The HP A1250N (X2 3800) is in all the big box retailers at $849 after rebate, and I haven't seeing anything with an Intel dual core with equivalent specs cheaper. If BestBuy, Circuit City, and Frys all carry it I'm thinking that qualifies as "mainstream PC"
If they are spending their time on things that are uninteresting for normal folk then they are WASTING their time!! Congress should be working in areas that interest citizens. Price regulation is a notably bad example, since this is clearly an area where congress should not be acting at all.
Ironically, Supermicro makes opteron white box systems and motherboards.
Monarch computing supposedly carries them, relabelled as "Monarch" brand.
Supermicro won't sell them to end users, and apparently won't let anybody advertise them as Supermicro due (presumably) to fear of damaging their relationship with Intel. It seems a weird way to operate unless there is something untoward going on.
Another fine article by Dan Lyons. Theo says a lot of silly things in his usual abusive manner that once again demeans any content, and is selectively quoted to make it look as bad as possible for Linux.
>> I take issue with the concept of respecting elders.
I know older fools too, but it takes some experience and wisdom to be able to recognize it in others. That is why I teach my children to treat adults with respect. It is far better to assume that others are worthy of respect and treat them with honor that is undeserved than to offend someone worthy.
Treating others with respect is a behavior that commands respect. It has no downside.
I've been a blockbuster subscriber for a few months, and this is not my experience. Turn around time to southern california is frequently two days (I mail a disc, wait a day, and get the replacement the next day) That's pretty darn good.
However, my queue is about 150 movies long and about 2/3 of them are in a wait state. I basically never get the top movie and frequently get something 25 movies down the list. That isn't very good. I will probably drop the service due to their inability to get me my most wanted movie.
> You always have to take what one guy says with a grain of salt;
When that guy is a VP, like "Robb Rasmussen, vice president of EDS Global Alliances" he is presumed to speak for the company. That fact that what he said demonstrated a complete lack of knowledge in his supposed area of expertise does reflect poorly on EDS and all of its employees. Like any other large company, there are some good people working there, but if I were you I'd be looking for another position with a company whose management I didn't have to apologize for.
Why would you not push your security fixes back to the original maintainer of phpBB?
If you want off-the-shelf fixes, and need to fix critical stuff now, your best strategy is to A) make the fix B) push the fix upstream so it is included in future versions (this may involve negotiation or rework on the patch, but it is cheaper and easier than maintaining and testing a private fork)
This is the whole point of why GPL code is better quality in the long run than commercial code - it is in everybodys best interest to get their patches into the main fork. Hoarding private patches becomes expensive.
These two are the only distributions with a sufficient support timeframe for our needs.
I tend to use RHE for Oracle servers where the expense is easy to justify and one of the generic versions (Whitebox/Centos/Tao/Fermi) for everything else. I'm considering a switch to SUSE in the future, as I've been disappointed by Redhat support, but am waiting for a SUSE rebuild project so that I'm not trapped by commercial availablity. So far I haven't found anybody trying to do a generic version of SUSE enterprise. Now that YAST is GPL it seems like one ought to be started.
End-of-lifing is a fine idea, provided that it is on a reasonable time frame. One year is insanely short for an OS. If RedHat had any sense they would just scale the support pricing directly to the age of the OS. That would be better for them, better for their customers, and better for linux enterprise deployment.
I have lots of machines which are stuck at an older revision due to software application requirements. (i.e. stupid vendors linked wrong so the product will only run with glibc from 7.2) I can't upgrade these machines, so redhat will simply not get more money from me for them.
I'd have no problem paying double or triple the quite reasonable $60/yr/machine RHN costs but I do have a problem with the $800/yr/machine that RHAS costs when it is accompanied with no community support and (in my experience) poor Redhat support.
I'm certain third party support will pop up to cover us folks with money that RedHat doesn't want to service, but it is unfortunate that RedHat is squandering its hard earned corporate goodwill so stupidly.
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The HP A1250N (X2 3800) is in all the big box retailers at $849 after rebate, and I haven't seeing anything with an Intel dual core with equivalent specs cheaper. If BestBuy, Circuit City, and Frys all carry it I'm thinking that qualifies as "mainstream PC"
If they are spending their time on things that are uninteresting for normal folk then they are WASTING their time!! Congress should be working in areas that interest citizens. Price regulation is a notably bad example, since this is clearly an area where congress should not be acting at all.
Ironically, Supermicro makes opteron white box systems and motherboards.
Monarch computing supposedly carries them, relabelled as "Monarch" brand.
Supermicro won't sell them to end users, and apparently won't let anybody advertise them as Supermicro due (presumably) to fear of damaging their relationship with Intel. It seems a weird way to operate unless there is something untoward going on.
Another fine article by Dan Lyons. Theo says a lot of silly things in his usual abusive manner that once again demeans any content, and is selectively quoted to make it look as bad as possible for Linux.
Could we please have a disclaimer in the summary?
That howstuffworks link crashed my firefox 1.0.4
on win Xp. Anybody else seeing that?
It's repeatable, but quite annoying.
>> I take issue with the concept of respecting elders.
I know older fools too, but it takes some experience and wisdom to be able to recognize it in others.
That is why I teach my children to treat adults with respect. It is far better to assume that others are worthy of respect and treat them with honor that is undeserved than to offend someone worthy.
Treating others with respect is a behavior that commands respect. It has no downside.
Don't see how you can call this "News" for nerds or anybody else. The editors are asleep at the wheel again.
I've been a blockbuster subscriber for a few months, and this is not my experience. Turn around time to southern california is frequently two days (I mail a disc, wait a day, and get the replacement the next day) That's pretty darn good.
However, my queue is about 150 movies long and about 2/3 of them are in a wait state. I basically never get the top movie and frequently get something 25 movies down the list. That isn't very good. I will probably drop the service due to their inability to get me my most wanted movie.
I'm not sure which I like best about this argument: that it is respectful of the opposing viewpoints or that it is simply well constructed.
Wish I had moderator points today...
> You always have to take what one guy says with a grain of salt;
When that guy is a VP, like "Robb Rasmussen, vice president of EDS Global Alliances" he is presumed to speak for the company. That fact that what he said demonstrated a complete lack of knowledge in his supposed area of expertise does reflect poorly on EDS and all of its employees. Like any other large company, there are some good people working there, but if I were you I'd be looking for another position with a company whose management I didn't have to apologize for.
Why would you not push your security fixes back to the original maintainer of phpBB?
If you want off-the-shelf fixes, and need to fix critical stuff now, your best strategy is to
A) make the fix
B) push the fix upstream so it is included in future versions (this may involve negotiation or rework on the patch, but it is cheaper and easier than maintaining and testing a private fork)
This is the whole point of why GPL code is better quality in the long run than commercial code - it is in everybodys best interest to get their patches into the main fork. Hoarding private patches becomes expensive.
These two are the only distributions with a sufficient support timeframe for our needs.
I tend to use RHE for Oracle servers where the expense is easy to justify and one of the generic versions (Whitebox/Centos/Tao/Fermi) for everything else. I'm considering a switch to SUSE in the future, as I've been disappointed by Redhat support, but am waiting for a SUSE rebuild project so that I'm not trapped by commercial availablity. So far I haven't found anybody trying to do a generic version of SUSE enterprise. Now that YAST is GPL it seems like one ought to be started.
End-of-lifing is a fine idea, provided that it is on a reasonable time frame. One year is insanely short for an OS. If RedHat had any sense they would just scale the support pricing directly to the age of the OS. That would be better for them, better for their customers, and better for linux enterprise deployment.
I have lots of machines which are stuck at an older revision due to software application requirements. (i.e. stupid vendors linked wrong so the product will only run with glibc from 7.2) I can't upgrade these machines, so redhat will simply not get more money from me for them.
I'd have no problem paying double or triple the quite reasonable $60/yr/machine RHN costs but I do have a problem with the $800/yr/machine that RHAS costs when it is accompanied with no community support and (in my experience) poor Redhat support.
I'm certain third party support will pop up to cover us folks with money that RedHat doesn't want to service, but it is unfortunate that RedHat is squandering its hard earned corporate goodwill so stupidly.