I respectfully disagree. With the persistent sway of legal favouritism toward corporate entities, not private citizens, now is precisely the time to worry.

Ben Croshaw (aka Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation) also does an admirable job; to the point of questioning how video games can achieve the status of art when so many AAA producers refuse to break away from bad television cliches.

Back on topic, never having known the man (Roger Ebert, that is), I'm still saddened by his passing. He was a standard in his field -- and always appeared to approach his task with professionalism and genuine integrity. Regardless of whether I agreed or disagreed with his final view, I managed to respect him for his efforts.

..and you can use Terminology to edit that Hosts file, too.

Who'd have thought this troll would have an actual reference point to a submission...

Somewhere between the two was YDL on a first gen G4. Yaboot was a piece of cake, throw Windowmaker on post install. All the goodness I needed until OS X got up to speed.

That was a sexy G4 back in '00.

Yup, YDL first, too. Kept it going until my old Yikes G4 bit the dust.

Got the buzz and went Redhat on x86 from there for a bit, then Debian, played with Gentoo during my Debian days and then realized my Debian days would probably never end.

So far, they haven't.

Dude, I didn't roll a lawful/good character. Deal with my chaotic/evil ways. :P

Not really the case. InstaDMG, DeployStudio and Munki will get you quite far down the road without a dollar spent and not much by way of a headache.

Yeah, pretty much.

My work life is primarily OS X (read: ARD and a crap load of ssh sessions) on the desktop and a fair mixture of Linux and OS X Server in the rack (I've still got a couple of Xserves...). Home is a fair mix of Win 7, OS X and Linux (FreeBSD if you count FreeNAS, but you probably shouldn't as it just sits and runs without interference).

Booting into Win 7, I get an immediate jolt of discomfort. Apps run as expected (stable and mostly sane), but I feel weird having to reach for Putty to get into my comfort zone. This is much less pronounced with a *nix box, but if I invoke a GUI (outside of WMaker or wmii), it feels... flimsy, cheap.

I despise so much of Apple's direction and philosophy; but damn it all. They make a slick OS that's downright comfortable.

Jesus.

The educational market doesn't focus on Linux, hell, they barely focus on Macs (disturbingly, although not surprisingly, they are all over the iOS band wagon; which is why I'll have four thousand of iPads by fall).

We have all kinds of state mandates as to what is taught and how dollars are spent (i.e. state approved vendors). Tech in education is NOT what many of us grew up with. The day of a mismashed C64/A2 lab held together with duct tape by a volunteer group of kids playing D&D every afternoon are over. Because kids cutting their teeth learning to write a program that accesses a flat text file, draw a moire pattern on the screen and other activities that teach basic concepts are over.

Primary tech is all about Lexia, Compass, First in Math and the like. It's a bunch of crap, substandard, third party software thrown onto a SMART board. It's got zero to do with life prep, it has everything to do with reinforcing the drill and test mentality while building brand loyalty.

I love Linux. I'm at my most comfortable with a fresh Debian netinstall and moving on from there. But this is education we're talking about. If it isn't "media rich", "Web 2.0 ready!", "Cloud enabled for a dynamic user experience!" or whatever bullshit catch phrase that is being spewed this week, it doesn't go anywhere.

Maybe my district is just too big. Perhaps this kind of idealism really is still possible in a small district (in which case, I need to find a new fucking job). But in my experience thus far, K-12 has turned into prestage for Corporate America. If it's not being used in the cubicle farm, it's got slim chance in the primary educational market.

It's all about numbers. Just trade profit margin for graduation percentages -- and if your numbers aren't high enough, prepare to have your funding cut.

Sigh.

How often do you really need gigabit?

Every time I expect a policy for a system reimage to succeed.

David Brin must be openly grinning over this.

Cheapo used market PC, invest in some large drives and a couple of drive docks, install FreeNAS.

Take a weekend to organize your data however it makes sense (by year, subject, file type, whatever), and store it on a particular drive. Rinse wash and repeat. Depending on how important the data is, store in a fireproof safe onsite, or offsite. When (read: if) you need the data again, dock the drive and retrieve.

Personally, I'm about to liberate myself from years of data. I'm tired of all these bloody drives and the annual, "I really want to look at _______ again". It's amazing how much of that crap has zero personal value anymore. (This isn't a comment on your data, but mine.)

It was the best mod up I could give you at the time. Those damn things are never around when you want them.

No, no, no. Don't mention that OS X has a shell.

OS X is complete and utter crap, you hear me? There's no bash or csh or ksh or anything like that! You can't ssh into a remote box and work from your Mac in an OTB situation, nor can you remote into your Mac and screen a session.

There's no vim, emacs or even nano (for someone wetting their feet); there's only TextEdit and you can only save to .iexclusivetextdocumentformat! Why without tab autocompletion, (semi)sane directory structure think of how impossible it is for someone worth their technical salt to find their way around! Just imagine a photograph of Mardi Gras, that's the exact kind of chaos that comes to my mind whenever I consider needing to edit /etc/hosts or tail /var/log/system.log on a Mac!

You cannot, absolutely cannot compile anything; you hear me? If it isn't able to be installed from Apple's walled garden, then it doesn't exist. No ability to build gcc, no ports installer, no way to install and invoke frotz, mp3blaster and htop in a three way, multi-panelled terminal session so that people think I'm doing something important when I'm really just trying to get that god damned fish into my ear while listening to 8 bit centric podcasts!

The Mac is clearly nothing but a n00b machine that costs too much!

good lord I'm off topic. I really need to cut down my caffeine.

Was it the 80's (the whole dad, D&D and the devil)? The 80's fucked me over, too. Geraldo, Oprah and that other one... Phil. Jesus, between D&D and Iron Maiden, I'm surprised a single child made it through the 80's without being sacrificed to the prince of darkness...