I was working for a Houston-based Halliburton in 2009 when my wife passed away suddenly at the age of 34.

We buried her next to family in Chattanooga. When I got to the funeral home, three divisions of Halliburton - not just the one I worked for - sent huge six-foot-tall flower arrangements. They'd not contacted me or anybody who was helping me out with things that I knew of, so I don't know how they got the info of where to send things.

I went back to work two weeks later (and even after that, had to work my way up gradually to doing a full day over the course of a week). The official company policy was that we got three days of bereavement leave. I asked what to do about the extra time I'd taken off, and a division VP (2-3 org chart positions above my direct manager) said "Put down that you were gone for three days, and don't worry about it."

Other than the coworker (who was from a different country and grew up in a different culture) that walked into my office two weeks later and said "She's dead, get over it", I couldn't have asked for a more supportive company to work for during such a tragedy.

Depending on the interface hardware, they might be better off at this point (both power usage and dependability wise) to look at one of the many commercial VAX emulators that run on server-class PC hardware and have available hardware to connect certain types of interface cards.

I used to run a pair hobbyist/enthusiast sites for fans of DEC's VAX and PDP-11 series of machines.

Shortly after 9/11, I got a phone call from someone at the Pentagon who was looking for certain parts so they could repair an older VAX that had been damaged in the attack. I was able to get them in touch with a third-party reseller who still had those bits in the back of a dusty warehouse.

It was surprising that they hadn't upgraded to Alpha (which had been out almost ten years) then; the telco where I worked had one big system that had gone through three company changes (DEC -> Compaq -> HP) and had been upgraded in-chassis from VAX to Alpha.

I think all large systems sold to the federal government are required to have service/support available for something like 5 to 10 years after final sale availability; can't find concrete details via Google.

Whoops, forgot to log in before posting this one.

Er, derp, I should have logged in before posting that.

Been there, done that. I almost went to work with Jher @ IO after I left Texas.Net, but ended up at OnRamp.
Sitting up on the 12th floor of 7th and Brazos for Y2K, listening to my police scanner and watching the crazyness down on 6th,
chatting with colleagues across town and across the country on IRC as we all did the same thing - waiting for a problem that
"never came" because we'd all worked to make sure it didn't happen.

The I/O performance on the free "VMWare Server" product *sucks* - because it's running on top of a host OS, and not on the bare metal.
I'm not surprised that FreeBSD Jails had better performance. VMWare Server is great for test environments and such, but I wouldn't ever use it in production.
It's not at all near the same class of product as the VMWare Infrastructure stuff (ESX, ESXi, etc.)

VMWare offers VMWare ESXi as a free download, and I/O performance under it would have been orders of magnitude better.
However, it does have the drawback of requiring a Windows machine (or a Windows VM) to run the VMWare Infrastructure management client.

Back in 2000, I got a letter from a Sun attorney threatening me with a lawsuit over some material on the "Rumors" section of my web site. They didn't like the fact that I'd copied documents (blueprints/engineering drawings) from their web server to mine and those documents were marked "Proprietary and Confidential". They also disliked the fact that I used the color purple on my web site and had a logo that was vaguely reminiscent of theirs.

I countered with the fact that I got the documents from a search on their publicly-accessible web server, and that after AOL, the next six top visitors of the site were Sun employees themselves hitting it from internal Sun proxy servers, and that no one had ever expressed concern over the logo or the purple color since the site was created in '97.

After a couple of weeks of negotiations, we came to an agreement and I made this public statement:

"I'm happy to announce that I have amicably resolved my situation with Sun regarding SunHELP.org. The site will function much like it has in the past, but in a manner that protects Sun's trademarks. In fact, although I will continue to operate independently of Sun, Sun has offered to help me provide you with better information about Sun and its products. I am pleased with the outcome and the manner in which this situation was resolved. I now consider this matter closed."

A couple of weeks later, I got a FedEx delivery of a brand-new Ultra 10 workstation as a "thank you" for "resolving the dispute in a friendly and speedy manner that avoided litigation". Since then, I've had good relations with the company. I was a member of the Opensolaris Pilot Program and have talked in email with both Scott McNealy and Jonathan Schwartz. Sun has greatly improved their relationship with third-party supporters since 2000; in fact, in 2006 they donated a fully-loaded T1000 system to SunHELP.

Nick at ThinkSecret probably ended up with some free Apple gear in exchange for shutting his site down - after all for Apple, "no publicity is bad publicity".

No, I'm just out of the office this week.

The article on UnitedLinux's new partners has a number of interesting tidbits. First of all, I was completly unaware that SCO was such a major contendor in the group, has anyone thought about how this fits into their supposed lawsuits against Linux vendors? If they are really intending to sue, it could be a way to harm Redhat, and the other non-UnitedLinux distributions.

As for the new partners mentioned in the article, none of them seem that major. All that UnitedLinux seems to get out of it is the ability to use a name, and all the companies (HP, Intel, IBM, and AMD) get out of it is prerelease code.