The Debian package management system ships with something called apt, which will calculate dependencies and fetch whatever is needed when you install a new program.
The two problems with this are (1) the new software you're installing needs to be in.deb format on an archive somewhere so that apt will have some way of calculating dependencies, and (2) if that package or any other package it depends on happens to be broken or there is some other sort of dependency problem, you're in for a big nasty fight.
Unless, of course, the app you need runs on Windows but not Linux. For example, you may have an accounting package or a printer that requires Windows.
Or maybe you want your people to have a browser that doesn't crash several times daily or stop responding when people click on links. You can say whatever you want about Microsoft, but you can't say Netscape's browser is better with a straight face.
IE and support for 3D are the two Big Reasons I won't even consider switching my desktop machine to Linux or *BSD. I'll run Linux on my server boxen but I haven't got any inclination to put up with shitty browsers and hard- or impossible-to-get-working 3D support under Linux, when I already have Windows (for free because I beta-tested it minimally which was also free), IE comes with it, and installing 3D support is a breeze.
A person should use the O/S that works best for them and timothy has made himself look like a stupid dork loser by appending that little biased tagline to the story. I don't need timothy or any other zealot telling me or anyone else what O/S to use. Of course, Slashdot editors have a long tradidion of interspersing stupid biased evaluations with their articles. Journalistic integrity is apparently not a goal at this site. Just look at the picture of Gates with the Borg stuff all over his head. Childish.
Of course, if Windows is the better answer to THEIR needs, it wouldn't make sense to use Linux or any other free or for-money O/S. I'm so sick of this anti-Windows nonsense.
One of the biggest differences (to a sysadmin) is that BSD and Linux use different init scripts. In BSD, your init script is this one big monstrous file. In Linux, your init scripts are SysV-style, in which you have seven directories (/etc/rc[0-6].d) which contain symlinks to files in a master directory (/etc/init.d).
IMHO, SysV is easier to administrate, because it's easy to follow and the divisions are easy to locate. Each runlevel (0-6), as indicated by its directory (/etc/rcX.d), contains numbered symlinks to files in/etc/init.d. For example, you might have/etc/rc2.d/S01cleanutmp, etc. At each runlevel, init executes the files in each/etc/rcX.d directory in numerical order.
Certainly the team that developed Solaris thought a SysV init was preferable. That says something, because Solaris used to be BSD way long ago in the 1.x days.
I guess which system (/etc/rcX.d or one big file) depends on whether you want a lot of easily understood small files or one huge file. In my experience, *BSD and Linux are just about equal as desktop performers. I use Linux because I prefer the SysV init style.
That's just because each vendor likes to tweak the kernel in a certain way. If you wipe out the vendor-supplied kernel and build and install your own with whatever patches you might need (wierd hardware, ReiserFS, etc.), the distro will still boot up and work fine.
All the vendors are doing is patching the kernels with stuff that anyone can download and patch their own kernel against anyway. For example, a vendor might include the ReiserFS patch. That's not a fork, it's just a common patch!
Our employer used to charge $0.65 a can for soda. Then we merged with another heavy hitter on the east coast who had THEIR machines rigged for $0.25. One of the perks of the merger was that now we get our soda for $0.25 as well.:)
Consumption hasn't gone up that much. The biggest difference seems to be that now, some people will say, "Can I get you a Coke?" when they go to the vending machine... or if a group from some office is ordering out, the guy who greets the delivery person in front will automatically buy everyone else soda.
I think what he was alluding to is the "slippery slope" phenomenon. The basic parts of this technology can probably be modified to examine content OTHER than MP3s - like the aforementioned example: books.
There are those in this world who seek control in order to destroy. This sort of technology is what they dream of posessing. That article the other week about that company which had mapped every IP address on the Internet by geographic location is a similar case.
Yeah... well I guess we ought to believe everything we read on xemu.com, right? After all, it's on the Internet, and all mud-slinging on the Internet is always based on facts and doesn't need to be verified.
Re:What?! The Americans still kill Indians and
on
FRG on W2K: No CoS
·
· Score: 1
That did not go unnoticed! What we call the "War On Drugs" is responsible for the fact that more than HALF of the people in U.S. prisons today are there because they used drugs. Not because they sold them, but just for posession/use. You'd think it would be better to rely on education and rehab programs, but the fascists behind the "war" are so concerned about what people do in the privacy of their own homes that they don't care that they are ruining the lives of people because they like to smoke a good bowl every now and then. I don't ever plan on using drugs but I think that this silly "war" is a waste of human lives.
Re:Oh you good Americans, please allow us ur own p
on
FRG on W2K: No CoS
·
· Score: 1
There are plenty of hystericals on Slashdot. They get moderator privileges, and they abuse them, amplifying what they agree with and modding down what they disagree with, even if it doesn't deserve to be. That is the caveat to this moderation system. I don't know that there is a better way of doing it though.
Re:It's not the religion, it's the org
on
FRG on W2K: No CoS
·
· Score: 1
That's what I am, although I usually call it "pragmatism." Take what you need/want and leave the rest to whoever wants it.
Because the person who set it as flamebait is a hysterical, and will actively fight anything that talks about elron and his doings in anything other than a negative light, no matter what it is. He or she has lost the ability to think rationally about this subject. For further examples of this mode of thinking, well, the elections are just over a day away, and there's no shortage of that kind of thinking flying around from both major parties.:)
Saying that BFE was a good book is nothing more than an opinion and didn't warrant the Flamebait mark.
Saying "BFE WAS AWESOME AND ALL YOU HATERS CAN SUCK MY BALLZAC!!!" would be an example of something that should be marked as flamebait.
Heh. The x-tians in Germany like to speak out against Scientology. I guess they forgot that two thousand years ago, THEY were considered the cult. I guess it's hard to write memoirs when you've been fed to the lions, eh?
I've had some dealings with the Church. I generally take what I consider useful but keep distant the rest of my time. I no more want to be a regular there than I'd want to be a regular at any church of any religion... it's just not for me. I find Scientologists in general to be pretty zealous about their beliefs, and I don't see anything wrong with it; plenty of people are zealous about their faith. I'm not zealous about it, but if people ask me about it, I give my honest opinion, and I have no trouble relating my experiences.
A lot of people like to talk trash about Scientology, without actually looking for themselves. They see and hear people trashing it but never take into consideration that those people might be lying for their OWN reasons. Proponents of Dianetics (which is the predecessor of Scientology and which no one claims is religious) and Psychiatry have locked horns on numerous occasions because they are competing for the same audience. They both have the same goals but believe in pursuing these goals in radically different ways. Psychiatry uses a combination of therapy and drugs to help ease the symptoms of a mental illness. Dianetics seeks to expose the root cause of the mental illness, allowing it to be dealt with and eradicated; drugs are never used, and in fact, the person receiving Dianetics is required to be fully awake during each session.
Many people have said that Scientology is responsible for crimes, such as murder. I don't know about that. I've never seen any evidence of it. But even if it has happened, that doesn't do anything to distinguish Scientology from any other church. Several hundred years ago, there were these wars called the Crusades in which Christians travelled en masse to convert as many people as possible and slay all who opposed them. It is quite possible that there are people with screws loose in Scientology, as with any other religion - but it's not fair to point at them and proclaim that they are a fair representation of the whole Scientologist population, especially when it implies that other religions don't have such people in them. I do know for a fact that Psychiatry is guilty of heinous crimes such as jamming an icepick through someone's skull and destroying portions of the brain (the transorbital lobotomy) and of strapping people down and sending electric shocks through them (electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT). They have been known to achieve similar effects with psychoactive drugs. Fortunately, lobotomy is illegal now.
Now, don't get me wrong, if you want someone to send doses of voltage through your body strong enough to kill your brain cells en masse, then by all means, go ahead. But don't piss on my parade if I think it's better to address a mental woe by addressing the problem at its root and allowing the mind to return to normal on its own. If you want to DELIBERATELY damage portions of your brain, then by all means, go ahead.
The fact of the matter is that you can walk into any grocery store and buy a copy of the Dianetics paperback for $6 or $7. Then you can take it home and read it, and have a friend read it, and the two of you can do Dianetics sessions on each other. You can, in fact, do all of this without ever setting foot in a Scientology organization or even talking to a Scientologist.
I want to have the freedom to investigate any religion I want, and to decide for myself whether or not it's for me. I don't need any government telling me what to believe and what not to believe. You can believe whatever you want about Dianetics and/or Scientology, but by accepting other people's evaluations verbatim, you really haven't done yourself any favors.
What if the government decided that a belief in Christ was detrimental to society, and used their Nazi-esque surveillance tactics to locate and kill you, AND your wife, AND your child?
"Pah," you say, "It'll never happen."
Yeah. That's what they thought in the USSR. I'll say it again:
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
- Benjamin Franklin
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
- Benjamin Franklin
The second you consign your safety into the hands of a government, you have consigned that safety into oblivion, because the people who run governments are just as succeptible to madness as anyone. The people of Germany trusted their government in the first half of the 20th century, and look where it got them. You might as well sculpt an idol out of horse shit and bow down before it and pray to it.
A few weeks ago I downed an entire bottle of red wine. I played a lot of Unreal Tournament that night and I did hella good. And it was hilarious, every bit of it. My fine motor control was not impacted even in the slightest. (Gross motor control is another matter; it took some real concentration to walk to the kitchen for food.)
If I take an IQ test today, down an entire bottle of red wine every weekend for the next 20 years, and then take the IQ test again at the end of that interval, the dip in my score will be much greater than if I drank lightly (as is my custom) or not at all. That's because I will have killed brain cells.
Marijuana kills brain cells. It is a scientific fact. If you smoke enough of the stuff, your brain is literally going to begin to shrink.
So in short, saying "weed is harmless" is inaccurate. You can point to smog or McDonald's or whatever, but you know what? Weed is worse. Smog will clog up your lymph nodes and McDonald's will clog up your arteries, so why make it worse by deliberately killing brain cells and increasing your risk of brain cancer?
The trouble is that MAPS has the power to "punish" anyone they want. If you run a large ISP (hundreds of thousands or even millions of users), the amount of spam flowing from your mail servers will be larger than for a smaller ISP, and it won't even be through any fault of your own - no matter how strong your TOS and how nasty you make the fine for spamming, the assholes will still abuse your service.
So what happens when abuse is reported to an ISP?
Depending on whether an ISP is running its own dialups or leasing them from one or more open provider networks (OPNs) such as UUNet or PSINet, or doing a combination of the two, reports about spamming will flow into it from agencies like SpamCop. The OPN usually hears about it first. Then they look up the account to see the username and ISP it belongs to. They will then contact that ISP and notify them of the spammer. After confirmation is done (i.e. the IP is cross-checked with the username and the spam is examined), the ISP will usually cancel the account. When that happens, the OPN will kick the spammer offline.
Or at least, that's how responsible ISPs do it. I've heard rumors that a certain ISP was getting spammer reports, cancelling the spamming customers, and then re-activating them later. UUNet got wind of it and decided to black-hole all mail coming from that ISP to their mail and news servers (they have quite a few). The persons responsible were shown the door.
It is dangerous IMO to have an unaccountable organization which holds the axe over ISPs. If you're a small ISP you have no recourse except to grovel before them. If you're a large ISP you can sue them. Even still, the responsible ISP can get royally screwed if MAPS decides they don't like said ISP. Examples like the above (UUNet black-holing an irresponsible ISP) would seem to indicate that OPNs and other backbone-related carriers are in a better position to enforce compliance anyway.
I hate the both of them, but I'll probably vote for Gore. At least when he talks about the war on drugs, it won't be hypocritical.
Oh yeah, I suppose you forgot the whole cocaine thing. Well, if you want someone whose brain has been addled by cocaine, and who laughs at people who are about to be executed, and who has signed enough death warrants to qualify him as a mass murderer, then vote for him.
Because it is unwise to trust the government and its agencies and employees to always do what is in the best interests of the populace.
Germany got lulled into a false sense of security. They thought that their government was benevolent. Remember what happened to them? Here's a hint: HEIL HITLER!!!
What if our government takes a turn for the worse and starts rounding up people and putting them in camps like Germany did, and like it did as well during WWII to the Japanese? A government is run by people who are just as susceptible to insanity and any number of bizarre neuroses as the rest of us. It is fundamentally unsafe to put all of your trust into the benevolence of such an entity. Now if it DID take a turn for the worse, what hope would any resistance have? If the FBI has its way, and gets Carnivore installed at every ISP, they will have easy access to EVERYTHING done by ANY target user on that ISP, subpoena or not. There's literally nothing to stop them. Seriously people, burning bridges before you can even cross them is a stupid idea.
To close, I would like to include a quote:
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
- Benjamin Franklin
You're right. Hippies smell. Like someone said a few weeks back, he needs to take a bath.
If I had a 20-processor SPARC machine, I'd run Solaris on it, not Linux. Solaris was lovingly crafted to run on EXACTLY that hardware, and the people analyzing the core dumps were taught by the same people who designed the O/S and kernel alongside the people who designed the hardware itself. That is hard to beat.
Of course if my company gave me a SPARC to use for a workstation, and I had the option to put Linux on it, I'd do it in a heartbeat. As many of us know, OpenWindows is a pile of manure compared to XFree86. But if you're going to use a giant SPARC as a server, why not go with the O/S that was designed specifically for it?
Except that living on a giant token ring-like network means that when enough people get on the ring, you lose bandwidth, and they get to sniff all your traffic.
I had Charter Cable and left them because of this, and also because they only provided 27K/sec. (I'm not shitting you. If you had two ISDN TAs and figured out a way to get all 4 B-channels to work together, you could actually beat it by a few K/sec. The promise of Cable was that it was supposed to be tens to hundreds of times faster than ISDN. How ridiculous.)
When I got DSL, I was pulling down 160K/sec. Then they had to drop me to 768k/sec (=~81K/sec) because of capacitance on my line; I live >10,000 feet away from the CO, so that really isn't so bad. That, plus the fact that my bandwidth to the C/O is A) dedicated, B) cannot be examined by other customers' DSL equipment, and C) PacBell is cooler than shit and giving me 5 IPs, letting me run my own servers, and even delegating reverse DNS to me, for about $80 altogether. (Something like $45 and you get 1 dynamic IP and you can't run servers, much less get to do your own reverse DNS. Still way the hell better than paying Charter $80 total for ~1/3rd the bandwidth.)
Slashdot Mirror
The two problems with this are (1) the new software you're installing needs to be in .deb format on an archive somewhere so that apt will have some way of calculating dependencies, and (2) if that package or any other package it depends on happens to be broken or there is some other sort of dependency problem, you're in for a big nasty fight.
Or maybe you want your people to have a browser that doesn't crash several times daily or stop responding when people click on links. You can say whatever you want about Microsoft, but you can't say Netscape's browser is better with a straight face.
IE and support for 3D are the two Big Reasons I won't even consider switching my desktop machine to Linux or *BSD. I'll run Linux on my server boxen but I haven't got any inclination to put up with shitty browsers and hard- or impossible-to-get-working 3D support under Linux, when I already have Windows (for free because I beta-tested it minimally which was also free), IE comes with it, and installing 3D support is a breeze.
A person should use the O/S that works best for them and timothy has made himself look like a stupid dork loser by appending that little biased tagline to the story. I don't need timothy or any other zealot telling me or anyone else what O/S to use. Of course, Slashdot editors have a long tradidion of interspersing stupid biased evaluations with their articles. Journalistic integrity is apparently not a goal at this site. Just look at the picture of Gates with the Borg stuff all over his head. Childish.
Of course, if Windows is the better answer to THEIR needs, it wouldn't make sense to use Linux or any other free or for-money O/S. I'm so sick of this anti-Windows nonsense.
IMHO, SysV is easier to administrate, because it's easy to follow and the divisions are easy to locate. Each runlevel (0-6), as indicated by its directory (/etc/rcX.d), contains numbered symlinks to files in /etc/init.d. For example, you might have /etc/rc2.d/S01cleanutmp, etc. At each runlevel, init executes the files in each /etc/rcX.d directory in numerical order.
Certainly the team that developed Solaris thought a SysV init was preferable. That says something, because Solaris used to be BSD way long ago in the 1.x days.
I guess which system (/etc/rcX.d or one big file) depends on whether you want a lot of easily understood small files or one huge file. In my experience, *BSD and Linux are just about equal as desktop performers. I use Linux because I prefer the SysV init style.
All the vendors are doing is patching the kernels with stuff that anyone can download and patch their own kernel against anyway. For example, a vendor might include the ReiserFS patch. That's not a fork, it's just a common patch!
Consumption hasn't gone up that much. The biggest difference seems to be that now, some people will say, "Can I get you a Coke?" when they go to the vending machine... or if a group from some office is ordering out, the guy who greets the delivery person in front will automatically buy everyone else soda.
There are those in this world who seek control in order to destroy. This sort of technology is what they dream of posessing. That article the other week about that company which had mapped every IP address on the Internet by geographic location is a similar case.
Yeah... well I guess we ought to believe everything we read on xemu.com, right? After all, it's on the Internet, and all mud-slinging on the Internet is always based on facts and doesn't need to be verified.
That did not go unnoticed! What we call the "War On Drugs" is responsible for the fact that more than HALF of the people in U.S. prisons today are there because they used drugs. Not because they sold them, but just for posession/use. You'd think it would be better to rely on education and rehab programs, but the fascists behind the "war" are so concerned about what people do in the privacy of their own homes that they don't care that they are ruining the lives of people because they like to smoke a good bowl every now and then. I don't ever plan on using drugs but I think that this silly "war" is a waste of human lives.
There are plenty of hystericals on Slashdot. They get moderator privileges, and they abuse them, amplifying what they agree with and modding down what they disagree with, even if it doesn't deserve to be. That is the caveat to this moderation system. I don't know that there is a better way of doing it though.
That's what I am, although I usually call it "pragmatism." Take what you need/want and leave the rest to whoever wants it.
Right, so why not have MS review it and find out the truth, either way?
Saying that BFE was a good book is nothing more than an opinion and didn't warrant the Flamebait mark.
Saying "BFE WAS AWESOME AND ALL YOU HATERS CAN SUCK MY BALLZAC!!!" would be an example of something that should be marked as flamebait.
I've had some dealings with the Church. I generally take what I consider useful but keep distant the rest of my time. I no more want to be a regular there than I'd want to be a regular at any church of any religion... it's just not for me. I find Scientologists in general to be pretty zealous about their beliefs, and I don't see anything wrong with it; plenty of people are zealous about their faith. I'm not zealous about it, but if people ask me about it, I give my honest opinion, and I have no trouble relating my experiences.
A lot of people like to talk trash about Scientology, without actually looking for themselves. They see and hear people trashing it but never take into consideration that those people might be lying for their OWN reasons. Proponents of Dianetics (which is the predecessor of Scientology and which no one claims is religious) and Psychiatry have locked horns on numerous occasions because they are competing for the same audience. They both have the same goals but believe in pursuing these goals in radically different ways. Psychiatry uses a combination of therapy and drugs to help ease the symptoms of a mental illness. Dianetics seeks to expose the root cause of the mental illness, allowing it to be dealt with and eradicated; drugs are never used, and in fact, the person receiving Dianetics is required to be fully awake during each session.
Many people have said that Scientology is responsible for crimes, such as murder. I don't know about that. I've never seen any evidence of it. But even if it has happened, that doesn't do anything to distinguish Scientology from any other church. Several hundred years ago, there were these wars called the Crusades in which Christians travelled en masse to convert as many people as possible and slay all who opposed them. It is quite possible that there are people with screws loose in Scientology, as with any other religion - but it's not fair to point at them and proclaim that they are a fair representation of the whole Scientologist population, especially when it implies that other religions don't have such people in them. I do know for a fact that Psychiatry is guilty of heinous crimes such as jamming an icepick through someone's skull and destroying portions of the brain (the transorbital lobotomy) and of strapping people down and sending electric shocks through them (electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT). They have been known to achieve similar effects with psychoactive drugs. Fortunately, lobotomy is illegal now.
Now, don't get me wrong, if you want someone to send doses of voltage through your body strong enough to kill your brain cells en masse, then by all means, go ahead. But don't piss on my parade if I think it's better to address a mental woe by addressing the problem at its root and allowing the mind to return to normal on its own. If you want to DELIBERATELY damage portions of your brain, then by all means, go ahead.
The fact of the matter is that you can walk into any grocery store and buy a copy of the Dianetics paperback for $6 or $7. Then you can take it home and read it, and have a friend read it, and the two of you can do Dianetics sessions on each other. You can, in fact, do all of this without ever setting foot in a Scientology organization or even talking to a Scientologist.
I want to have the freedom to investigate any religion I want, and to decide for myself whether or not it's for me. I don't need any government telling me what to believe and what not to believe. You can believe whatever you want about Dianetics and/or Scientology, but by accepting other people's evaluations verbatim, you really haven't done yourself any favors.
Didn't anyone think to requisition the SOURCE CODE to this defragmenter? That ought to put this whole issue to bed.
Wow. What a concept. 'Cept it ain't new, it's featured in Orwell's book 1984.
That, and s/he/it doesn't give any credence to history.
"Pah," you say, "It'll never happen."
Yeah. That's what they thought in the USSR. I'll say it again:
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
- Benjamin Franklin
- Benjamin Franklin
The second you consign your safety into the hands of a government, you have consigned that safety into oblivion, because the people who run governments are just as succeptible to madness as anyone. The people of Germany trusted their government in the first half of the 20th century, and look where it got them. You might as well sculpt an idol out of horse shit and bow down before it and pray to it.
If I take an IQ test today, down an entire bottle of red wine every weekend for the next 20 years, and then take the IQ test again at the end of that interval, the dip in my score will be much greater than if I drank lightly (as is my custom) or not at all. That's because I will have killed brain cells.
Marijuana kills brain cells. It is a scientific fact. If you smoke enough of the stuff, your brain is literally going to begin to shrink.
So in short, saying "weed is harmless" is inaccurate. You can point to smog or McDonald's or whatever, but you know what? Weed is worse. Smog will clog up your lymph nodes and McDonald's will clog up your arteries, so why make it worse by deliberately killing brain cells and increasing your risk of brain cancer?
So what happens when abuse is reported to an ISP?
Depending on whether an ISP is running its own dialups or leasing them from one or more open provider networks (OPNs) such as UUNet or PSINet, or doing a combination of the two, reports about spamming will flow into it from agencies like SpamCop. The OPN usually hears about it first. Then they look up the account to see the username and ISP it belongs to. They will then contact that ISP and notify them of the spammer. After confirmation is done (i.e. the IP is cross-checked with the username and the spam is examined), the ISP will usually cancel the account. When that happens, the OPN will kick the spammer offline.
Or at least, that's how responsible ISPs do it. I've heard rumors that a certain ISP was getting spammer reports, cancelling the spamming customers, and then re-activating them later. UUNet got wind of it and decided to black-hole all mail coming from that ISP to their mail and news servers (they have quite a few). The persons responsible were shown the door.
It is dangerous IMO to have an unaccountable organization which holds the axe over ISPs. If you're a small ISP you have no recourse except to grovel before them. If you're a large ISP you can sue them. Even still, the responsible ISP can get royally screwed if MAPS decides they don't like said ISP. Examples like the above (UUNet black-holing an irresponsible ISP) would seem to indicate that OPNs and other backbone-related carriers are in a better position to enforce compliance anyway.
Oh yeah, I suppose you forgot the whole cocaine thing. Well, if you want someone whose brain has been addled by cocaine, and who laughs at people who are about to be executed, and who has signed enough death warrants to qualify him as a mass murderer, then vote for him.
Me, I'm voting for the lesser of two evils.
Germany got lulled into a false sense of security. They thought that their government was benevolent. Remember what happened to them? Here's a hint: HEIL HITLER!!!
What if our government takes a turn for the worse and starts rounding up people and putting them in camps like Germany did, and like it did as well during WWII to the Japanese? A government is run by people who are just as susceptible to insanity and any number of bizarre neuroses as the rest of us. It is fundamentally unsafe to put all of your trust into the benevolence of such an entity. Now if it DID take a turn for the worse, what hope would any resistance have? If the FBI has its way, and gets Carnivore installed at every ISP, they will have easy access to EVERYTHING done by ANY target user on that ISP, subpoena or not. There's literally nothing to stop them. Seriously people, burning bridges before you can even cross them is a stupid idea.
To close, I would like to include a quote:
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
- Benjamin Franklin
You're right. Hippies smell. Like someone said a few weeks back, he needs to take a bath.
If I had a 20-processor SPARC machine, I'd run Solaris on it, not Linux. Solaris was lovingly crafted to run on EXACTLY that hardware, and the people analyzing the core dumps were taught by the same people who designed the O/S and kernel alongside the people who designed the hardware itself. That is hard to beat.
Of course if my company gave me a SPARC to use for a workstation, and I had the option to put Linux on it, I'd do it in a heartbeat. As many of us know, OpenWindows is a pile of manure compared to XFree86. But if you're going to use a giant SPARC as a server, why not go with the O/S that was designed specifically for it?
I had Charter Cable and left them because of this, and also because they only provided 27K/sec. (I'm not shitting you. If you had two ISDN TAs and figured out a way to get all 4 B-channels to work together, you could actually beat it by a few K/sec. The promise of Cable was that it was supposed to be tens to hundreds of times faster than ISDN. How ridiculous.)
When I got DSL, I was pulling down 160K/sec. Then they had to drop me to 768k/sec (=~81K/sec) because of capacitance on my line; I live >10,000 feet away from the CO, so that really isn't so bad. That, plus the fact that my bandwidth to the C/O is A) dedicated, B) cannot be examined by other customers' DSL equipment, and C) PacBell is cooler than shit and giving me 5 IPs, letting me run my own servers, and even delegating reverse DNS to me, for about $80 altogether. (Something like $45 and you get 1 dynamic IP and you can't run servers, much less get to do your own reverse DNS. Still way the hell better than paying Charter $80 total for ~1/3rd the bandwidth.)