Postfix + Cyrus IMAP and Cyrus POP3. Seperate your systems out (MTA v. Final Delivery). Use Cyrus Murder (as in a murder of ravens, or a cluster for us normal people.)
Back it up with LDAP for all the joyful goodness it bears (authentication, address books, etc.) If you want stronger authentication, add in Kerberos V.
I'm sure others will suggest all-in-one packages, but most of the ones I have seen are really some combination of Postfix or Sendmail combined with OpenLDAP and Cyrus, anyway.
Take your time to think about load-balancing, storage, and test, test, test!
It'll be a couple weeks of work (assuming you already have hardware and networking and storage gear), but you'll likely end up with a bulletproof mail system.
First, don't panic. Just because some company I've never dealt with stopped making a product I never used doesn't mean I feel the world is going in the crapper. There are other Unix/Linux Anti-V irus solutions.
There's ClamAV, which does an admirable job of keeping up with the stream of crap slung by the rest of the 'Net.
For commercial products, I've really liked Sophos' software. They were one of the only companies that supported the vast Unix/Linux versions we had when we made the selection.
Both work especially well when teamed with something like amavisd-new and your favorite MTA.
I recall some noise being made about McAffey bringing back their Linux AV software, too...
My wife purchased a laptop backpack from Spire USA (http://www.spireusa.com/) and it's possibly the best laptop backpack I've seen. She's had it for five years now, and it's held up exceedingly well.
Personal Transport on the Grid
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 1
A few technical things seemed wrong - for example, it is quite feasible to run transportation systems off grid electricity (electric trains, subways, etc. do this) - would it be so hard to do it for personal transport too?
Actually, I believe it would, at least without coming up with an innovative way to deliver the power through the ground without killing anyone who walks over it. Let alone having to rip up all the roadways to put down the power rails.
Mass transit is easy to run on electricity, because mass transit always takes a known, consistent route. Vehicles are a known size and shape. It's easy to engineer.
How do you do that for personal transports with nearly infinite endpoints?
I suppose one thing you could do is energize the freeways and major thouroughfares, and then let the cars rely on internal batteries for the last mile or so...
I realize this is a bit late in the game for this thread, but why don't you try SuSE?
I've been very happy with their Intel distro, and have used their sparc distro for some time now, as well.
the ISO's are available at www.linuxiso.org; it's 5 CD's (3 with binaries and 2 with source).
SuSE will eventually revert to selling it as a boxed set only, possibly with a single-cd "evaluation" edition, like with their Intel ports, but hey, get the 5-cd set while the getting's good!
Another good book on this subject is No Downlink. (sorry, i know, it's a link to amazon).
Provides yet another account of what was going on during and around the Challenger accident, from the perspective of a foreigner (from Denmark). Really a good read.
Any manual worth its weight in paper will have a very comprehensive index in the back, and a good table of contents at the front.
I've used O'Reilly books for years (especially their Perl and Java books) and have always been able to find what I was looking for using the paper book with the index at the back *MUCH* faster than I was able to find something using online documentation and a "search" function.
At the same time, there are occasions when I'm simply too lazy to get out of my desk chair, walk across the office or over to the bookshelf in the living room and get the book. For quickies, online documentation is perfect (see also man pages).
I wonder what would be so difficult about producing documentation both in PDF and in printed form? Several times now, we've ended up putting the PDF docs for a product we use on a fileserver for people to look at, and also printed a copy (on a duplexing printer =) ) and had it bound at Kinko's so that we'd have both options available. Why can't publishers print it for us? We'd gladly pay the premium.
Just like Operating Systems, word processors, and woodworking tools, you use the best tool for the job at hand. If you need fast, reliable disk subsystems designed for multitasking systems, go SCSI. If you're building an MP3 Jukebox for your home entertainment system, save $500 and buy a 30GB EIDE disk.
Personally, I have a dual Pentium Pro machine with all SCSI (cd, 2 Quantum Fireball 4.5GB UltraWide disks, Exabyte 8500 on a Mylex BT958). I have a single-processor machine with a single EIDE 16gb IBM disk & cdrom. Even booting the SMP box with only one processor, the UWSCSI disks running on a wide channel blow away the EIDE disk for raw throughput. But I do a lot of disk-intensive work on that machine, whereas the IDE machine is turning into an MP3 cache.
In short, when raw performance counts, go SCSI. If you don't care, and just want cheap space, go IDE.
I'm fairly convinced that there will be some problems, and that not everything is y2k compliant, but at this time tomorrow (5:10 pm tomorrow, PST) I'm also pretty sure that all the systems i manage, both at work and at home will still be clicking along happily, even though they're clocks are based on GMT. At this time on Saturday, I'll be going to the office to feed my fish, and maybe change the backup tapes. Monday I'll be buried in the usual boring e-mail again.
I was somewhat pissed to notice that the cost of premium gasoline seems to have gone up by 10 cents a gallon in the last few days in my neighborhood, though. oh, well...
Insofar as the binaries running everywhere point, this already happens to some extent. Somehow, Linux's ELF binary format has become a defacto standard, seeing as almost every major Unix vendor has one or another binary emulation program so that they can run Linux bins. SCO, *BSD, and other Intel-based unixes already have some sort of ABI for linux binaries, and Sun is probably working on the same thing for Solaris, too.
Part of the problem, too (I figured this out when building my dual Pentium Pro) is that a good case that is designed for cooling is very hard to come by. You can use less fans (though never less than 1 in the power supply, one on each processor, and on in the case somewhere) if the case is designed with cooling airflow in mind.
Unfortunately, most cases I've seen are just these ugly boxes that just follow the ATX spec for positioning, and don't give a damn about airflow. I've been working on a couple designs of my own, but custom cases are (a) a pain to make and (b) expensive, unless you happen to know somone who can work sheet metal for you.
The systems that usually have the best cooling are rackmount cases. The systems that usually look the best sitting on your desk or floor usually have crappy cooling, unless they're very roomy inside. I'd love to have the cash to throw at a 1meter rack (with doors) and rackable cases for my computers.. it'd save me a bit of room, and clean things up, but it costs way too much.
As has been said countless times already, this isn't about piracy. The issue is that we want to be able to view these movies in Linux, instead of having to use Windows or MacOS.
Yes, you could easily hook up a VCR and tape the output from a DVD player. You can do that today with a standard VCR and one of the many commercial home-theater DVD players. You can copy a movie you rent at BlockBuster with two VCRs. You can make tapes of music tapes or cd's (or, if you have a cd-writer, make a digital copy of the cd directly.) the industries don't seem to care about that; they just want to make sure that there is no open-source, freely available implementation of their standard.
I will remind you, though, that their "standard" isn't open; you need special permission to write an application that will decode a DVD disk/movie, and cannot divulge any information (especially their stupid and easily calculated encryption key). And, presumably, you need to give them good money to get the info you need to write an app.
If I wanted to pirate a movie from DVD right now, I'd buy a DVD player down at Fry's, rent the movie at BlockBuster, wire up my home theater, play the movie and record it on my dandy VCR onto a high-grade tape, and voila! I have my own copy of the movie. However, I want to be able to take a DVD with me on a business trip, and play it on my linux notebook. Why should I have to install Windows (and suck up about 500-800 megs of disk space) just to play a movie?
"At airports on the west coast, in LA, San Diego, San Francisco and Phoenix, regularly scheduled Chinese airlines crash, taking out runways and control towers. In San Diego, the airline misses the civilian airport and crashes at the Naval Air Station."
Definitely made me laugh; sure, it's "plausible" that someone can "miss" Lindburgh Field in San Diego, but there's still a fair distance between the civvie airport and Mirimar Marine Corps Air Station (the navy moved out a couple years ago).
Additionally, it would be an interesting crash to take out all the runways at once...
Reading this, and various other comments here, I can't help but think of the getups that were used in the film Virtuosity. Granted, the movie itself may not have been the best, but some sort of partial-pod that you are enclosed in, suspended by, and sensorially immersed in, combined with some sort of devices to give an appropriate amount of resistance to your feet, might give the best "free-form" simulation.
I've been thinking about this for a bit, too, and this might even evolve to something that could replace the big simulators used for airplanes/tanks/etc, if it gets good enough. Or, more to the point, if someone decided to develop it in the first place.
Re:Not flamebait: KDE 1.1.1 and RH6 are stable
on
Red Hat Growing Pains
·
· Score: 1
On this matter I'll have to agree. Granted, I tend to build "third-party" things like KDE myself from the sources, because of a bad experience long ago. I use KDE almost exclusively, because it does what I need. As soon as I upgraded my SPARC LX from RH 5.2 to 6.0, i started building the KDE 1.1.1 packages, and it's been extremely stable.
Which goes to show, that no matter *what* software package you install/build/etc, if you take care when you install it, back up everything before you do major upgrades, and don't install things you know you'll never use in a million years, you can have a very stable system.
It also helps if the code you're trying to run hasn't been pushed out the door the instant the latest build was completed without errors.
Take, for example, the task of changing a username. In linux, and solaris, the simplest case of this would involve only changing their username in/etc/passwd,/etc/shadow, and/etc/group; renaming their home directory, and that should cover it. In HP-UX, there is no/etc/shadow, you have to navigate the/tcb/files/auth/?/* files. In SCO (which I hate hate hate because there are no real files because everything is a damned symlink to something), there is *both* an/etc/shadow and/tcb/files/auth tree.
In an industry with so many standards that each vendor gets to choose their own, I really like RedHat's mostly FSSTAND compliant layout, and got spoiled with all system config files in/etc.
Perhaps it makes too much sense, though.
I have yet to evaluate Debian 2.1 and OpenLinux 2.2 to see how similar they are in general setup...
I remember 3 years ago, when Real Audio was really just coming on the scene, listening to screaming audio at 128kbps "Dual ISDN" quality, and it was every bit as crisp and clear as my CD player. Granted, I was at school and had an ethernet connection to the University's T1, but still, it was CD-quality streaming audio.
What I've noticed since then is that every single site that has Real Audio content only has it in 16kbps mono, which is, to be frank, shit. I occasionally try to look long and hard for the 128kbps streams I listened to back in school, but of course they've been replaced with 16kbps items.
I guess too many people complained about not being able to listen to them over their 28.8 modems.
This looks like a good thing. Especially since we have several employees working from home and connecting via the Internet with linux boxes. I was considering setting up a VPN using ssh and port forwarding, but this looks better.
Well, I don't know about 4 NICs, but I'm running a 2.2.2 kernel with 2 network cards in a few machines, and in all the configurations, I have compiled the network drivers into the kernel. One machine has a 3C905b and a WD80x3, and the other has two 3C905b's. RedHat's configuration has nothing to do with it, once you move to a custom kernel build, and I never build anything as a module unless I'm only using it sparingly (like SCSI Tape and SCSI Generic).
I'm running a Dual Pentium-Pro box with the 2.2.x kernel series, and have used 2 3c905b's in it since day one, using it for masquerading/firewalling, and have never had a problem with the 3com cards, running them at either 10Mb/s or 100Mb/s. We use them at work with all our pc-based servers, SCO and Linux (but we really really want to replace SCO). =)
It's really the only card I've ever used where I just plug it in and it works.
I'm definitely going to have to agree about improving things like Xconfigurator for the RedHat install, but for slightly different reasons: Monitor settings are easy enough to find, if you have the manual for your monitor, but trying to figure out how to manually set the Xconfig file so that you can get "oddball" resolutions, like 1152x864 or 1152x900 (like sun, i think) is next to impossible unless you're a genius. for a 17" monitor, 1024x768 is too big and 1280x1024 is almost too small.
Anyone have suggestions for this particular problem?
I too, might come across as a heathen, but I'd have to agree here.
Linux doesn't need another x86 emulator, another dos emulator, or the ability to run windows 98/nt apps. Linux needs to be strengthened in the GUI areas (whether you like GNOME or KDE IS irrelevant), and possibly in the business applications arena, though with StarOffice, Applix, and WordPerfect there are already some good applications out there. (though I'm at a fundamental disagreement with Corel's porting of ver 8 using wine)
Intel boxen are increadibly cheap today, and getting something that can run Windows faster than VMware on a Pentium 233 on Linux shouldn't cost more than $500 all said and done. That $500 buys a decent machine, too (which would run linux very well... erm... wait...)
However, just looking at empirical evidence from the F-117's own history, there are many occasions where Nighthawks have gone down over the US deserts due to both pilot error and mechanical malfunction.
And who here remembers the tape from the east-coast airshow on CNN? The camera was following the 117 through a series of aerobatic maneuvers, when what appears to be one of the *control* *surfaces* departs the rest of the plane. Once again, the pilot ejected, and the plane became a smoking pile of ruins in someone's backyard.
I'd have to agree; if the plane was shot down, it was because the SAM operator just happened to catch it at a vulnerable point: either with its flat bottom pointed directly at the radar, weapons bay doors open, or some funky wavelength resonance of the craft itself being so close to a radar station. That, or a heat-seeker got a lucky, unadulterated view of the exaust end of it during a turn or something.
Slashdot Mirror
Postfix + Cyrus IMAP and Cyrus POP3. Seperate your systems out (MTA v. Final Delivery). Use Cyrus Murder (as in a murder of ravens, or a cluster for us normal people.)
Back it up with LDAP for all the joyful goodness it bears (authentication, address books, etc.) If you want stronger authentication, add in Kerberos V.
I'm sure others will suggest all-in-one packages, but most of the ones I have seen are really some combination of Postfix or Sendmail combined with OpenLDAP and Cyrus, anyway.
Take your time to think about load-balancing, storage, and test, test, test!
It'll be a couple weeks of work (assuming you already have hardware and networking and storage gear), but you'll likely end up with a bulletproof mail system.
First, don't panic. Just because some company I've never dealt with stopped making a product I never used doesn't mean I feel the world is going in the crapper. There are other Unix/Linux Anti-V irus solutions.
There's ClamAV, which does an admirable job of keeping up with the stream of crap slung by the rest of the 'Net.
For commercial products, I've really liked Sophos' software. They were one of the only companies that supported the vast Unix/Linux versions we had when we made the selection.
Both work especially well when teamed with something like amavisd-new and your favorite MTA.
I recall some noise being made about McAffey bringing back their Linux AV software, too...
did someone warn the site operators that they'd been submitted to slashdot? Looks like they've recoiled in fear.
of course, it's not in google's cache yet.
My wife purchased a laptop backpack from Spire USA (http://www.spireusa.com/) and it's possibly the best laptop backpack I've seen. She's had it for five years now, and it's held up exceedingly well.
Actually, I believe it would, at least without coming up with an innovative way to deliver the power through the ground without killing anyone who walks over it. Let alone having to rip up all the roadways to put down the power rails.
Mass transit is easy to run on electricity, because mass transit always takes a known, consistent route. Vehicles are a known size and shape. It's easy to engineer.
How do you do that for personal transports with nearly infinite endpoints?
I suppose one thing you could do is energize the freeways and major thouroughfares, and then let the cars rely on internal batteries for the last mile or so...
I realize this is a bit late in the game for this thread, but why don't you try SuSE?
I've been very happy with their Intel distro, and have used their sparc distro for some time now, as well.
the ISO's are available at www.linuxiso.org; it's 5 CD's (3 with binaries and 2 with source).
SuSE will eventually revert to selling it as a boxed set only, possibly with a single-cd "evaluation" edition, like with their Intel ports, but hey, get the 5-cd set while the getting's good!
Another good book on this subject is No Downlink. (sorry, i know, it's a link to amazon).
Provides yet another account of what was going on during and around the Challenger accident, from the perspective of a foreigner (from Denmark). Really a good read.
Any manual worth its weight in paper will have a very comprehensive index in the back, and a good table of contents at the front.
I've used O'Reilly books for years (especially their Perl and Java books) and have always been able to find what I was looking for using the paper book with the index at the back *MUCH* faster than I was able to find something using online documentation and a "search" function.
At the same time, there are occasions when I'm simply too lazy to get out of my desk chair, walk across the office or over to the bookshelf in the living room and get the book. For quickies, online documentation is perfect (see also man pages).
I wonder what would be so difficult about producing documentation both in PDF and in printed form? Several times now, we've ended up putting the PDF docs for a product we use on a fileserver for people to look at, and also printed a copy (on a duplexing printer =) ) and had it bound at Kinko's so that we'd have both options available. Why can't publishers print it for us? We'd gladly pay the premium.
And yes, I know my homepage is broken.
Just like Operating Systems, word processors, and woodworking tools, you use the best tool for the job at hand. If you need fast, reliable disk subsystems designed for multitasking systems, go SCSI. If you're building an MP3 Jukebox for your home entertainment system, save $500 and buy a 30GB EIDE disk.
Personally, I have a dual Pentium Pro machine with all SCSI (cd, 2 Quantum Fireball 4.5GB UltraWide disks, Exabyte 8500 on a Mylex BT958). I have a single-processor machine with a single EIDE 16gb IBM disk & cdrom. Even booting the SMP box with only one processor, the UWSCSI disks running on a wide channel blow away the EIDE disk for raw throughput. But I do a lot of disk-intensive work on that machine, whereas the IDE machine is turning into an MP3 cache.
In short, when raw performance counts, go SCSI. If you don't care, and just want cheap space, go IDE.
That should be the headline. =)
I'm fairly convinced that there will be some problems, and that not everything is y2k compliant, but at this time tomorrow (5:10 pm tomorrow, PST) I'm also pretty sure that all the systems i manage, both at work and at home will still be clicking along happily, even though they're clocks are based on GMT. At this time on Saturday, I'll be going to the office to feed my fish, and maybe change the backup tapes. Monday I'll be buried in the usual boring e-mail again.
I was somewhat pissed to notice that the cost of premium gasoline seems to have gone up by 10 cents a gallon in the last few days in my neighborhood, though. oh, well...
Insofar as the binaries running everywhere point, this already happens to some extent. Somehow, Linux's ELF binary format has become a defacto standard, seeing as almost every major Unix vendor has one or another binary emulation program so that they can run Linux bins. SCO, *BSD, and other Intel-based unixes already have some sort of ABI for linux binaries, and Sun is probably working on the same thing for Solaris, too.
Apparently, these children never got the point of Christmas... And the Santa missed it, too.
What kind of a Santa ignores a child?
What kind of child then gangs up and beats Santa into submission, and then steals toys and candy?
This is a case where everybody was in the wrong. heck, Santa even used some kind of caustic glue for his fake beard! (not to bright, eh?)
Part of the problem, too (I figured this out when building my dual Pentium Pro) is that a good case that is designed for cooling is very hard to come by. You can use less fans (though never less than 1 in the power supply, one on each processor, and on in the case somewhere) if the case is designed with cooling airflow in mind.
Unfortunately, most cases I've seen are just these ugly boxes that just follow the ATX spec for positioning, and don't give a damn about airflow. I've been working on a couple designs of my own, but custom cases are (a) a pain to make and (b) expensive, unless you happen to know somone who can work sheet metal for you.
The systems that usually have the best cooling are rackmount cases. The systems that usually look the best sitting on your desk or floor usually have crappy cooling, unless they're very roomy inside. I'd love to have the cash to throw at a 1meter rack (with doors) and rackable cases for my computers.. it'd save me a bit of room, and clean things up, but it costs way too much.
As has been said countless times already, this isn't about piracy. The issue is that we want to be able to view these movies in Linux, instead of having to use Windows or MacOS.
Yes, you could easily hook up a VCR and tape the output from a DVD player. You can do that today with a standard VCR and one of the many commercial home-theater DVD players. You can copy a movie you rent at BlockBuster with two VCRs. You can make tapes of music tapes or cd's (or, if you have a cd-writer, make a digital copy of the cd directly.) the industries don't seem to care about that; they just want to make sure that there is no open-source, freely available implementation of their standard.
I will remind you, though, that their "standard" isn't open; you need special permission to write an application that will decode a DVD disk/movie, and cannot divulge any information (especially their stupid and easily calculated encryption key). And, presumably, you need to give them good money to get the info you need to write an app.
If I wanted to pirate a movie from DVD right now, I'd buy a DVD player down at Fry's, rent the movie at BlockBuster, wire up my home theater, play the movie and record it on my dandy VCR onto a high-grade tape, and voila! I have my own copy of the movie. However, I want to be able to take a DVD with me on a business trip, and play it on my linux notebook. Why should I have to install Windows (and suck up about 500-800 megs of disk space) just to play a movie?
Your statement:
"At airports on the west coast, in LA, San Diego, San Francisco and Phoenix, regularly scheduled Chinese airlines crash, taking out runways and control towers. In San Diego, the airline misses the civilian airport and crashes at the Naval Air Station."
Definitely made me laugh; sure, it's "plausible" that someone can "miss" Lindburgh Field in San Diego, but there's still a fair distance between the civvie airport and Mirimar Marine Corps Air Station (the navy moved out a couple years ago).
Additionally, it would be an interesting crash to take out all the runways at once...
Reading this, and various other comments here, I can't help but think of the getups that were used in the film Virtuosity. Granted, the movie itself may not have been the best, but some sort of partial-pod that you are enclosed in, suspended by, and sensorially immersed in, combined with some sort of devices to give an appropriate amount of resistance to your feet, might give the best "free-form" simulation.
I've been thinking about this for a bit, too, and this might even evolve to something that could replace the big simulators used for airplanes/tanks/etc, if it gets good enough. Or, more to the point, if someone decided to develop it in the first place.
On this matter I'll have to agree. Granted, I tend to build "third-party" things like KDE myself from the sources, because of a bad experience long ago. I use KDE almost exclusively, because it does what I need. As soon as I upgraded my SPARC LX from RH 5.2 to 6.0, i started building the KDE 1.1.1 packages, and it's been extremely stable.
Which goes to show, that no matter *what* software package you install/build/etc, if you take care when you install it, back up everything before you do major upgrades, and don't install things you know you'll never use in a million years, you can have a very stable system.
It also helps if the code you're trying to run hasn't been pushed out the door the instant the latest build was completed without errors.
I'll agree with you, there.
/etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, and /etc/group; renaming their home directory, and that should cover it. In HP-UX, there is no /etc/shadow, you have to navigate the /tcb/files/auth/?/* files. In SCO (which I hate hate hate because there are no real files because everything is a damned symlink to something), there is *both* an /etc/shadow and /tcb/files/auth tree.
/etc.
Take, for example, the task of changing a username. In linux, and solaris, the simplest case of this would involve only changing their username in
In an industry with so many standards that each vendor gets to choose their own, I really like RedHat's mostly FSSTAND compliant layout, and got spoiled with all system config files in
Perhaps it makes too much sense, though.
I have yet to evaluate Debian 2.1 and OpenLinux 2.2 to see how similar they are in general setup...
I remember 3 years ago, when Real Audio was really just coming on the scene, listening to screaming audio at 128kbps "Dual ISDN" quality, and it was every bit as crisp and clear as my CD player. Granted, I was at school and had an ethernet connection to the University's T1, but still, it was CD-quality streaming audio.
What I've noticed since then is that every single site that has Real Audio content only has it in 16kbps mono, which is, to be frank, shit. I occasionally try to look long and hard for the 128kbps streams I listened to back in school, but of course they've been replaced with 16kbps items.
I guess too many people complained about not being able to listen to them over their 28.8 modems.
As an aside: first post? cool =)
This looks like a good thing. Especially since we have several employees working from home and connecting via the Internet with linux boxes. I was considering setting up a VPN using ssh and port forwarding, but this looks better.
Well, I don't know about 4 NICs, but I'm running a 2.2.2 kernel with 2 network cards in a few machines, and in all the configurations, I have compiled the network drivers into the kernel. One machine has a 3C905b and a WD80x3, and the other has two 3C905b's. RedHat's configuration has nothing to do with it, once you move to a custom kernel build, and I never build anything as a module unless I'm only using it sparingly (like SCSI Tape and SCSI Generic).
I'm running a Dual Pentium-Pro box with the 2.2.x kernel series, and have used 2 3c905b's in it since day one, using it for masquerading/firewalling, and have never had a problem with the 3com cards, running them at either 10Mb/s or 100Mb/s. We use them at work with all our pc-based servers, SCO and Linux (but we really really want to replace SCO). =)
It's really the only card I've ever used where I just plug it in and it works.
I'm definitely going to have to agree about improving things like Xconfigurator for the RedHat install, but for slightly different reasons: Monitor settings are easy enough to find, if you have the manual for your monitor, but trying to figure out how to manually set the Xconfig file so that you can get "oddball" resolutions, like 1152x864 or 1152x900 (like sun, i think) is next to impossible unless you're a genius. for a 17" monitor, 1024x768 is too big and 1280x1024 is almost too small.
Anyone have suggestions for this particular problem?
I too, might come across as a heathen, but I'd have to agree here.
Linux doesn't need another x86 emulator, another dos emulator, or the ability to run windows 98/nt apps. Linux needs to be strengthened in the GUI areas (whether you like GNOME or KDE IS irrelevant), and possibly in the business applications arena, though with StarOffice, Applix, and WordPerfect there are already some good applications out there. (though I'm at a fundamental disagreement with Corel's porting of ver 8 using wine)
Intel boxen are increadibly cheap today, and getting something that can run Windows faster than VMware on a Pentium 233 on Linux shouldn't cost more than $500 all said and done. That $500 buys a decent machine, too (which would run linux very well... erm... wait...)
However, just looking at empirical evidence from the F-117's own history, there are many occasions where Nighthawks have gone down over the US deserts due to both pilot error and mechanical malfunction.
And who here remembers the tape from the east-coast airshow on CNN? The camera was following the 117 through a series of aerobatic maneuvers, when what appears to be one of the *control* *surfaces* departs the rest of the plane. Once again, the pilot ejected, and the plane became a smoking pile of ruins in someone's backyard.
I'd have to agree; if the plane was shot down, it was because the SAM operator just happened to catch it at a vulnerable point: either with its flat bottom pointed directly at the radar, weapons bay doors open, or some funky wavelength resonance of the craft itself being so close to a radar station. That, or a heat-seeker got a lucky, unadulterated view of the exaust end of it during a turn or something.