As many of us thought, there is a logical explanation. I'm giving Mr. Oleander's reply. (Received within, I would say, less than a half hour after sending the inquiry.)
(This posting of his reply is with his permission.)
Quote:
Hi Scott!
Thanks for your comments. We recently upgraded the website and, in fact,
this is really just a place-holder for a higher-end system. If you haven't
noticed yet, you can not actually purchase this system from the site and
the details are rather skimpy. This is because we've recently qualified a
BSD Worksation platform as a viable option and hadn't finalized all of the
hardware selection at the time of the site rollout. The picture that is
posted is not actually the chassis for the final product, which is much
more robust that what is shown.
However, that being said, yes, I am sure any self-sufficent DIY sysadmin
can certainly build their own system for less. Our customers that have
pushed for a BSD Workstation offering tend to be larger than a do it
yourself-er and require purchases of this nature to be from a company that
they can rely on for support after the sale. The final price of the actual
released workstation will probably be higher. This is because most of them
will be dual boot, RAID'd systems with the option for SAS drives, large
amounts of memory, etc.
Once the final product is ready for sale, we will do a formal press release
and I will probably post on one of the FreeBSD mailing lists. Also, we've
just finished writing the NIC driver for our new laptop and are in the
process of final tweaking and testing. Once again though, this probably
won't be a consumer product offering but more of a rugged corporate product
for multiple unit sales.
Sorry for the confusion and yes, please, go ahead and post this response in
your forum reply *waves*!
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