Heh, just occurred to me that withing the next few months Toshiba's Open Solaris branded/installed laptops powered by centrino chips will, likely, have full drivers for Windows, Solaris, and Linux making a purchase of their gear a pretty solid vote for consumer choice.

Anything with an Intel Centrino logo /should/ have a full array of linux supported hardware. The intel centrino chip "package" includes wifi, video, cpu, acpi, sata, and sound all with known working mainline kernel supported hardware. Not that I work for or endorse their products necessarily, they just happen to be the only vendor who has bothered with providing the code, documentation and (in the case of their wifi chipset) firmware for all the same hardware that they include in their logo certification program. Probably not the top of the line hardware, especially the video, but it's hard to argue with a product that fits so neatly into the HCL for any recent linux distro.

I thought I recalled reading something recently about Nvidia releasing more documentation on their video decode acceleration, but looking back through my browser history I think i may have created a composite memory based on an intel article and Nvidia opening an API for video decoding using their closed source driver. Either way I can't imagine that Nvidia is gonna be able to leave us out in the cold much longer on this front. Keep voting with your wallet and we'll see them change their tune soon enough.

This seems to confirm what people have been predicting all along, that OSS philosophy is driving competition between vendors to cater to their customers' needs. Nvidia, Intel, and now ATI all providing increasing levels of documentation and code support in competitive volleys. I for one welcome our new 3d accelerated overlords.

I'm not gonna put a comment in one way or the other on your political view or its accuracy or lack thereof, that said...

It is probably pretty easy to make the sort of argument you are making the style in which you have made it. When you start off with a exclusionary qualification of opinion and then follow up with redefining an indefinite group under your own terms there is little anyone can say to disagree. Since there is no big "L" liberal group which has a definitive stance on any of the topics you've mentioned you can define it however you want and then easily attack the straw man which you've created. I think you've named your straw man "they."
Perhaps if your arguments have real merit, in the future you can elucidate upon them in a way where you are able to define specifically the group which you are attacking and then point out, by specific example, the flaws in their position and/or method.

Maybe I've succumbed to a troll here, but I feel generous in the spirit of the winter holidays and would rather put my effort towards elevating the quality of this type of discussion.

I was speaking about consolidating several different servers which serve different roles. I.E. a single ip with port forwarding is used to masquerade a VM for pop3, one for web, one for DB, one for a custom backend application, etc. I work in hosting, this isn't an uncommon way of doing things. Also if you were wanting to virtualize a cluster of web servers that required several front end IPs then yes I agree NAT is probably not the best solution for you, OTOH I never claimed it was the best solution for everyone, I only said it was a perfectly workable solution for some. Also I never mentioned anything about IPV4 "running out" only that many people only have a very small number of usable IPs available to them.

There is a good reason you'd use nat for several VMs consolidated onto a single physical server. You can have all of your functional parts effectively gaped from one another while utilizing port forwarding to make everything appear to run from a single IP oubound. It's not too uncommon to do things this way when running in a limited IP space which can be a concern when you aren't get your IP space directly delegated from ARIN and end up having to pay per IP to a middle man. Many Collo facilities for instance provide a /29 or /30 as the default network block which leaves very few usable IPs.

Did you read what I wrote? IF you save money on the disk subsystem and use that money to buy more processor THEN you can use that additional processor to do a better job of managing your disk subsystem than the dedicated hardware could. So if you play it like I've outlined then you end up with faster disk when you need it and you also end up with more processor for other tasks when disk isn't taxing it.

I'm gonna call bullshit on this right now. General purpose processors have been dropping in price and going up in speed and core count much faster than hardware raid solutions. Take for example your average 12 port areca or 3ware or lsi raid card which will cost you 700 bucks, now instead of spending 700 on that card buy three 4 port lsi sata cards and spend the 300 bucks you save on a faster proc or one with a higher core density (4 vs 2 for example). You'll get not only faster or at least comparable performance, but you'll also get performance that scales up as you upgrade the rest of the system instead of being stuck with the perf that you get from your raid card. Another bonus is greater compatibility with different OS's as raid card drivers are traditionally notorious for having poor support in the long term and also have less tunability of the underlying logic. Finally you get better data portability, with a HW raid card you are stuck with the type of card you have used to create the array, with zfs or linux raid you are only limited to the OS you used; which sounds silly at first, but 3-4 years down the line when you are trying to find someone who stocks a defunct HW raid card to replace your burned out card you'll quickly appreciate. This is the exact same paradigm that makes things like SSL offload accelerators a poor value for a system which will be in use for more than a year or two, the more general use hardware will always outpace the performance of the purpose built stuff and by the nature of it being general use it will be far more flexible in the long run.

You might be interested to try out beagle on linux, it provides a very robust deep indexing service similar to that provided in OSX or Vista.

Interestingly enough, Sun is partnering with Toshiba to offer Open Solaris powered laptops in Q1 '09. I'm eager to see what they can cook up; as a Solaris admin and a heavy laptop user I can see the attraction to such a setup, but don't know if Sun has the chops to create something akin to the current .07+ network manager setup available on modern linux distros.