Okay, this is a serious pet peeve. Fark is not a word, never was, never will be, STOP USING IT unless you want to be placed in the same category as lusers who make the Vulcan "V" sign.
Farscape was a TV show, not "reality", and the only reason the word was "invented" was because Scifi didn't want the rating level increase that would come with characters actually properly swearing. If you're gonna swear, swear properly.
even the cost of new parts alone (xenon high-intensity-discharge headlights: $3,000 each)
Bullwhoey- they don't cost anything near that, even dealer list price! Talk about ignorant- the writer probably looked up what the "option" cost in the brochure for a new car. That pricing isn't even remotely realistic- anyone who knows anything about new car pricing knows that isn't even what you'd pay if you negotiated(MSRP is for suckers and Saturn customers. Oh wait, that's redundant).
Which brings us to the parts distribution system; there's so many hands involved between you and the company that made the part it's not even funny, and each one wants a nice healthy piece of the pie. Sample: eastern european company(the true original manufacturer) -> Bosch -> Audi -> Worldpac -> Local Parts Co -> Your Mechanic -> You. This can vary wildly based on the part, the marque, etc; some parts are dealer-only, which means you or your mechanic now have to go through the local dealer. If you're lucky, your mechanic has an account with Worldpac and you either get parts slightly cheaper or he makes more money on parts. If you're not lucky, your mechanic has to get the parts from a local parts supplier, who tags on their own chunk of change to the price.
Want a big scary monopoly? Worldpac certainly qualifies with a huge portion of the US market in parts; there's virtually nobody else in the business; there is no equivalent of Sun, Apple, etc; it's just them. They're pretty clever about the web, too- all those two-guys-in-a-garage online parts houses which sell parts to various enthusiast groups are getting their parts from exactly the same place, Worldpac. Worldpac packages them and then gives a return address matching the company you thought you were ordering from. The 2-guys are little more than a marketing front("we're BMW enthusiasts! When we answer line 2. Line 1, we're Honda enthusiasts!") Worldpac quickly figured out that was the best way to sell to guys who wanted to buy parts from fellow enthusiasts (aka not "The Man", ie, Worldpac), and even better still, when Worldpac fucks up(and they often do), guess who takes the phone call? Guess who gets sacrificed faster than a lamb at a pagan festival? Guess who quietly makes a deal with 2-other-guys-in-a-garage to be one of their new (insert car marque here) parts site?
Don't most driver's license cards have barcodes on the back that liquor stores, etc. can scan?
Yup, and there are a number of companies that are happy to provide them to bartenders for nearly free. Look closely and you'll find most have a modem port and a label with instructions on how to let it "phone home".
That kind of use needs to be made illegal reaaaal fast. I'm required by law to present my ID, but it'll get scanned and some company gets a number of pieces of personal information.
But, with more than a hundred formats for the best ID system we have, it's impossible for anybody to be an expert on what security measures to look for and be able to notice when they're absent.
So here's a shocker. The federal government sets or negotiates a common anti-counterfeit system to use on driver's licenses. Like a 2-D barcode with cryptographically signed info and a special hologram.
Ever notice how we're getting closer and closer to east germany? I mean hell, the local cops already sit at the town border running license plates(yay in-car cruiser terminals!) and checking for DWB.
FYI, that would be 500kbit, not "500k", and that is the theoretical, absolute, maximum. Expect that to drop significantly once everyone figures out they can do it. It will be like cablemodems all over again.
Oh, and you have to pay about $80/month to get that. I will never understand why cell companies don't embrace data more- it's far less of a headache for them to handle(no QoS needed, for one). I get GPRS service, but it's incredibly expensive, so I have never bothered to do anything more than load my webmail page once by linking the powerbook to the phone via bluetooth. Whee.
Not sure Open Source is terribly high on the list of priorities for a country like Ethiopia, but the concepts involved - such as the value of sharing exceeding the value of the material shared - are certainly important ones and would go a long way to combat the dangers of corruption and greed.
What are you, Jon Katz? Do you seriously have ANY idea how supremely arrogant and asinine you sound? Let me boil it down for you: "Install linux, and your warlords will stop shooting you!" Gimme a fucking break.
They don't need computers. They need the rest of the world to stop shipping them weapons, so that warlords stop giving RPGs to 12 year old kids to slaughter defenseless people(12 year olds because so many adults have been killed there aren't enough left to force into private armies). They also need the countries of the world to stop protecting their agricultural industries, making food so expensive 3rd world countries can't afford to buy it.
Seriously, when I've been completely pissed I can hardly remember key sequences and don't even think about coding while drunk, all you get is code riddled with errors and a headache.
A grad student at my college once coded an entire poker game(in Scheme, I believe) while throughly drunk one night. It worked flawlessly, on the first try the next morning. Nobody could figure out how most of it worked.
Intel flew him from Wisconsin to Texas for interviews one weekend and hired him on the spot(the offer was good enough he didn't dare even think it over). Our professor joked that they probably thought they had a "pretty good" candidate until they met him, and realized they had a genius on their hands...
Nice guy. Great sense of humor, brilliant, and while he'd get engrossed in some programming project, he was also pretty sociable.
from choosing text books, to getting home from the pub after a few too many.
How about getting your car home from the pub? There's a problem it can't solve. Top Gear's Jeremy Clarkson had a brilliant suggestion- he parks illegally. Gets a great spot, and the next morning, he walks down to the tow lot a few minutes away, pays the fee and drives home. Apparently it works out perfectly, with the tow fee being less than one-way taxi fare.
Excellent TV program, by the way. If you can find it on the p2p nets, it's fantastic. Fifth Gear is decent(Tiff is pretty funny, Viki's alright), but not as good. Beware short clips "mistakenly" named with "Top Gear" in the filename. Oh, I wish we had reviewers like Clarkson etc here in the states.
That little extra step of deciding where need to reach would be a huge burden when you're going down the interstate at 70mph
You're absolutely right. I had to stop driving manual transmission cars because I couldn't deal with the complexity...having to press a pedal AND move a lever? All while braking or tapping the gas?
But then, I didn't find automatics much better. One pedal for stopping, one for going? Aaaaa! What insane trickery!
I just figured that it there was more of a political reason than a tech. reason why pilots haven't been entirely automated.
In the case of landings, it's called "weather", or more specifically, "wind". My father flew single-engine planes and you had to have lightning fast reflexes on windy days. It's better in a jumbo because of their mass, but they get tossed around a decent amount too.
Pilots are in the cockpit because planes are complicated. Planes can, and often do, suffer from mechanical breakdown, requiring improvisation or "best effort" solutions. Instruments do regularly fail requiring again, educated guessing or getting the information in other ways; GPS fails? Pilot whips out the charts and uses the ADF to navigate by VHF beacons. Avionics fail? Well, landmark time. The pilot can handle it- the computer goes "beep" and prints out "service code #432565, call Boeing". You rave about autopilots, but we've had a string of problems with both autopilots and some control systems- most infamously the Airbus disaster where the plane gave the pilot the wrong altitude AND refused to let him apply full power to save the plane from crashing.
We have this redundant setup whereby the actions of the pilot in command are confirmed by the copilot. And if one kicks the bucket entirely, the other one is fully capable of taking over. They've even often got a guy just to handle watching over the plane(engineer) in many cases.
Most major incidences in the last 10 years of US commercial airflight were due to mechanical failure. Not pilot error. The very last fucking thing we need to do is put more machines into the equation when we've proven we can't handle building them correctly in the first place.
We even have digital billboards in Salt Lake already
Boston's cabs have started sprouting Super(with a capital S) bright orange LED panels on top. They are displaying sports scores, or maybe very short news bits. Because of the brightness, they are virtually impossible to ignore, and exceptionally annoying. I'm almost positive I saw a Clear Channel logo at the bottom of the sign unit.
Screw Microsoft- there's plenty of competition these days. It's Clear Channel and the other super-huge media conglomerates that really frighten me.
At least the signs aren't animated. I give them about 6 months to figure that out. Personally, I hope someone takes Clear Channel to court over the existing signs violating some motor vehicle law.
So, at 2.4 kilowatt-hours a day, at a cost of $0.08 (say) a kilowatt-hour, you would save over 19 cents a day on electricity, or enough to pay off the generator in 17.1 years.
You neglected to factor in the cost of running the grid out to your house. It can easily be $30,000. Many off-grid systems aren't off-grid because people want to save money; they're set up because there's no way to get the grid to them. For example, in the mountains a mile up a road where there's no other houses. You think the power company runs the line all the way up to your house for free? Hah.
Further, a good system balances more than just one source- for example, solar is great until it rains, or night-time. A device like this is perfect for reducing the number of batteries needed to keep the house powered overnight(and big storage batteries are pretty expensive and have to be replaced every few years).
The guy that Schilling played everquest with, Doug Glanville has got to be the reigning baseball alpha geek
How about Curt Schilling himself, who carries a powerbook on the road and has quicktime clips and a database of hundreds of batters?
Reportedly he also spent time on a famous red sox chat board the night before he signed with the sox, trying to make up his mind whether he should sign...and convince everyone he really was Curt Schilling(he managed to, after instantly returning questions on his career stats that, according to friends, would have taken a "good baseball researcher" at least 5-10 minutes to find).
He finished up VERY late that night(well, morning) by saying essentially "Thanks, I've decided to sign with the sox, I've always heard red sox fans were the most knowledgeable, you guys have proved it". A few hours later(heh) at the press conference, John Henry(who also logged in at one point) joked(along the lines of) "and in Curt's contract is a clause prohibiting him from staying up past midnight talking on internet chat boards the day before a game."
It was a little bit of a surprise to me when I visited rackspace.com a year or so ago, but they have a very high density scheme with no racks to speak of.
That scheme is most certainly NOT "high density". It is extremely LOW density; in the space of a dozen desktop machines(if that; probably more like 8), I can place FORTY TWO 1U rackmount systems. Uh huh. You read that right. That's not even as dense as you can get- the ultimate are blade servers, of which you can fit something like a dozen in 4-5U of space, complete with a built-in high speed network switch, KVM/LOM and power distribution all builtin to the case.
Desktop cases are a HUGE waste of space in enterprise environments because everything you need is usually built-in to the server mobo; I've never seen a server with anything save a SCSI RAID card in a PCI slot. So all the space for 5+ full size PCI slots is wasted...
Rackspace's 'scheme' is done when you have a)a boatload of space(because your target market is grossly oversaturated) and b)a need for as low a margin as possible(because your target market is grossly oversaturated and because it's low-scale, borderline consumer stuff, it's extremely price-competitive; in enterprise hosting, people ask about your financials before they ask about how big your genset is). Ie, Rackspace went the absolute cheapest route possible, and their customers will suffer as a result.
Why? Well, first cooling in rackmount cases is excellent; it's piss-poor in desktop cases, usually...so expect hard drive failures. NONE of the components are easily swappable; instead of "pull machine out on its rails, pop the top, place new memory in, push system back in", you've got "unplug the machine, pull it out of the shelf because there's no clearance on any of the sides, put it on a workbench, pop the case, put in the memory, put it back together, put it back in the shelf, plug it all in".
God help you if you need to swap power supplies- they're several screws and connectors all over the place; drives, fans, motherboard. You take 20 minutes, while I take 15 seconds to slide the lever, pull the PS module, put the new one in, lock the lever, and plug the power cord back in. Done, while you're on screw #2.
Yes, not an issue for this fellow, but your implication that Rackspace is somehow engaging in innovative thinking is ludicrous. No professional hosting company would even consider such bullshit.
And yes, I said professional; Rackspace caters to individuals, not corporations, and non-managed hosting- pretty much putting them a step above Joe and Bob's ISP, but not by much. I've worked for a commercial-only managed hosting company, and unlike Rackspace which let you "visit", it's an entirely different sort of place; customers don't set foot in the place, the building isn't marked, etc.
Just buy a 4 foot painted aluminum 19" open telco rack
Very bad idea unless you're mounting very shallow stuff or very tall stuff; there is a reason they call them "telco" or "relay" racks; telco/network gear is never very deep(long), unless it's also very tall, so it doesn't exert much outward pull on the screws. Think about the mechanics of it- and yes, it's not pretty when that 2U DB server with 4 very expensive SCSI disks makes Unintentional Ground Contact because the screws all stripped out.
Go with steel unless you have a really good reason not to. Aluminum strips like a son of a bitch, even just installing the stuff if you're not careful (ie mis-threading a screw or even over-tightening it.)
Get one big system and a VMware license... saves lots of space and hardware costs...
...and is absolutely useless for anything even remotely approaching performance testing, because you've got the overhead of the virtual machine software, and several systems fighting for CPU time, memory, and disk I/O(which is particularly a problem with IDE systems where disk I/O involves a lot of CPU overhead).
you have one kick ass box.
and if anything breaks, you now have ZERO working systems, instead of 2/3rds etc. IBM's big iron gets away with this because damn near everything is redundant and hot-swappable, so the machine never has to go down.
I don't consider the parent answer particularly insightful, sorry...
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, this is a serious pet peeve. Fark is not a word, never was, never will be, STOP USING IT unless you want to be placed in the same category as lusers who make the Vulcan "V" sign.
Farscape was a TV show, not "reality", and the only reason the word was "invented" was because Scifi didn't want the rating level increase that would come with characters actually properly swearing. If you're gonna swear, swear properly.
Terribly sorry. We were talking about the other grandmother on Slashdot.
If the kernel is free of copyright violations, why do we need insurance?
That's like saying "I guarantee there is no danger of flooding here. But I would be happy to sell you flood insurance."
Bullwhoey- they don't cost anything near that, even dealer list price! Talk about ignorant- the writer probably looked up what the "option" cost in the brochure for a new car. That pricing isn't even remotely realistic- anyone who knows anything about new car pricing knows that isn't even what you'd pay if you negotiated(MSRP is for suckers and Saturn customers. Oh wait, that's redundant).
Which brings us to the parts distribution system; there's so many hands involved between you and the company that made the part it's not even funny, and each one wants a nice healthy piece of the pie. Sample: eastern european company(the true original manufacturer) -> Bosch -> Audi -> Worldpac -> Local Parts Co -> Your Mechanic -> You. This can vary wildly based on the part, the marque, etc; some parts are dealer-only, which means you or your mechanic now have to go through the local dealer. If you're lucky, your mechanic has an account with Worldpac and you either get parts slightly cheaper or he makes more money on parts. If you're not lucky, your mechanic has to get the parts from a local parts supplier, who tags on their own chunk of change to the price.
Want a big scary monopoly? Worldpac certainly qualifies with a huge portion of the US market in parts; there's virtually nobody else in the business; there is no equivalent of Sun, Apple, etc; it's just them. They're pretty clever about the web, too- all those two-guys-in-a-garage online parts houses which sell parts to various enthusiast groups are getting their parts from exactly the same place, Worldpac. Worldpac packages them and then gives a return address matching the company you thought you were ordering from. The 2-guys are little more than a marketing front("we're BMW enthusiasts! When we answer line 2. Line 1, we're Honda enthusiasts!") Worldpac quickly figured out that was the best way to sell to guys who wanted to buy parts from fellow enthusiasts (aka not "The Man", ie, Worldpac), and even better still, when Worldpac fucks up(and they often do), guess who takes the phone call? Guess who gets sacrificed faster than a lamb at a pagan festival? Guess who quietly makes a deal with 2-other-guys-in-a-garage to be one of their new (insert car marque here) parts site?
Yup, and there are a number of companies that are happy to provide them to bartenders for nearly free. Look closely and you'll find most have a modem port and a label with instructions on how to let it "phone home".
That kind of use needs to be made illegal reaaaal fast. I'm required by law to present my ID, but it'll get scanned and some company gets a number of pieces of personal information.
So here's a shocker. The federal government sets or negotiates a common anti-counterfeit system to use on driver's licenses. Like a 2-D barcode with cryptographically signed info and a special hologram.
Ever notice how we're getting closer and closer to east germany? I mean hell, the local cops already sit at the town border running license plates(yay in-car cruiser terminals!) and checking for DWB.
FYI, that would be 500kbit, not "500k", and that is the theoretical, absolute, maximum. Expect that to drop significantly once everyone figures out they can do it. It will be like cablemodems all over again.
Oh, and you have to pay about $80/month to get that. I will never understand why cell companies don't embrace data more- it's far less of a headache for them to handle(no QoS needed, for one). I get GPRS service, but it's incredibly expensive, so I have never bothered to do anything more than load my webmail page once by linking the powerbook to the phone via bluetooth. Whee.
I for one welcome our teenage robot building overlords!
Er, wait....that would be truly frightening. Robot-building teenager overlords! Yeah, that's it.
Off topic I know, but what ever happened to the summary bit, and then "more that shows up when you actually click on the story" part?
If the poster couldn't do it, why couldn't the editor? Three keystrokes required...
What are you, Jon Katz? Do you seriously have ANY idea how supremely arrogant and asinine you sound? Let me boil it down for you: "Install linux, and your warlords will stop shooting you!" Gimme a fucking break.
They don't need computers. They need the rest of the world to stop shipping them weapons, so that warlords stop giving RPGs to 12 year old kids to slaughter defenseless people(12 year olds because so many adults have been killed there aren't enough left to force into private armies). They also need the countries of the world to stop protecting their agricultural industries, making food so expensive 3rd world countries can't afford to buy it.
A grad student at my college once coded an entire poker game(in Scheme, I believe) while throughly drunk one night. It worked flawlessly, on the first try the next morning. Nobody could figure out how most of it worked.
Intel flew him from Wisconsin to Texas for interviews one weekend and hired him on the spot(the offer was good enough he didn't dare even think it over). Our professor joked that they probably thought they had a "pretty good" candidate until they met him, and realized they had a genius on their hands...
Nice guy. Great sense of humor, brilliant, and while he'd get engrossed in some programming project, he was also pretty sociable.
How about getting your car home from the pub? There's a problem it can't solve. Top Gear's Jeremy Clarkson had a brilliant suggestion- he parks illegally. Gets a great spot, and the next morning, he walks down to the tow lot a few minutes away, pays the fee and drives home. Apparently it works out perfectly, with the tow fee being less than one-way taxi fare.
Excellent TV program, by the way. If you can find it on the p2p nets, it's fantastic. Fifth Gear is decent(Tiff is pretty funny, Viki's alright), but not as good. Beware short clips "mistakenly" named with "Top Gear" in the filename. Oh, I wish we had reviewers like Clarkson etc here in the states.
You're absolutely right. I had to stop driving manual transmission cars because I couldn't deal with the complexity...having to press a pedal AND move a lever? All while braking or tapping the gas?
But then, I didn't find automatics much better. One pedal for stopping, one for going? Aaaaa! What insane trickery!
In the case of landings, it's called "weather", or more specifically, "wind". My father flew single-engine planes and you had to have lightning fast reflexes on windy days. It's better in a jumbo because of their mass, but they get tossed around a decent amount too.
Pilots are in the cockpit because planes are complicated. Planes can, and often do, suffer from mechanical breakdown, requiring improvisation or "best effort" solutions. Instruments do regularly fail requiring again, educated guessing or getting the information in other ways; GPS fails? Pilot whips out the charts and uses the ADF to navigate by VHF beacons. Avionics fail? Well, landmark time. The pilot can handle it- the computer goes "beep" and prints out "service code #432565, call Boeing". You rave about autopilots, but we've had a string of problems with both autopilots and some control systems- most infamously the Airbus disaster where the plane gave the pilot the wrong altitude AND refused to let him apply full power to save the plane from crashing.
We have this redundant setup whereby the actions of the pilot in command are confirmed by the copilot. And if one kicks the bucket entirely, the other one is fully capable of taking over. They've even often got a guy just to handle watching over the plane(engineer) in many cases.
Most major incidences in the last 10 years of US commercial airflight were due to mechanical failure. Not pilot error. The very last fucking thing we need to do is put more machines into the equation when we've proven we can't handle building them correctly in the first place.
How was this redundant, when I posted it when there were 3 other comments? And how was it off-topic? Plenty of people thought it was funny...
I smell a new round of moderators shortly. Let's here it for metamoderation...
"Shouldn't that be GNU/Forge?"
"I for one welcome our Gnu project management overlords"
"In Soviet Russia, projects manage gnu!"
It isn't just the Toronto Star. Fun with google
It looks like CNN picked 2002, Linux.com(OSDN) picked 1999...2002 was particularly popular...
Boston's cabs have started sprouting Super(with a capital S) bright orange LED panels on top. They are displaying sports scores, or maybe very short news bits. Because of the brightness, they are virtually impossible to ignore, and exceptionally annoying. I'm almost positive I saw a Clear Channel logo at the bottom of the sign unit.
Screw Microsoft- there's plenty of competition these days. It's Clear Channel and the other super-huge media conglomerates that really frighten me.
At least the signs aren't animated. I give them about 6 months to figure that out. Personally, I hope someone takes Clear Channel to court over the existing signs violating some motor vehicle law.
You neglected to factor in the cost of running the grid out to your house. It can easily be $30,000. Many off-grid systems aren't off-grid because people want to save money; they're set up because there's no way to get the grid to them. For example, in the mountains a mile up a road where there's no other houses. You think the power company runs the line all the way up to your house for free? Hah.
Further, a good system balances more than just one source- for example, solar is great until it rains, or night-time. A device like this is perfect for reducing the number of batteries needed to keep the house powered overnight(and big storage batteries are pretty expensive and have to be replaced every few years).
How about Curt Schilling himself, who carries a powerbook on the road and has quicktime clips and a database of hundreds of batters?
Reportedly he also spent time on a famous red sox chat board the night before he signed with the sox, trying to make up his mind whether he should sign...and convince everyone he really was Curt Schilling(he managed to, after instantly returning questions on his career stats that, according to friends, would have taken a "good baseball researcher" at least 5-10 minutes to find).
He finished up VERY late that night(well, morning) by saying essentially "Thanks, I've decided to sign with the sox, I've always heard red sox fans were the most knowledgeable, you guys have proved it". A few hours later(heh) at the press conference, John Henry(who also logged in at one point) joked(along the lines of) "and in Curt's contract is a clause prohibiting him from staying up past midnight talking on internet chat boards the day before a game."
There are commercial tools that allow you to run exploits and install shellcode or deliver payloads?
I couldn't find this quote anywhere in the article...
That scheme is most certainly NOT "high density". It is extremely LOW density; in the space of a dozen desktop machines(if that; probably more like 8), I can place FORTY TWO 1U rackmount systems. Uh huh. You read that right. That's not even as dense as you can get- the ultimate are blade servers, of which you can fit something like a dozen in 4-5U of space, complete with a built-in high speed network switch, KVM/LOM and power distribution all builtin to the case.
Desktop cases are a HUGE waste of space in enterprise environments because everything you need is usually built-in to the server mobo; I've never seen a server with anything save a SCSI RAID card in a PCI slot. So all the space for 5+ full size PCI slots is wasted...
Rackspace's 'scheme' is done when you have a)a boatload of space(because your target market is grossly oversaturated) and b)a need for as low a margin as possible(because your target market is grossly oversaturated and because it's low-scale, borderline consumer stuff, it's extremely price-competitive; in enterprise hosting, people ask about your financials before they ask about how big your genset is). Ie, Rackspace went the absolute cheapest route possible, and their customers will suffer as a result.
Why? Well, first cooling in rackmount cases is excellent; it's piss-poor in desktop cases, usually...so expect hard drive failures. NONE of the components are easily swappable; instead of "pull machine out on its rails, pop the top, place new memory in, push system back in", you've got "unplug the machine, pull it out of the shelf because there's no clearance on any of the sides, put it on a workbench, pop the case, put in the memory, put it back together, put it back in the shelf, plug it all in".
God help you if you need to swap power supplies- they're several screws and connectors all over the place; drives, fans, motherboard. You take 20 minutes, while I take 15 seconds to slide the lever, pull the PS module, put the new one in, lock the lever, and plug the power cord back in. Done, while you're on screw #2.
Yes, not an issue for this fellow, but your implication that Rackspace is somehow engaging in innovative thinking is ludicrous. No professional hosting company would even consider such bullshit.
And yes, I said professional; Rackspace caters to individuals, not corporations, and non-managed hosting- pretty much putting them a step above Joe and Bob's ISP, but not by much. I've worked for a commercial-only managed hosting company, and unlike Rackspace which let you "visit", it's an entirely different sort of place; customers don't set foot in the place, the building isn't marked, etc.
Very bad idea unless you're mounting very shallow stuff or very tall stuff; there is a reason they call them "telco" or "relay" racks; telco/network gear is never very deep(long), unless it's also very tall, so it doesn't exert much outward pull on the screws. Think about the mechanics of it- and yes, it's not pretty when that 2U DB server with 4 very expensive SCSI disks makes Unintentional Ground Contact because the screws all stripped out.
Go with steel unless you have a really good reason not to. Aluminum strips like a son of a bitch, even just installing the stuff if you're not careful (ie mis-threading a screw or even over-tightening it.)
...and is absolutely useless for anything even remotely approaching performance testing, because you've got the overhead of the virtual machine software, and several systems fighting for CPU time, memory, and disk I/O(which is particularly a problem with IDE systems where disk I/O involves a lot of CPU overhead).
you have one kick ass box.
and if anything breaks, you now have ZERO working systems, instead of 2/3rds etc. IBM's big iron gets away with this because damn near everything is redundant and hot-swappable, so the machine never has to go down.
I don't consider the parent answer particularly insightful, sorry...
I for one, am severely disappointed in the only way in which the word "overlord" has been used in the comments posted thusfar!