There are parts of RedHat that CentOS doesn't include as they are not F/OSS licensed.
As far as I know, RedHat only produces GPL software and always have.
It looks like you are right there (I've just dug around for a little fact checking on myself). It would appear that all CentOS take out is copyright covered branding, like Debian removing Firefox/Mozilla branding to make "iceweasel" but on a larger scale.
One important difference between CentOS and RedHat is potential delay, or potential faults, in security update releases. If they are taking RedHat's updated packages then they have to wait until RedHat releases the source updated source packages and get them run through their build process and do what-ever testing they do before they release the update themselves. If they are making their own updates then there are two potential problems: a community effort is unlikely to put as much resource behind testing updates (not that this is a given: some F/OSS projects seem to have access to the resources to be very thorough on such matters, more so than some commercial bodies) so new bugs may be introduced temporarily, and with every update that doesn't come from RH you are moving away from that exact environment (which is a concern if that is why you are using CentOS in the first pace).
Of course people who chose CentOS over something else (such as Debian which has been my preference for some time), have a relatively easy transition to RedHat if they do decide they need the insurance of paid support and related consulting services.
From RedHat's PoV, someone using CentOS doesn't cost them any more than someone using Debian, Ubuntu, Madriva, or something else. They don't make money out of selling Linux, they make money selling the service and support contracts that go with it, and someone who isn't wanting to pay for that wouldn't use RedHat just because CentOS didn't exist.
There are parts of RedHat that CentOS doesn't include as they are not F/OSS licensed. Off the top of my head I can't tell anyone what they are (I'm a Debian person for the most part) but I'm sure it isn't difficult to look up - no doubt to some people those are worth some of what they pay them for the contracts too (or maybe they are things that make the support easier to offer? Remote admin related services and such? Either way it is something that CentOS, or Debian for that matter, doesn't have).
I'm sure RH would rather more people who used CentOS would pay for RedHat+support, but that isn't going to happen for the most part: if CentOS vanished today (as is seemed to nearly do a while ago when there were problems with a key maintainer) people using it would not automatically move to RedHat. It isn't like Debian (my preference, other perfectly decent options are available) doesn't have Apache, mySQL, Python, and all the other major packages that are commonly used, and for all the help RedHat has provided (I'm not trying to belittle them here: that have provided a *lot* of support to the Kernel and other projects in one way or another over they years) they can not claim that they created any of it wholesale.
They actually gain a little from CentOS: more people are using an arrangement very similar to theirs so to a certain extent that have a large group of testers out there, who RH have no particular responsibility to support and who help keep RH's preferred tool-chains relevant.
CentOS is no paragon of virtue (as you point out it was created to save money rather than for any technical or philosophical reason) but it certainly isn't a bad player in the market as you make the project out to be.
Your comparison with MS is interesting. How many small companies can you mention that have use MS support? Active people-paid-by-MS support, not the online docs and (unpaid) user populated forums? While large businesses no doubt get a fair amount of contact with MS I can tell you from the PoV of a small development shop with a collection of Windows, SQL Server, MSDN and Office licenses , we have once contacted MS and found it hard work. It ended up that we had to pay to push the issue beyond a certain point and claim the money back when it did turn out to be their bug not ours (it was a problem with the MMC snap-in API back soon after that was first "the way to do things" (I don;t know the exact details, I wasn't on that team). While not entirely unreasonable (I'm sure they get a lot of support calls that turn out to be a problem with the developer getting something wrong rather than MS's code being at fault) and the right result was where we ended up (a hotfix that was soon rolled into a generally available patch and a refund of all costs) it did seem to be harder work than I thought it should be. That was years ago and things may be completely different now, but "just Google it" is not the first port (and often only) of call just for Linux users who have paid no license/support fees, it is the first (and often only) port of call for Windows admins and developers too. I don't know what RH's support system is like, but for small companies moving away from Windows for what-ever reason the fact that they've never use the support "paid for" by licensing Windows/MSSQL/VS/Office/other is likely to make then take a moment to consider the CentOS/RedHat thing in a light favourable to CentOS. Back to my original point: if CentOS were not there the decision would be between and Redhat, it would not be an automatic customer for RedHat.
If you have the conversation in writing where you have recommended RedHat and why but you have been told to get CentOS instead, go CentOS. Chances are all will be well and it will be money saved. If something does go wrong that a support contract would have dealt with, no one can blame you for choosing CentOS over RedHat and you might even get a few hours paid overtime fixing the issue yourself...
What I CANNOT do is run Internet Explorer on Linux.
Try harder. 5, 6, and 7 (at least) will all work using Wine.
Invalid rant is invalid.
Try harder. I'm told 8 can be made to work, but 9 can't reliably as yet. And I expect it would take a while after release to get 10 going that way if it ever does.IE5/6/7 is not adequate testing to say your code works well with IE when many are using 8 or 9. Also, running IE away from Windows is probably explicitly against the license agreement in some way/shape/form (OK so click through licenses may be worth little more then their weight in my excrement, but I for one would not be willing to waste time arguing that point in order to test my stuff on MS's browser).
Focussing on the figurehead gives you the impression that the company overall has changed more than I think it has.
Gates started as the man who made the company, but by 2000-and-somthing his was more a figure head than a driving force (unlike Jobs, who managed to be both until handing over the reigns some months before his death, as a counter example). Ballmer is also not a single-man driving force, but he is lacking something that in Bill made that ignorable. He is a company man rather than a man that builds companies, as you point out.
You are not seeing the man with Ballmer: you are seeing the company under him. And I don't think that has changed nearly as much in the last ten years as the difference between Gales and Ballmer.
As relevant here as it was nine years ago: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/7/22/
(no big MS fan myself but come on typing "M$" for "MS" is no more mature than "Open Sores" in place of "Open Source")
Re:What is my overriding reason to migrate off XP?
on
10 Years of Windows XP
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· Score: 1
While the logo is displayed a fair chunk of the system devices get their first detailed probes and initialisations, so it could be that it responds badly as the memory subsystem is checked out at that point in specific circumstances. Edge cases like that are often fixed in BIOS updates so that would certainly be worth a try.
If it is a known bug in some versions of that chipset's firmware that can be worked around, you might find Linux uses the work-around where the official Windows drivers rely on the BIOS update being in place - so don't let Linux working make you not try the update (long gone are the days when a BIOS update was generally a flaky and risky proposition to only be attempted if there is a serious problem). If know enough to be able to find your way around the kernel's boot logs, you might find a clue in there if such a work-around is used.
Re:What is my overriding reason to migrate off XP?
on
10 Years of Windows XP
·
· Score: 1
Defined "won't boot" a little more precisely.
I'm guessing (I can't be more sure without more info) that the problem there is hardware/firmware rather than software. A couple of suggestions that might help or offer further diagnostic information:
* see if there are any BIOS updates for your motherboard, some times new updates are release to fix edge case timing issues that affect some RAM/CPU combinations and other such
* try booting another OS (Linux via a Live CD or USB based build, for instance) as the machine is and with the other slots populated.
Windows "Yuppie Flu" as it got called around these parts, "Yuppie Flu" being piss-take phrase for CFS whic at the time was more commonly/popularly referred to as ME (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_fatigue_syndrome)
I've read (though I can't quote sources, sorry) that the main reason computerised voices on navigation aids is female is the higher pitch. In jets where that sort of thing was pioneered it made the voice easier to distinguish clearly from the "background" noise of the engines without having to raise the volume, and presumably the difference is similar in cars.
There may be cultural reasons too, of course, but this theory of a physical reason makes sense to me.
Sometimes I'm not sure if these people are just ignorant to the Streisand effect, or are actively trying to use it to gain publicity for themselves generally or whatever the parody is using as inspiration or source material.
If you don't like it, why don't you fix it yourself?
That is only really relevant if he cares whether it works or not. He isn't complaining that it doesn't work, he is complaining that the bug reports are getting in the way. And he has fixed that himself, by making the module be marked as 3rd party (which it is) so the reports don't automatically hit their queue.
Definitely worth a try. But do keep your eyes open for ways out in case it doesn't work out well.
Best case: you get he credit for improving the company. That would put you in good stead where you are and help your attractiveness elsewhere if you need/want to move on later.
Worst case: you get somewhere to work until you find somewhere else. No point dropping yourself out of employment until you have a safe exit strategy, especially with the job market the way it is in most places. Just make sure you aren't standing too near any fans, so you've got time to duck if something unsavoury hits them.
Lack of CI and automated testing and such is not unusual at all - you were lucky in your last place (I wish I had that luck!). Lack of good source control is something that you need to fix fast, before it bites you in the arse (and it will).
I think I'm missing your point - I'm not sure what that adds to the discussion. Please enlighten (serious request there, not an accusation or put down).
But you are right, some people don't want to socialise this way. To be honest I don't, but with a large chunk of my family in other parts of the country (and in some cases, in other countries) it proves a useful way to not lose connection with the grapevine.
I'm not in the "people I've not really spoken to in 25 years and don't intend to" group though and neither are most of my contacts, that does strike me as somewhat sad. I do have a couple of people on my contacts list out of politeness rather than much else (not having them there would open arguments that are just not worth wasting other people's time over). You will not that I use the word "contact" rather than "friend" though, I'm old fashioned enough to be careful who I consider what and what things I'll discuss in public (I'll say nothing on fb or similar that I wouldn't feel comfortable shouting across a table in a crowded bar).
Maybe I'm missing something and/or it just wasn't working when we first tried the thing. We've not been back to try it again. I've never used it on gmail (my gmail account exists only because I wanted to see what the fuss was about all those moons ago, and is kept alive as my 'droid phone pretty much insists I have a Google account) so I can't comment on that. Maybe we'll give it another go next time people are moaning about a change fb have made to their chat option.
Lack of obvious working text chat integration kills it for me, that has become the primary reason I use fb since MSN Messenger became increasingly unreliable in alternate clients like Pidgin (I've refused to use the abomination that is the official client for that IM network since they successfully blocked the tool that let me take all the junk off the interface). Yes there is a chat box there but no display of who is online right now and when a couple of us tried while we were definitely online it didn't seem to want to connect us that way. We don't care for web-cam and voice chat, face-to-face is what pubs are for, just working text chat. Yes there are plenty of other options, but as far as my non-techie contacts (i.e. most of my family, who are the main reason I'm willing to touch fb with a bargepole) fb is the "other option" of choice no matter how much they moan each time something changes.
Actually for the most part they don't need it for themselves directly, most of the supply is used in the manufacturing industry producing things that are then sold to the rest of the world (yes the Chinese populous uses this output too, but once you take the poor rural population out of the equation it becomes clear that exports of such products is currently more significant than sales internal to the country). That is why China is controlling access to the rare elements as much as they can: they are protecting the manufacturing industry that their economy depends upon quite strongly. If this element, now found in significant quantities out of China's control is significantly useful then other governments may encourage (through grants and subsidies) the development of those alternatives in order to try tip the control of the market a little more towards their favour.
Some of the uses for it overlap with those for elements that are both rarer and pretty much controlled by China (they've bean very canny about securing such resources over the last decade or two, and now protect direct exports). If the main thing stopping the use of those alternatives is the cost of acquiring the raw material then this find is likely to make them more attractive by increasing availability and reducing that cost. The change won't be fast though, and many uses of rare earth materials are often in processes that involve other rare elements so unless the processes being discussed are unusual in only needing this one rare element such co-dependence will complicate things (unless this deposit contains the other elements in useful amounts too, of course - as others have pointed out deposits of several rare elements are often found together).
Exactly. Grand-daddy Phelps is either truly evil (as in immoral rather than amoral) or very seriously mentally deformed. Those below him in the pecking order are as bad or not far off. The young'n's on the other hand have never known anything else and thus are completely brainwashed ("indoctrinated" is what the Catholic church calls the same process), so I'll exclude them from what I'm about to flippantly say...
being persecuted like the early Christians who were tortured and executed by various means
Because that is so different from the "dismissive douche" you are replying to.
Until one or both of you start giving examples that illustrate your positions I'm going with "it takes two to make an argument, and I'm not going to listen to either of these douches".
No, but it is a great tool for creating and maintaining both online and offline backups. With a little scripting you can create a very efficient (in terms of storage space and bandwidth) system of snapshots in your online backups. Large files such as massive database backups need slightly different handling than smaller objects but rsync can help you with them too. And if you are backing up live database files you are doing it wrong. Any good RDBS features the ability to produce a consistent backup without taking the database down or even pausing it - the resulting file(s) are what you backup with your tool of choice.
The two problems you list, human error and lack of synchronisation, exist with any backup system that is not properly thought out, but full disc images are not necessary (no harm in taking them though if you can take the downtime of having everything read-only or simply off while the image is made). rsync can be used to maintain offline backups (which is essentially what your full disc images are) too and you can synchronise everything on disk to get a clean backup without pausing the whole filesystem long enough for a full image to be taken (LVM snapshots are a useful method of achieving this). A common problem with online backups is that the live machines have write access to the backup services, so an attacker can kill or damage both at once, but with simple careful though you can disconnect your backups with an intermediary so that neither the live machine nor the backup machines can authenticate against each other directly or otherwise (so as long as your snapshots go back far enough that a clean version still exists once the problem is noticed the issue can't affect all you online backups). Snashots going back far enough also protects you from the accidental delete circumstance you mention (again, if you notice in time).
rsync on its own is not a backup system (it is a very efficient file copying tool) as no other single tool is, including those that make full disk images, but it can be used as the core component of a well designed backup arrangement.
While we are on one of my pet issues (backups): how often do you test those full disk images? A backup should not be considered a true backup unless it is tested regularly. You don't want to wait until you need the backup system, to find that something has been going wrong for months undetected. Some sort of automated test is the goal if you can arrange it (test that need manual intervention are prone to error or just not being done when people get busy), though make sure your tests reports positives as well as negatives instead of a system where you assume no news is good news (no news could simply mean the backup checking routine has failed to run).
It is probably just that they are explicitly making an effort to cover these areas more, rather than covering parts of them when they overlap the general purpose of the show or the specific areas they have previously concentrated on.
A good move in any case, as long as they manage to do it in a way that still keeps the kids entertained (the best way to teach a child often being to entertain them so they don't realise they are being taught!).
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There are parts of RedHat that CentOS doesn't include as they are not F/OSS licensed.
As far as I know, RedHat only produces GPL software and always have.
It looks like you are right there (I've just dug around for a little fact checking on myself). It would appear that all CentOS take out is copyright covered branding, like Debian removing Firefox/Mozilla branding to make "iceweasel" but on a larger scale.
One important difference between CentOS and RedHat is potential delay, or potential faults, in security update releases. If they are taking RedHat's updated packages then they have to wait until RedHat releases the source updated source packages and get them run through their build process and do what-ever testing they do before they release the update themselves. If they are making their own updates then there are two potential problems: a community effort is unlikely to put as much resource behind testing updates (not that this is a given: some F/OSS projects seem to have access to the resources to be very thorough on such matters, more so than some commercial bodies) so new bugs may be introduced temporarily, and with every update that doesn't come from RH you are moving away from that exact environment (which is a concern if that is why you are using CentOS in the first pace).
Of course people who chose CentOS over something else (such as Debian which has been my preference for some time), have a relatively easy transition to RedHat if they do decide they need the insurance of paid support and related consulting services.
From RedHat's PoV, someone using CentOS doesn't cost them any more than someone using Debian, Ubuntu, Madriva, or something else. They don't make money out of selling Linux, they make money selling the service and support contracts that go with it, and someone who isn't wanting to pay for that wouldn't use RedHat just because CentOS didn't exist.
There are parts of RedHat that CentOS doesn't include as they are not F/OSS licensed. Off the top of my head I can't tell anyone what they are (I'm a Debian person for the most part) but I'm sure it isn't difficult to look up - no doubt to some people those are worth some of what they pay them for the contracts too (or maybe they are things that make the support easier to offer? Remote admin related services and such? Either way it is something that CentOS, or Debian for that matter, doesn't have).
I'm sure RH would rather more people who used CentOS would pay for RedHat+support, but that isn't going to happen for the most part: if CentOS vanished today (as is seemed to nearly do a while ago when there were problems with a key maintainer) people using it would not automatically move to RedHat. It isn't like Debian (my preference, other perfectly decent options are available) doesn't have Apache, mySQL, Python, and all the other major packages that are commonly used, and for all the help RedHat has provided (I'm not trying to belittle them here: that have provided a *lot* of support to the Kernel and other projects in one way or another over they years) they can not claim that they created any of it wholesale.
They actually gain a little from CentOS: more people are using an arrangement very similar to theirs so to a certain extent that have a large group of testers out there, who RH have no particular responsibility to support and who help keep RH's preferred tool-chains relevant.
CentOS is no paragon of virtue (as you point out it was created to save money rather than for any technical or philosophical reason) but it certainly isn't a bad player in the market as you make the project out to be.
Your comparison with MS is interesting. How many small companies can you mention that have use MS support? Active people-paid-by-MS support, not the online docs and (unpaid) user populated forums? While large businesses no doubt get a fair amount of contact with MS I can tell you from the PoV of a small development shop with a collection of Windows, SQL Server, MSDN and Office licenses , we have once contacted MS and found it hard work. It ended up that we had to pay to push the issue beyond a certain point and claim the money back when it did turn out to be their bug not ours (it was a problem with the MMC snap-in API back soon after that was first "the way to do things" (I don;t know the exact details, I wasn't on that team). While not entirely unreasonable (I'm sure they get a lot of support calls that turn out to be a problem with the developer getting something wrong rather than MS's code being at fault) and the right result was where we ended up (a hotfix that was soon rolled into a generally available patch and a refund of all costs) it did seem to be harder work than I thought it should be. That was years ago and things may be completely different now, but "just Google it" is not the first port (and often only) of call just for Linux users who have paid no license/support fees, it is the first (and often only) port of call for Windows admins and developers too. I don't know what RH's support system is like, but for small companies moving away from Windows for what-ever reason the fact that they've never use the support "paid for" by licensing Windows/MSSQL/VS/Office/other is likely to make then take a moment to consider the CentOS/RedHat thing in a light favourable to CentOS. Back to my original point: if CentOS were not there the decision would be between and Redhat, it would not be an automatic customer for RedHat.
If you have the conversation in writing where you have recommended RedHat and why but you have been told to get CentOS instead, go CentOS. Chances are all will be well and it will be money saved. If something does go wrong that a support contract would have dealt with, no one can blame you for choosing CentOS over RedHat and you might even get a few hours paid overtime fixing the issue yourself...
What I CANNOT do is run Internet Explorer on Linux.
Try harder. 5, 6, and 7 (at least) will all work using Wine.
Invalid rant is invalid.
Try harder. I'm told 8 can be made to work, but 9 can't reliably as yet. And I expect it would take a while after release to get 10 going that way if it ever does.IE5/6/7 is not adequate testing to say your code works well with IE when many are using 8 or 9. Also, running IE away from Windows is probably explicitly against the license agreement in some way/shape/form (OK so click through licenses may be worth little more then their weight in my excrement, but I for one would not be willing to waste time arguing that point in order to test my stuff on MS's browser).
Your counter-rant is invalid.
there were about 1 million people employed to remove fake goods from Chinese streets
So, no one trying to stop the many more fake goods that are being exported then?
Focussing on the figurehead gives you the impression that the company overall has changed more than I think it has.
Gates started as the man who made the company, but by 2000-and-somthing his was more a figure head than a driving force (unlike Jobs, who managed to be both until handing over the reigns some months before his death, as a counter example). Ballmer is also not a single-man driving force, but he is lacking something that in Bill made that ignorable. He is a company man rather than a man that builds companies, as you point out.
You are not seeing the man with Ballmer: you are seeing the company under him. And I don't think that has changed nearly as much in the last ten years as the difference between Gales and Ballmer.
As relevant here as it was nine years ago: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/7/22/
(no big MS fan myself but come on typing "M$" for "MS" is no more mature than "Open Sores" in place of "Open Source")
While the logo is displayed a fair chunk of the system devices get their first detailed probes and initialisations, so it could be that it responds badly as the memory subsystem is checked out at that point in specific circumstances. Edge cases like that are often fixed in BIOS updates so that would certainly be worth a try.
If it is a known bug in some versions of that chipset's firmware that can be worked around, you might find Linux uses the work-around where the official Windows drivers rely on the BIOS update being in place - so don't let Linux working make you not try the update (long gone are the days when a BIOS update was generally a flaky and risky proposition to only be attempted if there is a serious problem). If know enough to be able to find your way around the kernel's boot logs, you might find a clue in there if such a work-around is used.
Defined "won't boot" a little more precisely.
I'm guessing (I can't be more sure without more info) that the problem there is hardware/firmware rather than software. A couple of suggestions that might help or offer further diagnostic information:
* see if there are any BIOS updates for your motherboard, some times new updates are release to fix edge case timing issues that affect some RAM/CPU combinations and other such
* try booting another OS (Linux via a Live CD or USB based build, for instance) as the machine is and with the other slots populated.
Windows "Yuppie Flu" as it got called around these parts, "Yuppie Flu" being piss-take phrase for CFS whic at the time was more commonly/popularly referred to as ME (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_fatigue_syndrome)
I've read (though I can't quote sources, sorry) that the main reason computerised voices on navigation aids is female is the higher pitch. In jets where that sort of thing was pioneered it made the voice easier to distinguish clearly from the "background" noise of the engines without having to raise the volume, and presumably the difference is similar in cars.
There may be cultural reasons too, of course, but this theory of a physical reason makes sense to me.
Sometimes I'm not sure if these people are just ignorant to the Streisand effect, or are actively trying to use it to gain publicity for themselves generally or whatever the parody is using as inspiration or source material.
If you don't like it, why don't you fix it yourself?
That is only really relevant if he cares whether it works or not. He isn't complaining that it doesn't work, he is complaining that the bug reports are getting in the way. And he has fixed that himself, by making the module be marked as 3rd party (which it is) so the reports don't automatically hit their queue.
Definitely worth a try. But do keep your eyes open for ways out in case it doesn't work out well.
Best case: you get he credit for improving the company. That would put you in good stead where you are and help your attractiveness elsewhere if you need/want to move on later.
Worst case: you get somewhere to work until you find somewhere else. No point dropping yourself out of employment until you have a safe exit strategy, especially with the job market the way it is in most places. Just make sure you aren't standing too near any fans, so you've got time to duck if something unsavoury hits them.
Lack of CI and automated testing and such is not unusual at all - you were lucky in your last place (I wish I had that luck!). Lack of good source control is something that you need to fix fast, before it bites you in the arse (and it will).
I think I'm missing your point - I'm not sure what that adds to the discussion. Please enlighten (serious request there, not an accusation or put down).
But you are right, some people don't want to socialise this way. To be honest I don't, but with a large chunk of my family in other parts of the country (and in some cases, in other countries) it proves a useful way to not lose connection with the grapevine.
I'm not in the "people I've not really spoken to in 25 years and don't intend to" group though and neither are most of my contacts, that does strike me as somewhat sad. I do have a couple of people on my contacts list out of politeness rather than much else (not having them there would open arguments that are just not worth wasting other people's time over). You will not that I use the word "contact" rather than "friend" though, I'm old fashioned enough to be careful who I consider what and what things I'll discuss in public (I'll say nothing on fb or similar that I wouldn't feel comfortable shouting across a table in a crowded bar).
Maybe I'm missing something and/or it just wasn't working when we first tried the thing. We've not been back to try it again. I've never used it on gmail (my gmail account exists only because I wanted to see what the fuss was about all those moons ago, and is kept alive as my 'droid phone pretty much insists I have a Google account) so I can't comment on that. Maybe we'll give it another go next time people are moaning about a change fb have made to their chat option.
Also stories of being blocked from other Google services for doing something against policy on G+ puts quite a few people off.
... and why some people I know changed their minds about even looking. They want to socialise, not join a service specifically to be identified.
Lack of obvious working text chat integration kills it for me, that has become the primary reason I use fb since MSN Messenger became increasingly unreliable in alternate clients like Pidgin (I've refused to use the abomination that is the official client for that IM network since they successfully blocked the tool that let me take all the junk off the interface). Yes there is a chat box there but no display of who is online right now and when a couple of us tried while we were definitely online it didn't seem to want to connect us that way. We don't care for web-cam and voice chat, face-to-face is what pubs are for, just working text chat. Yes there are plenty of other options, but as far as my non-techie contacts (i.e. most of my family, who are the main reason I'm willing to touch fb with a bargepole) fb is the "other option" of choice no matter how much they moan each time something changes.
Actually for the most part they don't need it for themselves directly, most of the supply is used in the manufacturing industry producing things that are then sold to the rest of the world (yes the Chinese populous uses this output too, but once you take the poor rural population out of the equation it becomes clear that exports of such products is currently more significant than sales internal to the country). That is why China is controlling access to the rare elements as much as they can: they are protecting the manufacturing industry that their economy depends upon quite strongly. If this element, now found in significant quantities out of China's control is significantly useful then other governments may encourage (through grants and subsidies) the development of those alternatives in order to try tip the control of the market a little more towards their favour.
Some of the uses for it overlap with those for elements that are both rarer and pretty much controlled by China (they've bean very canny about securing such resources over the last decade or two, and now protect direct exports). If the main thing stopping the use of those alternatives is the cost of acquiring the raw material then this find is likely to make them more attractive by increasing availability and reducing that cost. The change won't be fast though, and many uses of rare earth materials are often in processes that involve other rare elements so unless the processes being discussed are unusual in only needing this one rare element such co-dependence will complicate things (unless this deposit contains the other elements in useful amounts too, of course - as others have pointed out deposits of several rare elements are often found together).
being persecuted like the early Christians who were tortured and executed by various means
No that is the best idea I've heard all day!
Bullshit.
Because that is so different from the "dismissive douche" you are replying to.
Until one or both of you start giving examples that illustrate your positions I'm going with "it takes two to make an argument, and I'm not going to listen to either of these douches".
Rsync is not a backup.
No, but it is a great tool for creating and maintaining both online and offline backups. With a little scripting you can create a very efficient (in terms of storage space and bandwidth) system of snapshots in your online backups. Large files such as massive database backups need slightly different handling than smaller objects but rsync can help you with them too. And if you are backing up live database files you are doing it wrong. Any good RDBS features the ability to produce a consistent backup without taking the database down or even pausing it - the resulting file(s) are what you backup with your tool of choice.
The two problems you list, human error and lack of synchronisation, exist with any backup system that is not properly thought out, but full disc images are not necessary (no harm in taking them though if you can take the downtime of having everything read-only or simply off while the image is made). rsync can be used to maintain offline backups (which is essentially what your full disc images are) too and you can synchronise everything on disk to get a clean backup without pausing the whole filesystem long enough for a full image to be taken (LVM snapshots are a useful method of achieving this). A common problem with online backups is that the live machines have write access to the backup services, so an attacker can kill or damage both at once, but with simple careful though you can disconnect your backups with an intermediary so that neither the live machine nor the backup machines can authenticate against each other directly or otherwise (so as long as your snapshots go back far enough that a clean version still exists once the problem is noticed the issue can't affect all you online backups). Snashots going back far enough also protects you from the accidental delete circumstance you mention (again, if you notice in time).
rsync on its own is not a backup system (it is a very efficient file copying tool) as no other single tool is, including those that make full disk images, but it can be used as the core component of a well designed backup arrangement.
While we are on one of my pet issues (backups): how often do you test those full disk images? A backup should not be considered a true backup unless it is tested regularly. You don't want to wait until you need the backup system, to find that something has been going wrong for months undetected. Some sort of automated test is the goal if you can arrange it (test that need manual intervention are prone to error or just not being done when people get busy), though make sure your tests reports positives as well as negatives instead of a system where you assume no news is good news (no news could simply mean the backup checking routine has failed to run).
It is probably just that they are explicitly making an effort to cover these areas more, rather than covering parts of them when they overlap the general purpose of the show or the specific areas they have previously concentrated on.
A good move in any case, as long as they manage to do it in a way that still keeps the kids entertained (the best way to teach a child often being to entertain them so they don't realise they are being taught!).