What surprises me is that I see a lot of advice on Vmware, very little on KVM/qemu (which performs better btw) and none on HyperV (that makes sense) nor on mainframe. Mainframe has been doing virtualization for decades and is lightyears ahead in I/O, segmentation, auditing, redundancy, reliability, performance, accuracy etc.

The latest offering from IBM scales to 300 virtualized servers (on a z114 in the cheapest config, realisticly @ $100K). Redundancy is built in the hardware. CRC is done at the hardware level. Mind you, these systems are designed to run at 100% utilization non-stop. Not this if higher than 15% you should run physical c(r)ap from VMware.

GDP/PPP is not telling everything.

Country - Population million - Electricity consumption (GWh/yr)

• USA - 307 - 4,401,698

• EU - 541 - 3,635,604

So with about 250 million people more we consume about 800,000 GWh/yr LESS

Figures taken from here.

So yes I'd say the USA is a wasteful economy and should do something about it.

alias help='man'

get a cheap HP ML110 server with a few GB of RAM, load it up with disks. Get a bigger housing if the case is too small. Benefits: remote management (very basic ILO), server grade chipset/CPU if you get the Xeon specced model. I got one of these in a special offer and it runs my linux server very well. 1.6TB RAID 1 (mdraid), off the shelf disks, bought half a year apart so I don't get bitten by some bug that's in one firmware and not the other. Enough CPU/RAM/disk overhead to run the occasional test VMs. I absolutely love it. The power consumption is also quite modest at around 75W when idle. I know the NAS solutions eat half of that at most but they aren't as flexible and the Atoms in them get absolutely blown away by the performance of my quad Xeon.

I was totally lost on this as well. Although they expect Windows 8 (w8 for short, heh) to be installed on instant-on devices I guess, so shutting down isn't called for except for a hard boot with the power button. It's actually located in 2 places: Start > Settings > Power > Shut down/Restart OR Log off > enter login screen (slide up to activate, arrgh) > Power Icon > Shut down/Restart. Who thought of this as the epitome of usability for a regular PC should be tarred, feathered, skinned, quartered and shot. Or made to use it him/herself on a regular PC for an extended period of time.

You're forgetting someting: both Google and Facebook accept a certain percentage of that hardware to break, and leave it broken until the next maintenance window. They make up for it in numbers and handle the redundancy/high availability in software/OS. They also accept that common hardware is "good enough" and achieve performance through higher volumes. They are also big enough to have a custom server built (design PCB, test, build etc.). Most companies aren't big enough to justify a complete custom design. Even the article only gives 3 examples (Google, Facebook & MS). In a traditional server model you want ultimate performance (which is what a server chipset gives you) and high MTBF and a high service level (i.e. 4hr response time with parts on site). That's what HP, Dell & IBM are selling and asking a premium for.

hmmm lemme see, mine are people I admire from the past (1 exception).

• tesla
• davinci
• einstein
• michelangelo
• dante
• nostradamus
• butler (break from the norm, it was my internal do it all server - file, print, p2p, itunes etc. that is why it was called butler)
• galileo

03:14:08 UTC on Tuesday, 19 January 2038 of course

Pair this with a prima donna attitude and a wish list of must-haves which would shame a senior on landing their first job and you've got the current situation in the Netherlands. Starters expect things to be perfect or just the way they want from the day they leave school (or buy their first house). They don't expect to work hard to earn things like that.

And if you read the license carefully you are entitled to 2 free support calls, after that you're billed € 250 excl. VAT per case just like the rest. That was the quote about 8 years ago, I don't think it has been lowered in the meantime. Of course this is only valid if you bought a full license.