Ever considered things such as automotive, aerospace or nautical research&development?

I work for an institute which does fundamental research on naval vessels and we develop loads of software which can compute flows and pressures on ship hulls and the likes, as well as predict/calculate performance. We have several scientific clusters, are starting to develop CUDA-based software for grid processing and such. So I'd say plenty of opportunities, you just need to look for them.

So you're saying politicians are like prostitutes? Well... they sure are dirty :)

Canonical making money? Last I read they were still not profitable.

And given the quality of Ubuntu as an enterprise quality OS it's no surprise... only RedHat can offer a complete enterprise solution with long term support (also on much of the software running on it's platform), clear vision on future development and direction and stability (this means testing things before pushing them, not waiting for bug reports before fixing things) Not to mention the tools to properly manage large amounts of systems : RedHat Satellite (and it's upstream project Spacewalk) So far the Debian/Ubuntu distro's have nothing that comes close to it's power and flexibility.

And of course, in need of such a pacemaker you'd have all the time in the world to first review all that data, then request additional information in area's where the design isn't clear enough for you. Then.... PEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP (flatliner) oops, too late.No need for further reviews, just a coffin will do.

She's a lawyer, she should know ALL about delaying tactics. Guess what the manufacturer(s) will do.... If I were here I'd get over it and just get one, maybe argue about it later IF things go wrong. And if not send the manufacturer a nice 'thanks for keeping me alive' note instead of bitchin'

What machine can handle 25 disks at once?
A tape robot easily holds 500 tapes or more, and manages them all by itself. Or would you rather have expensive people come in during weekends to keep swapping disks? Have you ever worked in a real enterprise environment and tried to set something up like you propose? Thought so...

OK, well with our full dataset being around 50 TB we can't handle that... backup takes around 36-40h for a full, so we do daily increments, weekly full. The full is around 50 TB. So for us tape is still the way to go.

So you don't do a full backup weekly?

Sure, if you only have like 1-10TB harddisks are fine...
But how to do you handle backups of say 50TB of data every week? Awful lot of disks to swap, copy times will be so long you'll need to start the next weekly while the last job is still running etc etc.

Tape still has it's place. It's not the universal solution for all backup problems, but for large datasets it's still king.

You're so wrong ...
Tape is the ONLY way to make serious backups and do archiving once you start having serious data volumes. 50TB of data is a LOT of disks... now do daily increments, weekly full backups with 2 months retention... also single disks are always slower than streaming to LTO4 or LTO5 tapes so your backup window becomes too big to handle.

Department of Institutional Paranoia

And if you'd swap "order of the new world" to "new world order" Mr X & Mr Y already have the department soundtrack ready :)

Sure... just ask em about timekeeping on VM's ...
I remember talking to VMWare engineers 2-3 years ago and for pretty every different RedHat patch level I got a different whitepaper on how to keep time in sync as much as possible. But as soon as system load went up, so did my clock drift :( And from what I'm seeing today it's still not fully fixed.

Just Google XenMotion... Yes Xen is rapidly catching up with VMWare.

I bet they totally loved you for that when a disk (or worse, RAID set) started crapping itself and just a few lost bits caused a directory (or worse...) to be totally inaccessible... Again, disk compression is usually a poor band-aid for a problem which can be solved in many more elegant ways. And this particulair band-aid just masks the wound and might cause nasty infections further down the road.

Then the conclusion is even easier :
"Redhat's (mostly business) users don't need or just don't care about disk compression so they don't ask for it"

Disk compression is a terrible band-aid for a cheap and easy-to-fix problem. Maybe it's time people rethink their storage strategies first...

Win2k was probably Microsoft's best piece of engineering... too bad it's almost impossible to run it on modern hardware.

As for Linux 3 click LDAP/AD join : All RedHat-deratives have had that for a long time if you were OK with plain LDAP. The system-config-autentication package sorted you out for LDAP and NIS. Both in the GUI or in a curses interface.