Public high school STEM classes are nowhere near sufficient as far as preparing students for a university-level STEM courseload is concerned.

Maybe if we made public education more about actually teaching and challenging students, rather than a game to see how you can bend the rules to pass the most students, then the first year of college wouldn't be such a difficult experience.

I'd suggest that you go with one of the mainstream/common Linux server distros: either RHEL (for which you can use CentOS, which is essentially the same, minus the RedHat-copyrighted bits) or Ubuntu Server.

Either of these can be configured to use a GUI. I'd actually pick RHEL/CentOS over Ubuntu, and during the install (which is graphical), you can select to install a web+database server along with a Desktop (GUI). The installation is fairly straightforward; the most complex part is arguably the partitioning, although you can use the guided partitioner to just use all free space on the disk. Partitioning isn't something that's linux-centric, although the partition scheme for Linux is perhaps a bit more complex than what'd you would expect coming from a Windows world (dedicated swap device, LVM to virtualize the partitions, etc..). If you use the guided "do it for me" option, you can avoid getting your hands wet with this complexity.

The primary reason I'd suggest going mainstream is that the support will be there. If you choose some OS that no one really uses, you'll be hard-pressed to find distro-centric documentation for it. If you go with Ubuntu or RedHat, you can use Google to get through any obstacles you may find. There are plenty of tutorials available when you google for a simple [do this task] on [this distribution]. For example:

http://www.google.com/search?gcx=w&ix=c1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=install+phpbb+on+rhel
http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&safe=off&site=&source=hp&q=install+phpbb+on+ubuntu+server

While you could probably use this documentation to complete a task on another distro, it's helpful to have a tutorial for the specific OS you're using; all the commands will be the same, and any dependency problems, etc... will all be accounted for.

Additionally, should you decide that you want to learn more and play around, having something mainstream installed means that your learning experience will be directly relevant to anything you want to do down the line.

As an alternative, you could go with a pre-built phpBB appliance. http://www.turnkeylinux.org/phpbb is a single ISO or VDK that is built on Ubuntu Server and comes pre-configured with phpBB (they have many other applications available as well - highly recommended!). It'll ask you a few questions during the install, and once complete, you'll boot up into a fully-functional Linux server with phpBB already running.

Am I reading the graphs wrong, or are they claiming 160,000MB/s throughput on those drives?

Is that supposed to be KB/s? I might buy 160MB/s (that's still crazy high), but 160GB?

This comment reads as total BS.

Let me get this straight - you're running pre-release Ubuntu on 60 production machines? Where's your boss, I think he needs to have a talk with you (and show you the door). No IT professional would be caught dead doing that. Besides, let's be honest here - most accountants and managers "require" MS Office (or some other Windows-only software), and wouldn't use Ubuntu.

And what the hell are you saying about being built on Debian, which leads to professional and real-world experience, whereas Fedora doesn't have that? Have you ever heard of RHEL?

Parent comment is bunk.

I agree that a good GUI for configuration is necessary in foreign environments. I recently had to setup a redhat cluster, and there was no way I was going to get anywhere (in any reasonable amount of time) reading the specifications and modifying the configuration XML by hand. So having the GUI (primitive though it may be) at hand was a life-saver.

But the every step of the way, when I made a configuration change in the GUI, I looked at the XML to see what it was doing. I did this for more than just curiosity, I did it to learn how the system works. Understanding the configuration files gives you an insight into the software that you simply can't get from a GUI. Speed of configuration aside (I think the author of TFA makes a good point here), the CLI is about learning and understanding.

I have to disagree with you about your main point, though. Admins had better be proficient with their shell of choice. Let's assume it's bash -- find me a sysadmin that doesn't know basic bash (for/while, if/else, variables, various conditionals, etc...), and I'll show you someone who's faking it. You don't have to be a full-on programmer, but these are the building blocks of a sysadmin's bash script, and you need to know them.

There's something missing from this entire debate -- it's things like this that will keep large business away from the cloud. One of the most important assets of a company is its confidential information, and unless a business can be certain that the information it stores on a server will remain private and confidential, there's no chance that they'll use cloud-based services.

This has the potential to drive away a lot of business from cloud services. I don't think it will affect Joe Regular on Facebook, but it might certainly turn MegaCorp Inc., and their millions of dollars, away from using cloud service.

On a related note, this bill has one fatal flaw. If I PGP encrypt my data, and don't ever share my private key, then that data remains private and uncrackable by anyone in the line of communication. So I'm not sure how useful this is for terrorism. In fact, probably not useful at all. It's probably only useful for domestic crime.

OK, so I hear this a lot and I never really understand the problem.

The "unwritten gmail contract" (and it actually applies to most Google products) is this: We will give you a service for free (in this case Gmail), and in return we are going to profile your use of that service to select ads for you. In the case of gmail, they give you however many GB of storage, always-on cloud email, and the best searchable email system I've ever seen. There are other Google examples, from gtalk to Google Docs. The basic principle behind it is the same, most people understand the deal, and I don't see anything wrong with it. There's no such thing as a free lunch, but this is pretty close.

I'm in the 500M to 1G camp, and I'm on Verizon. The only reason my data usage is so high is because Verizon offered to give me the "mobile hotspot" feature free for life (a little app on my phone that acts as a gateway and gives me a wireless access point which then routes out to 3G). I use it literally every day, on the train, to connect my netbook to the internet.

Without the mobile hotspot, I would probably use less than 100M per month. And hey, they gave it to me free!

I get your point (that a kernel module, being low-level, gives you greater access), but I think a malicious browser extension is worse.

* It's a lot less likely that a user will install a malicious kernel module, as compared to a browser plugin.
* It's a lot easier for someone with bad intentions, a few hours, and a little coding experience to write a browser plugin, than it is for them to write a kernel module.
* It's much easier to distribute a plugin, and the install base is much greater.
* The signal/noise ratio of data you would want to steal is much more attractive for a browser plugin, than it would be inside the kernel.

I completely "get it" that the entertainment companies need to protect their copyrighted material. That's their product, and it's how they make money; fair enough that they don't want people exploiting it.

But here's an example of them going too far: The other day I was watching clips from The West Wing on Youtube. I'm not sure how exactly I got there, but regardless, it was one of my favorite shows back in the day, even though the West Wing franchise never got a dime from me either through product purchases or ads. But after seeing a couple of clips, I was reminded of how much I liked the show, and started to consider purchasing the DVD set -- until I clicked on a clip that had no sound. Then I saw that great "this video contains audio not approved by..." on the top of the screen.

Needless to say, that killed the viewing experience right there. I think when the entertainment companies revisit the sheer dollars and cents, they might see that it's beneficial to leave a lot of this copyrighted material up there -- it might generate a few sales.

I think the consumer trend is pretty clear with respect to SSDs (enterprise-level I think is still uncertain). Consumers like the speed and the battery savings (laptops being incredibly popular now) that SSDs provide, but of course there is no way you are going to get the sheer quantity of storage space that you can get with hard disks.

Consequently, a lot of companies are marketing "home storage servers." I've seen Lenovo, Acer, Asus, etc... all come out with small 4 or 5 bay boxes, usually running Windows Home Server, all aimed at the mid-range consumer market. It makes complete sense to put the platters in a box, where you can keep network-accessible massive storage, and to put the fast, low-power SSD into your client machine.

The problem arises when you need to access what's on that home NAS while you're out on the road. While I think many people have the upload bandwidth for streaming music, I don't think that exists for video (at least, not in the United States, or at least not where I live). So sites like hulu, etc.. will remain popular in that regard for the time being.

I've seen, and have been able to reproduce reliably, hard disks losing their internal cache data, claiming to have written it to platter when in fact it was not. And I am /not/ talking about battery-backed RAID cache, OS write cache, or anything of that nature; I am speaking specifically of the internal hard disk cache.

When we figured out what was going on, needless to say we were all a bit shaken. But the lesson is learned: your storage needs to have a battery backup system.