Marco discovered a nice Flight Simulator from Google hidden within Google Earth. You need the latest version of Google Earth for it. I had Google Earth version 4.1.x which didn't work. You have to download the latest version 4.2. It provides You can activate it on different operating system as follows: On Linux Press: Ctrl-Alt-a On Windows Press: Ctrl-Alt-A On Mac Press: Command/Open Appley Key + Option + A Thanks Mike!

Compete is a relatively new player in website ranking and third party analytics, a space dominated so far by Alexa rankings and Google PageRank. Whereas Google PageRank is an approximate ranking for a single page, Compete rankings are, like Alexa, for the entire site and they offer it for free. In my initial analysis compete is far more accurate than Alexa. The other major players in this market are: comScore Media Metrix 2.0, Hitwise and Nielsen//NetRatings. Compete can be a very useful tool for web advertisers and venture capitalists. It allows independent assessment of sites to help estimate their advertisement potential as well as overall business potential (for web based businesses). Compete is the brainchild of Bill Gross, a serial entrepreneur who previously started search engine GoTo which became Overture which pioneered the business of paid search, and was later acquired by Yahoo. How does Compete measure the web traffic? Compete estimates site traffic and engagement metrics based on the daily browsing activity of over 2,000,000 U.S. Internet users. Compete applies a rigorous normalization methodology, leveraging scientific multi-dimensional scaling (by age, income, gender and geography) to ensure metrics are representative of the U.S. Internet population. Compete members are recruited through multiple sources, including ISPs, the Compete Toolbar and additional opt-in panels to ensure a diverse distribution of user types and to facilitate de-biasing across the data sources.

I currently use RAID1 with LVM on Fedora Core including RAID 1 on boot partition. This provides a fully redundant storage system with the ability to expand volume size in future. However RAID & LVM has to be managed from command line tools like mdadm in raidtools package. EVMS (Enterprise Volume Management System) on the other hand provides a single, unified system for handling all of your storage management tasks. EVMS recognizes all of the disks on your system and allows for a variety of partitioning schemes. Software-RAID and logical volume groups can be managed in EVMS. Filesystems can be created and checked, and are automatically updated when changes are made to the underlying volumes. With EVMS, there is no longer a need for several individual utilities for performing each of these tasks.

SystemRescueCd is a Linux system on a bootable CD-ROM for repairing your system and recovering your data after a crash. It aims to provide an easy way to carry out admin tasks on your computer, such as creating and editing the partitions of the hard disk. It contains lots of system utilities (GParted, parted, partimage, Sfdisk, fstools, ...[details below]) and basic tools (editors, file managers like midnight commander, network tools ... [details below]). It is very easy to use: just boot the CDROM. The kernel supports most of the important file systems (ext2/ext3, reiserfs, reiser4, xfs, jfs, vfat, ntfs, iso9660), as well as network filesystems (samba and nfs).

Partimage is a Linux utility which saves partitions having a supported filesystems (see below) to an image file. It is a free and open source alternative to the popular software Norton Ghost or DriveImage. Most Linux and Windows filesystems are supported. The partition image file can be compressed with the gzip / bzip2 programs to save disk space, and can be split into multiple files to easily copy them on CDs / DVDs. Partitions can also be saved across the network using the partimage network support, or using Samba / NFS. If you don't want to install Partimage or you don't have a running Linux installation then you can download and burn SystemRescue CD. It is a live cd, like Bart's Rescue CD, that allows to use Partimage immediately even if your computer has no operating system installed (useful to restore an image), and it also allows to save an image on a DVD on the fly.