Where providers are free to gouge and customers are free to... well... complain on Slashdot, but that's about it.

It's only actually free when there's freedom. Freedom to choose between genuinely different providers is a start. If they go to the same tier 2 provider, then the that will define the prices and services, so isn't a choice at all. If they ARE the tier 2, then they're the ultimate source of services and pricetag for all the tier 3s out there.

But there has to be more, since bandwidth throttling dictates bandwidth availability downstream. You can't sell what isn't there - unless you're Time-Warner or Comcast, of course. Try that with a physical product ("It'll cost you $elebenty, payable now, no refund, and if it doesn't do what we claim, that's not a lemon, that's the fault of some unidentified someone doing something somewhere somehow and we'd rather screw you than bother them"). So, freedom to know what you're actually buying and freedom to use statuary rights to obtain that product or a refund.

This is actually one reason I'm a little unhappy with free software. It has been telling vendors that it's ok to not provide what is offered. Not so much by actually doing that - free software has been, in general, superb about being up-front about what it can and cannot do, known defects and limitations, etc. More by saying in the license that the producer is entitled to lie through his teeth without consequence. A quick look at Oracle's conduct shows that vendors have paid very close attention to that clause.

Free Software relies on there being a viable alternative, that users can go elsewhere if dissatisfied. The resilience to fixing bugs in GCC and GLibC, in present and prior administrations, demonstrate that when viable alternatives are scant, such software is too complex to fork or replace unless it gets really, really bad. Which it has occasionally done.

When it comes to cable companies, it's infinitely worse. You're not in a position to run fibre from your home to an alternative tier 2 in another State. Partly because of expense, partly because laws governing interstate activities make it impossible for private individuals, and partly because the cable companies would raise all hell, three quarters of bloody murder and a dash of pint of high water to stop you. Which would not be hard for them, all they need to do is to persuade the tier 2 provider to not sell the capacity. If that failed, they could keep you tied up in knots with the FCC over whether you were an unlicensed telecom operator or not. Mind you, some of you might like knots. I dunno. If all else failed, they could SWAT the people running the cable, get you listed for suspected terrorist ties, or just repeatedly run a backhoe through your cable until you got the message.

You have no choice. You have no freedom. The cable operators have been redefining "monopoly" and "telecommunications" to whatever serves their purpose, not yours, and on multiple occasions. They have been free to do so because everyone likes simplified services and nobody in the States is going to vehemently oppose the "market at work". Even when it clearly doesn't. Not until it is far, far too late to stop things happening.

And we're way past it being too far. It was too far when telecos started replacing copper for fibre at select spots. Supposedly to improve service (which never improved). The reality was that DSL companies competing with the teleco all went out of business where this happened. No great surprise, you can't run DSL over fibre and everyone knew it. It was too late when telephonic "service of last resort" stopped being mandatory in many States. It was too late when ADSL was all private users could buy, SDSL was only sold to select businesses.

It was too late when rival multistate networks got bought up by the Big Telecos with not a murmur from anyone.

It was not because these were fatal in themselves, it's because people had become too stupid and too utterly dependent on being spoonfed by corporate giants (who are far less efficient than any big government ever thought of being, except at defrauding customers). The time for people to learn to think had passed. There wasn't anything left to think about. There were no examples to learn from. All that was left was a self-inflicted oblivion.

It's as if a hundred billion endpoints all screamed out and then fell silent.

And no Consumer Jedi to notice or care.

I just didn't visit this site for a few days and then found your ridiculous ADD comment with condescending advice and I felt it was ridiculous enough to reply to. It may not satisfy your ego but that's the very simple reality.

How about a sphere due to wrapping it all up in string :)

For all those "that just might work" people it would be a bit of a bastard of a job wrapping under the blocks even with enough rope.

Egypt had a pretty big empire with a lot of trees at the south end and a big river to float them down.

If it goes down you have another $15k box or a cheaper on that can get by, just like you would with the $25k box when you don't want to wait a day for the IBM guy to turn up, three hours to teach the IBM guy about the IBM system and another day for parts to be flown in.

There are plenty of good reasons but it's not as cut and dried as the post above. The biggest reason is capability - if the cheap box does not handle the job adequately or the architecture/platform is what you need to run your stuff then the expensive option can be more viable in the long run.

Since you had a very major reading comprehension clanger when you decided to jump on this thread unasked to put me in my place I really cannot see how you can continue to pretend that your advice is of any value, so what's the deal here? Personal ego boosting? Fair enough, I will concede that you are vastly superior at mass debating, however I do not wish to witness you mass debating all over my posts when it's not remotely relevant to what I have written.

And a liar too. Fits.

Systemd is a closed thing (unless you want to recompile to customize) that does way too much and that is one of its primary problems. Only morons and novices want a tool to do "more". SysV init, on the other hand, is primarily based on scripts, which means all you need even for deep customization is a text editor.

If you cannot see the the problem that systemd has, then you really are completely clueless. Go to windows, there you cannot customize anything with ease and it does everything for you (badly).

This merely enables the NSA and other bad actors to not even have to break into your computer anymore.

False Representation
Denial of Service
Fraudulant Use/Misuse of Computer Resources
Malicious Bypass of Security Protocols

Illegal? Yes.
Hanging offence? It should be.
Grist for the London cab companies for unfair competition? Ohhhhhh, I hope they've been informed. That could be so fun to watch.

I see two possible flaws in this theory.

First, if the attached rods are wood, wouldn't there be a limit to how much the block could weigh before crushing the rods?

If the resulting dodecagon utilizes the block's original four edges among its vertices, wouldn't they suffer some damage while being rolled? If those edges are capped in some way to protect them, we inevitably return to #1 regarding the edge caps.

Welcome to the "Web 2.0" world, which is where the volume is these days, and consequently most of the money.

IBM makes 85% of their money from fortune 100. From there it falls off fast. The money and especially the margin is at the top.

If one cannot order it cheaply and easily on the web ala Amazon shopping experience, who is going to bother to go through a reseller? That was the model 40 years ago! Kids today do not bother

What kid gets to pick the hardware infrastructure for his company of any size?

Why would I pay the vendor or the reseller higher prices when I can automate hundreds of thousands of servers on x86, in a lights out management datacenters across the globe, to the point of throwaway systems?

The prices aren't higher and the system outperforms thus lowering total cost. This is the whole "why quality saves money" issue that comes up in every industry.

Please provide links with pricing.

IBM doesn't do that. They should be more transparent but they aren't. They want you ordering through a partner or for larger customers through the sales channel. There is some pricing on the website but the real prices are 20-30% lower.

DELL has become expensive as well. For the price of one DELL server one can easily put together two or three blackbox servers, from motherboard to chassis, made 100% by intel.

Not really relevant. The question was Power vs. x86 not generic vs. name brand.

The only company I know of who has announced they would be offering it as cloud is Ubuntu cloud. IBM's hosting solution has it but so far nothing in the cloud space.