Oh yes, to clarify the question above: nobody sent money to me personally! All the money was a tax-deductible contribution to a 501(c)(3) non-profit animal shelter in Seguin, Texas. I have no connection with them except that I've donated a minivan and some stock photography earnings (derived from http://photo.net/photo/ ) to them.

Money for the new server will come from my pocket (or maybe I can browbeat the valinux.com or penguincomputing.com folks into giving me one since we're MIT! The server on which the forum is current running was donated by Sun Microsystems in 1995, by the way). I'm waiting for the dual P-800s to become available (Intel has announced them but apparently not shipped any). Then we need 2 GB of RAM and five 50 GB hard drives (we will mirror these X2 and then have a hot spare; total of two mirrored disks (not very good for Oracle performance -- one really wants to have 17 mirrored drives -- but easy and simple to maintain)). This is serious business to me, Pay or I pull the plug...

-- Phil Greenspun (philg@mit.edu), July 16, 2000