Oddly enough, I've found that hard drives last much better now as compared to 4-8 years ago.
When you deal with hard drives in large quantities, you start to see the failure rates. Anybody who's administered a large (200+ computer) network, or anybody who works in retail sales (a few hundred PCs sold per year) will see the effects of failure rates. They're there, and they're high.
The PCs with older drives (up to about 6GB) tend to last for years. My former workplace still has dozens of machines with smaller drives running with constant usage, every day, by several students (different work habits). It's always a shame to see them have to be replaced with shiny new equipment, because we know it won't last nearly as long.
So buy 10 drives and sell 9 of them. Keep one of them on the shelf until you need it. You're betting that the failure rate (after the first year of manufacturer's warranty) is less then 10%. If you bet wrong, you buy a drive at the deflated price.
We had one batch of drives from ${MANUFACTURER} with an almost 80% failure rate. The problem at this point in time, seeing as they were 20GB drives, is that we can no longer buy drives that small. 30s are on the chopping block - it won't be long before 40 is our 'small/economy' drive. So really, we have to buy the drive at the same price as they initially paid, wait 4-6 weeks until the equivalent drive comes back and sell that at the deflated price.
The economics of this situation really only work for the manufacturers. They've ensured that people will have to buy drives from them every year or two, regardless whether they want to or not.
Then buy at Circuit City, and get an extended warranty.
We don't tend to buy components from our competitors.;)
The drive is still going to fail in 14-18 months, and your still gonna lose your data, you just have the ability to send it back for a refurb unit.
The problem isn't the new unit; most customers aren't worried about paying another hundred dollars or so for a new unit; they just don't like the fact that they've lost their data and have to wait 4-6 weeks without a computer. The real problem is the cost-cutting, crappy manufacture of their products that cases the to fail so readily.
Actually, IBM make some of the most reliable drives I've ever used. Yes, they had a very high profile failure on one particular range of IDE drives, but I've never had any problems with their SCSI disks.
IBM has problems with all of their consumer-level hardware. Their PC300GL systems were the epitome of creap, unreliable garbage I've ever worked with. Our failure rate was about one in ten, atleast.
If you hit up this page and scroll down to the Media Centre picture, you can see the little buggers all lined up in a row.
I just wish the customers would exercise a little intelligence and backup their data before their drive goes south.
The problem with that is as follows;
Consumers buy a new computer. They expect it to 'work'. They don't want to have to be back every two months with another problem, and they certainly don't expect to lose the resumees they've typed and recipes they've collected. I mean, who would?
So we're quoting out a new system. We throw in a CD-RW and a handful of CD-RW discs. They ask why. What do we tell them? "You should back up your data so that you're prepared for your hard drive failing miserably."?!? Sure, we could make up an excuse about power surges, water damage, etc. but they still pry, and they tend to determine that we're trying to sell them a lemon and then put them to work for it.
We had one customer, a business owner, who experienced a bad hard drive (Western Digital 80GB ATA100 7200RPM). So I sold him a few CD-RWs to use in his 32x12x40 CD-RW drive to back up his important data. Some four months later he was in for a copy of his invoice for his insurance company because his computer was stolen. "Did they steal the CD-RWs?" I asked. Timidly, he informed me that he hadn't gotten around to backing up.
See, even after catastrophic failure people can't be convinced that they have to back up their important files daily or weekly.
Ideally, we'd sell atleast one computer to all of our business clients with a 20/40GB Travan drive in it, they'd allow us to configure a nightly backup routine, and we convince the receptionist to swap labelled tapes every night on her way out the door. But hey, that would make sense. Of course, customers see a potential $2k bill for such a setup and they balk.
I'd love tell them "I told you so!", but that would lose us a client, rather than teach them a lesson. They'd just wind up spending money at another store and not backing up their data.
At home I have a backup regimen that includes a 4AM cronjob, weekly, that archives all my variable data (home directories, mail spools, etc directories, my hosted websites, etc.), and I back all of these files up on to two CD-RW discs; one labelled "Current Week" and one labelled "Previous Week". When I get a chance, I'll be utilizing the Rsync incremental backup solution and archiving the current weekly snapshot, and saving the previous week's burned snapshot, like I'm doing now but better. {smile}
With a quick'n'dirty script and some discipline (store your files only in designated places, not all over your drive) and a weekly half-hour routine, anybody can keep their file loss to a minimum.
We're starting to offer in-home tutoring to customers, perhaps this will be a special promotion. "How to mitigate data loss 101".
you are out of touch with reality.
joe sixpack does upgrade and add new hard drives/burners etc.
I'm sorry sir, but where do you work? Mr. Potter was absolutely correct; Joe Sixpack things a monitor is a "TV", a keyboard is a "Typewriter", a computer is a "Hard Drive" (or "CPU", which is close enough), a CD-Burner is a "CD maker", and a printer is a "Photocopier".
These people don't understand how to operate on the inside of their computers, much like your average white-collar businessman doesn't understand how to work on the inside of their cars. They bring their computers to professionals (or, in far too many cases, to their "friend who like really knows this computer stuff").
Joe/Jane Sixpack will often learn his/her lesson after they zap their motherboard/CPU/RAM or snap pins off their HDDs, CDROMs, CD-RWs, or DVD-ROMs and have to replace components as well as perform the upgrade. They really don't like hearing that the $130 component they've just bought is now worth as much as the tin that surrounds it.
Fae it, we live in a throw away society. We want it cheap, and now.
When it comes to things like motherboards where we have a choice of cheap, middle of the road, high quality, and high-end boards, yes, I can see that. But when all consumer level hard drives being sold today come with the same defects, and fail after the same period of time (incidentally, we're seeing a LOT of RMAs of drives from a period early in the year 2001, which is just slightly over the new "one year" warranty period. Curious, no?) - what choice do consumers have? Purchase a drive that's five times as large as they actually need (don't let the manufacturers kid you; they're not pushing 20-40GB drives in their "special" series, they want you to buy the 120GB monsters with the 8MB caches, which means you're doubling your outlay already, plus the premium for the 'special edition' status), or purchase the crap that's being shoveled at us from every major manufacturer.
I'd be perfectly happy to sell drives that were 25% more expensive than the current industry price averages if the drives could be guaranteed for a three year period and have proven reliability. But then, that goes against our ideals of filling landfills as quickly as humanly possible, so that would never fly.
It pisses me off to no end when customers bitch and complain that the system they bought is having this problem and that problem, but when we priced it out for them they were looking to shave off every stray loonie they possibly could. "$115 for a motherboard? Don't you have anything cheaper, like, around the $75 range?" Let's see - the thing that all components of your entire computer, inside and out connects to, and you want it to be the CHEAPEST component? {SIGH!}
That settles it. No warranties offered for stupidity.
If they really were more reliable, (and granted, I do think they are, at least segate),
Speaking as a person who's had to RMA hard drives from every major manufacturer in the past six months (several of each - no noticeable bias towards any particular one), I can tell you that hard drives are being produced far cheaper now than I've ever seen, and that if anything, this warranty change is a reflection of that fact, and of HDD makers trying to constantly push newer/faster/better on their customers, and because they realize that they can't afford to actually service the sheite they're pushing on their customers.
I only wish it was decision makers like that who had to tell customer after customer that it would cost upwards of $3000 to retreive their data on top of the cost of replacing the defective drive.
Hell, without improved USB and journalling filesystems, what was the point in 2.4?
The new VM was one of the big kickers (then they replaced it mid-stream with a better one, which was risky at best, but I digress). I've found that on all workstations and servers on which I've installed the 2.4 kernels performance is through the roof. It responds faster under all load conditions than any 2.2 kernel ever could.
I read the kt digest, but I'm really not seeing any new wonderful things. Perhaps there are others in a similar situation?
Pre-emption, new I/O scheduler, new paging, all sorts of wonderful stuff that makes the kernel more suitable for heavier loads. Most everyone who's tested it thus far sees it performing far better than 2.4 so far, and it's got a whole slew of improvements yet to come.
There's also talk of replacing LVM1 with LVM2, and supporting various other logical disk managers which will make it more desireable on the enterprise front.
No response whatsoever. I guess they don't want to hear that there are actually bugs in their shiny new kernel.
Perhaps you just gave them enough information that they didn't need anything further from you, and instead went hunting for the cause of your problems. Speaking as a former programmer myself, often times I wouldn't consult directly with the user(s) who submitted bug reports, but would instead fix the problems and ship out a new, more stable version.
Aside from that after tweaking I got it to work, and it did outperform 2.4.18 in everything we cared about.
Excellent! I hope you've posted a follow-up to your initial message to LKML so people will know the solution as well as the problem.
I'm planning to start testing 2.5 once it's in feature freeze.
Since it would be infinitely more helpful to test features as they're added (ie; "Whoops! That broke it!") - why do you plan to wait? The 'stable' kernels are the ones in feature freeze, and 2.2 and 2.4 are being tested more than amply already. Why not throw caution to the wind and give 'er a go?
I tend to have more of a desktop bias since most of my computing is done at home and at work.
"Work" for me tends to be my laptop. Sometimes I sit at the store with it, sometimes I'm at client sites. I use it as my primary machine at home because I can sit on the couch and watch TV and half-ignore the computer, so as a result it's become quite a comfortable desktop environment.
As far as non-lean configuration goes, when I'm on mains power (which is actually the majority of its lifetime) I want to use an environment that's both functional/efficient and easy on the eyes. If I have to look at this thing for upwards of twelve hours out of a day, I want some eye-candy. Since I can do that without functionality or efficiency loss, I consider my situation to be the best of both worlds.
If anybody thinks their desktop of choice 'gets in the way' - disable all the features that you don't like, and re-map the rest of them the way you like it. Since I switched to Linux from OS/2, people will probably tend to find my desktop 'feels' more like OS/2 Warp than a typical Windows or Linux setup. (For the record - OS/2 with Object Desktop installed was a schweet environment to work in! For the lean side of things, FileBar was perfect. Man, I miss that operating system...)
My Toshiba's Li-Ion battery will keep me powered for quite a long time, but if I'm working on a jobsite I want to conserve as many of my resources available as possible to get the job done quickly and efficiently. Besides, as my battery life slowly drains, the CPU, video, and cooling fans are throttled down, giving me less power for 'glitz'.
Well, what I'm asking is what's inherently wrong with a GUI? *Should* server administration necessarily be difficult?
A GUI does not automatically equate to an easier task of administering a server, but instead to a more mindless task. Administering a server via CLI is dead simple. For example, I needed to update my DHCP server's configuration to pass two domains instead of one to the client machines. So I SSH'd over to the server from my laptop, ran `vim/etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf`, added the domain, and ran `killall -HUP dhcpd`.
To perform the same procedure under Windows, I would have had to either walk over to the server and connect a monitor to it, or run something like VNC (or Terminal Services, which I won't run on principle), open the start menu, the sub-menu for the DHCP server, open the configuration utility, find then alter the setting, apply changes, close the applet, open Start - Settings - Control Panel - Administrative Tools - Services, find the DHCP server, open the properties, and re-start it.
I would have had to think less, but do more and utilize about 98% more network and system resources to accomplish the same end.
All of my installed daemons can be configured from within/etc, and most an re-initialize their configs on the fly with a quich hangup signal. I can easily distribute configuration changes and software updates across a large network of Linux/UNIX boxes with any number of available tools; or even run many servers via read-only NFS with only local/etc directories, which can make updating 1000 servers happen within hours, not days.
The only supposed downside to administering a CLI system is that you have to actually know how it works before you can function. There are countless Windows administrators out there who feel that their experience with Win'98 makes them amply qualified to administer Win2k because the interfaces are similar enough.
To that end, when I login on my computer, I am not logging in to goof around with Gnome or KDE, I'm logging in to browse the web, check my e-mail, or work on some project.
Granted, but the ability to quickly re-arrange, re-size, create, and destroy windows is invaluable to working efficiently. When I'm running at 1024x768, sometimes I don't want six Xterms opened (which don't fit on the screen all at the same time without hiding portions of atleast two of them), but I can do so very easily without having to futz with command-line options. Ctrl-Alt-T opens a new terminal - I can open them even on my slow(er) laptop at a rate of two per second when my system is under a typical load. I can destroy windows at a rate of about five per second with configurable keyboard shortcuts, too, using WindowMaker or KDE, or even just Ctrl-D within Xterms.
What I don't like is navigating endless menus,
Why navigate menus? I rarely, if ever open my Kmenu - I've got keyboard shortcuts assigned to all tasks (again, under both my primary window managers). Some things have icons on my taskbar because hey, they're pretty.:) Moreover, you can organize the menu any way you'd like. My friend likes to group his applications by task ("Cd burning", "Audio", "Video", "Internet", etc.), as do I, but not to that extreme. More like "Applications", "Multimedia", and a couple of other fairly broad categories. Of course, you could also remove all entries and have only your five most commonly used applications right in the root of your menu if you want to.
using the mouse to manipulate files,
Why would you do that? Midnight Commander within an Xterm is perfect for that. Ctrl-Alt-T{cr}mc{cr} and I'm manipulating files. If I want to see more detail, I maximixe the Xterm and mc shows me wide listings of my directories. If I want to see larger type, I Ctrl-RightClick the Xterm and select "Huge" and give my poor eyes a rest. If I want to shoot the window to the background, I middle-click on the titlebar and it drops allll the way to the bottom of the 'pile'.
and not being able to efficiently switch tasks with only a keystroke.
Ctrl-Esc, scroll to desired task, Cr. Else, Alt-Tab works. Or, if I have tasks focused in alternate desktops, Alt-1 through Alt-0 switches from one to another.
This is a very different issue from Mozilla wasting resources - that has nothing to do with the interface. Frankly, the Web is a mouse-driven thing, and for that I can handle Mozilla being mouse-driven
In the interests of efficiency on a scale of 1-10, Mozilla rates somewhere around 0.5. {smile}
If you want graphical, mouse-driven web browsing even with anti-aliased fonts and JavaScript, backgroundable downloads - use Links.
Which brings up the key question... What are the other system requirements for running the 2.5 kernel?
Present system requirememnts are still listed in Documentation/Changes (referenced in the README file, which of course everyone reads before they attempt to compile a kernel, right?) and go as follows;
o Gnu C 2.95.3 o Gnu make 3.78 o binutils 2.9.5.0.25 o util-linux 2.10o o modutils 2.4.2 o e2fsprogs 1.29 o jfsutils 1.0.14 o reiserfsprogs 3.6.3 o xfsprogs 2.1.0 o pcmcia-cs 3.1.21 o PPP 2.4.0 o isdn4k-utils 3.1pre1 o procps 2.0.9
I couldn't post a direct copy/paste from the file, because apparently it contained too many "junk" characters and wouldn't pass the lameness filter. But if you download 2.5.43, you could just open up the file yourself.:)
I wait anxiously to test the new(er) 2.5 kernel; 2.5.39 compiled and runs for me, but I get a mini-oops on startup (haven't had time to report it yet.:/ ). 2.5.40 wouldn't compile, I missed.41,.42 had a flurry of "WAIT! IT'S STILL BROKEN!" messages on LKML, and I have yet to grab.43 at home (I've got it at work, which does me no good at home, see.:) ).
As soon as I get a chance, I intend to start hammering at 2.5.43 and file a bug report for any anomale I see.
The end results are that incumbent political parties (the government) tend to have an uphill battle to win support in electoral campaigns and that it is unusal for a party (or coalition of parties) to stay in office for more that two terms.
In some cases though, the system works to their favour. There was a lot of uproar and scandal surrounding Jean Chretien (our Prime Minister), but he was elected with a landslide victory for his third consecutive terms (we can do that in Canada. {smile} ). From the sounds of it, though, he's stepping aside and letting someone else come to bat. The Liberal party, however, will probably paint atleast 75% of the nation red once again.
More locally here in Ontario, the memorable Mike Harris won himself a re-election, even amidst million dollar teacher-run anti-Harris ad campaigns. They tried to convince the electorate into a 'strategic voting' (or some such) which basically meant "Anybody But Harris" - which failed extremely miserably. In Durham, one of the big epicentres of the teacher strikes (elementary and secondary) the entire region was won by the Progressive Conservative (Mike's) party.
Sometimes it works for, sometimes against them.
Of course, Harris is responsible for putting a leash on the school boards (now they have to run under a budget; something that have absolutely no idea how to do ($18 million to IBM for new computers, but they have no money to buy textbooks. Strange, dat!), which is why they're so cheesed... ), much welfare reform (he had the audacity to tell people they weren't supposed to live off of welfare indefinately. Prick!), among other things.
I think this guy is taking it too far. If you really want to avoid all bloat, you shouldn't run X anyway. Seems to me someone who doesn't like windowmanagers etc. should just run stuff from the console (and definately not Mozilla).
I agree. We have screen on the console and things like SVGALib for simplicity. Mozilla is the anti-lean, if you will, for a desktop. It consumes 50MB of RAM as soon as you actually use it for something - which is atleast 17MB more than X.
At home, for some strange reason, I run rxvts instead of Xterms. Now, the reason this is strange is because I run KDE 3, Mozilla, OpenOffice, and VMWare. Colour me quirky.;)
If I want to use my computer in a lean environment, I'll use something along the lines of TWM, LWM, etc. where I can still have some of the window manager functionality (resizing of windows to optimize my desktop space usage, for example) without all the bloat of desktop wallpapers, flashing/pulsing icons, translucent menus, etc.. In my normal work environment, however, I do appreciate a lot of the glitz so I leave it all enabled.
All a matter of choice, of course, but I don't see the point of going out of your way to make a complex situation in the interests of simplicity.
I certainly hope 2.6 out-performs 2.4, I mean, who'd want to take a step backwards, right? But we have a problem - the kernel team are implementing lots of top-notch functionality, but don't have enough people testing it. There are still compilation failures, ACPI buglets, and small quirks with several other sub-systems (speaking from my own experience here). Linus pleaded to the LKML not so long ago that he hopes lots more people will start plugging away so they can find and fix all the kinks before we go to 2.6 (or 3.0, like, whatever.:) ).
Slashdot Mirror
The PCs with older drives (up to about 6GB) tend to last for years. My former workplace still has dozens of machines with smaller drives running with constant usage, every day, by several students (different work habits). It's always a shame to see them have to be replaced with shiny new equipment, because we know it won't last nearly as long.
The economics of this situation really only work for the manufacturers. They've ensured that people will have to buy drives from them every year or two, regardless whether they want to or not.
If you hit up this page and scroll down to the Media Centre picture, you can see the little buggers all lined up in a row.
Consumers buy a new computer. They expect it to 'work'. They don't want to have to be back every two months with another problem, and they certainly don't expect to lose the resumees they've typed and recipes they've collected. I mean, who would?
So we're quoting out a new system. We throw in a CD-RW and a handful of CD-RW discs. They ask why. What do we tell them? "You should back up your data so that you're prepared for your hard drive failing miserably."?!? Sure, we could make up an excuse about power surges, water damage, etc. but they still pry, and they tend to determine that we're trying to sell them a lemon and then put them to work for it.
We had one customer, a business owner, who experienced a bad hard drive (Western Digital 80GB ATA100 7200RPM). So I sold him a few CD-RWs to use in his 32x12x40 CD-RW drive to back up his important data. Some four months later he was in for a copy of his invoice for his insurance company because his computer was stolen. "Did they steal the CD-RWs?" I asked. Timidly, he informed me that he hadn't gotten around to backing up.
See, even after catastrophic failure people can't be convinced that they have to back up their important files daily or weekly.
Ideally, we'd sell atleast one computer to all of our business clients with a 20/40GB Travan drive in it, they'd allow us to configure a nightly backup routine, and we convince the receptionist to swap labelled tapes every night on her way out the door. But hey, that would make sense. Of course, customers see a potential $2k bill for such a setup and they balk.
I'd love tell them "I told you so!", but that would lose us a client, rather than teach them a lesson. They'd just wind up spending money at another store and not backing up their data.
At home I have a backup regimen that includes a 4AM cronjob, weekly, that archives all my variable data (home directories, mail spools, etc directories, my hosted websites, etc.), and I back all of these files up on to two CD-RW discs; one labelled "Current Week" and one labelled "Previous Week". When I get a chance, I'll be utilizing the Rsync incremental backup solution and archiving the current weekly snapshot, and saving the previous week's burned snapshot, like I'm doing now but better. {smile}
With a quick'n'dirty script and some discipline (store your files only in designated places, not all over your drive) and a weekly half-hour routine, anybody can keep their file loss to a minimum.
We're starting to offer in-home tutoring to customers, perhaps this will be a special promotion. "How to mitigate data loss 101".
These people don't understand how to operate on the inside of their computers, much like your average white-collar businessman doesn't understand how to work on the inside of their cars. They bring their computers to professionals (or, in far too many cases, to their "friend who like really knows this computer stuff").
Joe/Jane Sixpack will often learn his/her lesson after they zap their motherboard/CPU/RAM or snap pins off their HDDs, CDROMs, CD-RWs, or DVD-ROMs and have to replace components as well as perform the upgrade. They really don't like hearing that the $130 component they've just bought is now worth as much as the tin that surrounds it.
I'd be perfectly happy to sell drives that were 25% more expensive than the current industry price averages if the drives could be guaranteed for a three year period and have proven reliability. But then, that goes against our ideals of filling landfills as quickly as humanly possible, so that would never fly.
It pisses me off to no end when customers bitch and complain that the system they bought is having this problem and that problem, but when we priced it out for them they were looking to shave off every stray loonie they possibly could. "$115 for a motherboard? Don't you have anything cheaper, like, around the $75 range?" Let's see - the thing that all components of your entire computer, inside and out connects to, and you want it to be the CHEAPEST component? {SIGH!}
That settles it. No warranties offered for stupidity.
Just a moment, I've been booted for more than 11 hours - I'll have to elaborate tomorrow when I can turn my computer on again ...
I only wish it was decision makers like that who had to tell customer after customer that it would cost upwards of $3000 to retreive their data on top of the cost of replacing the defective drive.
There's also talk of replacing LVM1 with LVM2, and supporting various other logical disk managers which will make it more desireable on the enterprise front.
Cooperation for a better OS, etc.. ;)
Still better than "Huh?", eh?
Surely you weren't referring to AMD's Athlon processor, were you?
As far as non-lean configuration goes, when I'm on mains power (which is actually the majority of its lifetime) I want to use an environment that's both functional/efficient and easy on the eyes. If I have to look at this thing for upwards of twelve hours out of a day, I want some eye-candy. Since I can do that without functionality or efficiency loss, I consider my situation to be the best of both worlds.
If anybody thinks their desktop of choice 'gets in the way' - disable all the features that you don't like, and re-map the rest of them the way you like it. Since I switched to Linux from OS/2, people will probably tend to find my desktop 'feels' more like OS/2 Warp than a typical Windows or Linux setup. (For the record - OS/2 with Object Desktop installed was a schweet environment to work in! For the lean side of things, FileBar was perfect. Man, I miss that operating system...)
My Toshiba's Li-Ion battery will keep me powered for quite a long time, but if I'm working on a jobsite I want to conserve as many of my resources available as possible to get the job done quickly and efficiently. Besides, as my battery life slowly drains, the CPU, video, and cooling fans are throttled down, giving me less power for 'glitz'.
To perform the same procedure under Windows, I would have had to either walk over to the server and connect a monitor to it, or run something like VNC (or Terminal Services, which I won't run on principle), open the start menu, the sub-menu for the DHCP server, open the configuration utility, find then alter the setting, apply changes, close the applet, open Start - Settings - Control Panel - Administrative Tools - Services, find the DHCP server, open the properties, and re-start it.
I would have had to think less, but do more and utilize about 98% more network and system resources to accomplish the same end.
All of my installed daemons can be configured from within /etc, and most an re-initialize their configs on the fly with a quich hangup signal. I can easily distribute configuration changes and software updates across a large network of Linux/UNIX boxes with any number of available tools; or even run many servers via read-only NFS with only local /etc directories, which can make updating 1000 servers happen within hours, not days.
The only supposed downside to administering a CLI system is that you have to actually know how it works before you can function. There are countless Windows administrators out there who feel that their experience with Win'98 makes them amply qualified to administer Win2k because the interfaces are similar enough.
If you want graphical, mouse-driven web browsing even with anti-aliased fonts and JavaScript, backgroundable downloads - use Links.
I couldn't post a direct copy/paste from the file, because apparently it contained too many "junk" characters and wouldn't pass the lameness filter. But if you download 2.5.43, you could just open up the file yourself. :)
I wait anxiously to test the new(er) 2.5 kernel; 2.5.39 compiled and runs for me, but I get a mini-oops on startup (haven't had time to report it yet. :/ ). 2.5.40 wouldn't compile, I missed .41, .42 had a flurry of "WAIT! IT'S STILL BROKEN!" messages on LKML, and I have yet to grab .43 at home (I've got it at work, which does me no good at home, see. :) ).
As soon as I get a chance, I intend to start hammering at 2.5.43 and file a bug report for any anomale I see.
More locally here in Ontario, the memorable Mike Harris won himself a re-election, even amidst million dollar teacher-run anti-Harris ad campaigns. They tried to convince the electorate into a 'strategic voting' (or some such) which basically meant "Anybody But Harris" - which failed extremely miserably. In Durham, one of the big epicentres of the teacher strikes (elementary and secondary) the entire region was won by the Progressive Conservative (Mike's) party.
Sometimes it works for, sometimes against them.
Of course, Harris is responsible for putting a leash on the school boards (now they have to run under a budget; something that have absolutely no idea how to do ($18 million to IBM for new computers, but they have no money to buy textbooks. Strange, dat!), which is why they're so cheesed ... ), much welfare reform (he had the audacity to tell people they weren't supposed to live off of welfare indefinately. Prick!), among other things.
At home, for some strange reason, I run rxvts instead of Xterms. Now, the reason this is strange is because I run KDE 3, Mozilla, OpenOffice, and VMWare. Colour me quirky. ;)
If I want to use my computer in a lean environment, I'll use something along the lines of TWM, LWM, etc. where I can still have some of the window manager functionality (resizing of windows to optimize my desktop space usage, for example) without all the bloat of desktop wallpapers, flashing/pulsing icons, translucent menus, etc.. In my normal work environment, however, I do appreciate a lot of the glitz so I leave it all enabled.
All a matter of choice, of course, but I don't see the point of going out of your way to make a complex situation in the interests of simplicity.
Go figure. :)
So download away and start testing!
Sorry; I forgot my tags. ;)