What you described related to the UK's DPA makes it a legal issue, not an ethical one. My best guess is that they're concerned with sensitive information being exposed to unauthorized people. So his security and ethics claims would really be one in the same. The ethics problem has nothing to do with laws though. Laws don't make something unethical. Legislators often make laws surrounding ethical issues, but they were ethical issues before the laws ever appeared.

You obviously don't pay much attention to how the economy works in this country.

My point wasn't that the capacity has anything to do with performance. The capacity is generally something that users want considering the amount of data many people are storing on computers now. My point was mostly that you get more capacity for your money if you go with a hard drive, and most users do not need to pay a huge premium to get performance they'll rarely, if ever, really need. A standard 7200 RPM HDD will perform fine for most, and if the user really wants something faster he can get a 10,000 RPM drive instead. He'd still save a lot of money over an SSD with even half the capacity. (Newegg shows the cheapest 80 GB SSD at $249 while a 10,000 RPM 150 GB Velociraptor is $160.)

Also, for the record, that 80 GB SSD would, in fact, be too small for my game installations. My OS and programs are all on one drive, and there is currently more than 80 GB used. I use a secondary drive for storing all non-program-related files too, so I can't cut down any more without moving programs themselves to a secondary drive. So yes, if you're playing several games, 80 GB is way too small.

The only exception that I'd point out to what you said is to watch very closely for RAM compatibility. Just getting the cheapest without really researching it more can land you with a very unstable computer (I know this from personal experience, so I spend a lot of time researching that before new builds). Newegg conveniently links to the manufacturer's product pages usually, so you can check there for RAM compatibility charts. Aside from that, I'd agree. If you're looking for a standard gaming rig, you don't need high-end parts. You don't need to overclock. You definitely don't need to spend a fortune. A case with PSU included is fine and will save you money. Any graphics card in the latest series from ATI or nVidia, even the low end of those series, will be more than enough. You'll get a good computer for a great price.

Also, +1 for recommending Newegg. I'll shop there over everywhere else even if it costs me more. The service is second to none (and I'm not using that as a cliche, I actually mean it), the prices are great, and the selection is huge.

He said "must have." You don't need an SSD by any stretch. SSDs are still far too expensive per-GB for the vast majority of users to bother with. A person can get a hard drive with many times the capacity for well under $100. And if the person doesn't know which CPU is which, he's not going to ever miss the performance difference.

That depends on how you have Fail2Ban set up. If you have it set to block for a very long period of time, then yes, this would be a problem. But I have it set to just block for 10 minutes. Even if I manage to lock myself out accidentally, I only have to wait 10 minutes. That short 10 minute block is usually more than enough to make bots move on. I've had a few of them continue to hammer away after the 10 minutes are up, but in a couple years it's been a very small percentage.

And to the guy who suggested using DenyHosts in addition to Fail2Ban, you're wasting your time. Fail2Ban performs the exact same thing as DenyHosts, but Fail2Ban does it for more services besides SSH. They're both good tools, but using them together is just unnecessary.

So then I assume you also would say that if I have nothing to hide, I shouldn't mind the police tearing my house apart looking for something that may or may not be there? If I have nothing to hide, I shouldn't mind being searched every time I enter or leave a building? I shouldn't mind being spied on at all times during my daily life? That's all ridiculous. Just because I don't want the Feds to know where I am every waking second doesn't mean I'm doing anything wrong. I just like my privacy, and they're interfering with that. It's not like it's anything new in this country (USA), but it's still wrong. Plain and simple.

What you're obviously not realizing is that the only reason identity theft exists in the first place is that there's a national ID number. Your SSN is a de facto national ID, and it makes it really, really easy to perform identity theft. If you create an even more formal national ID system, you actually make identity theft even easier since it's just a single document or number you have to steal.

And, I'm sorry, I couldn't care less about catching criminals with a system like this. If you have even 1 false positive, you've got too many. False positives are absolutely unacceptable under any circumstances, and our current judicial system is way past unacceptable at this point. I want no part of giving my DNA or fingerprints or anything else to the FBI for their databases, and I want no part of a system that can "accidentally" throw me in prison for something I never did.

Not really. The market always has an effect. Regardless of your skills and knowledge, if there is no demand for those skills, you won't have employment. Once you have a job, your job security *should* be based on your skills and knowledge. (I say should because there are other factors out of your control, some of which are artificial due to government regulation) But the market always has an influence on your employment, regardless of what you know.

You are correct that RAID is not the same as backing up, but the rest of your post doesn't make much sense. There is no performance boost from mirroring drives, which is what the main post said he wanted to use. Striping is a performance boost as the data gets written in half the time, but mirroring writes the full amount of data on each drive. So at best the performance is identical to no RAID at all, and with the added overhead it's probably a little slower actually. And to think that it's no additional complexity is just plain wrong. It's more to set up initially, and when something goes wrong (which happens ALL THE TIME with RAID), it's a huge pain to fix. This additional complexity is why I avoid RAID, actually. I don't need any performance boosts, I do backups for data redundancy, and adding the additional points of failure is just a waste of my time.

I posted earlier before I got to yours, but it was October 2008 for the patch and November 2008 for Conficker. You are correct though, that the patch was out before the malware. Had they patched on time, or even a month later, they'd have been fine. This is an example of a very poor IT model, not poor security in Windows. Therefore it is not a good example for the TCO of using MS products. If you show me a company/organization that patches on time, has a good IT model, good network design, etc., and the cost is still significantly higher than FOSS, then I'll listen. Until then, quit bashing on MS for the fun of it.

Exactly. This is the part that gets me. While I'm not disputing that there are costs involved in malware containment or prevention, they should not be nearly as high as the main article describes. If Manchester had simply patched its computers when the patch was released, they never would have this problem with Conficker to begin with. The article says that it hit the city in February, a full FOUR MONTHS after the patch was released. There's simply no excuse for that. I work in a giant corporate machine, and even we get patches pushed out to 10's of thousands of Windows machines faster than that. The cost of prevention is far lower than the cost of reaction most of the time. So while I agree that it's a cost that needs to be factored in, I have a very difficult time believing that it's as high as some of you are making it out to be.

Keep in mind, patching systems to prevent exploits is not something that is limited to Windows either. It's something you should do for ALL operating systems, regardless of the security model or other factors. If you aren't keeping your Linux install and FOSS software updated, you're putting yourself at risk just the same as on a Windows system. Don't ever fool yourself into thinking otherwise.

And for the record, I'm a Linux user (and a huge fan of Linux to boot) as well as a Windows user. So this isn't coming from someone who doesn't like Linux. I'm simply attempting to give it a more objective viewpoint.

Oh I definitely wouldn't use NFS by itself as there are no backups then. In that I agree completely. The only problem with using rsync by itself is that you either have to run it almost continuously or live with the fact that there will be periodic differences. Using NFS ensures that all home directories are always identical, and then having an rsync backup at an interval adequate to your usage provides the redundancy you're talking about in case of disaster.

As someone else pointed out somewhere else in these comments, it's probably best to not try to use one tool to accomplish everything. It's both a blessing and a curse that most tools for Linux are very specialized. Each does something very well, but you don't typically find the "one size fits all" solutions either. Set up a combination of tools that provides you with all the functionality you need and you'll be completely satisfied.

If NFS is hacking, then cool. I'm a hacker! Sorta... :)

And I hadn't seen the post you were replying to, hence my failure to understand the full context. Sorry about that. :)

It's not necessarily as world-ending as you make it sound. I use NFS to mount home directories as well as a couple others. I also have redundant hard drives on the Linux server, and each night rsync makes the backup drive a mirror image of the main drive. I could schedule that to run more often, but I don't change things often enough to make more than once a day necessary. If the main hard drive dies, I can very quickly and easily switch over to the backup drive temporarily until I get a new drive with all the data on it. If the server itself dies, it wouldn't take significant time to get it set back up. The only way I'm really stuck is if the main OS hard drive (separate drive altogether) dies, and even that only keeps me without my home directory for a week tops. For some applications, that may be too long, but in those cases you could simply have the rsync nightly backup also copy everything to a backup directory on a second server that could be your backup NFS host. The main article said that the user has two Linux servers at his disposal right now, so that could easily work. It would take all of about 5 minutes to get the backup server to point /home to the backup directory and get NFS shares on the laptop to point to the new NFS host. If all you're looking for is syncing between hosts, NFS is the way to go. If you're looking for versioning too, then it may not fit the bill quite as well.