A good start would be to pick those movies the Studios don't over-promote, such as ones from the 50s and 40s, and therefore wouldn't care much about being stolen. Shown them that people will buy "Charlie Varrick" or Jimmy Stewart flicks unprotected for a few bucks, and gradually they'll start loosening up their back catalogue of more contemporary films. At some point, on many of those movies they'll be paying more in fees to the copy-protection companies than they'd lose in theft. They'll further save the cost of packaging, as they'll only be available via iTunes and similar services. They hold the IP, someone else distributes and markets, money flows in on long-since amortized assets, and everyone is reasonably content.
One could argue they should give up on copy protection for anything more than a month or so old, as everyone who wants a copy has already bought/stolen it, but incremental advances will have to do at the moment.
If you keep up with the magnifying-glass nonsense and fire ants, as well as letting them live in polluted areas, eventually what should arise is a fire-ant which incorporates available metals into its exoskeleton, making it highly reflective and probably safe from Archimedian solar incineration. Then, you're going to be really and truly hosed. Picture legions of sparkly, mirror-plated fireants advancing upon subdivisions everywhere, immune to 10 year olds with magnifying glasses, which are apparently our last defense against them since nothing else in the insecticide-> dynamite range is making much of an impression.
On the really Big Iron, IBM doesn't care either, because they have AIX. Yes those machines will run Linux, but they'll run other, more tightly-controlled, highly-optimized, technologies as well. It's all scale, and at the low end, Intel/AMD has the scale. At the higher-end, then Power + proprietary OS + services becomes competitive. Home desktop is uninteresting because the margins are too thin, product cycles short, and the after-market services non-existant.
The other side is that they still have low-end, 1-4 core Linux-compatible systems, which clock in starting at $3K each. Most of these compete nicely against Itanium or late Alpha systems, and outpace Opterons. In the HPC arena, nothing else has the floating-point chops except the IA-64, and it's not clear that Intel/HP have the guts to push it hard enough to compete. The Power systems are not going to wither away, especially as they gain an increasing foothold in High-performance systems, as well as being the core of IBM's Z-series main-frames and smaller systems. IBM has decided on the customer size it wants to deal with, and unsurprisingly, that size is large, with margins. They're returning to their roots. You'll probably see Sparc and IA-64 dropped long before Power is.
This is the classic: "if GW didn't know about what Karl and Dick are doing in his name, then he's incompetent, and should be impeached and removed, while if he does know, then he's a criminal, and should be impeached and removed". It's time for "The Buck Stops Here" moment, and for the man to resign in disgrace. His father was a capable, but visionless, caretaker while in offer, and in this case we're missing the capable and caretaker modules.
There's been a building sense that with any luck, we're going to have an Augean Stables moment here one of these days, and it will be interesting to see what gets sluiced out into the sunlight when it happens.
That's a good point. now the kid will never appreciate the old version with the bad makeup, but Charleston Heston screaming, "You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell! "
Early 19th century the british navy was still allowing squeakers on board warships, to both learn the craft and because being small they were good for running things across a crowded deck under fire. It's good for kids to learn early that not only isn't the world fair, it isn't fair in their favor either. Kids from overprivileged/oversheltered backgrounds should probably still be sent to sea for a few years, or apprenticed to a lawyer, or some such to have this lesson driven home.
Actually, I do only use it with the utmost grace and respect. True, use is too strong a term, as I have refused to carry cellphones, beepers, palm-pilots, and other forms of electronic leashes for bosses, coworkers, and family for quite a while now. If they want me to carry a leash then they're going to have to treat me like a mountain goat; tranquilizer dart when i'm not looking and a tracking collar before I wake up.
As for the rest of the demographic, I'd liike to do the reverse; dart followed by phone/crackberryectomy.
The only thing it didn't grab on mine was the NFS settings in NetInfo. Everything else just quietly wandered from the G5 to the x86 without my involvement, and the only difference I noticed was that I'd bought a larger external monitor, rather than a 17" iMac. It even caught my OpenDirectory setup.
You can go one better; just clone your one standard machine, and save the disk image. That way if you have two machines (laptop and desktop, for instance, or loaner while one's in the shop), you can just put the new machine in target disk mode, and do an ASR restore. Probably only worth the effort if you're running a lab or office worth of machines, but still pretty cool, as you can set various values to be configured on a per-machine basis while the rest is just duped straight across.
The best part is that it works like it should; the computer works, and I go off and think somewhere.
And for you Unix guys going, "and.....", it didn't even involve pulling the old system disk and using an intermediate system to dd it across. It Just Works. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go find my black turtleneck and attend the Cult's weekly meeting.
Or, my cynical, university-employed, side says, allows administrators to indulge their Edifice complexes with a pot of money lacking strings, while still demanding the science/engineering departments bring in more grant money so they can skim it for overhead. Stanford is not the only university that's been using "overhead" to panel and decorate the administrators' offices.
(disclaimer: TIME chosen because more authoritative publications are behind subscription firewalls; disclaimer 2: sour grapes due to working in facilities deemed "unsafe by modern standards for both teaching and research")
If you dig around online (just type "laser sintering" into google), you'll find systems that will allow you to build metal parts instead of just plastic prototypes. As the technology improves, expect radical changes from this becoming generally available. Hypothetically, Volvo could digitize all of the parts of the 240DL, and when you need one, rather than stocking them someone would just print you a new (hubcap, engine manifold,door handle). Theoretically, nothing has to ever be unsupported again. Nerdy example: the Mamiya 6 rangefinders are known for weak film advance, and the parts are long since out of stock, so if you own one, you're relying on either other dead ones, or a repairman having laid in a stock of parts years ago. With laser-sintered metal parts, you'd just type in the broken part, and have a new one fused and delivered decades after support officially ceased.
No, George Bush Jr. Went out drinking with Kennedy, got him so sloshed that he had alcohol poisoning and the D.T.s the next day, and they had to shoot him before he became a national embarassment by announcing Free Zero-Point Energy and Open Bars for the North Vietnamese.
As I remember, I drilled around Apple's docs until I found the right part number, then typed it into the MacWareHouse side of CDW. Your local apple store should be able to order it for you as well.
That's just... wrong. If you have a 570 lying around to run gentoo on, you should at least be typing, "emerge written_language", or "emerge photosynthesis". Oh wait, sorry, that's a 590 I'm thinking about.
I didn't say anything about voiding the warranty. The fear of scratching your mini while you face it down with two putty knives seems to deter many potential upgraders. Personally, I just decided that the dings would be on the bottom where I'd never see them, and so went for it.
Somehow, we expect that upgradable machines should be built like the Pro (side latch) or iMac (use a towell to protect the screen, but there are large, spring-loaded so you can't lose them, screws), rather than, "get two putty knives, sharpen the edges, and ignore that cracking sound".
I don't any more, but I ran a 32 node SP2 under AIX 4.3 as a personal machine for a while (it was in, ahem, testing mode, for a month before the unwashed masses were allowed onboard). I'm sure your Linux system would make a nice staging ground to test programs before they were sent to run for real.:~) Having been the herder for that beast, I'm more appreciative of the joys of smaller machines at times. At least they don't come with a boa-constrictor for a power-cord that has to be hard-wired into the bus-box.
Quite seriously, who makes your box? Sun, SGI, Cray, or home-built?
Remeber the Pros, like the XServes, take ECC RAM. No matter who you buy it from, it isn't cheap. Apple's price for the Pro isn't much more than (~$140 at this point), than decent third-party RAM. (4 1GB ECC from Crucial is $560, 2x2GB is $840) The HD's may be more comparable, but check access time, cache size, and warranty.
The only hard part about upgrading the RAM in a mini is not panicking at the plastic-popping sounds you get when you crack the case. Two sharpened putty knives (or lab spatulas), and you're golden. I did the memory and added wireless to mine at the same time, and I'm typing on it now, six months later. The mini is designed like apple's DRM; it prevents the casual tinkerer from getting inside of it, voiding their warranty, then having a fit on the phone.
Computational Chemistry. Hook a couple of those babies together with 10G Myrinet, and really get somewhere. You'll still have enough cycles left over to nicely ray-trace a journal-cover for Nature when you're done.
There's also SETI@HOME; remind yourself that we're effectively alone 8 times faster than before!
Because HP invested a few Billion dollars in Itanium, and killed their PA-RISC architecture in the process? Do you know how many manager-egos would be lost to admit they were wrong, and should just use Alpha (developed by their late Arch-Rival DEC) instead?
The other reason is that I went to a talk by (alleged) HP sales-people four years ago about their HPC offerings. Half-way through the meeting, it became apparent that they weren't really HP reps, but Compaq reps, and a few slides later, DEC-reps. They kept telling us how great the next Alpha would be, and when the performance graphs were put up, someone had slipped in (obviously erroneously) Itanium-2 performance numbers. Basically, the "Failed Itanic Processor" easily dusted the doors of the next-generation Alpha, and its only competition in the HPC arena was the upcoming Power5 from IBM. In short, the Alpha was a great processor in the 90s (and in 2003 a 1996 Alpha under my desk was handily dusting 2.0 GHz Xeons), but it isn't now, especially given that an additional translation layer for everyday business/entertainment apps would be required.
Honestly, as much as anyone, I'd like to see X86 and its various junior abominations (x86-64, et al.) go away, and be replaced by a chip that better balanced integer against floating-point, but it's not going to happen. (for reference, on any sort of normal job, my new MacPro, 2.66 GHz Xeon-5100, is per-core, only 30% faster than a 2.0 GHz G5, which is mostly the clock-rate difference. If you're not doing quantum chemistry, you'll probably get a better spread between the archs, but the x86 is *still* float-weak.)
That's the issue, isn't it? A friend and I went and saw Star Wars (ep 4 to the younger gen) when it was reissued (we'd originally seen it when we were 9, in our respective home states), and it's still a great adventure yarn (even if more than one you wish that Han had followed up on his threat to let Luke float home). Empire is a solid follow-up, with the beauty that the good guys don't always win (an important lesson), and if Lucas had stopped there, it might be a respected cultural phenomena, still discussed as part of the explosion of memorable films from the 70s. But he didn't, and ended up parodying himself. Jedi was the start, and really should be lumped in with the new 1,2, and 3 in terms of having escaped from quality control.
OTOH, I just sat through the Firefly episodes, and can't believe that Enterprise was given three seasons to wander around and die, while an arguably superior, if somewhat strange, alternative got jacked around by Fox and then cancelled. "Serenity" is an OK movie, but by the time you get to the later FF episodes, where the crew has gelled, or at least become interesting, and the stories are becoming somewhat ambiguous in what's been accomplished, you can see that Whedon was really going somewhere. The episode where they raid the hospital so that Simon can subject his sister to first-world medicine is simultaneously a hoot and scary in parts (the men with blue hands), and the story about the kid who never really comes back from the war and becomes a gut runner is both entertaining and sad. Unfortunately, now that he's killed both Wash and Book, as well as the rousing success of Serenity, it's hard to believe that anyone is going to give him the chance to expand on those stories.
Amiga Persecution Syndrome, redux. That company is lucky the calls calling them idiots didn't devolve into conference calls with the callers fighting over RedHat vs. Debian GNU/Linux vs. Gentoo. It's a worrisome trend in OS devotees, as I remember people being VMS partisans, or OS/360 worshippers (which is fair, since miss a sacrifice to a 3090 and it's likely to eat a programmer or two in retribution), but very few systems inspire this rabid, lunatic-fringe, behaviour. Amigas, OS/2, and Linux. There is a Cult of Mac (and I'll admit that I've drunk the kool-aid on that one), but it's more placidly self-satisfied than off-their-meds rabid.
So, Larry Ellison is not going to get the Nobel Peace Prize (Tom Siebel who left Oracle to found his own company once said that "he wanted to run a more humane company than Oracle", and "he runs the company along the lines of his former employer, the US Marine Corps."), but it's still Linux. It's not like Larry put his money into porting OS/400 to Intel Hardware, and told them to use Oracle/400 or be sent to Siberia. I didn't think the "community" liked RedHat well enough to get up the energy for a "You're Not Using RedHat? You SucK!" campaign.
Actually, they kind of do, they just don't go out of their way to help you do it. You can load OpenDarwin, and run a generic X environment on top, or if you're truly ambitious, X + SheepShaver and get an OS-7 environment with Darwin underneath. You can (allegedly) replace Explorer in Windows with *whatever*, and still run the core Windows OS under your chosen user environment.
If you do either, almost none of your applications will still work, hence why it's not a real popular activity, but the underlying OS is still distinct from the operating environment.
You forgot the big meteor crater, and the (hopefully) inactive volcanoes. There's also the little issue of power (for AC) and water (for not drying up and blowing away), no matter who or what is causing the warming trend. You live in a place where people have to water cactus, which probably would qualify as a disaster area (Phoenix certainly is aesthetically), if it weren't the normal state of affairs. (As for the cause of the warming, my vote is personally on the Andorians)
Seriously enough, Forbes did a little disaster cost-estimate post-Katrina, and the least destructive (financially) by at least a factor of 5-10 was a severe ice-storm in the Northeast. West gets drought, fire, and geological events, midwest flooding and tornadoes, coast hurricanes, and NE ice and snow. So, if you're serious about not being a burden on the rest of us, please feel free to move back to NY, PA, or New England. (and stay off the flood plains when you do.)
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A good start would be to pick those movies the Studios don't over-promote, such as ones from the 50s and 40s, and therefore wouldn't care much about being stolen. Shown them that people will buy "Charlie Varrick" or Jimmy Stewart flicks unprotected for a few bucks, and gradually they'll start loosening up their back catalogue of more contemporary films. At some point, on many of those movies they'll be paying more in fees to the copy-protection companies than they'd lose in theft. They'll further save the cost of packaging, as they'll only be available via iTunes and similar services. They hold the IP, someone else distributes and markets, money flows in on long-since amortized assets, and everyone is reasonably content.
One could argue they should give up on copy protection for anything more than a month or so old, as everyone who wants a copy has already bought/stolen it, but incremental advances will have to do at the moment.
At that rate of return, which is above junk bonds, you'd better hope the company also employs someone named "Bruno", who is well-versed in kneecaps.
If you keep up with the magnifying-glass nonsense and fire ants, as well as letting them live in polluted areas, eventually what should arise is a fire-ant which incorporates available metals into its exoskeleton, making it highly reflective and probably safe from Archimedian solar incineration. Then, you're going to be really and truly hosed. Picture legions of sparkly, mirror-plated fireants advancing upon subdivisions everywhere, immune to 10 year olds with magnifying glasses, which are apparently our last defense against them since nothing else in the insecticide-> dynamite range is making much of an impression.
On the really Big Iron, IBM doesn't care either, because they have AIX. Yes those machines will run Linux, but they'll run other, more tightly-controlled, highly-optimized, technologies as well. It's all scale, and at the low end, Intel/AMD has the scale. At the higher-end, then Power + proprietary OS + services becomes competitive. Home desktop is uninteresting because the margins are too thin, product cycles short, and the after-market services non-existant.
The other side is that they still have low-end, 1-4 core Linux-compatible systems, which clock in starting at $3K each. Most of these compete nicely against Itanium or late Alpha systems, and outpace Opterons. In the HPC arena, nothing else has the floating-point chops except the IA-64, and it's not clear that Intel/HP have the guts to push it hard enough to compete. The Power systems are not going to wither away, especially as they gain an increasing foothold in High-performance systems, as well as being the core of IBM's Z-series main-frames and smaller systems. IBM has decided on the customer size it wants to deal with, and unsurprisingly, that size is large, with margins. They're returning to their roots. You'll probably see Sparc and IA-64 dropped long before Power is.
Lyndon Baines Johnston?
Richard Millhouse Nixon?
At least by proxy (gentlemen such as Al "I'm in control, here, at the White House" Haig) Ronald Wilson Reagan
And, almost, Robert "Darth" Dole.
I believe it was Harry Truman who said Americans thought it ok if the president was a SOB, as long as he was Their SOB.
Well, Hitler is obviously irrelevant because we *know* that he didn't send any email. Even TCP over Avian Carrier wasn't available in '44.
This is the classic: "if GW didn't know about what Karl and Dick are doing in his name, then he's incompetent, and should be impeached and removed, while if he does know, then he's a criminal, and should be impeached and removed". It's time for "The Buck Stops Here" moment, and for the man to resign in disgrace. His father was a capable, but visionless, caretaker while in offer, and in this case we're missing the capable and caretaker modules.
There's been a building sense that with any luck, we're going to have an Augean Stables moment here one of these days, and it will be interesting to see what gets sluiced out into the sunlight when it happens.
That's a good point. now the kid will never appreciate the old version with the bad makeup, but Charleston Heston screaming, "You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell! "
Early 19th century the british navy was still allowing squeakers on board warships, to both learn the craft and because being small they were good for running things across a crowded deck under fire. It's good for kids to learn early that not only isn't the world fair, it isn't fair in their favor either. Kids from overprivileged/oversheltered backgrounds should probably still be sent to sea for a few years, or apprenticed to a lawyer, or some such to have this lesson driven home.
Actually, I do only use it with the utmost grace and respect. True, use is too strong a term, as I have refused to carry cellphones, beepers, palm-pilots, and other forms of electronic leashes for bosses, coworkers, and family for quite a while now. If they want me to carry a leash then they're going to have to treat me like a mountain goat; tranquilizer dart when i'm not looking and a tracking collar before I wake up.
As for the rest of the demographic, I'd liike to do the reverse; dart followed by phone/crackberryectomy.
Vr'zN!
Yep, works pretty well. Has a more threatening sound than the traditional anglo-saxon as well.
The only thing it didn't grab on mine was the NFS settings in NetInfo. Everything else just quietly wandered from the G5 to the x86 without my involvement, and the only difference I noticed was that I'd bought a larger external monitor, rather than a 17" iMac. It even caught my OpenDirectory setup.
You can go one better; just clone your one standard machine, and save the disk image. That way if you have two machines (laptop and desktop, for instance, or loaner while one's in the shop), you can just put the new machine in target disk mode, and do an ASR restore. Probably only worth the effort if you're running a lab or office worth of machines, but still pretty cool, as you can set various values to be configured on a per-machine basis while the rest is just duped straight across.
The best part is that it works like it should; the computer works, and I go off and think somewhere.
And for you Unix guys going, "and.....", it didn't even involve pulling the old system disk and using an intermediate system to dd it across. It Just Works. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go find my black turtleneck and attend the Cult's weekly meeting.
Or, my cynical, university-employed, side says, allows administrators to indulge their Edifice complexes with a pot of money lacking strings, while still demanding the science/engineering departments bring in more grant money so they can skim it for overhead. Stanford is not the only university that's been using "overhead" to panel and decorate the administrators' offices.
(disclaimer: TIME chosen because more authoritative publications are behind subscription firewalls; disclaimer 2: sour grapes due to working in facilities deemed "unsafe by modern standards for both teaching and research")
If you dig around online (just type "laser sintering" into google), you'll find systems that will allow you to build metal parts instead of just plastic prototypes. As the technology improves, expect radical changes from this becoming generally available. Hypothetically, Volvo could digitize all of the parts of the 240DL, and when you need one, rather than stocking them someone would just print you a new (hubcap, engine manifold,door handle). Theoretically, nothing has to ever be unsupported again. Nerdy example: the Mamiya 6 rangefinders are known for weak film advance, and the parts are long since out of stock, so if you own one, you're relying on either other dead ones, or a repairman having laid in a stock of parts years ago. With laser-sintered metal parts, you'd just type in the broken part, and have a new one fused and delivered decades after support officially ceased.
No, George Bush Jr. Went out drinking with Kennedy, got him so sloshed that he had alcohol poisoning and the D.T.s the next day, and they had to shoot him before he became a national embarassment by announcing Free Zero-Point Energy and Open Bars for the North Vietnamese.
As I remember, I drilled around Apple's docs until I found the right part number, then typed it into the MacWareHouse side of CDW. Your local apple store should be able to order it for you as well.
That's just... wrong. If you have a 570 lying around to run gentoo on, you should at least be typing, "emerge written_language", or "emerge photosynthesis". Oh wait, sorry, that's a 590 I'm thinking about.
I didn't say anything about voiding the warranty. The fear of scratching your mini while you face it down with two putty knives seems to deter many potential upgraders. Personally, I just decided that the dings would be on the bottom where I'd never see them, and so went for it.
Somehow, we expect that upgradable machines should be built like the Pro (side latch) or iMac (use a towell to protect the screen, but there are large, spring-loaded so you can't lose them, screws), rather than, "get two putty knives, sharpen the edges, and ignore that cracking sound".
I don't any more, but I ran a 32 node SP2 under AIX 4.3 as a personal machine for a while (it was in, ahem, testing mode, for a month before the unwashed masses were allowed onboard). I'm sure your Linux system would make a nice staging ground to test programs before they were sent to run for real. :~) Having been the herder for that beast, I'm more appreciative of the joys of smaller machines at times. At least they don't come with a boa-constrictor for a power-cord that has to be hard-wired into the bus-box.
Quite seriously, who makes your box? Sun, SGI, Cray, or home-built?
Remeber the Pros, like the XServes, take ECC RAM. No matter who you buy it from, it isn't cheap. Apple's price for the Pro isn't much more than (~$140 at this point), than decent third-party RAM. (4 1GB ECC from Crucial is $560, 2x2GB is $840) The HD's may be more comparable, but check access time, cache size, and warranty.
The only hard part about upgrading the RAM in a mini is not panicking at the plastic-popping sounds you get when you crack the case. Two sharpened putty knives (or lab spatulas), and you're golden. I did the memory and added wireless to mine at the same time, and I'm typing on it now, six months later. The mini is designed like apple's DRM; it prevents the casual tinkerer from getting inside of it, voiding their warranty, then having a fit on the phone.
Computational Chemistry. Hook a couple of those babies together with 10G Myrinet, and really get somewhere. You'll still have enough cycles left over to nicely ray-trace a journal-cover for Nature when you're done.
There's also SETI@HOME; remind yourself that we're effectively alone 8 times faster than before!
Because HP invested a few Billion dollars in Itanium, and killed their PA-RISC architecture in the process? Do you know how many manager-egos would be lost to admit they were wrong, and should just use Alpha (developed by their late Arch-Rival DEC) instead?
The other reason is that I went to a talk by (alleged) HP sales-people four years ago about their HPC offerings. Half-way through the meeting, it became apparent that they weren't really HP reps, but Compaq reps, and a few slides later, DEC-reps. They kept telling us how great the next Alpha would be, and when the performance graphs were put up, someone had slipped in (obviously erroneously) Itanium-2 performance numbers. Basically, the "Failed Itanic Processor" easily dusted the doors of the next-generation Alpha, and its only competition in the HPC arena was the upcoming Power5 from IBM. In short, the Alpha was a great processor in the 90s (and in 2003 a 1996 Alpha under my desk was handily dusting 2.0 GHz Xeons), but it isn't now, especially given that an additional translation layer for everyday business/entertainment apps would be required.
Honestly, as much as anyone, I'd like to see X86 and its various junior abominations (x86-64, et al.) go away, and be replaced by a chip that better balanced integer against floating-point, but it's not going to happen. (for reference, on any sort of normal job, my new MacPro, 2.66 GHz Xeon-5100, is per-core, only 30% faster than a 2.0 GHz G5, which is mostly the clock-rate difference. If you're not doing quantum chemistry, you'll probably get a better spread between the archs, but the x86 is *still* float-weak.)
That's the issue, isn't it? A friend and I went and saw Star Wars (ep 4 to the younger gen) when it was reissued (we'd originally seen it when we were 9, in our respective home states), and it's still a great adventure yarn (even if more than one you wish that Han had followed up on his threat to let Luke float home). Empire is a solid follow-up, with the beauty that the good guys don't always win (an important lesson), and if Lucas had stopped there, it might be a respected cultural phenomena, still discussed as part of the explosion of memorable films from the 70s. But he didn't, and ended up parodying himself. Jedi was the start, and really should be lumped in with the new 1,2, and 3 in terms of having escaped from quality control.
OTOH, I just sat through the Firefly episodes, and can't believe that Enterprise was given three seasons to wander around and die, while an arguably superior, if somewhat strange, alternative got jacked around by Fox and then cancelled. "Serenity" is an OK movie, but by the time you get to the later FF episodes, where the crew has gelled, or at least become interesting, and the stories are becoming somewhat ambiguous in what's been accomplished, you can see that Whedon was really going somewhere. The episode where they raid the hospital so that Simon can subject his sister to first-world medicine is simultaneously a hoot and scary in parts (the men with blue hands), and the story about the kid who never really comes back from the war and becomes a gut runner is both entertaining and sad. Unfortunately, now that he's killed both Wash and Book, as well as the rousing success of Serenity, it's hard to believe that anyone is going to give him the chance to expand on those stories.
Amiga Persecution Syndrome, redux. That company is lucky the calls calling them idiots didn't devolve into conference calls with the callers fighting over RedHat vs. Debian GNU/Linux vs. Gentoo. It's a worrisome trend in OS devotees, as I remember people being VMS partisans, or OS/360 worshippers (which is fair, since miss a sacrifice to a 3090 and it's likely to eat a programmer or two in retribution), but very few systems inspire this rabid, lunatic-fringe, behaviour. Amigas, OS/2, and Linux. There is a Cult of Mac (and I'll admit that I've drunk the kool-aid on that one), but it's more placidly self-satisfied than off-their-meds rabid.
So, Larry Ellison is not going to get the Nobel Peace Prize (Tom Siebel who left Oracle to found his own company once said that "he wanted to run a more humane company than Oracle", and "he runs the company along the lines of his former employer, the US Marine Corps."), but it's still Linux. It's not like Larry put his money into porting OS/400 to Intel Hardware, and told them to use Oracle/400 or be sent to Siberia. I didn't think the "community" liked RedHat well enough to get up the energy for a "You're Not Using RedHat? You SucK!" campaign.
Actually, they kind of do, they just don't go out of their way to help you do it. You can load OpenDarwin, and run a generic X environment on top, or if you're truly ambitious, X + SheepShaver and get an OS-7 environment with Darwin underneath. You can (allegedly) replace Explorer in Windows with *whatever*, and still run the core Windows OS under your chosen user environment.
If you do either, almost none of your applications will still work, hence why it's not a real popular activity, but the underlying OS is still distinct from the operating environment.
You forgot the big meteor crater, and the (hopefully) inactive volcanoes. There's also the little issue of power (for AC) and water (for not drying up and blowing away), no matter who or what is causing the warming trend. You live in a place where people have to water cactus, which probably would qualify as a disaster area (Phoenix certainly is aesthetically), if it weren't the normal state of affairs. (As for the cause of the warming, my vote is personally on the Andorians)
Seriously enough, Forbes did a little disaster cost-estimate post-Katrina, and the least destructive (financially) by at least a factor of 5-10 was a severe ice-storm in the Northeast. West gets drought, fire, and geological events, midwest flooding and tornadoes, coast hurricanes, and NE ice and snow. So, if you're serious about not being a burden on the rest of us, please feel free to move back to NY, PA, or New England. (and stay off the flood plains when you do.)