Yeah, I have no idea what I'm supposed to say here. I've been at Rackspace for 2 years, and I do a lot of deployment, and before that I worked for Virginia Tech, and I revived and ran the CS department linux mirror (mirror.cs.vt.edu), which rsynced ISO's.... plus all the ones that I've done for personal installs etc...

Fair enough.

Yeah, my son was classified as "mild aspergers'", which means he has a near photographic memory, and can repeat things from commercials on TV with near pitch perfect inflection. He's ahead of his class in academics, and behind in social interaction (but that's getting better). Oddly, he seems to interact better with the adults and older kids like 6th graders than he does with his kindergarten peers.

He was acting out a lot last year and the beginning of this year, but he's really calmed down and been a model kid the last couple of months - more interactive, more listening to parents, less hitting friends and teachers when he's upset. The school has a great program for this kind of stuff - they've given him safe environments that he can retreat to if he gets freaked out, and he meets with some of the special ed folks a couple of times a week to work on things that other kids pick up naturally but that he misses.

Thanks for your input. =)

Hey, thanks for replying. I don't know if you go back and check your slashdot messages.

But, just real quick - the Aspergers' thing, with my son - it scares me sometimes. Even though it's mild, and even though if we don't tell someone, they just sort of assume he's "a little weird". But, all in all, it's cool, right?

I keep thinking that, once he's a bit older and it becomes possible for him to move in circles that respect intellect rather than social graces, he'll be fine. But it breaks my heart to see him at a birthday party with other kids his age - almost completely non-interactive with them.

So, in your experience, does this get easier?

Well, it's not just tomatoes and cheese, it's tomato sauce and cheese.

I have to say, though, the more I get into making high quality pizza, the more I realize that in some cases, less is more. The crust is the most crucial part. But for authentic tasting sauce, try this:

* Get some canned whole peeled italian tomatoes (something like http://bit.ly/5kwRed).
* Open up the can, de-seed the tomatoes, and rinse thoroughly (discard the liquid, it's bitter).
* Either hand chop or use (of all things) a slap-chop to get them down to just bigger than "crushed" consistency.
-- There's really no substitution for the hand chopping - I've tried a dozen times in a food processor or blender, and it just gets too smooth, and too liquidy.
* add in about a teaspoon of sea salt and a tablespoon or so of chopped fresh oregeno, mix it up, let sit for a minute or two, then take it for a spin in a salad spinner (to get some of the liquid out).

* take this mix, don't cook it, but put it sparingly on a pizza crust, and add some basil leafs, cut roughly into forths or fifths, and then top with fresh mozzarella (http://bit.ly/70jKgg) and olive oil.

* Cook at the hottest setting your oven will do (500+) for 2-3 minutes, then set broiler on high for another minute.

Makes even bad crust ok. But anyway, after doing it a thousand ways, I still feel that less is more for sauce.

By the way, the best for me (by miles) is DiFara's on Avenue J in Brooklyn. Dom has owned that store for 40 years, since it was an italian neighborhood (it's now hasidic jewish). Lately his doctor told him he needs to cut back his hours for his health, so he only works Tuesday - Sunday, 10 hour shifts. This guy is a relic - the last of the real corner pizzerias. Go there, it's worth a trip to New York. (http://bit.ly/15LvkR).

~X

I know that your parent poster was a bit obnoxious, but you are also being a bit dense here.

I am the parent of a 5 year old boy with Asperger's. It is a disorder classified within the autism spectrum. You may be behind the times. The Autism Spectrum Disorders include classic Autism, Aspergers', and Atypical Autism (PPD-NOS); it is a "spectrum of several disorders with related causes and symptoms".

As for Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, I agree that it is extremely immature to be diagnosing people whom who haven't met and when you don't have the medical qualifications to do so. However, being "masters of social interaction" isn't necessarily ruling them out. Aspergers folks can be good at social interaction the way you or I may be good at writing code - because they study and seek to understand it.

My wife and I coach my son about how to interact in social situations, because he literally doesn't understand them. Aspergers means that you'll never understand why the band nerd doesn't sit next to the prom queen at lunch, or why you can't say what's on your mind if it's true, or correct other people if they're incorrect. But a good way to hide all that is for a reporter to ask someone to describe their life's work - which, trust me, Aspergers folks could do for hours with passion.

So, don't be so quick to dismiss. Autism Spectrum Disorders are common, more so than you'd think.

Can you rephrase that as a Horse-and-Buggy analogy?

http://www.rackspace.com/email_hosting/careers

Drop off a resume.

We're in southwestern VA, which isn't too far from where you are now, if you have family in the area etc. We do a fair bit of Java, with some hadoop/lucene applications. There's also a lot of php/perl/dotnet stuff going on.

Tell 'em Will sent you.

Maybe.

But, my experience with RHEL has been that a Major Number release won't honestly change that much from point release to point release; moving to grub2/parted/GPT seems to be a drastic, disruptive change, compared to many of the point-release changes in 4.x and 5.x (moving from 2.6.24-128.123456 to 2.6.24-128.123456-1 seems to be the M.O.).

My concern is that if it doesn't make it into 6.0, it won't make it into 6.* - If we were saying "Oh, fedora 12 is going to be the base for RHEL5.5", then I wouldn't be worried, I would say there's plenty of time to vet the hardware and roll it into some future 6.0 release. But the fact that 6.0 is ComingSoon(tm) and potentially based on this Fedora release makes me a bit nervous about the likelihood that it'll be in any 6.x release.

I agree with you. We've done well keeping costs down with commodity hardware - if you put 6 big drives in a rackmount, it gives you a lot of space and IO, and that's done us just fine for a long time. But, when we move to bigger drives (750GB x6 + raid10) we hit that 2TB limit. Doing 2 small drives in raid1 for the OS and 4 drives in raid10 for the data really limits our space. And keep in mind, that's 1300 servers total; of which probably only 400 are for storage.

We've been testing SAN / DAS for a long time, we use it for many things already and it's where we're moving for our general cloudy storage anyway. Since all of our storage servers have a hot standby, it's a hard sell to jump into DAS / SAN when you can buy two cheap boxes that have equal total space for less than the cost of 1 box + SAN + all the associated stuff - especially when cheap is "good enough" when you have a hot spare box ready to take over in the event of failure. You can spend and spend in pursuit of better hardware that can attain more "9's" of uptime.

But the point being, we've got somewhat of a unique situation where we are always squeezing the limits out of cheaper commodity hardware and have done fine. However, the small business is going to be hit by this. RHEL6 is going to be the defacto base version from 2010 (?) 'till probably 2014, and by then, 2TiB will seem commonplace. You'll be able to buy a 4TB disk from newegg for $199, but won't be able to boot RHEL from it. That's annoying.

It seems very ... lazy? head in the sand? of RHEL to not address this issue.

Blah blah legal disclaimers about forward looking statements, nothing is in stone, all this is speculative, etc.

My major complaint du jour (as a sysadmin working with over 1300 RHEL systems) is that Fedora (and thus future RHELs) haven't moved to grub2 and GPT yet.

This isn't a major problem with Fedora, but the scuttlebutt is that RHEL6 is going to be based on Fedora 12; and we're going to be using RHEL6.x for probably 5 years into the future.

Without moving to GPT, we won't be able to boot off of logical (or physical) disks that are greater than 2TiB. This is a limitation of using an MBR. For the home user, this most likely isn't going to be a problem for a while - even the 2TB disks that are out there are smaller than 2 TiB, so they're fine for MBR's. But, for enterprise solutions, if you put 6 or 8 500GB disks in a rackmount and raid5 them, or 1TB disks and raid10 them, you're going to need a separate logical disk that you can install the MBR to.

There are a couple of work arounds - rumor has it that the Perc6e command line configuration utility can manually specify the logical disk size and truncate at (2TiB - 1k), but I've never gotten it to work. You can hex edit the MBR and chop it off at the 32 bit limit. Or, you can hack anaconda to support grub2, since it already uses parted (i think), but that's a bit of a kludge. Or, you can stick the MBR and /boot/ on a USB key, but that's kludgey too.

Other distros use GPT at this point, and supposedly it's completely backwards compatible. Windows 2008 can do it. But, last I checked (and I've been looking into this a lot lately), Fedora 12's repo still lists grub2 as ***this is experimental don't use unless you're a sadist*** etc.

~X

I find that better than just saying tough tooties to the family.

Not that I disagree with you (I don't) but someone should point out that, if I die, nothing that I do will go on to feed my family. That's why I have *life insurance*.

Why do artists deserve more?

Welcome to the problem of all law enforcement in the US (some states *cough*virginia*cough* worse than others).

The police at some point in the last 60 years or so moved from a philosophy of "keeping the peace" to "enforcing the law".

distribute copyright, not physical media.

once you own the media, it's yours.