Well, I live in Europe and have been to the US. And the waiters in Paris pale in comparison to some waiters in Florida ;-). But on average people are people wherever you go. You got friendly and entertaining people in all societies as well as rude obnoxious ones. In areas with high populations like big cities you got more of both of them.

I don't think the primary motivation for massive surveillance and such things is fear. In my opinion it is about control and power. Being able to silence any opposition before it gets organized and knowing in advance which groups dissent is growing gives you the power to stay in control longer. Fear is only used to gain acceptance of the public: think of the terrorists etc.
 

But that depends on other parties with the will and capabilities to support the framework having an interest. Being open source definitely is an advantage but by no means a guarantee a project will survive. Sturgeon's law applies to open source software just the same as to proprietary software.

The request of the submitter for a fail-safe set of axioms can never be answered. With fail-safe systems tending to fail by failing to fail safe. But with common sense a few indicators of long term viability are easy to give:

1) Who controls the software ?
If it is a single party chances are good it will be abandoned at some point in the not so distant future. Open Source can help with this point but as said earlier it is no guarantee. There are many open source projects which are for all practical purposes developed by a single company. These projects are just as likely to be abandoned as commercial software.

2) Who uses the software ?
The more people use the software the less likely it is it will be abandoned. For commercial proprietary software a big user base means income and companies are not in the habit of slaying the goose that lays the golden eggs. For open source software it means there is a bigger potential pool of contributors to continue development if a main developer exits the project.

3) How long has the software existed ?
New software is continuously written and released. Again according to Sturgeon's law 90% will be crap. It will take a little while before the writers realizes their software belongs to this majority and stop supporting it. The longer software has been actively developed the less likely it is to be crap and discontinued.

4) What was the motivation for creating the software ?
If the motivation is a specific goal other than meeting the needs of the users expect the software to be abandoned if it becomes clear that the goal is unrealistic. If the goal is met the software might be continued. Think about lock-in strategies and subverting standards in this regard.

The choice for Adobe Flex had issues in at least point 1, 2 and 3.

A few hours ? If he had put it in an account with only 0,1% interest he would have earned almost 3 million dollar per second...

I agree with the Proxmox sentiment. It has served us very well and continues to do so.

Ah, I think it was just a sign error. The buoyancy should of course have been 100T and not -100T.

Yup there are other ones. Thales also comes to mind....

And there is a visual programming environment for squeak especially geared towards kids with localization in many languages. It's called Etoys (http://www.squeakland.org/). You can also link it to an Arduino or Mindstorm for real world interaction with Physical Etoys (http://tecnodacta.com.ar/gira/projects/physical-etoys/). It's what my kids use ;-).

However revenue is not the interesting part, income is. And net income for Microsoft has been falling lately to 2010 levels. See this chart. Not that this is proofs impeding doom on Microsofts part, just that business hasn't been nice to them lately. A fate they share with many other companies in these difficult times. What is interesting is that neither Google or Apple share this kind of dip.

I use a HP Microserver N40L as a NAS. It's way cheaper to purchase than decent 4 drive dedicated NAS appliance. It's more powerfull and does not use much energy. I bought mine for about €200,- without disks . It uses about 14 Watt without disks booting from USB. With the high electricity prices here (€0.23 per kWh) I expect to spend in 4 years 4x365x24x0.014x0.23= €112,- on energy on the system. So in total that is €312,-. That total is still less than the purchase price alone of a decent 4 bay NAS which will still not give me the same performance. Installing OpenMediaVault or FreeNAS is about as much work as configuring a dedicated NAS (Next, next, finnish).

I installed 4 WD20EARX disks for €84,- per piece. This increases the power usage to about 40 Watts active. So the disks are the biggest component in price and energy usage and that will be the same with a NAS. Performance is great I can saturate a 1Gbps ethernet link nicely if the device requesting the data is fast enough.

But if you want to make this analogy correct it it should be something like:
Customer to Bill: That weld is bad.
Bill to Customer: No, you're looking at it wrong.
Supervisor overhearing this and after inspecting the weld: Bill, STFU and grind it out and redo. It's absolutely one of the worst welds I've ever seen. And don't be an arsehole to our customer.
Bill to supervisor: Sorry boss. I'm doing my best and wonder why the bottom being cold would be a problem.
Supervisor to Bill: You know that a cold weld won't handle load and can cost lives. But what pissed me off the most is the way you handled our customer when he was right.

Well, I know people who use FreeNAS which is based on FreeBSD. I think the thought behind the BSD license is telling. It basically says you can take the code and nothing in return is expected, which is exactly what they get.

Disney is able to produce great movies, like the first "Pirates of the Caribbean", "The Avengers", and others. Any Star Wars movie without Mr. Lucas involved has to be greeted with a new hope!

FTFY

How long before we see a T-shirt with Mickey holding a light saber and the text below it:
Minnie, I am your father.....

While I agree that there are talented Windows administrators just as there are talented Linux administrators the rest of that paragraph is nonsense. The concepts differ significantly between the two operating systems once you look further than the "OS manages hardware resources and provide services" part. And you will not be fine one a more than trivial setup by just reading the books and following best practices. In fact, in my opinion that is one of the things that makes the difference between a mediocre administrator and a good one. The good administrator has a good insight in why things are best practice and knows when to deviate from them while a mediocre one just follows the rules. And a good Windows administrator is just as scarce and will cost you about the same as a good Linux administrator. But with the Windows administrator you get the added cost of licenses.

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