9.04 is not early for Ubuntu, and Arch has much problems with needing to keep up on every hairbrained thing the Arch developers are doing instead of it just working. Update and Pacman is using GPG all of a sudden, locking you out of everything? To the forums with you. Readline updates, but everything you're using from the AUR is still linked against the old version (that they just removed)? To the forums with you. Awesome3 changed its configuration again? Forums. Etc. If you want to work instead of tinker, Arch is about as awesome a choice as Gentoo.

I like how you completely ignored Solaris yet still presented the comment as if it was a valid counterargument.

Is this a terrible, terrible joke? That's 186 characters. Comparatively:

sed -r -ie "s/(.{3})A/\1B/g" somefile
Or:
perl -pi.orig -e 's/(.{3})A/$1B/g' somefile

A trivial Perl script to wrap that if you want it programmatically is 98 characters, with proper spacing and no golfing at all.

Python:
python -c "import os,re;[open('outfile.txt','a').write(re.sub(r'(.{3})A', r'\1B', line)) for line in open('infile.txt','rb')]"

Yes, that's golfed a tad to make it convenient as a oneliner, but the "re.sub" bit is much, much shorter than your ridiculous map+join combination. Just because you don't know regular expressions doesn't mean they're not more efficient.

That's for the (older) UL80VT rather than the UL80JT. The VT uses Core2 ULV, a GeForce 210, the switchable graphics have a noticeable delay (like Thinkpad T400s), etc. This is presumably a newer version.

Uh, what? Microsoft wasn't a concern at the time. Ultrix, Tru64, AIX, Solaris, VMS, IRIX, MVS, Nonstop, and all the other relevant operating systems at the time used that licensing model. HPUX still does -- they ship a non-ANSI C compiler and a crippled linker. You can't compile anything without paying for a compiler or wedging GCC on there. MIPSPro was never free. suncc wasn't free, etc.

GNU was founded before the era of Microsoft dominance. I don't really like GNU (CDDL, Apache, or BSD license if you please), but OP has valid points.

Our RedHat account manager indicates that RHEL6 will probably be based off F11 with some parts (likely the KVM bits) of F12.

The thing is, at least in every part of the country I've lived in, it's cheaper by $20/month or so to get basic, no-frills cable plus cable internet than cable internet by itself.

Given the form factor, I'd say, yes, for the desktop (in the same way as an E3k, deskside Onyx, AlphaServer 2100, et al). The difference between distributed and parallel is essentially zero other than swapping client/server to parent/child threads. A system like this would be ideal for localized rendering jobs, virtualization, and a number of other tasks that may be undertaken. More than that, it's modular. You don't need to get ridiculous amounts of licenses for Vmotion, Windows, ESX, or whatever it may be, and it can be expanded as the business gets the money.

Frankly, this is not aimed at your budget or what you can afford. I'd question your ability to compete on price/performance for all but the most trivial tasks also (a fully loaded Octane III is damn close to list price on the components).

If 1000TX had anywhere near the latency of Infiniband, maybe. There's no doubt that clustering has its point, but you cannot possibly believe that individual nodes communicating across 1000TX (or 1000FX, for that matter) are going to compete with a chassis like this in this segment. No, I don't consider TFTP/NFS/PXE booting to be solutions in this manner, since nodes in a cluster are not the same thing as a single image, and they have no access to peripherals which may be in the chassis (if one goes with the PCIe expansions).

The form factor matters not because of aesthetics, but because fast interconnects and redundant components matter for some applications. It is not a competitor to desktops.

Let me know when you assemble what is essentially a blade chassis (it's really more comparable to the Onyx/Origin, Superdome, or Sun's E$numK systems given that you have the option of using PCIe nodes instead) with Infiniband interconnects in a deskside form factor, plus redundant hot-swappable components and the ability to run the entire thing as a single OS image yourself.

If nobody's picked you up on this offer through other channels, I'm definitely interested.

I don't pretend to understand Intel's modeling scheme here. A small bump (55xx), with some of them having HyperThreading, some not, some have QPI, some not, etc. It's not exactly intuitive, and I wouldn't have known to look there either if we weren't using some of them.

I'm going to say you didn't look hard enough. Published SPEC results have a Sun Fire x4270/x2270 walking all over the T5240/T5120 for 1/3rd of the cost or less (with 6GB of RAM).

They cannot, of course, run nearly as many threads in hardware, but for brute-forcing compression, it's sort of a moot point.

SPARC VII, yes. The Nehalem Xeons are about on par with T2s at substantially lower cost.