Yeah, that average american is like the slashdotter who argues about copyright protection with the GPL while stealing music and movies on kazaa and morpheus.
The problem is very simple. Say I am a commercial developer who licenses the XYZ library from another company, and distributed it in a program which also includes getopt or some other GNU library.
According to Section 2b of the GPL: "You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License."
So the entire application as distributed must be made GPL, including the XYZ library licensed from a third-party. This is why the GPL is a dangerous, viral license and is why we should all be using BSD.
And how can we re-implement GNU software if we have had access to the source code? Having seen the source-code of the bash shell in college, can I write my own shell without putting myself or my company at risk of a lawsuit?
The GPL is a work developed by a man who is wholly dedicated to wiping out intellectual property as it exists today. It must be interpeted through those lenses.
Remember the incident a few years ago with the smart-ass kid who got caned? Smuggling the internet into Singapore is unlikely to be well received.
While you may be able to tunnel some sort of encrypted VPN solution via DSL, I'm sure the authorities and/or network folks at the ISP will notice the massive amounts of encrypted traffic heading into your computer.
When that kid was caned for chewing gum or whatever "crime" he committed, the US Dep't of State was unable to do anything. So when you are facing years in an asian prison for importing Western TV, you'll be safe to assume nobdoy in the US is going to help you.
If a company is sending you to Singapore, ask for a hardship-tour pay differential or do not go at all. Otherwise, go somewhere else or learn to do what you are told in foreign lands.
80% or more of all felony cases are resolved by plea bargain. The entire justice system would collapse if half of all felony arrests went to trial.
Speeding tickets are not a criminal matter. However, you can plead not guilty and go on trial before a judge or magistrate. In most juristrictions there will be a representative from the DA's office, and you can hire a lawyer.
If speeding isn't good enough, try drugs.
In New York, possessing a tiny amount of cocaine will get you 5-10 years in prison. Your sentence is based on the quanity of narcotics in your posession.
Policement stand out on the street and watch drug transactions take place. When they choose too, they round up the buyers and sellers and arrest them.
In 95% of cases, the offenders plead guilty to a lower posession offense (2 yrs in prison, no parole). You can insist on a jury trial, but you will be convicted and will face 10 years in prison instead of two.
My wife was an assistant DA for awhile. She started to have trouble sleeping at night after she saw a few people get railroaded like this and hasn't practiced since.
The impact of speed limits on highway speed: http://www.ibiblio.org/rdu/sl-irrel.html http://www.ibiblio.org/rdu/a-slmatr.html
The impact of speed limits on safety: http://www.hwysafety.com/hwy_montana_2001 .htm http://www.nj.npri.org/nj99/03/fedagency.htm
Summary of findings by the US Dep't of Transportation study:
* Based on the free-flow speed data collected for a 24-h period at the experimental and comparison sites in 22 States, posted speed limits were set, on the average, at the 45th percentile speed or below the average speed of traffic
* Speed limits were posted, on average, between 5 and 16 mi/h (8 and 26 km/h) below the 85th percentile speed.
* Lowering speed limits by 5, 10, 15, or 20 mi/h (8, 16, 24, or 26 km/h) at the study sites had a minor effect on vehicle speeds. Posting lower speed limits does not decrease motorist's speeds.
* Raising speed limits by 5, 10, or 15 mi/h (8, 16, or 25 km/h) at the rural and urban sites had a minor effect on vehicle speeds. In other words, an increase in the posted speed limit did not create a corresponding increase in vehicle speeds.
* The average change in any of the percentile speeds at the experimental sites was less than 1.5 mi/h (2.4 m/h), regardless of whether the speed limit was raised or lowered.
* Where speed limits were lowered, an examination of speed distribution indicated the slowest drivers (1st percentile) increased their speed approximately 1 mi/h (1/6 km/h). There were no changes on the high-speed drivers (99th percentile)
* At sites where speed limits were raised, there was an increase of less than 1.5 mi/h (2.4 km/h) for drivers traveling at and below the 75th percentile speed. When the posted limits were raised by 10 and 15 mi/h (16 and 24 km/h), there was a small decrease in the 99th percentile speed.
* Raising speed limits in the region of the 85th percentile speed has an extremely beneficial effect on drivers complying with the posted speed limits.
* Lowering speed limits in the 33rd percentile speed (the average percentile that speed were posted in this study) provides a noncompliance rate of approximately 67 percent.
* After speed limits were altered at the experimental sites, less than one-half of the drivers complied with the new posed limits.
* Only minor changes in vehicles following as headways less than 2s were found at the experimental sites.
* Accidents at the 58 experimental sites where speed limits were lowered increased by 5.4 percent. The level of confidence of this estimate is 44 percent. The 95 percent confidence limits for this estimate ranges from a reduction in accidents of 11 percent to an increase of 26 percent.
* Accidents at the 41 experimental sites where speed limits were raised decreased by 6.7 percent. The level of confidence of this estimate in 59 percent. The 95 percent confidence limits for this estimate ranges from a reduction in accidents of 21 percent to an increase of 10 percent.
* Lowering speed limits more than 5 mi/h (8 km/h) below the 85th percentile speed of traffic did not reduce accidents.
* The indirect effects of speed limit changes on a sample of contiguous and adjacent roadways was found to be very small and insignificant.
If everyone decided to breach the DMCA, the government would have no trouble continuing to enforce it and collect revenues from fines.
About 90% of drivers speed at least once a day. This does not stop the police from enforcing outrageously slow speed limits. In New York, some "school zones" have 15 mph limits which are universally ignored, even by school busses. There is still a sheriff sitting there with a radar gun though.
The merchantile systems systems setup by the Imperial powers gave them cheap sources of raw materials (raw materials that were not available to other Empires) and a captive market for manufactured goods.
The French and Indian War, which was the impeteus for the taxation that led to the American Revolution, was actually a part of the larger 30 Years War between England and France. When colonial militia was defeated repeatedly by the French and Iroquois forces, British regular infantry established garrisions in New York and New England to protect the colonies -- which was quite expensive.
The British Empire became richer because it focused it attentions on British India, which was a veritable gold mine of spices and material, as well as a massive captive market.
By the time the 20th Century rolled around, the economies of scale achieved by the industrial revolution made the European and US markets so powerful that captive colonial markets quickly became impovrished backwaters.
The British Empire was the largest and smartest. Spain mined so much gold, they created a hyper-inflation which eventually bankrupted most of the nobility.
So while it's not far to say that Europe was built entirely on the backs of it's colonies, it would have been impossible for European powers to raise enough capital to do everything they did without sucking down colonial resources.
If there was a 1/4" gap on a door panel, water would flow.
When you buy a car, probaly about 15% of it is raw materials. about 35% of it is employee health insurance.
I don't have an auto industry example, but here's one from the steel industry:
Korean steel companies require about 16-25 workers to do the job of 2 workers for US Steel. It costs them about 2.5x more to produce a given quanity of steel than a good US mill.
Why are American steel companies bankrupt then? Health care costs for pensioners accound for $0.35 for every dollar of revenue.
The Software industry has no unions, few retirees. Software is cheap because they lack the overhead of industrial companies. Plus additional copies of software cost nearly nothing make.
Europe loves to criticize the US, but is too dependent on the benefits of being Americas lackey to take any action on it's own.
It's very easy for German and French politicians to hurl insults and compare the US gov't to Hitler or some crazed Roman Emperor. It's alot harder to offer constructive alternatives or action.
Italy, Germany, the UK, Russia, Sweden, every nation in Europe allowed the bloody Yugoslavian civil war to drag on and on -- all the while blasting US policy towards rouge states like Iraq. In the end, who took action? The US.
"Why would you want to? If I need to, I can fire up man pages and search google. I administer about 10 fileservers across three departments totaling a good 15-20TB and hundreds of users and have never run into a situation where ACLs are needed."
You have never worked with a secure application, or with a company which protects client data properly.
DoD requires that information access be compartmentalized. That means that your system admin can't read the data, either.
HIPAA requires that all patient healthcare data be secure and compartmentalized -- even amoung business units of the same company who need access to data. How do you do that without ACL's?
There's alot out there besides file servers. Windows is hardly perfect -- but is a great choice for small to medium-sized applications.
You schedule downtime windows. We do up to 6 hours every 3 months or so.
Then you READ the patch documentation. If you don't need the patch, don't install it. As an example, we do not allow IIS on any server that does not explicity require it. We do not patch disabled services that are not in use.
The few servers that we run that have IIS and require frequent patching are clustered. We then upgrade the cluster one machine at a time, resulting in no downtime for our customers.
Unix needs to rebooted for security patches as well. If you install AIX or Solaris rollup patches, they require a reboot. Plenty of Linux security problems and critical bugs (ex. memory subsystem in 2.4 anyone) require kernel upgrades as well.
How is someone bitching about 8MB in 2002 lucid or rational? $20 hard disks is only 40 gigs! Load times are slow, cause I am too retarded to have mozilla load automatically in the background!
"We've got problems at my work with people thinking that they are fully fledged programmers since they can record two macros and cut'n'paste the results into a super-macro"
That's a problem anywhere. When I was a junior sysadmin at a university Unix shop we'd have PhD candidates dropping fork bombs and other stupid Unix programmer tricks.
"Oh, what? Surely one can pull the TP-cable out of *nix boxes too. Even the 'central' one in the basement... Security can not be a reason to use M$ software."
Microsoft Security is pretty decent and granular in an all Windows 2000 / Active Directory environment. Try implementing group policy and acls in Linux or Solaris.... it can be done, but you do not know anyone who can.
IIS vulnerabilities do not count -- Apache has it's share of exploits and doesn't belong in an LDAP or NIS server. Similarly, you keep IIS where it belongs.
"Take a standard, implement it, expand it in your solution in order to make your app 'integrate' with others, but not the other way around. A good application should be able both to import and export data properly. (M$ Word RTFs crash my FrameMaker... portable format - not)."
No disagreement with you there.
"Again, you do not get less downtime by buying an expensive system with big flaws. They probably pay loads of $$$ to get a guaranteed time to support arrives and press the 'reset' button. *nix usually do not fail as ofter as Win*, thus no need to advertise that support will arrive in 2.3ms. The lack of service can be because it is not needed, not because it is an ingnored flaw."
That's really not true anymore -- busy Windows servers are nearly as reliable as Unix these days. The only real disadvantage of Windows (and Linux) vs. Commerical Unix are mass-deployment and backup tools. Comparing your Windows XP desktop computer's uptime to your Linux boxes' is not a valid comparison.
As far as your delusions about support go, you need to think a little. Our datacenter pays about $1.2M annually for 4-hour support contracts for Unix machines. (For our most important machines only) Similar contracts from Dell or Compaq for Intel hardware cost about 1/2 of a similar Unix contract.
"Since most advertised software is commersial, and they probably do not look for software them selves (just ask for it in a formal way and have companies make offers). Just use KDE as the German government intends to do. This does not only give a better quality of the software, but also save loads of license $$$."
If you have ever worked in a large IT shop with lots of custom applications, you will know that custom software sucks and costs about 5x an off-the-shelf solution. Plus, who has the budget for full-time developers to make software that is already on the market for 1/5 the cost??
Re:US Postal Service
on
Accurate OCR?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The USPS has a very tightly defined set of data that it needs to scan. (ie zipcodes)
If there is more than a slight chance of a misread, then the machines automatically send the envelope to a human reader, who keys in the zip.
Alot of storage is very finicky -- and odd low-level problems emerge when you mix disk manufacturers or even disk models in some cases.
When Sun 5200 fibre arrays first came out, if you got a batch of Sun-branded drives that were manufactured by different vendors, you would have all sorts of odd locking issues and other goodies.
A good strategy for reliable storage:
- Don't be cheap. You get what you pay for. - Plan for Disk-to-Tape (or DVD) backup, actually test restores regularly- - Use well-supported, stable versions of filesystems - Don't buy the latest and greatest unless there is a business reason to do so
They are environmental nightmares. Heavy metals like lead have a habit of leaking into the water table and destroying the ground.
Recycling batteries help alot -- but I would still argue that the impact of lead pollution, plus pollution created by coal plants is far worse than running a well-maintained gas engine.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that average american is like the slashdotter who argues about copyright protection with the GPL while stealing music and movies on kazaa and morpheus.
The problem is very simple. Say I am a commercial developer who licenses the XYZ library from another company, and distributed it in a program which also includes getopt or some other GNU library.
According to Section 2b of the GPL: "You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License."
So the entire application as distributed must be made GPL, including the XYZ library licensed from a third-party. This is why the GPL is a dangerous, viral license and is why we should all be using BSD.
And how can we re-implement GNU software if we have had access to the source code? Having seen the source-code of the bash shell in college, can I write my own shell without putting myself or my company at risk of a lawsuit?
The GPL is a work developed by a man who is wholly dedicated to wiping out intellectual property as it exists today. It must be interpeted through those lenses.
Remember the incident a few years ago with the smart-ass kid who got caned? Smuggling the internet into Singapore is unlikely to be well received.
While you may be able to tunnel some sort of encrypted VPN solution via DSL, I'm sure the authorities and/or network folks at the ISP will notice the massive amounts of encrypted traffic heading into your computer.
When that kid was caned for chewing gum or whatever "crime" he committed, the US Dep't of State was unable to do anything. So when you are facing years in an asian prison for importing Western TV, you'll be safe to assume nobdoy in the US is going to help you.
If a company is sending you to Singapore, ask for a hardship-tour pay differential or do not go at all. Otherwise, go somewhere else or learn to do what you are told in foreign lands.
No, you are wrong here.
80% or more of all felony cases are resolved by plea bargain. The entire justice system would collapse if half of all felony arrests went to trial.
Speeding tickets are not a criminal matter. However, you can plead not guilty and go on trial before a judge or magistrate. In most juristrictions there will be a representative from the DA's office, and you can hire a lawyer.
If speeding isn't good enough, try drugs.
In New York, possessing a tiny amount of cocaine will get you 5-10 years in prison. Your sentence is based on the quanity of narcotics in your posession.
Policement stand out on the street and watch drug transactions take place. When they choose too, they round up the buyers and sellers and arrest them.
In 95% of cases, the offenders plead guilty to a lower posession offense (2 yrs in prison, no parole). You can insist on a jury trial, but you will be convicted and will face 10 years in prison instead of two.
My wife was an assistant DA for awhile. She started to have trouble sleeping at night after she saw a few people get railroaded like this and hasn't practiced since.
A 0.0134 second google search revealed this:
http://www.ibiblio.org/rdu/a-slmatr.html
1 .htmm
The impact of speed limits on highway speed:
http://www.ibiblio.org/rdu/sl-irrel.html
The impact of speed limits on safety:
http://www.hwysafety.com/hwy_montana_200
http://www.nj.npri.org/nj99/03/fedagency.ht
Summary of findings by the US Dep't of Transportation study:
* Based on the free-flow speed data collected for a 24-h period at the experimental and comparison sites in 22 States, posted speed limits were set, on the average, at the 45th percentile speed or below the average speed of traffic
* Speed limits were posted, on average, between 5 and 16 mi/h (8 and 26 km/h) below the 85th percentile speed.
* Lowering speed limits by 5, 10, 15, or 20 mi/h (8, 16, 24, or 26 km/h) at the study sites had a minor effect on vehicle speeds. Posting lower speed limits does not decrease motorist's speeds.
* Raising speed limits by 5, 10, or 15 mi/h (8, 16, or 25 km/h) at the rural and urban sites had a minor effect on vehicle speeds. In other words, an increase in the posted speed limit did not create a corresponding increase in vehicle speeds.
* The average change in any of the percentile speeds at the experimental sites was less than 1.5 mi/h (2.4 m/h), regardless of whether the speed limit was raised or lowered.
* Where speed limits were lowered, an examination of speed distribution indicated the slowest drivers (1st percentile) increased their speed approximately 1 mi/h (1/6 km/h). There were no changes on the high-speed drivers (99th percentile)
* At sites where speed limits were raised, there was an increase of less than 1.5 mi/h (2.4 km/h) for drivers traveling at and below the 75th percentile speed. When the posted limits were raised by 10 and 15 mi/h (16 and 24 km/h), there was a small decrease in the 99th percentile speed.
* Raising speed limits in the region of the 85th percentile speed has an extremely beneficial effect on drivers complying with the posted speed limits.
* Lowering speed limits in the 33rd percentile speed (the average percentile that speed were posted in this study) provides a noncompliance rate of approximately 67 percent.
* After speed limits were altered at the experimental sites, less than one-half of the drivers complied with the new posed limits.
* Only minor changes in vehicles following as headways less than 2s were found at the experimental sites.
* Accidents at the 58 experimental sites where speed limits were lowered increased by 5.4 percent. The level of confidence of this estimate is 44 percent. The 95 percent confidence limits for this estimate ranges from a reduction in accidents of 11 percent to an increase of 26 percent.
* Accidents at the 41 experimental sites where speed limits were raised decreased by 6.7 percent. The level of confidence of this estimate in 59 percent. The 95 percent confidence limits for this estimate ranges from a reduction in accidents of 21 percent to an increase of 10 percent.
* Lowering speed limits more than 5 mi/h (8 km/h) below the 85th percentile speed of traffic did not reduce accidents.
* The indirect effects of speed limit changes on a sample of contiguous and adjacent roadways was found to be very small and insignificant.
Actually, studies have repeatedly found that changing speed limits on rural highways has little or no statistical correlation to average speed.
If everyone decided to breach the DMCA, the government would have no trouble continuing to enforce it and collect revenues from fines.
About 90% of drivers speed at least once a day. This does not stop the police from enforcing outrageously slow speed limits. In New York, some "school zones" have 15 mph limits which are universally ignored, even by school busses. There is still a sheriff sitting there with a radar gun though.
Because it is cost-effective to pirate software, movies, cd's and porn rather then buying them.
Kazaa is the best P2P, because it has the most stuff on it.
Not quite true.
The merchantile systems systems setup by the Imperial powers gave them cheap sources of raw materials (raw materials that were not available to other Empires) and a captive market for manufactured goods.
The French and Indian War, which was the impeteus for the taxation that led to the American Revolution, was actually a part of the larger 30 Years War between England and France. When colonial militia was defeated repeatedly by the French and Iroquois forces, British regular infantry established garrisions in New York and New England to protect the colonies -- which was quite expensive.
The British Empire became richer because it focused it attentions on British India, which was a veritable gold mine of spices and material, as well as a massive captive market.
By the time the 20th Century rolled around, the economies of scale achieved by the industrial revolution made the European and US markets so powerful that captive colonial markets quickly became impovrished backwaters.
The British Empire was the largest and smartest. Spain mined so much gold, they created a hyper-inflation which eventually bankrupted most of the nobility.
So while it's not far to say that Europe was built entirely on the backs of it's colonies, it would have been impossible for European powers to raise enough capital to do everything they did without sucking down colonial resources.
Not as rare as you might think. Most PC's sold in Sears, Leachmere and JC Penney (yes they sold pc's) shipped with GEOS for awhile.
The "owner" of the Beatles portfolio will in 200 years though, if anyone is still listening.
The CD market has little or no effect on classical music.
No artist makes money on CD sales -- the music monopolies take care of thet. The money is made in live performance and by sponsor contributions.
That obnoxious FAQ written by RMS even admits that the FSF has no legal or ethical reason to demand that "Linux" be called "GNU/Linux".
You don't much about industry, do you?
If there was a 1/4" gap on a door panel, water would flow.
When you buy a car, probaly about 15% of it is raw materials. about 35% of it is employee health insurance.
I don't have an auto industry example, but here's one from the steel industry:
Korean steel companies require about 16-25 workers to do the job of 2 workers for US Steel. It costs them about 2.5x more to produce a given quanity of steel than a good US mill.
Why are American steel companies bankrupt then? Health care costs for pensioners accound for $0.35 for every dollar of revenue.
The Software industry has no unions, few retirees. Software is cheap because they lack the overhead of industrial companies. Plus additional copies of software cost nearly nothing make.
Why are you manually installing Windows 2000 Server?
Don't you have a sysprep image of a default server base for your site?
Who has 1-2 hours to spare fiddling with server installs?
Fuckoff man -- go bitch on Indymedia.
I always find smug europeans amazing.
Europe loves to criticize the US, but is too dependent on the benefits of being Americas lackey to take any action on it's own.
It's very easy for German and French politicians to hurl insults and compare the US gov't to Hitler or some crazed Roman Emperor. It's alot harder to offer constructive alternatives or action.
Italy, Germany, the UK, Russia, Sweden, every nation in Europe allowed the bloody Yugoslavian civil war to drag on and on -- all the while blasting US policy towards rouge states like Iraq. In the end, who took action? The US.
"Why would you want to? If I need to, I can fire up man pages and search google. I administer about 10 fileservers across three departments totaling a good 15-20TB and hundreds of users and have never run into a situation where ACLs are needed."
You have never worked with a secure application, or with a company which protects client data properly.
DoD requires that information access be compartmentalized. That means that your system admin can't read the data, either.
HIPAA requires that all patient healthcare data be secure and compartmentalized -- even amoung business units of the same company who need access to data. How do you do that without ACL's?
There's alot out there besides file servers.
Windows is hardly perfect -- but is a great choice for small to medium-sized applications.
Pretty simple, actually.
You schedule downtime windows. We do up to 6 hours every 3 months or so.
Then you READ the patch documentation. If you don't need the patch, don't install it. As an example, we do not allow IIS on any server that does not explicity require it. We do not patch disabled services that are not in use.
The few servers that we run that have IIS and require frequent patching are clustered. We then upgrade the cluster one machine at a time, resulting in no downtime for our customers.
Unix needs to rebooted for security patches as well. If you install AIX or Solaris rollup patches, they require a reboot. Plenty of Linux security problems and critical bugs (ex. memory subsystem in 2.4 anyone) require kernel upgrades as well.
How is someone bitching about 8MB in 2002 lucid or rational? $20 hard disks is only 40 gigs! Load times are slow, cause I am too retarded to have mozilla load automatically in the background!
Please just make it stop!
"We've got problems at my work with people thinking that they are fully fledged programmers since they can record two macros and cut'n'paste the results into a super-macro"
That's a problem anywhere. When I was a junior sysadmin at a university Unix shop we'd have PhD candidates dropping fork bombs and other stupid Unix programmer tricks.
"Oh, what? Surely one can pull the TP-cable out of *nix boxes too. Even the 'central' one in the basement... Security can not be a reason to use M$ software."
Microsoft Security is pretty decent and granular in an all Windows 2000 / Active Directory environment. Try implementing group policy and acls in Linux or Solaris.... it can be done, but you do not know anyone who can.
IIS vulnerabilities do not count -- Apache has it's share of exploits and doesn't belong in an LDAP or NIS server. Similarly, you keep IIS where it belongs.
"Take a standard, implement it, expand it in your solution in order to make your app 'integrate' with others, but not the other way around. A good application should be able both to import and export data properly. (M$ Word RTFs crash my FrameMaker... portable format - not)."
No disagreement with you there.
"Again, you do not get less downtime by buying an expensive system with big flaws. They probably pay loads of $$$ to get a guaranteed time to support arrives and press the 'reset' button. *nix usually do not fail as ofter as Win*, thus no need to advertise that support will arrive in 2.3ms. The lack of service can be because it is not needed, not because it is an ingnored flaw."
That's really not true anymore -- busy Windows servers are nearly as reliable as Unix these days. The only real disadvantage of Windows (and Linux) vs. Commerical Unix are mass-deployment and backup tools. Comparing your Windows XP desktop computer's uptime to your Linux boxes' is not a valid comparison.
As far as your delusions about support go, you need to think a little. Our datacenter pays about $1.2M annually for 4-hour support contracts for Unix machines. (For our most important machines only) Similar contracts from Dell or Compaq for Intel hardware cost about 1/2 of a similar Unix contract.
"Since most advertised software is commersial, and they probably do not look for software them selves (just ask for it in a formal way and have companies make offers). Just use KDE as the German government intends to do. This does not only give a better quality of the software, but also save loads of license $$$."
If you have ever worked in a large IT shop with lots of custom applications, you will know that custom software sucks and costs about 5x an off-the-shelf solution. Plus, who has the budget for full-time developers to make software that is already on the market for 1/5 the cost??
The USPS has a very tightly defined set of data that it needs to scan. (ie zipcodes)
If there is more than a slight chance of a misread, then the machines automatically send the envelope to a human reader, who keys in the zip.
Remember that IRIX and AIX use XFS and JFS, respectively.
If you sent corrupted volumes to a shop that can recover commerical Unix disks, they should be able to recover data on a Linux box. JFS=JFS.
That is not a smart strategy.
Alot of storage is very finicky -- and odd low-level problems emerge when you mix disk manufacturers or even disk models in some cases.
When Sun 5200 fibre arrays first came out, if you got a batch of Sun-branded drives that were manufactured by different vendors, you would have all sorts of odd locking issues and other goodies.
A good strategy for reliable storage:
- Don't be cheap. You get what you pay for.
- Plan for Disk-to-Tape (or DVD) backup, actually test restores regularly-
- Use well-supported, stable versions of filesystems
- Don't buy the latest and greatest unless there is a business reason to do so
Ever seen a lead-acid battery production plant?
They are environmental nightmares. Heavy metals like lead have a habit of leaking into the water table and destroying the ground.
Recycling batteries help alot -- but I would still argue that the impact of lead pollution, plus pollution created by coal plants is far worse than running a well-maintained gas engine.