Re: 1) Iowa's farmers need to quit concentrating on corn and go back to diversified farms anyway. Iowa is now has the lowest level of wild or natural acrage in the nation and in the end, all those flat, plowed fields is costing them big time.

Completely off topic, but Dick Cheney's view of the world is just as far from reality as Al Gore's.

That's the problem with extremists. They are all completely full of shit (and you can't even compost it). The problem with stupid people is they believe what extremists have to say.

Our market niche is high-end computing, and always has been. In the x64 world, it means that in order to compete we have to do stuff that white boxes can't.

My experience always had IBM P5 (now P6) for the real high end applications, except for big Oracle servers. We primarily used SPARC for mail, Oracle, and webservers, or the specific telecommunications app that required Sun. On the other hand, I know the defense department still has a lot of high end SPARC, due to trusted Solaris.

I really hope SPARC does survive,and, as I said, I still prefer Solaris as a Unix OS. But I would like to see it as more than just an Oracle niche support market. I'm just not convinced that it will happen. Especially given the crap outsourcing that Sun has taken to for their support contracts. Hell, I know more about their new hardware than most of the CEs that have been sent out to support the limited Sun hardware at the currently company I work for. And that crap support is the reason that there won't be much more Sun coming in here.

SPARC was a dying hardware platform anyway. Sun was shipping far more Intel product than SPARC. It's too bad. SPARC was pretty good for the level it was designed to operate (mid-range area). IBM and HP have somehow convinced everyone that P5/6 and Itanium somehow fit in that environment, but they are really out of the price range and overpowered for those needs.

I'm just hoping Solaris survives the Oracle take over. I still like Solaris better than Linux for webservers and such, personally.

about making a game that keeps making them money. The vast majority (something like 86%) of their player populace considers themselves "casual" which basically means that they will play the game as long as it's still fun to them. 8% of players (that's the last number I heard, anyway) are involved in regular runs of end-game raiding. Clearly, they do not represent a significant portion of World of Warcraft income; yet, their voices have had a significantly inordinate impact on game play for much of the life of World of Warcraft. The remain ~6% are "hardcore PvPers" who went through their own (shorter) period of inordinate influence over gameplay; yet, again, we can see that they are not a major source of income for the game. Blizzard is now starting to recognize that they can reduce their overall churn rate by conctrating on that 86% of players who want to play for fun and comradery and do it in the 2-10 hours a week that they wish to set aside to play. And if you play 40 hours a week? Well, you should probably go hit the gym because you are probably raising the rest of our health insurance rates.