All I can say is, "why is anyone surprised?". This program begs to be abused. It's the most tedious, convoluted, beurocratic POS I've ever had the misfortune to be involvewd with. I don't remember the details exactly, as they have never applied to my district, but one of my colleagues in another district ran into a situation under certain parts of the application where you can't submit the application without having bids for service in hand, but you can't get bids until after you have submitted the application and gotten certain pieces of information back from the SL. It's basically impossible to follow the application process properly. The official solution from the SL organization that runs the helpdesk for the program? Lie. Just say you have bids when you don't, and after you get the information back from the SL so you can properly do the RFP, get the bids.
It's insane, there are tons of little things like that. Not to mention they only fund certain types of projects and equipment, so it's almost impossible to get a good quality, cohesive solution. Unless you use this money exclusively to offset the cost of telco services, any projects you do based on it (assuming you follow the rules) will turn out totally half-assed, and they never account for the costs of owning the equipment itself. School districts are so underfunded that they usually can't afford to hire competent staff, so you've almost always got people in the IT depts that don't _really_ know what their doing, and don't have the time to improve themselves, so the IT depts are always screwed up and wasting money because they take vendors and other agencies like the SL at their word, and frankly don't know any better. Case in point, I'd bet the wireless cards that sat on the loading dock sat there because the person who was running the project got canned because of a funding shortage, and nobody else knew about them, or didn't understand them. Since IT projects in education are never driven by business needs there is little pressure put on people to make things work.
Combine this with the fact that schools are so grossly underfunded in general, people are so used to "making do", that they don't even blink when something doesn't work right or doesn't get done right, they expect it not to from the start. And if they can find a loophole that will get them some money to work with, ethical or not, most of them will use it, since there is no other way that their needs will be met. It's sad, really, that so much lipservice is paid to improving education, but nobody in the position to do something about it _for real_ ever does. This is just another example of this.
In some cases I'd agree, _but_ the speed improvement is useful for/tmp, and having the swap on RAID means that if a drive fails and I need to hit swap, it won't freak out. I think the overhead of a couple of percent of CPU time and drive space is well worth the extra fault tolerance gained as well as the throughput improvement. Those were my proirities when putting this together, not eeking out as much space as possible. And again, The throuput improvment more than offsets the cost in CPU time. I know that seperate swap spaces can be setup with the same priority effectively RAIDing the swap, but you don't get the fault tolerance in that scenario.
I have a similar-ish setup that is now nearly 5 years old and only just now am I considering upgrading. I have 4 9GB 10K RPM SCSI drives using software RAID 5 for my / and swap. I have a 250GB 7200 RPM IDE drive for/archive (my equivalent to your/scratch). I got a "high end" IDE drive for the archive simply because of the better warranty, the improved performance over the cheaper model was just a bonus. So anyway, the throughput on my array matches the throughput of my modern "fast" IDE drive, and has about 1/3 the seek time. When I LAN with friends, I'm always the first with the level loaded, even though I have the "slowest" system of the group in terms of CPU, RAM, graphics card, etc. It cost quite a bit when I put it together, but it's been well worth it, seeing as how it has taken 5 years for the desktop-level stuff to catch it performance-wise. When I do upgrade, I will probably go with an escalade driving 74GB Raptors, since the have command queueing they are beating all but the most high-end SCSI drives out there now.
This is what I'm talking about. Linux users do NO ONE any favors when they adopt this sort of crap. Via is not the only maker of small motherboards. When they stop treating linux users like sewcond class citizens I'll happily go looking here - until then Via will get not one penny of my money. Not for one of these mini systems nor for any other motherboard or peripheral.
How are linux users being treated second class? What they are providing is very comparable to what they are providing under Windows: a binary library for supported other pieces of software. That's what the Windows users are getting. Demanding source code is asking for special treatment. I think it's commendable that they are supporting Linux as much as they are. Sure they could do better, but this is a step in the right direction. Not supporting a company like this is counterproductive if you want better Linux hardware support. When a company takes a risk and offers some support support for a non-mainstream system, they will likely continue to offer that level of support, or even expand it, if their initial experiment works out well. If it fails, they will bag it altogether. What would you rather have: partial support that lets you use the hardware, even if it's imperfect, or no support at all? Expecting a company to drop everything and bend over backwards for a market segment that is not neccesarily part of their core target, and is small, even if it is growing, is naive. They are trying to make money afterall. But even this is secondary to the real point:
Vote with your dollars. And be vocal about it.
Exactly. Vote with your dollars and support companies that provide Linux support, even if it's imperfect. Then say, "Hey, you know, I bought your product because I can use it with Linux, and I really like it. You know what would make it even better? If you would make an effort to support all of it's features in Linux, or release a spec or some driver source, so someone else in community can make full support happen. That would probably get you even more customers. I know I would be telling all my friends to buy your stuff, even the ones who use Windows, because then if they want to switch to Linux, it will be easier for them." Once a company hears that enough times, they will be more likely to provide improved support or release code. If they make a guesture to the community by providing partial support, and all they get back is, "Fah! That's not good enough!! You must release code or provide full support before we will buy!!!" they will just tell us all to bugger off and focus only on their core markets, while we sit out in the cold wishing we had even just a binary driver for our hardware MPEG decoders so we could watch our movies on our little set-top boxes...
Get real man. Face the fact that as desktop Linux users, we are the equivalents of Internet age Hippies. We are a fringe group, but we've got some damn good ideas that will change the world. Everyone else just needs to catch up, and we need to have the patience to let them. Otherwise, things are not likely to work out the way we want them to.
there are benchmarks all over, google for "via epia review" and you are sure to get some good ones. Anecdotally, they are plenty fast for basically everything but 3d games, multimedia creation, and viewing very highly compressed (mpeg4, high bitrate divx) video. This new board will hopefully change that. I've used one (an 800 mhz) as a desktop machine for a co-worker, and the only thing they commented on was how quiet and little it was compared to their old (p4) machine. They made no mention of a performance hit, and they work on the thing all day long. I've also used one (1 Ghz) as a firewall / server for my dad's business. And frankly, the poor thing is bored.
Flash works fine, even those silly animated shorts and games. Remember that a "slow as balls" computer by todays standards will likely meet their (your parents) needs just fine. The biggest benefit over a cheap athlon is that these can be made small and quiet, making them unobstrusive. They also run cool enough that they don't affect the temperature of the room they are in noticably, unlike athlons / P4 which in a lot of ways are very expensive space heaters....
but "The Practice of System and Network Administration" is very, very handy. Full of best practices and day-to-day scenarios and how best to handle them. See it here at Amazon. I have found the advice contained in there to be indispensible as I am maturing as a sysadmin.
I have had phone/dsl and ISP services off and on for some years from Qwest/USWest and Qwest.net. On the phone/dsl service side of things, they delete portions of account information (like SSN) almost immediately. I recently moved and they bunged up the move order. When I called back a day after my new service was supposed to start, and had to start "new" service, they still had my name, address, etc. but no longer had my SSN or any of my old billing information. Pretty good. Qwest.net, on the other hand, apparently doesn't get rid of anything, as they still had that (partially obsolete) information when I spoke with them minutes later...
Not neccesarily meaning to learn more, but go for a position at a public school district or university. If public schools on the East coast are anything like those on the West, they are in dire need of competent tech staff. The pay isn't what you would be getting "in the industry" but there seem to be more jobs out there and there is arguably less pressure and stress as well. My situation is atypical, but I started in a public school district as a tech support monkey for a small district with 500 computers a little over 3 years ago, and now I am the "technology supervisor" at a medium-sized district with a 1000 machine network. My pay has gone up 300% and I have 5 tech minions and an "administrative assistant". Is it my dream job? No. Does it let me live quite comfortably doing work I like in a poor IT economy and rack up a bunch of high quality experience? Yes. Does it beat managing a video game store in a mall like I was before? You better friggin' believe it does...
You raise excellent points on the positive effects of insurance companies, but I think that they pale in comparison to the negative effects. Look at the "insurance chain" in health care. Doctors have astronomical insurance premiums to pay, which they pass on to their clients, which forces their insurance costs up. And because after this cycle completes, the perceived cost of delivering healthcare is higher, and therefore the possible loss, making the doctors' insurance rates go up, and then the cycle repeats. That is (I beleive) why my doctor charged me a $150 recently for about 10 minutees worth of work examining an excema breakout on my hand. Surely, if healthcare weren't effectively being run by insurance companies, I doubt very much that visit would have cost nearly that much. Granted, the true root of this is a litigious, "No fair! You owe me!" society, but the high probability of lucritive payoffs provided by the insurance company encourages that behavior.
This has made it effectively impossible for those without very costly insurance to be able to obtain quality healthcare. And in my experience, even with "good" insurance, the care one needs is often still out of reach because of various exclusions, exemptions, or what have you.
I think OSS insurance is a good thing for this very reason: it means some institution actually thinks it's insurable. The way you make money selling insurance is covering things that are likely to NOT burst into flames.
Then do we really need it if it's not likely to "burst into flames"? I mean remember, this is insurance for protecting us against lawsuits, not physical loss or natural disaster. The potential for liability is low, and avoided if we do not accept frivolous IP lawsuits like this and legitimatize them by creating such entities. Accepting this practice now sets precedent for the future. Not too many steps down (an admittedly paranoid) chain of logic takes us to a pretty scary place. where this type of insurance is accepted as general practice, and everyone generally carries "lawsuit insurance", not just people whose profession puts them in a position of high potential liability, or people who are afraid of IP lawsuits. What does that get us? Richer insurance companies, fewer resources to put into positive endeavours, more incentive for frivolous lawsuits, and yet another way to divide people into "haves" and "have nots". One more step takes us to a place where this sort of insurance is required, like car insurance, to do something (go to school, shop at certain stores, you name it) and then we have yet another handy tool for making it harder for the poor to participate in society and allow the wealthy feel even more comfortable in their position of power.
Anyway, this is wandering pretty far OT, so I guess I'm done for now.;)
Just look what insurance has done to health care. The _last_ thing we need as a society is another aspect of our lives that is deemed neccesary to insure. On the whole, I beleive that insurance companies are some of the most exploitive organizations around, draining resources from society with very little positive return. At best, this is going to convince people to throw money away, at worst it is going to encourage frivolous lawsuits because the odds of payoff become higher, thereby making "OSS Insurance" a de facto requirement for running OSS and taking away one of its largest strengths.
I'm doing this now, both at work and at home. The clients PXE boot, download a Kernel, and then run remote X-sessions from the server. An easy way to get this setup is download the K12LTSP custom fedora ISO's to setup the server. It says it is designed for use in schools, but it works equally well in other envirnments. It works really well all in all. Having a $200 client with no moving parts the size of a paperback book is really appealing. Once the Nanode comes out, I plan to set my wife up with one. She can't wait to get the room heater she has now off her desk.
Big Company X that used to have 50 engineers suddenly only needs 40 because of OSS, so they let 10 go. But Little Company Y wants to do a project they think will require 20 engineers, but can't afford to hire 20. Some OSS tool is discovered that will help with the project, making it feasible to do with only 15 engineers. So company Y, rather than bagging the project and hiring 0 engineers, hires 15. Net change for the "industry" is +5, and now Small Company Y is able to make a new offering and hopefully compete with Big Company X. The net result in Company X does not neccesarily reflect the net result industry wide. By lowering the cost of entry, you let more players into the game, and industry-wide there is growth, even if (or especially when?) there is some amount of contraction within "the big boys". Obviously this is not a complete analysis, but it is a logical way to look at the situation that seems to come to the oppositce conclusion yours does.
I'm hardly an expert, but based on what I remember from my business classes, this seems to be based on the fundamental difference between the way that you and I view the situation at an economic level:abundance economics versus scarcity econmics. In other industries, abundance economics is generally the suggested way to view things, and is recognized (according to my business professors) the way things usually end up working out in the end and to are generally to everyone's benefit in the long run, all other things being relatively equal.
I haven't used the specific ones you found, but tried a very similar product for repairing a set of tried and true loudspeakers I used to own that suffered a similar failure. Bottom line, don't waste your time, just get some new speakers. It seemed to work well enough at first, but after only a few months of my listening habits, they were shot again. But as usual, YMMV.
I would say not, unless you are at a level where you could realistically get some high-level security certs or something really rare like a top-tier BICSI cert. Those aside, I just don't think they're worth it. I'm not going to renew mine.
"...and recompile-reboot-repeat Linux machines only to end up at a FreeBSD machine that's more reliable than running water. Now, that's not to say that there's anything wrong with Linux, but its frequent updates to stay on the absolute bleeding edge does cost it a measure of reliability."
This phenomenon is more of a function of the particular user/ admin than the platform as a whole. I have a good number of Linux servers and desktops under my control and the ones that matter have been "as reliable as running water" because I chose to keep them off the bleeding edge for the stability it would deliver. The desktop ones that I monkey with all the time have been less so, but even so, in nearly every instance it's been because I screwed something up, not because of any flaw in the software.
As an aside, I have tried working with FreeBSD in the past because of it's reputation for superior security and reliability. I got it running as a basic firewall for a medium-large network, but it never got out of the testing phase because after an unspecified amount of time less than 8 hours it would run out of memory, fail closed, and have to be rebooted to restore service. Now this same machine is acting as a firewall, webcache proxy, and network monitor under linux and has had no unscheduled downtime. This isn't to say anything against FreeBSD, but to underscore the point that the reliability of any given system is often largely a function of the person running it. I obviously didn't know BSD well enough to make that system reliable, but with Linux, it has been a rock.
"The single most dangerous threat to the success of Linux, especially in the workplace, are the legions of fanboys who show up at the most inopportune times and places to rant and rave irrationally, irreverently, and incessantly"
I couldn't agree more. I was involved in some Oregon state senate hearings about an Open Source bill. The majority of the pro-open source camp got together before hand and we hashed out a cohesive well-formed argument about the merits of OSS, Linux, and what the bill proposed with each of us having a particular section to cover. Unbeknownst to us, there was a small "legion of fanboys" who managed to sneak onto the podium between a set of our presenters and really weakened our argument with their poorly thought-out ranting. Not only that, but they consumed all of the remaining argument time so that we were unable to bring up a good number of the points we had planned to make. That hurt us doubly when the opponents later brought up the points we were planning to address. For people who were "on our side" they did us more harm than any of the actual opposition did that day.
I have freakishly wide feet, so finding comfortable shoes is pretty difficult for me. I have found that New Balance consistently makes most of their models up to 4E wide. Most have little if any metal in them and I am on my feet all day most days and never suffer from foot-ache. They certainly aren't very "professional" looking, but if you are using hiking boots as your benchmark, these will fit the bill nicely and be metal free, lighter, and worlds more comfortable
You make decent argument, but in my experience, it is usually the other way 'round, people use Windows at home because it's what they use at work. Never have I seen any business or organizational choices made based around what people use at home. I've seen them based on what other businesses and orgs use, but never based on what employess choose.
Where I work, people are always asking me for computer advice (I'm "the IT guy") and in many cases a Mac or a PC running Linux would be what I recommend for their needs, and their first response is always "But I use Windows at work...". I even hear this from people who admittedly prefer Macs, but are so convinced that they don't work with files from Windows machines, they don't consider them a real option.
I don't think redhat cut their throat, in fact they made what is in my opinion a very sound decision. They are focusing on Biz / Org sales instead. It's not a worse choice, just a different one.
Try doing it the other way. Have your Direct TV box control the PVR with the auto-tune/auto VCR function. It seems pretty simple so far, I am about 1/3 of the way through my project doing exactly this.
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All I can say is, "why is anyone surprised?". This program begs to be abused. It's the most tedious, convoluted, beurocratic POS I've ever had the misfortune to be involvewd with. I don't remember the details exactly, as they have never applied to my district, but one of my colleagues in another district ran into a situation under certain parts of the application where you can't submit the application without having bids for service in hand, but you can't get bids until after you have submitted the application and gotten certain pieces of information back from the SL. It's basically impossible to follow the application process properly. The official solution from the SL organization that runs the helpdesk for the program? Lie. Just say you have bids when you don't, and after you get the information back from the SL so you can properly do the RFP, get the bids.
It's insane, there are tons of little things like that. Not to mention they only fund certain types of projects and equipment, so it's almost impossible to get a good quality, cohesive solution. Unless you use this money exclusively to offset the cost of telco services, any projects you do based on it (assuming you follow the rules) will turn out totally half-assed, and they never account for the costs of owning the equipment itself. School districts are so underfunded that they usually can't afford to hire competent staff, so you've almost always got people in the IT depts that don't _really_ know what their doing, and don't have the time to improve themselves, so the IT depts are always screwed up and wasting money because they take vendors and other agencies like the SL at their word, and frankly don't know any better. Case in point, I'd bet the wireless cards that sat on the loading dock sat there because the person who was running the project got canned because of a funding shortage, and nobody else knew about them, or didn't understand them. Since IT projects in education are never driven by business needs there is little pressure put on people to make things work.
Combine this with the fact that schools are so grossly underfunded in general, people are so used to "making do", that they don't even blink when something doesn't work right or doesn't get done right, they expect it not to from the start. And if they can find a loophole that will get them some money to work with, ethical or not, most of them will use it, since there is no other way that their needs will be met. It's sad, really, that so much lipservice is paid to improving education, but nobody in the position to do something about it _for real_ ever does. This is just another example of this.
In some cases I'd agree, _but_ the speed improvement is useful for /tmp, and having the swap on RAID means that if a drive fails and I need to hit swap, it won't freak out. I think the overhead of a couple of percent of CPU time and drive space is well worth the extra fault tolerance gained as well as the throughput improvement. Those were my proirities when putting this together, not eeking out as much space as possible. And again, The throuput improvment more than offsets the cost in CPU time. I know that seperate swap spaces can be setup with the same priority effectively RAIDing the swap, but you don't get the fault tolerance in that scenario.
I have a similar-ish setup that is now nearly 5 years old and only just now am I considering upgrading. I have 4 9GB 10K RPM SCSI drives using software RAID 5 for my / and swap. I have a 250GB 7200 RPM IDE drive for /archive (my equivalent to your /scratch). I got a "high end" IDE drive for the archive simply because of the better warranty, the improved performance over the cheaper model was just a bonus. So anyway, the throughput on my array matches the throughput of my modern "fast" IDE drive, and has about 1/3 the seek time. When I LAN with friends, I'm always the first with the level loaded, even though I have the "slowest" system of the group in terms of CPU, RAM, graphics card, etc.
It cost quite a bit when I put it together, but it's been well worth it, seeing as how it has taken 5 years for the desktop-level stuff to catch it performance-wise. When I do upgrade, I will probably go with an escalade driving 74GB Raptors, since the have command queueing they are beating all but the most high-end SCSI drives out there now.
Ditto for me
This is what I'm talking about. Linux users do NO ONE any favors when they adopt this sort of crap. Via is not the only maker of small motherboards. When they stop treating linux users like sewcond class citizens I'll happily go looking here - until then Via will get not one penny of my money. Not for one of these mini systems nor for any other motherboard or peripheral.
How are linux users being treated second class? What they are providing is very comparable to what they are providing under Windows: a binary library for supported other pieces of software. That's what the Windows users are getting. Demanding source code is asking for special treatment. I think it's commendable that they are supporting Linux as much as they are. Sure they could do better, but this is a step in the right direction. Not supporting a company like this is counterproductive if you want better Linux hardware support. When a company takes a risk and offers some support support for a non-mainstream system, they will likely continue to offer that level of support, or even expand it, if their initial experiment works out well. If it fails, they will bag it altogether. What would you rather have: partial support that lets you use the hardware, even if it's imperfect, or no support at all? Expecting a company to drop everything and bend over backwards for a market segment that is not neccesarily part of their core target, and is small, even if it is growing, is naive. They are trying to make money afterall. But even this is secondary to the real point:
Vote with your dollars. And be vocal about it.
Exactly. Vote with your dollars and support companies that provide Linux support, even if it's imperfect. Then say, "Hey, you know, I bought your product because I can use it with Linux, and I really like it. You know what would make it even better? If you would make an effort to support all of it's features in Linux, or release a spec or some driver source, so someone else in community can make full support happen. That would probably get you even more customers. I know I would be telling all my friends to buy your stuff, even the ones who use Windows, because then if they want to switch to Linux, it will be easier for them." Once a company hears that enough times, they will be more likely to provide improved support or release code. If they make a guesture to the community by providing partial support, and all they get back is, "Fah! That's not good enough!! You must release code or provide full support before we will buy!!!" they will just tell us all to bugger off and focus only on their core markets, while we sit out in the cold wishing we had even just a binary driver for our hardware MPEG decoders so we could watch our movies on our little set-top boxes...
Get real man. Face the fact that as desktop Linux users, we are the equivalents of Internet age Hippies. We are a fringe group, but we've got some damn good ideas that will change the world. Everyone else just needs to catch up, and we need to have the patience to let them. Otherwise, things are not likely to work out the way we want them to.
there are benchmarks all over, google for "via epia review" and you are sure to get some good ones. Anecdotally, they are plenty fast for basically everything but 3d games, multimedia creation, and viewing very highly compressed (mpeg4, high bitrate divx) video. This new board will hopefully change that. I've used one (an 800 mhz) as a desktop machine for a co-worker, and the only thing they commented on was how quiet and little it was compared to their old (p4) machine. They made no mention of a performance hit, and they work on the thing all day long. I've also used one (1 Ghz) as a firewall / server for my dad's business. And frankly, the poor thing is bored.
Flash works fine, even those silly animated shorts and games. Remember that a "slow as balls" computer by todays standards will likely meet their (your parents) needs just fine. The biggest benefit over a cheap athlon is that these can be made small and quiet, making them unobstrusive. They also run cool enough that they don't affect the temperature of the room they are in noticably, unlike athlons / P4 which in a lot of ways are very expensive space heaters....
Bah. FUD. Go here to see more info. Also, there is support for the decoder specifically built into MythTV and it works very well.
but "The Practice of System and Network Administration" is very, very handy. Full of best practices and day-to-day scenarios and how best to handle them. See it here at Amazon. I have found the advice contained in there to be indispensible as I am maturing as a sysadmin.
I have had phone/dsl and ISP services off and on for some years from Qwest/USWest and Qwest.net. On the phone/dsl service side of things, they delete portions of account information (like SSN) almost immediately. I recently moved and they bunged up the move order. When I called back a day after my new service was supposed to start, and had to start "new" service, they still had my name, address, etc. but no longer had my SSN or any of my old billing information. Pretty good. Qwest.net, on the other hand, apparently doesn't get rid of anything, as they still had that (partially obsolete) information when I spoke with them minutes later...
Not neccesarily meaning to learn more, but go for a position at a public school district or university. If public schools on the East coast are anything like those on the West, they are in dire need of competent tech staff. The pay isn't what you would be getting "in the industry" but there seem to be more jobs out there and there is arguably less pressure and stress as well. My situation is atypical, but I started in a public school district as a tech support monkey for a small district with 500 computers a little over 3 years ago, and now I am the "technology supervisor" at a medium-sized district with a 1000 machine network. My pay has gone up 300% and I have 5 tech minions and an "administrative assistant". Is it my dream job? No. Does it let me live quite comfortably doing work I like in a poor IT economy and rack up a bunch of high quality experience? Yes. Does it beat managing a video game store in a mall like I was before? You better friggin' believe it does...
the P in LAMP stands for PHP not Perl.
Actually, both are equally valid and recognized, and LAMP is often broken out as Linux - Apache - MySQL - perl/PHP. The P stood for perl first though.
You raise excellent points on the positive effects of insurance companies, but I think that they pale in comparison to the negative effects. Look at the "insurance chain" in health care. Doctors have astronomical insurance premiums to pay, which they pass on to their clients, which forces their insurance costs up. And because after this cycle completes, the perceived cost of delivering healthcare is higher, and therefore the possible loss, making the doctors' insurance rates go up, and then the cycle repeats. That is (I beleive) why my doctor charged me a $150 recently for about 10 minutees worth of work examining an excema breakout on my hand. Surely, if healthcare weren't effectively being run by insurance companies, I doubt very much that visit would have cost nearly that much. Granted, the true root of this is a litigious, "No fair! You owe me!" society, but the high probability of lucritive payoffs provided by the insurance company encourages that behavior.
;)
This has made it effectively impossible for those without very costly insurance to be able to obtain quality healthcare. And in my experience, even with "good" insurance, the care one needs is often still out of reach because of various exclusions, exemptions, or what have you.
I think OSS insurance is a good thing for this very reason: it means some institution actually thinks it's insurable. The way you make money selling insurance is covering things that are likely to NOT burst into flames.
Then do we really need it if it's not likely to "burst into flames"? I mean remember, this is insurance for protecting us against lawsuits, not physical loss or natural disaster. The potential for liability is low, and avoided if we do not accept frivolous IP lawsuits like this and legitimatize them by creating such entities. Accepting this practice now sets precedent for the future. Not too many steps down (an admittedly paranoid) chain of logic takes us to a pretty scary place. where this type of insurance is accepted as general practice, and everyone generally carries "lawsuit insurance", not just people whose profession puts them in a position of high potential liability, or people who are afraid of IP lawsuits. What does that get us? Richer insurance companies, fewer resources to put into positive endeavours, more incentive for frivolous lawsuits, and yet another way to divide people into "haves" and "have nots". One more step takes us to a place where this sort of insurance is required, like car insurance, to do something (go to school, shop at certain stores, you name it) and then we have yet another handy tool for making it harder for the poor to participate in society and allow the wealthy feel even more comfortable in their position of power.
Anyway, this is wandering pretty far OT, so I guess I'm done for now.
Just look what insurance has done to health care. The _last_ thing we need as a society is another aspect of our lives that is deemed neccesary to insure. On the whole, I beleive that insurance companies are some of the most exploitive organizations around, draining resources from society with very little positive return. At best, this is going to convince people to throw money away, at worst it is going to encourage frivolous lawsuits because the odds of payoff become higher, thereby making "OSS Insurance" a de facto requirement for running OSS and taking away one of its largest strengths.
I'm doing this now, both at work and at home. The clients PXE boot, download a Kernel, and then run remote X-sessions from the server. An easy way to get this setup is download the K12LTSP custom fedora ISO's to setup the server. It says it is designed for use in schools, but it works equally well in other envirnments. It works really well all in all. Having a $200 client with no moving parts the size of a paperback book is really appealing. Once the Nanode comes out, I plan to set my wife up with one. She can't wait to get the room heater she has now off her desk.
Here's a little devil's advocacy....
Big Company X that used to have 50 engineers suddenly only needs 40 because of OSS, so they let 10 go. But Little Company Y wants to do a project they think will require 20 engineers, but can't afford to hire 20. Some OSS tool is discovered that will help with the project, making it feasible to do with only 15 engineers. So company Y, rather than bagging the project and hiring 0 engineers, hires 15. Net change for the "industry" is +5, and now Small Company Y is able to make a new offering and hopefully compete with Big Company X. The net result in Company X does not neccesarily reflect the net result industry wide. By lowering the cost of entry, you let more players into the game, and industry-wide there is growth, even if (or especially when?) there is some amount of contraction within "the big boys". Obviously this is not a complete analysis, but it is a logical way to look at the situation that seems to come to the oppositce conclusion yours does.
I'm hardly an expert, but based on what I remember from my business classes, this seems to be based on the fundamental difference between the way that you and I view the situation at an economic level:abundance economics versus scarcity econmics. In other industries, abundance economics is generally the suggested way to view things, and is recognized (according to my business professors) the way things usually end up working out in the end and to are generally to everyone's benefit in the long run, all other things being relatively equal.
Bwahahaha... I did the same thing! Those were thedays eh?
I haven't used the specific ones you found, but tried a very similar product for repairing a set of tried and true loudspeakers I used to own that suffered a similar failure. Bottom line, don't waste your time, just get some new speakers. It seemed to work well enough at first, but after only a few months of my listening habits, they were shot again. But as usual, YMMV.
I would say not, unless you are at a level where you could realistically get some high-level security certs or something really rare like a top-tier BICSI cert. Those aside, I just don't think they're worth it. I'm not going to renew mine.
"...and recompile-reboot-repeat Linux machines only to end up at a FreeBSD machine that's more reliable than running water. Now, that's not to say that there's anything wrong with Linux, but its frequent updates to stay on the absolute bleeding edge does cost it a measure of reliability."
This phenomenon is more of a function of the particular user/ admin than the platform as a whole. I have a good number of Linux servers and desktops under my control and the ones that matter have been "as reliable as running water" because I chose to keep them off the bleeding edge for the stability it would deliver. The desktop ones that I monkey with all the time have been less so, but even so, in nearly every instance it's been because I screwed something up, not because of any flaw in the software.
As an aside, I have tried working with FreeBSD in the past because of it's reputation for superior security and reliability. I got it running as a basic firewall for a medium-large network, but it never got out of the testing phase because after an unspecified amount of time less than 8 hours it would run out of memory, fail closed, and have to be rebooted to restore service. Now this same machine is acting as a firewall, webcache proxy, and network monitor under linux and has had no unscheduled downtime. This isn't to say anything against FreeBSD, but to underscore the point that the reliability of any given system is often largely a function of the person running it. I obviously didn't know BSD well enough to make that system reliable, but with Linux, it has been a rock.
"The single most dangerous threat to the success of Linux, especially in the workplace, are the legions of fanboys who show up at the most inopportune times and places to rant and rave irrationally, irreverently, and incessantly"
I couldn't agree more. I was involved in some Oregon state senate hearings about an Open Source bill. The majority of the pro-open source camp got together before hand and we hashed out a cohesive well-formed argument about the merits of OSS, Linux, and what the bill proposed with each of us having a particular section to cover. Unbeknownst to us, there was a small "legion of fanboys" who managed to sneak onto the podium between a set of our presenters and really weakened our argument with their poorly thought-out ranting. Not only that, but they consumed all of the remaining argument time so that we were unable to bring up a good number of the points we had planned to make. That hurt us doubly when the opponents later brought up the points we were planning to address. For people who were "on our side" they did us more harm than any of the actual opposition did that day.
I have freakishly wide feet, so finding comfortable shoes is pretty difficult for me. I have found that New Balance consistently makes most of their models up to 4E wide. Most have little if any metal in them and I am on my feet all day most days and never suffer from foot-ache. They certainly aren't very "professional" looking, but if you are using hiking boots as your benchmark, these will fit the bill nicely and be metal free, lighter, and worlds more comfortable
Come on editors... is this really front page worthy?
I really hope you're right AC, but I really doubt that you are...
You make decent argument, but in my experience, it is usually the other way 'round, people use Windows at home because it's what they use at work. Never have I seen any business or organizational choices made based around what people use at home. I've seen them based on what other businesses and orgs use, but never based on what employess choose.
Where I work, people are always asking me for computer advice (I'm "the IT guy") and in many cases a Mac or a PC running Linux would be what I recommend for their needs, and their first response is always "But I use Windows at work...". I even hear this from people who admittedly prefer Macs, but are so convinced that they don't work with files from Windows machines, they don't consider them a real option.
I don't think redhat cut their throat, in fact they made what is in my opinion a very sound decision. They are focusing on Biz / Org sales instead. It's not a worse choice, just a different one.
Try doing it the other way. Have your Direct TV box control the PVR with the auto-tune/auto VCR function. It seems pretty simple so far, I am about 1/3 of the way through my project doing exactly this.
Since when is a $1200 computer pricey? I could get two at that price for what I paid for my last complete desktop setup...