But, windows is always marketed as being "easy" and therefore not requiring skilled but expensive admins to run it... As a consequence, many companies employ cheaper people with lesser skills. At the lower end of the pay spectrum "give them admin" and "just reinstall" are considered acceptable solutions to problems.

By contrast, unix is generally considered harder so companies expect to pay more and generally end up with a higher standard of staff... Although in situations like this, unix is actually much easier.

Amen to that. We deploy clusters of BL460c G1s that runs very smooth. I like how the design that let you remove hard drives without having to dismantle the servers. That is one of the reason why I choose the C-class over IBM's HS blade servers. the iLO2 is also far superior that it's IBM counterpart. However, if you're going to run lots of HP servers on your data center, having an extended maintenance contract is essential. When one of my HP BL20p crapped out, it takes 2 weeks for HP to get replacement part for the board.

Everyone should know that you have to pay an early termination fee if you get a 2 year contract with your free phone. That is how things work and if you don't want to pay it, put up with the phone you have for another 2 years (or less hopefully unless you JUST UPGRADED). More than likely if you are able to get by with your phone for any length of time you can also get by just as well for another year and a half before splitting to another provider that will shaft you just as much with the same sorts of fees.

I concur. Why have a huge box when you can have a little portable machine that is barely slower than a desktop? After over 20 years of strictly owning desktops, I bought a notebook and can't imagine why I never did earlier. Cost was certainly a factor, but now notebooks are damned cheap with lots of sub $1000 machines with decent specs. I went cheap and got an Acer Aspire 14" and the size and weight are pretty nice. 3gb RAM, 2ghz dual core athlon turion with cores from the latest phenom and hypertransport 3 for like $500 and a nvidia 9100m that will at least play some decent 3d games really kind of made it a nice machine. No crappy intel gma here. At this point the only thing I wish it had was a discrete video card, but seing as how the 9100M is at least pretty equivalent to an 8400GS, its a whole lot better the aging radeon 9250 PCI I used for years was. Don't think it will play oblivion all that well, but any games up to 2005-2006 run pretty good. Not bad for an integrated chipset. After 6 months this machine has been super stable, though virtualbox doesn't seem to play when I try to use both cores in a VM, but I'm suspecting it is how my bios implements AMD-V though, and probably not anything with the virtualbox code, though it is one of the things they keep tweaking for stability looking at the changelogs Turning off IO APIC seems to make things nice and stable.

While it's true that there are a lot of organizations that provide support for single mothers while remaining neutral on the right-to-abortion issue a great deal of officially anti-abortion groups/orgs do this activity while remaining vocal on their abortion stance. And whether or not the organization is "officially" anti-abortion does not change the fact that the individuals who make up the organization consider themselves "pro-lifers". Not all activists are militant sign-waving protesters. It's just those ones that get the most publicity because they put themselves in the media spotlight while these quiet activists choose an activity less in-your-face.

No, nationalization is when the government assumes control of something. The GP was not talking about that. He was talking about private citizens purchasing shares of an existing corporation on the open market in order to own a controlling interest. That controlling interest can then be used to determine how that corporation runs. His idea is to use that to set up a truly customer-friendly cell-phone company. In a way it's a good idea. The barriers to entry in this market are rather high; better to legally take over an existing company with an existing customer base than to try to start from scratch.

Either you were itching for an excuse to discuss socialism or you really misunderstood the GP.

In what ways are these charities? I thought charity is about giving to people in need, not supporting political organisations.

Very few charities are not political organisations. I work in financial audit and our firm is something of a charity specialist. I cannot think of a single one which is not politically active. Try to think of a charity and then consider why and how they may be trying to influence government and the public - they're highly likely to be doing it.

To be clear, doing so is often an effective use of their resources in attempting to achieve their objectives. You may be thinking of your $10 donation being a few food parcels for some "save the kids in Africa" campaign, but it's going to take a lot more than that.

For what it's worth I wouldn't trust research findings from a charitable organisation either. Aside from obviously having an organisational bias, they likely got the money from a grant (or paid a researcher similarly) and the application will specify outcomes and milestones and you can be damn sure they don't involve "taking appropriate action based on scientific results". A charity's accounts, prospectus and websites etc (in UK anyway) specify the trustees and their occupation - I consider this disclosure the most important of all...

As part of the audit we have to consider if the charity is really doing the work of government and it's often a tricky question. Sometimes it's quite clear that if the charity wasn't doing it, the government (local or national) would have to do so, and they're usually providing a lot of the funding. I suspect a lot of what the government claims to do are things they pay a charity to do.

I'm an atheist myself, but you, sir, are begging the question. Religion is only deceptive towards their congregation if you take it as given that God does not exist. If we're wrong and God does, in fact, exist, then you are the one who is lying to everyone who reads your post.

Oh and another one:

I am a long time user and customer of VMWare products. But for my desktop virtualisation (and more and more non system critical servers) i am moving to virtualbox, why?

My host system is linux and Virtualbox is compiling the needed kernel modules through the package manager automagically on updates, i have to do this for vmware server by hand, every fucking time. And this is often, since i prefer patched servers so new kernels are going ins ASAP.

Cheers,
-S

Yup, that's obviously a general guideline, not to be taken too strictly. It's not like they are threatening to send you to jail if you don't follow it. Oh, wait...

I'm sorry, I left off the next section:

Violators of this policy may be subject to appropriate disciplinary action up to and including employment termination, termination of agreements, denial of service, and/or legal penalties, both criminal and civil.

We only need to wait on a little natural selection to kick in for the usage to drop.

Just kidding - start enforcing the law!

Yep, wash it out. A few years ago, googling my full name pointed to a Usenet post where I was asking for advice on how to take magic mushrooms, ad position one or two. (I accidentally didn't change my profile when typing it or something). I was a little embarrassing but I don't think it had any big consequences.

Now the first google page lists bug reports, google code projects and my stackoverflow account (and related pages). The mushroom story is now on page 5 or something where I don't really care about it.

The problem is that most employers won't ask. That opens up kegs of worms that they don't need to - instead, they see your resume, google your name, and into the circular file you go. No fuss.

I've no idea, tell you the truth. I'm not a salesperson for them, I was just shooting for a vaguely witty remark indicating that at first glance, infobunker seems more about a keen slogan than a useful service. Clearly there's more to them than first impression.

But here goes anyway - damn you for making me use my brain. I am making certain assumptions based on what I've read -- primary among them being that IM didn't just jam a data center into the old mine any way it would fit.

It seems that the biggest benefits they draw from it over any other location is that a) they don't have to dig the pit to get the protection it offers, and b) they can use geothermal temperature control. Given the nature of their business (securing data against all forseeable catastrophe), I'm gonna hazard a guess that they've taken such points as you raised into consideration.

You can bet that if I were looking to give them my business, I'd be doing more than assuming.

With EC2, you'd bring up a new node based on the clean AMI, but with a security policy which allows only your IP to talk to it (this is the default). You'd fix the vulnerability and save that instance as a new AMI.

You'd launch new instances of the clean, fixed AMI. You'd shut down the old infected instances. Done. No downtime and a complete purge.

Most of your time would be spent fixing the vulnerability, the rest of it are just standard EC2 maintenance tasks that if you're moderately savvy in the cloud would take you at most a few minutes.