NuTCrAcKeR wrote:


10 pounds of crap .... 5 pound bag, so i have to choose the 5 pounds of MS
as opposed to OpenSource.


Oh I quite agree - the practical realities of work have to take precedence.
In my case however I can afford to set a machine up over the course of a
few days, attending to it from time to time as it's doing a build, because
my line of work is embedded hardware design and so I don't have to worry
about commissioning several machines a week for impatient clients. I can
start it off, design a board during the day, and then see if the machine's
ready to do something several hours later as I'm walking past.

I do lots of Gentoo Linux servers for people this way, but they understand
that:
a) It's going to be an obsolete machine (nothing wrong with that of course)
but as such it'll still be more than good enough for the job and besides,
look at the peanuts you'll shell out to buy one, and
b) It's not going to happen in one day. Give me a call in about a week.

A lot of these legacy machines are indeed finding new life in scenarios like
this. A client of mine, after seeing the 4 Proliants in my rack (1200,
5000, 5500, 7000 - all running Gentoo with 2.6 kernels) is getting me to
build him up a LAMP server for his travel booking company because he's seen
how fast my own web server runs (the 5500, and the machine is way faster
than my ADSL connection anyway) and he can't argue for spending $1000 for a
new machine with inferior cooling and mechanical ruggedness when he can
pick up something with quad processors and RAID 5 storage for one fifth of
that cost.

But of course, by the same token I'm not going to walk into the bank's data
centre and suggest they outfit themselves with a bank of 7000s like the
ones they just decommissioned six months ago