I did this (four days at work, three days home every week) for about six months several years ago. I think that, for us, the separation probably strengthened our marriage by encouraging us to make the time together count. (And, yes, we had a lot of sex during those three days home.)
However, I wouldn't even consider it now. Here are some factors to consider:
Children. Do you have children? Do you want to have children? If so, then you need to think very carefully about how that's going to play out. Young children especially will grow very quickly if you don't have daily contact.
Is this a permanent thing? After about six months of this, both my wife and I were ready for it to be over. I was able to make a telecommuting arrangement, but the nature of the work (computer systems troubleshooting) and the nature of the company (major, national company with 10's of thousands of employees) allowed that. What's your exit strategy?
How stable is your marriage? While it was okay for us, when I worked (bi-vocationally) as a minister in a military town I saw way too many women who would fall into adultery when their husband was away for months at a time. And we won't even get into what soldiers in remote locations do. (Call me old-fashioned, but I happen to think that adultery is wrong on either side of the equation.)
Can you handle it? It can get really lonely being away from home like that. You're not in the "remote" location often enough to form roots, and you're away from home often enough that friendships tend to be compromised. It's not just your wife, it's you too.
I could probably list more, but the bottom line is that this is not (necessarily) the end of the world, but you definitely need to think hard about whether it's what you want in life. I would personally not advise it unless your marriage is stable, you trust your wife (i.e. you won't be concerned about her having outside relationships--which can be bad whether she's having them or not) and you have no small children. But it will have to be your call.
It seems like the gap may be the difference between "benevolence" and "omnibenevolence", and perhaps the exclusivism that such benevolence would imply.
Although it makes me quite unhappy, my understanding of scripture is that not everyone is saved. God/desires/ that everyone be saved, but he also desires that we choose him freely, according to our own character. So, you get into this very tough situation of having to acknowledge that there are some God has chosen (because they chose him, but which came first?) and others that God has not chosen (for whatever reason.) Those he chooses enjoy the fruits of his benevolence, if not now then in the last day, and those he has not chosen... don't. (Note that I'm NOT advocating double-Predestination here.)
I'm afraid that the notion of omni-benevolence, which really comes from Platonism, not the Bible, creates a false image of God. God is (or is supposed to be) kind of a pushover parent who just keeps doing nice things for their kids no matter what sort of brat they've become. The problem is that we look at benevolence in very human terms, and not in divine term. His eyes see further than ours, and accordingly he makes decisions that to us just don't make sense.
I tried OS/2 on several occasions. I found it slow and clunky, and whenever I would complain the OS/2 zealots would respond with a barage of alterations to the config.sys. And it may have been better than Windows 3.1, but it wasn't appreciably better than Windows '95 from my perspective as a user. The hardware requirements were high, the support was lousy, and the platform was always marginal at best.
In contrast, the mac offers significant advantages over XP, and few who have used OSX for a few days would willingly go back.
Re:Why this is significant: Risk Reduction
on
Going To Boot Camp
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· Score: 1
Now you've turned this into a simple anti-XP rant. Why can't you just be honest and adult about it?
No, I don't like XP, and I dislike it for object reasons. I dislike it because it lacks a proper shell. I dislike it because I have to run antivirus products, which all slow my system down and get in my way. I dislike it because I find the interface clunky and unintuitive. I dislike it because I hate having to waste my time hunting for drivers, something I almost never have to do on a Mac. I dislike it because the Windows versions of iLife sort of applications are inferior and harder to use. And I don't play games (like most "adults"), and I have only found one application that I prefer on XP--namely, Quicken.
Therefore, I run it for Quicken and Quicken only, as I made fairly clear. However, it would be significantly more convenient for me to run it on my laptop, along with everything else I do every day, without having to sacrifice the vastly superior (for me) mac environment to do so.
It seems to me that the person who has an agenda here is/you/.
Re:Why this is significant: Risk Reduction
on
Going To Boot Camp
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· Score: 1
1. Since most "home users" have got Windows XP on their PCs as an OEM license, possibly with a Dell/HP/etc recovery disk for their PC, there is no way they can migrate run XP on an Apple unless they go buy a proper copy of XP on a CD at their local computer store. So, in their "unsureness" about commiting fully to Apple, not only do they have to pay for completely new hardware but also another copy of XP (in most cases). I don't see many "home user" types bothering with that at all.
But what if they were going to buy new hardware anyway? And what if they/like/ Apple hardware better than the ubiquitous Dell crap?
Surely you can see that $150 for a new copy of XP home is a small investment compared to $2000+ for a new computer comparable to the MacBook pro?
2. Let's lump all the Linux and OS X "home users" into the same group for one moment. The chances are that group of people have moved to their non-Microsoft OS of choice because they are pretty savvy with computers, have had a lot of experience with Windows in the past and have made an informed decision to use an alternative. But it is not Joe Average-types that do this, it's people with some knowledge about computers that do it.
And... your point is? There are plenty of people who are fairly knowledgable about computers who are a bit nervous about buying a mac and giving up all their applications when they aren't terribly familiar with the environment. And there are enough of them to represent a sizable market segment.
In reality, you're trying to hide what is, in fact, a big climb-down and U-turn by a lot of Apple users. Before, you couldn't run XP so you spent a lot of time on here detailing the superiority of OS X to XP - but now you can run it, it's a different matter...
No, i still maintain that XP sucks. I have to use it for work, and I hate every minute of it. But, on the other hand, I have to run my home finances on XP because, as much as XP sucks Quicken for Mac sucks more. If I were not a rabid UNIX type, I would probably not be willing to have a whole separate computer for quicken. As it stands, I am willing to go to that trouble and expense, because I know that there is something better than XP. Now others will have the change to learn that without the risk of kissing XP goodbye permanently.
Except for a few heretical Calvinists, Christian theology--going back to the patristic period and, yes, even the new testament--has always maintained the reality of free will. Per Boethius (from the 6th century), God's foreknowledge is not the same as human foreknowledge, since God knows/everything/ in one instant. So, it's not really foreknowledge at all, although the human word "foreknowledge" is as close as we get. God's foreknowledge doesn't involve causation.
Why this is significant: Risk Reduction
on
Going To Boot Camp
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I think a lot of people are missing the true significance of bootcamp. What bootcamp does is, for the home user, reduce the risk of buying a Mac. A lot of home users (even fairly savvy ones) are uncomfortable with the idea of jumping to a Mac if it's a one-way trip, and if they don't like it they're stuck with this very expensive piece of hardware that is useless to them because they need to run "X".
Now, they can buy a Mac in the knowledge that, if there is some vital piece of software (be it a custom app, or a game, or whatever) it/can/ be run. And, if they just hate Mac OS, they still have a very slick Windows box. This is even more the case with the availability of virtualization solutions--Apple now has a convenient transitional platform for switchers.
What Apple is betting on is that the user experience on Mac OS X is enough better that, when users get to try OSX and Windows side-by-side, they'll prefer OSX. Where OS2 missed was not by offering compatibility, but by failing to offer any compelling advantage to running native. Apple offers many compelling advantages, including a spiffy look and feel, much better "ease of use", and much less risk from malware. And that is why this strategy makes sense.
What if you're right? God should instead lobotomize us all (spiritually if not intellectually) and appoint angels to guide us by the hand through every step of life, change our diapers, and generally make us happy?
Sounds downright Orwellian to me. You want the impossible: free will without freedom.
Most Christian theology has taught that the one law governing God is the law of non-contradiction: God can't be both A and not-A at the same time. (The apothatic tradition seems to say that he can--e.g., Pseudo-Dionysius spoke of God as a "luminous darkness"--until you understand that the point of the via negativa is to show the limitation of human language in describing the almighty.)
If this is true, and God can't contradict himself, then neither can he make us free without giving us the freedom to sin.
Oddly enough, everything I wrote was more-or-less a rehash of material from Thomas Aquinas' Summa, written in the 12th century.
Seems to me that either (a) he was miraculously responding to claims that scientists wouldn't get around to making for hundreds of years before they were even made or (b) the Christian position has not changed in the manner you suggest. Perhaps you could slice it with a razor belonging to another Medieval fart, Occam, and get back to me.
Or, you could just admit that you know one hell of a lot less about theology than theologians these days know about the philosophy of science.
This experiment is IMO worthless, for much the same reason that previous experiments (with results more amenable to the faithful) were worthless.
The problem is that no Christian who is not completely theologically naive is going to suppose that their prayer can make God do something. God does what God chooses to do, according to his own logic. That's why the Lord's prayer opens with (my translation):
Our heavenly father,
May/your/ name be held holy,
May/your/ kingdom come,
May/your/ will be done,
All these on earth as in heaven.
There is, right from the start, a recognition that the answer to prayer is at God's will (or whim if you prefer).
In other words, prayer is not a deterministic process. You don't push a "pray" button and reliably expect a certain action from God. God's will is much more important than the will of the person praying. Because of this, prayer is not really susceptible to statistical analysis: God knows not just what you're praying, but why, and he has his own agenda that's perhaps rather different from yours. Worse, this sort of analysis generally cannot distinguish between "impossible" and "rare". Perhaps God only answers prayers for Anabaptists, or Pentecostals, or that truly dedicated fraction of the church that actually has better morals, lower divorce rates, and is what really keeps the church going. This sort of "fringe" reaction is going to be quite difficult to detect in the sort of study done.
Why pray then? Perhaps for the same reason that death row inmates keep petitioning the governor, even though clemency is rare indeed: ultimately, there are circumstances in which only God has the power to do something, and once in a great while he does, for reasons that we find inscrutable. More importantly, for we Christians, Jesus told us to. Of course, just like that death row inmate, we don't/only/ pray. We pray and pursue every other option that we believe can help. But neither do we give up prayer just because it rarely "works" according to our agenda.
One effect, incidentally, is that of maintaining hope. When a person loses hope, they've lost everything.
Now this, of course, leads to a much more complicated problem (viz. theodicy, the study of why God allows suffering and evil.) But I'm certainly not going to tackle that in a slashdot post.
Y'know... I think the fact that the parent, a vicious slander against pastors, was moderated "insightful" and "informative", while my (true) claim that most pastors children become pastors was modded a "troll" REALLY says something about slashdot moderators.
What it says I will leave as an exercise for the observer.
As a pastor myself, I know a lot of pastors. And I know an awful lot of pastors whose parents and grandparents were pastors, and a lot of pastors whose children become pastors.
Not whores.
Not to say it could never happen, but it doesn't tend to, and it's sad that you got modded up just because you had someting nasty to say about people who spend their whole lives trying to help others.
The following is a description of the main conclusions from each of the seven categories of interest:
Drug vs. drug comparisons: The limited evidence available from studies comparing different stimulants suggests that there are few, if any, short-term differences in effectiveness among methylphenidate (MPH), dextroamphetamine, and pemoline. The studies comparing stimulants to tricyclic antidepressants had many limitations and presented conflicting results.
Drug vs. nondrug comparisons: Despite the limitations in the individual studies, the results indicate consistently that stimulants are more effective than nonpharmacological interventions when compared head-to-head.
Combination therapies: There is a lack of evidence supporting the superiority of combination therapy over stimulant alone or superiority of combination therapy over nondrug intervention alone. A recent large trial found that combined treatment offers modest additional benefits over single-component treatments for non-ADHD areas of functioning.
For a library of only 3500 volumes, software isn't the problem. The problem is organizing them on the shelf. (Even a spreadsheet would be adequate software for a library of that size.) You need to number your books.
I started out with Dewey, but found that in titles where I was overconcentrated (e.g. theology and especially New Testament) Dewey didn't offer enough granularity, plus you have to buy the books to really use it. Instead, I've gone to LC cataloging. This has several advantages:
It's pretty well fleshed out for the largest libraries with the most specialized holdings.
Most academic works (and a lot of non-academic non-fiction) print LC numbers in their front matter.
For those that don't, just go to the LC website and look up the number they use. There are very few books that the LoC doesn't have. (One notable exception, for my purposes, would be Bible study curricula and the like.)
Be warned, however, that numbering your books is a heck of a lot of work, and not for the faint of heart.
I strongly agree. I had RSI problems for a while, and resolved them by getting a/good/ office chair and setting it up properly. Your chair should be as high as you find comfortable. You should/not/ be leaning back in it--in fact, it's best if you can tilt the seat slightly forward. you should never be "lounging" in your chair. Always sit with your back straight. The back of the chair is there for additional support and reinforcement, you should barely touch it most of the time.
Wrist pads are useful, but probably not for the reason you think. The purpose of the wrist pad is to prevent you from dropping your wrists. Also, your keyboard should be/flat/ or tilted slightly down, not tilted up. Take regular breaks, and it never hurts to warm up a bit at the start of the day.
Also, losing weight will help with all sorts of RSI, because excess weight creates unusual pressures on various nerves.
I remember a program my boss hired written back on my first SA job. This program was to automate the creation of accounts on the university's UNIX systems. Unfortunately, when delivered it had a bug in the uid creation algorithm that gave it O(n!)--i.e. for 5000+ users, if you extrapolated the curve, it would have taken 5.2 billion years to finish.
In desperation, because the developer was an idiot, I took a look at the code. By adding one word: making a variable representing the UID static, the app went from O(n!) to O(n). Of course, this was a college, so I didn't get a bonus. But the point is that simple optimizations often yield HUGE results. I'm tempted to say that complex optimizations are rarely as effective as simple ones.
I agree that drugs should not be the first attempt at a solution, and agree completely that any approach must include parental involvement and non-medication support and training. I'm also glad that you found something that works for you.
Of course, the fact that he did raises doubt about the diagnosis. It could easily be Bipolar or something, in which case the fact that talk therapy helped is not surprising. However, study after study after study after study has shown that no non-drug-therapy for ADHD is particularly effective.
Not to mention that adult ADHD is often associated with some pretty nasty stuff when left untreated, including spousal abuse. Can we say "divorce city"?
Maybe now Amazon will start stocking Toys R Us type stuff themselves, instead of forcing me to go with third-party sellers. I have Amazon prime, and would like to use it for video games and the like, but can't because Amazon never stocks the stuff themselves. (And Amazon prime only works with items Amazon sells themselves.)
I've not done much with Niagara servers yet (should be getting one in the next few months) but from what I understand the processor in the Niagaras would not be well adapted to CPU intensive, single user use. It's supposedly got a multitude of "little" cores, which makes it well adapted to applications that are heavily multithreaded. This is especially good when combined with Solaris, which has got multiprocessing overhead down more-or-less to theoretical minimums. So, it would make a good web server or database server for a large number of users, but not so good as a compute server for a single user.
Obviously, you've never been a sysadmin in an enterprise environment. First of all, I don't give a shit what kind of audio or video card a server has. In fact, if it's my server, it doesn't even have a monitor or speakers. Instead, it has a serial cable plugged into a terminal server, and that's all. All your fancy video card does is burn power and make heat that I have to spend money to pump out of the rack.
The difference between a server and a PC is:
A server is designed to serve data, and has nothing I don't need for it. That means that that damn video card that's not even hooked to a monitor can't break and take my website down with it's million dollars a day revenue.
A server is designed to serve data reliably, and has enterprise class components. That means no cheap-ass western digital hard drives. If you don't think there's a difference, you've never used Enterprise hardware.
A server is designed to serve data cheaply. This means low TCO, not low purchase price. Which means an OS that pushes the most bits per cpu, while requiring the least system administrator time. Is Solaris that OS? Debatable, since time has ensured that Apache is highly optimized for Linux. But if you can't run Linux on these yet, you will be able to soon. However, the CPU architecture on these is pretty highly parallel, and Solaris may work better than Linux. Sun is presenting some impressive numbers for these. And they're cheap (as servers go).
In other words, this may be a good time to buy SUNW, at least if you can grow a beard.
I have a Solaris web server with an uptime of 2436 days. It's last outage was when we moved it from one location to another. 'nuff said.
(Yes, it should have been patched, etc., but as it turns out this server is running Solaris 2.5.1, and everyone forgot it was there. the amazing thing is that it has run for over 6 YEARS without a reboot.)
Slashdot Mirror
However, I wouldn't even consider it now. Here are some factors to consider:
- Children. Do you have children? Do you want to have children? If so, then you need to think very carefully about how that's going to play out. Young children especially will grow very quickly if you don't have daily contact.
- Is this a permanent thing? After about six months of this, both my wife and I were ready for it to be over. I was able to make a telecommuting arrangement, but the nature of the work (computer systems troubleshooting) and the nature of the company (major, national company with 10's of thousands of employees) allowed that. What's your exit strategy?
- How stable is your marriage? While it was okay for us, when I worked (bi-vocationally) as a minister in a military town I saw way too many women who would fall into adultery when their husband was away for months at a time. And we won't even get into what soldiers in remote locations do. (Call me old-fashioned, but I happen to think that adultery is wrong on either side of the equation.)
- Can you handle it? It can get really lonely being away from home like that. You're not in the "remote" location often enough to form roots, and you're away from home often enough that friendships tend to be compromised. It's not just your wife, it's you too.
I could probably list more, but the bottom line is that this is not (necessarily) the end of the world, but you definitely need to think hard about whether it's what you want in life. I would personally not advise it unless your marriage is stable, you trust your wife (i.e. you won't be concerned about her having outside relationships--which can be bad whether she's having them or not) and you have no small children. But it will have to be your call.Although it makes me quite unhappy, my understanding of scripture is that not everyone is saved. God /desires/ that everyone be saved, but he also desires that we choose him freely, according to our own character. So, you get into this very tough situation of having to acknowledge that there are some God has chosen (because they chose him, but which came first?) and others that God has not chosen (for whatever reason.) Those he chooses enjoy the fruits of his benevolence, if not now then in the last day, and those he has not chosen ... don't. (Note that I'm NOT advocating double-Predestination here.)
I'm afraid that the notion of omni-benevolence, which really comes from Platonism, not the Bible, creates a false image of God. God is (or is supposed to be) kind of a pushover parent who just keeps doing nice things for their kids no matter what sort of brat they've become. The problem is that we look at benevolence in very human terms, and not in divine term. His eyes see further than ours, and accordingly he makes decisions that to us just don't make sense.
In contrast, the mac offers significant advantages over XP, and few who have used OSX for a few days would willingly go back.
Therefore, I run it for Quicken and Quicken only, as I made fairly clear. However, it would be significantly more convenient for me to run it on my laptop, along with everything else I do every day, without having to sacrifice the vastly superior (for me) mac environment to do so.
It seems to me that the person who has an agenda here is /you/.
Surely you can see that $150 for a new copy of XP home is a small investment compared to $2000+ for a new computer comparable to the MacBook pro?
AndExcept for a few heretical Calvinists, Christian theology--going back to the patristic period and, yes, even the new testament--has always maintained the reality of free will. Per Boethius (from the 6th century), God's foreknowledge is not the same as human foreknowledge, since God knows /everything/ in one instant. So, it's not really foreknowledge at all, although the human word "foreknowledge" is as close as we get. God's foreknowledge doesn't involve causation.
Now, they can buy a Mac in the knowledge that, if there is some vital piece of software (be it a custom app, or a game, or whatever) it /can/ be run. And, if they just hate Mac OS, they still have a very slick Windows box. This is even more the case with the availability of virtualization solutions--Apple now has a convenient transitional platform for switchers.
What Apple is betting on is that the user experience on Mac OS X is enough better that, when users get to try OSX and Windows side-by-side, they'll prefer OSX. Where OS2 missed was not by offering compatibility, but by failing to offer any compelling advantage to running native. Apple offers many compelling advantages, including a spiffy look and feel, much better "ease of use", and much less risk from malware. And that is why this strategy makes sense.
Sounds downright Orwellian to me. You want the impossible: free will without freedom.
Most Christian theology has taught that the one law governing God is the law of non-contradiction: God can't be both A and not-A at the same time. (The apothatic tradition seems to say that he can--e.g., Pseudo-Dionysius spoke of God as a "luminous darkness"--until you understand that the point of the via negativa is to show the limitation of human language in describing the almighty.)
If this is true, and God can't contradict himself, then neither can he make us free without giving us the freedom to sin.
Seems to me that either (a) he was miraculously responding to claims that scientists wouldn't get around to making for hundreds of years before they were even made or (b) the Christian position has not changed in the manner you suggest. Perhaps you could slice it with a razor belonging to another Medieval fart, Occam, and get back to me.
Or, you could just admit that you know one hell of a lot less about theology than theologians these days know about the philosophy of science.
The problem is that no Christian who is not completely theologically naive is going to suppose that their prayer can make God do something. God does what God chooses to do, according to his own logic. That's why the Lord's prayer opens with (my translation):
There is, right from the start, a recognition that the answer to prayer is at God's will (or whim if you prefer).In other words, prayer is not a deterministic process. You don't push a "pray" button and reliably expect a certain action from God. God's will is much more important than the will of the person praying. Because of this, prayer is not really susceptible to statistical analysis: God knows not just what you're praying, but why, and he has his own agenda that's perhaps rather different from yours. Worse, this sort of analysis generally cannot distinguish between "impossible" and "rare". Perhaps God only answers prayers for Anabaptists, or Pentecostals, or that truly dedicated fraction of the church that actually has better morals, lower divorce rates, and is what really keeps the church going. This sort of "fringe" reaction is going to be quite difficult to detect in the sort of study done.
Why pray then? Perhaps for the same reason that death row inmates keep petitioning the governor, even though clemency is rare indeed: ultimately, there are circumstances in which only God has the power to do something, and once in a great while he does, for reasons that we find inscrutable. More importantly, for we Christians, Jesus told us to. Of course, just like that death row inmate, we don't /only/ pray. We pray and pursue every other option that we believe can help. But neither do we give up prayer just because it rarely "works" according to our agenda.
One effect, incidentally, is that of maintaining hope. When a person loses hope, they've lost everything.
Now this, of course, leads to a much more complicated problem (viz. theodicy, the study of why God allows suffering and evil.) But I'm certainly not going to tackle that in a slashdot post.
What it says I will leave as an exercise for the observer.
Not whores.
Not to say it could never happen, but it doesn't tend to, and it's sad that you got modded up just because you had someting nasty to say about people who spend their whole lives trying to help others.
I started out with Dewey, but found that in titles where I was overconcentrated (e.g. theology and especially New Testament) Dewey didn't offer enough granularity, plus you have to buy the books to really use it. Instead, I've gone to LC cataloging. This has several advantages:
- It's pretty well fleshed out for the largest libraries with the most specialized holdings.
- Most academic works (and a lot of non-academic non-fiction) print LC numbers in their front matter.
- For those that don't, just go to the LC website and look up the number they use. There are very few books that the LoC doesn't have. (One notable exception, for my purposes, would be Bible study curricula and the like.)
Be warned, however, that numbering your books is a heck of a lot of work, and not for the faint of heart.Wrist pads are useful, but probably not for the reason you think. The purpose of the wrist pad is to prevent you from dropping your wrists. Also, your keyboard should be /flat/ or tilted slightly down, not tilted up. Take regular breaks, and it never hurts to warm up a bit at the start of the day.
Also, losing weight will help with all sorts of RSI, because excess weight creates unusual pressures on various nerves.
In desperation, because the developer was an idiot, I took a look at the code. By adding one word: making a variable representing the UID static, the app went from O(n!) to O(n). Of course, this was a college, so I didn't get a bonus. But the point is that simple optimizations often yield HUGE results. I'm tempted to say that complex optimizations are rarely as effective as simple ones.
Uh huh. But the answer this guy needs could come straight of the table.
I bet your insurance agent does.
Not to mention that adult ADHD is often associated with some pretty nasty stuff when left untreated, including spousal abuse. Can we say "divorce city"?
Maybe now Amazon will start stocking Toys R Us type stuff themselves, instead of forcing me to go with third-party sellers. I have Amazon prime, and would like to use it for video games and the like, but can't because Amazon never stocks the stuff themselves. (And Amazon prime only works with items Amazon sells themselves.)
I've not done much with Niagara servers yet (should be getting one in the next few months) but from what I understand the processor in the Niagaras would not be well adapted to CPU intensive, single user use. It's supposedly got a multitude of "little" cores, which makes it well adapted to applications that are heavily multithreaded. This is especially good when combined with Solaris, which has got multiprocessing overhead down more-or-less to theoretical minimums. So, it would make a good web server or database server for a large number of users, but not so good as a compute server for a single user.
The difference between a server and a PC is:
- A server is designed to serve data, and has nothing I don't need for it. That means that that damn video card that's not even hooked to a monitor can't break and take my website down with it's million dollars a day revenue.
- A server is designed to serve data reliably, and has enterprise class components. That means no cheap-ass western digital hard drives. If you don't think there's a difference, you've never used Enterprise hardware.
- A server is designed to serve data cheaply. This means low TCO, not low purchase price. Which means an OS that pushes the most bits per cpu, while requiring the least system administrator time. Is Solaris that OS? Debatable, since time has ensured that Apache is highly optimized for Linux. But if you can't run Linux on these yet, you will be able to soon. However, the CPU architecture on these is pretty highly parallel, and Solaris may work better than Linux. Sun is presenting some impressive numbers for these. And they're cheap (as servers go).
In other words, this may be a good time to buy SUNW, at least if you can grow a beard.(Yes, it should have been patched, etc., but as it turns out this server is running Solaris 2.5.1, and everyone forgot it was there. the amazing thing is that it has run for over 6 YEARS without a reboot.)