Mod this parent down... not insightful.
In 2000, I bought a video card (Matrox G400MAX, which I'm still using) for about $160, I think. What does a video card cost today? It's hard to say, since there's a lot of variety. But speaking very generally, a video card costs about the same. You bought a G400MAX in 2000 for $160, a card with the exact same capabilities 7 years later would certainly cost less today. Now what you may trying to say is that "a reference card" (which you G400MAX could be classified as, always costs "about $160", however the capabilities of "a reference card" increase year after year.
If Radiohead did not have record labels such as "XL, ATO, Parlophone and Capitol" marketing them or in essence providing seed funding/capital, would Radiohead have had the ability to make a name for themselves in today's internet era? My band gives away their music for free and do you think KROC in LA would tell the world that my band gives away our music for free? Nope. Radiohead was taking advantage of the marketing that had already been done (and yes they paid for it with the labels taking their cut of Radiohead's work).
So how could you market your music? Mail CDs to the radio stations, doubt it. Battle of the Bands, local gigs, works fine but takes a while to build up a non-regional following, and even that might not lead to radio play. So you're still left with word of mouth.
and this is where Radiohead cheated. Their word of mouth was spread via the mass media. I heard about it on not less than 3 radiostations. Radioheads "Can we get people to download something for free?" is not much different from a local ice cream shop offering a free scoop on their anniversary. Since the ice cream is free, I'll give it a try even if I normally don't eat ice cream in February. Sure I might return one day and purchase some on my own, or maybe i'll never go back there.
While I envy Radiohead's experiment on downloading free music (or name your price), I think it would be far more interesting for a study to be done on the viability of the thousands of bands which do not already have an international following of giving away their music.
Here's my questions to the/. audience... When you go anywhere, are you expecting 100% of the time to get a cell phone signal?
-Drive into a parking garage, no signal. -Go down into the basement, no signal. -Drive through a tunnel, no signal. There's plenty others but you get the point...
So why should you expect to get "4 bars" 100% of the time?
You shouldn't. If you want 100% guaranteed signals, sit by a landline.
I know we've got some self-righteous people here, "I'm a sysadmin, my linux servers can never go down..." "I'm a brain surgeon..." I don't care WHO or WHAT you are as you try to justify your need to have Beethoven's 5th or Snoop's 2nd play at max volume.
Look at the smokers. They need to smoke, so they go outside every hour. You want to check your voicemail, blackberry, pager, go outside every hour and check. If it's going to kill you, or another person for you to be 100% unreachable for a period of time, then don't go to these places where you are unavailable.
What would you do if you were in a movie theater, sports arena in which the walls were of sufficient thickness/material that you couldn't get a signal? Would you sue the owner of the arena/theater? Doubt it. You'd probably blame your wireless carrier for not putting a tower INSIDE the arena/theater.
What about when you fly? If you are so self-important that you can never miss calls, then when you fly from SF to NY and it takes 6hrs, you probably tell someone, "Hey, I'm going to be unavailable for 6hrs on Tuesday, don't page me."
Lastly, if you're a sysadmin, and you have a process in which "If we don't reach Bob in 5minutes, our whole business will die. Go create a procedure, whereby your IT group isn't "One car wreck away from a disaster." Go create backups, alternative people to help etc...
Belly ache all you want, but smokers aren't allowed to smoke in movie theaters because it's unhealthy to me. Go ahead and use you cell phone in the theater and you'll find out how unhealthy it is to you.
Movie reviewers solved this issue, not by going with STARS, but guys like Roger Ebert decided to give it a 'thumbs up' or 'thumbs down' knowing that liking a movie is very subjective. In essence he's saying "I liked it" or "I didn't like it".
People want to give a absolute rating (4 stars, 99pts 'this game rockz!') as it gives them some self appointed absolute ruling, for which there is no unit of measurement. Is a 90% sports game better or worse than a 90% FPS from gamespot equate to the same 90% from ign?
You can't tell. So go with "i like it" or "i don't like it."
I've been overpaid, not sure how much. Could be 900, could be twice that. Either way, the money is spent. I did spend almost 4 hours one day at the district offices only to be told they had no answer and couldn't help me. Lame! I was also told that if I was overpaid they will request it back. However I got mixed answers to how and when I'd have to repay them. SOme say they will deduct it from one full paycheck. Others say it will be taken out in smaller increments. We'll see what happens. What really sucks is those of us who have been overpaid have also paid taxes on that money.
So if by having hardware prices fall, it's easier for Joe Consumer to purchase a larger system, and with the requirements of Windows (read: Vista) being greater than that of linux or XP, I would think that it's now easier for Joe Consumer to get into a Vista system. Yeah the cost of Windows is still higher, but the total cost of a new machine is still lower.
Bottom line: lower hardware costs benefit those platforms which are normally out of reach. Linux has always been "affordable", if people are buying linux at $200, they won't buy it at $100...
It would be nice if they could demonstrate that other cities have accepted such an offer - keep in mind that the Gazette is Montréal's leading English language, right-leaning paper. The sense that they are also delivering a slight poke to the French spoken city officials is unmistakable.
Almost all bigbox electronics stores in the SF Bay area have some min wage person checking your receipt vs your bag and marking your receipt with a pink/yellow highlighter. I'm not sure what the highlighter does, nor do I really care. I just see it as another step in checking out. Sometimes the cashier doesn't remove the 'shoplifter' magnetic strip and the buzzer/alarm goes off. Yeah, it sucks when that happens, but do I act like a dick and 'continue walking b/c I know *I* didn't steal anything and the cashier f-d up'? No.
You had multiple opportunities to show your bag and receipt to the employees and headed off this whole problem. Instead you've got some ax to grind or point to make. You'll eventually make a couple of lawyers even richer, clog up the court system and get your 15minutes of fame on/.
Google is blanketing its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters with 9,212 solar panels, enough to light 1,000 homes So how many "Google DataCenters" do 1000 homes equate to?
For single author, single file documents, MSWord, Openoffice work fine, but when your working on books, larger documents that are comprised of "1 file per chapter" and require easy to use templates (MSWord creates new font templates automatically) so multiple authors can work on the document at the same time. I prefer to use Adobe Framemaker (unix/mac version available as well).
With properly defined templates prior to writing, it's a snap. Though you could spend a while making 'standardized templates'. I'm a professional tech writer and author many documents (think User's Guides, Service Guides etc..) for a large computer company. There's a dozen of us on the team and this makes it easy to bring a new techwriter up to speed.
The best part, what you see on the screen is exactly what gets printed out. Framemaker has it's place. For making a quick document not really, but for more "industrial efforts" it's definitely better than both word and open/star/neo office.
Christians are taught to forgive. Muslims are taught to die in defense of Islaam. THAT is the difference How is the parent modded "insightful" with a generalization like the above? I'm sure I could find an instance whereby "The Christians" didn't forgive.... let's see...
The Crusades. WW2 (remember, the Germans were christians and they didn't forgive the Jews/athiests for being different). Spanish Inquisition.
No one race/religion/group is perfect, so pull your head outta your ignorant ass.
Gimme a break. In the summary:
"In a blog post on the Internet Governance Project's (IGP) Web site, Milton Mueller, Professor and Director of the Telecommunications Network Management Program at the Syracuse University School of Information Studies and a partner in the IGP, details the Final Outcomes Report of the WHOIS Working Group, published on Tuesday, and inability of the various stakeholders to reach any kind of consensus." So the best you could do is to spend the Entire quote putting in this guy's title? This isn't the SCO case, whereby all/. readers know what's going on. How about actually mentioning something about his opinion. You could have just said,
"Milton Muelle, a partner on the Internet Governance Project weighs in on the ability of the various stakeholders to reach any kind of consensus. [Include what the IGP is...]"
When I check out at my local grocery store, I've consistently received coupons for "similar products that I might like" since the 80s. Buy Ben n Jerry's ice cream? Get a coupon for Breyers. Something is predicting I might like another brand of ice cream.
I've been getting these coupons since the early 90s.
We should be able to sue this coupon for "wasting taxpayer dollars" similar to how you can be fined for pulling a fire alarm as a prank.
Telcos make money by charging a customer (you a corporation etc..) to access their network. I read here everyone saying "Google give me free wifi....". Sure they will... and how will Eric Schmidt recoup this $4.6B plus maintenance, plus deployment costs, plus support costs..... etc etc) investment? Do you really think that the idea of "If I give everyone free wifi, they'll automatically use my search engine, Gmail, more?"
I forsee one day... a/. post/comment that complains "Google hasn't brought WIFI to *MY* area.... WAAAHH" I can't wait until we're all bashing Google the same way we bash ATT/Verizon/Sprint for their shoddy coverage.
I also can't wait to see what kind of antenna I'll need on my roof to beam a signal to the nearest TV tower.
A couple of additional points here. First, IBM paints a pretty picture about being all cozy with Linux. The truth is that they use it as a bait-n-switch tactic to get people to move to AIX or z/OS (all proprietary IBM Operating Systems). This means added revenue for IBM. That is, as soon as customers start putting a heavy load on the system, IBM will start pushing AIX or z/OS as a preferred solution. Dunno about bait and switch being an IBM trait. You could say that for ANY IT vendor. You start out by buying their entry/lowend gear and if you continue to grow they start to recommend larger/higherend versions of their gear. There aren't many shops where the google/yahoo model (add more and more commodity servers...) works. While the largest x86 based server IBM makes can have 32CPUs (primary use is VMWare), i highly doubt that windows or linux could take advantage of that many CPUs for a large database installation, while AIX/OS400 have no problems dealing with high numbers of CPUs.
Since this is/. and we must have examples:
I'm sure...
Your network is made up of hundreds of 16port Cisco hubs and not 9slot Cat6ks. Your storage sits on internal disk and not external arrays by EMC/HDS/IBM/HP.. You still ride the same 1 gear bicycle you had when you were 6, and didn't upgrade to one with more gears. 10Mb ethernet on coax is still the preferred medium. Haven't upgraded from linux 2.2 or windows 95.
I wonder how much $$ he's made from people downloading his songs? I seem to recall that he's had quite a few downloads from the downloading of Goodbye England's Rose (Candle in the wind remake for Diana's funeral).
I work in a longtime "blue shop" perspective, not always from a software/OS perspective. While I like the 'concept' of running linux on zSeries, I think you could take a look at the requirements and choose a platform that can run the same Apps.
For example, for email we run Lotus Notes on a couple of BIG pSeries (AIX) servers. We could have run it on a farm (technical term) of windows boxes.
For webservers, which you could run on AIX, or linux on zSeries. We have multiple (read: many) x86 servers running linux+apache. Why? They connect to a backend app server (pSeries) which connects to a backend zSeries DB2 (I'd prefer Oracle however, to run Oracle on zSeries requires it to be run in a linux VM).
We definitely subscribe to the school of using VMs whether they are zSeries, pSeries, or VMWare on x86. Even if the x86 server is running ONE application, we still put vmware underneath, as it allows for us to move the image to a newer hardware platform when it's time to upgrade. Even some of the larger x86 servers run vmware but in each partition there is a single instance of apache. Makes for managing storage that much easier (fewer zones, cabling etc).
Would I consider moving our apache on linux on x86 to apache on linux on zSeries? Not really. It's a waste of CPU cycles (MIPS). I'd rather use zSeries MIPS for something a bit more critical like keeping my database up and running than serving out webpages (static or dynamic).
IT isn't not about religion, it's about finding the best tool considering your requirements. I have no problems telling IBM that product XYZ is trash. While my servers are IBM, you won't see IBM disk, or IBM tape, and atleast once a quarter some salesman from IBMs storage group is at my door. He buys me lunch and every quarter he is sent packing. You won't see ibm bladecenters as the thought of hundreds of additional servers to manage isn't appealing (but I'll gladly take 100s of VMs across larger x86/pseries boxes).
I know many of you were expecting to hear me say 5000 linux servers, but there are options for my requirements that did not lead to big "google style" linux farms.
BTW: I have no problems kicking out IBM on x86 if HP/Dell/Sun have a better product, and knowing this and letting IBM know this gives me a great advantage over them, as they very well know I'm capable of bringing in something more suitable. (I *used* to have IBM storage).
You forgot one very important component, the car battery used to START THE GENERATOR. I've been to many sites whereby the battery that would start the generator is a) dead or b) missing.
I'm not saying that there aren't vendors with single produts that are better, but NOT all companies/customers are looking for 500 different vendors. You wouldn't build a server farm from 50 different linux servers b/c "IBM w/redhat is better at dns, HP w/Ubuntu is better at samba, Dell/slackware is better at sendmail..." you'd go outta your mind supporting such a hetergenous infrastructure.
Cisco/MSFT have plenty in common. All religions aside, when you hire someone it's much easier to find someone that is familiar (CCIE) with a broad range of cisco products than to find one that has (as you put it), "Juniper for routers. Extreme for Network Switches. Juniper/Netscreen, Fortinet, or even Checkpoint for firewalls." The same holds true if you were hiring someone with office skills. It's much easier to find someone that is well versed in MS-Office than it is to find someone that has the same skillset in lotusnotes, wordperfect, etc...
Building an IT infrastructure is more than just having the 'fastest, best out there'. It's building the best solution for YOUR environment. I work with plenty of clients that have Juniper in the core and cisco at the access/distribution layer.
Cisco is the Microsoft of networking gear. Their stuff is complete crap compared to the alternatives in every category. It's also overpriced. I think you hit the nail on the head. Alternatives in every catagory. Which means you have 500 different vendors. From core routers, to access switches to firewall appliances, to Content/Caching engines to telephony to wireless, heck Cisco even makes storage switches. If there's a nework problem, you call up ONE company. You sign one large support contract, makes it very easy to have 'one neck to choke' when there's an issue.
When you build a server (not a hobbiest linux box at home) would you rather buy all the parts (cpu, ram, disk, etc..) from ONE vendor, or would you rather buy each component from someone else? You'd call up IBM/hp/dell/sun and order a server, so when the ram breaks you call the same vendor as when the CPU breaks.
While cisco gear may not be the best in every catagory, the solution as a whole is pretty good and there's not a networking vendor that can provide an 'end to end' solution. Plus there's something to be said for being able to put firewall/content/PoE/WAN modules in a single chassis.
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If Radiohead did not have record labels such as "XL, ATO, Parlophone and Capitol" marketing them or in essence providing seed funding/capital, would Radiohead have had the ability to make a name for themselves in today's internet era? My band gives away their music for free and do you think KROC in LA would tell the world that my band gives away our music for free? Nope. Radiohead was taking advantage of the marketing that had already been done (and yes they paid for it with the labels taking their cut of Radiohead's work).
So how could you market your music? Mail CDs to the radio stations, doubt it. Battle of the Bands, local gigs, works fine but takes a while to build up a non-regional following, and even that might not lead to radio play. So you're still left with word of mouth.
and this is where Radiohead cheated. Their word of mouth was spread via the mass media. I heard about it on not less than 3 radiostations. Radioheads "Can we get people to download something for free?" is not much different from a local ice cream shop offering a free scoop on their anniversary. Since the ice cream is free, I'll give it a try even if I normally don't eat ice cream in February. Sure I might return one day and purchase some on my own, or maybe i'll never go back there.
While I envy Radiohead's experiment on downloading free music (or name your price), I think it would be far more interesting for a study to be done on the viability of the thousands of bands which do not already have an international following of giving away their music.
Here's my questions to the /. audience... When you go anywhere, are you expecting 100% of the time to get a cell phone signal?
-Drive into a parking garage, no signal.
-Go down into the basement, no signal.
-Drive through a tunnel, no signal.
There's plenty others but you get the point...
So why should you expect to get "4 bars" 100% of the time?
You shouldn't. If you want 100% guaranteed signals, sit by a landline.
I know we've got some self-righteous people here, "I'm a sysadmin, my linux servers can never go down..." "I'm a brain surgeon..." I don't care WHO or WHAT you are as you try to justify your need to have Beethoven's 5th or Snoop's 2nd play at max volume.
Look at the smokers. They need to smoke, so they go outside every hour. You want to check your voicemail, blackberry, pager, go outside every hour and check. If it's going to kill you, or another person for you to be 100% unreachable for a period of time, then don't go to these places where you are unavailable.
What would you do if you were in a movie theater, sports arena in which the walls were of sufficient thickness/material that you couldn't get a signal? Would you sue the owner of the arena/theater? Doubt it. You'd probably blame your wireless carrier for not putting a tower INSIDE the arena/theater.
What about when you fly? If you are so self-important that you can never miss calls, then when you fly from SF to NY and it takes 6hrs, you probably tell someone, "Hey, I'm going to be unavailable for 6hrs on Tuesday, don't page me."
Lastly, if you're a sysadmin, and you have a process in which "If we don't reach Bob in 5minutes, our whole business will die. Go create a procedure, whereby your IT group isn't "One car wreck away from a disaster." Go create backups, alternative people to help etc...
Belly ache all you want, but smokers aren't allowed to smoke in movie theaters because it's unhealthy to me. Go ahead and use you cell phone in the theater and you'll find out how unhealthy it is to you.
Movie reviewers solved this issue, not by going with STARS, but guys like Roger Ebert decided to give it a 'thumbs up' or 'thumbs down' knowing that liking a movie is very subjective. In essence he's saying "I liked it" or "I didn't like it".
People want to give a absolute rating (4 stars, 99pts 'this game rockz!') as it gives them some self appointed absolute ruling, for which there is no unit of measurement. Is a 90% sports game better or worse than a 90% FPS from gamespot equate to the same 90% from ign?
You can't tell. So go with "i like it" or "i don't like it."
In other news...
Linux compiles 10x on Modern dual core systems than on a PII.
How are publicists any different from Boxing's promoters...?
ask Mike Tyson how much Don King made off of him..
I've been overpaid, not sure how much. Could be 900, could be twice that. Either way, the money is spent. I did spend almost 4 hours one day at the district offices only to be told they had no answer and couldn't help me. Lame! I was also told that if I was overpaid they will request it back. However I got mixed answers to how and when I'd have to repay them. SOme say they will deduct it from one full paycheck. Others say it will be taken out in smaller increments. We'll see what happens. What really sucks is those of us who have been overpaid have also paid taxes on that money.
Michael Manring http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Manring uses a custom Zon Bass Guitar http://www.zonguitars.com/zonguitars/hyperbass.html. Below each tuning knob is a lever which can de-tune a string with just the flip of the switch. No fancy pickups, electronics etc. Sure if he needs to tune beforehand, he does it the old fashioned way (by ear, tuner etc..), but while playing he detunes in a flash. You can find him pretty easily on youtube http://youtube.com/results?search_query=Michael+Manring&search=Search
While the parent is clearly a rant. I agree, i'm sick of the "open source is holier art than thou..." attitude.
So if by having hardware prices fall, it's easier for Joe Consumer to purchase a larger system, and with the requirements of Windows (read: Vista) being greater than that of linux or XP, I would think that it's now easier for Joe Consumer to get into a Vista system. Yeah the cost of Windows is still higher, but the total cost of a new machine is still lower.
Bottom line: lower hardware costs benefit those platforms which are normally out of reach. Linux has always been "affordable", if people are buying linux at $200, they won't buy it at $100...
It would be nice if they could demonstrate that other cities have accepted such an offer - keep in mind that the Gazette is Montréal's leading English language, right-leaning paper. The sense that they are also delivering a slight poke to the French spoken city officials is unmistakable.
Almost all bigbox electronics stores in the SF Bay area have some min wage person checking your receipt vs your bag and marking your receipt with a pink/yellow highlighter. I'm not sure what the highlighter does, nor do I really care. I just see it as another step in checking out. Sometimes the cashier doesn't remove the 'shoplifter' magnetic strip and the buzzer/alarm goes off. Yeah, it sucks when that happens, but do I act like a dick and 'continue walking b/c I know *I* didn't steal anything and the cashier f-d up'? No.
/.
You had multiple opportunities to show your bag and receipt to the employees and headed off this whole problem. Instead you've got some ax to grind or point to make. You'll eventually make a couple of lawyers even richer, clog up the court system and get your 15minutes of fame on
For single author, single file documents, MSWord, Openoffice work fine, but when your working on books, larger documents that are comprised of "1 file per chapter" and require easy to use templates (MSWord creates new font templates automatically) so multiple authors can work on the document at the same time. I prefer to use Adobe Framemaker (unix/mac version available as well).
With properly defined templates prior to writing, it's a snap. Though you could spend a while making 'standardized templates'. I'm a professional tech writer and author many documents (think User's Guides, Service Guides etc..) for a large computer company. There's a dozen of us on the team and this makes it easy to bring a new techwriter up to speed.
The best part, what you see on the screen is exactly what gets printed out. Framemaker has it's place. For making a quick document not really, but for more "industrial efforts" it's definitely better than both word and open/star/neo office.
The Crusades.
WW2 (remember, the Germans were christians and they didn't forgive the Jews/athiests for being different).
Spanish Inquisition.
No one race/religion/group is perfect, so pull your head outta your ignorant ass.
"Milton Muelle, a partner on the Internet Governance Project weighs in on the ability of the various stakeholders to reach any kind of consensus. [Include what the IGP is...]"
When I check out at my local grocery store, I've consistently received coupons for "similar products that I might like" since the 80s. Buy Ben n Jerry's ice cream? Get a coupon for Breyers. Something is predicting I might like another brand of ice cream.
I've been getting these coupons since the early 90s.
We should be able to sue this coupon for "wasting taxpayer dollars" similar to how you can be fined for pulling a fire alarm as a prank.
Telcos make money by charging a customer (you a corporation etc..) to access their network. I read here everyone saying "Google give me free wifi....". Sure they will... and how will Eric Schmidt recoup this $4.6B plus maintenance, plus deployment costs, plus support costs..... etc etc) investment? Do you really think that the idea of "If I give everyone free wifi, they'll automatically use my search engine, Gmail, more?"
/. post/comment that complains "Google hasn't brought WIFI to *MY* area.... WAAAHH" I can't wait until we're all bashing Google the same way we bash ATT/Verizon/Sprint for their shoddy coverage.
I forsee one day... a
I also can't wait to see what kind of antenna I'll need on my roof to beam a signal to the nearest TV tower.
Since this is
I'm sure...
Your network is made up of hundreds of 16port Cisco hubs and not 9slot Cat6ks.
Your storage sits on internal disk and not external arrays by EMC/HDS/IBM/HP..
You still ride the same 1 gear bicycle you had when you were 6, and didn't upgrade to one with more gears.
10Mb ethernet on coax is still the preferred medium.
Haven't upgraded from linux 2.2 or windows 95.
I wonder how much $$ he's made from people downloading his songs? I seem to recall that he's had quite a few downloads from the downloading of Goodbye England's Rose (Candle in the wind remake for Diana's funeral).
I work in a longtime "blue shop" perspective, not always from a software/OS perspective. While I like the 'concept' of running linux on zSeries, I think you could take a look at the requirements and choose a platform that can run the same Apps.
For example, for email we run Lotus Notes on a couple of BIG pSeries (AIX) servers. We could have run it on a farm (technical term) of windows boxes.
For webservers, which you could run on AIX, or linux on zSeries. We have multiple (read: many) x86 servers running linux+apache. Why? They connect to a backend app server (pSeries) which connects to a backend zSeries DB2 (I'd prefer Oracle however, to run Oracle on zSeries requires it to be run in a linux VM).
We definitely subscribe to the school of using VMs whether they are zSeries, pSeries, or VMWare on x86. Even if the x86 server is running ONE application, we still put vmware underneath, as it allows for us to move the image to a newer hardware platform when it's time to upgrade. Even some of the larger x86 servers run vmware but in each partition there is a single instance of apache. Makes for managing storage that much easier (fewer zones, cabling etc).
Would I consider moving our apache on linux on x86 to apache on linux on zSeries? Not really. It's a waste of CPU cycles (MIPS). I'd rather use zSeries MIPS for something a bit more critical like keeping my database up and running than serving out webpages (static or dynamic).
IT isn't not about religion, it's about finding the best tool considering your requirements. I have no problems telling IBM that product XYZ is trash. While my servers are IBM, you won't see IBM disk, or IBM tape, and atleast once a quarter some salesman from IBMs storage group is at my door. He buys me lunch and every quarter he is sent packing. You won't see ibm bladecenters as the thought of hundreds of additional servers to manage isn't appealing (but I'll gladly take 100s of VMs across larger x86/pseries boxes).
I know many of you were expecting to hear me say 5000 linux servers, but there are options for my requirements that did not lead to big "google style" linux farms.
BTW: I have no problems kicking out IBM on x86 if HP/Dell/Sun have a better product, and knowing this and letting IBM know this gives me a great advantage over them, as they very well know I'm capable of bringing in something more suitable. (I *used* to have IBM storage).
...the most they can say is "At least the thief still has his/her rights..."
If my car is stolen, I *want* them to find it.
You forgot one very important component, the car battery used to START THE GENERATOR. I've been to many sites whereby the battery that would start the generator is a) dead or b) missing.
I'm not saying that there aren't vendors with single produts that are better, but NOT all companies/customers are looking for 500 different vendors. You wouldn't build a server farm from 50 different linux servers b/c "IBM w/redhat is better at dns, HP w/Ubuntu is better at samba, Dell/slackware is better at sendmail..." you'd go outta your mind supporting such a hetergenous infrastructure.
Cisco/MSFT have plenty in common. All religions aside, when you hire someone it's much easier to find someone that is familiar (CCIE) with a broad range of cisco products than to find one that has (as you put it), "Juniper for routers. Extreme for Network Switches. Juniper/Netscreen, Fortinet, or even Checkpoint for firewalls." The same holds true if you were hiring someone with office skills. It's much easier to find someone that is well versed in MS-Office than it is to find someone that has the same skillset in lotusnotes, wordperfect, etc...
Building an IT infrastructure is more than just having the 'fastest, best out there'. It's building the best solution for YOUR environment. I work with plenty of clients that have Juniper in the core and cisco at the access/distribution layer.
When you build a server (not a hobbiest linux box at home) would you rather buy all the parts (cpu, ram, disk, etc..) from ONE vendor, or would you rather buy each component from someone else? You'd call up IBM/hp/dell/sun and order a server, so when the ram breaks you call the same vendor as when the CPU breaks.
While cisco gear may not be the best in every catagory, the solution as a whole is pretty good and there's not a networking vendor that can provide an 'end to end' solution. Plus there's something to be said for being able to put firewall/content/PoE/WAN modules in a single chassis.
Integration and consolidation does save power.