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Actually, Beowulf clusters of 800-1,000 machines running Linux can be competitive with supercomputers.

News for you: Linux clusters are the new supercomputers. Not just Blue Gene, but probably Ascii Purple as well, which is supposed to be the fastest supercomputer ever.

The PC division of the combined HP/Compaq had net revenues of $22 billion.

The HP Services revenue was $9.1 billion.

HP's Imaging and printing was $20.3 billion.

The Enterprise group (which is all the non-PC business I think: workstation+server+storage) net revenues were $11.4 billion.

$2 billion out of $11.4 billion is 17% of HP's enterprise sales. Not ludicrous, but somehow I didn't think Linux had quite grown that big yet. I'd love for it to be $2 billion but that still seems quite high to me in relation to other figures floating in my memory.

Let me cross-check Google. Ah, here we go. A recent IDC batch of figures (add salt) in TechExtreme say that Linux revenue, industry-wide, was $607 million in the fourth quarter 2002, with conventional UNIX totalling $5 billion. Which extrapolating badly would mean Linux system sales have hit $2.4 billion (its actually less because prior quarters were less- Linux is growing rapidly). HP's share of that isn't outlined there, but it does say IBM is #2 with 20.5% and Dell has 19.5%. Assuming HP is getting, say, 25% of the market, HP's Linux sales would be $600 million. If they were like twice that of IBMs (which seems quite unlikely or HP'd be bragging about it), that's still only $1.2 billion.

So I still don't understand what the heck that $2 billion dollar figure represents.

--LP

My former undergrad prof, Dr. John Donoghue at Brown University, is at the cutting edge of research into neural implantable interfaces.

Monkeys Demonstrate Thought-Controlled Computing

Monkeybrain Joysticks Excerpts:

A rhesus macaque monkey at a Brown University laboratory can move a cursor on a computer screen just by thinking about it - playing a pinball game in which every time a red target dot pops up, the monkey moves a cursor to meet the target quickly and accurately. The monkey plays the game mentally, controlling where it wants the cursor to go by thinking.

The primary research Nature article is Connecting cortex to machines: recent advances in brain interfaces

Cheers,
Joel

Whine mode: When I submitted an article on this and IBM's entry two weeks ago it wasn't interesting:
2002-07-03 17:22:22 Your Next Desktop: the Size of a Deck of Cards? (articles,news) (rejected)

There's a teaser at Business 2.0. Another fluffy article is at TechExtreme. The best coverage, on C|NET, came out in April.

Dual 800 is an old model, nearly 11 months me think. Maybe they got those dual 800s pretty cheaply if Apple or some reseller wanted clear it's storage for shipment of G5 boxes ;)

This laser keyboard thing is interesting, but take a look at virtual keyboard. Seems to me this one is a little more useful.

totally offtopic, but anyway, no mac laptop ever caught fire outside of a lab, but, one dell did. Dell had to recall almost
300,000 batteries. Whereas apple only had to pull about 1000.

Slashdot To Refuse To Read All Submissions [ SlashdotPosted by Macos on Tue November 21, 13:44
from the turn-on-red-alerts dept.
Carnage4Life writes: "This ZDNet article describes how Slashdot next generation scripts, condemned Slashcode, will begin a tradition started by CmdrTaco where stories that have not been written by anyone of /.'s friends are ignored. Currently Slashdot merely issues a warning when a fact based story is received, the Slashdot vision is to expand this to include all stories with a hint of truth in them.
On the surface, this may seem like a good idea until one realizes that this means that it is conceivable that all stories that expect to appear on Slashdot will have to be Roblimo certified or risk being ignored or even worse refused to publish. As the ZDNet article speculates, this will put even more power over Slashdot readers developers in the hands of Slashdot. "
This story has been turning up a bit over the last few days - while I'm not one to buy into conspiracy theories, this whole thing seems like a plan that originally had good intentions, but the potentials for foul play are pretty easy to think up, and I've been ignoring it.