There's a big debate about Windows vs. Linux, but I think most people versed in the issue acknowledge that Linux has obvious advantages over Windows — most notably security and stability (My Linux server at home had been up for about 180 days until the UPS failed during a power outage last week. We've got Linux machines at work with uptimes of 885 days). I don't think that most people who choose Windows do so because they actually believe Windows is superior to Linux in aspects like those — it's just that Linux's downsides (difficult to configure, more geeky knowledge needed, incompatibility with a lot of hardware due to no manufacturer support, etc.) are enough to outweigh its benefits.

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I realized recently that I understand the bitterness that gay people feel about how it's "cute" to be lesbian these days. I see the same thing occurring with nerds. Everyone loves to say how much they love nerds these days, or how they're a big nerd, but I suspect very few of them would really enjoy sitting in on a Linux install or helping to calculate 100 digits of π with pencil and paper for the fun of it. I think this recent infatuation with nerds is similar to the same way that I like cows or Japanese like Americans: They like the concept, but the actuality is less glamorous and a lot more Cheez-Doodle-encrusted.

I made the switch over to the new server today. Did you notice? I hope you didn't.

On Will Byrd's recommendation, I bought dedicated server hosting at ServerBeach about a week ago. I settled for one of the cheapest options, paying $159/month for an Athlon 2600 server with two 80 GB EIDE drives and 1 GB of RAM, running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. $159 is a lot of money, but on the plus side, I now have lots more disk space (old BinRock was perilously close to filling up its single 74 GB disk) and more bandwidth than I'll ever use (this server comes with 2000 GB/month, and BinRock usually uses about 30).

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Sorry for the outage. BinRock was inaccessible for the weekend. It went down on Friday morning, but I didn't realize it until I woke up Friday evening, just after Bryan had gone home for the day. As a result, he couldn't take a look at it until he got into work today. A weekend without BinRock! Oh, agony.

If you're curious, the problem was that it somehow lost the part of its network configuration that told it how to get out onto the internet, so it was alive and well, it just didn't know how to talk to us. The poor little guy must have been so frustrated.