I know those terrible unions! First they ended child labor. Then they forced employers to pay a living wage without employees having to work 70+ hour weeks. Then they went way too far and demanded safe working conditions! Fer Crist sake! what is this world coming to if someone isn't willing to risk their life to support the family the supposedly love?
Even if you don't belong to a union you benefit from the work the unions have done to improve on the job safety and work conditions. I used to help organize for the Communication Workers of America in Texas which is a "right to work" state. Basically most Texans are like the Anonymous Coward. They were happy to get raises and be protected by the union but they don't want to pay their dues and join up. I remember dozens of folks who said that they couldn't afford to join the union and after we successfully lobied for a raise they still didn't join up. Some would call folks like this deadbeats.
I got a CS degree but my first job covered areas usually associated with EE, digital signal and image processing, data compression, pattern recognition, machine vision. At times I wish I got an EE degree. I would have been better prepared for some of the work I did with an BSEE but so far I haven't felt that limited by having a CS degree.
Ain't this the truth! I ride bicyles. When I look at the rec.bicyles.* groups cyclists put their bikes in their signatures as if owning a high end bicycle makes them cooler. Ditto for the automobile and motercycle newsgroups. A few folks here even put the kind of computer and OS they use into their signature. I guess they have to tell everyone what kind of stuff they own so we will all know how just how very cool they are.
Bruceness (just so you know)
Cinelli Supercorsa w/Campy SR
Nikon FM2n
2000 SE Miata.
Emacs works just as well from a telnet session as vi; if you don't want it to open a new window on your desktop just use the "-nw" option. Even if your terminal emulation sucks the ^L that redraws your screen in vi does the same thing in emacs. For C programming the emacs cc-mode has nice touches like an indentation engine, brace matching, and commenting or uncommenting blocks. If you like you can add syntax shading or the capibility of automatically checking your work into RCS or CVS when you save. One of my best emacs stories was a time I had to answer 30,000 emails checking a particular box on the email and entering a password in a blank on each one. In emacs I entered VM (a mail program in (X)emacs) recorded my keystrokes into a macro whilest I answered the first one; then told emacs to do the same thing 29999 more times. When I came back from lunch it was all done; 30 seconds work. I could have written a program to do the same thing or used procmail or similar but the emacs solution was much easier. Every hour you spend learning emacs will save you many hours in the future through increased productivity. Vi is fine for changing a line here and there in a config file but for program development emacs is the only way to fly.
Re:Titanium is also very flexible.
on
The Sexiest Metal
·
· Score: 1
The idea that steel bicycle frames get soft with use is a myth. Steel does not change its modulus of elasticity over time and use. Of course it will flex more when it cracks but at the point of immenent failure the crack will be noticible other ways; the one steel frame I broke (an old Bridgestone road bike) started creaking. Unfortunately I was looking in the wrong places for the crack and missed the fact that the seat stay was cracked at the seat cluster until it broke. My other two frames; an early '70's Gitaine and an '84 Cinelli are still going strong, the Gitaine has been my town bike and has jumped millions of curbs and thousands of trips home loaded with groceries (I didn't own a car for years and used my bicycle for everything) and the Cinelli has many tens of thousands of miles on it and a couple seasons of racing. Yes it is possible to break a steel frame; my Bridgestone did break but my other frames have taken an unimaginable amount of abuse and have held up wonderfly; my Cinelli even has the fully intergal fork crown that has a reputation for breaking. It is unknown if the new generations of steel (853, Foco, etc.) will be as durable as the past steels (531, Columbus SL, etc.). Someone looking for a frame for a lifetime is still best served by a brazed steel frame since brazed steel frames are repairable while aluminum, titanimum and TIG welded steel frames generally aren't.
Re:Titanium is also very flexible.
on
The Sexiest Metal
·
· Score: 1
I got some flexon frames when they first came out. The woman fitting the frames told me that indeed I could indeed wind them around my finger and they would snap back to shape just like in the commercial but there was a limited number of times I could do this before they would snap. The frames were like $500 dollars and in spite of their not breaking the hinges did become spindly in 3 years so I went back to cheap $90 stanless steel frames and replace them when they break.
I don't own any machine with OS X on it. I probably will in the future though. As far as running on "standard hardware" what you are really asking for is something that runs on the lowest common denomenator of computers. There are advantages to selling hardware and software together. I run Solaris 8 on both SPARC hardware and Intel (Compaq). On SPARC it runs flawlessly, on the Compaq you have to power cycle it every time you reboot or it won't come up and even then once in a while it "looses its mind" while boooting. The hardware support isn't as good; I can only use 8 bit color on the Compaq since it has a weird video adaptor. I don't get as good throughput from the 3com network card as the built in NIC on the sun. When you buy both the hardware and software from the same vendor there can be no finger pointing back and forth between vendors; it just plain has to work. When you can specify the hardware you don't have to worry about supporting thousands of different video, SCSI, and network cards, and motherboards. Buying hardware and software from the same vendor is more expensive but you usually end up with a much better integrated product with fewer suprises.
Actually, it only takes 20 minutes to learn all the vi you absolutely need. You can spend the rest of your life learning useful tricks with it.
I recommend learning enough vi to get by in a pinch then investing the rest of your time learning emacs then install emacs on every UNIX or UNIX-like system you touch.
Re:It means that Sun is dead meat.
on
Unix Isn't Dead
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I thought Sun was dead in the early 90's. They were last in price/performance and they pissed off half their users by pressuring them to migrate from SunOS 4.x to Solaris 2.x which in the beginning really did suck. I thought DEC was the rising star with fast cheap Alpha servers and OSF/1 while bloated at least was comfortable to both BSD and Sys V hacks. Sun continued and with the release of the UltraSPARC CPU was respectable again in price/performance but has been drifting back ever since. The company who has the current hot box will change every year; things like support and preserving your investment are as important as raw performance in business and Sun does a comparitively good job in the other areas. I can tell you horror stories about dealing with IBM when I managed RS6000's at my last employ. I'm not saying that I'd never buy another AIX server but IBM would have to convince me that they do a much better job supporting their hardware and software than they used to. Because of this I'll pay a hefty premium to get a Sun instead of an IBM.
Sure I'm paid to work 40 hours and I spend plenty of time there doing recreational web surfing. On the other hand, I carry a pager and a cell phone 365x24x7 and whenever work needs me I have to drop everything and do their work on my time. If I have to work on what should be my personal time I see nothing wrong with spending time at work doing personal things. My bosses know I do this and have never given me any greif. As long as you get your work done how you schedule your time should be up to you.
Your system is thrashing. The folks that claim that not running X or nice'ing non-essential processes are just plain wrong. The small amount of memory freed up will not help you and nice'ing other processes will not help when the system is spending > 90% of its CPU time swapping or looking for swap victims. What you need is more RAM, boatloads of it. Max out your system and if that still isn't enough than get systems that can take more RAM. Upgrading to FreeBSD can help if you are close to having enough RAM and just need a little better efficiency to get you by. Another advantage to FreeBSD over Linux is that generally when Linux starts thrashing it never comes back; it thrashes itself into oblivion until you reboot while FreeBSD recovers after the memory hogs finally finish running..
I've been mucking around with SAN's for a couple of years. Since it has become a buzzword here we have even used them in places where they made no sense at all simply because higher ups thought they were the way to go. The drawback I see to SAN's are that they are expensive, complex, and the underlying technology is still evolving. On the other hand we have achieved far better performance out of our big SAN storage arrays than we have ever got from local disks. Also, for most things I deal with RAID5 is evil. We mirror and stripe almost everything. We only use RAID5 where the volume is read mostly (RAID5 has poor write performance) and static. We have had large RAID5 volumes die due to multiple drive failures; this sort of thing doesn't happen every day but it is a nightmare when it does. My motto is that disks are cheap, data are expensive.
I don't think Linux kernel hackers want any help from the *BSD camp. Remembering back to the KA9Q networking days in Linux; it was more important for the Linux group to do things their own way than to provide the best services to their users. My understanding is that Linux could have incorporated large parts of BSD network code that would carry both the BSD and GPL licenses but the Linux developers made their users wait until they could develop their own BSD-like networking.
Yea but Solaris on Intel is dying. Sun says there will be no Intel port of Solaris 9. I agree that Solaris 8 IA is pretty nice and is free for noncomerical use but the clock is ticking.
I've worked for the CS dept of a university for 7 years as a sysadm, researcher, and research assistant so I know a bit about CS degrees. In every case I've seen, someone coming from industry to CS has gaps in their knowledge. I'm sure you are a bright guy but being self taught you probably have great depth of knowledge in areas you have used and suprisingly large gaps in other areas. It will take some time and effort to cover all the areas they expect you to master. With your background some of your courses will be slam dunks but others will kick your butt.
It probably wouldn't be that hard for you to pass all the CS classes in a year except the second issue, core courses. You have to take English, History, Political Science, Math, lab science, and a few other odds and ends before you can get your Bachelor's degree. In grad school you can concentrate on just your major but in undergrad they make you take all the stuff you had in high school. Some of these classes might even be hard and take a lot of time away from your CS classes.
If you really want a degree the best thing would probably be to take as many core and introductory courses as you can online or as night classes at a junior college then finish up your CS classes at a good university. If your ultimate goal is a MS or PhD than you shold get whatever bachelor's degree that will be the quickest so you can get into grad school sooner. If you get a MS in CS than whatever you get as a bachelor's degree won't matter much and some employers will even like it being different making you a more "rounded" individual.
Whatever you decide to do, good luck!
I don't believe that you would need 30 megapixels to equal 35mm film. Films most people use resolve around 100 limes/mm. The zoom lenses
most people use don't even resolve that. Full
frame 35mm is 24mm x 36mm so typical 35mm quality can be reached with 8 megapixels. Only the very
best 35mm single focal length lenses at their best aperature and the slowest high quality films resolve 200 lines/mm. In theory you would need 30 megapixels to equal this but that is well beyond typical 35mm quality.
She noticed the shortage of nurses and the glut of IT professionals. She is going to keep her nursing license up to date so she can go back to nursing if she decides to. Doing what she was doing it was hard to make over $50K/year working for a hospital and there is the constant fear of malpractice suits. One of her fellow nurses was in "the wrong place at the wrong time" and was responsible for part of a $10 million judgement. She could make more money working agency instead of for a hospital but with few or no benefits and even less protection against law suits. There is a nursing shortage but the whole reason for it is because nursing doesn't pay as well as it should and their working conditions are usually not that great (micromanagement from supervisors and condescending attitudes from physicians). She is also considering trying to combine her medical experience with her tech training to do something like being technical support for a medical company.
This is on the money. The most important thing is if your server is running its software well and your users are seeing good response times. I've had servers that did fine with load averages over 200 while I've seen other servers that tanked while the load average was still below the number of CPU's. When you are not seeing good performance than statistics like load average, page rescans, network collisions, etc. are things you need to look at to determine where the bottle-neck is. If it ain't broke don't fix it! Most "real" servers are i/o bound rather than cpu or memory bound. The i/o can be disk or network but i/o is typically the factor limiting throughput not cpu. Application servers running bloatware sometimes are cpu limited though.
BSD isn't dying either.
BSD doesn't gauge its success on taking the desktop over from Microsoft. BSD is over 20 years old and there are more people running BSD now than any time in its history. BSD has a "critical mass" so it will continue even if there are more than ten times as many Linux users.
BSD's license is more flexible than the GPL. It is basically open source without the politics. Even if Linux was as good or better than BSD in every way (which it really isn't) BSD's license would guarantee that it would be prefered for some projects.
my opinion is that System Administration is a calling rather than something you choose. The first time I had a UNIX account in college I immediately started to figure out how things worked. Most of my classmates wanted to learn as little as possible to write their programs or do their projects but I kept drilling away figuring things out. Funny thing is that I wasn't this way about other systems; I never liked VMS and never explored it, same with our IBM mainframe (absolutely hated JCL!). UNIX seemed to speak to me. The first two computer jobs I got was as a UNIX programmer and I enjoyed them but when I got my first job as UNIX System Admin I knew I was home. If you are cut out to be a UNIX admin you will gravitate to it; if not you will never be happy doing it. IMHO anyway.
My fiance is 42 and for the last decade was a maternity nurse. On a whim she took a class and got her MCSE and immediately landed a job. She is making a little less than she was as a nurse but that should change after her next salary review. Now worries about being sued for malpractice in IT either!
I've been on several projects that started our using Linux that hit a wall and had to move to a different platform. Because of that I'm not going to put my reputation on the line saying that we can do such and such with Linux unless I've seen it done. We have a few databases that we run on Solaris that could probably be moved over to Linux. We have a few Sun 450's with 4 cpu's and 4 GB of RAM with 100 GB of disk running smallish Informix or Oracle databases. Buying a stout server-class 4 way Intel box with 4 GB or RAM is a couple dual port SCSI adaptors and a box of 10K RPM disks wouldn't be that much cheaper than a Sun 450. Certainly not enough cheaper for me to make promises I'm not sure I could keep. With databases several times this large and busy I'd be even less likely to try it.
But will a Linux soultion really come out that much cheaper than a commercial one? The OS cost is a rather minor part of most projects. Linux or *BSD are great for taking care of small sundry projects done in-house but by the time you have to hire consultants you are out of the skunkworks area anyway. My experience with Linux is that when you try to do big jobs you end up being a trailblazer; this can be fun but if you are charging for time it gets expensive. Sun can tell you exactly what you need to run your multi TB databases from experience but in the Linux camp you are usually running into "theoretically this should work."
As far as I know X/Open now owns the trademark UNIX. A version of Linux could probably be modified such that it validates as a version of UNIX but frankly nobody really seems to feel like it is worth the time or money to do so. Shoot, BSD versions were refered to as UNIX long before X/Open controled the trademark so it seems ironic that BSD has to now be labeled as a UNIX-like OS. BSD was UNIX before UNIX was cool.
This would be interesting for a high level discussion. One of the reasons I switched from Linux to BSD for servers in the mid 90's was because BSD's VM system was miles ahead of Linux. I know both systems have changed a lot since then. I don't know if Linux has caught up and surpassed FreeBSD or if FreeBSD has maintained its lead.
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I know those terrible unions! First they ended child labor. Then they forced employers to pay a living wage without employees having to work 70+ hour weeks. Then they went way too far and demanded safe working conditions! Fer Crist sake! what is this world coming to if someone isn't willing to risk their life to support the family the supposedly love?
Even if you don't belong to a union you benefit from the work the unions have done to improve on the job safety and work conditions. I used to help organize for the Communication Workers of America in Texas which is a "right to work" state. Basically most Texans are like the Anonymous Coward. They were happy to get raises and be protected by the union but they don't want to pay their dues and join up. I remember dozens of folks who said that they couldn't afford to join the union and after we successfully lobied for a raise they still didn't join up. Some would call folks like this deadbeats.
I got a CS degree but my first job covered areas usually associated with EE, digital signal and image processing, data compression, pattern recognition, machine vision. At times I wish I got an EE degree. I would have been better prepared for some of the work I did with an BSEE but so far I haven't felt that limited by having a CS degree.
Ain't this the truth! I ride bicyles. When I look at the rec.bicyles.* groups cyclists put their bikes in their signatures as if owning a high end bicycle makes them cooler. Ditto for the automobile and motercycle newsgroups. A few folks here even put the kind of computer and OS they use into their signature. I guess they have to tell everyone what kind of stuff they own so we will all know how just how very cool they are.
Bruceness (just so you know)
Cinelli Supercorsa w/Campy SR
Nikon FM2n
2000 SE Miata.
Emacs works just as well from a telnet session as vi; if you don't want it to open a new window on your desktop just use the "-nw" option. Even if your terminal emulation sucks the ^L that redraws your screen in vi does the same thing in emacs. For C programming the emacs cc-mode has nice touches like an indentation engine, brace matching, and commenting or uncommenting blocks. If you like you can add syntax shading or the capibility of automatically checking your work into RCS or CVS when you save. One of my best emacs stories was a time I had to answer 30,000 emails checking a particular box on the email and entering a password in a blank on each one. In emacs I entered VM (a mail program in (X)emacs) recorded my keystrokes into a macro whilest I answered the first one; then told emacs to do the same thing 29999 more times. When I came back from lunch it was all done; 30 seconds work. I could have written a program to do the same thing or used procmail or similar but the emacs solution was much easier. Every hour you spend learning emacs will save you many hours in the future through increased productivity. Vi is fine for changing a line here and there in a config file but for program development emacs is the only way to fly.
The idea that steel bicycle frames get soft with use is a myth. Steel does not change its modulus of elasticity over time and use. Of course it will flex more when it cracks but at the point of immenent failure the crack will be noticible other ways; the one steel frame I broke (an old Bridgestone road bike) started creaking. Unfortunately I was looking in the wrong places for the crack and missed the fact that the seat stay was cracked at the seat cluster until it broke. My other two frames; an early '70's Gitaine and an '84 Cinelli are still going strong, the Gitaine has been my town bike and has jumped millions of curbs and thousands of trips home loaded with groceries (I didn't own a car for years and used my bicycle for everything) and the Cinelli has many tens of thousands of miles on it and a couple seasons of racing. Yes it is possible to break a steel frame; my Bridgestone did break but my other frames have taken an unimaginable amount of abuse and have held up wonderfly; my Cinelli even has the fully intergal fork crown that has a reputation for breaking. It is unknown if the new generations of steel (853, Foco, etc.) will be as durable as the past steels (531, Columbus SL, etc.). Someone looking for a frame for a lifetime is still best served by a brazed steel frame since brazed steel frames are repairable while aluminum, titanimum and TIG welded steel frames generally aren't.
I got some flexon frames when they first came out. The woman fitting the frames told me that indeed I could indeed wind them around my finger and they would snap back to shape just like in the commercial but there was a limited number of times I could do this before they would snap. The frames were like $500 dollars and in spite of their not breaking the hinges did become spindly in 3 years so I went back to cheap $90 stanless steel frames and replace them when they break.
I don't own any machine with OS X on it. I probably will in the future though. As far as running on "standard hardware" what you are really asking for is something that runs on the lowest common denomenator of computers. There are advantages to selling hardware and software together. I run Solaris 8 on both SPARC hardware and Intel (Compaq). On SPARC it runs flawlessly, on the Compaq you have to power cycle it every time you reboot or it won't come up and even then once in a while it "looses its mind" while boooting. The hardware support isn't as good; I can only use 8 bit color on the Compaq since it has a weird video adaptor. I don't get as good throughput from the 3com network card as the built in NIC on the sun. When you buy both the hardware and software from the same vendor there can be no finger pointing back and forth between vendors; it just plain has to work. When you can specify the hardware you don't have to worry about supporting thousands of different video, SCSI, and network cards, and motherboards. Buying hardware and software from the same vendor is more expensive but you usually end up with a much better integrated product with fewer suprises.
Actually, it only takes 20 minutes to learn all the vi you absolutely need. You can spend the rest of your life learning useful tricks with it. I recommend learning enough vi to get by in a pinch then investing the rest of your time learning emacs then install emacs on every UNIX or UNIX-like system you touch.
I thought Sun was dead in the early 90's. They were last in price/performance and they pissed off half their users by pressuring them to migrate from SunOS 4.x to Solaris 2.x which in the beginning really did suck. I thought DEC was the rising star with fast cheap Alpha servers and OSF/1 while bloated at least was comfortable to both BSD and Sys V hacks. Sun continued and with the release of the UltraSPARC CPU was respectable again in price/performance but has been drifting back ever since. The company who has the current hot box will change every year; things like support and preserving your investment are as important as raw performance in business and Sun does a comparitively good job in the other areas. I can tell you horror stories about dealing with IBM when I managed RS6000's at my last employ. I'm not saying that I'd never buy another AIX server but IBM would have to convince me that they do a much better job supporting their hardware and software than they used to. Because of this I'll pay a hefty premium to get a Sun instead of an IBM.
Sure I'm paid to work 40 hours and I spend plenty of time there doing recreational web surfing. On the other hand, I carry a pager and a cell phone 365x24x7 and whenever work needs me I have to drop everything and do their work on my time. If I have to work on what should be my personal time I see nothing wrong with spending time at work doing personal things. My bosses know I do this and have never given me any greif. As long as you get your work done how you schedule your time should be up to you.
Your system is thrashing. The folks that claim that not running X or nice'ing non-essential processes are just plain wrong. The small amount of memory freed up will not help you and nice'ing other processes will not help when the system is spending > 90% of its CPU time swapping or looking for swap victims. What you need is more RAM, boatloads of it. Max out your system and if that still isn't enough than get systems that can take more RAM. Upgrading to FreeBSD can help if you are close to having enough RAM and just need a little better efficiency to get you by. Another advantage to FreeBSD over Linux is that generally when Linux starts thrashing it never comes back; it thrashes itself into oblivion until you reboot while FreeBSD recovers after the memory hogs finally finish running..
I've been mucking around with SAN's for a couple of years. Since it has become a buzzword here we have even used them in places where they made no sense at all simply because higher ups thought they were the way to go. The drawback I see to SAN's are that they are expensive, complex, and the underlying technology is still evolving. On the other hand we have achieved far better performance out of our big SAN storage arrays than we have ever got from local disks. Also, for most things I deal with RAID5 is evil. We mirror and stripe almost everything. We only use RAID5 where the volume is read mostly (RAID5 has poor write performance) and static. We have had large RAID5 volumes die due to multiple drive failures; this sort of thing doesn't happen every day but it is a nightmare when it does. My motto is that disks are cheap, data are expensive.
I don't think Linux kernel hackers want any help from the *BSD camp. Remembering back to the KA9Q networking days in Linux; it was more important for the Linux group to do things their own way than to provide the best services to their users. My understanding is that Linux could have incorporated large parts of BSD network code that would carry both the BSD and GPL licenses but the Linux developers made their users wait until they could develop their own BSD-like networking.
Yea but Solaris on Intel is dying. Sun says there will be no Intel port of Solaris 9. I agree that Solaris 8 IA is pretty nice and is free for noncomerical use but the clock is ticking.
I've worked for the CS dept of a university for 7 years as a sysadm, researcher, and research assistant so I know a bit about CS degrees. In every case I've seen, someone coming from industry to CS has gaps in their knowledge. I'm sure you are a bright guy but being self taught you probably have great depth of knowledge in areas you have used and suprisingly large gaps in other areas. It will take some time and effort to cover all the areas they expect you to master. With your background some of your courses will be slam dunks but others will kick your butt. It probably wouldn't be that hard for you to pass all the CS classes in a year except the second issue, core courses. You have to take English, History, Political Science, Math, lab science, and a few other odds and ends before you can get your Bachelor's degree. In grad school you can concentrate on just your major but in undergrad they make you take all the stuff you had in high school. Some of these classes might even be hard and take a lot of time away from your CS classes. If you really want a degree the best thing would probably be to take as many core and introductory courses as you can online or as night classes at a junior college then finish up your CS classes at a good university. If your ultimate goal is a MS or PhD than you shold get whatever bachelor's degree that will be the quickest so you can get into grad school sooner. If you get a MS in CS than whatever you get as a bachelor's degree won't matter much and some employers will even like it being different making you a more "rounded" individual. Whatever you decide to do, good luck!
I don't believe that you would need 30 megapixels to equal 35mm film. Films most people use resolve around 100 limes/mm. The zoom lenses
most people use don't even resolve that. Full
frame 35mm is 24mm x 36mm so typical 35mm quality can be reached with 8 megapixels. Only the very
best 35mm single focal length lenses at their best aperature and the slowest high quality films resolve 200 lines/mm. In theory you would need 30 megapixels to equal this but that is well beyond typical 35mm quality.
She noticed the shortage of nurses and the glut of IT professionals. She is going to keep her nursing license up to date so she can go back to nursing if she decides to. Doing what she was doing it was hard to make over $50K/year working for a hospital and there is the constant fear of malpractice suits. One of her fellow nurses was in "the wrong place at the wrong time" and was responsible for part of a $10 million judgement. She could make more money working agency instead of for a hospital but with few or no benefits and even less protection against law suits. There is a nursing shortage but the whole reason for it is because nursing doesn't pay as well as it should and their working conditions are usually not that great (micromanagement from supervisors and condescending attitudes from physicians). She is also considering trying to combine her medical experience with her tech training to do something like being technical support for a medical company.
This is on the money. The most important thing is if your server is running its software well and your users are seeing good response times. I've had servers that did fine with load averages over 200 while I've seen other servers that tanked while the load average was still below the number of CPU's. When you are not seeing good performance than statistics like load average, page rescans, network collisions, etc. are things you need to look at to determine where the bottle-neck is. If it ain't broke don't fix it! Most "real" servers are i/o bound rather than cpu or memory bound. The i/o can be disk or network but i/o is typically the factor limiting throughput not cpu. Application servers running bloatware sometimes are cpu limited though.
BSD isn't dying either. BSD doesn't gauge its success on taking the desktop over from Microsoft. BSD is over 20 years old and there are more people running BSD now than any time in its history. BSD has a "critical mass" so it will continue even if there are more than ten times as many Linux users. BSD's license is more flexible than the GPL. It is basically open source without the politics. Even if Linux was as good or better than BSD in every way (which it really isn't) BSD's license would guarantee that it would be prefered for some projects.
my opinion is that System Administration is a calling rather than something you choose. The first time I had a UNIX account in college I immediately started to figure out how things worked. Most of my classmates wanted to learn as little as possible to write their programs or do their projects but I kept drilling away figuring things out. Funny thing is that I wasn't this way about other systems; I never liked VMS and never explored it, same with our IBM mainframe (absolutely hated JCL!). UNIX seemed to speak to me. The first two computer jobs I got was as a UNIX programmer and I enjoyed them but when I got my first job as UNIX System Admin I knew I was home. If you are cut out to be a UNIX admin you will gravitate to it; if not you will never be happy doing it. IMHO anyway.
My fiance is 42 and for the last decade was a maternity nurse. On a whim she took a class and got her MCSE and immediately landed a job. She is making a little less than she was as a nurse but that should change after her next salary review. Now worries about being sued for malpractice in IT either!
I've been on several projects that started our using Linux that hit a wall and had to move to a different platform. Because of that I'm not going to put my reputation on the line saying that we can do such and such with Linux unless I've seen it done. We have a few databases that we run on Solaris that could probably be moved over to Linux. We have a few Sun 450's with 4 cpu's and 4 GB of RAM with 100 GB of disk running smallish Informix or Oracle databases. Buying a stout server-class 4 way Intel box with 4 GB or RAM is a couple dual port SCSI adaptors and a box of 10K RPM disks wouldn't be that much cheaper than a Sun 450. Certainly not enough cheaper for me to make promises I'm not sure I could keep. With databases several times this large and busy I'd be even less likely to try it.
But will a Linux soultion really come out that much cheaper than a commercial one? The OS cost is a rather minor part of most projects. Linux or *BSD are great for taking care of small sundry projects done in-house but by the time you have to hire consultants you are out of the skunkworks area anyway. My experience with Linux is that when you try to do big jobs you end up being a trailblazer; this can be fun but if you are charging for time it gets expensive. Sun can tell you exactly what you need to run your multi TB databases from experience but in the Linux camp you are usually running into "theoretically this should work."
As far as I know X/Open now owns the trademark UNIX. A version of Linux could probably be modified such that it validates as a version of UNIX but frankly nobody really seems to feel like it is worth the time or money to do so. Shoot, BSD versions were refered to as UNIX long before X/Open controled the trademark so it seems ironic that BSD has to now be labeled as a UNIX-like OS. BSD was UNIX before UNIX was cool.
This would be interesting for a high level discussion. One of the reasons I switched from Linux to BSD for servers in the mid 90's was because BSD's VM system was miles ahead of Linux. I know both systems have changed a lot since then. I don't know if Linux has caught up and surpassed FreeBSD or if FreeBSD has maintained its lead.