In other words, the thousands of businesses and people using xserves or OS X Server to host various sites/apps with the OS-included software?

Apple is late. Stupid though it may be, many people are using OSX for servers. Apple did once sell these servers, cater to this market, and have enterprise support. Apple didn't even bother to release a patch for 10.6, even though it is still in use on most of these servers.

Apple completely dropped the ball.

Thanks! Just ordered a set...

So you're telling me we wouldn't be at war now if only we hadn't ended the war? It's not enough that my friends did 5-10 tours? How many more did you want us to do?

Read the other comments in this article that point out all the pros. I love md and lvm, but they are little league compared to ZFS.

Hell, just the snapshotting alone. User accessible previous copies of files!

In the business world, if you don't have the scale and expertise to build your own cluster, you use real enterprise gear in redundant configurations. Whether NetApp/EMC or ZFS on qualified hardware.

If availability isn't important to you, and you can afford to keep spare controllers on hand so you don't have to wait days to source a compatible controller 5 years from now... fine, use LSI. But don't pretend it's somehow smarter to use HW RAID on a critical system.

Your examples strike me as extraordinarily simple. Are these the things you're actually filtering out applicants on? I figure we're talking junior admin work here, but still..

I am fairly secure in my current position, but I occasionally contemplate becoming a fulltime Unix admin to make my life easier. However, all the postings I see have high listed requirements (e.g. 3-5 years experience in an environment with over 1,000 servers). I figured it was really that competitive these days, even for junior positions.

Or is there something else at play here? Are those posted requirements generally bullshit? Are you going for undermarket salaries? Is your organization somehow unique?

A US job that they don't get hired for still:
1) reduces competition for other jobs
2) increases wage competition for skilled workers

Both of which benefit the person who did not get the local job.

I suspect you're right about price fixing. However, the fact that someone in the economy has to pay a large sum of real money is irrelevant in determining cost-benefit.

Yes, it's real money. But so are labor costs. And, in theory, those labor costs represent [a portion of] the real value that person is adding to the economy. So anything that makes the employee able to add value more efficiently is overall good.

In general, an employee would not be earning $200/hr on a $7,000 workstation if they weren't adding more than $200/hr of value to the economy in some way. So making them more efficient either allows them to add more value, or gives them more free time to do other things (which tend to benefit the economy and society as a whole).

So maybe there is collusion, price gouging, artificial shortages, or something going on... but I know people who would gladly pay a huge premium for minor speed increases. And that really drives development, which should ultimately benefit the home user.

You are the one making an elementary mistake, I am afraid. Your conclusion does not follow, even if we accept your entire argument.

You have heard the phrase "trust, but verify". It is far too easy to fake transparency and mislead other states. Every state throughout history has done this. At the very least, you need good intelligence sources to verify a state's public pronouncements regarding intentions are sincere. Even if they are sincere, you need to know the intentions/plans/abilities of internal players who may be in opposition.

Although I guess we could just take Putin at his word that he is just conducting military exercises and has no intentions towards Crimea? I'm sure he'll be giving Crimea back to Ukraine any day now.

Advocating covert verification of states' intentions and abilities has nothing to do with government accountability. That is an extreme oversimplification and false dichotomy.

No, any enterprise that cares about its data or uptime will use "enterprise" SSDs*. All** the big storage players have been using enterprise rated/labeled SSDs, and many of them use "enterprise" HDDs as well. So that's a pretty big chunk of the storage market. I'm not saying EMC doesn't have a high markup, but if you're using EMC storage with SSDs, you're using enterprise SSDs.

There are a bunch of reasons to use enterprise stuff in other situations as well, but I'm not going to try to debate the technicals right now.

As a side note, it sounds like your company is having pretty serious issues with storage and backup. What are they going to do when data grows a bit and daily backups start taking 25 hours?

*Or have a completely different architecture to sidestep the problem. It's harder than it sounds.
**There may be exceptions?

That is true of a lot of newer think tanks. You can generally judge a think tank by its ratio of PhDs to staff.

Brookings is part of the old guard. They employ a lot of serious researchers and generally strive towards objectivity. Nothing's 100%, but I'd say they're comparable to a good university.

Fair enough. I appreciate your honest reply.

W was a unique president. Off the top of my head, he's the only recent president who seems to have actually done everything wrong. Obama has done some good... but since everything he does is controversial and subject to the harshest rhetoric I've seen in the US, I decided to leave him out of this.

While that is correct, you are assuming vi has a steep upward slope. That was not the case for me.

1 minute in: "Oh crap... how I do I type? How do I EXIT?"
15 minutes in: "whew, helpful man page and articles." "cfg edited and saved. Go me!"
1 day later: "I just deleted two lines! Crap! How do I exit without saving? Ugh... what'd that man say again?"

A quick initial climb, a steep drop into a lake filled with tears, and then a gradual slope.

The problem is that in this statement:

you are imaging that the US is the "bully country", and failing to imagine what most other countries would do with control over the internet. And actively ignoring what many other countries do with control over their piece of the internet.

The US bullies on plenty of issues. Control over the internet really isn't one of them.

I got the impression you were making the argument about the federal government specifically. Sometimes the federal/state government increases liberty by getting rid of a federal/state regulation. Sometimes abolishing a regulation leads to less liberty.

Neither I nor the Green Party believes government never does harm. I am certainly not claiming that federal, state, or local governments are free of corruption.

The core of the argument is that 1) government is not inherently bad and 2) we can substantially improve the quality of our government through 3) changes in electoral rules, campaign financing, and the revolving door. When a large voting bloc stops believing 1 and 2, we're basically doomed. I'd much rather argue over the best #3 and how to get them implemented.