Just another data point: http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/12/09/1726222/freebsd-project-falls-short-of-year-end-funding-target-by-nearly-50

The Mac Mini's more of a home/small company server, IMHO.

We have a couple of XServes in production that we saved from the scrap heap and have another 4 in reserve in case the production ones crap out. They're nice systems, but don't talk to SATA II or III drives and need to be jumpered down to 1.5GB.

When the XServes die or aren't supported by whatever OS we need, then we'll have to reassess things.

and they're number what now? :)

Re: windows vs Mac, I personally hate using windows as a workstation, but I have one at home for gaming. In general, it's a crufty clunky dog's breakfast of an OS that's a pain in the butt to configure and update. I've used nearly every version of DOS or Windows since the days of DOS 2.0 and Windows 2.0, so I'm familiar with its flaws and foibles. The only versions I've never used are Vista and Win 8.

MacOS used to be a crap OS. It was pretty, but didn't multitask at all and crashed far too often to trust. OS/2 was nice, but fragile and was never as popular as Windows. OS X is an awesome OS for workstations and is excellent to work with for day-to-day stuff. The only Linux I use for workstation stuff is Ubuntu. CentOS as a workstation OS is ok, but is too much of a pain to deal with for stuff like sound cards, etc.

Slashdot has a lot of different kinds of people on it. Many of them hobbyists and people who work in small *nix shops. Many are also enterprise IT types and the most popular enterprise *nix is Linux, hands down. Redhat/CentOS flavors dominate, but there are a few debian shops as well, such as Akamai.

A lot of that stuff is just holy wars, but if you look at what vendors support what OS's, You don't typically see much for BSD. Our company recently retired a BSD cluster and are in the process of decommissioning our BSD-based servers for a myriad of reasons. Juniper may use BSD in their stuff, but many more use Linux as their embedded OS.

BSD is popular with some companies and in colleges, but when you get into the real world it's either Linux or Solaris and Solaris is fading fast. Look at the job market. Linux is what most companies are looking for. I'm not dissing BSD, but I'd never recommend it for anything in the enterprise.

I used to run some SunOS (bsd-flavored) systems 'back in the day' and loved them, but when Solaris came out, pretty much everyone switched. I've used Solaris 2.5 - Solaris 10 on both SPARC and X86 and have watched it decline over the years in popularity because of hardware costs and X86 compatibility issues. Oracle has made some really dumb moves over the years regarding the stuff they purchased as part of Sun and most admins I know have given up on their stuff.

and yeah, I'm well aware of CentOS' lineage. We chose it because it's essentially Red Hat, but doesn't have the hefty price tag.

OS X is a capable OS, but best used as a workstation at best. Deploying large numbers of OS X servers is greatly complicated by the fact that even Apple acknowledges that there's no market for their server grade systems and they've stopped selling them. Even if I put a Mac Pro into production, they'd be so expensive and occupy so much room that they'd fill the data center. If I stick a Mac Pro sideways in a rack, it takes 4 or 5U at least for 12 cores. I can put 4 dual hex or octo core Xeon rack mount servers in the same space or even some dual 16 core opteron servers. If I choose to use blades, I can put 16 HP 460c blades in 10U.

Don't even mention the Mac Mini as a viable server platform, it's an underpowered joke of a system if you want to do real work on it for sustained periods of time. They're not intended for, nor will they stand up to the kind of loads you see in the enterprise.

I work in the IT industry running computational clusters and lots of other kinds of servers. My rock is pretty large, but I'm on the top of it.

I do have a couple of OS X servers in the enterprise, but they're only there to run Open Directory to manage our Mac workstations.

your assertion that windows 7 or OS X is better than a Linux server shows how out of touch you are with enterprise computing. We have some windows 2003 and 2008 servers in production, but they're there to provide infrastructure for the windows workstations. No one tries to do anything else with them since it's far easier to deploy services on Linux.

As I mentioned, I love apples workstations and laptops but they don't make an appropriate platform for running any meaningful services in the enterprise.

Because as good as OS X is, it's not a particularly good server platform and requires Mac hardware, while Linux has been around for ages, runs on commodity hardware, has a very well supported number of open source packages and is considered mainstream by most Unix admins.

As a server platform, OS X suffers from the same problem as Solaris. You need the vendor supplied hardware to get it to run well. Solaris is a dying OS because Sun and Oracle supplied hardware is too expensive and just isn't worth it when you can get three times the computing power for less money, and X86 Solaris is frankly crap, since it has such a small hardware compatibility list.

I don't mention BSD since it's not really mainstream any longer. It's a good OS, but lacks overall vendor support.

All that being said, I prefer OS X systems for my workstation and CentOS or Scientific Linux for servers. Redhat's nice, but overpriced when you need to deploy a lot of systems.

A class-a fire still puts out a lot of heat. Trying to put it out with diesel will give you a class-b fire to boot, I think.

Flash point of diesel fuel's 144F so it's not exactly something I'd throw on a fire (gasoline's flash point is -45F).

It's not something I'd want to handle around an open flame or anything, but it's pretty safe otherwise.

There's a fair amount of stress where the buffer tube screws into the lower. Both from torque forces caused by the user pulling the gun in tight to their body while they shoot and stress caused as the buffer spring compresses when the gun shoots. The stress is nothing like what's seen on the upper, but obviously you don't want the gun breaking just because you've pulled in too hard while shooting.

While the lower receiver doesn't see the kind of stresses that are present in the upper receiver and bolt carrier, the lower receiver failed exactly where it sees the most real stress. As the bolt carrier moves backwards during the ejection phase of the cycle, it compresses the buffer spring and that stress plus the stress caused by the stock attachment was more than the lower could handle.

Personally, whenever I test fire a gun, I put it in an appropriate test jig and make sure I'm clear from any likely failure. I don't think his gun would have blown up, but if the lower failed just as the bolt carrier began moving rearward, it's likely that the carrier and upper would have been damaged and things would have gotten interesting.

I shot an conventionally made AR-15 that suffered a catastrophic failure of the bolt lugs and in spite of the bolt carrier coming back much faster than normal, everything held together just fine. If such an event happened with a printed plastic lower, it's likely that the gun would have been damaged badly.

I've seen prices on 3d printing for metal and the prices to render a standard lower receiver would have greatly exceeded the cost of buying a conventionally manufactured one.

I've been amazed over the years at the very poor quality of in-dash software and functionality. My 2008 Subaru Legacy has a so-so Nav system and horrendously expensive map upgrades while my wife's 2011 Sienna has probably the worst in-entertainment/Nav system I've seen.

While my Legacy's Nav system is somewhat hackable, the Sienna seems resistant to any kind of tweaking to improve any aspect of its operation. Instead, we're forced to accept whatever execrable interface they provide, no matter how irksome it may be.

Both systems could be vastly improved if auto-makers would use a more modularized and upgradable approach to their in-dash systems. Rather than sticking us with a system that's more or less immutable, why not use a general purpose computer underneath whatever buttons and displays they choose to use and allow companies or individuals to provide software to support the various functions we'd like to see. Kind of a chumby approach to things. A user could plug in a NAV module, a way to expand storage, a better quality audio amp or whatever they need to interface to the latest and greatest cell phones.

Both side of the aisle are sufficiently full of poo that we'd be in bio-fuel heaven for the foreseeable future.

Cygwin is an improvement, but still uses the braindead windohs pipes. Real *nix is vastly preferable for people who want/need it.

Speaking from an economic standpoint, a union is a monopoly on the supply of their 'product' (labor) and can dictate the terms the cost of their product to the consumers of that product (industry). That monopoly position has done great harm to many of the industries that are forced to pay higher than market costs for labor than they would in right-to-work states.

Clouds, virtual systems, clusters, stand-alone servers all benefit from being in an environmentally friendly facility where there's lots of networking capacity and sufficient power and cooling. While home users have dedicated desktop or laptop computers, it's far more power efficient to use technologies like blade systems to package computing power. Regardless, everything's still in a data center where the equipment can be protected.

I used to work at a very large ISP where there were a half dozen data centers, each containing racks and racks of servers, storage and backup. The data centers I visit now still resemble the old ones, but they're more power efficient and the equipment has much higher densities and the networks much higher capacity.

Unless someone can make a computer or cloud that doesn't require much in the way of power, cooling or physical security, then the data centers will probably continue their current trend for the foreseeable future.