Couldn't agree more. I do prefer online purchasing for those very reasons myself. I think it also comes down to simply getting the 'best' deal, and if that's brick-and-mortar or online with 2-day S&H, that's what it is. I think there's also some convenience in there, too, especially if there's something you want. It's all what you are willing to pay for that item you want, need or can't live without. I know it's not going to break the bank for me to pay the 5-7% sales tax on items online, I just hope that the prices online still stay competitive and don't stick it to the consumer, otherwise it honestly won't make a bit of difference to me anymore.

All in all, I'm indifferent on the sales tax dilemma and I've came to the conclusion that this internet place isn't really a fun place anymore...

Sure, OP. Oracle isn't evil. Right. That's like saying The sky isn't blue or the grass isn't green. I think it's fair to say they have a VERY bottom line approach to business. Their stove-pipe approach to support when it comes to lock-in on hardware and ugly software models and support for Oracle DB, IM, Oracle Solaris (and Linux), and being purely selfish with ZFS is just nauseating anymore.

Absorbing MySQL, and pretty much train wrecked it, then having OSS community and founders of MySQL during it's infancy peak time forked over to create MariaDB just shows you the potential that MySQL had and Oracle failed at.

It sounds to me like you're trying to sell them on how 'well rounded' and 'IT-intelligent' you are versus actually knowing the business you were for that your IT department supports to make the business successful. If you want to get them comfortable, then perhaps you are the one that needs to be educated in 'suit/business talk'. IMHO, all you're asking for is two things that will totally work against you:

1) Loss of interest after about 10 minutes because you're either in the weeds too much and you eventually work you way back to the IT closet you came from

2) That 'one' management component that slightly cared about your teaching tutorial, has an internal epiphany, and now uses their scratch-on-the-surface knowledge to contract all your future ideas, decisions and pitches.

I think it would be your best interest to figure out the cost savings, increased productivity, product improvement, upgrade/growth/implementation strategy, ect. ect. ect. and maybe go back and find out the mission statement you are working for to begin with as well. You seem to only be concerned with getting that new, fancy IT toy at your place of employment and less about how it helps the company that employs you.

I guess if the Indian government wants to talk about censorship and muting of violence, then I vote for them to worry less about about the minors registering on social networks like FB and alike, and more about the ones getting raped on buses in their own country as of late.

It's a bit shallow of me to exploit a circumstance such as that (and certainly not a dig at all from the wonderful Indian community at large), but it's sad what 'Big Machine' irregardless of worldly location will waste their time on. Want to do some cleanup with violence? Start within the confines of your own country boundaries first. Definitely in some need of some human filth policing.

Couldn't agree more...

From a Anaconda GUI manual install process, it seems silly to ditch very basic password blackout + back-end entry validation to make sure both password and retype fields match. Was that too much to maintain?

From a Kickstart perspective, I'd say it's even 'less' secure because you can hard-code plain-text useradds in %post, grub passwords, AND more importantly, the root password itself. Not to mention, reveal a boat load about your hardware/network infrastructure that can be a lot more detrimental in the wrong hands or eyes.

...but point taken on both, I'd hope: 1) You're doing the install yourself and if it is a semi-sensitive install and NOT done with prying eyes and 2) from a ks perspective, you practice good filesystem ownership and permissions or satellite/spacewalk access controls. u

All in all, it's shit like this that makes me lose even more faith in the current Fedora maintainers and the Linux distro going forward. Within the last year, things like non-POSIX adoption breeding into packages, lack of security (as mention in article), putting 'all' binaries in /usr/bin because 'we're lazy' approach and negating proper UNIX structure. Plain and simple, a lot of change to fix shit that had a standard, WASN'T broken and thought through LONG ago when most of these 'kids' were playing NES in mom and dad's basement.

We've all been in situations where a new hot dog 'somebody' comes into the workplace, swings the dong around to show their intellect or to make their positional place in their new turf. Put your tenure and title away, along with his/her blunt explanation or criticism of your code for a second and I think what you have to consider is merely a few things:

1) Did he/she make you think about something you didn't consider before or how to handle?

2) Did he/she offer absolutely any real suggestions with proven code that will expand on what you did and make it better?

If it's 'no' to both, then tell that person to piss off. Because it's nothing more than someone wanting to hear themselves speak.

I have this happen to me all the time: People question what you, how do you, why you do, not because there's some sense to 'learn' from your experience, because they are just simpletons who try to be this all-knowing-intellect-goat and 'look good' in front of their peers.

I think if you have a perfect, well-balanced, engineered, methodical and concrete explanation WHY you did something, then I would consider the person's commentary as a fart in the wind and certainly as nothing more than being a typical douche-bag trying to hand out solutions-looking-for-problems.

I've never personally used a rent-to-own service, but I can't imagine it's much fun when your marketed crowd is people who can't afford things outright, then specifically deadbeats who have zero intention of ever buying it and will go to great lengths to try and keep your merchandise.

But there's some shady about this whole story that just doesn't make a lot of sense. Why on earth would a rent-to-own company have a whole development team designing all this for them? I think there was a bit of wrongful intent on the company to want to try and steal some PII; maybe not use it themselves, but sell that information, sure.

Now being tied up with a legal battle, it's now easy for their lawyers to pull out the scapegoat that it was all about protecting their investment and assets. As much as I buy that, that's what the repo-man makes a living for. And if you're losing that many computer assets of non-payment or delinquency, then start selling bottom-line PCs and bring some pimple-faced Best Buy let-go in to oversell and dramatize the hell out of them for you. Or better yet, just stop selling them altogether.

Aww, sounds like Mom and Daddy didn't give you hugs AND were God haters. Yikes. I bet you have some problems.

Balloons are every kid's enjoyment for birthdays, special event or talking like an oompa-loompa, fun-hater Tom Welton. Good luck explaining that Hellium is essential to MRI equipment because it's low boiling point and keep magnets cool to kids who just want a Mylar balloon that says "Happy Birthday".

I think we need to reevaluate what's wrong and focus research towards re-engineering MRI machines or use different mediums to cool these differently. I've seen this in the news for almost the last decade and if it's such a dilemma. What's that famous Albert Einsetin quote? "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."

Bah, don't try to console the masses with the it-won't-be-so-bad speech.

If there's a need for revenue then start doing subscriptions and tier off your desktop builds then with "innovative" feature sets that are specific and elegant to a UI experience.

Ad's piss people off and IMHO they will just drive people to build package sets an cust repos that rid the ads or just find Ubuntu alternatives. Shame on you, Ubuntu.

I do have to say I do feel a bit of empathy for OP. I'm sure if I had to 'time' my bathroom breaks after going to a Mongolian grill for lunch, I'd be a bit embarrassed to mark that down as well. All jokes aside, I do go back and forth on this subject of time tracking. I'd say inherently, company time gets more abused than treated as a flexible privilege. At my work in salaried careers, I see people taking 'multiple' breaks during the day that total up to 'hours' (yes not an hour, hours), plus smoke breaks, plus water cooler talk, plus BS about random subjects at their desk, 2+ hour lunch breaks, showing-up-late-leave-early enough, work-from-home-because-I'm-expecting-the-UPS-guy, etc. that I start to question who tracks all this or even matches this all up on their time sheet at the end of the pay period. I don't have enough experience in call centers to really say why they are really driven on 'time' as their measurement medium. Bottom line, I like to keep things simple: Either some suit thought it would be a good idea to do that so they get a bonus for meeting some silly 'goal' they had to dream up or it's been enough of a abuse problem because employees have figured out bathroom breaks aren't measured against you and do not effect your bonus incentives, so to get an extra break, they claim a weak blatter.

As much as I'd like to claim same-shit-different-group on this one, what exactly are they protesting? Generally against banks because...you like to keep your money in the place place you stash your Playboy so mom doesn't find it?

First of all, kudos to the witty chap who zoomed in on that clip board after taking the photo. But really, who are we kidding? Assange has always been 5 steps ahead of any dignified authority who is after him for all of this. I think it would be a little naive to assume he hasn't seen this coming and doesn't have a plan (and/or successor) to continue on.

Instead of exhausting resources on trying to figure how to get to one man in an embassy, why not shift those efforts to his network and minions doing the heavy lifting for him? This is starting to feel like a '24' episode right now... WWJBD.

For starters, I'm really tired of this /. *NIX is-too-hard ranting all the time on 'Ask Slashdot' posts. Don't be a n00b douche; if you don't get it, then spend some time and get it. Don't blame the documentation; dig in and figure out something for yourself for once. Sometimes you Nintendo-and-Mt-Dew generation make me want to throw up.

As for your solution, do-not go with some installable appliance-type distro like FreeNAS; yes it's *BSD under the hood, but you're at the mercy of what that 'focused' distro is goign to provide for you. Case in point: since you're undecided, go with a full-blown distro so you have some flexibility to grow and augment the mission and purpose of this server you're hosting data on.

Since you're clearly a n00b since it's coming to picking out a *NIX solution, go with anything Linux at this point, and set up the NAS services yourself (e.g. Samba/SMB, NFS, etc.) In turn, you'll be able to go to get better community support helping you out, you'll have more flexible OS configuration and growth, and you'll probably learn something to boot.

Also, you don't need to do union filesystem. Simple udev rules and auto mounting them under your top-level structure you're sharing out with your NAS services will do you just fine.