I suppose what the article means is that there are 4 x 48U racks installed in the server room. It is fiction that each rack could actually loaded with 48 x 1U servers! Potential problems are: cooling, weight, air (fire hazard), power supply.

Most likely actual rack usage looks as follows:

- Rack with 5 Servers
- Rack for Patching and switches
- Rack for phone system / phone patches
- Rack for backup.

If they have remaining capacity, they could rent it out/sell to other community organisations.

Sound to me like the poster uses a virtual shared server, ie. The hosting company provides a virtual root environment, this would be an explanation why they can "root" the server, ie. just access the file system directly from the hypervisor. I am sure this kind of service does not include uptime guarantees, it operates most likely under "Best Effort" promise. Which means they do not need to guarantee either uptime or availability. Their monitoring system and logs do not detect any error, so they want to check the posters systems logs - a reasonable request as they are trying to help him. Monitoring is a difficult task - what to you measure, where is your sensor. Was the outage on your own internet connection rather than on the server? "Moments ago, there were three simultaneous outages while I was logged into the server working on some projects. " It sounds very suspicious, like the admin interface causes interruption in the VM. Something like this happened to my VMWare Servers totally unexplainable, but reproducably.

Its a silly argument that the article makes. E-Readers can display B&W pages, and gray shades. This is absolutely sufficient for displaying textbooks. There is a line of extremely bloated textbooks that takes liberties with layout and colour. I just wonder for what purpose colour is used in those books. In my opinion it does neither help understanding of diagrams and models, nor does it improve the information density. Perhaps a revisit of Tufte's rules for information design is in order for publishers?

Companies operate with constrained resources in order to generate a profit. While developing a product a company only experiences cost, no income. After the selling starts a company receives income that slowly covers development cost until it breaks even. After break even, additional sales generate profit. After sales start any maintenance work reduces profit.

Why do I talk about what everyone already knows? A company like microsoft must decide for themselves how to use their limited resources. They decide how serious a bug is by looking at the urgency, and seriousness vs reduced profits. They make a decision based on their own interest. By putting an exploit on ebay, the cost and seriousness of the bug is not decided merely by microsoft, but by the market.

If MS thinks its irrelevant, they need not do anything. If they think its serious, they will have the choice of either fixing it until the auction ends, or bidding to prevent disclosure. Third parties interested in security will also have a chance to bid, however they must realise that their purchase may soon loose value if a fix is provided.

Overall I think its a good idea - in the best case it encourages a faster fixing of issues.