My wife also brought up a good point while we were discussing this topic last night. How much of the attention span issue might be connected to parents who just plunk their kids down in front of the TV and don't pay attention to them vs. the ones that actually interact and even watch the programming with their kids? I'm certain there's a bit of a factor in there since television was largely a social activity when I was a kid. I didn't watch it alone. I usually watched it with my folks, my cousin (who may as well have been a kid sister), and other kids. We talked through the shows, I asked questions about things in the shows, etc... There has to be an effect there.
...would you really want to buy something from a company named Hynix? At worst it sounds like a Unix that smells like ass. At best it sounds like a bunch of stoned Unix devels.
Well... I did score pretty damn high on an informal test of autistic tendencies. But I'm not an autistic person nor an "aspie". The test said I was borderline. Still, I call BS because it was informal. And besides, I don't like labels.
Actually, I'm kidding. I quite liked Eudora for it's simplicity. That and the fact that recovering mail was a breeze. After having gone through a few iterations of Microsoft Outlook PST hell and then finally wising up and using only IMAP with Thunderbird, I have to say that Eudora did things right for its day. I suspect the new Eudora will probably be a good deal different from the original. Although I wouldn't mind if they'd port it over to Linux since it's open source now. Thunderbird is OK, but it's not simple enough for my users.
My... such anger. I'm sorry you feel so strongly about Rand and her sham of a "philosophy". It clearly indicates how much you lack any sort of empathy. Keep your disease to yourself.
:) How old are you? 20-something? No, I'm not slamming you or trying to be offensive. You actually gave me a pretty good chuckle pinning me for growing up in the 50s. I'm a product of the 1970s. However, I honestly and totally accept that fact that the Brady Bunch may as well be Laurel and Hardy shorts to anyone born after 1980 because TV changed a LOT since my childhood. When I was a kid we only had six TV stations in my market. Today the same market has ten stations, but they take a back seat to cable and satellite. I didn't grow up with cable but it's likely you did. And you probably also had the options of video games and lots of stuff on video. And my daughter is now growing up with a completely different take on television since it's totally controlled by her parents. She watches at most 60 to 90 minutes per day and only about 45 minutes of that is "live" from PBS Kids Sprout. The rest is stuff on DVD with no commercials. And since my wife and I watch NO television until after she's asleep she actually sees FAR less television than we did when we were kids. Interestingly enough, my daughter prefers playing outside or in her room with her toys (she's under three) by a large margin to watching TV. I think she finds TV boring.
And of course the other difference for kids of the 70s vs. kids of the 80s, 90s and today is that we had to wait until our favorite episode was aired again to see it again. The VCR and later the DVR and today's media centers changed all that. Now it's possible for children to indulge in my childhood fantasy of being able to watch your favorite episode over and over and over again. Back in the 70s the best anyone could do (no I didn't do this because my parents wouldn't allow it) was to go to the same movie in the cinema repeatedly. I knew kids who claimed to have seen Star Wars 25 times when it debuted. My daughter, on the other hand likes to watch any two of her six favorite episodes of the Berenstain Bears (each at 13 minutes a pop) each night before her bed time snack. And that's more a ritual than anything else.
IM does worry me a bit though. I'm hoping that my daughter will find e-mail or blogging more interesting than IM. IM seems to cater to the lowest common denominator. But then again, so does most of the net nowadays. The glory days of the 80s and 90s internet are far behind us.
And we all know how cheap that stuff is...;P Most of what I've been reading about vertical farms involves the reuse of abandoned buildings in urban areas. So it's unlikely those building will be optimized for vertical farming. I love the idea of very futuristic ideas that can help all mankind. But I also know that the economic realities will prevent any of this from benefiting the people who need it the most: the poor.
That sounds more likely. Because these days I watch a fairly small amount of television and none of it is broadcast. I take DVDs out of the local library, and download programming that is not available in the U.S. with Bittorrent. (U.S. television is complete crap) As a result most of my TV viewing is done if I have free time. And typically not more than about 45 minutes a day thanks to the lack of television commercials that DVD and foreign television provide. I'd be interested to see a study regarding the differences between the effects of television on attention span with subjects who grew up in the 70s vs. kids today vs. people who watch television with little to no advertising. Of course that study will likely be done in about 25 year's time.
Nice. But it's a pipe dream. It'll never happen on any usable scale since it assumes more energy than we can afford to expend on such a venture in terms of lighting it sufficiently. Especially the inner portions of the edifice.
When I was a kid I watched a TON of television and I have an incredibly long attention span. I can sit and write code for hours. Or work on music for hours (piano, guitar, synths, audio workstation). I can have a long conversation on a particular subject (over dinner, in the car, etc...). My average viewing day at age three during the week was:
7:00AM-11:00AM (Cartoons, Little Rascals, Brady Bunch) 3:00-5:00PM (Rin-Tin-Tin, more Little Rascals, The Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, Looney Toons, etc...) 7:00PM-9:00PM (Anything my folks watched which could have been Star Trek, Hogan's Heroes, any number of 70s cop shows and of course the news occasionally in the 6:00-7:00PM time slot.
Weekends were usually:
7:00AM- 12:00PM (Cartoons) 1:00PM-5:00PM (Local hosted movies "Superhost" in Cleveland) 6:00PM-7:00PM (Star Trek) 8:00PM-11:00PM (Any number of "family shows" in the 70s, Love Boat and Fantasy Island on Saturday nights, and maybe a movie on Sunday nights)
I'm an American too. But I no longer have a country I can identify with since things are so far off the mark these days. We're now an empire building monster hulk of a dying nation. At one time we believed in peace as a goal. Now we only believe in profit, and war and global instability are damn profitable. We only pay lip service to democracy and peace. We throw those terms around the way a street whore calls her clothes "classy". In reality, we're in Iraq, not to bring peace or democracy. We're in Iraq so a bunch of private contractors can make a ton of money. The people here back at home who have a financial interest in those private contractors are cheering them on. But not so they can successfully rebuild Iraq. The people here are cheering them on so their portfolios can have a higher value. If things were different and we actually believed in peace and democracy, then every American citizen would happily pay an extra "Support Iraq" tax that would fund the military. The military would draft skilled men from the U.S. to give their service for NO PROFIT to rebuild Iraq and we would cheer those men on as REAL HEROES. If they make it back alive, the U.S. government (using our taxes) would set those men up with a really decent, guaranteed and reasonable standard of living for the remainder of their lives. There would be NO private contractors. There would be NO profit. There would only be the fulfillment of a moral obligation to keep our word to the Iraqi people. But instead, most Americans who support this war are vile, stupid and greedy. So yes, I'm an American, but I am 180 degrees out of sync with what America has become. So I no longer have a country. There is such a thing as honour, and most of America no longer has any.
Y2K? Please. It WAS a problem. There were effects that WERE a problem to many people. They just weren't that glamorous. At the same time, the media blew it out of proportion. Anyone who actually knew what they were talking about regarding Y2K knew it would cause problems, but didn't expect the world to be destroyed. Try again.
Running two DNS boxes for a large organization on Gentoo right now. In production. As Xen VMs. It's doable. Is it always the right choice? No. That's why I've also had to deal with CentOS, Redhat, Solaris (until I put the knife in their back since updates were insane to manage in 2001), HP-UX, OpenVMS, Tru64 (a few legacy systems that won't be going away any time soon), and even (gasp) Windows. The only problem I have with BSD is that they don't tend to have the latest feature set that I need. They're way too conservative.
Same here. In a way I'm glad I had that upbringing because it gave me a really good idea what most religious organizations are all about: power and money.
...of fair business practices and open standards I don't see why there is all this backlash against OOXML. I mean, it's gonna be a de facto standard anyway. Why fight it? Imagine if the same kind of stance were taken with operating systems. Some boneheads out there decide that they're going to take on Microsoft which owns the de facto OS platform and they put together their own OS. How far would that get them? Especially if they tried to get people to actually use it! I'd say that it would probably take them a good forty or fifty years of work to break even. Why bother? I mean, just imagine if something that monumentally stupid was attempted. We'd probably have compatibility issues for decades before anything got better! I say, just let Microsoft do what it wants and everything will be a-OK.
...and the anti-genetic manipulation extremists will take issue with this kind of research. The religious folks will say we're playing god and that it's not good to fight his will. "If his will was for you to have faulty heart valves that it's probably a punishment because you've done something wrong. Maybe you didn't support president Bush, or you faltered in your stance against gays, or you said 'hi' to a liberal moonbat, or didn't tithe on Sunday. Whatever the case, you're a sinner and deserve to burn in hell for all eternity so he made your heart valves faulty. Just get right with God and he'll recreate your heart valves so that they're as good as a new born's". (No, I'm not being hyperbolic, I've dealt with christian fundamentalists who actually think and say things like this)
On the other hand, the extremist anti-genetic manipulation folks will say, "This goes against nature. We do so many things that violate the rules of nature which is why the Earth is at such a treacherous tipping point. There are too many people alive at this moment because of the artificial system's we've put in place to help them survive. This contradicts the survival of the fittest and provides us with nothing but an oversurplus of people who just shouldn't be alive right now. This means we're going to exceed the Earth's ability to support life (carrying capacity). By being able to grant people with faulty heart valves longer lives, we're only making the problem worse. Do NOT support the this research. It is an anti-Earth stance and is unsound science".
Meanwhile more people continue to die for oil in Iraq in a war founded on lies. No, the terrorists of 9/11 were not Iraqis. Get over the fact that you were lied to.
...won't happen. We're almost out of many of our fossil fuels. Unless we find a sustainable way of getting "up there", we're going to be landbound for a while. I suspect the idiot Americans will start working on the nuclear air craft idea again. Why must business and lawyers interfere with EVERYTHING that could spell progress for us? We could have been so far ahead with the electric car (solar, rechargeable or fuel cell) if business didn't intervene to protect it's interests and try to squeeze every last dollar of profit out of fossil fuels. We could have had much better public mass transportation if the greedy heads of the auto industry didn't dismantle what once was (beautiful electric trolleys) to put down paved roads. Think about how much better off we'd be if all businesses actually paid attention to human considerations first: nature, natural approaches to health care starting with proper diets for everyone, renewable energy sources, and finally product built to last a long time instead of planned obsolescence and limited durability. My folks had a refrigerator from General Electric that they got in 1969 and it lasted until 1990. THAT is a perfect example of what a quality product's lifespan SHOULD be. Today, you can buy a fridge that has more bells and whistles, but it will die on you in seven years or less. You might be able to push ten years, but not without having some repair bills. The same thing should apply to big servers in IT. You SHOULD be able to buy a server today that will last 25 years for the capacity and applications you need. Those apps and the OS should be well supported within that 25 year period. THAT is a very realistic and responsible approach. THAT is something that vendors like Microfaust can't offer, but Linux based distros can. So, get with the program folks! Of course it won't happen. The money grubbing idiots of Amrican capitalism would just as soon burn their own children as fuel (which they are doing in Iraq) before they'd take any kind of financial hit. Our world is run by money addicts.
...with Sun support, I can safely say that Linux has one BIG thing over on them. If you make the right choice in distro (along with the associated community) for your needs, you can get support at your level of need. I choose Gentoo because I like to have a system that is tailored to exactly what I want/need and outperforms other distros. I acknowledge that Gentoo needs a bit more knowhow than some of the "easy to use distros", but frankly the only distro that's better than Gentoo is Linux from Scratch. The Gentoo community on the Gentoo forums is generally quite knowledgeable and for every question I've ever run into, there's been someone who's given me an answer in less than a day. The same can't be said for the CentOS forums where it seems that it's mostly former Windows admins looking for an MS replacement instead of a new way of working. That's not a slam against CentOS or it's community. It's just an honest assessment of the situation. I went to that forum looking for help on using multipath fiber channel controllers for redundancy and NO ONE responded. I posted the same question on the unix.com forums and someone pointed me in a good direction (LVM multipath) which led me to the final answer (RAID multipath) for what I needed. I then went back to the CentOS forum and posted the solution that worked for me. The same thing happened with questions about Xen virtualization. My needs exceed the support that the CentOS community is capable of providing. They also exceed what is supportable by RedHat (I want something other than ext3 for example). So Gentoo is a great fit since it allows me to do whatever I want. Ubuntu is a non-starter since most of their forums are populated by "me too"-ers. Again, that's not a slam against Ubuntu or it's community. It's simply a true statement of fact that Ubuntu doesn't meet my needs.
So where commercial enterprise OSes are concerned, I think I'd stick with Windows before I'd ever choose a Sun product. I recommended that my supervisors stay away from Sun because of their (at the time) horrid update path for the OS. Things may have improved at that time, but as the article indicates, it may be a little too little a little too late. My shop went with HP-UX and haven't looked back. The quality of support is excellent and the knowledge of the techs is amazing. When I dealt with Sun support, I'd say that one out of every ten techs actually seemed to know what they were talking about. I'd ask a simple question about the issue at hand and give them plenty of info and description only to hear them say they'd get back to me. Then three days, maybe a week later I'd get a call back. This was typical, even though our level of service was supposed to provide is with response in 24 hours. It was just mind numbingly annoying how stupid some of the techs were. For commercial Unix, my take is, "ANYTHING OTHER THAN SLOWLARIS". The slow being applied to support response times for the most part. HP-UX has it's own issues, but at least support isn't one of them.
So much like the Linux argument I made above, the best way to choose a commercial OS is to see if it fits YOUR needs and then weigh that with the depth of knowledge and response times that their support offers. However, in reality, if you have talented staff, support is generally not necessary outside of the hardware realm these days.
Who's really high? The executives who think they should continue to pocket huge bags of money for no effort? Yes. I completely agree. They need to lay off the crack.
They have to lower already vastly inflated prices. I guess that means some no talent executives who do jack shit to actually produce the music and sit around with their thumbs up their holes all day might not be able to buy that extra jet, or home in the tropics. Truly a tragedy of world proportions.
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My wife also brought up a good point while we were discussing this topic last night. How much of the attention span issue might be connected to parents who just plunk their kids down in front of the TV and don't pay attention to them vs. the ones that actually interact and even watch the programming with their kids? I'm certain there's a bit of a factor in there since television was largely a social activity when I was a kid. I didn't watch it alone. I usually watched it with my folks, my cousin (who may as well have been a kid sister), and other kids. We talked through the shows, I asked questions about things in the shows, etc... There has to be an effect there.
...would you really want to buy something from a company named Hynix? At worst it sounds like a Unix that smells like ass. At best it sounds like a bunch of stoned Unix devels.
...Rasputin. Man, I wish I could grow a beard like that. I'd love to look like an insane monk.
Well... I did score pretty damn high on an informal test of autistic tendencies. But I'm not an autistic person nor an "aspie". The test said I was borderline. Still, I call BS because it was informal. And besides, I don't like labels.
Actually, I'm kidding. I quite liked Eudora for it's simplicity. That and the fact that recovering mail was a breeze. After having gone through a few iterations of Microsoft Outlook PST hell and then finally wising up and using only IMAP with Thunderbird, I have to say that Eudora did things right for its day. I suspect the new Eudora will probably be a good deal different from the original. Although I wouldn't mind if they'd port it over to Linux since it's open source now. Thunderbird is OK, but it's not simple enough for my users.
My... such anger. I'm sorry you feel so strongly about Rand and her sham of a "philosophy". It clearly indicates how much you lack any sort of empathy. Keep your disease to yourself.
:) How old are you? 20-something? No, I'm not slamming you or trying to be offensive. You actually gave me a pretty good chuckle pinning me for growing up in the 50s. I'm a product of the 1970s. However, I honestly and totally accept that fact that the Brady Bunch may as well be Laurel and Hardy shorts to anyone born after 1980 because TV changed a LOT since my childhood. When I was a kid we only had six TV stations in my market. Today the same market has ten stations, but they take a back seat to cable and satellite. I didn't grow up with cable but it's likely you did. And you probably also had the options of video games and lots of stuff on video. And my daughter is now growing up with a completely different take on television since it's totally controlled by her parents. She watches at most 60 to 90 minutes per day and only about 45 minutes of that is "live" from PBS Kids Sprout. The rest is stuff on DVD with no commercials. And since my wife and I watch NO television until after she's asleep she actually sees FAR less television than we did when we were kids. Interestingly enough, my daughter prefers playing outside or in her room with her toys (she's under three) by a large margin to watching TV. I think she finds TV boring.
And of course the other difference for kids of the 70s vs. kids of the 80s, 90s and today is that we had to wait until our favorite episode was aired again to see it again. The VCR and later the DVR and today's media centers changed all that. Now it's possible for children to indulge in my childhood fantasy of being able to watch your favorite episode over and over and over again. Back in the 70s the best anyone could do (no I didn't do this because my parents wouldn't allow it) was to go to the same movie in the cinema repeatedly. I knew kids who claimed to have seen Star Wars 25 times when it debuted. My daughter, on the other hand likes to watch any two of her six favorite episodes of the Berenstain Bears (each at 13 minutes a pop) each night before her bed time snack. And that's more a ritual than anything else.
IM does worry me a bit though. I'm hoping that my daughter will find e-mail or blogging more interesting than IM. IM seems to cater to the lowest common denominator. But then again, so does most of the net nowadays. The glory days of the 80s and 90s internet are far behind us.
Oh yes I did. And I know that the study was done on kids a few years younger than me (I was born in the earliest 70s). Try again.
Oh ho! Thou art 31337! You used the epithet: "LUSER" in all caps. Here's a nickel kid. Go buy an education.
God. If ONLY I had mod points. You'd get a +100 Enlightened.
And we all know how cheap that stuff is... ;P Most of what I've been reading about vertical farms involves the reuse of abandoned buildings in urban areas. So it's unlikely those building will be optimized for vertical farming. I love the idea of very futuristic ideas that can help all mankind. But I also know that the economic realities will prevent any of this from benefiting the people who need it the most: the poor.
That sounds more likely. Because these days I watch a fairly small amount of television and none of it is broadcast. I take DVDs out of the local library, and download programming that is not available in the U.S. with Bittorrent. (U.S. television is complete crap) As a result most of my TV viewing is done if I have free time. And typically not more than about 45 minutes a day thanks to the lack of television commercials that DVD and foreign television provide. I'd be interested to see a study regarding the differences between the effects of television on attention span with subjects who grew up in the 70s vs. kids today vs. people who watch television with little to no advertising. Of course that study will likely be done in about 25 year's time.
Nice. But it's a pipe dream. It'll never happen on any usable scale since it assumes more energy than we can afford to expend on such a venture in terms of lighting it sufficiently. Especially the inner portions of the edifice.
When I was a kid I watched a TON of television and I have an incredibly long attention span. I can sit and write code for hours. Or work on music for hours (piano, guitar, synths, audio workstation). I can have a long conversation on a particular subject (over dinner, in the car, etc...). My average viewing day at age three during the week was:
7:00AM-11:00AM (Cartoons, Little Rascals, Brady Bunch)
3:00-5:00PM (Rin-Tin-Tin, more Little Rascals, The Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, Looney Toons, etc...)
7:00PM-9:00PM (Anything my folks watched which could have been Star Trek, Hogan's Heroes, any number of 70s cop shows and of course the news occasionally in the 6:00-7:00PM time slot.
Weekends were usually:
7:00AM- 12:00PM (Cartoons)
1:00PM-5:00PM (Local hosted movies "Superhost" in Cleveland)
6:00PM-7:00PM (Star Trek)
8:00PM-11:00PM (Any number of "family shows" in the 70s, Love Boat and Fantasy Island on Saturday nights, and maybe a movie on Sunday nights)
It had no impact on my attention span.
I'm an American too. But I no longer have a country I can identify with since things are so far off the mark these days. We're now an empire building monster hulk of a dying nation. At one time we believed in peace as a goal. Now we only believe in profit, and war and global instability are damn profitable. We only pay lip service to democracy and peace. We throw those terms around the way a street whore calls her clothes "classy". In reality, we're in Iraq, not to bring peace or democracy. We're in Iraq so a bunch of private contractors can make a ton of money. The people here back at home who have a financial interest in those private contractors are cheering them on. But not so they can successfully rebuild Iraq. The people here are cheering them on so their portfolios can have a higher value. If things were different and we actually believed in peace and democracy, then every American citizen would happily pay an extra "Support Iraq" tax that would fund the military. The military would draft skilled men from the U.S. to give their service for NO PROFIT to rebuild Iraq and we would cheer those men on as REAL HEROES. If they make it back alive, the U.S. government (using our taxes) would set those men up with a really decent, guaranteed and reasonable standard of living for the remainder of their lives. There would be NO private contractors. There would be NO profit. There would only be the fulfillment of a moral obligation to keep our word to the Iraqi people. But instead, most Americans who support this war are vile, stupid and greedy. So yes, I'm an American, but I am 180 degrees out of sync with what America has become. So I no longer have a country. There is such a thing as honour, and most of America no longer has any.
Y2K? Please. It WAS a problem. There were effects that WERE a problem to many people. They just weren't that glamorous. At the same time, the media blew it out of proportion. Anyone who actually knew what they were talking about regarding Y2K knew it would cause problems, but didn't expect the world to be destroyed. Try again.
Running two DNS boxes for a large organization on Gentoo right now. In production. As Xen VMs. It's doable. Is it always the right choice? No. That's why I've also had to deal with CentOS, Redhat, Solaris (until I put the knife in their back since updates were insane to manage in 2001), HP-UX, OpenVMS, Tru64 (a few legacy systems that won't be going away any time soon), and even (gasp) Windows. The only problem I have with BSD is that they don't tend to have the latest feature set that I need. They're way too conservative.
Same here. In a way I'm glad I had that upbringing because it gave me a really good idea what most religious organizations are all about: power and money.
Oooh... you called me a cock monster. Is that some kind of X-rated muppet?
...of fair business practices and open standards I don't see why there is all this backlash against OOXML. I mean, it's gonna be a de facto standard anyway. Why fight it? Imagine if the same kind of stance were taken with operating systems. Some boneheads out there decide that they're going to take on Microsoft which owns the de facto OS platform and they put together their own OS. How far would that get them? Especially if they tried to get people to actually use it! I'd say that it would probably take them a good forty or fifty years of work to break even. Why bother? I mean, just imagine if something that monumentally stupid was attempted. We'd probably have compatibility issues for decades before anything got better! I say, just let Microsoft do what it wants and everything will be a-OK.
...and the anti-genetic manipulation extremists will take issue with this kind of research. The religious folks will say we're playing god and that it's not good to fight his will. "If his will was for you to have faulty heart valves that it's probably a punishment because you've done something wrong. Maybe you didn't support president Bush, or you faltered in your stance against gays, or you said 'hi' to a liberal moonbat, or didn't tithe on Sunday. Whatever the case, you're a sinner and deserve to burn in hell for all eternity so he made your heart valves faulty. Just get right with God and he'll recreate your heart valves so that they're as good as a new born's". (No, I'm not being hyperbolic, I've dealt with christian fundamentalists who actually think and say things like this)
On the other hand, the extremist anti-genetic manipulation folks will say, "This goes against nature. We do so many things that violate the rules of nature which is why the Earth is at such a treacherous tipping point. There are too many people alive at this moment because of the artificial system's we've put in place to help them survive. This contradicts the survival of the fittest and provides us with nothing but an oversurplus of people who just shouldn't be alive right now. This means we're going to exceed the Earth's ability to support life (carrying capacity). By being able to grant people with faulty heart valves longer lives, we're only making the problem worse. Do NOT support the this research. It is an anti-Earth stance and is unsound science".
Meanwhile more people continue to die for oil in Iraq in a war founded on lies. No, the terrorists of 9/11 were not Iraqis. Get over the fact that you were lied to.
...won't happen. We're almost out of many of our fossil fuels. Unless we find a sustainable way of getting "up there", we're going to be landbound for a while. I suspect the idiot Americans will start working on the nuclear air craft idea again. Why must business and lawyers interfere with EVERYTHING that could spell progress for us? We could have been so far ahead with the electric car (solar, rechargeable or fuel cell) if business didn't intervene to protect it's interests and try to squeeze every last dollar of profit out of fossil fuels. We could have had much better public mass transportation if the greedy heads of the auto industry didn't dismantle what once was (beautiful electric trolleys) to put down paved roads. Think about how much better off we'd be if all businesses actually paid attention to human considerations first: nature, natural approaches to health care starting with proper diets for everyone, renewable energy sources, and finally product built to last a long time instead of planned obsolescence and limited durability. My folks had a refrigerator from General Electric that they got in 1969 and it lasted until 1990. THAT is a perfect example of what a quality product's lifespan SHOULD be. Today, you can buy a fridge that has more bells and whistles, but it will die on you in seven years or less. You might be able to push ten years, but not without having some repair bills. The same thing should apply to big servers in IT. You SHOULD be able to buy a server today that will last 25 years for the capacity and applications you need. Those apps and the OS should be well supported within that 25 year period. THAT is a very realistic and responsible approach. THAT is something that vendors like Microfaust can't offer, but Linux based distros can. So, get with the program folks! Of course it won't happen. The money grubbing idiots of Amrican capitalism would just as soon burn their own children as fuel (which they are doing in Iraq) before they'd take any kind of financial hit. Our world is run by money addicts.
...with Sun support, I can safely say that Linux has one BIG thing over on them. If you make the right choice in distro (along with the associated community) for your needs, you can get support at your level of need. I choose Gentoo because I like to have a system that is tailored to exactly what I want/need and outperforms other distros. I acknowledge that Gentoo needs a bit more knowhow than some of the "easy to use distros", but frankly the only distro that's better than Gentoo is Linux from Scratch. The Gentoo community on the Gentoo forums is generally quite knowledgeable and for every question I've ever run into, there's been someone who's given me an answer in less than a day. The same can't be said for the CentOS forums where it seems that it's mostly former Windows admins looking for an MS replacement instead of a new way of working. That's not a slam against CentOS or it's community. It's just an honest assessment of the situation. I went to that forum looking for help on using multipath fiber channel controllers for redundancy and NO ONE responded. I posted the same question on the unix.com forums and someone pointed me in a good direction (LVM multipath) which led me to the final answer (RAID multipath) for what I needed. I then went back to the CentOS forum and posted the solution that worked for me. The same thing happened with questions about Xen virtualization. My needs exceed the support that the CentOS community is capable of providing. They also exceed what is supportable by RedHat (I want something other than ext3 for example). So Gentoo is a great fit since it allows me to do whatever I want. Ubuntu is a non-starter since most of their forums are populated by "me too"-ers. Again, that's not a slam against Ubuntu or it's community. It's simply a true statement of fact that Ubuntu doesn't meet my needs.
So where commercial enterprise OSes are concerned, I think I'd stick with Windows before I'd ever choose a Sun product. I recommended that my supervisors stay away from Sun because of their (at the time) horrid update path for the OS. Things may have improved at that time, but as the article indicates, it may be a little too little a little too late. My shop went with HP-UX and haven't looked back. The quality of support is excellent and the knowledge of the techs is amazing. When I dealt with Sun support, I'd say that one out of every ten techs actually seemed to know what they were talking about. I'd ask a simple question about the issue at hand and give them plenty of info and description only to hear them say they'd get back to me. Then three days, maybe a week later I'd get a call back. This was typical, even though our level of service was supposed to provide is with response in 24 hours. It was just mind numbingly annoying how stupid some of the techs were. For commercial Unix, my take is, "ANYTHING OTHER THAN SLOWLARIS". The slow being applied to support response times for the most part. HP-UX has it's own issues, but at least support isn't one of them.
So much like the Linux argument I made above, the best way to choose a commercial OS is to see if it fits YOUR needs and then weigh that with the depth of knowledge and response times that their support offers. However, in reality, if you have talented staff, support is generally not necessary outside of the hardware realm these days.
Who's really high? The executives who think they should continue to pocket huge bags of money for no effort? Yes. I completely agree. They need to lay off the crack.
They have to lower already vastly inflated prices. I guess that means some no talent executives who do jack shit to actually produce the music and sit around with their thumbs up their holes all day might not be able to buy that extra jet, or home in the tropics. Truly a tragedy of world proportions.