Oh they care, for the most part. They just don't think about privacy.

Because then it's "unfair" to the SUV-driving soccer moms and limo-riding corporate execs out there. It "unfairly" rewards hybrid drivers and those who get significantly more MPG than average.

If it detects smoke, it gives you a "heads up" warning before screaming its guts out. if you wave at it, it shuts up.

That's not how drives die of old age. A sudden and permanent drive failure like what is described is almost always a controller failure. When mechanical drives die of old age, they generally develop bad sectors and read-errors accumulate on the platter, but you can still read from the un-damaged areas. When SSDs die, those worn-out sectors go read-only or begin throwing similar read/write errors, depending on the firmware.

After having a 40GB IBM Deathstar suddenly go down in flames, and dozens of "salvage my data!" calls from friends and family, I don't trust any single drive of any age or provenance. ALWAYS have backups.

VMware is not open-source, and is pretty expensive if you need more than the basics. However it's well-supported in most circles, and its paid-license-support gets it past the PHB hurdle.

Xen is a beast. The time investment alone to get it to work puts it out of reach for even mid-level Linux admins. Plus it requires extra help to run non-Xen guest OSes.

OpenVZ isn't real virtualization. It's OS-level containment and pseudo-virtualization, which can be good for some things.

KVM has real steam behind it. It's already in the mainline kernel, it supports real virtualization (I've been able to get all modern Linux distros running as KVM guests as well as WinXP - WIn8 preview), but can get almost as fast as Xen's para-virtualization with some guest-OS drivers installed. There have been new features added to the Linux kernel to help it (Kernel Same-page Merging is one example). It's not that difficult to get working, especially if you use something like libVirt to do the heavy lifting for you.

I'm not an Ubuntu user, so I can't give first-hand experience using KVM on LTS, but a quick google search turned up this this HOWTOforge article on the latest LTS and from my reading, it seems pretty straight forward.

Very very strange. I've got an F18 (i686 PAE) VM spun up and I'm looking at it now. The "System Settings" window is up on my screen and it's taking up about 1/3 of the 1280x1024 screen. I can drag it around like any window, but it won't maximize, even throwing it against the top of the screen doesn't maximize, but other windows do.

I did notice a layout bug in Anaconda, particularly the partition/lvm layout has some stuff running off the right edge of the screen, but I'm not seeing any problems with System Settings.

If you don't like GNOME 3, you can pick a different spin:

Available spins as of this morning:
Fedora 18 Desktop Edition
Fedora 18 KDE Spin
Fedora 18 LXDE Spin
Fedora 18 Xfce Spin

Or you can do a minimal install from the installer ISO (Either on DVD, USB stick, or even over a network), then install a desktop of your choice from the following (Incomplete) list:
GNOME 3.6
Cinnamon
MATE
KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.9
Xfce 4.10
Enlightenment

I don't know if dialogs are still immovable, my ISO is still downloading.

http://get.fedoraproject.org/

Possibly, but you would have to post the script first (hint hint).

Yes, I'm sure it wasn't an SSL issue. It was a straight DNS "Domain not found" problem.

However, thank you for the idea of looking up the secondary NS records. Turns out our .com's nameservers reside in our .net domain, which is handled by GoDaddy. I'm off to change those to our static IP addresses.

You would think so, but the company I work for uses GoDaddy (At least up until today we did, we may be going elsewhere now) for our registrar, but nothing else. We run our own DNS servers, our own web servers and load balancers, our own mail servers, etc. but we got scads of complaints about "the website is down" yesterday during the event. We traced it back to external DNS failures, but I have full-time monitoring on all of our systems and nothing on our end even hiccuped. It worked for some locations but not others.

It makes no sense to me either.

That doesn't get around your registrar going down, just your hosting.

TL;DR: Is there an advanced PostgreSQL for MySQL Users guide out there somewhere? Something more than basic command-line equivalents? And preferably from the last two major releases of the software?

Long version
I've been using MySQL personally and professionally for a number of years now. I have setup read-only slaves, reporting servers, multi-master replication, converted between database types, setup hot backups (Regardless of database engine), recovered crashed databases, and I generally know most of the tricks. However I'm not happy with the rumors I'm hearing about Oracle's handling of the software since their acquisition of MySQL's grandparent company, and I'm open to something else if it's more flexible, powerful, and/or efficient.

I've always heard glowing, wonderful things online about PostgreSQL, but I know no one who knows anything about it, let alone advanced tricks like replication, performance tuning, or showing all the live database connections and operations at the current time. So for any Postgres fans on Slashdot, is there such a thing as a guide to PostgreSQL for MySQL admins, especially with advanced topics like replication, tuning, monitoring, and profiling?

That's not how the idea of distributed social networking works. At least not distributed FEDERATED networking. I haven't seen anyone saying "Join my social network, it's better because it's mine." I see people saying "join this social network because it is YOURS and it can work with other networks" (through connectors or the native protocol.

You sign up for Alice's network, you friend the ten people on Bob's network, and the 35 on Charlie's network, then when you hit your feed page (On your node) you see all the posts shared with you from your friends on Bob's network, Charlie's network, etc. All of your agents (nodes) communicate and send data around on your behalf (shares, likes, posts, pics, videos, events, etc).

It's like E-mail (Or XMPP). You have an identifier that "belongs" to you, and an agent (your node) that works for you. It aggregates everything you care about (And everything anyone cares to share with you) and presents it to you. You don't have to do anything special. And anyone can find you based on your identifier.

I'm not totally on-board with Bennett's platform, mainly because if there are ANY costs implied or associated with running your profile, that will strip out a good 80% or so of the people who would participate. Think of all the people who go bonkers when a "Facebook is going to start charging you" message hits the wire.

For those of us outside mainland China, how would we get our hands on one of these?