Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard 1572

The nice thing about industry standard I-O interfaces is that there are lots of choices for the consumers. The bad thing about them is that there are lots of choices for the consumers.

If you are buying server hardware, from the less-than-a-handful of vendors that still care about stability, you can get a configuration that is as close to "guaranteed" to work as you can reasonably hope for. The problem is, it will cost about 6-12X the normal PC purchase price to get there. It will also require that you run something other than Windows on it.

The problem for those vendors is that customers by and large don't care about such things if it means a higher price, and their compebreastion knows it. I suspect that in the very near future either

a) customers will realize product quality isn't really available at Walmart prices b) The companies still making reliable hardware will go out of business or succumb to the market demands for cheap, cheap, cheap.

My money is on B happening long before A. If A ever does occur, it will be too late.

I suppose the end result will be that those corporate IT departments that have budget for their own large scale testing efforts prior to deployment will be able to find a stable configuration somewhere in the slop that is mbutt market computers, and the rest will have their pagers ring off the hook 24x7.

-- Randy Howard (2reply remove FOOBAR) Politicians and diapers are similar ... they both require frequent changing, and for the same reason.