Except when it's the former :)

Yes, the shuttle was to be retired with no immediate replacement, but with one on the horizon. Now there is nothing on the horizon except Falcon 9 and Dragon. Which NASA probably would never use.

Supply vs. Demand curve. It's economics 101. There is less supply to meet demand thanks to Obama gutting NASA. And considering the only other market provider is China, we've effectively given Russia a monopoly.

Why do they always have to be villains? Tony Stark wasn't a villain.

Remember? heck, I even had a perstor controller so my 40 meg mfm drive was running as a 76 meg drive. I even had two of em in an external enclosure.

Does Ksplice Uptrack use cryptography?

        Yes. All network traffic is encrypted, and all updates are
            cryptographically signed.

http://www.ksplice.com/uptrack/faq

Look harder next time.

Last I checked, crackers actually signed openssh packages sent out over RHN for RHEL 4. Also, lets compare. Redundant oracle database server, running Enterprise edition. Lets see. Server 8K. RHEL License 300 bucks. SAN so you can support RAC - 50K. Oracle licensing for an additional server, 125K. Total cost of around 183K to run RAC compared to a standalone server. That's a lot of money to justify being immune to the major cause of downtime (Kernel patches - hardware these days just doesn't fail in a way that brings systems down).

Payback for 183K at 4 dollars a month is 45,750 months. Or 3,812 years. That's a really long time to put RAC out there as a solution just to achieve HA. Now, I'm not saying that this solution is as good as RAC at eliminating downtime, but I have 5 full time production oracle servers in a mid sized company that have had exactly 0 minutes of hardware related outage over the past 18 months. Of the outages, 95% were kernel patches. To my boss, if I can eliminate 95% of our database downtime for $20 a month, what do you think he's going to say. It's a lot more convincing then saying I can eliminate 100% of it for $180K per server, that's for sure. Maybe the economics of my company (mid sized company, supporting about 140 servers total) are the exception, but in my case, this makes damn good sense.

grr Lindor *IS* a brand name of Lindt.

Actually Lindor a brand name of Lindt.

Unless you have an incredibly unique name, you simply say, "I have no idea who that was, but it wasn't me". There is no other identifying informaton or anything else like that.

No, it's more like buying a 3.18ti BMW and having the dealer treat you like scum, then wonder why you aren't buying an M5.

1. If they can't support the low end stuff, wouldn't I be insane to plop down a quarter of a million dollars on something from them?
2. As I said, it was a typo. I'm a human and 3 and 4 are right next to each other on the keyboard. Deal with it.

1. It's a DS400. The internals are the same as the DS300, the controller card is just different. Wouldn't be the first typo.
2. It's used as offline storage for our databases, not as a production system. It isn't a serious problem, but thank you for classifying my issues for me. I'm fully capable of determining the difference between a serious issue and a minor inconvenience. At the same time, any hardware that has been broken for 6 months after first notifying the vendor, regardless of the criticality of the situation is ridiculous.
3. 15+ E-mails is what we've received from IBM over the past 6 months, not the other way around. I assure you that we've been sending e-mails daily and we were calling till they stopped answering.
4. I'm not the primary sysadmin working on this case, so I'm not even the one involved with IBM. I'm just copied on the e-mails and amazed by the ridiculousness of it all, especially compared to my experiences with HP and Dell support.

And the whole process has been full of ridiculousness. They'd send a tech who found both controllers unresponsive. The tech rebooted the SAN and sent the diagnostics to IBM. IBM replied a week later saying "It looks like the SAN was rebooted before the tech got there, you need to start over". So the SAN freezes again, they want to send a tech back out to get the logs, to which we point out that we've already TRIED that and the whole process repeats.