First, calculate the chances of a disaster vs. where you can actually find customers and IT talent. There are not too many highly trained systems administrators in rural New Mexico. Also, can you get enough customers to pay the bills for your multi-million dollar co-location facility? Seems to me the location is worth the risk. If you are well prepared, you can mitigate the damages. It is more of a risk to have a crappy business location.

And why should a DBA be scared of that? Do DBAs double as Backup Administrators now?

You mean like the Alfred Nobel PEACE prize?

This was modded informative because the argument is so old, it's coming back as 'vintage' by hipsters.

The first thing that came to mind was the baking soda volcano that are a part of every 6th grade science fair. I wonder how many of these researches saw this as the "grown-up" version.

Ballmer... is that you?

I have seen this as well. It's not uncommon for someone coming from Windows to ask "What is a good Linux distro to learn on?". Some knucklehead will pipe up with Gentoo, LFS, or Slackware so that they "learn" linux.

Most new users have embraced Linux by starting with Ubuntu rather than getting frustrated and giving up like in the "good ol' days".

Actually, I would say thanks for spending a lot of money to create and promote a Linux distribution that even non-linux geeks have heard about. He has done more to increase exposure of Linux than most anyone. It's unfortunate that Canonical isn't doing well since I think most people would say that building a sustainable model to keep Linux in the spotlight is a good thing for the community as a whole. Guess what?... servers and bandwidth cost money. Advertising and putting on events cost money. When was the last time you contributed to your local LUG to keep it afloat?

Where's your God now?

Good luck with the show Ilan!

Being from SoCal, it's great to have a replacement for the now defunct LinuxWorld. In fact, it is a bit more like a giant .org pavillion.

Now if we can just get LugRadio to come back...

Actually, the most useful these days would be a marketing degree. Web design was once thought of as the balance between graphics design and programming, but now days everything comes down to SEO. Being able to design a site (and landing pages) that get good placement on google is more valuable.

So how is Gentoo these days?

It's so simple, I don't see why everyone doesn't do that.

You mean there is already a French Toaster?