Actually, this brings me to the other point of comparison between commercial Unix and commercial Linux: quality of support. What happened when I ran into an OS problem with Solaris? I would run the explorer script, send output to Sun support and they would send me a patch to install or some other fix. Opening support cases with Novell or RH is pointless. First thing they tell you is to install the current service pack of the OS. They have no idea what the problem is or if one of the patches contained in the service pack would fix the problem. But they are perfectly willing to let you take the risk. Don't get me wrong, Sun's quality support is a thing of the past and Oracle is not to blame for this. These days when you call Solaris support it seems you get the same Novell morons on the line as when you call for SLES support. Sometimes I wish I could just reach out throught the phone line is beat that curry chicken they had for lunch out of them. On the other hand I feel sorry for them because Linux' debugging facilities quite frankly suck, despite the impressive number of logs it keeps. Kernel panics and non-trivial hardware problems are all a great mystery to Linux syslogd.

And, yet, here I am holding down the same job for the past twelve years, denying some Indian CompTIA Linux+ laureate an honest living. You are running Ubuntu? Obviously, your servers are not nearly as critical as you think they are, since the user's edition of Linux satisfies your customers' requirements.

Clearly, very few people here have any enterprise-level Solaris experience. In terms of stability and performance I compare Linux to Solaris like you compare Windows to Linux. Well, this may be too harsh but this is mostly addresses to the fat dorks on Slashdot screaming "death to Solaris". The biggest file server guys like that had to support is the one sitting under their desk with all the porn on it.

When I transitioned from Solaris and AIX to supporting RH and SuSE several years ago, I experienced somewhat of a shock: servers hanging on shutdown, lousy NFS performance, Samba slowing down to a crawl under moderately heavy load and a crapload of other issues I never thought a unixoid OS can suffer from. All these problems coupled with consumer-grade hardware and what you get is one big, never-ending downtime. Something is always down or barely limping along.

There were times when all our servers were running Solaris, AIX or HP-UX. I could come to work, drink my coffee, read the news, space out for a couple hours, then break for lunch, work a couple hours on some project and go home. As more and more real servers are being replaced by cheap HPs and Dells running the blasted RHEL or, worse yet, SLES, all this free time I used to have is a distant memory.

Some science is definitely behind this. The question is: how far behind? Physicists discussing software problems are not nearly as hopeless as programmers discussing physics. This is exactly how one gets gamma radiation from outer space appear in the same sentence with cell phones and microwave ovens as a possible cause for malfunctioning electronic circuits and sloppy coding.

How, you ask? The same way clock radios replaced neither clocks nor radios. Swiss cheese, for example, successfully combines cheese and holes and, yet, makers of hole-less cheese as well as manufacturers of holes are still very much in business. While combining many functions into one product may seem as a fun way to pass the time, sometimes you just want to enjoy good cheese without any holes.

Nevermind the "voting" thing. Without Google China may find itself without scientists. Just as India without Google may find itself out of IT specialists.

I agree. Especially since most slashdoters already have their DIY lobotomy kits.

Tokyo's subway map has always reminded me of Japanese scat videos. Maybe they were high on that? Anyway, there is plenty of slime and mold in our datacenter. No better technology though, so this theory is busted.

I don't see where he said that you can buy a median home with fifty-four grand. He just said that you could buy a home in her neighborhood for that amount. This is a fact and no reason to pitch a conniption.

In the future there will be robots.

Apparently, you are not a Linux user.

They raped all of their servers. I am in the process of moving my site to another hosting provider. Bluehost stretched its resources well beyond breaking point.

When I saw the title of the post, I thought the companies would be Industrial Light & Magic and Apogee.

I love poetry!

Arbitrary coherence is an oxymoron. It is either coherence or it's arbitrary. Decisions we make are never arbitrary, not even when we try to make a random choice. Ariely's experiment found an interesting correlation in the decisions made by the test subjects. However, the experiment was not designed to determine the reasons behind the decisions. Just because you don't understand the motivation behind someone's decisions, does not make these decisions arbitrary. And, obviously, they are not arbitrary since the experiment established a strong pattern to the subjects' actions. Ariely's findings are not exactly new either. Open just about any product catalog and you will notice the same pattern: common, "on-sale", moderately-priced items are tucked at the end of the page containing expensive products that often are not even in the same category. Clearly, we assign value by association in the absence of relevant facts. However, this does not make our decisions arbitrary. What results did Ariely expect his experiment to produce? True randomness from a human brain? I don't think so.