The only machine I've seen it run smoothly on, and even then it still had problems, was a fancy-pants Dell at some office job.
He's obviously never seen that many computers. There are millions of PCs running XP just fine. Even my mom's computer runs without problems now that I put XP on there and she has a 5 year old in the house who plays on it!! Walk through a datacenter with racks and racks of xp machines working just fine and then make that statement. Furthermore, this poster reveals something about himself:
On my home computer, which is all overclocked and has neon and stuff
Well, this is the kind of guy whose experience with operating systems I can trust. If my BMW ever breaks, I'll be sure to find one of those guys working on his car installing undercarriage lighting and a huge spoiler on his front wheel drive car. Yeah, that's it. Lastly, I'll get in a slight MS blast:
I am sticking with 2000 until whatever's past XP comes out.
Good luck waiting for that.
If you don't agree, too bad. I have karma to burn. Thanks for the vine... I'm out.
I don't know why I even bother responding to college kids on too much redbull.
It's a release candidate! It's out there to find bugs. That's what they found. If the idiot who put this on 5 computers cared about the data on the machines he should have backed them up. Wait until you're out of school and make stupid newbie mistakes like this guy a couple of times. Learn from them (hopefully) and get on with life.
I ran 2k on my desktop at home and my laptop. I upgraded the laptop to XP for the wireless utilities built in. 2k required a vendor supplied utility which plain sucked. XP SP2rc2 has a very nice setup for wireless that makes it worthwhile for me. Over 4 years of running 2k and XP I've had only 3 bluescreens. Two of them were hardware faults (no ECC mem on either of my win machines). So, altogether not bad. I have my complaints, but stability is generally not one of them. My servers are a different story. They are all Solaris Sparc boxes. When it comes to my web/dns/firewall/mail I don't trust anything else yet. I often load up a machine with the newest SUSE, redhat or Mandrake and play around, but always end up leaving things the way they are - working.
It is a nice monitor. It's mostly used for large numbers of terminals and browser windows. However the longer I work, the more I have to deal with reports and spreadsheets. It's extremely nice to be able to have two docs up side by side for comparison or reference. The 9600 does do a decent job of powering it on older games or CPU intensive games like flight sims and RPGs. Half-life, etc are really not possible as anything under the native resolution doesn't look as nice on LCDs. I gave up on fps games pretty much 4 or 5 years ago. I was really tired of getting my ass kicked by 12 year olds in tribes. I don't have the time anymore to be good enough to last very long against those young whippersnappers. The plus side is that my social skills have improved since I'm not attached to a keyboard 24/7.
Well, I am rather disappointed in the resolution they chose for the top end. I have a nice widescreen monitor which does 1920 x 1200. I know others who have highend gear (for other purposes than gaming) which far exceed that. In my case, I just want 1920x1200 at highest quality textures and AA over 30fps since I'm LCD. I have my doubts that I'll get there without dropping some cash on a new vid card since I run a Radeon 9600 Pro. I don't think that the current batch of cards is going to "handle" very high resolutions with AI involved or network functions in the background. Wait until someone creates the ultimate benchmark with 32 players in some massive rocket launch deathmatch. Those fps will dive and give rise to cries of frustration from the fps chasers. This is going to be the rallying cry for hundreds of dumbass CompUSA employees:
You need this $400 video card from Nvidia to really enjoy D3. (Pause) What's PCI express? You don't want PCI. You want an AGP card cause they're faster.
I'm sorry about that last bit. I had some idiot at CompUSA point me to the wireless section when I was asking for USB cables today. He said he thought I wanted "wireless USB". A fucking wireless USB cable?!? They never cease to amaze me.
They see you walking about with your pretty little white clickety box maybe playing a little Ludwig van and they'll soon give you a nice beating. Better served to just have a little milk and keep the clicky box hidden at home.
[I don't know why I wrote this. It's late and the previous post reminded me of Kubrick.]
The common idea is that in contract law both parties must receive a benefit for the contract to be valid.
When I was married, I made sure I hired someone who agreed to give me the negatives and a set of proofs. While that worked out OK, there were other problems that we ran into. The idiots at most of the local photo shops wouldn't print copies for me because they were obviously professional and they needed a release form from the photographer. While I understand being careful about copyright infringement, who the heck runs around with negatives who doesn't own the right to print from them? How does anyone prove they own the copyright? The whole scenario really ticked me off at the time. So, even if you own the negatives you might encounter problems getting prints.
I think you are focusing too narrowly on this. The impact COULD be on many fronts. First, as a sysadmin you could determine where your problems exist and provide proof to your internal cevelopment teams or to the vendor. I would find this priceless as most of us have been on the vendor seesaw before. Oracle blames SAP who Oracle and then both intimate it could really be the OS or Veritas... Second, app developers can use this tool to dramatically improve the performance of their apps. You don't think db vendors will use this to improve their apps to gain a benchmark advantage over competitors? Some Solaris gains could even improve the performance of apps on other OSes. Third, Sun support will use this extensively to determine where customer problems lie and get real root causes much more often without live coredumps and the like. Most customers will be very pleased with being able to get a detailed view of their boxen while the problem is occuring and a faster resolution.
There are other ways this could help Solaris users when you add in the Solaris Zones, but I'll leave that to the imagination. All in all, there are many reasons Sun should be very happy with this and sing its praises to the world. The real issue is that most people do not move to new OSes quickly. There are LOTS of people still running 2.6. Heck, a lot of big customers have probably just finished moving to Solaris 8 (2.8, SunOS 5.8). There have to be a lot of really good reasons to move to Solaris 10 for companies to shift directions and start deploying. In this case, I believe there are. The Solaris Express program should help a lot as well.
DISCLAIMER: I work for Sun. I do not drink the company Kool-Aide though.
The real reason for gold plating has more to do with oxidation than the resistance of the different metals. Dending on where you live, those connections can develop problems fairly quickly. I also had someone point out that they paid a LOT of money for their equipment and don't want any dissimlar metal issues. While I'm not sure about the odds of that being an issue, who am I to quibble with him over a 100 dollar cable to hook up 3000 dollar rack equipment?
I love this kind of stuff. Clueless moderators mod the parent insightful because none of them happen to have any personal experience with the subject. Lack of personal evidence does not constitute a conspiracy. Really, it doesn't.
I have personally known about whiskers for over five years. It was becoming a potential problem in an old datacenter at work. It is a serious condition that datacenters with critical machines (or contractual obligations) take into account in datacenter design and maintenance. With 5 9's required for a lot of machines (Hitachi, IBM, Unisys, etc) there is little room for allowing electrically conductive dust particles to flow across every board on your machines.
The other posters have given examples to satisfy the typical/. need for anecdotal evidence, yet you groundlessly claim that the articles anecdote MUST have some other explanation. Why? I am all for being a little skeptical, but there is such little reason for it in this case. Would you begrudge them the opportunity to clean out their under-tile areas? Most of us know how bad those areas can get regardless of the whisker issue.
I have a nice 24.1 inch Sun LCD that has ~100dpi. That is good enough for me for now. Of course I'd like the 300dpi for smaller screens. Things like ebooks will be possible at that point. For larger monitors I don't need 300dpi unless I plan on planting myself inches from the screen. My biggest complaint about these large res monitors is the crappy DVI interface we've been saddled with. DVI maxes out at 1920X1080. With some tricks ATI drives my monitor at 1920x1200. Nvidia took that out of their drivers for a while (I haven't looked to see if they got it fixed in the last 6 months). Now that is with the double DVI-D cable. If you want more than that, you have to resort to the two cable BS that you see on the posted site. I find that extremely sad. Wy the hell can't we get a better digital standard for monitors than this? Not to mention they push this down our throats with HDTV connections too to prevent copying. What a load of crap.
Yes, good idea. Make sure you get a white one too. My 325i is as white as the iPod I'll be hooking up to it. I am going on a 2000 mile drive later this week and this is the solution I've been looking for. I thought about satellite radio, but I'd rather stick to crap I know I like than what you get on the radio these days.
That reminds me of something I saw on VH1. It was in the 100-81 episode of Greatest Metal Moments. The show had some funny stuff in it, but got real lame towards number one. Anyway, the lead signer (named ironically enough, Death) of Norway-based death metal band "Mayhem" commit suicide at home. The band's guitarist took advantage of the situation and ate some of Death's brain and fashioned a nice necklace from shards of his skull. Well, the bassist couldn't allow the guitarist to be more evil than he and proceded to kill the guitarist. He was sentenced to 21 years of jail for the murder. I can't help wondering what the drummer has planned. He simply can't let that stand now can he?
Because it will not always be Linux underneath. Running the JDS just means you have a common set of apps, ui, libraries and java. It could soon be Solaris x86 underneath or a sparc version running on Sunrays (which I still think are cool).
The real upside of of zones is when combined with N1 Grid. I know it sounds really amorphous, but with zones it really starts to make sense. Imagine rolling out a new zone or dozens when needed across a datacenter full of stock Solaris 10 machines (x86 or SPARC). The storage is on EMC or Hitachi, so you just hand out LUNS like candy for the zone's "/" with predefined pkgs and patches and you have a really dynamic environment for Oracle 10g, webservices, etc. This is the story that needs to be told, but I sometimes think Sun is using Novell's old marketing team.
DISCLAIMER: I work for Sun but I try not to drink the company Kool Aid.
I really doubt any of those companies are incorporated in NY. Most companies in the US are incorporated in Delaware. This is done for very good reasons (google it if you wish) of business law. So, the question remains: why does NY get to hold the money in escrow? I would hazard a guess that California (and then perhaps NY) is where the largest portion of the music was created. The unclaimed funds should be given to the National Endowment of the Arts or some national children's music foundation instead of reverting to the good people of NY. We should at least make sure it benefits artists directly.
I have seen all the channels on both and DISH has better stuff. Directv only has porn certain hours of the day, whereas DISH has it on 24/7. Thats kinda cool for Sat morns with the wife.
The problem is that the 333Mhz/2M was as good as it got for the Ultra 5
Not true, sir. The ultra 5 can handle 400Mhz/2MB modules (Sun p/n 501-5741 and 501-5741). There are requirements on the level of the OBP, but those can be handled with flashing the prom. If you are even braver, I know of many people who overclock these with pretty good success. I run my entire house it seems off of one Ultra 2 with 1GB RAM and a bunch of disks. I am getting rid of my A1000 (12x9.1GB) that used to house everything if someone wants it. I just can't stand the noise and heat anymore.
That is already on the books at Sun. Take a look at Sun processors. Sun is pointing toward massive threading as the future. Now, I work for Sun and could very well be within the "bullshit field" and not know the truth from a M$ press kit; but it is an interesting direction for server CPUs. It would not help desktop apps though. I recall Carmack's QuakeIII discussion of how difficult it was to wring any performance benefits from dual cpus. I doubt having 16 threads will be of any benefit to Quake5 or whatever. For those apps, single thread performance is key. Still, if you are running a web server or db, having huge numbers of threads in the pipes at the same time could have a great effect on performance if the OS and/or TCP/IP stacks can deal with it.
Read just a little before you comment on something. Virtual CPUs do not count toward the license count. Your hyperthreaded P4 will only count as one CPU. In case anyone thinks I'm here to support Sun, my employer, I would never run Solaris x86 at home. I've got better things to do with my time.
For selfish reasons, I hope you are wrong. If you are, does it make you feel any better that RedHat will be your system integrator? Someone has to set a standard that everyone can write for. Oracle, PeopleSoft etc. write their code to RHAS which has certain libraries, java, and other pkg dependancies. It seems to me that everyone is trading one landlord for another. I would feel immensely better if a standards org with real teeth and community backing would emerge and decide what milestones everyone will target. That way SUSE, RH and even IBM could release a Linux distro that had the same kernel, glib, gtk+ etc as everyone else.
In any case, you are missing the direction most big Unix vendors are going. Linux does not have partitioning. I haven't heard any plans for that from anyone (I could be wrong though). How about proc affinity or processor sets? IBM and Sun seem to be heading toward what Sun calls N1. Moving load to any machine in your datacenter as needed. It's essentially virtualizing your systems to enable seemless, automated maintenance of all your hosts. I know both are going that direction. I know some customers who are foaming at the mouth for this. You need an integrator for this. Whether it's IBM, HP or Sun, who knows. It won't be Dell (no R&D) and it won't be MS (it would only work on MS products).
So there are reasons Sun et al aren't going to be lapped by Linux. Linux is great for small servers. Linux is great if you have a rack of servers. Linux is not robust in the manner I mentioned earlier on large systems. The larger the system, the more often something will break that requires replacing hardware. Try telling a CIO that the ERP cluster has to come down so you can change a DIMM. I'd rather DR that board out and replace it w/o the downtime or talking to a very unhappy CIO.
Well, I guess it really depends on what you were doing with the boxes and how you were benchmarking. I have seen exactly the opposite in a recent case. A customer brought in some Dell's that were supposed to do the work of two Sparcs of equiv specs (dual procs both). The customer (a HUGE Intel backer) was stunned to find out one sparc box did the work of more than two x86 boxes. YMMV. It really depends on what you are doing with your boxes. That is why it is really difficult to generalize about performance.
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He's obviously never seen that many computers. There are millions of PCs running XP just fine. Even my mom's computer runs without problems now that I put XP on there and she has a 5 year old in the house who plays on it!! Walk through a datacenter with racks and racks of xp machines working just fine and then make that statement.
Furthermore, this poster reveals something about himself:
Well, this is the kind of guy whose experience with operating systems I can trust. If my BMW ever breaks, I'll be sure to find one of those guys working on his car installing undercarriage lighting and a huge spoiler on his front wheel drive car. Yeah, that's it.
Lastly, I'll get in a slight MS blast:
Good luck waiting for that.
If you don't agree, too bad. I have karma to burn. Thanks for the vine... I'm out.
I don't know why I even bother responding to college kids on too much redbull.
;)
It's a release candidate! It's out there to find bugs. That's what they found. If the idiot who put this on 5 computers cared about the data on the machines he should have backed them up. Wait until you're out of school and make stupid newbie mistakes like this guy a couple of times. Learn from them (hopefully) and get on with life.
Kids!
I ran 2k on my desktop at home and my laptop. I upgraded the laptop to XP for the wireless utilities built in. 2k required a vendor supplied utility which plain sucked. XP SP2rc2 has a very nice setup for wireless that makes it worthwhile for me. Over 4 years of running 2k and XP I've had only 3 bluescreens. Two of them were hardware faults (no ECC mem on either of my win machines). So, altogether not bad. I have my complaints, but stability is generally not one of them.
My servers are a different story. They are all Solaris Sparc boxes. When it comes to my web/dns/firewall/mail I don't trust anything else yet. I often load up a machine with the newest SUSE, redhat or Mandrake and play around, but always end up leaving things the way they are - working.
It is a nice monitor. It's mostly used for large numbers of terminals and browser windows. However the longer I work, the more I have to deal with reports and spreadsheets. It's extremely nice to be able to have two docs up side by side for comparison or reference. The 9600 does do a decent job of powering it on older games or CPU intensive games like flight sims and RPGs. Half-life, etc are really not possible as anything under the native resolution doesn't look as nice on LCDs.
I gave up on fps games pretty much 4 or 5 years ago. I was really tired of getting my ass kicked by 12 year olds in tribes. I don't have the time anymore to be good enough to last very long against those young whippersnappers. The plus side is that my social skills have improved since I'm not attached to a keyboard 24/7.
I don't think that the current batch of cards is going to "handle" very high resolutions with AI involved or network functions in the background. Wait until someone creates the ultimate benchmark with 32 players in some massive rocket launch deathmatch. Those fps will dive and give rise to cries of frustration from the fps chasers.
This is going to be the rallying cry for hundreds of dumbass CompUSA employees:
I'm sorry about that last bit. I had some idiot at CompUSA point me to the wireless section when I was asking for USB cables today. He said he thought I wanted "wireless USB". A fucking wireless USB cable?!? They never cease to amaze me.
They see you walking about with your pretty little white clickety box maybe playing a little Ludwig van and they'll soon give you a nice beating. Better served to just have a little milk and keep the clicky box hidden at home.
[I don't know why I wrote this. It's late and the previous post reminded me of Kubrick.]
The common idea is that in contract law both parties must receive a benefit for the contract to be valid.
When I was married, I made sure I hired someone who agreed to give me the negatives and a set of proofs. While that worked out OK, there were other problems that we ran into. The idiots at most of the local photo shops wouldn't print copies for me because they were obviously professional and they needed a release form from the photographer. While I understand being careful about copyright infringement, who the heck runs around with negatives who doesn't own the right to print from them? How does anyone prove they own the copyright? The whole scenario really ticked me off at the time. So, even if you own the negatives you might encounter problems getting prints.
I think you are focusing too narrowly on this. The impact COULD be on many fronts.
First, as a sysadmin you could determine where your problems exist and provide proof to your internal cevelopment teams or to the vendor. I would find this priceless as most of us have been on the vendor seesaw before. Oracle blames SAP who Oracle and then both intimate it could really be the OS or Veritas...
Second, app developers can use this tool to dramatically improve the performance of their apps. You don't think db vendors will use this to improve their apps to gain a benchmark advantage over competitors? Some Solaris gains could even improve the performance of apps on other OSes.
Third, Sun support will use this extensively to determine where customer problems lie and get real root causes much more often without live coredumps and the like. Most customers will be very pleased with being able to get a detailed view of their boxen while the problem is occuring and a faster resolution.
There are other ways this could help Solaris users when you add in the Solaris Zones, but I'll leave that to the imagination. All in all, there are many reasons Sun should be very happy with this and sing its praises to the world. The real issue is that most people do not move to new OSes quickly. There are LOTS of people still running 2.6. Heck, a lot of big customers have probably just finished moving to Solaris 8 (2.8, SunOS 5.8). There have to be a lot of really good reasons to move to Solaris 10 for companies to shift directions and start deploying. In this case, I believe there are. The Solaris Express program should help a lot as well.
DISCLAIMER: I work for Sun. I do not drink the company Kool-Aide though.
Nice anecdotal evidence. You'll fit in here just fine.
The real reason for gold plating has more to do with oxidation than the resistance of the different metals. Dending on where you live, those connections can develop problems fairly quickly. I also had someone point out that they paid a LOT of money for their equipment and don't want any dissimlar metal issues. While I'm not sure about the odds of that being an issue, who am I to quibble with him over a 100 dollar cable to hook up 3000 dollar rack equipment?
I love this kind of stuff. Clueless moderators mod the parent insightful because none of them happen to have any personal experience with the subject. Lack of personal evidence does not constitute a conspiracy. Really, it doesn't.
/. need for anecdotal evidence, yet you groundlessly claim that the articles anecdote MUST have some other explanation. Why? I am all for being a little skeptical, but there is such little reason for it in this case. Would you begrudge them the opportunity to clean out their under-tile areas? Most of us know how bad those areas can get regardless of the whisker issue.
I have personally known about whiskers for over five years. It was becoming a potential problem in an old datacenter at work. It is a serious condition that datacenters with critical machines (or contractual obligations) take into account in datacenter design and maintenance. With 5 9's required for a lot of machines (Hitachi, IBM, Unisys, etc) there is little room for allowing electrically conductive dust particles to flow across every board on your machines.
The other posters have given examples to satisfy the typical
I have a nice 24.1 inch Sun LCD that has ~100dpi. That is good enough for me for now. Of course I'd like the 300dpi for smaller screens. Things like ebooks will be possible at that point. For larger monitors I don't need 300dpi unless I plan on planting myself inches from the screen.
My biggest complaint about these large res monitors is the crappy DVI interface we've been saddled with. DVI maxes out at 1920X1080. With some tricks ATI drives my monitor at 1920x1200. Nvidia took that out of their drivers for a while (I haven't looked to see if they got it fixed in the last 6 months). Now that is with the double DVI-D cable. If you want more than that, you have to resort to the two cable BS that you see on the posted site. I find that extremely sad. Wy the hell can't we get a better digital standard for monitors than this? Not to mention they push this down our throats with HDTV connections too to prevent copying. What a load of crap.
Yes, good idea. Make sure you get a white one too. My 325i is as white as the iPod I'll be hooking up to it. I am going on a 2000 mile drive later this week and this is the solution I've been looking for. I thought about satellite radio, but I'd rather stick to crap I know I like than what you get on the radio these days.
...
And yes, I am an elitist liberal blah blah
But it's so much fun! And I worked for it.
That reminds me of something I saw on VH1. It was in the 100-81 episode of Greatest Metal Moments. The show had some funny stuff in it, but got real lame towards number one.
Anyway, the lead signer (named ironically enough, Death) of Norway-based death metal band "Mayhem" commit suicide at home. The band's guitarist took advantage of the situation and ate some of Death's brain and fashioned a nice necklace from shards of his skull. Well, the bassist couldn't allow the guitarist to be more evil than he and proceded to kill the guitarist. He was sentenced to 21 years of jail for the murder. I can't help wondering what the drummer has planned. He simply can't let that stand now can he?
Because it will not always be Linux underneath. Running the JDS just means you have a common set of apps, ui, libraries and java. It could soon be Solaris x86 underneath or a sparc version running on Sunrays (which I still think are cool).
The real upside of of zones is when combined with N1 Grid. I know it sounds really amorphous, but with zones it really starts to make sense. Imagine rolling out a new zone or dozens when needed across a datacenter full of stock Solaris 10 machines (x86 or SPARC). The storage is on EMC or Hitachi, so you just hand out LUNS like candy for the zone's "/" with predefined pkgs and patches and you have a really dynamic environment for Oracle 10g, webservices, etc.
This is the story that needs to be told, but I sometimes think Sun is using Novell's old marketing team.
DISCLAIMER: I work for Sun but I try not to drink the company Kool Aid.
I really doubt any of those companies are incorporated in NY. Most companies in the US are incorporated in Delaware. This is done for very good reasons (google it if you wish) of business law. So, the question remains: why does NY get to hold the money in escrow? I would hazard a guess that California (and then perhaps NY) is where the largest portion of the music was created. The unclaimed funds should be given to the National Endowment of the Arts or some national children's music foundation instead of reverting to the good people of NY. We should at least make sure it benefits artists directly.
Just my opinion, YMMV
I have seen all the channels on both and DISH has better stuff. Directv only has porn certain hours of the day, whereas DISH has it on 24/7. Thats kinda cool for Sat morns with the wife.
Not true, sir. The ultra 5 can handle 400Mhz/2MB modules (Sun p/n 501-5741 and 501-5741). There are requirements on the level of the OBP, but those can be handled with flashing the prom. If you are even braver, I know of many people who overclock these with pretty good success.
I run my entire house it seems off of one Ultra 2 with 1GB RAM and a bunch of disks. I am getting rid of my A1000 (12x9.1GB) that used to house everything if someone wants it. I just can't stand the noise and heat anymore.
That is already on the books at Sun. Take a look at Sun processors. Sun is pointing toward massive threading as the future. Now, I work for Sun and could very well be within the "bullshit field" and not know the truth from a M$ press kit; but it is an interesting direction for server CPUs. It would not help desktop apps though. I recall Carmack's QuakeIII discussion of how difficult it was to wring any performance benefits from dual cpus. I doubt having 16 threads will be of any benefit to Quake5 or whatever. For those apps, single thread performance is key.
Still, if you are running a web server or db, having huge numbers of threads in the pipes at the same time could have a great effect on performance if the OS and/or TCP/IP stacks can deal with it.
Read just a little before you comment on something. Virtual CPUs do not count toward the license count. Your hyperthreaded P4 will only count as one CPU.
In case anyone thinks I'm here to support Sun, my employer, I would never run Solaris x86 at home. I've got better things to do with my time.
I got sucked in and had to look. There goes my appetite!
For selfish reasons, I hope you are wrong. If you are, does it make you feel any better that RedHat will be your system integrator? Someone has to set a standard that everyone can write for. Oracle, PeopleSoft etc. write their code to RHAS which has certain libraries, java, and other pkg dependancies. It seems to me that everyone is trading one landlord for another. I would feel immensely better if a standards org with real teeth and community backing would emerge and decide what milestones everyone will target. That way SUSE, RH and even IBM could release a Linux distro that had the same kernel, glib, gtk+ etc as everyone else.
In any case, you are missing the direction most big Unix vendors are going. Linux does not have partitioning. I haven't heard any plans for that from anyone (I could be wrong though). How about proc affinity or processor sets? IBM and Sun seem to be heading toward what Sun calls N1. Moving load to any machine in your datacenter as needed. It's essentially virtualizing your systems to enable seemless, automated maintenance of all your hosts. I know both are going that direction. I know some customers who are foaming at the mouth for this. You need an integrator for this. Whether it's IBM, HP or Sun, who knows. It won't be Dell (no R&D) and it won't be MS (it would only work on MS products).
So there are reasons Sun et al aren't going to be lapped by Linux. Linux is great for small servers. Linux is great if you have a rack of servers. Linux is not robust in the manner I mentioned earlier on large systems. The larger the system, the more often something will break that requires replacing hardware. Try telling a CIO that the ERP cluster has to come down so you can change a DIMM. I'd rather DR that board out and replace it w/o the downtime or talking to a very unhappy CIO.
I digress....
I was hoping someone else on /. was a clone.
Well, I guess it really depends on what you were doing with the boxes and how you were benchmarking. I have seen exactly the opposite in a recent case. A customer brought in some Dell's that were supposed to do the work of two Sparcs of equiv specs (dual procs both). The customer (a HUGE Intel backer) was stunned to find out one sparc box did the work of more than two x86 boxes. YMMV. It really depends on what you are doing with your boxes. That is why it is really difficult to generalize about performance.