I find this funny because I'm in the market to buy a new car and I hate all of the domestics (I live in Canada). The only one I kind of like is the Saturn Astra, but it seems pretty over priced for what you get. I wish we had the selection of small cars that Europe has. The prospect of a turbo diesel... oh man sign me up. The only way you could make that any more attractive is to make it all wheel drive.

I was thinking more along the lines of reading a book instead. Maybe learn to play an instrument. But what you said works too.

So I'm sitting on the couch watching TV and this commercial comes on. It's about this guy who is going to buy a laptop and Microsoft is going to pay for it. So he's looking around the store and there's a large variety of PCs around, and he's looking at them all, being very picky.

Then he comes across this Mac and he says something about people who like Macs are about pretty things, I think that's what he said. So I think to myself, Vista WASEN'T about making the OS look nicer?

So the commercial goes on, guy buys a PC. Then the ad states something like PCs are best buy for your dollar (over MAC). Well there's so many things wrong with this statement. Microsoft has no control over the price of laptops, that's controlled by the vendors. Microsoft still charges you for the operating system, it's just rolled into the price of the laptop. Yes, Mac does the same, but when it comes time to format your Mac or replace your hard drive or something, you don't need some damn key to do it. It's a Mac, you paid for the Mac, that means you paid for the OS. That's great.

I'm a Linux guy and I like not paying for software. I also like making that software better. Sometimes I wish Canonical, Novel or RedHat would put in their two cents worth. Then again it might be better that Microsoft seem a little schizophrenic. Anyway, Linux isn't about the corporation or sales figures.

The moral of the story: don't watch TV, especially commercials.

I'm experimenting with XenServer on some enterprise software. Turns out that Oracle will never certify (I'm guessing) anything but their own VM software, which IS Xen based. Think hard about that, I know I am.

Well anyways, I don't remember if it's VMware or XenServer, but all processors in the Resource Pool must have the same processors. All Intel or all AMD in order to take advantage of High Availability. Oh yea, and I think XenServer only supports 64bit systems. Hum, what else.

Oh yes, more processors are better, don't assign more virtual processors than you have physical or strange things start happening. Not sure if you're looking at RAID for shared or local storage, but NAS storage would be handy on a quick network. If you're looking to serve your VMs from shared storage, well unless you're going fiber channel or something else really expensive, then commercial RAID is you're best bet.

If this really is just home experimentation, then RAM won't be a concern, but if you're looking to do some serious work, you're looking at 1GB of RAM per virtual machine if you ask me. Of course, we do some crazy number crunching. Anyways, food for thought.