Some of these vendor-ware boxes are so hard to install, patch and maintain, that quite often they are left alone to run for years in production until the hardware dies.
If it gets hacked... it's the hacker's fault.
When the hardware dies,... it's the hardware vendor's fault.
If it's left unmaintained, the company saves money
If it is maintained, the admins won't be allowed to do anything when the company won't give them an update window, out of fear of breaking it. So the admin's sit on their hands and spin in their chairs every day.

It's always someone else's fault when the server goes balls-up, and when that happens, they get someone in to reinstall the server on new hardware.
(after lengthy outages)

He's got money for this, but no money to give me contact with an Oracle support engineer on my continent who speaks English, and can reach me in a timely fashion.

Well, did it?

I'm not running a client trading terminal that deals with thousands of dollars on anything unsupported... even though it tends to work OK-ish under Wine.

Just because we never used a particular function doesn't mean other people might want to.
(which is why I don't get why comparing the Sony to what Apple could presumably do got shouted down as being offtopic. Yes, some people have to, or prefer to use Apple products in their daily work and won't get this Sony laptop.)

But support for 4K for the video editors sounds pretty cool in TB2
My bet is that the new Mac Pro redesign will get it too.

It's the "obligatory Apple reference" (tm)

Given Haswell's power saving credentials and the retina MacPros are mainly just battery under the hood, it should get interesting.
(also thunderbolt 2 coming around the corner)

Let's see what Apple can get away with in their next MacBook refresh...

A perfect example of this is basically the issue of old video games. (I may as well bring this up because it's going to come up)

Recently, the Internet Archive stored a whole pile of TOSEC collections of games from various old systems (thanks to their DCMA exemption of being an archival repository so that they can legally do this). Data and information that would have otherwise been completely lost into a digital black hole, if it weren't for the fans of the system, and the dedicated teams of people collecting and amassing this software as a hobby.... in breach of copyright.

The problem with DRM is that without dedicated crackers and pirates, unless the original rights holders are around long enough to resell old titles for that long (which most aren't), old games will simply disappear into a digital copyright black hole and never be seen again. This happens once the computer/console system system is old, not sold anymore, and forgotten about, and the media degrades and isn't backed up in some form (in breach of EULA). If people aren't able to collect the software and hang on to it, preserving/duplicating the media while still in copyright, it's going to vanish. Culturally important games of significance will be lost forever, and that, if anything is as much a crime as it is to pirate software in the first place.
It's only due to the efforts of an army of swappers/crackers, etc, that most of the old games on old systems were even preserved.

The steam model on PC is quite good though as it makes a few compromises where you can actually make backups and go offline if you want.
For old computers and consoles however, this doesn't apply,.... and with some more restrictive attempts to squash the used game market, and force internet-always-connected authentication on upcoming consoles to even play the game... one has to wonder if the game companies deliberately want to squish all traces of their old work, let it disappear into the ether, and to resell you this year's football game which is just like last year's. I fear that this is where we are headed (if we aren't there already)

Democracy can't function without a consumption-based culture!

[quote]What's with BitCoin? Why all the negative press? I've seen no named commenter put forth a rational argument as to why it won't work - that can stand up to logical scrutiny. All arguments so far have been handily shot down by subsequent responses. (You're welcome to try, though.)[/quote]

It won't work because there's a limit to the number of Bitcoins you can make. Additionally all the control mechanisms that market makers normally employ on major currency pairs won't work. It's a threat to the world's major banks and the status quo, and they'll throw resources at burying it or trying to control it with all the weapons they have (such as lobbied governments, lobbied laws, and the media) if it becomes too popular to be a threat to their business.

I was talking about banks. Not governments. How did you get modded up for this?

I would forget about governments attempting that.... but banks? Almost certainly.

Actually trading bitcoin on a spot market would be completely unworkable however, because without any mechanism for guided market maker manipulation, price fluctuations would happen at complete random (which has been the case with bitcoin historically).
Professional currency traders specifically look for price manipulation opportunities to make consistently profitable trading decisions. Without the manipulation, you may as well leave wall street and head to the casino.

Yes, the very fact that major currencies are manipulated *should*, quite rightly, blow your mind as to what that means for life on this planet...., given that the media, books on economics, and hundreds of failed traders would tell you that the market is somehow random.
Well somehow people find a living off day trading wall street. If they can't do it consistently, how else are they doing it?

We all know that this is the first salvo being fired at digital currencies.

The "powers that be" running the world's major banks in concert, can't have any currency run outside of their control and manipulation, because then they would lose their grip on the world's economies (and in turn, their people) to do their bidding.

If they can't latch control onto Bitcoin or other currencies, they will attempt to stifle it's ascendancy, or drive it far underground.
Remember that they only manage to control the world because we have to use the major currencies under their control, which gives them their license to print credit at the cost of everyone's freedom who actually has to do the work for it's creation.

How much can a koala bear?

>Stop considering license prices, and start considering Total cost of ownership

That's OK if the organization has deep pockets, deadlines, and defined SLAs, and you happen to be an outside contractor who is called in to make a solution where he/she has to be able to walk away from whatever solution is in place at the end of the day, and have it supportable by other people.

However, at some places where they pay in-house admins, they might have carte-blanche to hack together whatever solution they like in whatever timeframe they like, to get something that's functional... at least most of the time, and then document it for their admin team.

I've worked in both modes of organisation and there is a completely different culture and approach to problems in both of them.

I think that as you find yourself re-reading what I wrote, I wasn't picking one solution over another. Just listing options. To someone who's pockets don't run deep, vmware isn't negligible in the licensing department. No two-ways about it, and no spin about TCP will hide that. When in-house admins and devs are paid a monthly wage and allowed to run amok doing their own R&D, TCO is fairly negligible. What isn't negligible for in-house admins, is to explain to their superiors as to why, despite being asked to keep costs down, that they go for the most expensive solution - what when there are open-source alternatives that they have all the time in the world on to get working and support.

Either way, vmware requires competent admins just like any other solution.