@Anonymous - you would actually ‘trust’ an upgrade of Windows? I’d only ever want a clean install.
It’s time to take ownership.
All I read is how awful Microsoft is but I can’t help to wonder why? If you are about to configure and setup a server why didn’t you think about the cost up front?
You should say here is my x,y,z hardware now what server edition do I need to support this? Failure to do so is failure on your part not Microsoft’s. Take responsability for being your own IT / Server administrator and quit whining because you didn’t do you job.
BTW, I love StackOverflow! Listen to the podcast on the day of the release.
Captcha Words: soulless montgomery - funny!
Try this. You buy Vista Ultimate. Windows 7 comes along and it’s looking to be a legitimate upgrade. You go to the upgrade site, decide Ultimate was the ultimate waste of money, and decide on Windows 7 pro. You then realize by looking at the upgrade matrix that you cannot downgrade Vista Ultimate to Win7 Pro without doing a clean install. Conclusion: Microsoft can shove it.
I can almost forgive Microsoft for the market segmentation voodoo that they do; I cannot forgive them for locking me into their ‘ultimate’ pricing scheme.
+1 to Wild Bob. Do your research.
Oh… so you are to stupid to look up a edition usable for datacenters?
And don’t know the limits of the software you are using?
Well… lets blame the seller, who had similiar offers since 1999…
And then buy the datacenter edition . (Hell , next you find out about the Team Edition of VS)
I assume that the Stack Exchange product means that rumors that the Stack Overflow code might one day be open-sourced are untrue…?
Oh…You want the ‘girlfriend experience’ 
The SQL 2008 specs say OS Maximum:
http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/editions-compare.aspx
The Windows Server 2008 specs say 32GB maximum:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/compare-specs.aspx
Maybe you missed this?
Brings to mind the old Intel marketing ploy used back in the day with their 486DX and 486SX processors. Recall that the 486DX had the math coprocessor built in and had a higher price than the coprocessor-less 486SX. It seemed perfectly reasonable to most consumers that the 486SX, lacking a certain feature, should be cheaper than the comparable 486DX model since it would be cheaper to manufacture the 486SX models, right? Wrong. Manufacturing the 486SX was actually more expensive than manufacturing the 486DX because it involved an extra step in the manufacturing process – disabling the coprocessor chip. Yup, the 486SX began its life as a 486DX, but Intel took the extra step of disabling the already perfectly good math coprocessor chip in order to be able to segment the market, not to mention competing with AMD and Cyrix.
By the way, this is all based on something I recall reading in a computer magazine. My apologies to the weasels at Intel if the facts are not accurate. It could well be that later on the 486SX processors were built without the coprocessor chip, but I do believe at least the initial offerings were made as described above.
The arguments about OSS taking too much time entertain me. These comments usually come from people who view running linux as a pain. It’s only a pain until you understand the system. Then it blissfully makes sense AND it’s “free”.
As others have stated, you can save yourself a lot of time/money long run if you just take the small investment up front of learning the system.
“…because hardware is cheap, and programmers are expensive.”
OMG! Fire the crew, buy some RAM!
Then we can change Coding Horror to RAM Horror.
It would be trivial to prove everything in this post wrong.
@Anton, You might get WS2008 Enterprise for free, however if you check the MSDNAA licensing you may just find that whilst you can use that for development purposes, you sure as hell cannot use it for a Production environment like SO/SF/SU/MSO.
While the licensing and features of the various MS products leads to confusion, I cannot blame it all on MS. I feel some of the blame lies in the procurement channel that sold you a server that needed to be upgraded less than 18 months after purchase.
I am not surprised at the anti-MS comments
@Wedge, @Martin, @Michael- Besides RAM & BIOS, the addressable memory includes other hardware memory- com & parallel ports, sound-video & other cards
@Anonymous on July 6,But 2009: I never said the program itself was put out as a GPL’ed product. Bitkeeper was put together by a group that wanted to get away from cvs. They were an OSS group which is why OSS developers got it for free. They just did not GPL it. I brought them up as an extreme example of pricing by the ability of the customer to pay.
@Mark on the 486DX/SX: Usually this kind of segmentation in the chip world is not done by deliberately disabling a feature in an otherwise perfectly good chip, especially if it is intended to be sold for a lesser price - that would take an extra step and that costs. Every 0.1c matters to them. Instead the SX was a DX with a failed co-processor. It could be sold cheaper because it failed out of the test line earlier than the DX. The automated manufacturing line just did a slightly different bond-out so the partially functional co-proc would not be accidentally invoked.
Now, one can go back further to the early TI calculator chips, which were all the same die but either different bond-outs for the various grades of calculator functionality, or had feature enable pins. Again, not really chiseling, just picking from different test grades. Also there were some EOM calculator manufacturers that crippled their systems while stocking only the one fully functional part. It’s not really that the buyers are being cheated. It all comes down to commodity price management.
+1 to Wild Bob.
One of the only comments to not be so stupidly biased it didn’t make sense.
@mr. Orange
Oh yeah, and everything you do on your MS machine you can do on a >Mac (but better, obviously), so that’s no longer an argument
Tried booting a game recently? 
I know, it’s not a “dev thing”. But that comment was so open, it was false. Try to be more precise.
@Fazal Majid
If I were you, I would start testing my app on Mono. You can keep >using your existing .NET development tools, but deploy and test onto >a platform with less onerous licensing.
That’s an awesome tool. But there’s a heap of haters bashing it in the OSS community. Just because it runs/compiles C#
@David W.
The old line of “If you want a feature, then why don’t you program >it?” is no longer true
Wanna bet? Run me a game. Not under WINE. Emulating (I know, Wine Is Not an Emulator but it does the same things. :P) can run most games, but I like my performance on Windows machines.
@J. Stoever
Yeah, thank God that Linux only comes in one flavor.
Which distro was that one? FOSS is as bad as MSFT. Only difference is that FOSS puts up nice websites slamming corporations and has “FREE” in great big letters with lots of !'s and daggers for emphasis.
MSFT has one major advantage over FOSS. If something doesn’t work, you ring someone up and complain. You don’t try and figure out what’s going wrong, post to forums that call you names because you don’t know machine code and google like mad. Paying really does give you benefits.
And there’s only 7 distros, as compared to how many for Linux?
One other advantage is that you know what the MSFT license is, FOSS isn’t really free or open. And still hasn’t got 1 license.
@OP (article poster)
Really… How could you miss something like that? I’m a 20yr old student and I’ve known about software limitations for years. It’s, I would have thought, common knowledge.
@ all FOSS MSFT bashers
The day that a linux distro is on the majority of computers in the world is the day that you can tell me it’s better.
@ all Apple MSFT bashers
The day Apple decides to 1, secure it’s products and 2, patch them with reasonable speed when flaws are found is the day that you can tell me Apple is better.
Safari loads and runs .dmg files silently in the background without informing the user. Apple may get around to patching it the end of July. If it was IE, it would have been patched instantly as a critical update, no-one would have installed it, but at least the patch would be out.
Oh yea, I also want to be able to pick my hardware, not be limited to 1 platform (Apple) or have to browse eosteric sites to find a driver for a part (linux). One of the things that made MSFT is it’s acceptance of the rubbish. It would render all websites regardless of standards comformance (IE up to 6) and would run old hardware with dodgy drivers (XP). The main reasons people are leaving MSFT is because IE7 and 8 start showing error messages when they come across dodgy coding and Vista required a reasonably new machine to run instead of a piece of junk that’s been sitting in the garage for years.
ALL products have segmented pricing, “FOSS” and major corporations both. It’s normal and has been so for quite some time. Get used to it.
And read the specs on hardware/software BEFORE you make a decision.
Above sentence with lots of !'s and daggers for emphasis.
I use open source everywhere and I have to think about licensing.
So that begs the question, when are you going to Open Source StackOverflow, so it too can be available in Awesome?
How could you have missed the RAM limitation of the version you opted for. I know the marketing lingo built into any MS purchase can lead any savvy user/buyer astray, but, think about it. You needed more RAM even before you started your business plan or whatever plan you had in mind. Don’t blame MS for your own folly of missing the scalability aspect of your original purchase.
That being said, switch now to a more open supplier of software and of hardware if you wish to gain more flexibility and avoid the scalability trap. Scalability should be open-ended, not a closed option at purchase time. You will always need more RAM, more disk space. Don’t limit yourself to suppliers who put caps on these variables: they need to be unlimited in future expandability!..