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Lots of A/C. (more where that came from).

Lots of A/C. (more where that came from).

I'd certainly expect to see that Mac users would be more likely to buy music from the store, which I'd attribute mainly to the lack of P2P clients available on the Mac, which has certainly helped Apple establish themselves in the market with the Mac version of iTunes.

Dude, what are you talking about?

I take it you don't have a Mac. Well, I don't need 10,000 different programs, 99% of which have shitty interfaces sitting atop half-assed implementations. (Then again, this is the place where 'vi' qualifies as a nice interface...so what should I expect?)

My personal favorite client is Acquisition. Nice interface, works well, very Mac-like.

I wonder if Microsoft is threatened HP to restrict the Windows and Office licenses if they made a player that could play WMA and ACC.

Not too long ago, they were threatening Dell of not giving them Windows licenses if IE wasn't the only browser in new computers... here's a /. article around that subject . Well, I hope that's no surprise to anyone. Although M$ does make good products (and I don't mean to start a whole debate here) they have a tendency to use their monopoly to force products.

I also wonder if Apple restricted HP from supporting WMA? Yes, Apple does these kind of things too!

Eh, a war of monopolies! They've just found common grounds to fight on...

The Creative Nomad Zen NX doesn't look the same to me as the Dell DJ.

From the press release, I understand the iPod will be the same as the existing 3rd generation iPod, ust with dark "HP Blue" color instead of white (which should look sharp with the chrome back).

No it doesnt, it runs linux

• 4GB
• US $249
• size of a business card
• same user interface as the iPod
• Gold, Silver, Blue, Pink and Green Anodized Aluminium
• Firewire and USB2, can charge from either.
• Accessories: dock, armband, belt clip.
• Shipping next month in the US. April worldwide

Hmm, guess this means my submission a couple hours ago won't go through (dangit, Wired!)...

Here is the official press release and the list.

There is a lot of good points to note all around. The first is the G5 Terascale cluster at Virginia Tech at #3 (10.28 Tflops/s, 2200 CPU, Infiniband) is the first academic computer to break 10 teraflops/s. This extra performance was promised at Mac OS X Developer's conference last month. Not to sure if the price is a testament to Infiniband ($1.5 million cabling, cards, and routers) or the Macs ($4.2 million list).

Good thing too because in a surprise move the NCSA cluster made the list at #4 (9.82Tflops/s, 2500 CPU, Myrinet). This cluster is built using Dell's running Pentium 4 XEONs and Red Hat Linux! One subtle point to note is that they didn't get all the systems online in time (there should be 2900 CPUs, not 2500). I bet some programmer at PSC and an ex-Chief Scientist of SDSC is appreciating having a hand in edging out NCSA for #3--not to mention Apple beating Dell for #3.

The fastest Itanium cluster is at #5 (8.63 TFlops/s, 1936 CPU, Quadrics) which is looking like the odd man out boxed in by a PC based systems using Myrinet, the P4 Xeon above, and the most powerful Opteron system at #6 (8.05 Tflops/s, 2816 CPU, Myrinet). Another point of similarity:did I mention it's also using Linux?

And finally, It's easy to overlook #73, a single compute node of BlueGene/L (1.44 Tflops/s, 1024 CPU). Imagine 128 of these connected together and you have something that will easily take #1 when it's completed even if we handicap it 20-40%. As noted on SlashDot earlier, this will be running Linux.

Person bags on me for talking about $5.7 million list price paid vs educational list price paid.

Yeah, you're right it was a little dishonest. In particular the part where I claimed it was $5.7 million when the cost was $5.2 million and included the cards/routers/cabling which (in Q&A) amounted to $1.5 million.

The G5s cost to $4.2 million not to $5.7 million. I was wrong and deceptive and I apologize.

As for the quibble about list price vs. educational list I apologize for that too: I took this information from the part where he said that they paid full list price and later assumed that it was the educational list. I'm wrong, you can spec 1100 G5's at AppleStore (non-education) for $3.27 million. If you get the 2GB of RAM from AppleStore at a rip off price, you still come in at $4.4 million--still under the $5.7 million I said in my post and (way under the $8-$10 million quoted by IBM and HP for their Opteron and Itanium2 systems).

A very good price indeed since it meant that you didn't have to "secretly explore pricing options" with Dell.

To those who are wondering why the G5 is a serious contender for supercomputing applications( and why VT decided the way they did ), you may want to follow this link: http://www.chaosmint.com/mac/vt-supercomputer/

Here's a quick rundown:

Dell - too expensive [one of the reasons for the project being so "hush hush" was that dell was exploring pricing options during bidding]

Sun (sparc) - required too many processors, also too expensive

IBM/AMD (opteron) - required twice the number of processors and was twice the price in the desired configuration; had no chassis available

HP (itanium) - same

Apple (IBM PPC970) - system available with chassis for lowest price

Here's a reasonable picture. Found in an article a lower post linked to ('dells dud').

picture here

1. Take a deep breath.

2. Step away from you computer and walk out side for a bit. Try not to be scared by all the blue sky and that really bright yellow ball up there.

3. Come back in after sudden exposure to intense light causes immediate sunburn.

4. Read about Deja Vu here.

http://www.chaosmint.com/macintosh/articles/dell-d j-digital-jukebox-h.shtml

Slide Four
Choosing the Right Architechture

cost vs. performance (purely)
total cost $5.2 million includes system itself, memory, storage, and communication fabrics
one of the cheapest systems of its kind

Slide Five
Architectural Options

Dell - too expensive [one of the reasons for the project being so "hush hush" was that dell was exploring pricing options during bidding]
Sun (sparc) - required too many processors, also too expensive
IBM/AMD (opteron) - required twice the number of processors and was twice the price in the desired configuration; had no chassis available
HP (itanium) - ditto
Apple (IBM PPC970) - system available with chassis for lowest price

... or just look at that photo and notice that there are fans at the top. Either that or the guy is walking on the ceiling

Or does this photo look inverted to you guys? Or did they glue those big fan-things to the ceiling?

Here's why. Some of the more pertinent points:

Dell - too expensive [one of the reasons for the project being so "hush hush" was that dell was exploring pricing options during bidding]

Sun (sparc) - required too many processors, also too expensive

IBM/AMD (opteron) - required twice the number of processors and was twice the price in the desired configuration; had no chassis available

HP (itanium) - ditto

Apple (IBM PPC970) - system available with chassis for lowest price

Chasomint has here a table comparing the 1.6 Ghz G5 (slowest available) to 6 other windows machines. It is a complicated photoshop benchmark. The 1.6 Ghz G5 gets beat by the single P4 3.06, however it is the 2nd fastest machine there by benchmark wins. Note that the 1.6 Ghz machine is the lowend G5, and has nowhere near the performance of the dual 2.0 ghz G5's that apple uses to test.

Don't the chaosmint show a bit of a different story from a real user?