INQUIRER a "half-baked Chomskyite" rag

CIA targets kid with website
So basically, you went to the trouble of writing this piece just to inform us of how much you hate the CIA, and how you think they are responsible for everything askew in this world. Great. But, considering you want to call yourself a _technology_ journalist, you might want to spend a little more time reporting _technological_ news, and a little _less_ time propagandizing your half-baked Chomskyite political opinions. It's too bad you didn't get to live in one of those antiimperialist paradises CIA agitates against, either, though it's never too late to move (just hurry up, because their number is dwindling). And -- careful -- the multinational capitalist corporations are out there to control your thought!

kind regards,

Giorgos Vasileiou
Email address supplied

See Also
Noam Chomsky

If it has to run, better use Sun
Greetings Mikey,

I got a good chuckle from your article on Sun memory prices. First of all let me be up front and state that I am employed by Sun as a service person. That aside, the answer to your question Is Sun memory "better" than Kingston memory the simple answer is yes. Why ask a sales type such as reseller which is better? The answer will be the one the highest profit margin. My take is from the "how they run" perspective. Sun memory has many built in enhancements which do a superior job of error reporting, error recovery, and system stability not to mention FRUID capability.

The old adage "you get what you pay for" definitely carries over to memory selection. My last adventure into third party memory was with a local IT manager who saved $7K by purchasing an aftermarket brand of memory for their Sun server. After one year in service the system began hanging and experiencing CPU panics. Unfortunately for them they lost $75K in downtime while the issue was being resolved. Replacing the aftermarket memory with Sun memory fixed the problem. This is a recurring theme in my line of work. I have also seen a failed aftermarket DIMM take a system completely down until the DIMM was removed.. The bottom line is how far can you afford to stick your neck out?

A Sun employee
[please don't use my name as I enjoy being employed!]

P.S. Hope your feeling better. Are you tired of eating chicken yet?

A Slowaris admin writes about Sunmem
hello,

Being an solaris Admin the memory is the same, however, If sun comes in to work on your kit and they see the non sun memory (or ANY other non sun part) you must replace the part with a sun part BEFORE they will work on the kit. On sun E10K this was okay.

We were not allowed to open the box anyhow. (First version and it had problems.) However if sun breaks something they will fix it. (Such as an E10K backplane). On our big servers we just use all sun kit. on all desktop kits it depends what we have on hand. If a client box (ultra sparc etc) we rebuild with sun kit and send it back to them. And on a side Note for admins you can test the difference in memory and watch for ECC errors.

Also consider this is ECC sdram.... Old technology My Dual proc athlon is at least DDR ECC memory.

Just My 2 cents.

P.S. I had about 10 years ago the sun offical part's/price list . I lost it ;( . But I still remember the 450 dollar floppy drive for sun 386i boxes (street price was 45) and 10000 $ dollars for an 6 meg 9U memory board for the sun 3/260 (A box I wished I still owned.)

Name, email address supplied

Someone in the Know writes
Keeping in mind if you have a maintenance contract, and you slap in some Kingston memory, make sure you don't let sun know when you call up for a problem. As that is an unsupported configuration and they will tell you to put SUN memory in before they'll do anything for you.

And of course SUN won't replace kingston memory. i.e. if one of your sysadmins calls in not knowin it's kingston memory. The problem is diagnosed as a memory issue, they send out new memory to you, the sysadmin sends the kingston back, you will then receive a fairly heft memory bill for about 120% of the cost of buying the memory off the shelf from Sun.

Name, email address supplied