It is the visionaries who change the world, not the bean counters

There is a meme in IT: Linux is cheap. Even smart people like Andreessen are surprised, that this meme proofs more and more as false:

As Ning figured such things, the loaded cost (AKA TCO) of a whitebox Linux box running Intel chips was $10,350 over 36 months. Sun's AMD boxes running Solaris 10? $4760. Whatever you might think about those numbers and how they were generated, it was pretty apparent that they surprised the Ning gang.

Okay, more news: TheRegister reports about our new workstations. VMWare seems to feel the heat of the competition. There are rumors of a free version of GSX.
The effect of “Frankenstein Computing” gets more visible from time time:

"'Best of breed' is now code for Frankenstein. I've walked into more than a few data centers where I said, 'Whoa, where did you get that thing?'" McNealy said. "They've got body parts from every supplier you can imagine. There are big bolts sticking out everywhere and stitch marks."

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But in most cases its not the fault of the IT-staff. Nowadays the decisionmakers do not decide with techical expertise, they collect numbers for theirs spreadsheet. Most of the time decisionmakers have no technical background, they have a major degree in bean counting. In conjunction with clueless project managers the worst combination, you can imagine. In this situation the only valid solution is to leave the table to rescue the remaining parts of your own sanity. At the end the customer has a datacenter consisting out of patchwork technology, nothing really matches together and he is constantly occupied with plugging eleven holes in the dam with ten fingers. Okay, enough lamentation …
The newest fashion fad in frankenstein computing: Watercooling in the Datacenter. Okay, we are not able to drive down heat disipation, let´s use water like 20 years ago. A old kludge to solve a problem with a root cause: Using a desktop processor as a server processor. But , dear HP, i see the problem. This the only you can solve it, when you outsource all your processor development to Intel and AMD. But to be honest, in my opinion water cooling is the only way to increase the density of x86-computing. The question is: Is x86 - at least with the current technology - the correct solution at all? And what is the right solution? Maybe the industrie has to start again, because even the best kludge cannot last forever.
A few days ago i read a nice quote in a internal mail . Basically it goes like: The biggest intellectual capital is the courage to build something like Niagara And with this words i close for today.