The year before the US, under Bush and Cheney and Rummy, invaded and conquered Iraq (for no particulatly good reason), there was a naval exercise imitating the invasion.. Gen. Shinsecki, on the defending forces, blew up a number of ships, including, IIRC, an aircraft carrier, by sending small fishing vessels, much harder-to-hit targets than capital ships, in packed with HE.

My personal bet on this imitation Nimitz is that it's a target, to work out similarly effective attacks.

I know, no fun, nothing to laugh at....

                      mark

Since the OP says that their second choice is sysadmin, they've got a possibility: ask his employer about being kicked upstairs to Tier 2 tech support, or Tier 3.

Or are they moving everything across the border, Timotht?

                  mark

Sorry. RHEL (and thus CentOS, and I presume Scientific Linux) have 10 year support.

                  mark

Let's see, the head of Mt. Gox unloaded all his bitcoins, and then told his users. Prosecutors are looking into this.

Goshawowie, where did they find this "old", "lost" file, in the head honcho's smartphone?

                    mark

Really? Why? You don't think there's a good supply of programmers who know Linux out there from, oh, all the telecoms*? Or most of the stock trading companies? How 'about Fortune 500 companies that use some other version of Unix, like, say, Lowe's?* Or how about Android programmers? Or.... shall I go on?

You's is a statement based on no facts, or ignorance thereof.

                            mark

* Why, yes, I have worked at two major telecoms, and a short contract at Lowe's, so yes, I do actually know what I'm talking about.

Which is, of course, more vulnerable, and therefore the schools systems are more vulnerable, esp. since they're far short of funds to hire enough qualified help to secure all the schools.

Now, LibreOffice goes head to head - ok, some VM scripting, macros, and other bizaree things that Office does may not work... but are you going to look me in the face and tell me that anyone under college is going to use that crap to write papers and homework? For that matter, who in college (except maybe business majors) will use it?

                      mark "and linux is a *lot* easier to manage than the arcanity of M$, and there's zero annual license fees"

...get back to you on that.

                mark "will join the American Society of Procratinators one of these days, if it's still around...."

Several years ago, here in DC, I went to a forum about security and the Internet. On the panel were staffers from then-Sen. Kerry, and from a House committee. After it was over, I went up and spoke to each, individually, and neither had ever *heard* of the concept of an air gap between controls and the 'Net... and we were speaking of nuclear power plants, etc.

Ignorance and "cost savings" make *great* insecurity vectors.

                  mark

As I think I've posted here before, the last three or four years, google results have been getting worse and worse - I regularly see things I've excluded with a -"search term" that have that term, explicitly, in the semi-para that's displayed, And the ads are *much* worse. I was looking for mens boots -ladies -women -womens (and yes, if you give or do not give a plural, the other will show up), and saw a sponsored ad for women's boots

ROI has definitely cut into usefullness. And why hide the advanced search?

                mark

That was the one that got away from me as a kid, herding them, and I was punished for loosing her. They belonged to us, and so any offspring are *mine*.

And you kids these days, think spring is bad when the dogs and cats start shedding, we needed *rakes* when out mammoths started shedding....

                    mark "and my folks still had the bones of the dinosaurs they helped get rid of...."

First, I'd like to know the domain registrars for the sites - are there a few, or many? If a few, that's a bigger problem.

Second, remember that you can always manually add another nameserver, like one of google's, to your resolv.conf, and fix it so that it's not rewritten (or automatically replace it every time you log into your computer).

Third, thanks for another reason, among many, to not ever want to switch to Comcast.

                mark

"Asking around among our tech-savvy friends though, no one has a good answer to the question, 'how would you backup 20TB of data?'. It's not like you could just plug in an external drive, " tells me that you have NO "tech-savvy friends". None. Zip.

Right now, I'm on my biweekly offline backup - that's where we rsync from the online backups to offline backups. This is the 10 3TB drive, if you're interested, out of 13.

Now, if you actually had any "tech-savvy friends", as opposed to people who think they're "power users", they'd have pointed out, first, that what your tech-savvy-friendless friend had was *not* a 20TB file, but many, many files. It's certiainly not any kind of problem to partition them - y'know, divvy up the RAID and have movies and music subdirectories, and break that up by moving all the movies whose title starts with "A" under /movies/A.... and then rsync (or however you prefer) copy enough to close to fill one drive, then swap drives....

Oh, and why can't you do it in an external drive? Certainly, that's what I'm doing *right* *now* as I type with those 13 3TB drives.

                      mark

Let's start with the NIH main campus, in Bethesda, MD, where somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 people work every day. That include maintenance, cafeteria and hospital staff. If between 500 and 1000 left, that's 2.5%-5% reduction.

Then consider the fact that it's probably the largest pure medical research institution in the world. Note that I said "pure research" - we're not talking about billions used to find a drug that's equivalent to, or only marginally better than an existing drug... because your patent on that one's about to run out.

And I suppose most of you are twentysomethings who never get sick, and will live forever (aka willfully ignorant children).

And the US, biggest economy in the world (for the moment) can't keep the budget up, since we have to have 15% or lower taxes on the people whose annual income is larger than most countries, because, heaven forfend, they might have to scrimpt and save, and maybe would be unable to buy that next Hawaiian island....

This sucks.

                      mark

For one, she will NOT want to install all the constant flow of updates, while CentOS (like upstream, as we say), is *stable*, and she doesn't need the GoshAWoWeeK3wl eyecandy crap so popular with teenagers.

Besides, you've been using CentOS for years. Who do you think is going to get called for tech support... and wouldn't you rather work on something you're *very* familiar with?

              mark "read a zillion horror stories of folks doing tech support for their folks over the phone, esp, WinDoze tech support....:"

Will Comcast sign a legally-binding agreement that, in the event that someone uses your hotspot to plot with Al Queda, or d/l kiddie porn, or whatever, that they'd defend you to prevent you from being charged in connection with it? Which of them will go in your place to Gitmo, or San Quentin, or whatever....?

                      mark "not a chance in hell I'd agree"