Probably is... as long as you don't show any nipples!

You have to remember that enterprise level storage isn't a single set of drives holding the data, it's a hierarchy of different technologies depending upon the speed of data access required. Since SSDs arrived they've been used at the highest access rate end of the spectrum, essentially using their low latency for caching filesystem metadata. I can see that now they are starting to replace the small, high speed drives at the front end entirely. However, it's going to be some time before they can even begin to replace the storage in the second tier and certainly not in the third tier storage where access time isn't an issue but reliable, "cheap" and large drives are required. Of course, beyond this tier you generally get on to massive robotic tape libraries anyway, so SSDs will never in the foreseeable future trickle down to here.

<quote>

<quote><p>I built a model to calculate the fuel consumption of locomotives on 24 routes crossing the nation. on each route, i had a record every tenth of a mile that calculated instantaneous speed, acceleration, and power. rolled it all up to aggregate fuel economy, horsepower, etc. metrics. more than 10^6 records. power user, bitch.</p></quote>

<p>Model building like that is probably better done in R anyway</p></quote>

Indeed, especially as Excel doesn't use IEEE standard floating point maths and doesn't round the results of arithmetic operations reliably and loses precision. It's also slow as it doesn't use the floating point unit of the processor.

Actually, other than a very few packages, I've not had any problems installing "generic" RPM packages on Mandriva or Mageia.

The biggest problem comes with dependencies which have different names, in which case you manually install the correct packages before forcefully installing the RPM with --ignore-deps.

Working in a scientific environment there are sometimes you just have to do this as the RPMs are only available for RHEL and nothing else.

It seems mostly to be a "me too" bragging right. MacOS has launchd, Solaris has svc.configd so someone thought that Linux needed one too.

On the whole it's also trying to boot marginally quicker, but not necessarily correctly. i.e. play fast and loose.

Let's face it, does it really matter if a server or desktop takes 20 seconds rather 30 seconds to boot if the machines going to have an uptime for several weeks?

Wouldn't it be better that it is guaranteed to be running correctly after 30 seconds rather than having services try to start up before the rest of the system is ready for them and failing?

Well, obviously I'm not hip and trendy enough and think that shiny-shiny is no substitute for correctly working.

The reason for the fork was the Mandriva fired all their French developers, moved production to a cheaper country and then totally broke the distribution (Mandriva 2011.0).

The original programmers took the Mandriva 2010.x distribution, forked it, updated it and made the Mageia (mage-ee-ah) 1 distribution, which actually worked.

Mageia 2 moved to systemd (*spit*) but generally didn't break backwards compatibility. I've been running the pre-release version of Mageia 3 on a server for the last month or so (because the chipset needed a newer kernel than previous releases had) and it's been very stable.

Subsequently, Mandriva's management have had a small rethink and are now basing their server distribution upon Mageia (because it actually works).

Of all the Linux distributions I've found the Mandrake/Mandriva/Mageia family to be the least primitive and actually work, both in a scientific computing desktop role and a server roll. They're generally hassle free and the update and upgrade system practically flawless.

Actually, they've not abandoned it, it's merely the thrusters are simulating the aircraft-like ability. If you look at the rolls video you see that the craft can do some very un-aircraft-like turns if the player wants them to.

It's actually a sequel and not a re-implementation.

Of course, it's still pre-alpha quality, so you can't judge the final game from the Skunk Works developed initial test system.

Well, for one of them just read the license agreement for any software which contains cryptography.

The main chain the the US have to pull is economic.

Basically, if the US decides that a country should suffer its roth then all it needs to do is put them on the "don't trade without a special license" list or require companies who sell to the federal government not to trade with that country. You'd be surprised at how effective that would be in hitting the economy of the target country, especially if it's a developed, industrialised one.

No, Java is an exceptional language: At the slightest provocation is throws one.

I you have had installed BT's Fibre To The Cabinet broadband service, either directly from BT or via one of the resellers, then it's most likely that the modem will be a Huawei. Also, the comms equipment installed in the street cabinets will be manufactured by them.

As far as I'm aware, the company has no (own brand) retail products in the UK.

Having used Mandriva (and Mandrake before it) ever since Redhat split its distributions I tried the 2011 version... It was a complete pig's ear of a release, especially if you want to integrate it into a shared network or use it for real work. The worst part (other than systemd and its intrinsic brokenness) is the default "Start" menu replacement. (Oh, and the WiFi is completely broken, the wired networking half so.)

Mandriva 2010.x was stable and worked very well and this is the basis for Mageia.

If there were anything they should kill it would be the "desktop" version, start with the old code and move forward.

As to the anonymous coward who wrote the essay on how bad Mandrake/Mandriva is, I'd just show him URPM, the distro installer (for 2010.x) and compare them with the other distros' solutions. They pale beside them.

An example could be an infected word document which requires Visual Basic scripting to cause the agent to run won't work on the Mac version of Microsoft Office. However, the "DNA" of the infection will stay in the file harmlessly until such time as it is transported to a PC and opened within the Windows version of Microsoft Office, which does have the scripting language available.

It is true that most of the drive-by attempted infections will fail, as do most biological attempted infections by viruses when they land on the wrong host.