According to the AlwaysOn Groups link you provided, he would need to bother with clustering: "Each availability replica must reside on a different node of a single Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) cluster. For more information about prerequisites, restrictions, and recommendations for availability groups, see Prerequisites, Restrictions, and Recommendations for AlwaysOn Availability Groups (SQL Server)."

"What's a 160-miles-per-charge, $50k car worth to you?" Presumably, $50k.

I don't particularly disagree that things do change, and that textbooks get updated, I'm just saying that putting technology into classrooms for the sole reason that you have instantly updated information is perhaps unnecessary.

I'd venture to say that this is not entirely true for many subjects that students learn in K-12. For example, geometry, arithmetic, algebra, even basic calculus haven't changed significantly in hundreds of years. Why would you need instantly up to date information to learn these subjects? The same is true for english, history, etc., etc. Just a thought.

Um, Richard Stallman is a crazy person. I'm all for free and open source software, and I use a fair bit of it, but I also understand that there are people out there that might want to make money from their hard work. What's brilliant is that you have a choice: you can either find free and open source software, or you can choose to pay those people. Either way, the scenario Stallman paints in that asinine "Right to Read" piece will not happen. People need to stop listening to crazy people like him.

IIRC, the free version of ESXi has some weird memory restrictions that make it not very useful for larger enterprise setups, but otherwise I think you're right.

While every environment varies, we've been running a three-node Hyper-V cluster with an iSCSI SAN backend for three years, and it's never crashed. To compare setups, we have 10TB of storage on our SAN, and two Internet connections, with all the network infrastructure one would expect to find between those Internet connections and the cluster. The cluster currently runs 17 Windows servers (from 2003 through 2008 R2) and four Linux servers. We also have one standalone Hyper-V host with DAS storage running an additional four Windows servers and two Linux servers. Your comment about Hyper-V being absolute crap is maybe a bit overstated. Just my two cents.

I work at a non-profit, and we went with Hyper-V about three years ago because of the licensing. Microsoft almost gives away their products to non-profits, and you still get support. For us, it was a no-brainer. I've worked with VMWare also, and I don't really feel we're missing anything. I have an assortment of Windows, Ubuntu, and CentOS servers, and everything works the way it's supposed to for us. Just my two cents.

Would be for Apple to let us virtualize OS X server on our existing (insert VM platform of your choosing) clusters, instead of requiring Apple hardware. I had an Apple rep tell me the other day that they have that requirement because the experience is better on their hardware (when talking about a server that sits in a rack that you never look at). What a joke.

Is anyone really all that interested in a game that started out as a Quake mod in 2001? Anyone other than open source bigots who are excited that they can play a game and it's totally free?

Except that he specifically said the ribbon UI. He then goes on to talk about giving up on Office 97 about a year ago, which calls further into doubt that he ever tried Office 2007. Face it, this person is a dirty troll. I don't mind someone having a legitimate beef with something, but I'm sick and tired of the people that just jump on the bashing bandwagon and have never even tried a product.