Um, 'standard Realtek ones'?

The rtl8139 NIC has long been a 'standard' NIC for me - I'd buy 5 at $10 each. it's the same chipset put on motherboards since forever, I believe (and now they often have the rtl8169 or similar). They have always worked well for general Linux purposes. I don't remember having a problem with them back then, though I do remember using a lot of 3com 10/100 cards around that time, too so I may be mistaken.

It could be, if people in India were able to work instead of just play office politics to a science.

You don't outsource IT work to India if you want the product to be of any use to anyone 2-3 years from now. That's twice the case for systems or DBA work. (Just ask an immigrated Indian if it's a good idea... they won't even do it.)

One of the most memorable forks of Debian was Stormix (not mentioned on WP): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormix

For those who don't remember, or weren't there: it was a very nicely cleaned up Debian installer with additional driver support and simplified configuration. It ran very well on a wide range of systems and was way, way ahead of pretty much everything else with respect to software installation and system configuration.

The Stormix company, when it failed, became Progeny, if I recall correctly. Progeny was a greatly used add-on repository for Debian which eventually had a lot of the functionality added into the core of Debian.

Without Stormix, later efforts like Knoppix and Ubuntu would not have been possible.

Most Americans would be just fine if the Insurance (as well as government) meddling went away.

Everything would be cheaper. All this 'single payer' stuff does is make it so that the gov't (aka taxpayers) will foot the bill for the ever-bloating healthcare system in the US. Premiums go up? No problem, that just means more taxes. And then the hospitals feel justified in raising their prices to get their piece of the pie, or to help pay their doctors who now also have increased liability insurance, or all of the above - and on and on.

Most people would be shocked to find out that most of a hospital's staff is actually busy with bureaucratic bullshit, not actual healthcare. IT in healthcare is a massive cost and a general boondoggle as well.

What Europeans and Canadians don't seem to realize that any good idea they implement and works will, in all likelihood, be a complete clusterfuck here due to how corporations are run in the US. Special interests will be fed first. It will not meet the initial scope of the policy/plan/etc. It will go severely over budget, and costs will mostly be offset to be discovered years later, after everything has been implemented and it'd "cost too much" to reverse or make any changes to the system which might benefit the common man.

I don't understand why you "old world" countries remove your appendixes, or why it seems so common to have problems with them.

I have mine. Everyone in my extended family has their's. I have known only a handful of people that I know of who have had their's removed, and three of them were European with two of them injuring themselves requiring it being removed.

What's the deal?

I did something similar to this when I was in college, for a Palm Pilot. The same would apply for a tablet.

I 'form fit' common packing box cardboard around the device and then used gaff tape to hold it all together. I left a hole at the bottom of the sleeve so i could quickly push it up and out of the sleeve, if desired, and dropping the device while in the sleeve would lead to no damage.

I then superglued a nylon strap with two carbiner-type belt clips under it around the top,and old denim to the gaff tape with a velcro flap to cover it all. It was pretty straight nerdy but it was functional, and I could clip it to my bag, my belt, etc.

On the matter of bikes and cost...

If you're going 60 miles an hour or more, you're almost invariably trusting your life to a combination of road construction, road conditions, and a $150(ish) tire. And how well do you trust the frame welds?

And I personally see the liberation of riding to be a huge thrill. I'm not talking about recklessness, I'm just talking about the liberty of being on a bike in general.

(I live 40 miles from Sturgis... bikes are culture here.)

No, these distros have solved nothing other than the problem of things being too straightforward and consistently manageable.

That's where Arch and Gentoo fall flat. If you want to be able to consistently manage things from one machine to another? You've got a headache in front of you. This stems from the fact that they use packaging techniques which are only marginally less cumbersome than flat ZIP files with README.txts.

In other words, Arch/Gentoo solve the problem only slightly more thoroughly than manually downloading the tarballs from the project sites and building it yourself.

If you could get a single paramedic across town in 5 minutes, versus the time it'd take several to mount and spin up a helocopter, etc. this seems fairly practical to me. That said, a jetpack just seems impractical at this point - it's science fiction. We can't illicit enough thrust from something so compact as to be practical.

That said, it's got a 30 mile range. They really need to think about a rotobird variant, either single or double blade. I'm guessing it could be done for less than $50k, bringing it well within range of the motorcycle/thrill seeker enthusiast...

Yeah, but you're running NFS4, Samba4, BIND9, and Postfix with a bunch of extras bolted on (dnsrbl, postscreen, etc.) which didn't exist 20 years ago! :P

Not that there's much of a difference, mind you...

As an administrator, the only thing on that list which is even remotely appealing is the last item, and only then in a limited (say, cloud-type) environment. Everything else just reads as "look, something else to avoid knowing how to program, while at the same time providing a great big mess on which you can hang your hat at the end of the day because it's difficult to debug/troubleshoot with traditional language knowledge".

As a perl-writing Linux admin, I had to write powershell a couple years ago to do what would've been fairly easy with perl (progmatically, at least): a dozen or so nested logic structures, conditions, and what have you, based on the textual descriptors of various Sharepoint elements/objects, the end goal being to migrate multiple different Sharepoint environments into a single organized hierarchy.

This didn't work well. Neither perl-like text based sorting or the like worked well (because EVERYTHING is an object) or conventional OO type thinking. Quirky is an understatement. As for excruciatingly slow? Also an understatement: simple textual list sorts took FOREVER. And if that wasn't bad enough, sorting through a handful of 1-5MB XML files at a time (yes, using the proper XML functions) ballooned memory use to gigabytes. I ultimately resorted to dropping things to XML, doing the real work in perl, and then feeding the result back into Powershell - it was quicker, and the system didn't OOM in the process.

It isn't Powershell that's neat; it's Microsoft's integration of PS into its core OS functionality (and every other product) to allow for management and manipulation. That on its own isn't enough to justify using Powershell, unfortunately. It's just too damn unwieldy: it's like the undead afterbirth of COBOL, Java, Perl, and VB - leveraging only the unwieldy parts of each.

Thankfully, you're right: there isn't a burdensome, poorly conceived and implemented by Indians, management scripting language for Linux. But for everything else? We've got purpose built tools which do their one job, and do it well. (perl + puppet/chef, on the other hand, seems like a fairly close comparison to WMI...)

And? This has been the case for over a decade now. You can hire a dozen Windows admins for a dime - and each will have a dozen or so systems they can effectively manage.

With MS's bare bones Windows installs, PowerShell management, etc. and destruction of the 'old' MSC way of managing Exchange, this is becoming much less the case. Any reasonably complex Windows site is now going to require similar levels of skill to manage as a comparable Linux environment. The tools to do so, however, will be significantly less mature, with a smaller community: there are still far more Perl Monkeys than PowerShell Punks (or whatever) out there, and using puppet is a far cry more intuitive and known than something like the more advanced/esoteric PowerShell management functionality necessarily leveraged for a non-stock Windows installation.

In other words, IIS does nothing much better than Apache?

I played the hell out of Chip's Challenge. It was pretty much the only reason I saw to have Windows installed, at the time.