I can not understand how anyone could refer to your post as "communication". Just because it's online, doesn't mean the rules of grammar, punctuation and spelling do not apply.
So it may have a greater upfront cost, but if you factor it out over 10 years, it will pay for itself in lower energy bills for the datacenter. That's the whole rub of this argument. Sycraft, like most of the PeeCee hardware crowd, is only looking at the original hardware price and warranty cost for 2-3 years. People who buy big iron tend to look at the TCO over a much longer period of time and include more things into their equations (downtime, power, cooling, consolidation, training, etc.).
It's an apples vs. oranges argument. Pick the tool based on what you need, not on what you see on the shelves at Best Buy or Fry's.
I suspect that is an artifact of where you cut your teeth. I'm always beating my head against the wall with Linux. The fact that there really is no clear distinction between system and userland or between core system and optional add-ons on Linux drives me batty. What numbskull decided it was a good idea to put static webpages in/var or to put configuration files for optional software in/etc/opt?
The fact that Sun seems to be drinking the Linux Kool-Aid, or caving to the non-technical business types on Wall Street that seem to think that in order to be a success you must have a Linux solution, is not good thing in my mind. Don't get me wrong, there are certainly areas where Sun could improve, and many of them are areas where Linux shines - mainly in the GUI and package management - but if what I was looking for was Linux, I wouldn't be buying Sun.
Sun had the solution to "the Linux Problem" as well as "the Microsoft Problem" in hand more than a decade ago and screwed it up by repeatedly burning adopters of Solaris x86 and by not using the opportunity provided by the purchase of Cobalt to split the hardware lines while maintaining a cohesive OS on top. Combined with the SunRays and StarOffice, they could have easily provided a single provider solution from the call center and home office to the office desktop through the server room.
The problem is that Sun ignored Linux for too long while wasting time and energy on Microsoft instead of using their assets and innovation to move the fight onto ground of their choosing. They let the snowball build too big and are now chasing it down the hill trying to get in front of it to stop it. Only time will tell if they are going to be able to pull it off.
Unless you are utilizing the way awesome SGI graphics frame buffer there is absolutely no reason to buy SGIs. If you are going to spend the money for hardware like the SGIs (and not be doing graphics stuff), you'd be better off buying Sun SPARC equipment (even if you are going to be running Linux on it instead of Solaris).
Maybe the solution would be, partially, to move to a categorical system that would automatically assume that all pages are personal pages unless you explicitly specify something else in your metatags or robots.txt file. Then you divide your databases along the lines of categories (say: personal, business, organization, government, education. You know, like the way the top level domains were intended to work).
It seems that everyone and their brother is out there trying to get every single page on their site indexed in the engines. This is the wrong approach for many reasons: it help prolifigate link rot and search engine database bloat, it increases the time it takes for a spider to "index the web", it decreases the effectivenes of the search engines, etc.. etc.. The better way to resolve this is to only index the "splash", or first, page of a site. Index that page completely. That page should contain all of the keywords and such necessary for a search to find every relevant item or page on your entire site. That the spiders only have to index a MUCH smaller portion of the web and will still return all of the relevant information in a much quicker time with much smaller databases. While at the same time allowing the restrictions on number of keywords and size of descriptions to be greatly increased. Of course this requires web designers to actually have some sort of interest in the public good so that they provide good, valid keywords and information as well as decent navigation internally to the site. It also creates problems for people who are not on their own domain, but are merely someone's ~. I think though that these things can be ironed out in a re-write of the robots.txt file format.
I would definitely agree with this. The Sun Enterprise Cluster software is the way to go if you are looking for 2 to 4 node clusters for HA application failover or for something like a 2 node parallel server for a database. I am fairly certain that it will run on Solaris x86 too, though if you really need clustering (and the inherent concept of "no single points of failure"), you probably should be looking at the more dependable, and redundant, Sparc platforms.
However, if you are looking for a very large parallel processing "machine" reminiscent of the old Sequent machines for distributed parallel applications, it seems to me that Beowulf would be a better solution.
It really does depend on what you are looking for.
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I can not understand how anyone could refer to your post as "communication". Just because it's online, doesn't mean the rules of grammar, punctuation and spelling do not apply.
It's an apples vs. oranges argument. Pick the tool based on what you need, not on what you see on the shelves at Best Buy or Fry's.
I suspect that is an artifact of where you cut your teeth. I'm always beating my head against the wall with Linux. The fact that there really is no clear distinction between system and userland or between core system and optional add-ons on Linux drives me batty. What numbskull decided it was a good idea to put static webpages in /var or to put configuration files for optional software in /etc/opt?
The fact that Sun seems to be drinking the Linux Kool-Aid, or caving to the non-technical business types on Wall Street that seem to think that in order to be a success you must have a Linux solution, is not good thing in my mind. Don't get me wrong, there are certainly areas where Sun could improve, and many of them are areas where Linux shines - mainly in the GUI and package management - but if what I was looking for was Linux, I wouldn't be buying Sun.
Sun had the solution to "the Linux Problem" as well as "the Microsoft Problem" in hand more than a decade ago and screwed it up by repeatedly burning adopters of Solaris x86 and by not using the opportunity provided by the purchase of Cobalt to split the hardware lines while maintaining a cohesive OS on top. Combined with the SunRays and StarOffice, they could have easily provided a single provider solution from the call center and home office to the office desktop through the server room.
The problem is that Sun ignored Linux for too long while wasting time and energy on Microsoft instead of using their assets and innovation to move the fight onto ground of their choosing. They let the snowball build too big and are now chasing it down the hill trying to get in front of it to stop it. Only time will tell if they are going to be able to pull it off.
Unless you are utilizing the way awesome SGI graphics frame buffer there is absolutely no reason to buy SGIs. If you are going to spend the money for hardware like the SGIs (and not be doing graphics stuff), you'd be better off buying Sun SPARC equipment (even if you are going to be running Linux on it instead of Solaris).
Maybe the solution would be, partially, to move to a categorical system that would automatically assume that all pages are personal pages unless you explicitly specify something else in your metatags or robots.txt file. Then you divide your databases along the lines of categories (say: personal, business, organization, government, education. You know, like the way the top level domains were intended to work).
It seems that everyone and their brother is out there trying to get every single page on their site indexed in the engines. This is the wrong approach for many reasons: it help prolifigate link rot and search engine database bloat, it increases the time it takes for a spider to "index the web", it decreases the effectivenes of the search engines, etc.. etc.. The better way to resolve this is to only index the "splash", or first, page of a site. Index that page completely. That page should contain all of the keywords and such necessary for a search to find every relevant item or page on your entire site. That the spiders only have to index a MUCH smaller portion of the web and will still return all of the relevant information in a much quicker time with much smaller databases. While at the same time allowing the restrictions on number of keywords and size of descriptions to be greatly increased. Of course this requires web designers to actually have some sort of interest in the public good so that they provide good, valid keywords and information as well as decent navigation internally to the site. It also creates problems for people who are not on their own domain, but are merely someone's ~. I think though that these things can be ironed out in a re-write of the robots.txt file format.
I would definitely agree with this. The Sun Enterprise Cluster software is the way to go if you are looking for 2 to 4 node clusters for HA application failover or for something like a 2 node parallel server for a database. I am fairly certain that it will run on Solaris x86 too, though if you really need clustering (and the inherent concept of "no single points of failure"), you probably should be looking at the more dependable, and redundant, Sparc platforms.
However, if you are looking for a very large parallel processing "machine" reminiscent of the old Sequent machines for distributed parallel applications, it seems to me that Beowulf would be a better solution.
It really does depend on what you are looking for.
-Solaris/Sun Cluster Administrator