a subset of the userbase (for HR and technical reasons) so everyone must suffer.
No...
TURN ON LAMP
or
FROTZ SPELLBOOK (assuming Enchanter or Sorceror)
Depending on how you define "soul", you could argue that machines are more likely to have souls. We're just meat, thinking meat, and once we die it's not provable that our consciousness can carry on. Machines, on the other hand, can more easily download their "mind" (if there is such a thing) to another vessel. They are, in essence, immortal.
So welcome our new immortal machine overlords.
The majority of the CPAN catalog works fine *ONCE* you install a GCC-built perl. If you use the XlC built perl then be prepared for a nightmare of troubleshooting Makefiles.
IBM supports AIX quite well. We have enterprise support here and it's pretty good.
I agree with some of your comments.
SMITTY is ugly, but I think it's a good tool. The best feature is that it constructs the command line commands rather than trying to modify configuration files or re-write the tools. This means that anything that you can do via smitty can be easily scripted even if you don't have much AIX experience.
For some workloads Linux will kick the pants of AIX. For others, especially those that require high throughput, the story is different. AIX on pSeries can move massive amounts of data, more so than a similarly configured PC based server.
AIX has some awesome disk tools. I use Linux on a daily basis, but the Linux tools are not yet at the same level as AIX. The current state of LVM is about where Veritas was a couple years ago. This is still enterprise quality (and free, dammit), but generally not as easy to use as AIX.
And yes, I also administer AIX, but have been running Linux in production for more than a decade.
YellowDog makes a PowerPC based Linux machine. The latest Linux Journal has a review of it:
http://us.fixstars.com/products/powerstation/
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/10263
Not perfect, but workable.
To this I say:
"Starbuck was a guy."
The new BSG Starbuck is kind of hot. She's not a guy.
I've watched every episode of TOS and TNG. I have a communicator lapel pin. I have a phaser to exercise my cat. The startup sound on my PC used to be "To boldly go where no man has gone before.. SWOOOOSH."
The problem is that there's so much cruft in it already. We already know that there are problems with timelines and plot devices. Would you rather they make up some nonsense about some freak event that changed how an alien race appears or start from scratch? Yes, the original canon is old and loved, but there are so many problems trying to please the rabid fan base that the STORY can no longer be told.