So who is going to teach Gladys from accounting how to store her contacts' PGP keys and encrypt her email?

Maybe PGP is a little on the difficult side, but at my company, we use a dedicated server for any email that needs to be encrypted. It has a little web app (written by a former employee) people can use to send and receive messages, with attachments, if necessary. All the data is transferred through HTTPS. I don't use it, myself, but it must be pretty easy, because we have to follow HIPAA regulations and we have plenty of people here who aren't exactly computer experts.

It always struck me that Zip drives became so ubiquitous.

I'm guessing they just happened to be in the right place, at the right time - right between floppy disks and recordable CDs. I never bought a ZIP drive, myself, because to me, it was clear they wouldn't be around for long. Ironically, they didn't even really outlast the floppies they were designed to replace.

I always thought it was too bad Fujitsu wasn't better at marketing. For twice the price, their 3-1/2" MO drives could generally hold 3 times as much. They were fast and reliable, too. My Dynamo 640 still works, after about 15 years.

Do they get to monitor communications or wipe my own device now if anything goes wrong?

I wouldn't worry about it. This will never happen at any company that has any concern about security. An employee can do what they want with their own computer, so it's a perfect vector for viruses, etc. If we give them a computer, we can say "this is to be used only for work." How can we allow them to bring their own devices, when we can't even allow them to plug in a USB key?

At my office, we don't even allow wireless connections, internally. The access points are connected to a router that's completely outside the firewall, and they're only turned on when we know someone's using it.

If you're going to get a new router, I'd strongly recommend the RT-N66U

I understand what makes ASUS think the RT-N66U is worth $60 more than an RT-N16, but does it really make a difference, if you're just using it for a home router?

Did they fix the installer? Once I got it installed, Fedora 18 (with KDE) is pretty good, but the installation was a bitch. The installer choked on my hard drive, because it was already partitioned. I had to get to the shell and delete the partitions manually to get it to work.

Who here is still using the x86 in their server farms?

What do you mean, "still"? I imagine most people are using them. Why? Because they're cheap and, most importantly, standardized.

I'll admit, I'm a big fax of Unix, but we decommissioned our last pSeries server a couple of years ago. The last straw was when we tried to add some additional disk space to the machine. Our distributor wanted about $25,000. After a little research, I discovered we could get a whole new x86 server with twice the disk space for less than $18,000. I'm pretty sure it was more powerful than the pSeries system. too. For the price of an IBM pSeries or iSeries machine, you can get a couple of x86 machines and use the second one for a backup.

Also, when you're dealing with IBM, you're locked into IBM. I suppose I'm not surprised that you can't just drop any old PCI card into an IBM system and expect it to work, but very few non-IBM SCSI peripherals worked with the system, either.

I hated to give up on IBM, but they're just too difficult to work with, any more.

RHEL/CENTOS minimal does this just fine.

Depends on what you call minimal. If you have a machine with (a minimum of) 512Mb memory, than yeah, it's fine. On the other hand, if you've got a machine from about 1998, with 64Mb of memory, you're basically SOL. CentOS won't even install. (I'm sure the fact that it's a Red Hat clone has something to do with it.)

Old machines are great for routers or VPN servers, and they can't be used for much else. If the machine is installed at a remote office, the long-term CentOS support is really useful, since I don't have to upgrade the machine (requiring on-site service) every 18 months, or so, if I want to keep getting kernel updates.

I guess I just don't get why I should care that Linux has a "stigma?"

You should care because, the fewer people who are using Linux, the less hardware manufacturers will care about supporting it. Look at how much trouble we've had getting 3D graphics drivers working properly. How would you like it if we had that kind of trouble with all hardware?

Quake ran like pure shite even on the 5x86/133

I imagine this had as much to do with the Pentium's 64-bit external data bus, as it had with the FPU. Pentiums were capable of moving data (from processor to memory) at nearly twice the rate of a 5x86/133. (Higher fill rates.)

Except that it didn't.

You'd think that, on Slashdot, people would try to know what they're talking about, before they make idiots of themselves, but I guess not.

http://download.intel.com/design/pentium/datashts/24199710.pdf

In fact, the latter was faster than a Pentium 75MHz for anything that didn't require the FPU.

Or external bus access. A Pentium 90 could comfortably play Quake; an Am5x86/133 could not, because it only had a 32-bit external bus. Pentiums had a 64-bit external bus.

But none of those come close to the performance of COBOL for these specific tasks.

I'd actually like to know if this has ever really been put to the test.

The application on which we run our business was written in a language that is obviously a descendant of COBOL, and one of the reports it generates takes multiple hours to run. One day, I thought I'd try an experiment and, after messing around for an hour or two, I had a sed/awk pipeline that produced exactly the same results in about 10 minutes - and part of that time was used to convert the language's data files to text that sed and awk could understand.

It would be interesting to see how much COBOL code could be replaced in a similar way.

Why would BMW lower their prices when they have a complete monopoly?

The only cars you can buy in Australia are BMWs? I'm not sure I believe that.

You could try reading my post

Sorry, I guess lost some clarity, by going for dramatic effect. I basically meant to say: "it sure would be a lot easier if all storage used the same units." It's pretty annoying when 1TB of memory doesn't fit into 1TB of disk.

They are profiteering. No more, no less.

Oh, stop. I've got no love for Microsoft, but in this case, I have to agree with them. It's not like we're talking about selling food and water for an inflated price after a disaster. It's just software. If you don't like the price, don't buy it.

There are plenty of other options. Use Linux. Write your own. Whatever. If people had started doing that ten years ago, when Linux started becoming a little more popular, Linux would be an entirely acceptable alternative, by now, and neither Microsoft nor Apple would be in a position to do any "price gouging." Instead, people complain that it's too hard, and then whine when companies take advantage of them. Sorry, but you won't get any sympathy from me.