Qantas Ditches Linux for AIX

An anonymous reader writes "Australia's No. 1 airline Qantas will shift their underlying platform running its internal finance systems from Linux to IBM's AIX next month as part of a wide-ranging technology transformation project. 'We're moving from a Linux platform to an IBM AIX environment — we did that to address some stability issues we were having', said Suzanne Young, Qantas group general manager for finance improvement and segmentation. The decision was made last year, as part of the planning for the rollout."

Comments

Re:obsolete?

[Arker]

AIX is really old, mature, and definitely still maintained. It's a very good system.

I expect it will eventually be retired and replaced with Linux, but that's still years down the road. Right now, it offers some advantages, particularly on minicomputer class hardware.

Re:obsolete?

[AlexMax2742]

'We're moving from a Linux platform to an IBM AIX environment we did that to address some stability issues we were having'

That's why it's a good idea for them. Sounds to me like they're having genuine problems, if they moved to Windows Server 2003 complete with a crowing from Microsoft Headquarters, that might be something to worry about, but I doubt IBM has anything to gain from them moving from Linux to AIX, both of which they have a substantial amount of investment in.

And no, AIX is not dead, not any more than BSD is anyway.

Re:Slashdot them!

[Paska]

> Wait, who's Quantas?

Qantas is one of the world's oldest Airlines, and Australia's biggest airline. It also has one, if not the best, aviation safety record of any airline, ever.

IBM business plan at work

[ntufar]

It is a good example showing why IBM supports Linux:

1. Hook up customers on a cheaply solution based on Linux and MySQL.
2. As customer's data and number of clients grow they will start experiencing scalability problems.
3. Propose much more scalable, reliable, dependable (and much more expensive) solution on AIX, AS/400, Mainframe.
4. Profit!

Re:IBM business plan at work

[snero3]

You are not too far from the truth there.

We started our relationshop with IBM on their intel and Linux X series servers and as we grew they moved us to P series servers running AIX which happens to run all linux binaries just fine and even has the same command set.

The "Upgrade" path was easy and plainless and the cost was spread out over years so it kept management and the accountants happy.

Personally I see it as a winning solution for both Linux and IBM.

Re:obsolete?

[TheMidnight]

AIX is hardly obsolete. Over half of our clients with large server systems use IBM hardware and AIX. IBM hardware tends to be cheaper than other vendors, and AIX itself is a very stable operating system and easy to configure and maintain via SMIT. There are many advantages to AIX: cheaper hardware, powerful POWER5 architecture to run on (IBM hardware scales quite nicely), decent support, and it is maintained by one of the oldest technology companies in America. Compared to Solaris and HP-UX, it's one of the best UNIX flavors out there, and doesn't have the stability problems seen with Linux. Linux is stable, but still quirky.

IBM still maintains AIX. It's not reaching end of support like Tru64 or OpenVMS, and with POWER6 and POWER7 coming in the future, will likely enjoy a long, long support future.

not really news

[belmolis]

Moving from one Unix to another isn't really news. Moving to Vista would be news.

They're just fishing

[jamesh]

C'mon, we've seen this so many times. They're only making that announcement so that Linus will come to the party and offer them a fantastic price cut on Linux.

It's worked for just about every large company that's threatened to abandon Microsoft.

Re:well

[Iron Condor]

If there system was unstable it was probably their system design and not the OS.

Exactly - and that's why it makes sense for them to switch to something like AIX that actually has a "system design". Which Linux doesn't. Linux is just an OS. Any one PC may or may not work with Linux. And may or may not stop working tomorrow for any of a thousand reasons.

When an hour of downtime costs you real money, it suddenly becomes a worthwhile thing to have someone who's contractually obliged to fix your system when it breaks. Posting a bug report at freshmeat doesn't quite cut it when you have planes grounded...

That's Oz for ya

[alienmole]

Management sees the Bottom Line Price and tends not to listen to IT telling them that, no, you can't just copy all the applications over to the IBM box just because IBM told you that UNIX is UNIX.

In management's defense, this is Oz we're talking about. I assume there was beer involved. And sheilas. When yer stonkered, even AIX can start looking pretty attractive.

Re:That's Oz for ya

[BluBrick]

1975 called - They want their stereotype back.

Re:obsolete?

[The Bungi]

AIX, Solaris and HP-UX are essentially what defines the concept of UNIX nowadays. The descendants of System V (well, not really Solaris). Linux and BSD are a distant second, at least in enterprise environments.

Besides mainframe and midrange systems, that's what you'd call "big iron".

Re:well

[zurtle]

Agreed x2.

companies need that stability to run. I went for a job interview in Oz for a company that processes sugar cane (CRS). When they're crushing the cane to get the sugary goodness out of it, they're running several plants 24/7 for several months. Furthermore these plants are spread over about 1000 km as the crow flies (indeed they use a plane to get between plants in emergencies). In their quest for stability, they use C and Fortran ("What?" I hear some of you young critters say) on VAX to run their automated weighing machines.

No fancy .Net or even [relatively-mature] VB6 for them (the guy who interviewed me had a severe dislike for Microsoft - they tried them and got burned once). They wanted something that worked like a piston and never stopped.

Good on Qantas. Their in-flight meals aren't too bad either (I flew over from New Zealand - the country that sells Dells in shops).

The technical term...

[nixkuroi]

Would that be called "Expenguination" ?

Re:well

[Per Abrahamsen]

> When an hour of downtime costs you real money, it suddenly becomes a worthwhile thing to have
> someone who's contractually obliged to fix your system when it breaks.

Many vendors, including IBM, would be happy to sell you such a contract for a Linux based system. In fact, I'd be very surprised if Qantas didn't already had such a contract for their Linux based system.

Presumably the new contract is cheaper, at least initially.

Segfault?

[the_womble]

we did that to address some stability issues we were having', said Suzanne Young, Qantas group general manager for finance improvement and segmentation

Surrely, if they are having problem's with Linux stability, it must be the general manager for segmentation's fault?

Linux never crash

[TheScream]

Qantas never crash... on linux

Switching OSs always fixes the problem

[Error27]

At least it fixes the problem until the migration is over, then all bets are off.

In this day and age, if your root cause analysis comes up with "Linux is unstable" then something is screwed up with your analysis. Still this doesn't affect me, so good luck with that. :) AIX is a wonderful OS from what I hear.

Can't say I blame them

[Darth Liberus]

My project has been migrating our 300+ machines from Solaris to Red Hat over the past couple of years. We were all excited at first, now we all miss Solaris.

Why? Because for all the wonderful things we can do with Linux, there's one thing we can't do - we can't keep the machines from locking up. That almost never happened with Solaris, and when it DID happen Sun would figure out what went wrong and issue a patch for it within a couple of days.

Don't get me wrong, I love Linux. A lot. It's done many wonderful things for UNIX and the IT industry as a whole and will continue to do so. But it's not ZOMG TEH BEST OS EVAR! for every project, and I don't think Linus ever intended it to be :)

Re:Can't say I blame them

[straponego]

I don't know what you've tried, so don't take offense... and I'm not trying to justify these shortcomings, because I agree they're not acceptable, but on the off-chance I can help you, or someone else... In my experience, that kind of instability is really unusual unless you've come across a combination of elements which just doesn't work well together, or simply includes one bad element. If these crashing systems are all on the same platform, it might be fairly easy to isolate the problem.

Since you say the machines are locking up, I'm assuming it's not an application thing. I'm talking about things that cause kernel panics or worse, here. I'm also assuming the hardware is not defective, RAM is good, etc.

Easiest things first: Whenever I find a Linux install is unstable on hardware that I haven't used before, there are a few kernel commandline options I like to try. "noapic" solves a ton of interrupt/SMP issues, "noacpi" can also help stability, and "nomce" fixes (well, ignores) a lot of bogus MCE errors-- errors that always came up on hardware that was otherwise totally stable. MCE support seems to be much more accurate with recent kernels and hardware, though. Bonus option, "nommconf" can help if a PCI device, say a Myrinet card or RAID controller, isn't seen by the kernel, even as an unknown device in lspci.

Also, since you mention Redhat, I've found situations in which last couple of RHEL4 kernels tend to crash within a few days (maxing load on 4 cores, disk, and network the whole time). I don't know if installing a non-RHEL kernel is an option for your company. If you're running RHEL3, a vanilla kernel.org kernel might be pretty painful due to some things like SELinux. On RHEL4, kernel.org kernels are very easy to install in practical terms but may not be allowed by policy. If it's an option, I've been having no problems with 2.6.19.5. That's probably rather new for a company wide deployment, but if your crashes are repeatable/testable, and that does fix it, it could at least point the way.

Why the surpise? Linux IS NOT the most stable Unix

[keepper]

Ok, put it as experience.. Put it as bias...

But in my experience and that of many others. linux is flexible... fast.. versatile.. but the most stable it isnt.. its part of its design goal. A stable OS, has stable developement practices.. Linux's goal is not to have a stable dev practice. ( see the whole spew about bin drivers.. :( )

Why do you guys think redhat has RHEL... to stabilize linux. go to any other distrib, and well.. things change often.

Fast change does not bode well with stability. Stability comes with time.

You want fast and cheap, go linux.

You want stable, you go commercial unix ( Solaris,AiX these days)

You want a good middle ground.. you go *BSD ;)

( yes, i'm biased, i've run extremely large bsd environments, but currently running a linux one.. and trust me, i miss my bsd )

Re:obsolete?

[trewornan]

A great example of why it makes sense to avoid using MS operating systems - if you have problems with Linux you can move over to AIX without too much difficulty. If you're having problems with AIX move your apps to BSD. Problems with BSD try Solaris.

Having problems with Windows . . . you're fscked!

Re:well

[cyber-vandal]

1998 called - they want your argument back.

Re:obsolete?

[arivanov]

In addition to that IBM has done a relatively good job to ensure that porting applications is a breeze, especially to-from linux. It used to be the case where migration from Solaris to linux and back was the easiest. IMO, nowdays, AIX has overtaken it in that respect.

In addition to that, if Qantas does not have sufficiently good application level fallback and has to rely on the hardware being rock solid, AIX is another obvious choice. You get clearly better MTB compared to a PC based server under Linux. Everything else aside you have working hardware monitoring and management which under linux is still a problem. Add to that some noises IBM is making about binary compatibility and you get a fairly compelling deal for a large company which runs a lot of custom software (which I bet was initially written for a mainframe and expects the hardware + OS to have 99.95+ year round availability).

AIX C compiler

[12357bd]

My first experience with AIX was auditing some large set of application C code. It was shocking, lots of uninitialized local vars, code assuming it to be 0, and it worked!
I suppouse someone at IBM decided to systematically clear stack var area at function entry... better that than to fix the broken code!.

Re:well

[hdparm]

Oh shut up. Do you really think Qantas didn't have vendor supported Linux?

My take on this is one of the following:

- Linux was already supported by IBM and they figured a way of making more money (licenses + hardware)
- Someone at Quantas (perhaps lady from the article) has strong ties with someone at IBM and will earn a nice cut
- They can't fix their application / database, so they figured they'll blame it on Linux and by some time

Linux not stable? Give me a break.

Obsolescence is relative

[Savage-Rabbit]

That's why it's a good idea for them. Sounds to me like they're having genuine problems, if they moved to Windows Server 2003 complete with a crowing from Microsoft Headquarters, that might be something to worry about, but I doubt IBM has anything to gain from them moving from Linux to AIX, both of which they have a substantial amount of investment in. I doubt IBM has anything to gain from them moving from Linux to AIX I'm sure that IBM makes more selling AIX licences then Linux licenses. IBM hardware for AIX is probably more expensive then x86 Linux hardware too. Greater costs shouldn't surprise anybody. I know from experience that AIX is significantly more stable than Linux, it costs to IBM money achieve that stability and it requires the customer to use higher quality hardware. In the case of AIX it's 'obsolescence' (If you can call it that, I prefer to think of it as a mature product) is an advantage. Linux is a low to medium end server OS and it does a good job in that market segment. The beauty of Linux is that it is relatively easily interchangeable with any of a number of high end *NIX OS'es if you need super high stability. For somebody like an airline this is a huge advantage, they can use Linux for the less mission critical systems but have a clear and relatively easy migration/upgrade path to a selection of more stable *NIX dialects if their stability requirements for the system in question change. Another point is that you don't get this with Windows if you need more stability or suffer from critical bugs that Microsoft hasn't addressed in months or even years but that are making your life a misery you can't switch to a competing Windows compatible OS that has fixed these issues, there aren't any. As for money, you forgot to mention retraining, but even if you take that and all other cost factors into account money really isn't an object here. It costs them less to throw money at the problem and go with AIX than to put up with the business and customer confidence they are losing because of stability problems with things like their ticket booking systems.

And so it starts

[Builder]

10 years ago, I jumped onto the Linux bandwagon. Last year, I started brushing up my Solaris skills and I'm now working to add some Sun certs to my RHCE.

Linux just is NOT ready for the enterprise. Red Hat, the 'biggest' Linux company out there just hasn't learnt to run with the big dogs yet.

Technical issues about the OS aside, Red Hat just don't present as a professional company. After dealing with Sun and MS for years, dealing with RH is a bit of a joke. £300k doesn't even buy you any media! A visit to their head office in North Carolina sees the presentation done from a projector on a desk, with bits of cardboard to stop it wobbling. Trial versions of the software to keep your skills up to date ? Don't be silly - you have to use CentOS for the free tools and you're SOL for their closed source tools like Satellite or RHN Proxy.

Once you go from there to the support issues, RH take an even bigger beating. 'Just reboot it' is NOT the first (and for 3 hours, only) option I want to hear when I have a production server locked up. And 3 hours to escalate to second line is NOT good enough for a platinum contract (Premium in RH terms?). If I wanted that kind of solution and support, I'd go back to sending my cheques to Redmond.

At a technical level, Linux is NOT keeping up and is barely fit for datacentre purposes. Only recently has the LVM stuff got to a useful level where we can do multipathing (with IO on both paths) without needing third party software. It's not great yet, and the tools to maintain it are badly documented, but since we just can't get Veritas for 64bit RHEL4 (or couldn't when I checked a few months back), it's the only choice we have.

The constant changes to the API and ABI are a total PITA for ISVs. You can either go with RHEL / SLES (or CentOS if you're broke like me :)) and forsake many useful updates and features in tools like Samba and then you'll get your stable API / ABI. Or you can go with a bleeding edge distro and never have ISV support for your products. Neither of these is a great choice for us, we'd like something in the middle, but I can't find a commercial vendor providing this today.

Lastly, the tools. I'd really rather not get started on the issues with the tools that RH provides to manage systems. Suffice to say, not being able to do LVM setup using the text installer came as a bit of a shock. And when confronting RH on the severe deficiencies in their text-based admin tools, I was just told to spend 8k on a closed source RH product to resolve these... How much MORE like MS can you be? Yeah, we know the base product is a bit broken, but that part isn't really our focus - here, try this expensive fix.
Documentation is in a similar state with some stuff being very well documented and other stuff, poorly if at all.

In the end, Sun still have a better understanding of what the enterprise needs, both from a support and an OS point of view.

People forget, AIX is a complete package

[SmallFurryCreature]

When you buy AIX you don't just buy an OS, you buy the hardware as well. As Apple fanboys know, it is MUCH easier to get stable software if you know exactly what kind of hardware you are going to run on.

YES it is possible to run linux on this hardware too, this is IBM after all, BUT even then you are running an OS that is designed to run on much more. AIX isn't.

Isn't linux on PC hardware stable? Nope.

And yes, I do run linux on my desktop and it is pretty damn stable, BUT I have had crashes and freezes over the last couple of years. Even one on a light server that only runs apache.

No, nothing like the famed windows crashes and forced reboots every single day BUT if you run a major company and a computer hiccups once every 3 years that still can mean a significant amount of downtime over all your machines combined.

Saying AIX is more stable then Linux is roughly like claiming a diesel truck is more reliable then a pretrol powered van. It is not really a slam against van's, just that trucks are in a different class entirely.

Freedom of choice with Windows

[DrYak]

NO ! You're spreading kommunist FUD !!!
There's freedom of choice with Microsoft

Having problems with Windows . . . you're fscked!

If you have problems with Windows XP, you can move over to Windows Vista.

And as an added bonus, then you'll realise that things that much fscked up under Windows XP in comparison, and you'll happily move back to XP.

Re:well

[LizardKing]

Linux not stable? Give me a break.

When my second to last employer switched OS from Tru64 to Linux, we saw a massive drop in stability. This wasn't a drop in stability or reliability of our applications, but of the OS and hardware. We had been an Alpha and Tru64 shop, and before that a Vax and VMS one. When the writing was on the wall after Compaq acquired DEC and HP then acquired Compaq, we switched to Linux on HP. This was their supposedly high-end machines, complete with huge RAID cabinets with dual redundant everything. From not needing to reboot the Alphas unless we wanted to reinstall the OS, we went to having to reboot the Linux boxes every couple of days. The RAID arrays would simply stop working, but more often than that Linux would go haywire and lock up with unkillable processes chewing up the CPU's. Despite a very expensive support contract, HP couldn't fix either issue, we just came to expect a visit from the engineer to replace the RAID controllers every so often and frequent reboots. As we were selling a logistics system to run warehouses 24/7, we were not happy and started to look at Solaris on Sun hardware. I left before the switch, but unless HP have managed to solve the Linux and RAID issues I expect that they have lost a customer by now.

But, Linux/Intel has done a lot for competition

[rohar]

My work has around 500 *nix servers with Solaris, HP (paRISC and Itanium), Linux and AIX. I support Oracle on HP, Solaris and AIX (4.3 and 5L). I don't think any of the platforms have much difference in stability issues. We have been consolodating the Oracle environment on AIX and although Oracle has been pushing Linux/x86 there is the issue of endian byte order in going to a non-RISC cpu. The environment is large and a complete changeover would be difficult and a mixed RISC/Intel environment is more difficult with physical database migration and transportable tablespaces. The Power5 is a good design, AIX 5L is reasonably stable and the Power6 coming out this summer is supposed to be clocked up to 5GHz, which is a big deal when you are licensing Oracle by the CPU.

Linux/x86 has forced IBM, Sun and HP to be competitive with much cheaper hardware and support and when pricing servers with 32GB+ of ram, there isn't much difference between Linux/x86/support and AIX/HPUX/Solaris and when you do TCO analysis, they are all very similar.

There has been a major drop in the high end *nix distributed computing environment pricing brought on by Linux, to the point where it isn't that much of a cost savings switching between Linux and HPUX/AIX/Solaris (or the other way). I don't agree that AIX is more stable than Linux, but AIX isn't that much more expensive anymore.

Astute(and correct) observations

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, so here goes.

Big Freaking Disclaimer, I work for IBM in support...

That being said, I use Linux as my primary desktop both at work(thank you IBM) and at home. Debian on both, though I do have to say, I just built a MythTV box and used Ubuntu(faster updates/multimedia/interface acceptable to the female counterpart) and I am VERY impressed with Fiesty Fawn 7.0.4. I have been running Linux since the pre-1.0 kernels and it has been my desktop of choice since 98 and my ./ account number is 5 digits(as well as my ICN number, yeah who cares). I am also in school working with HPC(High performance computing) building, programming and maintaining beowulf clusters. My point is this, I have more experience with Linux than most.

Being that I work at IBM, I also have alot of experience with AIX. While personally, I hate AIX(any UNIX that cannot be administered via vi is shit in my book, take that any way you like), AIX is EXTREMELY stable, and IBM makes sure of it. I have seen the testing they do to both the hardware and software(OS level at least) and it is centered around stability/reliability first and foremost, followed closely by serviceability(tracing facilities, error reporting/recording), performance and then ease of use. Now, this order is not true of all commercial UNIXs, Solaris is used more in scientific applications/number crunching and tends to focus a bit more on performance over serviceability(surely) and possibly even stability. I have seen more Solaris machines bite it than AIX machines, but this is more likely hardware related that OS related. In either case, they are inherently more stable than Linux.

Yeah, I said it, and its true. While Linux is a WONDERFUL and EXCITING desktop OS, and makes a damn fine department server, the OS itself, and not even so much the OS, the kernel is pretty darn stable(dont believe me, boot up a Linux machine and dont do anything, it will run until something harware/power related dies). It is the surrounding libraries and applications that are not quite up to snuff. We in support see this a number of times. Here is an example:

Currently today, right now, PDKSH that is available on http://web.cs.mun.ca/~michael/pdksh/ is completely broken when it comes to job control. Now most of you have no clue what I mean by that, but a quick explanation is placing jobs into the background with a '&' at the end of the command line. Now programmatically, there are a number of way to do this from the shell and on PDKSH, they are completely broken. I tracked this down back in 2002 and a bug report was submitted to the developer of PDKSH. Every major Linux disribution shipped this binary in 2002, so we actually had to package and ship our own version of pdksh to make things work. Redhat later switched to AT&T's ksh, because pdksh was too broken to fix for the most part. Roll forward to 2004, we ran into a really strange problem with one of the products I support(Tivoli) and worked it for 2 months, tracing calls/checking stack traces/and general debugging and in the end, it worked right back around to this bug in pdksh. The customer had installed our pdksh, but later, had replaced it with SuSE's, which at that time was still broken. A colleague of mine finally sat down, on IBM's dime mind you, and took the time to report this bug to all the major distributions, here is the one from Debian:

http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-bugs-dist@lists .debian.org/msg17434.html

This is just one package. There are a thousand stories out there that are the same. I know we regularly submit libc patches as well because we find stuff that is borked in there.

So all in all, its not really the kernel, so much as it is the rest of the building blocks that one must use within Linux. You could use your own compiler and libraries, but then are you really using

Re:Linux problems

[orangesquid]

Actually, I would say the analogy would be more accurate if done this way:
Windows-user patient visiting Windows-OS doctor:
Doctor: Welcome to My Visit. Please note: all information contained in this visit is proprietary medical information. Am I a real doctor? Would you like to call the ADA and ensure my license is Genuine?
Patient: Uh, that's okay. I'd rather just get on to what's wrong.
Doctor: Okay. Say "Start" to begin!
Patient: ... Start? ... Doctor, something feels wrong. I think my wrist is broken.
Doctor: What's that, you say? Your breath is rotten? Here's a prescription for breathmints. Is that what you needed?
Patient: No, not my breath, I said my wrist. Could you take a look at it?
[ Doctor shines light in Patient's ears. ]
Doctor: Your problem appears to be a herniated disc, but because you have red hair, I am unable to offer any treatment. Would you like me to submit a report about your hair color to the publisher of my medical texts?
Patient: Uh, no thanks.
[ Doctor runs quickly out of the room. ]

Linux-user patient visiting Linux-distribution doctor:
Doctor, skimming a textbook: This is Gray's Anatomy, 23rd Edition. Reading skeletal charts... done. Reading cardiovascular charts... done. Reading male groin chart... done. Reading female groin chart... WARNING: PATIENT DOES NOT HAVE FEMALE OPTIONS INSTALLED---CONTINUING ANYWAY. Reading blood pressure chart... rescaling... done. WARNING: YOUR LOCALE IS SET TO "IMPERIAL UNITS". METRIC UNITS WILL BE THE ONLY TYPE SUPPORTED IN THE 40TH EDITION! Done.
[ Doctor stares blankly at patient. ]
Patient: ... Um, something is wrong with my wrist.
Doctor: Ok.
Patient: ... Could you take an X-ray or something?
Doctor: What primary focus depth for the X-ray?
Patient: What do you mean?
[ Doctor hands patient a book on X-rays. Patient skims through for a few minutes. ]
Patient: Oh, aim for about 2cm penetration for my wrist.
[ Doctor X-rays wrist. ]
Doctor: Your X-ray has been placed in the hospital's default location. Consult with the front desk staff to change where your X-rays are stored.
Patient: Can you tell me what's wrong?
Doctor: I don't understand.
Patient: Please examine my X-ray for problems.
Doctor: Which X-ray?
Patient: ... uh, the one in the hospital's default location.
[ Doctor examines X-ray, which takes a mere fraction of a second. ]
Doctor: Ulna and Radius are properly spaced. All ligaments are intact. Capitate is cropped at the edge of the slide. Pisiform is intact. Triquetrum is intact. GRAYS_SCAPHOID_CHECK: STUB! Continuing. NOTICE: Lunate is not intact.
Patient: Does that mean I need surgery?
Doctor: Please see "Lunate HOWTO."
[ Doctor hands patient a file of papers. Patient reads through them. ]
Patient: Uhh, I think I just need a cast for two months, from what I can make of this. I guess I also need to schedule for a follow-up when it's time to remove it.
Doctor: What color would you like your cast to be? What day of the week two months from now?
Patient: White is fine. And, a Monday, preferably in the morning.
Doctor: "White" is ambiguous. Say "fine" again to get a list of possibilities. We have appointments beginning at 1300-hours Universal Coordinated Time.
Patient: Just use the first kind of "white" you have, I don't care. Umm, that would be starting at 9AM Eastern/daylight, right?
Doctor: "White, beige-white" chosen. Yes, that is 1300-hours Universal Coordinated Time.
Patient: Okay. Schedule me for 1300 then.
Doctor: Okay. Scheduled.
[ Doctor applies cast to patient. ]
Patient: Thanks. Do I pay here, or out front?
Doctor: Payment is optional. All our services are essentially free-as-in-beer but funded by contributions. More importantly, though, all of our medical treatment is free-as-in-speech. This means that you are allowed to discuss your treatment with whomever you like or take not