Samsung released the SPH-M2100 with music plaback in 2000.
And the implementation of a real web browser
Opera Mobile was released in 2000.
And the integration of both Yahoo and Google services
Mail and maps, once you get past the brand names. Both have been available on smart phones for ages. My current phone set me back $30 - not only does it have mapping, but it has the GPS that makes it useful.
And the thin form factor
Same thickness as a Samsung Blackjack. Thicker than a Motorola Q. Truly earth-shatter.
About the only thing that's arguable "innovative" is the interface. There weren't first on full touch-screen interfaces (LGE, BenQ and Nokia have all demoed similar models and so far as I know they won't be the first to market either). MultiTouch isn't new - they bought that technology - but they are the first to implement it in a phone, so I'd give them that.
Two words - corporate sales. The market is a lot larger than retail and the preference is still for desktop machines (lower cost, lower theft). There is certainly demand for a lower cost alternative to current systems though. Expect the market to shift to SFF machines running "notebook" drives.
Even within the confines retail market, unit sales still favour desktop systems; notebooks have only outstripped desktops in terms of dollars spend due to the unit price being approximately $400 higher.
Exactly. Linux does it better but still doesn't do it well. At this point in time it has a far better chance of improving significantly than a new project would be.
Windows programs will never run well under Linux (with the release of Vista, Wine is losing more ground than it ever took).
I don't think this is necessarily a death knell as a viable desktop platform. The same can be said about MacOS X, afterall. Services are finally becoming viable alternatives to applications - see gmail instead of outlook, flikr instead of local photo management, the popularity of flash games.
The era of "I need Windows because I need " certainly isn't over by a long shot, but it's not as strong an argument as it once was. (When that's true, I expect virtualization to be a much more common solution than emulation.)
Even shockwave and quite a few video codecs don't work.
After hardware (specifically 3d drivers for video cards and wireless chipsets) that strikes me as the biggest barrier. Thankfully it's not nearly as dire as it could be. Most online video is trending to FLV, which works fine (though it will be nice when FP9 finally comes out of beta since it allows richer controls and the significantly better On6 codec). Next biggie for video would be VC-1/WMV9, which is now fully supported. For audio it's all about mp3. That's a huge blow. On the other hand Fluendo paid for a patent license to allow free distribution of their plugin.
All the interesting stuff in supplanting Windows in the desktop is in, well, the desktop. The underlying operating system is irrelevent so long as it works, and Linux is going to continue doing that far better than upstart efforts.
Cellular service with a particular carrier tends to vary wildly from region to region, but in this area the coverage is fairly spotty (last year there were long periods where even downtown coverage was bad, mostly when they were trying to eliminate supposed redundancy from the AT&T merger) and their customer service has been less than stellar (high turnover with account reps doesn't help).
The real killer for us, though, was SMS service bad to the point of being unusable - messages regularly delayed for hours, a high percentage of messages never showing up, several instances where their mail gateway simply rejected or bounced messages, and so forth. They had us reset phones (which often would result in all delayed messages delivered at once, but never solved anything long term. They had us try several models of phones. They tried claiming that there was a problem with *our* mailserver (sorry, no, not only did we send from multiple networks, but I can see the errors your gateway is returning in the logs). One sales rep tried to sell us an "enterprise messaging plan" that cost more but gave no additional guarantees... and apparently had been discountinued anyways since the website had removed it from the list of options.
Ultimately the accounts were cancelled and Sprint contracted instead. That was about a year ago. We recently got a couple phone to trial and have had the exact same issues.
The C64 still holds the crown as the best selling personal computer of all time. At about 30 million units (not counting the backwards compatible C128) it's certainly less obscure than the TG/16.
(Never owned one myself. I was in the Apple II camp.:)
Talented architects are fabulous, but you don't ship computers with them. The best design in the world won't help you if it's not a shipping product from a company with the resources to ensure a steady supply.
In any case, we are at a time where the outlook of the PPC has never looked better.
Again, people don't buy outlook. They buy computers. Apple desperately needed a refresh on their notebook designs, which had been stuck with the G4 for over four years.
Intel may be selling some decent processors now, but they will never be as cheap or efficient as the PPC. (and with the integration offered by P.A. Semi, this was only improving.)
Instruction sets aren't cheap or efficient, processors are. There are plenty of x86 designs on the market that are energy efficient, cost effective, highly integrated or some combination of those attributes.
SpamHaus is the only blacklist that I trust to do straight blocking on. We've been using them for years and have gotten a grand total of two complaints about blocked mail; in both cases the sender was on the XBL because their machine was compomised. Considering our active userbase is in the hundreds of thousands, I'd say that isn't bad at all.:)
We actively discourage people from using SORBS. Even if they were more accurate, their removal policy is extortion.
Any of the other blacklists out there I would recommend only as part of a scoring algorithm. Most are fairly cavalier about blocking entire netblocks even if the problem is isolated, most have no automatic aging of entries, many have poor delisting policies or are slow to respond and the false positive rates tend to vary from ok to abysmal (SpamCop, for example, doesn't seem to know the difference between a bounce message and a piece of spam... though to their credit they are fairly good about removals and provide a feedback loop so you at least know when they've tagged a message as spam).
Yeah, if you're running in stanby, powering off isn't a huge savings. Plenty of sites don't even bother configuring that.
Not nearly as many companies take power into consideration as should, but expect that to change. The vendors are using it as a key sales pitch to spur upgrades and move customers onto higher cost items ("well sure this Core 2 machine costs more than the Pentium D model, but once you take power savings into consideration...").
I expect energy efficient processors will creep into business desktops (Optiplex, ThinkCentre, etc) and 2.5" drives will eventually supplant 3.5" drives.
Yeah, I focused on desktop savings mostly because that's Apple's primary market, but power in the server market is an even greater concern. Not only are the systems prone to being more power hungry, but you're going to pay a lot more (think line conditioners for clean power, battery backup, generators, etc).
We just pulled in power for another eight racks. Even with relatively low power blade servers... ow.
Dual core 2GHz PPC below 25W isn't an improvement I guess? Look at PA-Semi...
You mean a processor from a fabless company announced six months after Apple announced the switch to Intel, and wasn't expected to sample until nearly a year after the first Intel Macintosh shipped? It's an interesting product, particularly if the performance of the cores is any good (hard to say, since there seems to be much in the way of benchmarks), but it didn't exist as a product until recently. Even if it had, there's the significant question of whether they could secure the fab capacity to supply a major customer like Apple.
What home user really cares if their PC takes 150W or 180W ? Nobody...
Desktops aren't the dealbreaker here. Try asking "who cares if their laptop runs for 5 hours or 3 hours?" or maybe "who cares if their laptop can be used comfortably in their lap?" or perhaps "who cares if they can get reasonable performance for photo-editing, video-editing and what not in a portable form factor?".
Cast an eye toward the business market and performance per watt on the desktop is important. You may not care about a 30W savings but an a company with 500 seats may well care about 28800kWh in savings per year (assuming 240 work eight hour work days a year after factoring out weekends holidays and vacation).
It's the same with a server. You're suggesting running the car for ten years without changing a part just to avoid putting in a part that won't work right. While software isn't as simple as a car part, this is still incorrect.
Most operating system vendors put out these neat things called patches (or updates, or errata) to fix things that are broken. Those are parts. Moving to a new version of the entire operating system is akin to buying the next model year.
And it doesn't take five years to plan a production environment upgrade - that's ridiculous.
I never said it did.
The PLANNING can be done in a month - it's the actual upgrade that can take a while if done properly over time. And even a test cycle could be done in a relatively short time.
That depends entirely on the company and their business requirements. If you've got a relatively large number of servers, a wide range of applications or constrictive SLAs your test cycle will be considerable. There's also the question of how much spare manpower you have for the job. Having to bring in consultants to oversee regression tests because your schedule is compressed and/or your normal QA people are otherwise occupied is added overhead that can usually be avoided.
We're also not talking about server software not evolving quickly. In that situation, you don't have to upgrade the server software itself. We're talking about the OS needing upgrades due to lack of support - which is part of the business of software. Software cannot be supported forever or even the number of years desired by businesses using it.
It can't? Better tell that to Red Hat (7yr support cycle), SuSE (7yr support cycle), Sun (12yr support cycle), IBM (5-6yr support cycle), Hewlett Packard (10yr support cycle), Microsoft (10yr support cycle), etc.
It would be nice if software were as modularized and documented and controllable as a car part, but it isn't. Business needs to accept that fact and use scheduled upgrades to deal with it.
The important bits for most server applications - web servers, database servers, file servers (in the case of *nix at least), etc are modular.
The upgrades might be three or five years, or less or more, but it has to be done.
I never said anything about an indefinite upgrade cycle. You said "this notion that servers can't be touched for five years... is reaching for the moon in terms of reliability" and I disagreed with "five years is hardly an unreasonable life cycle in large scale IT deployments.
I stand by my statement. Five years is a fairly common lifecycle. Three years is possibly more common for actual deployment (ties nicely to common lease terms) but even then you want the support cycle of the platform you're installing to be longer to allow for testing prior to deployment.
People's expectation for video quality on the web is sufficiently lower than even SD broadcast since it's largely bandwidth constrained. When the bar is set for 320x240, you don't need studio level production to satisfy the audience.
I'd expect that for certain types of video, you could easily get away with a high end consumer camera. There's several on the market that have many of the features you listed; e.g. the PV-GS500 has multiple CCDs, focus ring, manual exposure settings and reasonable optics for a street price of around $700. No doubt it would be completely unsuitable for broadcast work, but for amatuer web video?
As for the rest, my guess is that in most cases with any medium or large business, business needs (new services, new marketing, new regulatory, whatever) are going to force doing all that anyway, regardless of what the OS vendor actually does.
That's largely a matter of software running on an operating system, not the operating system itself. With commercial software you're actually more likely to have a requirement on an older platform than a new one (plenty of apps out there are certified for nothing newer than RHEL3).
And really server software doesn't evolve all that quickly. Apache 1.x can deliver fancy shmancy "web 2.0" pages just dandy, with MySQL 4.x as a backend even.
Most of the stuff you mention is either something that shouldn't take "man years" of effort, or, in the case of porting software and QA, depends on factors outside of the OS itself and are even more likely to require changes over a five-year period in today's environments.
It should take as long as it takes. And the reality is that it is man-years of effort to do right. Upgrades in a production environment have to be heavily planned and handled with a lot of care. Regardless whether porting and QA are part of the upgrade itself, they are an added cost incurred by an upgrade cycle.
Finally, all of this stuff is a matter of IT management PLANNING. If your planning is decent, an OS upgrade should not be a make or break event. Waiting until the last minute and doing it when you HAVE to do it is how you get "man years" of effort involved.
Who said anything about waiting until the last minute? An overly aggressive upgrade cycle ensures insufficient planning. A five year upgrade cycle affords you the opportunity to start evaluation and planning early, have a leisurely pilot and test cycle, and leave plenty of wiggle room in the rollout to make sure you hit the target completion date.
Just as the best way to maintain a car is to know hoe many miles each part is certified for, then replace it BEFORE it breaks, the best way to maintain a server is scheduled upgrades - not trying to run it into the ground for five or more years.
My "car" is certified for seven years and gets regular scheduled upgrades. What you're saying is I should trade in a well-maintained vehicle that runs beautifully just because there are newer shinier carson the lot.
Five years is hardly an unreasonable life cycle in large scale IT deployments. It's not laziness to avoid massive expenses - the upgrade itself, retooling config files (e.g. Apache 1.x to 2.x), recertifying hardware, porting or rebuilding software, running everything through a new QA cycle, etc. There's also issues of SLAs which may require customer approval for major software changes or incur penalties if critical systems need to be downed for the upgrade (and god forbid anything goes wrong).
Edge into even a medium-sized company and an upgrade may cost man-years of labor from several departments. You damn well better have a solid business case before you recommend an upgrade.
I've been running Ubuntu on my laptop for a while now (a few days ater 6.06). Seems a solid enough distribution, so far, but I'd personally hold off using it on a server until they a longer track record and a formal definition of "support".
When you're talking server platforms, Fedora was never a viable platform (despite some folks insistance on running it as such). For something Red Hat flavoured, you'd want to look at CentOS.
Erm, Ubuntu supports for 18 months for most of their releases. Only one release has been designated "long term support" and that's only 5 years for servers; the desktop version is only supported for 3 years.
And, on top of that, Fedora Legacy is not Red Hat, is not affiliated with Red Hat, and is not sponsered by Red Hat. As such their actions don't reflect on Red Hat.
I consider the Wii worth it on gameplay alone. Wii Sports is a hoot (especially at gatherings) and even if you can get nearly identical graphics with Zelda on the Gamecube, you're not getting the same experience.
Add in a low price and the nostalgia value of the virtual console and it's hardly "utterly pointless". Maybe not worth it for you personally, but that's another issue altogether.
Slashdot Mirror
And the integration of iPod
Samsung released the SPH-M2100 with music plaback in 2000.
And the implementation of a real web browser
Opera Mobile was released in 2000.
And the integration of both Yahoo and Google services
Mail and maps, once you get past the brand names. Both have been available on smart phones for ages. My current phone set me back $30 - not only does it have mapping, but it has the GPS that makes it useful.
And the thin form factor
Same thickness as a Samsung Blackjack. Thicker than a Motorola Q. Truly earth-shatter.
About the only thing that's arguable "innovative" is the interface. There weren't first on full touch-screen interfaces (LGE, BenQ and Nokia have all demoed similar models and so far as I know they won't be the first to market either). MultiTouch isn't new - they bought that technology - but they are the first to implement it in a phone, so I'd give them that.
Apple's forte is refinement, not innovation.
Two words - corporate sales. The market is a lot larger than retail and the preference is still for desktop machines (lower cost, lower theft). There is certainly demand for a lower cost alternative to current systems though. Expect the market to shift to SFF machines running "notebook" drives.
Even within the confines retail market, unit sales still favour desktop systems; notebooks have only outstripped desktops in terms of dollars spend due to the unit price being approximately $400 higher.
Think EyeTV, not ITV. :)
I'm in Buffalo
But it doesn't, and it can't.
Exactly. Linux does it better but still doesn't do it well. At this point in time it has a far better chance of improving significantly than a new project would be.
Windows programs will never run well under Linux (with the release of Vista, Wine is losing more ground than it ever took).
I don't think this is necessarily a death knell as a viable desktop platform. The same can be said about MacOS X, afterall. Services are finally becoming viable alternatives to applications - see gmail instead of outlook, flikr instead of local photo management, the popularity of flash games.
The era of "I need Windows because I need " certainly isn't over by a long shot, but it's not as strong an argument as it once was. (When that's true, I expect virtualization to be a much more common solution than emulation.)
Even shockwave and quite a few video codecs don't work.
After hardware (specifically 3d drivers for video cards and wireless chipsets) that strikes me as the biggest barrier. Thankfully it's not nearly as dire as it could be. Most online video is trending to FLV, which works fine (though it will be nice when FP9 finally comes out of beta since it allows richer controls and the significantly better On6 codec). Next biggie for video would be VC-1/WMV9, which is now fully supported. For audio it's all about mp3. That's a huge blow. On the other hand Fluendo paid for a patent license to allow free distribution of their plugin.
The iPhone was release in 1997. The iMac was announced in 1998. Since Cisco acquired all assets and marks of Infogear, Cisco FTW. :)
All the interesting stuff in supplanting Windows in the desktop is in, well, the desktop. The underlying operating system is irrelevent so long as it works, and Linux is going to continue doing that far better than upstart efforts.
Cellular service with a particular carrier tends to vary wildly from region to region, but in this area the coverage is fairly spotty (last year there were long periods where even downtown coverage was bad, mostly when they were trying to eliminate supposed redundancy from the AT&T merger) and their customer service has been less than stellar (high turnover with account reps doesn't help).
... and apparently had been discountinued anyways since the website had removed it from the list of options.
The real killer for us, though, was SMS service bad to the point of being unusable - messages regularly delayed for hours, a high percentage of messages never showing up, several instances where their mail gateway simply rejected or bounced messages, and so forth. They had us reset phones (which often would result in all delayed messages delivered at once, but never solved anything long term. They had us try several models of phones. They tried claiming that there was a problem with *our* mailserver (sorry, no, not only did we send from multiple networks, but I can see the errors your gateway is returning in the logs). One sales rep tried to sell us an "enterprise messaging plan" that cost more but gave no additional guarantees
Ultimately the accounts were cancelled and Sprint contracted instead. That was about a year ago. We recently got a couple phone to trial and have had the exact same issues.
C64 is a bit too obscure, me thinks.
:)
The C64 still holds the crown as the best selling personal computer of all time. At about 30 million units (not counting the backwards compatible C128) it's certainly less obscure than the TG/16.
(Never owned one myself. I was in the Apple II camp.
Talented architects are fabulous, but you don't ship computers with them. The best design in the world won't help you if it's not a shipping product from a company with the resources to ensure a steady supply.
In any case, we are at a time where the outlook of the PPC has never looked better.
Again, people don't buy outlook. They buy computers. Apple desperately needed a refresh on their notebook designs, which had been stuck with the G4 for over four years.
Intel may be selling some decent processors now, but they will never be as cheap or efficient as the PPC. (and with the integration offered by P.A. Semi, this was only improving.)
Instruction sets aren't cheap or efficient, processors are. There are plenty of x86 designs on the market that are energy efficient, cost effective, highly integrated or some combination of those attributes.
SpamHaus is the only blacklist that I trust to do straight blocking on. We've been using them for years and have gotten a grand total of two complaints about blocked mail; in both cases the sender was on the XBL because their machine was compomised. Considering our active userbase is in the hundreds of thousands, I'd say that isn't bad at all. :)
We actively discourage people from using SORBS. Even if they were more accurate, their removal policy is extortion.
Any of the other blacklists out there I would recommend only as part of a scoring algorithm. Most are fairly cavalier about blocking entire netblocks even if the problem is isolated, most have no automatic aging of entries, many have poor delisting policies or are slow to respond and the false positive rates tend to vary from ok to abysmal (SpamCop, for example, doesn't seem to know the difference between a bounce message and a piece of spam... though to their credit they are fairly good about removals and provide a feedback loop so you at least know when they've tagged a message as spam).
You'd think being in Buffalo we'd be just as well off, but weather is unseasonably warm so far this year. :)
Yeah, if you're running in stanby, powering off isn't a huge savings. Plenty of sites don't even bother configuring that.
Not nearly as many companies take power into consideration as should, but expect that to change. The vendors are using it as a key sales pitch to spur upgrades and move customers onto higher cost items ("well sure this Core 2 machine costs more than the Pentium D model, but once you take power savings into consideration...").
I expect energy efficient processors will creep into business desktops (Optiplex, ThinkCentre, etc) and 2.5" drives will eventually supplant 3.5" drives.
Yeah, I focused on desktop savings mostly because that's Apple's primary market, but power in the server market is an even greater concern. Not only are the systems prone to being more power hungry, but you're going to pay a lot more (think line conditioners for clean power, battery backup, generators, etc).
We just pulled in power for another eight racks. Even with relatively low power blade servers... ow.
Dual core 2GHz PPC below 25W isn't an improvement I guess? Look at PA-Semi...
You mean a processor from a fabless company announced six months after Apple announced the switch to Intel, and wasn't expected to sample until nearly a year after the first Intel Macintosh shipped? It's an interesting product, particularly if the performance of the cores is any good (hard to say, since there seems to be much in the way of benchmarks), but it didn't exist as a product until recently. Even if it had, there's the significant question of whether they could secure the fab capacity to supply a major customer like Apple.
What home user really cares if their PC takes 150W or 180W ? Nobody...
Desktops aren't the dealbreaker here. Try asking "who cares if their laptop runs for 5 hours or 3 hours?" or maybe "who cares if their laptop can be used comfortably in their lap?" or perhaps "who cares if they can get reasonable performance for photo-editing, video-editing and what not in a portable form factor?".
Cast an eye toward the business market and performance per watt on the desktop is important. You may not care about a 30W savings but an a company with 500 seats may well care about 28800kWh in savings per year (assuming 240 work eight hour work days a year after factoring out weekends holidays and vacation).
It's the same with a server. You're suggesting running the car for ten years without changing a part just to avoid putting in a part that won't work right. While software isn't as simple as a car part, this is still incorrect.
... is reaching for the moon in terms of reliability" and I disagreed with "five years is hardly an unreasonable life cycle in large scale IT deployments.
Most operating system vendors put out these neat things called patches (or updates, or errata) to fix things that are broken. Those are parts. Moving to a new version of the entire operating system is akin to buying the next model year.
And it doesn't take five years to plan a production environment upgrade - that's ridiculous.
I never said it did.
The PLANNING can be done in a month - it's the actual upgrade that can take a while if done properly over time. And even a test cycle could be done in a relatively short time.
That depends entirely on the company and their business requirements. If you've got a relatively large number of servers, a wide range of applications or constrictive SLAs your test cycle will be considerable. There's also the question of how much spare manpower you have for the job. Having to bring in consultants to oversee regression tests because your schedule is compressed and/or your normal QA people are otherwise occupied is added overhead that can usually be avoided.
We're also not talking about server software not evolving quickly. In that situation, you don't have to upgrade the server software itself. We're talking about the OS needing upgrades due to lack of support - which is part of the business of software. Software cannot be supported forever or even the number of years desired by businesses using it.
It can't? Better tell that to Red Hat (7yr support cycle), SuSE (7yr support cycle), Sun (12yr support cycle), IBM (5-6yr support cycle), Hewlett Packard (10yr support cycle), Microsoft (10yr support cycle), etc.
It would be nice if software were as modularized and documented and controllable as a car part, but it isn't. Business needs to accept that fact and use scheduled upgrades to deal with it.
The important bits for most server applications - web servers, database servers, file servers (in the case of *nix at least), etc are modular.
The upgrades might be three or five years, or less or more, but it has to be done.
I never said anything about an indefinite upgrade cycle. You said "this notion that servers can't be touched for five years
I stand by my statement. Five years is a fairly common lifecycle. Three years is possibly more common for actual deployment (ties nicely to common lease terms) but even then you want the support cycle of the platform you're installing to be longer to allow for testing prior to deployment.
People's expectation for video quality on the web is sufficiently lower than even SD broadcast since it's largely bandwidth constrained. When the bar is set for 320x240, you don't need studio level production to satisfy the audience.
I'd expect that for certain types of video, you could easily get away with a high end consumer camera. There's several on the market that have many of the features you listed; e.g. the PV-GS500 has multiple CCDs, focus ring, manual exposure settings and reasonable optics for a street price of around $700. No doubt it would be completely unsuitable for broadcast work, but for amatuer web video?
As for the rest, my guess is that in most cases with any medium or large business, business needs (new services, new marketing, new regulatory, whatever) are going to force doing all that anyway, regardless of what the OS vendor actually does.
That's largely a matter of software running on an operating system, not the operating system itself. With commercial software you're actually more likely to have a requirement on an older platform than a new one (plenty of apps out there are certified for nothing newer than RHEL3).
And really server software doesn't evolve all that quickly. Apache 1.x can deliver fancy shmancy "web 2.0" pages just dandy, with MySQL 4.x as a backend even.
Most of the stuff you mention is either something that shouldn't take "man years" of effort, or, in the case of porting software and QA, depends on factors outside of the OS itself and are even more likely to require changes over a five-year period in today's environments.
It should take as long as it takes. And the reality is that it is man-years of effort to do right. Upgrades in a production environment have to be heavily planned and handled with a lot of care. Regardless whether porting and QA are part of the upgrade itself, they are an added cost incurred by an upgrade cycle.
Finally, all of this stuff is a matter of IT management PLANNING. If your planning is decent, an OS upgrade should not be a make or break event. Waiting until the last minute and doing it when you HAVE to do it is how you get "man years" of effort involved.
Who said anything about waiting until the last minute? An overly aggressive upgrade cycle ensures insufficient planning. A five year upgrade cycle affords you the opportunity to start evaluation and planning early, have a leisurely pilot and test cycle, and leave plenty of wiggle room in the rollout to make sure you hit the target completion date.
Just as the best way to maintain a car is to know hoe many miles each part is certified for, then replace it BEFORE it breaks, the best way to maintain a server is scheduled upgrades - not trying to run it into the ground for five or more years.
My "car" is certified for seven years and gets regular scheduled upgrades. What you're saying is I should trade in a well-maintained vehicle that runs beautifully just because there are newer shinier carson the lot.
Five years is hardly an unreasonable life cycle in large scale IT deployments. It's not laziness to avoid massive expenses - the upgrade itself, retooling config files (e.g. Apache 1.x to 2.x), recertifying hardware, porting or rebuilding software, running everything through a new QA cycle, etc. There's also issues of SLAs which may require customer approval for major software changes or incur penalties if critical systems need to be downed for the upgrade (and god forbid anything goes wrong).
Edge into even a medium-sized company and an upgrade may cost man-years of labor from several departments. You damn well better have a solid business case before you recommend an upgrade.
I've been running Ubuntu on my laptop for a while now (a few days ater 6.06). Seems a solid enough distribution, so far, but I'd personally hold off using it on a server until they a longer track record and a formal definition of "support".
When you're talking server platforms, Fedora was never a viable platform (despite some folks insistance on running it as such). For something Red Hat flavoured, you'd want to look at CentOS.
Fedora != Fedora Legacy
RHT said nothing. Fedora Legacy, "a community-supported open source project" which "is not a supported project of Red Hat, Inc." did.
Erm, Ubuntu supports for 18 months for most of their releases. Only one release has been designated "long term support" and that's only 5 years for servers; the desktop version is only supported for 3 years.
And, on top of that, Fedora Legacy is not Red Hat, is not affiliated with Red Hat, and is not sponsered by Red Hat. As such their actions don't reflect on Red Hat.
Erm, I never visit Wired directly, only when someone posts a link that looks potentially interesting.
I consider the Wii worth it on gameplay alone. Wii Sports is a hoot (especially at gatherings) and even if you can get nearly identical graphics with Zelda on the Gamecube, you're not getting the same experience.
Add in a low price and the nostalgia value of the virtual console and it's hardly "utterly pointless". Maybe not worth it for you personally, but that's another issue altogether.