Virtualization is great, but compared to containerization it is a real pig. I'm in a similar situation to the OP, and I generally shut down my development VMs before doing graphics work, video editing, or relinquishing the workstation to my sons to play games. This includes idle VMs, which still chew up a fair amount of RAM and CPU. With containers, unless there is a busy process running, I can leave them running without notice.

Most operations on containers, with the exception of downloading the first image, are fast, like sub-second fast. Operations on VMs are painfully slow by comparison, easily a minute or more. The fact that containers are so lightweight opens up all kinds of uses that would be impossible with VMs, like deploying 40 containers to simulate a large environment, all on a ho-hum workstation. Even if you just use containers like VMs, it means you spend less time waiting and more time working.

I could mention more advantages, but I already sound like a new Christian.

For a decent implementation of containers you'll need Linux (LXC, perhaps under Docker) or FreeBSD (jails). And since a container uses the host kernel, you can't run Windows or FreeBSD inside a container on a Linux host. That is still the realm of virtualization.

To put containers in perspective, here is a good talk.

No single currency, perhaps, but how about a basket of currencies? Better yet, why not let any country wanting to back it's own currency choose what it backs its currencies with? That way large trading partners could back one-another's currencies, in part. And why limit yourself to currencies, there's always prescious metals.

I can imagine that this move would make for an exciting currencies market, at least, initially. In the long-term, though, a currency's value as tool to back others with would come down to its performance and stability...or perhaps that it moves out of phase in relation to others and stabilizes the basket.

I can echo this, almost exactly.

I've been using consumer-grade wireless equipment in the enterprise. The key is that we flash routers with OpenWRT. We decided to do this after testing out some enterprise wireless gear from a couple of reputable companies, cracking open their equipment, and realizing it was basically identical to the consumer-grade gear. It's also nice having to worry a little less about the possibility of manufacturer's back-doors. Much lower price and the ability to have a nearly identical interface on a mix of equipment are big positives as well. A minus is that devices tend to keep a death-grip on the access-point they connect to first.

We must have 50 wireless access points (mostly Netgear, some ASUS, some Linksys) running for a couple of years and have had no issues whatsoever other than having one router lock up after a power bump.

What equipment are you using? Either it's junk or you have some sort of problem in your environment (dirty power, high ambient temperatures).

Under Linux, I found Blender's editor, although far from perfect, was a much better option than OpenShot. Crashing is the norm with OpenShot. I wouldn't even think of doing anything other than very simple editing under OpenShot. Anything more than nipping out the wanted portion of of a video clip and adding a single audio track would be a no-go for me with OpenShot. Anything more complicated and you are likely to eexperience crashes.

Blender worked for me on a project with about a dozen video clips (~5 minutes in total) and at least a couple of dozen audio clips that had to be accurately timed. (A Nerf "war" video that my young sons nagged me into.)

This was six months ago. Things may have changed for the better since then.

Is there a $3.14 million bounty I can claim for pwning Haiku?

It seems like your problem is with the claims added, or at least highly magnified, by two levels of news aggregation.

I replaced a failed hard-drive on 2U 12-drive storage (for VMs) storage server yesterday. It took less than 20 seconds. No downtime.

The complete process went like this: Press the button that releases the lever on the hot-swap tray, lever the hot-swap tray (and drive) loose, slide the tray completely free, put the failed tray and drive in the bad-drive pile, pull a new (and tested) hot-swap tray and drive off the shelf, insert it, and walk away. Including prep (installing the drive in the tray and testing), it might have taken five minutes.

If downtime matters to you, using a consumer device in a colo site probably won't be of interest. Having said that, I've seen colo services doing similar things with D-Link home server boxes a couple of years ago. Those were at least hot-swap. My guess is that it may have saved them some money in up-front costs.

Certainly, annual crop production is nightmarish, environmentally speaking, whether we eat the result directly or, even worse, feed it to an animal and then eat the animal. Perennial production does look like it has some promise. This discussion got me to revisit some of my permaculture books on the shelf, and checking the local tree nursery catalogs. I actually think, even in my climate, that one could grow the bulk of their diet in an agroforestry operation. Basically, pasture (for sheep or cattle) broken by rows or patches of fruit and nut trees.

We're already started in this direction, but as a result of this discussion, we're going to commit to an additional 30 trees this spring. (That's about the most that one can get started while holding down a full-time job.)

Wow! Something positive resulting from a Slashdot discussion.

Thanks for adding to the discussion.

I actually do grow a significant portion of my family's food. Maybe one-quarter of the meat and 1/10th the vegetables. We could make that 100% of our meat and maybe one-quarter of our vegetables, but there would be no variety in our diet. Even the small portion of our diet I produce is a lot of work. Why do I bother? Simple: I developed an interest in how my food was produced. Toured a livestock feedlot (ie. finishing), a chicken operation, and a pig operation. Both from an animal suffering and an environmental impact point-of-view, I was...disappointed. Frankly, it is hard for me to imagine a way that these sorts of enterprises could be made acceptable.

Pastured livestock operations, which I've been periferally involved in most of my life, can certainly be done with an arguably positive environmental impact and a minimum of animal suffering. That's what I've been concentrating on. It's work and I've definitely lost a fair bit of money doing it.

One point I've come to realize is that annual crop production (grain, vegetables, and most fruit) is an environmental nightmare. With the exception of tree- and perennial-based production, there simply isn't a way to produce plant food that doesn't involve killing most of the other plant species on your food production plot. Sure you can cover-crop and under-sow, but you still have bare-ground for a significant part of the year. Mulching just smothers all the plants outside your crop rows. Permaculture is interesting, but I'm not sure how realistic it is outside of temperature regions.

It bothers me a lot to think about this, so I try not to.

I received a Mendel90 kit from Nop Head about three weeks ago. (Nop Head has been prolific in the Rep Rap community.) The instructions were very clear and the whole kit went together over the course of about three work-days (mostly done while watching Netflix). The few minor issues I ran into were due to my mis-reading the instructions, or not reading them at all. The kit was lacking on some heat-shrink tubing, but that's the only real criticism I have. Even for someone who hasn't picked up a soldering iron in 15 years, the build procedure was straight-forward.

The Mendel90 design is, IMHO, much better than the Mendel or even the MendelMax. The frame self-aligns to the point that there is no need to square anything up. The ribbon cables are brilliant. Of the Rep Rap variants out there, it's probably the best of the bunch at this moment. Not perfect, but very usable and straight-forward to put together.

As I write this, I'm printing up some parts for my son's worm-bin project out of glow-in-the-dark PLA. (No reason for the glow-in-the-dark other than it was in the printer.) Its been a blast to go from a sketch on paper to a finished part in a couple of hours, if that.

Another year of development on the slicing software, printer firmware/electronics, and the elimination of bridging/over-hang issues by dual-extruders and water-soluble support material will make 3D printing accessible to the masses. It's going to be fun to watch...and participate in.

Not so sure about that last sentence there.

I trained a new hire to use VirtualBox on an Ubuntu 12.04 box this week. He had just about zero experience with virtualization. Basically my instructions were to have installation ISOs for whatever OS he wants to run virtualized and to apt-get install virtualbox. He then set everything up on his own and only asked for help when it came to setting up a virtual network. I told him he should first figure out cloning. A few minutes later we were back on the virtual network. My own experience a couple of years ago was similar. In both cases, we had the manual handy, but never used it.

My proficiency with KVM/libvirt took more effort. But virt-manager makes it pretty straight-forward. Our KVM/libvirt virtualization system has several host nodes running a few dozen guests with storage on a SAN/NAS (it does both). This wasn't painful to do at all. An automatic backups/snapshot system has been more challenging, but that's mostly just because we want to minimize interruption of the guest (just suspend the guest, grab an LVM snapshot, wake the guest, copy the snapshot, free the snapshot) and due to our larger guests being about 200GB in size. Storing versions of files that large, and moving them around, requires delta compression. (Hint: Use xdelta3 before copying the data off-site.)

We also played with Proxmox a few months ago. A summer student had all of the above (except for backups) working in two days. Confusion over whether the licensing was really free, the fact that it is its own distribution (a double-edged sword for sure), and the fact that configuration of aggregate network links (LACP) was really goofy, all kept us from adopting it. Too bad, being able to switch a guest from one host to another in real-time while viewing the guest's display with only a tiny pause, was a really neat trick.

If I can do the above mixed in with all of my other responsibilities (as a school authority director of tech), anyone can.

I forgot the PC Engines boxes that we have in a few spots. We use them as the box that monitors the UPS and controlls what gets shut-down when the power goes out and looks like it will be down for a while. Since the box draws about 10 watts, the UPS can run it for days before running out of juice. When the power comes back, the PC Engines box coordinates bringing everything else back up. We haven't found anything else that compares for a low-power box that doesn't have to do much of anything other than run reliably.

It's not rack-mountable. No IPMI either. That should be a deal-breaker for anyplace serious enough to have a rack.

We try to virtualize anything that can be virtualized. But for those few tasks that really need to run on bare metal, we've had good luck with little Atom D525 Supermicro rackmountable boxes. We bought a few complete boxes (minus ram and storage) that Newegg billed as fanless (which was a lie). Those ran hot enough to develope problems after a few months. Ever since we've built ours up from parts (SUPERMICRO CSE-510-200B 1U rackmount server case, SUPERMICRO MBD-X7SPE-HF-D525-O server motherboard, SUPERMICRO MCP-220-00051-0N single 2.5" fixed HDD mounting bracket, GELID Solutions Model CA-PWM 350 mm PWM Y Cable, RAM and storage). About $400 and have been really reliable. Only thing I don't like is that they don't have IPMI on a dedicated port.

But honestly, if there is any virtualization going on, there shouldn't be much need for these.