I suggest you look again at rsync

However, he'll want to keep in mind that, depending on his environment, he may have some other issues. For instance, I'd like to use it at work, but I can't because file access times are important to us, and rsync changes the access times on the source files. Last I checked, there was no option to make it stop that, so I'm stuck with tar.

Ironically, if you knew my last name, you'd probably say you'd never heard it before, yet when I search for "firstname lastname" I get about a million hits, most of whom are not me. There's even a "www.firstname-lastname.com" out there.

It's even worse for my kids. About a month after my youngest son was born, we had to call the hospital for his records, and there was some confusion, because there was another guy with the same name, who was treated there a few months before that.

but in smaller cities and towns, T1 and T3s are still the way to go.

I'd like to know what you mean by small town, then. I live in what I'd call a small town. We've got roughly 80,000 people and we're the largest city within at least a 100 mile radius. Our ISP ran a fiber to our computer room and connected it to a media converter, the other side of which is Ethernet. We used to have two T1s, but the fiber/Ethernet connection gave us three times the bandwidth for maybe a 3% increase in price.

Third, 9 pin RS232C is frequently not enough for a lot of older devices.

That hasn't been my experience. I've been doing RS232 since the early 80s, and I've run across very few devices from that time period that use more than the minimum three.

What I have seen for devices that use the other signals is that they'll use them differently. For instance, the original RS232 spec uses RTS/CTS differently than they're used today. Also, pins will be used incorrectly; I have a computer in my garage that uses DTR for flow control.

You can still buy PC with an ISA slot

You don't need an ISA slot to get serial ports. Just a few months ago, I put together a brand new computer at work that has two RS232 ports on a PCI-express card. You can get one from Newegg for around $50.

So who is going to teach Gladys from accounting how to store her contacts' PGP keys and encrypt her email?

Maybe PGP is a little on the difficult side, but at my company, we use a dedicated server for any email that needs to be encrypted. It has a little web app (written by a former employee) people can use to send and receive messages, with attachments, if necessary. All the data is transferred through HTTPS. I don't use it, myself, but it must be pretty easy, because we have to follow HIPAA regulations and we have plenty of people here who aren't exactly computer experts.

It always struck me that Zip drives became so ubiquitous.

I'm guessing they just happened to be in the right place, at the right time - right between floppy disks and recordable CDs. I never bought a ZIP drive, myself, because to me, it was clear they wouldn't be around for long. Ironically, they didn't even really outlast the floppies they were designed to replace.

I always thought it was too bad Fujitsu wasn't better at marketing. For twice the price, their 3-1/2" MO drives could generally hold 3 times as much. They were fast and reliable, too. My Dynamo 640 still works, after about 15 years.

Do they get to monitor communications or wipe my own device now if anything goes wrong?

I wouldn't worry about it. This will never happen at any company that has any concern about security. An employee can do what they want with their own computer, so it's a perfect vector for viruses, etc. If we give them a computer, we can say "this is to be used only for work." How can we allow them to bring their own devices, when we can't even allow them to plug in a USB key?

At my office, we don't even allow wireless connections, internally. The access points are connected to a router that's completely outside the firewall, and they're only turned on when we know someone's using it.

If you're going to get a new router, I'd strongly recommend the RT-N66U

I understand what makes ASUS think the RT-N66U is worth $60 more than an RT-N16, but does it really make a difference, if you're just using it for a home router?

Did they fix the installer? Once I got it installed, Fedora 18 (with KDE) is pretty good, but the installation was a bitch. The installer choked on my hard drive, because it was already partitioned. I had to get to the shell and delete the partitions manually to get it to work.

Who here is still using the x86 in their server farms?

What do you mean, "still"? I imagine most people are using them. Why? Because they're cheap and, most importantly, standardized.

I'll admit, I'm a big fax of Unix, but we decommissioned our last pSeries server a couple of years ago. The last straw was when we tried to add some additional disk space to the machine. Our distributor wanted about $25,000. After a little research, I discovered we could get a whole new x86 server with twice the disk space for less than $18,000. I'm pretty sure it was more powerful than the pSeries system. too. For the price of an IBM pSeries or iSeries machine, you can get a couple of x86 machines and use the second one for a backup.

Also, when you're dealing with IBM, you're locked into IBM. I suppose I'm not surprised that you can't just drop any old PCI card into an IBM system and expect it to work, but very few non-IBM SCSI peripherals worked with the system, either.

I hated to give up on IBM, but they're just too difficult to work with, any more.

RHEL/CENTOS minimal does this just fine.

Depends on what you call minimal. If you have a machine with (a minimum of) 512Mb memory, than yeah, it's fine. On the other hand, if you've got a machine from about 1998, with 64Mb of memory, you're basically SOL. CentOS won't even install. (I'm sure the fact that it's a Red Hat clone has something to do with it.)

Old machines are great for routers or VPN servers, and they can't be used for much else. If the machine is installed at a remote office, the long-term CentOS support is really useful, since I don't have to upgrade the machine (requiring on-site service) every 18 months, or so, if I want to keep getting kernel updates.

I guess I just don't get why I should care that Linux has a "stigma?"

You should care because, the fewer people who are using Linux, the less hardware manufacturers will care about supporting it. Look at how much trouble we've had getting 3D graphics drivers working properly. How would you like it if we had that kind of trouble with all hardware?

Quake ran like pure shite even on the 5x86/133

I imagine this had as much to do with the Pentium's 64-bit external data bus, as it had with the FPU. Pentiums were capable of moving data (from processor to memory) at nearly twice the rate of a 5x86/133. (Higher fill rates.)

Except that it didn't.

You'd think that, on Slashdot, people would try to know what they're talking about, before they make idiots of themselves, but I guess not.

http://download.intel.com/design/pentium/datashts/24199710.pdf