There is a beer snob crowd out there. Though the wine snobs tend to think of us as base and beneath them, that's only because they're just as ignorant about beer as the normal consumer. They've never had a Belgian Lambic or a wheat beer from Germany.
Well I manage to be a beer snob, a wine snob, and a liquor snob.
I've had some very good imported beers including Belgian and German ones. I've also had US made Belgian-style lambics and German-style wheat beers that were quite good as well.
Probably the most supprising thing to me has been discovering that some mass-market wines and spirits are actually quite good. In particular there are some large wineries where every wine they sell is quite drinkable, almost any single malt scotch you find will be at least decent, and some of the most widely marketed bourbons are among the best.
Then again I care more about what tastes good to me and not that I paid a ton of money for it or that it is difficult to procure (both of which do seem to drive some of the wine and liquor snobs)
The best hope is that a state develops a signifigant wine industry that can counter the power of the distributors.
The lobbing by the various wine trade associations has helped some as well.
Most notably Texas recently changed it's laws to allow direct shipment due to pressure by both the local and national wine industry.
Many think that New York may do so as well due to it's large wine industry.
Needless to say it will be interesting to see how everything ends up falling out. But the trend is definately toward allowing direct shipment.
Thankfully I live in a state (WA) with decent direct shipment laws for wine, beer, and spirits. This is mostly due to the local industry being more politically and economicly powerful than the distributors and the Liquor Board encouraging small specialty distributors for beer and wine (spirits are a state monopoly).
Still I wish this state was as enlightened as CA when it comes to liquor laws, there is no good reason for the state to keep a retail and wholesale monopoly on sales of spirits (though distilleries are allowed to sell their product by the bottle on-site to the public).
We should also do away with the last vestages of the 'three-tier' system and allow retailers (like Costco) and manufacturers to hold distributor licenses as well. (manufacturers are already allowed to act as retailers in limited circumstances).
I never said overbrewed. I do know the difference, especially since the process (toasting the leaves and the temperature that the leaves are steeped at) is very similar for tea. You can have your stroke now.
I happen to like my coffees roasted on the dark side myself. It is as much a matter of personal taste as anything else. In Europe and the Mediterranean basin you find coffee roasted anywhere from very light (just enough so that it isn't green coffee anymore) to very dark (nearly charcoal). I will agree that Starbucks tends toward the dark end of that spectrum but their coffee wouldn't be unusally dark for say Naples.
I've had lightly roasted fine coffee and still prefer the dark stuff myself. Now I will say that I try to avoid Starbucks whenever possible but their coffee is drinkable (at least their beans, drip, and straight espresso are I don't do the sweetend crap for people who don't like coffee)
Kiona 2002. I currently have 8 bottles left of the two cases I purchased at the beginning of last year. I'd currently sell them for far higher than what Inniskillin or Jackson-Triggs best ice wines are going for.
Ah Kiona, I'm familar with them they do some very nice non-ice wines as well.
I think I know how they get away with selling it so cheap. The growing conditions in much of Eastern Washington are nearly ideal for a number of grape varieties and the conditions are pretty consistent from year to year which means that nearly every year is a good year with little chance of crop failure (at least compared to Napa or Bordeaux). In addition the conditions for the formation of ice wine occur at nearly the ideal time every year in some vinyards. I believe this is especially true of Kiona's vinyards. Therefore they can put a certain amount of their crop into ice wine production with little risk.
Their 2003 wasn't as good in my opinion. Too much acid on the palate. Some wineries sell at higher price points because they can. Some wineries sell at lower price points because they feel like it and it is a good business strategy as well. I would sooner buy a case of really good $20 ice wine than I would three bottles of a $80 good ice wine. In fact, I bought two cases. Which winery made the higher profit off of me?
For whatever reason most Washington wineries tend to favor low price points for the quality and doing relatively high volume (not as high as E&J but up there with the higher volume quality Napa or Sonoma producers). There are very few of the sort of botique wineries in Washington doing super small case volumes like you see in California.
I don't know what kind of teenagers you hang out with but most are interested in alcohol bang for the buck and aren't going to shell out even $15 for a bottle of wine.
Anyone under 21 who has an appriciation for the good stuff is welcome to it in my mind. These aren't the people the law is trying to protect. Besides anyone who I've known who was under 21 and liked decent booze had plenty of older friends/relatives who would buy it for them.
In my experience teenagers get alcohol by having someone who is 21 or older to buy it for them or going to stores that are known for not carding.
As for direct shipment, most wineries who do this are small wineries selling a high-quality premium product. The issue they face is very often out-of-state distributors don't want to deal with small volume wines or producers. Not that it is much of a problem here but my state has been pretty good in the last few years about licensing specialty distributors. Then again my state allows direct shipment from most of the wine producing states. Probably something to do with us having the second largest wine industry in the US after California.
No I'm not suggesting that all Episcopalians support gay marrage.
However you are implying that no "Christian" church supports gay marrage or would choose to perform one. Therefore any that do must not really be "Christian".
That is just as wrong as for me to imply that a good "Christian" would endorse gay marrage and any that don't aren't real "Christians".
Only God knows what God endorses. The best we can do is to guess what that might be. I might be wrong, you might be wrong, only God knows for sure.
Hmm... funny I know churches such as our local Episcopalian Cathedral that will marry gay and lesbian couples. There are many other churches that will do the same.
Careful about generalizing about Christian Churches in this country. Most 'liberal' and many mainline denominations will marry gay couples. The membership of those denominations while not as large as it used to be still represents a fairly sizable percentage of Christians in this country who claim membership in a particular church or denomination.
Now if you'll excuse me I have a Unitarian Jihad subcommitee meeting to attend.
Excuse me, but while it may be true BSD style licenses are "more free" than GPL (in the sense that one who is not the copyright holder is allowed to do more with the work under copyright), try comparing the GPL to any commercial software license for freedom.
Lets see: Can I modify a work under commercial license? probably not. Can I distribute those modifications? probably not. Can I give a copy of the work to my friend? probably not. If the work is a program can I install it on more than one comupter? probably not.
Furthermore as has been seen in the EULAs used by many websites such as online photo albums, commercial companies try to claim ownership of work they didn't create all the time.
Now why would someone use GPL in the first place? Well let's say I write a really nice networking stack. I don't particularly want someone else to be able to make modifications to my code and then claim the whole as their own. If I release my code as GPL then I know any changes or improvements anyone makes will be availible to everyone. If I release it under BSD someone has the option of taking both my code and the modifications to it propritary at any time.
Basicly it all boils down to what the copyright holder is comfortable with using to license their work and conversely what a user of said copyrighted work is comfortable with accepting in the way of license terms.
If you don't like the terms of the GPL then don't use things licensed under it. But for all the kvetching about how the GPL is "less free" than BSD-style licenses I guarentee that almost any commercial license will give you far less freedom than the GPL will.
BTW did I also mention that most of the Windows boxes have a far better on-line time than Linux? I know they have to reboot quite often, but that's about it. The reboots are at night-time anyways.
Funny our UNIX machines including our production Oracle servers stay up until they are taken down for a reason (scheduled reboot, moving hardware, OS upgrade). On the other hand our winddows servers seem to need a reboot almost every time MS comes out with a new hotfix. On top of that a couple of our windows servers need frequent reboots due to something going seriously screwy with the OS.
Now I will say I'm not one of those people who gets into uptime wars. There are perfectly good reasons to reboot a system at regular intervals. For our HP-UX and Solaris systems this is about once every 6 months, for our Linux servers once every 3 months, and for our Windows servers once a month.
what you find so redeeming about this 'crust'? It's the burnt part of the bread!
Well when you bake bread you really can't help but make it with a crust.
Now I happen to like crusts, but then I either bake my own bread or buy fancy artisnal bread fresh from a bakery. These breads typically have a nice chewy crust to them.
I agree that the crust on most mass-market breads especially your typical white bread like Wonder seems rather pointless. (then to my mind most mass market bread is rather pointless)
Well assuming you aren't a vegan you can get beef that isn't raised or slaughtered with any of the practices the activists complain about.
I buy Oregon Country Beef at the local store, given that their prices haven't gone up much while "normal" beef has it comes out being around the same price nowdays. There are similar brands of grassland and organic beef availible all over the country.
Why do I buy it? Well to me it just tastes better and it supports a bunch of small ranchers in a nearby state. I can also eat it rare without worring about getting sick.
Similar options are availible for Pork, Chicken, and Lamb. They aren't even all that much more expensive around here anymore. I suspect that the "traditional" producers have been forced to raise prices due to higher oil prices (modern farming is hugely energy intensive) whereas energy is a much lower component of organic food products prices.
I must admit I don't really understand the weird Canadian habit of ordering media blackouts in order to ensure a fair trial.
While it does occasionally lead to circuses like the OJ trial the contrasting experience in the US where there is no real ablity to supress coverage of a trial is that the accused for the most part still get their day in court.
From what I've seen the bans mostly seem to be used where what comes out in court will be embarrasing to the government or other powerful individuals. This is exactly the sort of situation where a public trial and the right of the press to cover it is important.
The software itself is extremely overrated. Legato had far better host agents for unix, windows, DB modules. Tivoli might be even better.
I wouldn't know about either Legato or Tivoli as I don't have direct experience with either. I know that people tend to speak very highly of Legato.
I will say that Netbackup blows the doors off anything else I've had experience with such as Arkeia, Backup Exec, and several other rather lame PC/small office backup products.
Does anyone else dislike their UI with a passion? At least on the no-cost version of their product... it's unusable.
The UI on the for-pay version of Arkeia is just as bad. The only thing I can figure is Knox was intentionally trying to make it look ugly.
I'd rather throw down cash on ARCserve.
I wouldn't go that far. The alternatives have to be pretty bad before I'd consider going within a mile of any CA product.
On the other hand Veritas Netbackup has proven to be an excellent solution for far less than Knox wanted to charge. It is easy to see why their product is the market leader.
Needless to say, we went with someone else. Veritas had a great enterprise solution that worked with Linux and Windows (the server app runs only on Windows) and supports a huge array of tape drives. And it was one-third the price.
Actually Veritas supports a nubmber of UNIX platforms for the server app including Solaris, HP-UX, and Linux (there is the issue that for Linux Veritas only supports RHEL and SuSE, but there are free distros that are 'close enough' to work and given a little effort even Debian or Gentoo could probably be made to work)
I agree with you on Arkeia though. I used it for about 2 years as well before it got pitched for Netbackup. The clients were harder to install, the backup server kept corrupting its catalog, the UI was amaturish, and restores were hit and miss at best. I'm rather supprised that Knox has the stones to charge more for their product than Veritas does. Perhaps Netbackup was more expensive several years ago, but even with all of the various addons we have (datacenter product, 2 libraries and media servers, 6 database agents, several multiprocessor HP-UX clients, etc.) it is quite price-competitive with every other commercial backup product I've looked at.
Veritas Netbackup wouldn't even touch a Sarge install, it was a dependency hell that I didn't have the time nor patience to get in to. I've got Redhat boxes, from 7.2 to 9, that all need backing up too... So what are the pros out there using? Is there anything that isn't rsync and a few mt commands in a bash script?
Netbackup seems to work fine with Debian Sarge clients for us. We've got the server running on a RedHat 7.3 box at the moment but are considering upgrading to a later RedHat/Fedora/CentOS/Mandrake.
I suspect you could probably make the server work on Debian Sarge but doing so would likely take a bit of work.
Could you install CentOS (Veritas doesn't support any free OS's as a server, and while CentOS is free, it is a clone of a Veritas supported OS;) on your backup server? Not sure what your environment is like, but my backup server is pretty much dedicated to backups and file sharing, so it really doesn't matter what OS it runs.
AFAIK Veritas supports several Linux Distros and if you really object to paying the distro vendor there are any number of distributions that are 'close enough' (like CentOS) that the Netbackup server should be able to install and run. We've currently got our Netbackup server install running on RH 7.3 but there is no reason it shouldn't work say on Fedora or Mandrake.
Also if one was willing to work at it you could probably get the Netbackup server to work on Debian Woody or Sarge. I know this is possible for some other large commercial packages as I've done Debian installs of them in the past. (I really wish that commercial app vendors would start supporting Debian Stable. It's not like it is a fast moving target or anything)
For that matter I believe Veritas also supports FreeBSD as a Netbackup server. I could be wrong though as it has been a while since I've checked.
Amazon charges sales tax in WA, which I believe they do because they have a physical presence in the state.... But it is only a small one.
In all seriousness Amazon itself does charge sales tax in WA, KS, and ND. Other sellers like Target and ToysRUS will charge sales taxes in any state where they have physical stores.
I agree that this is perhaps not a bad idea for tech companies.
I also believe Oregon has some major incentives for tech companies to locate in economicly depressed areas (pretty much anywhere outside of the Portland area). For example Symantech has most of their IT staff in Springfield, OR.
There are some advantages for the employees too beyond the outdoor recreation opportunities, namely: lower cost of living, less traffic/shorter commutes, and far lower housing prices. (if you make $60K/year you can afford a nice house in the Dalles. In San Jose, Seattle, or even Portland you can't really afford a house on $60K/year, forget getting a nice one)
Then you're shit out of luck. Here's a game I like to play called "working for mysql nuts"
That is why anyone sane who wants to use an OSS database uses Postgres instead. There is also ADABAS/SAPDB/MaxDB, Interbase/Firebird, Ingres, and a couple of others.
I do agree with you about the limitations of mysql. I only use mysql when I have an application that doesn't support a better database engine. (unfortunately mysql specific applications tend to have all sorts of hacks in them to get around the limitations of mysql)
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I believe we have more microbreweries per capita than anywhere else in the US
I don't know, Seattle could probably give Denver a run for it's money. There are a lot of local breweries around here.
There is a beer snob crowd out there. Though the wine snobs tend to think of us as base and beneath them, that's only because they're just as ignorant about beer as the normal consumer. They've never had a Belgian Lambic or a wheat beer from Germany.
Well I manage to be a beer snob, a wine snob, and a liquor snob.
I've had some very good imported beers including Belgian and German ones. I've also had US made Belgian-style lambics and German-style wheat beers that were quite good as well.
Probably the most supprising thing to me has been discovering that some mass-market wines and spirits are actually quite good. In particular there are some large wineries where every wine they sell is quite drinkable, almost any single malt scotch you find will be at least decent, and some of the most widely marketed bourbons are among the best.
Then again I care more about what tastes good to me and not that I paid a ton of money for it or that it is difficult to procure (both of which do seem to drive some of the wine and liquor snobs)
The best hope is that a state develops a signifigant wine industry that can counter the power of the distributors.
The lobbing by the various wine trade associations has helped some as well.
Most notably Texas recently changed it's laws to allow direct shipment due to pressure by both the local and national wine industry.
Many think that New York may do so as well due to it's large wine industry.
Needless to say it will be interesting to see how everything ends up falling out. But the trend is definately toward allowing direct shipment.
Thankfully I live in a state (WA) with decent direct shipment laws for wine, beer, and spirits. This is mostly due to the local industry being more politically and economicly powerful than the distributors and the Liquor Board encouraging small specialty distributors for beer and wine (spirits are a state monopoly).
Still I wish this state was as enlightened as CA when it comes to liquor laws, there is no good reason for the state to keep a retail and wholesale monopoly on sales of spirits (though distilleries are allowed to sell their product by the bottle on-site to the public).
We should also do away with the last vestages of the 'three-tier' system and allow retailers (like Costco) and manufacturers to hold distributor licenses as well. (manufacturers are already allowed to act as retailers in limited circumstances).
I never said overbrewed. I do know the difference, especially since the process (toasting the leaves and the temperature that the leaves are steeped at) is very similar for tea. You can have your stroke now.
I happen to like my coffees roasted on the dark side myself. It is as much a matter of personal taste as anything else. In Europe and the Mediterranean basin you find coffee roasted anywhere from very light (just enough so that it isn't green coffee anymore) to very dark (nearly charcoal). I will agree that Starbucks tends toward the dark end of that spectrum but their coffee wouldn't be unusally dark for say Naples.
I've had lightly roasted fine coffee and still prefer the dark stuff myself. Now I will say that I try to avoid Starbucks whenever possible but their coffee is drinkable (at least their beans, drip, and straight espresso are I don't do the sweetend crap for people who don't like coffee)
Kiona 2002. I currently have 8 bottles left of the two cases I purchased at the beginning of last year. I'd currently sell them for far higher than what Inniskillin or Jackson-Triggs best ice wines are going for.
Ah Kiona, I'm familar with them they do some very nice non-ice wines as well.
I think I know how they get away with selling it so cheap. The growing conditions in much of Eastern Washington are nearly ideal for a number of grape varieties and the conditions are pretty consistent from year to year which means that nearly every year is a good year with little chance of crop failure (at least compared to Napa or Bordeaux). In addition the conditions for the formation of ice wine occur at nearly the ideal time every year in some vinyards. I believe this is especially true of Kiona's vinyards. Therefore they can put a certain amount of their crop into ice wine production with little risk.
Their 2003 wasn't as good in my opinion. Too much acid on the palate. Some wineries sell at higher price points because they can. Some wineries sell at lower price points because they feel like it and it is a good business strategy as well. I would sooner buy a case of really good $20 ice wine than I would three bottles of a $80 good ice wine. In fact, I bought two cases. Which winery made the higher profit off of me?
For whatever reason most Washington wineries tend to favor low price points for the quality and doing relatively high volume (not as high as E&J but up there with the higher volume quality Napa or Sonoma producers). There are very few of the sort of botique wineries in Washington doing super small case volumes like you see in California.
I don't know what kind of teenagers you hang out with but most are interested in alcohol bang for the buck and aren't going to shell out even $15 for a bottle of wine.
Anyone under 21 who has an appriciation for the good stuff is welcome to it in my mind. These aren't the people the law is trying to protect. Besides anyone who I've known who was under 21 and liked decent booze had plenty of older friends/relatives who would buy it for them.
In my experience teenagers get alcohol by having someone who is 21 or older to buy it for them or going to stores that are known for not carding.
As for direct shipment, most wineries who do this are small wineries selling a high-quality premium product. The issue they face is very often out-of-state distributors don't want to deal with small volume wines or producers. Not that it is much of a problem here but my state has been pretty good in the last few years about licensing specialty distributors. Then again my state allows direct shipment from most of the wine producing states. Probably something to do with us having the second largest wine industry in the US after California.
Depends on the location. A 50 foot tower on top of a hill near aircraft flight paths can be an aviation hazard.
FAA regulations govern when a structure is considered a hazard and how it must be lit if it is.
Radio and TV masts generally will have solid or flashing red lights to warn low-flying aircraft.
Some of the more recent towers use white xenon strobes instead of the more traditional slow flashing red lights.
I suspect the strobes are what the astronomers are complaining about.
No I'm not suggesting that all Episcopalians support gay marrage.
However you are implying that no "Christian" church supports gay marrage or would choose to perform one. Therefore any that do must not really be "Christian".
That is just as wrong as for me to imply that a good "Christian" would endorse gay marrage and any that don't aren't real "Christians".
Only God knows what God endorses. The best we can do is to guess what that might be. I might be wrong, you might be wrong, only God knows for sure.
Yea and the Bible forbids eating shrimp. Your point?
Hmm ... funny I know churches such as our local Episcopalian Cathedral that will marry gay and lesbian couples. There are many other churches that will do the same.
Careful about generalizing about Christian Churches in this country. Most 'liberal' and many mainline denominations will marry gay couples. The membership of those denominations while not as large as it used to be still represents a fairly sizable percentage of Christians in this country who claim membership in a particular church or denomination.
Now if you'll excuse me I have a Unitarian Jihad subcommitee meeting to attend.
Excuse me, but while it may be true BSD style licenses are "more free" than GPL (in the sense that one who is not the copyright holder is allowed to do more with the work under copyright), try comparing the GPL to any commercial software license for freedom.
Lets see: Can I modify a work under commercial license? probably not. Can I distribute those modifications? probably not. Can I give a copy of the work to my friend? probably not. If the work is a program can I install it on more than one comupter? probably not.
Furthermore as has been seen in the EULAs used by many websites such as online photo albums, commercial companies try to claim ownership of work they didn't create all the time.
Now why would someone use GPL in the first place? Well let's say I write a really nice networking stack. I don't particularly want someone else to be able to make modifications to my code and then claim the whole as their own. If I release my code as GPL then I know any changes or improvements anyone makes will be availible to everyone. If I release it under BSD someone has the option of taking both my code and the modifications to it propritary at any time.
Basicly it all boils down to what the copyright holder is comfortable with using to license their work and conversely what a user of said copyrighted work is comfortable with accepting in the way of license terms.
If you don't like the terms of the GPL then don't use things licensed under it. But for all the kvetching about how the GPL is "less free" than BSD-style licenses I guarentee that almost any commercial license will give you far less freedom than the GPL will.
BTW did I also mention that most of the Windows boxes have a far better on-line time than Linux? I know they have to reboot quite often, but that's about it. The reboots are at night-time anyways.
Funny our UNIX machines including our production Oracle servers stay up until they are taken down for a reason (scheduled reboot, moving hardware, OS upgrade). On the other hand our winddows servers seem to need a reboot almost every time MS comes out with a new hotfix. On top of that a couple of our windows servers need frequent reboots due to something going seriously screwy with the OS.
Now I will say I'm not one of those people who gets into uptime wars. There are perfectly good reasons to reboot a system at regular intervals. For our HP-UX and Solaris systems this is about once every 6 months, for our Linux servers once every 3 months, and for our Windows servers once a month.
what you find so redeeming about this 'crust'? It's the burnt part of the bread!
Well when you bake bread you really can't help but make it with a crust.
Now I happen to like crusts, but then I either bake my own bread or buy fancy artisnal bread fresh from a bakery. These breads typically have a nice chewy crust to them.
I agree that the crust on most mass-market breads especially your typical white bread like Wonder seems rather pointless. (then to my mind most mass market bread is rather pointless)
... naked and petrified with hot grits down Natele Portman's pants.
Well assuming you aren't a vegan you can get beef that isn't raised or slaughtered with any of the practices the activists complain about.
I buy Oregon Country Beef at the local store, given that their prices haven't gone up much while "normal" beef has it comes out being around the same price nowdays. There are similar brands of grassland and organic beef availible all over the country.
Why do I buy it? Well to me it just tastes better and it supports a bunch of small ranchers in a nearby state. I can also eat it rare without worring about getting sick.
Similar options are availible for Pork, Chicken, and Lamb. They aren't even all that much more expensive around here anymore. I suspect that the "traditional" producers have been forced to raise prices due to higher oil prices (modern farming is hugely energy intensive) whereas energy is a much lower component of organic food products prices.
I must admit I don't really understand the weird Canadian habit of ordering media blackouts in order to ensure a fair trial.
While it does occasionally lead to circuses like the OJ trial the contrasting experience in the US where there is no real ablity to supress coverage of a trial is that the accused for the most part still get their day in court.
From what I've seen the bans mostly seem to be used where what comes out in court will be embarrasing to the government or other powerful individuals. This is exactly the sort of situation where a public trial and the right of the press to cover it is important.
What do you suggest?
Personally I like "Warning: may contain nuts"
The software itself is extremely overrated. Legato had far better host agents for unix, windows, DB modules. Tivoli might be even better.
I wouldn't know about either Legato or Tivoli as I don't have direct experience with either. I know that people tend to speak very highly of Legato.
I will say that Netbackup blows the doors off anything else I've had experience with such as Arkeia, Backup Exec, and several other rather lame PC/small office backup products.
Does anyone else dislike their UI with a passion? At least on the no-cost version of their product... it's unusable.
The UI on the for-pay version of Arkeia is just as bad. The only thing I can figure is Knox was intentionally trying to make it look ugly.
I'd rather throw down cash on ARCserve.
I wouldn't go that far. The alternatives have to be pretty bad before I'd consider going within a mile of any CA product.
On the other hand Veritas Netbackup has proven to be an excellent solution for far less than Knox wanted to charge. It is easy to see why their product is the market leader.
Needless to say, we went with someone else. Veritas had a great enterprise solution that worked with Linux and Windows (the server app runs only on Windows) and supports a huge array of tape drives. And it was one-third the price.
Actually Veritas supports a nubmber of UNIX platforms for the server app including Solaris, HP-UX, and Linux (there is the issue that for Linux Veritas only supports RHEL and SuSE, but there are free distros that are 'close enough' to work and given a little effort even Debian or Gentoo could probably be made to work)
I agree with you on Arkeia though. I used it for about 2 years as well before it got pitched for Netbackup. The clients were harder to install, the backup server kept corrupting its catalog, the UI was amaturish, and restores were hit and miss at best. I'm rather supprised that Knox has the stones to charge more for their product than Veritas does. Perhaps Netbackup was more expensive several years ago, but even with all of the various addons we have (datacenter product, 2 libraries and media servers, 6 database agents, several multiprocessor HP-UX clients, etc.) it is quite price-competitive with every other commercial backup product I've looked at.
Veritas Netbackup wouldn't even touch a Sarge install, it was a dependency hell that I didn't have the time nor patience to get in to. I've got Redhat boxes, from 7.2 to 9, that all need backing up too... So what are the pros out there using? Is there anything that isn't rsync and a few mt commands in a bash script?
Netbackup seems to work fine with Debian Sarge clients for us. We've got the server running on a RedHat 7.3 box at the moment but are considering upgrading to a later RedHat/Fedora/CentOS/Mandrake.
I suspect you could probably make the server work on Debian Sarge but doing so would likely take a bit of work.
Could you install CentOS (Veritas doesn't support any free OS's as a server, and while CentOS is free, it is a clone of a Veritas supported OS ;) on your backup server? Not sure what your environment is like, but my backup server is pretty much dedicated to backups and file sharing, so it really doesn't matter what OS it runs.
AFAIK Veritas supports several Linux Distros and if you really object to paying the distro vendor there are any number of distributions that are 'close enough' (like CentOS) that the Netbackup server should be able to install and run. We've currently got our Netbackup server install running on RH 7.3 but there is no reason it shouldn't work say on Fedora or Mandrake.
Also if one was willing to work at it you could probably get the Netbackup server to work on Debian Woody or Sarge. I know this is possible for some other large commercial packages as I've done Debian installs of them in the past. (I really wish that commercial app vendors would start supporting Debian Stable. It's not like it is a fast moving target or anything)
For that matter I believe Veritas also supports FreeBSD as a Netbackup server. I could be wrong though as it has been a while since I've checked.
Amazon charges sales tax in WA, which I believe they do because they have a physical presence in the state. ... But it is only a small one.
In all seriousness Amazon itself does charge sales tax in WA, KS, and ND. Other sellers like Target and ToysRUS will charge sales taxes in any state where they have physical stores.
I agree that this is perhaps not a bad idea for tech companies.
I also believe Oregon has some major incentives for tech companies to locate in economicly depressed areas (pretty much anywhere outside of the Portland area). For example Symantech has most of their IT staff in Springfield, OR.
There are some advantages for the employees too beyond the outdoor recreation opportunities, namely: lower cost of living, less traffic/shorter commutes, and far lower housing prices. (if you make $60K/year you can afford a nice house in the Dalles. In San Jose, Seattle, or even Portland you can't really afford a house on $60K/year, forget getting a nice one)
Then you're shit out of luck. Here's a game I like to play called "working for mysql nuts"
That is why anyone sane who wants to use an OSS database uses Postgres instead. There is also ADABAS/SAPDB/MaxDB, Interbase/Firebird, Ingres, and a couple of others.
I do agree with you about the limitations of mysql. I only use mysql when I have an application that doesn't support a better database engine. (unfortunately mysql specific applications tend to have all sorts of hacks in them to get around the limitations of mysql)