Careful, your mainframe zealot side is showing. You're also comparing IBM to MS + VMWare + Citrix + firewalls. Anyone who has a mainframe has that other stuff anyway. I hope you wouldn't claim that you don't need a firewall if you're running Oracle on a mainframe rather than on a Sun box! You buy a mainframe and your CPU is throttled unless you pay for it. When you buy Intel or SPARC hardware, you can run it flat out without paying extra. Also, IBM licensing is at least one order of magnitude costlier than MS + VMWare. Never mind that you have to pay double for the rare skills to manage the mainframe, even before you virtualize anything. And if you virtualize linux on the mainframe you'd have to hire a different person to manage the linux instance, since mainframers typically don't handle other operating systems.

Big deal, you had a successful NIC failover. Not a good justification for the expense of a mainframe and the scarce staff to run it. Pretty much any decent hardware can do that these days.

Why would anyone spend huge sums of $ on a mainframe and the scarce mainframe programmers to keep it running, just to run a virtualized copy of linux? That's *way* too much overhead. Never mind that you can't virtualize windows on a mainframe -- talk about inflexible. IBM's increase in mainframe revenue has more to do with the success of its sales force in making existing hardware sound obsolete, and twisting the arms of existing customers who haven't managed to get off the 'legacy' mainframe environment yet. OTOH, if you use VMWare (or Sun xVM or Zen) you can run on pretty much commodity hardware, and virtualize linux, windows, and solaris to your heart's content. My macbook pro runs VMWare's Fusion which allows me to virtualize Microsoft from Vista back to Windows 3.11, and any linux variant I can get my hands on, and Solaris 8 thru 10, and *bsd, and Netware, JunOS, etc. And whatever skills I learn from running VMWare's desktop virtualization product is fairly transferable to virtualization on their server and management products (think ESX and VirtualCenter).

From the fine article: "It is the largest ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula yet to be threatened." So, thinking about the US response to "threatened" spiders, frogs, and other critters...that language prepares us all to have our own rights restricted in deference to ice chunks. Sheesh.

We might as well say that since some users attack webservers running on port 80, all tcp/80 outbound will be blocked, so users must connect to webservers on some alternate port, like 443 or 8080. So if 50k of millions of users are listed in the CBL, let's annoy the millions of users instead of the 50k problem children?? Shheeesh. SMTP on tcp/25 is about as fundamental standard Internet Service as it gets. And now Internet Service Providers are going to deny a fundamental Internet Service to their paying customers?! What a dumb idea. Then all those users that use a real mail client instead of webmail will need to reconfigure their email client to use a less-standard port. Yeah, I know some clients will attempt port 25 and then resort to the alternate ports, but that still half-breaks email.

like who uses OSX server anyway? I've seen scads of macbooks, but OSX servers...? c'mon. I just tested a macbook and it came up just fine on doxpara's test.