I completely agree.. Database is the answer and most databases can export directly to XML or something for future use. Every OS these days has at least one free database engine available, including android. Once your data is in SQL you can do practically ANYTHING with it!

SSD is the best thing I have seen since I upgraded my 286 to a 486!

WOW, someone remembers the Radius Pivot monitor!! I had one of those, you had to have a special video card and it was a beast of a monitor. Very heavy and clumsy to move around. It worked nicely though!

I love MAKE. They have projects that a kid can do and start getting intrested in things that light up, explode, move around and play games. I would have loved to have MAKE when I was growing up. I understand what you mean about Byte and others. I grew up on a VIC-20 Model I and they even had code for that old thing. I think it is more that computers no longer belong to the geeks. It's not as interesting messing around with code that is compiled in to something that is compiled in to something and finally compiled in to something that is run in a virtual memory. Most noobs cannot even code for the hardware. How interested would you be in coding for a pock calculator. Back then the computers were simple enough to do some good stuff with a minimal amount of hardware. But as for magazines.. geesh.. other than Make I think there are a few for Pic MicroControllers. Is 2600 still around? :P

LMFAO!!!!! hehehehe.... I love it! Not far from the truth. Check this out.. 1909!!!

http://www.natch.net/stuff/78_license/

Has the RIAA claimed ownership rights over the music they made with it?

I agree very much to what you said. I personally think that the open source companies can and do have the means to steer allot of the highly visible open source projects either monetarily or intellectually. There is nothing wrong with innovation for innovations sake. If the average user is who a distribution is geared to they have all the control in the world to make it as user friendly or as up to date as they would like. They are the ones who should be driving user acceptance and not the developer who contributes out of love in their own spare time developing what they find interesting.

Raid 5 hardware almost always has an ASIC for each drive. The hardware on the typical mother board may say it will do raid 5 but it is still sharing the same ASICs. Also, any other devices connected to the controller will slow things down greatly. Most motherboards use one ASIC per channel (SATA 1 and 2, SATA 3 and 4, exc..). Same with IDE. If you are using a slow device on the same channel all devices on that channel slow down to the same speed as well as having to share the ASIC.
It is like comparing apples to oranges. If you want to run raid 5 or 50 you need to fork out the money for a raid controller, 1 ASIC per device. If speed is the only concern then go ahead and put one drive per channel on the motherboard (SATA) and use an IDE CD Drive and an IDE to boot off of. This will prevent any righting to the OS drive while keeping your stripe optimized. Unless you are using the RAID 0 purely as a work disk, stuff like video editing, I would NEVER suggest it. If one drive dies you lose everything and even the best recovery software short of a hex editor will be able to recover your data.

There are so many solutions out there that can fit whatever needs you may have; it is all a matter of how much you want to spend.

You do your due diligence and you will be much better off than trying to recover after a drive or OS failure. Plan for the worst hope for the best.

I am a big advocate of raid but DigiShaman has a good point. It is always a good idea to have some sort of off-line backup. Another disadvantage of raid is that if something does break the average user is going to be perplexed about what is going on and may not even know something has failed. Getting it back to a redundant state can also be a bit complicated for even the experienced user, which is why desktop systems do not typically ship from vendors in a raid configuration. If I were in a IT support role I would want the systems I support to be in some sort of raid but if I were in phone support or just sending a novice user off with the machine I would not suggest it. I guess the pros and cons need to be weighed.

Oh, I forgot, It also had scheduled snapshots on the LUN so it could be recovered to any point at any time.. Was such a beautiful thing..

I agree, RAID is not perfect but as for restoring data from a failed drive via some sort of recovery software will be useless in the case of multiple failures.
I work on large SAN/NAS arrays and there is never any full proof way of getting data back. Even if the OS is backed up to tape there is always the chance that the parity will fail, exc.. Most raid controllers are capable of detecting existing RAID configurations so replacing a card should no be that big of a deal. I will give you that it is never full proof and I have even seen data loss on a raid from swapping controllers.
The most awesome safest configuration I have ever seen was a SAN with dual channel drives connected to dull array controllers in a MESH SAN network. The SAN hardware is capable of dynamic RAID 50 with global hot spares. Then on top of all that the entire configuration was mirrored off-site via dark fibre then weekly full backups and daily incremental backups. Oh, and each workstation was connected to the MESH with 4 fibre controllers. There was no single point of failure in this configuration. Was a honor to work on that array.

When worst comes to worst there is nothing better than having a RAID. I personally run a RAID5 at home but drives are cheap enough that is should be easy to set up a mirror on any workstation. Most motherboards these days support mirroring strait from the bios but even if it does not windows will do it in the OS as well. It is also my understanding that Linux supports all raid levels in software.
Now days it is also common place to see laptops with room for multiple drives. There is no reason at all to not have some sort of raid these days, especially if there is critical data on the drive.
As for OS corruption a raid will not prevent this but there are built in services for configuration "restore" points as well as drive snapshots that will be able to restore a system to a functional state from a "Safe Boot". There really is no reason to use any special software to "Recover" a system if it is configured in a manner that is redundant and secure.

Joshua