What a silly idea. If customers can't be billed, and are denied access, they will not be very happy, and will likely seek and find ways to circumvent such controls. Figuring out exactly where someone is physically located at on the Internet isn't so easy. If people want porn, they will find a way to get it, illegal or not.
Governments shouldn't be in the business of trying to legislate sexual morality anyway.
Highly censored forum? Give me a break. The way that Slashdot moderation works is far from censorship. If you set your threshold properly, you can read everything, even trolls and first posters.
I'm just saying that even if there were no guns, we'd still be able to enjoy meat products.
I'm not so sure about that in the long run. If we give in on one thing, sooner or later the militant PETA-philes will be pushing for legislation outlawing the eating of meat. Sure, they'll start with just banning hunting. Sooner or later they will outlaw eating cows (because eating beef offends Hindus) and pigs (because eating pork offends muslims and jews), eventually it will be poultry and then fish.
It is a slippery slope that we shouldn't go down.
At any rate, I disagree with your point in that I don't believe guns are only used for violence, and I think that even if it was possible to eliminate guns that it wouldn't eliminate violence from society. I think that eliminating guns would be a huge mistake in the long run.
Yes, this is where "shot to the head" comes from. Still, you are killing something.
Uh, when you eat a plant you are still killing something. Food comes from living things. The way that cattle are shot is probably about the most humane way they could do it (its not like you could effectively guillitine a cow).
And, by the way, you don't have to eat things killed with guns to survive
Why would I mind if things were killed with guns or not? I don't see anything wrong with it, in fact, I have hunted, and probably will hunt in the future. I would now if I had the time.
Although a certain portion of meat products has generally been proven necessary. Try chicken - no guns used there...
I eat chicken, beef, pork, sheep, whatever. I don't see the fact that chicken is killed by a different means makes any difference to me. As long as it is done humanely, I don't care. From an economic standpoint, food processors should use whatever humane method is the most cost effective. It is worth noting that people generally let fish die by suffocation which is not very humane and think nothing of it. Most commercial fish is killed that way too. I don't generally eat fish, but that is because I don't like most kinds of fish, not because I am morally opposed to it.
Uh, have you ever visited a meat packing plant? There are dozens of them in the state I live in, and I've had the opportunity to actually tour some of them. What most of the cattle slaughter operations use for killing cows is a.22 rifle of the inexpensive variety (Marlin or Ruger usually). Think about it. Its not like they can poison the cows to kill them. It would be cruel to cut them open and let them bleed to death (not to mention messy). They do things the quickest, cleanest, most painless way possible. What way would you suggest as more 'efficient'?
Its not like Visual C++ uses some mutant strain of C++. I doesn't? What the heck do you call goofy abominations like lstrcpy() lstrcmp() lstrcat()? Maybe the core language syntax is marginally ANSI-like, but their library implementations are highly wacked, not even including Win32.
And if you use any of VC++'s code generation, you are going to get stuff that is MFC dependant, which is in turn Win32 dependant.
Personally, I had a lot better luck with the Powersoft (Watcom) C++ compiler when I had to generate binaries under Windows. Their library implementations were much more normal.
You actually find vinyl LP's of new releases in stores in Europe? I don't recall seeing any when I was there last fall, but I didn't have a chance to check out any specialty stores, just big places like Herrods and stuff.
That was the one bad thing about how the AT&T breakup was handled, it didn't go far enough, fast enough on the local service front. Long distance got competition much sooner, so consumers saw a big benefit there much more quickly. It has only been recently that CLEC (Competitive Local Exchange Carriers) have started to challenge the RBOCs. As more and more CLECs come in and cable companies start to enter the local phone service market, we will finally start to see the benefits of competition in local service.
There are two analog option that are superior to CD. Records (LPs),
Fine if you have a cleanroom to play them in. But in reality LP's effective sound quality is ruined by the fact it is virtually impossible to keep them dust and scratch free. And unfortunately, LP's are basically a playback only media, and a dead one at that (since virtually no new content is released in that format anymore).
and VHS tape
If you had said Hi-8 tape, I maybe could believe that. VHS tape sounds pretty good, but I would still expect it has more hiss than CD.
As a Sound Engineer, CD audio quality is IMO not as good as analog.
Speaking as a consumer, CD audio quality is better than any consumer grade analog option (and 1/2" 2-track isn't an option for the consumer, for that matter 1/4" 2-track open reel isn't a serious option). That is all that matters. Since I can't hear over 16kHz anyway (and most people can't hear over 18kHz), increasing the sample size or sampling frequency seems like a complete waste of time and money for a consumer product. Maybe it would be worthwhile for studio grade products, but I can't see anyone but a serious audiophile buying one for at home.
You appear to be confused about the whole purpose of VMS' file versioning.
I'm not confused, I just have no use for VMS's file versioning. As I said, I haven't had the misfortune of using VMS since the 80's and frankly, it isn't likely I'll ever be subjected to using VMS again (since Compaq is pretty much burying it), so it really doesn't matter.
A partial solution (of course not one they told anyone about at the U), but I still prefer a system that I can check files in only when I want. Having it auto-delete versions means that if I want to save the nth version and not have it purged I have to copy it to some other filename. The auto file versioning also doesn't do much to help with multiple developer versioning and synchronization that checkin/checkout systems deal with. If you want to keep a large number of versions around, a system that stores deltas instead of whole files is much more disk space efficient (not that big a deal these days, but back in the 80's when I used VMS it was a huge deal).
Plus, I took computer programming when the computer lab at MIT used a VAX 11/780:^)
When I started college they used a 5 node cluster (four 11/780's and an 11/785) for most of the undergraduate class work at the university I attended. The Com Sci department had their own VAX 11/780 running 4.2 BSD (later upgraded to 4.3), and several other departments had their own VAXen running BSD. I later went to work for one of those departments.
The documentation is excellent, even if it spans something like 13 3" thick 3ring binders
Much to the dismay of the DEC field service rep, when I worked at a university for a department where we ran BSD, we bought a new VAX, and promptly file-13'd the VMS doc and recycled all those bright orange 3-ring binders for two whole sets of BSD docs.
Why? whenever you save a file, its version number goes up by 1.
I don't like versioning that doesn't happen when I want it to, to the files I want to keep under version control. I prefer an approach like RCS/CVS/PVCS.
You don't need to worry about the version # unless you want to look at your old versions (all are saved by default).
It was the 'all are saved by default' that many people ran afoul of, as it chewed up all their disk quota and required constant vigilance to keep things tidy.
Oh, and if for some reason you unplug your microvax accidentaly while editing the file, (the only way a non-sysadmin user can make it crash) you can recover from the journal file which is created, by default, with the command EDT/RECOVER LOGIN.COM, which has captured all the keystrokes of you editing session, and will redo them at warp speed on the screen while you watch.
EDT... ack, that gives me the heebie-jeebies. Never did like that or TPU (the other display editor). Of course it could be worse, if you didn't get on a DEC terminal (a lot of the labs had ADM3a's, ADM5's or TVI910's), you were stuck with using SOS (the horror!). On the other hand if you were using one of the BSD machines, you could run vi just fine even on the ADM's which were dumb as rocks. BTW, vi also has a recover mode.
What if Ken Olsen had said
Instead he said "UNIX is snake oil", and history played out the way it did. Ah well, DEC built pretty nice hardware in those days, but most of us where I worked/went to school were more happy running BSD than VMS, especially because DEC's licensing and maintenance/support contracts for VMS made running VMS cost prohibitive. Today I can do everything and more on my cheapo home Linux box than I could do back then on $100K VAXen.
but you are dead wrong about file versioning. I regard this as the most useful OS feature ever invented. I truly miss it when using other operating systems.
I don't like versioning that happens so automatically. Having version control available when I want it is a good thing, having it forced on me all the time can be annoying. It is probably a matter of personal preference, but I just didn't like the way that it was implemented in VMS. Something like RCS/CVS/PVCS is more what I am comfortable with. To add insult to injury, it tended to cause directories not only to fill up with extraneous garbage that required time to clean out, it also tended to screw people over on disk quotas if they were negligent in keeping things tidy.
Sure you can get Intel boxes for a dime a dozen...
Hardware costs are the same or slightly lower for Linux, because Linux has lower hardware requirements.
sure linux is free.
Linux development tools are also much cheaper than those for Windows, and this is a direct issue because the kind of apps that are run on a Beowulf type machine are typically homegrown.
Sure Windows costs money to buy.
Windows costs a lot more than you might even think by the time you add in all the add-on software and development tools you would need to build a cluster and development environment. We are talking 10's of thousands of dollars difference for a few dozen nodes.
BUT they both require something that costs alot: service.
And they both require it. That is true of any type of computer system. Nothing I've seen would tell me that there is any reason to expect that Windows would cost less for service, support and administration than Linux, in fact from what I've seen, and despite Microsoft's marketing, it is the opposite.
Beowulf clusters are potential security risks if not properly administered and kept patched up to date.
The same thing is true of Windows boxes. The same thing is true of any type of system. Actually most Beowulf boxes are hidden away behind firewalls and not something that is accessable to every Joe random student and outsider, so you are overstating the relative security risk compared to any other computer system.
Installation and maintanance require *good* sysadmins. What's the average salary of a sysadmin?
It's not insignificant, but it is cheaper around most major universities (especially since they have the advantages of indentured servants... err... coop and graduate students and generally depressed markets for tech staff). And from what I've seen in the university environments, it is a lot easier to find people with skills in UNIX/Linux administration than it is to find MSCEs. Also in my experience UNIX/Linux not only require less administration work because they are more reliable, it is easier for a smaller number of admins to administrate a larger number of *nix boxes than Windows.
Look at what you currently have in house for expertise.
It sounds like this guy is one of the in-house sysadmins. Most universities have more in-house expertise in UNIX/Linux for large scale implementations, which is one of the big reasons that all of the big research orgs are using Linux for their Beowulf clusters.
Perhaps it is more like "They want to use NT, but I don't want to get stuck supporting it". The other question is, should pointy haired bosses who won't be the ones using the machines be the ones making the decisions on platforms either? I think the guy asking the question is a sysadmin. From my experience, he should certainly have some input on what platform is chosen, since it will directly affect his job. Contrary to how Microsoft markets it, in my experience, NT requires not only more service and administration because it is less reliable, but it is less convenient and more complex to administer, especially as the number of servers increases. GUI based admin tools really become more of a hindrance than an advantage when you need to perform the same functions on dozens or hundreds of machines, and you start wishing for a nice, fast command line interface and/or scripting alternatives.
DCL CLI is far easier and more intuitive than any *nix shell
Woof. I totally disagree on that one. I always hated DCL and found navigating the VMS file systems and directory structure maddening. The VMS file versioning was also inconvenient. I really hated VMS's error messages, which were always nearly indecipherable and full of %%%% signs. Blech.
Of course, with OpenVMS you lose one of the factors the original poster was looking for - low cost.
That is an understatement. Commercial UNIX looks like a bargain compared to OpenVMS. Not to mention the cost of the support and maintenance contracts and the cost of other software for OpenVMS.
I suspect that they will either change nothing with respect to their Sparc clones or essentially mimick Sun's positions there. If they are really progressive they will port the same software to Sparc Linux that they are porting to x86 Linux.
On the other hand, administration/management type people who don't know what a Beowulf cluster does or how it is used are often involved in the decision making process for computers at universities/companies. Pro-Windows zealots of that type try to throw NT at everything too. And as we all know, Windows NT is not a drop in replacement for UNIX/Linux for every task either.
What is your problem with someone trying to do a little research into what alternatives are out there? What have the Windows zealots got to hide? If they can't ask questions like this in a forum like Slashdot, where can they ask?
As for making real-world decisions in the future, it is best to have the information on which to make a good decision. You seem to be implying that people should just roll over and go for the 'easy answer'.
If you are looking for the kind of clustering that Windoze NT does, then you want something like TurboCluster Server from TurboLinux, it is clustering for high availability and high throughput for web servers. TurboLinux
If you need more general load balancing clustering for enterprise applications, look at Linas Vepstas's Linux Enterprise Computing pages at http://linas.org/linux/, he has a section on clustering on that page.
If you need supercomputer numbercrunching or render-farm type clustering, then the Beowulf approach is what you want. Linas' pages also have a section on Beowulf type clustering.
Re:Why I hate Mac keyboards
on
Interface Zen
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· Score: 2
you feel the nipple being on the wrong finger, as opposed to just failing to feel a nipple at all
That is a point I had never thought of. Another thing that you don't mention is that your middle fingers are the longest fingers, and thus the most likely to come into contact with the keys first as your hands come down to the keyboard. I always assumed that the dimples on the fj keys were because the people who designed the early IBM PC/XT/AT keyboards were obviously hunt and peck typists (and thus would prefer the fj keys due to using primarily the index fingers).
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I am a 0.99 junkie... :-)
:-)
I am also a smartass, but that is beside the point.
You mean VA Linux, "/vmlinux" is something totally different... :-) Well, without /vmlinux, VA Linux wouldn't be there I guess.
What a silly idea. If customers can't be billed, and are denied access, they will not be very happy, and will likely seek and find ways to circumvent such controls. Figuring out exactly where someone is physically located at on the Internet isn't so easy. If people want porn, they will find a way to get it, illegal or not.
Governments shouldn't be in the business of trying to legislate sexual morality anyway.
Highly censored forum? Give me a break. The way that Slashdot moderation works is far from censorship. If you set your threshold properly, you can read everything, even trolls and first posters.
I'm just saying that even if there were no guns, we'd still be able to enjoy meat products.
I'm not so sure about that in the long run. If we give in on one thing, sooner or later the militant PETA-philes will be pushing for legislation outlawing the eating of meat. Sure, they'll start with just banning hunting. Sooner or later they will outlaw eating cows (because eating beef offends Hindus) and pigs (because eating pork offends muslims and jews), eventually it will be poultry and then fish.
It is a slippery slope that we shouldn't go down.
At any rate, I disagree with your point in that I don't believe guns are only used for violence, and I think that even if it was possible to eliminate guns that it wouldn't eliminate violence from society. I think that eliminating guns would be a huge mistake in the long run.
Yes, this is where "shot to the head" comes from. Still, you are killing something.
Uh, when you eat a plant you are still killing something. Food comes from living things. The way that cattle are shot is probably about the most humane way they could do it (its not like you could effectively guillitine a cow).
And, by the way, you don't have to eat things killed with guns to survive
Why would I mind if things were killed with guns or not? I don't see anything wrong with it, in fact, I have hunted, and probably will hunt in the future. I would now if I had the time.
Although a certain portion of meat products has generally been proven necessary. Try chicken - no guns used there...
I eat chicken, beef, pork, sheep, whatever. I don't see the fact that chicken is killed by a different means makes any difference to me. As long as it is done humanely, I don't care. From an economic standpoint, food processors should use whatever humane method is the most cost effective.
It is worth noting that people generally let fish die by suffocation which is not very humane and think nothing of it. Most commercial fish is killed that way too. I don't generally eat fish, but that is because I don't like most kinds of fish, not because I am morally opposed to it.
and kill them in more efficient ways.
.22 rifle of the inexpensive variety (Marlin or Ruger usually). Think about it. Its not like they can poison the cows to kill them. It would be cruel to cut them open and let them bleed to death (not to mention messy). They do things the quickest, cleanest, most painless way possible. What way would you suggest as more 'efficient'?
Uh, have you ever visited a meat packing plant? There are dozens of them in the state I live in, and I've had the opportunity to actually tour some of them. What most of the cattle slaughter operations use for killing cows is a
Its not like Visual C++ uses some mutant strain of C++. I doesn't? What the heck do you call goofy abominations like lstrcpy() lstrcmp() lstrcat()? Maybe the core language syntax is marginally ANSI-like, but their library implementations are highly wacked, not even including Win32.
And if you use any of VC++'s code generation, you are going to get stuff that is MFC dependant, which is in turn Win32 dependant.
Personally, I had a lot better luck with the Powersoft (Watcom) C++ compiler when I had to generate binaries under Windows. Their library implementations were much more normal.
Yes, you get vinyl releases of new stuff. A lot, actually. Including Whitney Houston &.c.
Oh boy, Whitney Houston. I can harld contain my enthusiasm.
I hope someone was kidding when they gave that example. I meant new releases, and preferably from someone who doesn't suck.
You actually find vinyl LP's of new releases in stores in Europe? I don't recall seeing any when I was there last fall, but I didn't have a chance to check out any specialty stores, just big places like Herrods and stuff.
Each RBOC got it's own little monoply.
That was the one bad thing about how the AT&T breakup was handled, it didn't go far enough, fast enough on the local service front. Long distance got competition much sooner, so consumers saw a big benefit there much more quickly. It has only been recently that CLEC (Competitive Local Exchange Carriers) have started to challenge the RBOCs. As more and more CLECs come in and cable companies start to enter the local phone service market, we will finally start to see the benefits of competition in local service.
There are two analog option that are superior to CD. Records (LPs),
Fine if you have a cleanroom to play them in. But in reality LP's effective sound quality is ruined by the fact it is virtually impossible to keep them dust and scratch free. And unfortunately, LP's are basically a playback only media, and a dead one at that (since virtually no new content is released in that format anymore).
and VHS tape
If you had said Hi-8 tape, I maybe could believe that. VHS tape sounds pretty good, but I would still expect it has more hiss than CD.
As a Sound Engineer, CD audio quality is IMO not as good as analog.
Speaking as a consumer, CD audio quality is better than any consumer grade analog option (and 1/2" 2-track isn't an option for the consumer, for that matter 1/4" 2-track open reel isn't a serious option). That is all that matters. Since I can't hear over 16kHz anyway (and most people can't hear over 18kHz), increasing the sample size or sampling frequency seems like a complete waste of time and money for a consumer product. Maybe it would be worthwhile for studio grade products, but I can't see anyone but a serious audiophile buying one for at home.
You appear to be confused about the whole purpose of VMS' file versioning.
I'm not confused, I just have no use for VMS's file versioning. As I said, I haven't had the misfortune of using VMS since the 80's and frankly, it isn't likely I'll ever be subjected to using VMS again (since Compaq is pretty much burying it), so it really doesn't matter.
A partial solution (of course not one they told anyone about at the U), but I still prefer a system that I can check files in only when I want. Having it auto-delete versions means that if I want to save the nth version and not have it purged I have to copy it to some other filename. The auto file versioning also doesn't do much to help with multiple developer versioning and synchronization that checkin/checkout systems deal with. If you want to keep a large number of versions around, a system that stores deltas instead of whole files is much more disk space efficient (not that big a deal these days, but back in the 80's when I used VMS it was a huge deal).
Novell is also very expensive.
Compared to Linux, perhaps, but not that much worse than NT...
Plus, I took computer programming when the computer lab at MIT used a VAX 11/780 :^)
When I started college they used a 5 node cluster (four 11/780's and an 11/785) for most of the undergraduate class work at the university I attended. The Com Sci department had their own VAX 11/780 running 4.2 BSD (later upgraded to 4.3), and several other departments had their own VAXen running BSD. I later went to work for one of those departments.
The documentation is excellent, even if it spans something like 13 3" thick 3ring binders
Much to the dismay of the DEC field service rep, when I worked at a university for a department where we ran BSD, we bought a new VAX, and promptly file-13'd the VMS doc and recycled all those bright orange 3-ring binders for two whole sets of BSD docs.
Why? whenever you save a file, its version number goes up by 1.
I don't like versioning that doesn't happen when I want it to, to the files I want to keep under version control. I prefer an approach like RCS/CVS/PVCS.
You don't need to worry about the version # unless you want to look at your old versions (all are saved by default).
It was the 'all are saved by default' that many people ran afoul of, as it chewed up all their disk quota and required constant vigilance to keep things tidy.
Oh, and if for some reason you unplug your microvax accidentaly while editing the file, (the only way a non-sysadmin user can make it crash) you can recover from the journal file which is created, by default, with the command EDT/RECOVER LOGIN.COM, which has captured all the keystrokes of you editing session, and will redo them at warp speed on the screen while you watch.
EDT... ack, that gives me the heebie-jeebies. Never did like that or TPU (the other display editor). Of course it could be worse, if you didn't get on a DEC terminal (a lot of the labs had ADM3a's, ADM5's or TVI910's), you were stuck with using SOS (the horror!). On the other hand if you were using one of the BSD machines, you could run vi just fine even on the ADM's which were dumb as rocks. BTW, vi also has a recover mode.
What if Ken Olsen had said
Instead he said "UNIX is snake oil", and history played out the way it did. Ah well, DEC built pretty nice hardware in those days, but most of us where I worked/went to school were more happy running BSD than VMS, especially because DEC's licensing and maintenance/support contracts for VMS made running VMS cost prohibitive. Today I can do everything and more on my cheapo home Linux box than I could do back then on $100K VAXen.
but you are dead wrong about file versioning. I regard this as the most useful OS feature ever invented. I truly miss it when using other operating systems.
I don't like versioning that happens so automatically. Having version control available when I want it is a good thing, having it forced on me all the time can be annoying. It is probably a matter of personal preference, but I just didn't like the way that it was implemented in VMS. Something like RCS/CVS/PVCS is more what I am comfortable with. To add insult to injury, it tended to cause directories not only to fill up with extraneous garbage that required time to clean out, it also tended to screw people over on disk quotas if they were negligent in keeping things tidy.
Sure you can get Intel boxes for a dime a dozen...
Hardware costs are the same or slightly lower for Linux, because Linux has lower hardware requirements.
sure linux is free.
Linux development tools are also much cheaper than those for Windows, and this is a direct issue because the kind of apps that are run on a Beowulf type machine are typically homegrown.
Sure Windows costs money to buy.
Windows costs a lot more than you might even think by the time you add in all the add-on software and development tools you would need to build a cluster and development environment. We are talking 10's of thousands of dollars difference for a few dozen nodes.
BUT they both require something that costs alot: service.
And they both require it. That is true of any type of computer system. Nothing I've seen would tell me that there is any reason to expect that Windows would cost less for service, support and administration than Linux, in fact from what I've seen, and despite Microsoft's marketing, it is the opposite.
Beowulf clusters are potential security risks if not properly administered and kept patched up to date.
The same thing is true of Windows boxes. The same thing is true of any type of system. Actually most Beowulf boxes are hidden away behind firewalls and not something that is accessable to every Joe random student and outsider, so you are overstating the relative security risk compared to any other computer system.
Installation and maintanance require *good* sysadmins. What's the average salary of a sysadmin?
It's not insignificant, but it is cheaper around most major universities (especially since they have the advantages of indentured servants... err... coop and graduate students and generally depressed markets for tech staff). And from what I've seen in the university environments, it is a lot easier to find people with skills in UNIX/Linux administration than it is to find MSCEs. Also in my experience UNIX/Linux not only require less administration work because they are more reliable, it is easier for a smaller number of admins to administrate a larger number of *nix boxes than Windows.
Look at what you currently have in house for expertise.
It sounds like this guy is one of the in-house sysadmins. Most universities have more in-house expertise in UNIX/Linux for large scale implementations, which is one of the big reasons that all of the big research orgs are using Linux for their Beowulf clusters.
they want to use NT but I know Linux is better
Perhaps it is more like "They want to use NT, but I don't want to get stuck supporting it". The other question is, should pointy haired bosses who won't be the ones using the machines be the ones making the decisions on platforms either? I think the guy asking the question is a sysadmin. From my experience, he should certainly have some input on what platform is chosen, since it will directly affect his job. Contrary to how Microsoft markets it, in my experience, NT requires not only more service and administration because it is less reliable, but it is less convenient and more complex to administer, especially as the number of servers increases. GUI based admin tools really become more of a hindrance than an advantage when you need to perform the same functions on dozens or hundreds of machines, and you start wishing for a nice, fast command line interface and/or scripting alternatives.
DCL CLI is far easier and more intuitive than any *nix shell
Woof. I totally disagree on that one. I always hated DCL and found navigating the VMS file systems and directory structure maddening. The VMS file versioning was also inconvenient. I really hated VMS's error messages, which were always nearly indecipherable and full of %%%% signs. Blech.
Of course, with OpenVMS you lose one of the factors the original poster was looking for - low cost.
That is an understatement. Commercial UNIX looks like a bargain compared to OpenVMS. Not to mention the cost of the support and maintenance contracts and the cost of other software for OpenVMS.
I suspect that they will either change nothing with respect to their Sparc clones or essentially mimick Sun's positions there. If they are really progressive they will port the same software to Sparc Linux that they are porting to x86 Linux.
On the other hand, administration/management type people who don't know what a Beowulf cluster does or how it is used are often involved in the decision making process for computers at universities/companies. Pro-Windows zealots of that type try to throw NT at everything too. And as we all know, Windows NT is not a drop in replacement for UNIX/Linux for every task either.
What is your problem with someone trying to do a little research into what alternatives are out there? What have the Windows zealots got to hide? If they can't ask questions like this in a forum like Slashdot, where can they ask?
As for making real-world decisions in the future, it is best to have the information on which to make a good decision. You seem to be implying that people should just roll over and go for the 'easy answer'.
If you are looking for the kind of clustering that Windoze NT does, then you want something like TurboCluster Server from TurboLinux, it is clustering for high availability and high throughput for web servers. TurboLinux
If you need more general load balancing clustering for enterprise applications, look at Linas Vepstas's Linux Enterprise Computing pages at http://linas.org/linux/, he has a section on clustering on that page.
If you need supercomputer numbercrunching or render-farm type clustering, then the Beowulf approach is what you want. Linas' pages also have a section on Beowulf type clustering.
you feel the nipple being on the wrong finger, as opposed to just failing to feel a nipple at all
That is a point I had never thought of. Another thing that you don't mention is that your middle fingers are the longest fingers, and thus the most likely to come into contact with the keys first as your hands come down to the keyboard. I always assumed that the dimples on the fj keys were because the people who designed the early IBM PC/XT/AT keyboards were obviously hunt and peck typists (and thus would prefer the fj keys due to using primarily the index fingers).