What if none of these other viewers will allow you to view the content produced/consumed by WMP? How much of a choice do you have then? I don't think that anyone cares if MS adds a piece of software, but what they always do is add a piece of software that uses a secret, propritary, copyrighted, and/or DRM'ed data format to ensure that no one else can compete by simply building a better media player.
NFS/SMB: If nobody can connect to your server who will use your filer? MSIE: If you can't view the "best viewed with MSIE" web pages who will use the browser? MS Office: If you can't read the file who will use your word processor? WMV: If you can't view DRM'ed data who will use your player?
This is how MS "competes". They block everyone else by first leveraging their OS monopoly to gain market share for the new product, then they ensure that the new product has a secret format so that competitors spend all of their time reverse engineering the protocol. Or better yet the data is cryptoed and a law gets passed that makes it illegal to even try.
This strategy has worked well for MS, their products don't need to be innovative, they just have to be OK. As long as they don't completely suck, enough people will use them that they can kill off competition with their MS only "enhancements" (read cryptoed data format, unpublised behavior). Look at MSIE, upon achieving market dominance, they completely stopped development. No popup blockers, no tabbed browsing, no gestures, bad CSS support, etc., etc. Did everyone start using Firefox? Nope, MSIE still worked ok and coupled with the occasional site that proclaims "You are using an unsupported browser, please go away", people are unlikely to move to a different browser.
Luxury items oftem cost more. Why are people assumed to be idiots if they don't buy the low bid computer?
The appearance of the MacBook versus the Dell, is, alone, enough of a reason for me to spend more. Not that I do, I happen to own an old Toshiba 7200. My point is that some people buy Porsche, some buy Ford. To say that the Porsche is over priced because they both have the same horsepower is to miss the point entirely.
Galileo brought back the idea that the Earth revolved around the Sun, as proposed by the ancient Greeks. Although not the inventor, he was one of the first to point a telescope up instead of down and discovered the moons of Jupiter, and observed and recorded their orbits.
The west was plunged into the "dark ages" following the collapse of the western half of the Roman Empire. Much of what had been learned before was lost in an atmosphere of war and religeous zelotry. What was lost was subsequently regained from outside sources, through exposure to the far east, the Byzantine empire, the middle east, and China.
It doesn't follow that muslims invented everything simply because the west learned of these things from them. There is often no clear lineage of invention. If the oldest archaelogical mention of a tool is in one location, we say that country X invented the tool, even if country X didn't really exist at the time. Its all just a way of generating nationalism isn't it? I mean, Eratosthenes, discovered that the Earth was a sphere, does that mean that the west discovered it first, Greece?, Lybia (He born in Cyrene)?
Its all bunk, the people that discovered all of these things have no real connection to modern society. It may make us feel good to say "my people invented blah" but that's just silly. At some point we need to consider that what really created all of this was human society. People working to create, understand, and make life easier for themselves and others.
I RTFA'ed and it appears that they're just testing the technology using Earth based telescopes. They want to be sure that the stuff will work before putting it in orbit. Granted they can't actually find the planet from the surface but they can test the instruments and techniques.
mutts make better dogs than purebreds. It's totally possible to make a super easy distro with FOSS, you don't HAVE to provide 4 different word processors in 1 distro.
I think the competition only helps the software improve. To insist upon only one app per function is to trade in the open source free market for the proprietary planned economy.
The author says "usinesses and organizations of all sizes need consistent, predictable, scalable, self-contained platforms for server solutions. Windows wins."??
Are you sure that he didn't say it the other way around?
consistent - Within a Linux distro one usually finds very good consistency, although the pace of change of Linux sometimes means the changes are greater than what one finds in a new windows release. When's the last time MS improved the cmd window, as opposed to the last time GNU updated gnome term.
predictable - not sure what this means, maybe the author is saying that the Linux interface doesn't look 100% like his NT box so its impossible for anyone to figure out where explorer is.
scalable - Windows is more scalable than Linux/unix? Really?
self-contained - Windows comes with everything you need and Linux doesn't? You mean, like drivers?, like a compiler? Like image manipulation software, like an office suite?
A lot of software vendors have missed the boat. If they had ported to Linux when there was no free substitute they might have prevented or slowed the development of the free substitute. Now they are competing against a product that is so mature that it is better than their software.
Worse yet, the Linux substirutes will eventually be ported to Windows and undercut their core business. All because they didn't want to "waste" money on a small segment of computer users, who, unfortunately for the propprietory software vendors, happen to be developers.
Painful business lesson. They don't seem to understand that its not about market share in the Linux segment its about market share, period.
Another option might be to implement your C++ parts as remote objects and then get your java gui to interoperate with them via corba/iiop or xml/rpc. The cool thing, if you use xml/rpc, is that you eventually operate in an asp mode, the gui is downloaded but the business parts sit on a network server somewhere.
JNI is pretty common, I've never used it, but it kind of scares me to extend the JVM. I worry about stability (my C skills suck) and migration to newer versions of the VM.
A better way to copy paste between files in vim might be:
yap :new otherFile.java
(position cursor)
p :wq
or in an ide:
drag a box over the paragraph
control-C
find other file in an enormous list of code files.
double click to open
position cursor with mouse and scroll bar
control-V
mouse to file dropdown, click (save)
click on little x to close file.
Too true, I used to develop a web app and used Solaris/sparc with Sun's JDK 1.3.1 for my dev server and then deployed on Linux/intel with IBM's JDK 1.3.1. Never had a problem.
The GUI issues seem to be limited to areas where you bunt up against a platform limitation. Like using second/third mouse buttons on a mac, or failing to use the File class properly. They are usually self inflicted. The only real issue I ever had was with drag and drop flakyness under win32.
I assume this thread will attract the usual C++ trolls. "Java's not a real language, blah, blah, blah"
An alternative railway guage has been announced. Proponents expect the world to switch to the new guage due to its increased cornering performance and load bearing capacity.
I don't see how multipath io is a "Sun hardware" thing. If I have 2 Linux machines and I want to connect them to a san in a fault tolerant manner. How do I do that? The current linux method, mpmpd, is crap. It can't be used in a cluster situation and the failback is a nightmare.
Basically Linux makes a good 1-4 cpu server, just don't try to do anything too exotic with it. Frankly, I think that its better for desktop machine than for a server.
As for AIX, its the one Unix that I have yet to use. Judging from IBM's stance on Linux, AIX will probably be EOL'ed before I get a chance. Given the eagerness with which the unix vendors jumped ship for NT in hte 90's I have little desire to use any other real Unix than Solaris. I will continue to use linux and I like it a great deal as it serves well for about 90% of the stuff that I do.
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
Come, every frustrum longs to be a cone
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.
For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Bools or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
Cancel me not - for what then shall remain?
Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
the product o four scalars is defines!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.
I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 phi!
To paraphrase oo doesn't make messy code, messy people who mis-use oo make messy code.
I think the main problem with what, aparently all of us, have seen with oo code, is the universities. The coding style that is taught in universities makes for really ugly, unmaintainable code.
If you cram 100 abstractions and modularization into a project in university, you get an A and every one says how clever you are to have used all of these features in your project. Do the same in the real world and you are left with unmaintainable blech.
People have to learn that the various oo features are there to help them simplify their code, not to make it more complex. If using a particular modularization technique, say an interface, doesn't remove complexity then don't add it.
Another really bad thing that people do is add code for some unspecified future purpose. Maybe they are creating a class that does some math, they need an add method and a subtract method, so they think, what the hell, I'll add a multiply and divide too. Why? All this does is make the code less readable. Never implement anything that you don't need right now.
In short: 1. Keep it simple. 2. Set up monitoring. 3. Use a staging server. 4. Backup data. Backup hardware. Backup staff. 5. Never believe the traffic "estimates"
Location: Use a decent colo facility. Make sure that the techies seem competent. Confirm that they have multiple network peerings, good bandwidth. Run some traceroutes from locations around the country, if possible, to get a handle on the lag. Ask them about their redundant power, their 24/7 NOC, their strategy for managing DDOS. Try and find a colo that isn't about to go out of business, an empty colo is bad, but so is a full one.
Hardware: Realize that the main contributing factor to your "down time" will be your code, not for instance, a network switch. Remember this when people tell you to set up some sort of complex HA switch configuration, etc. Think more in terms of "hot standby" than "no single point of failure".
Fully redundant hardware is expensive to buy, expensive to configure, and expensive to maintain. If you need the fault tolerance then, you should have the budget to do it right. If not, then don't blow all the cash on a switch cluster.
Ask yourself, "What if?", What if the firewall dies? What if the Load Balancer dies? What if the Database dies? Make sure that you can recover within an acceptable amount of time. If that's a week, then maybe you just need a reliable hardware supplier, if its 1 day, you better have the part at the office, if its 1 hour, the part better be racked in the cage and configured.
Software: Use what you know. I have seen very large sites created using lots of technologies. They can all do the job, you just have to play by their rules. I would recommend using something that a healthy number of other people are using so that you will get some imporvements as time goes on, PHP, Perl, Java, and.NET seem to be popular choices. Don't get hung up on benchmarks claiming that server A is 13% faster than server B. The main thing is that the technology is easy to use and reliable.
Os: Linux of course!:-) All I can say is, make sure that its stable. Don't choose an os that exhibits ANY stability issues. I have heard horror stories from people that used NT 4. Anything that needs a "reboot cycle" should be a big red flag. You should only have to reboot when you upgrade the kernel, etc.
Security: I am no guru here, but the main point is to think in layers, firewall externally and between layers. Don't go too nuts, the site has to be usable, but add as much as you can put up with, and have time for.
Web clusters, load balancers and all that: Session is the key to a transactional web site. Sessions are usually maintained via browser cookies.
A content load balancer will stick a user to a webserver based on the cookie. So you probably want one of those. IP based sticky doesn't work all that well because some providers, AOL, send requests out using multiple IP addresses. An extra wrinkle here is SSL, unless your lb can peer inside the SSL data it won't be able to get at the cookie. So if you are using BOTH http and https on the same session you will need an lb that can peer into ssl data.
Some lbs can also help out with abuse and are crossover security devices. All are routers, and most have access control lists, syn cookie, and other security features. Still they are generally not designed to be the front line defense, but constiture another layer.
Database: Don't go the Oracle RAC route unless you are going to buy more than 4 cpu's. A 4 way server is chaper and FAR easier to set up. Maybe get a 2 way xeon, with n+1 power and with an external raid array. Then get a shitty single cpu machine with a big internal scsi disk to use as a backup, in case the main db dies. The backup db can be used as a development db in the mean time.
Sometimes its easier to split up your user group into a number of clusters than to scale one cluster to service all of the users. If the users do
is that its a least common denominator OS. All of the development effort goes in to the most commonly used hardware configurations.
This is great if you are running a uni-processor desktop machine, or 2 cpu web server, but if you are doing anything that's even remotely non-trivial, like a cluster with a shared SAN. The support is primitive, to say the least. For these sorts of tasks, Solaris (and other commercial OS's) tend to be a better choice, IMHO.
Only I went all the way to Solaris/Sparc. Trying to setup an Oracle RAC on Linux (RHEL) was a nightmare, due to the lack of support for multipath failover on the SAN gear. I eventually caved and went with sparcs. They were WAAAAYY easier to setup, and the failover/back works like a charm.
I would do single instance Oracle setups on Linux, and, like you, I would stick to something that Oracle certifies, like RedHat, but I don't think that I will try another RAC for a while.
Besides, RedHat is a very small piece of the software cost, compared to the price of Oracle, its trivial. So why use Debian?
Slashdot Mirror
What if none of these other viewers will allow you to view the content produced/consumed by WMP? How much of a choice do you have then? I don't think that anyone cares if MS adds a piece of software, but what they always do is add a piece of software that uses a secret, propritary, copyrighted, and/or DRM'ed data format to ensure that no one else can compete by simply building a better media player.
NFS/SMB: If nobody can connect to your server who will use your filer?
MSIE: If you can't view the "best viewed with MSIE" web pages who will use the browser?
MS Office: If you can't read the file who will use your word processor?
WMV: If you can't view DRM'ed data who will use your player?
This is how MS "competes". They block everyone else by first leveraging their OS monopoly to gain market share for the new product, then they ensure that the new product has a secret format so that competitors spend all of their time reverse engineering the protocol. Or better yet the data is cryptoed and a law gets passed that makes it illegal to even try.
This strategy has worked well for MS, their products don't need to be innovative, they just have to be OK. As long as they don't completely suck, enough people will use them that they can kill off competition with their MS only "enhancements" (read cryptoed data format, unpublised behavior). Look at MSIE, upon achieving market dominance, they completely stopped development. No popup blockers, no tabbed browsing, no gestures, bad CSS support, etc., etc. Did everyone start using Firefox? Nope, MSIE still worked ok and coupled with the occasional site that proclaims "You are using an unsupported browser, please go away", people are unlikely to move to a different browser.
Luxury items oftem cost more. Why are people assumed to be idiots if they don't buy the low bid computer?
The appearance of the MacBook versus the Dell, is, alone, enough of a reason for me to spend more. Not that I do, I happen to own an old Toshiba 7200. My point is that some people buy Porsche, some buy Ford. To say that the Porsche is over priced because they both have the same horsepower is to miss the point entirely.
Galileo brought back the idea that the Earth revolved around the Sun, as proposed by the ancient Greeks. Although not the inventor, he was one of the first to point a telescope up instead of down and discovered the moons of Jupiter, and observed and recorded their orbits.
The west was plunged into the "dark ages" following the collapse of the western half of the Roman Empire. Much of what had been learned before was lost in an atmosphere of war and religeous zelotry. What was lost was subsequently regained from outside sources, through exposure to the far east, the Byzantine empire, the middle east, and China.
It doesn't follow that muslims invented everything simply because the west learned of these things from them. There is often no clear lineage of invention. If the oldest archaelogical mention of a tool is in one location, we say that country X invented the tool, even if country X didn't really exist at the time. Its all just a way of generating nationalism isn't it? I mean, Eratosthenes, discovered that the Earth was a sphere, does that mean that the west discovered it first, Greece?, Lybia (He born in Cyrene)?
Its all bunk, the people that discovered all of these things have no real connection to modern society. It may make us feel good to say "my people invented blah" but that's just silly. At some point we need to consider that what really created all of this was human society. People working to create, understand, and make life easier for themselves and others.
I RTFA'ed and it appears that they're just testing the technology using Earth based telescopes. They want to be sure that the stuff will work before putting it in orbit. Granted they can't actually find the planet from the surface but they can test the instruments and techniques.
mutts make better dogs than purebreds. It's totally possible to make a super easy distro with FOSS, you don't HAVE to provide 4 different word processors in 1 distro.
I think the competition only helps the software improve. To insist upon only one app per function is to trade in the open source free market for the proprietary planned economy.
The author says "usinesses and organizations of all sizes need consistent, predictable, scalable, self-contained platforms for server solutions. Windows wins."??
Are you sure that he didn't say it the other way around?
consistent - Within a Linux distro one usually finds very good consistency, although the pace of change of Linux sometimes means the changes are greater than what one finds in a new windows release. When's the last time MS improved the cmd window, as opposed to the last time GNU updated gnome term.
predictable - not sure what this means, maybe the author is saying that the Linux interface doesn't look 100% like his NT box so its impossible for anyone to figure out where explorer is.
scalable - Windows is more scalable than Linux/unix? Really?
self-contained - Windows comes with everything you need and Linux doesn't? You mean, like drivers?, like a compiler? Like image manipulation software, like an office suite?
This guy is on crack.
Isn't it against the law in the US to circumvent encryption?
I'm sure the Canadians would relish the opportunity to fire up the white house again.
A lot of software vendors have missed the boat. If they had ported to Linux when there was no free substitute they might have prevented or slowed the development of the free substitute. Now they are competing against a product that is so mature that it is better than their software.
Worse yet, the Linux substirutes will eventually be ported to Windows and undercut their core business. All because they didn't want to "waste" money on a small segment of computer users, who, unfortunately for the propprietory software vendors, happen to be developers.
Painful business lesson. They don't seem to understand that its not about market share in the Linux segment its about market share, period.
Is a robot inanimate? I think, by definition, not. Perhaps non-sentiant, but certainly animate.
I am now struggling to get some automatic dev links to be created in solaris
/reconfigure
# touch
# init 6
You need not worry about this as Gates has already said that this version of Windows would be impossible to create.
Another option might be to implement your C++ parts as remote objects and then get your java gui to interoperate with them via corba/iiop or xml/rpc. The cool thing, if you use xml/rpc, is that you eventually operate in an asp mode, the gui is downloaded but the business parts sit on a network server somewhere.
JNI is pretty common, I've never used it, but it kind of scares me to extend the JVM. I worry about stability (my C skills suck) and migration to newer versions of the VM.
A better way to copy paste between files in vim might be:
:new otherFile.java
:wq
yap
(position cursor)
p
or in an ide:
drag a box over the paragraph
control-C
find other file in an enormous list of code files.
double click to open
position cursor with mouse and scroll bar
control-V
mouse to file dropdown, click (save)
click on little x to close file.
Too true, I used to develop a web app and used Solaris/sparc with Sun's JDK 1.3.1 for my dev server and then deployed on Linux/intel with IBM's JDK 1.3.1. Never had a problem.
The GUI issues seem to be limited to areas where you bunt up against a platform limitation. Like using second/third mouse buttons on a mac, or failing to use the File class properly. They are usually self inflicted. The only real issue I ever had was with drag and drop flakyness under win32.
I assume this thread will attract the usual C++ trolls. "Java's not a real language, blah, blah, blah"
An alternative railway guage has been announced. Proponents expect the world to switch to the new guage due to its increased cornering performance and load bearing capacity.
I don't see how multipath io is a "Sun hardware" thing. If I have 2 Linux machines and I want to connect them to a san in a fault tolerant manner. How do I do that? The current linux method, mpmpd, is crap. It can't be used in a cluster situation and the failback is a nightmare.
Basically Linux makes a good 1-4 cpu server, just don't try to do anything too exotic with it. Frankly, I think that its better for desktop machine than for a server.
As for AIX, its the one Unix that I have yet to use. Judging from IBM's stance on Linux, AIX will probably be EOL'ed before I get a chance. Given the eagerness with which the unix vendors jumped ship for NT in hte 90's I have little desire to use any other real Unix than Solaris. I will continue to use linux and I like it a great deal as it serves well for about 90% of the stuff that I do.
It looked to me like this article paints Torvalds as somewhat full of himself.
I really do think Linux is the better system by now, in all the ways that matter.
Ever tried to set up multipath io for a clustered san with Linux? Ever try to spin down a drive in linux?
There are plenty of things that Linux could gain from a look at Solaris, and I hope it does.
from "The Cyberiad" by Stanislaw Lem
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
Come, every frustrum longs to be a cone
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.
For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Bools or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
Cancel me not - for what then shall remain?
Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
the product o four scalars is defines!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.
I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 phi!
To paraphrase oo doesn't make messy code, messy people who mis-use oo make messy code.
I think the main problem with what, aparently all of us, have seen with oo code, is the universities. The coding style that is taught in universities makes for really ugly, unmaintainable code.
If you cram 100 abstractions and modularization into a project in university, you get an A and every one says how clever you are to have used all of these features in your project. Do the same in the real world and you are left with unmaintainable blech.
People have to learn that the various oo features are there to help them simplify their code, not to make it more complex. If using a particular modularization technique, say an interface, doesn't remove complexity then don't add it.
Another really bad thing that people do is add code for some unspecified future purpose. Maybe they are creating a class that does some math, they need an add method and a subtract method, so they think, what the hell, I'll add a multiply and divide too. Why? All this does is make the code less readable. Never implement anything that you don't need right now.
In short:
.NET seem to be popular choices. Don't get hung up on benchmarks claiming that server A is 13% faster than server B. The main thing is that the technology is easy to use and reliable.
:-) All I can say is, make sure that its stable. Don't choose an os that exhibits ANY stability issues. I have heard horror stories from people that used NT 4. Anything that needs a "reboot cycle" should be a big red flag. You should only have to reboot when you upgrade the kernel, etc.
1. Keep it simple.
2. Set up monitoring.
3. Use a staging server.
4. Backup data. Backup hardware. Backup staff.
5. Never believe the traffic "estimates"
Location:
Use a decent colo facility. Make sure that the techies seem competent. Confirm that they have multiple network peerings, good bandwidth. Run some traceroutes from locations around the country, if possible, to get a handle on the lag. Ask them about their redundant power, their 24/7 NOC, their strategy for managing DDOS. Try and find a colo that isn't about to go out of business, an empty colo is bad, but so is a full one.
Hardware:
Realize that the main contributing factor to your "down time" will be your code, not for instance, a network switch. Remember this when people tell you to set up some sort of complex HA switch configuration, etc. Think more in terms of "hot standby" than "no single point of failure".
Fully redundant hardware is expensive to buy, expensive to configure, and expensive to maintain. If you need the fault tolerance then, you should have the budget to do it right. If not, then don't blow all the cash on a switch cluster.
Ask yourself, "What if?", What if the firewall dies? What if the Load Balancer dies? What if the Database dies? Make sure that you can recover within an acceptable amount of time. If that's a week, then maybe you just need a reliable hardware supplier, if its 1 day, you better have the part at the office, if its 1 hour, the part better be racked in the cage and configured.
Software:
Use what you know. I have seen very large sites created using lots of technologies. They can all do the job, you just have to play by their rules. I would recommend using something that a healthy number of other people are using so that you will get some imporvements as time goes on, PHP, Perl, Java, and
Os:
Linux of course!
Security:
I am no guru here, but the main point is to think in layers, firewall externally and between layers. Don't go too nuts, the site has to be usable, but add as much as you can put up with, and have time for.
Web clusters, load balancers and all that:
Session is the key to a transactional web site. Sessions are usually maintained via browser cookies.
A content load balancer will stick a user to a webserver based on the cookie. So you probably want one of those. IP based sticky doesn't work all that well because some providers, AOL, send requests out using multiple IP addresses. An extra wrinkle here is SSL, unless your lb can peer inside the SSL data it won't be able to get at the cookie. So if you are using BOTH http and https on the same session you will need an lb that can peer into ssl data.
Some lbs can also help out with abuse and are crossover security devices. All are routers, and most have access control lists, syn cookie, and other security features. Still they are generally not designed to be the front line defense, but constiture another layer.
Database:
Don't go the Oracle RAC route unless you are going to buy more than 4 cpu's. A 4 way server is chaper and FAR easier to set up. Maybe get a 2 way xeon, with n+1 power and with an external raid array. Then get a shitty single cpu machine with a big internal scsi disk to use as a backup, in case the main db dies. The backup db can be used as a development db in the mean time.
Sometimes its easier to split up your user group into a number of clusters than to scale one cluster to service all of the users. If the users do
As opposed to the typical "Linux" stock: LNUX
is that its a least common denominator OS. All of the development effort goes in to the most commonly used hardware configurations.
This is great if you are running a uni-processor desktop machine, or 2 cpu web server, but if you are doing anything that's even remotely non-trivial, like a cluster with a shared SAN. The support is primitive, to say the least. For these sorts of tasks, Solaris (and other commercial OS's) tend to be a better choice, IMHO.
Yoper Linux really does look like it could be the first serious competition Gentoo has had in a long time.
For what? "The worst installer of all time", or "The most time consuming distro ever".
Only I went all the way to Solaris/Sparc. Trying to setup an Oracle RAC on Linux (RHEL) was a nightmare, due to the lack of support for multipath failover on the SAN gear. I eventually caved and went with sparcs. They were WAAAAYY easier to setup, and the failover/back works like a charm.
I would do single instance Oracle setups on Linux, and, like you, I would stick to something that Oracle certifies, like RedHat, but I don't think that I will try another RAC for a while.
Besides, RedHat is a very small piece of the software cost, compared to the price of Oracle, its trivial. So why use Debian?
Debian's cool BTW, I use it at home!