SGI's problem was that they had a good run at selling really expensive hardware which could do 3D graphics well; they only really had Sun for competition in those days. Once PC graphics got good enough, it was a death knell; you could either spend 10k+ on an SGI/Sun workstation or about 2k for a high-end PC which was just as good (or near enough). Given that most people had a PC to run their office apps (Outlook, Word, Excel etc), it also saved desk space.

Sun at least had a fairly solid server business which kept them going for a while; SGI servers were generally only used in places with a strong presence of SGIs on the desktop.

SGI also had some classics - "XFS is great, it'll never need to be fsck'd!" Few months later, the fsck for xfs was released... It was, in general, a good OS with some odd quirks as I recall.

The penalty isn't for losing, it's for fighting. Most big companies can't be bothered with the hassle of paying lawyers for protracted lawsuits, where the judges often don't understand the technical detail being discussed and so there's a risk of losing even if the lawsuit is patently bollocks.

Patent trolls exploit the fact it's cheaper to roll over & pay the fee than it is to fight, where if you win, you lose.

On the flipside, my last PC upgrade was to get a new desktop before it got to the point I wouldn't be able to get XP on it...

I'm looking at a laptop upgrade now (old one is 6 years old and creaking...) which will end up running Windows 7 as there's little reason not to get it.

Well, there's two sides to that - in the main, most of the information is relatively harmless to the people on the ground (other than the obligatory stoking up of anti-American/allied sentiment). However, if it identifies Afghan informants on the ground, that's endagering someone who's put their neck out to help the allied forces and is a sucky way to repay their assistance as it will probably lead to their death. There are other ways in which information can directly harm individuals as well.

Reporting the outcome of engagements which may or may not have resulted in the death of civilians isn't something we should be suppressing unless it actively endangers someone.

I upgraded the firmware on one of our servers in June and was slightly shocked when the OBP banner said "Copyright Oracle Corporation" where it used to say "Sun Microsystem"... the rebranding continues apace...

"designed for the audio enthusiast" - i.e. the only people who will pay $500 for a cable they could buy for I think in that way, it's perfectly designed.

Yup, had the whole thing in various people's facebook status whinging about how we've "pissed on his dreams". My response was that he'd pissed on the dreams of the others in X-Factor (not that I care about them) as well as anyone who might have actually put in the effort to write something orginal and aim to get to number 1.

Cue the world's smallest violin, playing just for Joe...

There are varied benefits, but some highlights:

• Desktop breaks? Ship out a new box, they plug it in and away they go. You don't need to worry about what software they need as it's all on the server.
• Security - no hard drives on desktop which can be stolen.
• Patching/maintenance. Would you rather maintain patches on 1000 desktops or 10 big boxes in the data centre?
• Power/cooling/noise at sites. A "real" thin client (as opposed to a PC masquerading as a thin client) will have minimal power requirements which leads to less cooling and noise (no fans or crunching hard drives)
• Portability. I don't care which desk I sit at, my virtual desktop will automatically have all my apps. If you have a solution like Sun's Sunray, you can even log out of your Sunray half way through writing a document, move to another desk (possibly in another city) and pick up the doc where you left off.
• High bandwidth apps run in the same data centre as the database server/whatever and you only get the screen updates down the wire which can be more efficient.

When coming to Edinburgh:

• do not ask "what time does the 1 O'clock gun go off?"
• while you're at it, don't ask where the cannon ball lands.
• please refrain from comments like "gee, isn't it great they built the castle so close to the train station?"

I'd like to say these kind of things are made up, but no.

To be honest, I've looked at a lot of these low power systems, but almost all of them run only a single hard disk. As the main point of these servers is for file serving, it seems remiss to not have some kind of mirroring of disks. Anyone got a good solution which supports two (or more) hard drives?

I'll give you a phrase to explain why - "distortion in the space/time continuum". That phrase was used in far more episodes in ST:TNG than it deserved to be used, to the extent it pretty much became a cliché.

It's not unique to ST and Stross doesn't claim it is, but it's probably the worst culprit. It tended to play a kind of Deus ex Machina with $RANDOM_TECH_DEVICE to solve the problem.

Just don't run it on Solaris... killall behaviour varies between versions of Unix/linux. For (Open)Solaris, killall man page shows "killall - kill all active processes".

BTDT brought the box to its knees...