Ubuntu (and it's variants) and OpenSuse are pretty damned good, it's literally minutes and you've got an integrated, modern KDE, or Unity or GNOME up and running. You want more software of security patches? It's just a couple clicks and you're there. Now if you had some concrete numbers on instability or performance numbers then you could talk about something, real numbers, not just hearsay.

Thing is, I don't think you can find and interesting performance difference between Linux and FreeBSD, excluding the possibility that there might be a few pathological cases where one really out performs the other, and the Linux community is such that if you could produce a real benchmark, they'd invalidate it before too long and fix the performance problem. And from my own experience shipping products and running businesses on it, I don't think you could show a substantial difference in reliability. Now one thing I know you could measure the difference on is the amount of time managing them and I think Linux has a gigantic lead here.

I'm not a BSD hater exactly, but they need a better story than they've had and they need a different sort of community. If you like oldskool like UNIX, real UNIX, then BSD is just the thing. If you want UNIXy like stuff with some more contemporary things (think upstart, systemd, I don't know a full desktop UI) then Linux is pretty clearly the choice. Now that newer stuff may not be what you want, I'm personally sort of surprised how well Linux does in the embedded world where a BSD might be far better suited in a multitude of ways. PCBSD is getting nice, it's still nowhere near the level of polish that Ubuntu is though. LLVM and Clang have finally provided them with a non-GCC build chain option, there has been a ton of cycles spent on GPL vs. BSD licenses and in this particular case, I don't see how BSD has benefited in those discussions, at the end of the day the difference fundamentally lets businesses do stuff and just not contribute it back. Maybe I'm wrong but while BSD was worrying about a build chain, Linux platforms were building GNOME and KDE and remarkably simple graphical installers and easy to use automatic patch systems and support for tons of hardware and the list goes on.

That's part of the solution. I'm not sure how many people are killed by the police every year (maybe 8-10 in Colorado alone) but if they don't want to be recorded, then the masses should vote to disarm them, give them pepper spray and nothing else.

I don't visit it nearly as much as I used to, it's still in my home
page tabs and I scan it regularly but with a family and my career
where it is I can't post as much. Some parts of growing up suck.

The world is so different now. I'll tell you what slashdot showed me
and helped me with, in the mid to late 1990s it became clear that
nerds and geeks could change the world. A couple guys with a computer
and an idea could start a company, make money, employ people and
ultimately make a difference. The hard part of that for most of us
introverted nerdy dudes is "community." A few people can really make a
difference but it still takes a community around them and there are
community skills. "Opensource" was taking off, VA Linux and Redhat
were hot stocks, I was young, fresh out of college, full of piss and
viniger but I didn't know how to take part. (Why is that? I have no
idea, it's really odd saying it but it's true)

I guess I had two experiences: At work, we hired a relatively well
known Linux kernel hacker to help with something and he showed me how
to contribute, the hows and whys of things. It was incredible how it
built the community confidence. I knew how to code, I knew technology
but for some reason I felt like I didn't want to look stupid or be
rejected or I didn't know how to play with others. Second, I took
part in the Loki Hack competition at the Atlanta Linux Showcase. ESR
was there, Ryan Gordon was there a couple other guys that seem to
still be nerd famous, Taco and Hemos showed up with some food or
something a couple times. I remember thinking "these guys are 'doing
it!'" and you guys were cool enough and friendly with *everybody* It
was oddly confidence building. I have no idea why exactly I felt that
way, but being around other people doing the things you want to do,
contributing to a cause, taking part inspires and gives confidence to
contribute and take part.

Community, communication, and all sorts of other
not-quite-as-technical things are incredibly important to making
something like Linux succeed. It's really hard to quantify, but I've
seen and felt the difference, it's incredibly important and valuable.
Thank for that. I've made my career with Linux and opensource
technologies, I've got a home and a family that that stuff has helped
me realize.

Apple spent a couple decades on 2 other less popular platforms before they got to Intel and for years they took beatings about performance and fabricating benchmarks or tests to stack the performance the right way. Now they are more than capable of building their own chips, they have the money and the know how but why would they do that again unless the prediction is that there will be a world where they aren't compared to Windows on Intel machines?

Now I could see Mac books and Mac Pros with an ARM chip in them for certain functions and for the custom silicon that Apple adds to them. That doesn't seem totally out of the realm of possibility. At the end of the day though, someone is going to rip a blu-ray or render some HD video or count the FPS with some game and compare that number to the one made on a Dell with an Intel Core x in it and that's going to be that.

Do you own it or do they?

If you need database support for it, then there is an opportunity to get some opensource fame and add it.

The assumption is they can get at the hashes, salt or not, with some of the GPU accelerated stuff and criminal set out there now, if they can get the hashes and it's simply salted and hashed or just hashed, within a reasonably small amount of time they can turn that in to passwords.

There is bcrypt but there are also hmacs, it would be interesting to see an analysis of md5-hmac vs salting or some other techniques, being as how it's largely considered easy to collide. Personally, I'd use an HMAC with SHA. I'd properly pad the passwords to be a full block in size and I'd pick a very random pass-phrase. Standards groups have helped design them with security in mind, where as the bcrypt proponents largely point to the speed of bcrypt as its biggest advantage.

where are the reports of "savage molestation and rape?"

Just curious, it looks nothing like that but I'd like to know which news organizations reported that.

It's a certainty. Thing is, google-go is a C competitor, not a C#, Java, etc.. competitor. Not any time soon at least and it's also very much a work in progress.

Sun beat MS in a very similar law suit, I don't see any reasons why Oracle won't win against Google either, that leave google 2 options: 1) buy the rights from Oracle for a huge chunk of cash or 2) create their own tool set and language. They've already built the tool set.

Personally, I see it as a marketing and product positioning problem. There is clearly a market for a C competitor, people have been working at them for years but no real players have backed any until go. Google pretty clearly needs a higher level application tool too. They just need to market both without eating each other or undermining each other, that's the problem.

So if you're a large business, what's the best way to make sure any two devices on your network can easily talk to each other if they need to? Keep in mind that companies like HP and IBM buy other companies on a very regular basis and there are constant collisions with private space when that happens. What's the solution?

The very best solution is to give all the machines unique public IPs that are routable and do your own routing inside your network. A lot more companies than those use that practice.

What OS/2 "services" matter?

Personally, I dropped OS/2 like a hot rock when the community started making up BS rumors like this one. It was worse than the commodore and amiga communities. I just can't think of some good reasons why IBM would want to do that. They've sold the PC Company, now they'd want a beach head in PC software? Secondly, it's not like OS/2 isn't a brand with some baggage... They were smart enough to smell the winds of change when they did (it could have cost IBM billions and billions more to keep fighting that battle) they are certainly smart enough to know better now.

I could sort of see an IBM Linux distribution of sorts, I could even see IBM spending some funds on making it more desktop friendly but anything divided by 2? Not a chance.

There are companies that specialize in grouping together small companies and independents to qualify for group rates. Trinet is an example of a company that specializes in doing that for startups, there are other coops and probably some different local options. In the corporate world you're probably used to paying a fairly small chunk and your employer actually pays the majority of it, when you're on your own you get to pay it all so it's more. It can be afforded though, it's a matter of priorities. We're talking about downgrading the next car you buy kind of a price you might be looking at a Lexus for $40k or something but the insurance costs might drive you down to like a $25k Toyota or Honda, it's that kind of monthly payment.

Another option, and it really depends on what you mean when you say "health insurance" I think the majority of folks just want to go to the doctor whenever they want and not have to pay a lot. Things like checkups and annual exams are the sorts of things that don't really fall under insurance in the classical sense. So what you do is approach BlueCross/BlueShield or some other insurance company and you get quotes for catastrophic coverage with like a $5000 deductible. I've seen this cost families of 4 under $200 a month. So this won't cover checkups, it won't cover child birth, it won't cover the flu and it probably won't cover most simple broken bones like children may get from time to time. What it does cover is a big expense and you'll have to adjust the deductible to something you can deal with: $2000, $5000, maybe $10000, if those are just way out of line for you then maybe this isn't for you. Essentially, you're responsible for health maintenance. Doctor's visits will probably cost like $100 and you'll pay the sticker price for medicine but a lot of doctors are pretty cool about that and then some companies like Walmart (go figure) are very aggressively trying to drive the costs of medicines down and encouraging the use of generics and such and a large scale. You pay for what you need, if you're a tightass or really strapped for cash, you can cut annual visits out and only go when you're really sick, but that's not a good thing to do. If you have a really healthy lifestyle though, it might be a cost effective way to go, you're worried about your kids falling of their bikes or your wife getting in a car accident and you can buy coverage for that type of stuff.

The bigger problem here is that the business model for American insurance companies is pretty broken and they've confused the consumers to the degree that they've pitted them against each other. The healthier/younger folks want doctors visits and medicine for no more than $30 a shot. The middle aged folks want every option in the world when a health issue materializes, regardless of costs and so the insurance companies in the middle of that. It's health maintenance vs. insurance and they play together, the more you maintain your health, generally the less you will need actual insurance. Now the insurance companies are run by legitimate cock suckers, there are some rules about who they can deny and why but as an independent you're on the short end of the stick more often. If you or your wife could return to corporate work pretty easily, that's an option to get coverage again. If you're not careful you go with some low cost catastrophic coverage, one of you children get a cancer or something that's kind of in the grey area between coverage and non-coverage and then they black ball you when you try to upgrade to a more comprehensive plan; at that point you're on the hook for thousands of dollars in treatment (or accept death, I guess) and they won't help you.

Another option is your wife could get a part time job somewhere and work enough to buy insurance for the family. Or depending upon the ages of your kids, colleges and universities often have plans that they can buy in to.

Like I mentioned above, there companies that specialize in forming coops to get group rates, there are also companies that specialize in selling insurance and while it sounds like the wrong thing to do, finding one of those companies or consultants might be a worthwhile thing to do to customize a plan for your family. Almost anything you do will probably cost you more than it did at a large company though, that's just going to be a fact of the matter.

Well these lists are the journalistic equivalent of "mailing it in" so it's hard to nit pick when you're picking at bullshit...

If the PowerPC was a terrible product, then what was the 68000 series?

Yes that's true. I'm just thinking about making Postgresql a little bit easier to get going.

I've suggested this before. Build PostgreSQL and package it with some tweaked configurations, enable all local connections by default, beef up the buffers and some of the memory usage by default, write some install scripts to make accounts for local users, add PLSQL out of the box... I can't help but think that that's like 80% of the problem the Postgresql holdouts have, you do have to do more lifting to get it running. Maybe start writing a Postgresql configuration GUI that will help you tune the config stuff some.

If you want to be fancy include one of the replication packages out of the box too.

Call it "MyPgSQL..."

What did this blog writer actually ever do that's worth a shit? Shouldn't that be one of the first things mentioned? Far as I can tell, he's a nobody that writes a blog. I can't find any references to any important pieces of software he's worked on that makes me think I should give a shit what he thinks. Moreover, the ideas he's propagating are bullshit, what he says is true if you don't write software, don't work on important software, and don't play on teams, otherwise it's just stupidity and he's showing his youth. Nothing to see here, move on.

Taco, Hemos, Slashdot, et al.., remember way back in the day when we were infested by all those Katz articles and so they implemented the Katz-block technology to let us remove that crap from the front page? I like the developers section but this is a bullshit article, we need to introduce a more fine grained Katz-block. We need an "everything you know is wrong" subsection, a "new language or some shit like that" subsection, and a "technology x is dead" subsection so I can block that crap out of the front page.