This post shouldn't have been modded down. It is a valid argument. There are tons of business apps out there that won't run on Linux. Just because Linux has an OSS equivalent of something doesn't mean it is also equivalent in quality, support, or familiarity to the users who already have years of training invested in a particular tool.

There are some offices where Linux, one of the free office suites, and some of the various free apps out there would be adequate for the required workflow, and we do hear about those companies and governments when they switch to Linux.

However, to blindly proclaim that Linux is a drop-in replacement for Windows that will start saving you money immediately is quite ridiculous. If this was *really* the case then businesses would already be doing it en masse.

They caught the guy who sent them so I'm not sure why Tor needs to be blocked.

(A Xen hypervisor, rather)

RHEV uses KVM. With that said, I believe (haven't checked recently though) that Red Hat still supports running RHEL as a guest inside of a KVM hypervisor.

The problem though is that the NSA has been caught red-handed on multiple occasions. Then we hear about NSA's massive new data center that is under construction. So we want to know what they're up to and what they're doing. They won't tell us. The courts refuse to do their jobs when we try to sue and discover the information. Even NSA's budget is a state secret. So maybe what the NSA is doing is totally above board (or maybe not) but they refuse to have any level of accountability so as far as I am concerned, and many other people are concerned, they are guilty until they can prove their innocence.

Given the history of our government misusing its powers, I don't think it is unreasonable at all to assume that the NSA is up to no good.

That's not really true. Miners can collectively switch to a new client that supports whatever feature they want, but everyone else needs to run the same client in order for that to work.

Otherwise the rest of the bitcoin network will refuse to confirm their transactions.

No. The smallest unit of Bitcoin is the Satoshi, which is 1/100,000,000 of a bitcoin.

It will happen eventually but the developing world can't afford to give each of their college students iPads or Kindles or whatever. Paper textbooks are cheap outside of the USA because that is what the market will bear over there.

They will be on paper for at least a little while longer.

You sound like you've never had to mediate a 3-way vendor argument between the hardware vendor, the linux support vendor and the HBA vendor, all claiming that it's someone else's fault that the hardware/OS/HBA combo doesn't work, even though they assured you that it did before you bought it. Oh, and you're a top customer, so they want to keep you really really happy. But not "it actually works" kind of happy.

I was talking about Solaris on Intel. Not sure where you got this from. In fact, you kind of reinforce my point: running Solaris on other people's hardware is just asking for trouble like this, which WAS MY POINT!

Anyway, if you really want to play this game, I'd be more than happy to pull up some of the various support cases I've opened with Sun and Oracle about Solaris and get you to try to explain each one to me, since you're such a bigot for Solaris.

Spoken like someone who has never run them side by side in a large estate

I have and do at my current gig, so shut your pipe. I have also done software development for both. So I know the ins and outs of both OSes pretty damned well. I even admitted to you that Solaris is the better OS, yet you're still not happy with my response. Spoken like a true fanboy you have.

There is one advantage to Solaris and it is the vendor lockin, namely the fact that you have limited hardware combinations, whereas with Intel you have literally hundreds of combinations of chipsets and configurations to support and test against. Again, this is one reason why I do *NOT* recommend Solaris on Intel unless you're buying one of Oracle's own Intel servers where they have actually tested the OS and the hardware together.

Or who want to run large databases with more than a few GB of RAM. Small databases seem fine on Linux, but Oracle or DB2 or Sybase don't seem as stable on Linux as on Solaris when you get up to 32+GB RAM.

I'm running rather large databases, much larger than that, with OEL on Dell branded hardware. It just works for us.

Yes, and it's a crying shame. Oracle are terrible. I know of whole enterprises who jumped ship when Oracle took over. But Linux still isn't there, even though most places I'm working at these days have more Linux than Solaris, HP-UX or AIX, and usually more than all other Unix combined. But there's still too much of the amateur around Linux.

Your only indictment against Linux is that you have some specific hardware issue, that's not really convincing and pretending that Solaris doesn't have those issues is just plain laughable and absurd.

OK, first off, it is not stolen. You cannot steal open source software. Oracle is following the GPL.

Second, Oracle was doing OEL before they acquired Sun.

Solaris is a technically good and high quality OS but its hardware support was limited. If you bought the Sun-branded boxes and Sun-branded cards, you were OK. However if you are white-boxing a server, you had to be careful to select chipsets that were on their compatibility list. Then support got murky at that point even then.

I really, really love Solaris, but let's face the facts. Outside of the SPARC platform, there is no reason for Solaris. Linux does everything as well or nearly as well. Linux is weaker in some areas, but not weak enough to justify the cost and lock-in of Solaris.

Solaris exists for Oracle to milk legacy customers on support contracts who aren't ready or willing to migrate to Linux and commodity x86 hardware . There isn't much if any new development going on, and Oracle is only pushing Solaris to new customers as part of their big data warehouse solutions (where customers have $$$$$ and want to spend it with one vendor) where they want to get people locked in to one vendor.

This is a urban legend. Attaching "Business Reply Mail" envelopes and cards to parcels is an invalid use of those mailings and will be discarded. You are either lying (this incident never happened) or your postman has never worked in sorting and has no clue about this.

See here and here.

If you want to piss them off, send them something nasty that will gum up the letter-opening machines at the CC company. Of course you may well end up being sued or charged with a crime, depending on the circumstance.

It's been a while since I've used a full-service pump but they ALWAYS ask you what kind of gas you want in your vehicle..

What, do you think that people who drive diesels are constantly getting regular gasoline in their tanks because the pump boy doesn't know how to ask you what fuel you want?

The environmentalists are actually against it