> Your organizational skills are quite a bit above average.

And that, in and of itself, is very sad and telling of the lack of basic education people are getting anymore. I'm Gen-X and went to a private school (after starting in public and our parents seeing how much that system was already failing back in the 1970s) and we did things there like having some basic monetary education in the 8th grade. We were each given a mimeograph (ah, the smell) set of checks, then we each drew our "job" from a random list and had to do simple budgets based on said income. I'll never forget that the Doctor made a "massive" $75k in 1987 (though the values we were using were already quite old).

Late to the party but..

Here's my entirely personal opinion/experience with Linux Enterprise support for the last nearly20 years now (started supporting linux in house in the early 2000s), we were a 99% Solaris house (a few HP-UX) until even our ISVs were saying that everything they were doing was going linux on x86 (then x86_64) as SPARC was quickly falling behind (yet still cost insanely more $).

RedHat: Was SUPER expensive when it first went RHEL. They initially wanted something like $1600/server/year for x86_64 hosts, set based on what MS was asking at the time. They refused to work with us to split up licensing hosts vs paying for support. Granted, I later learned that our rep at the time was a bit of a jerk and it was probably more him vs the company. Everyone I know that uses RHEL in house, pays for a few critical boxes, runs most on the equiv CentOS to save a ton of $. They are stable and do regular releases though.

Ubuntu/Canonical: FAR more interested in being bleeding edge than stable. Is beloved by SW devs, is way too bleeding edge for HW dev use/compute (I support IC design engineers and the ISVs are SUPER slow at adopting releases so Ubuntu is WAY too fast.. they have a hard time keeping up with RHEL/SLES). They're terrible at outputting patches for things like the automounter, often being years (yes, really) behind.

SUSE/SLES: We started working with them right when Novell bought them and they wanted a foot in the door. They were very willing to split up the cost to license running on hosts/CPUs vs paying for support, which made them far more affordable. They go out of their way to help us work with the ISVs whenever possible. The support response times and quality is fantastic (I have a few co-workers who's dealt with all 3 "enterprise" support channels and they all say SUSE is the best, by far).

Honestly RHEL and SUSE are pretty close as far as stability and sticking to release schedules and all, but my own experience has put SUSE on a level above RHEL overall. Sadly I think RH has coasted far too long on the continued belief that "RHEL is _the_ enterprise linux distro that everyone supports." SUSE was the scrappy competition for quite awhile there and had to really fight to stand out and make a bigger name for themselves. I know of at least one massive chip maker that is nearly completely SUSE in house aside from our IC compute farm, but we have this interesting mix where it's:

IC Engineering compute: SLES
SW devs: Ubuntu
Everyone else/corp: CentOS/RHEL

People love to attack the top dog(s).

Dunno how, but i seem to have responded to my own post. It was meant for you, but i can't seem to delete it...

slashdot only indents threads to a certain level, then the conversation continues there. It's a reason people often quote the bits they're responding to. Or at least it used to.. I'll LOL if this one's indented further.

Just one of the things he added in his later releases.. it was not there originally.

In fact, I think the first movie I recall seeing that "ring" shockwave effect was Star Trek VI.

I enjoyed it. Then again, I like Cloud Atlas too. I've run into a lot of people that don't like the Wachowski's stuff post-Matrix because they tend to be hard to follow if you're not paying attention to all the details and don't follow stuff that jumps around a lot... and they're longer movies. Too many people can't seem to focus on a single thing for 3 hours anymore.

I tend to actually like stuff with weird/convoluted premises though.

I look forward to taking advantage of hacking the devices with ease from my phone.

Seems apropos. Though I doubt it'd be a million voices crying out these days.

As a unix sysadmin, I know some hard core Solaris bigots though.

Right.. because simply filling in a few blanks that you, yourself left (to help out previous co-workers you might even get along with fine)... vs doing an entire job based off 1 day's work is EXACTLY the same thing. *sigh*

just goes to show the best product doesnt always win - same is true with the ipod, there were better options at the time.

Of course YMMV and opinions and all but... I have to disgree on this. I had dozens of mp3 players starting with the initial Diamond PMP300, which is usually considered the 2nd commercial mp3 player. This was followed by several more Rio devices, then some no-name stuff that used various memory card technologies.. eventually I had a couple CD-mp3 players and even a Creative Nomad HDD player (good lord the UX on that thing was horrible!). Then in 2003 or so I tried an ipod, and I never looked back. The UI/UX on the ipod was miles above every other player I'd had. Also while some people decry the use of itunes and prefer just dumping files directly onto the memory card/player, I found I hated those ways. I often ran into issues with the older FAT filesystems on them and files per directory limits and had to script up annoyingly dumb scripts to break the files up into subdirs. With the ipod/itunes it was done for me, or I could limit what I wanted to copy via playlists and the like. Rather than me having to take care of my device, it just worked as designed with a simple interface on the computer via itunes.

Once I eventually got an iphone (3g I think was my first) I found I no longer needed the separate ipod anymore and have stuck with iphones since.

BTW, I'm actually curious what you think which mp3 players were better options during the first few years the ipod was out.

Yeah, I always love when a Hollywood movie tries to talk down to us plebs about how "eviil" some corporation(s) is/are, or how the "system" is holding down people.

They're some of the most over-paid, spoiled and "in an insulated echo chamber," people out there.

I especially love when they pull the 1% vs the 99% stuff.. many of them are in the 1%.

Because your theory worked so well in the Jim Crow south.

I love when people bring up Jim Crow in these cases about the free market.. Jim Crow laws were the antithesis of freedom, they were gov't forced segregation. Ironically, put into place by the Democratic party.

Or are you just another vodka-swilling stooge doing what the Kremlin tells you?

I love that the left suddenly hates the Russians.

Eyewitness testimony also started the "hands up, don't shoot" crap that was proven to be a lie based on the autopsy but also there was conflicting eyewitness reporting. People are still using the chant to this day.

The best comparison I could make for it at the time is to the supermarket tabloids. It's not so much that it's fake news, as it was pure entertainment that happened to be taken seriously by random nut jobs we could easily ignore in our day to day lives.

That's the same reasons I like to watch some of the crazy stuff like Ancient Aliens now and then. Yeah, it's all complete bullshit, but damn they come up with some crazy/interesting theories sometimes.

Honestly it's not that far from the full backstories and stuff they come up with in Movies/TV shows at times.. like all the stuff in the Stargate TV universe matched to all the mythical gods and such.