Oxford says Apple's OS X is a Linux distro 3210

snips

On Mon, 06 Mar 2006 23:49:21 -0700, GreyCloud

I will - if it's actually worth the money. And... here's the real kicker... it has to be *worth the money*.

Take backups. My way, I can compress, encrypt and store whatever parts of the system I wish, wherever I wish; all I need is the ability to ssh in. Or, for that matter, I could presumably ftp it over, or any of a half-dozen other methods of getting it there, with about equivalent ease.

That could be storing it to a local (i.e. somewhere in our facility) server. Or, if we're after remote storage in case of the place burning down, it could be to some hosting server run by some other company. And we don't even have to worry overmuch about whether they're going to snoop the data - it's encrypted.

If he could show me a nice GUI-based solution which did all the same things, was as easy or nearly as easy to apply, and could be installed on as many systems as I like so I can back 'em all up this way, I'd be happy to pay $50 for it. If it was slick enough I could set it up on *one* system and have it work as a "backup orchestrator" for an arbitrary number of systems - while still giving me the same options for remote storage, auto-login, encryption and the like, I might be willing to pay, say, $150 for it.

Problem is, he can't show me a solution which can even compete with the single machine solution, let alone an entire server farm, and that's completely ignoring the price.

He's falling into the whole Wintroll trap. Pay more, get less. It's a bit odd he sees this as somehow superior, when it apparently isn't even equal.

Most of it. The gal in the next room is hardly a programmer, yet she merrily spews piped commands about. One of her favorites is something along the lines of ps -A grep smtp wc -l. She runs this relatively regularly on one of the mail servers, since it's been known to occasionally cough up a hairball and end up running something like 1500 instances. :)

Price... and DOS. I'll grant that for day-to-day operations, such as using your word processor, the GUI-based approach is a definite win if only because the fonts are easier on the eyes for long-term use. IMO, at least.

Give a DOS twonk a cheap GUI that's no worse, really, than what he's already got, but adds some - perhaps minimal, but real - benefits, he's liable to jump. :)

Gods. You know, the dudes who created beer. :)

-- MS, because work should be measured by effort, rather than result.