Slashdot Mirror
Own a Piece of An Apple-Based Supercomputer
Graff writes "Now that Apple has come out with the Xserve G5, Virginia Tech has been swapping out parts of their 'System X' supercomputer for the more compact 1U Xserves. MacMall is selling some of those System X component G5 systems with an approximate $200 savings and an extra 512 megs of RAM over a normal G5. You can read more about it at MacCentral."
As someone else noted, if they were engraved or etched or something that would make them special.
This is an educational and research establishment, not a commercial enterprise.
/.) that Virginia Tech would have sold the units to students, freshmen, whatever, at a knock down rate. Or even used a ton of them within the university itself.
You'd have thought (as some students were hinting here at
Yet more profiteering from a supposedly educational institution.
I was a bit confused by the decision to include Firewire in this machine. I know it is an apple kind of penchant, but surely a server won't need firewire.
Actually there are lots of reasons to include firewire on a server.
- You can hang a firewire mass storage device off of it to backup (tape, disk, etc), boot from (recovery, etc), add extra storage in a pinch, etc.
- You can create various types of clusters using firewire. One product is the sancube.
- It's cheaper to design in a feature that may not be used in one incarnation of a product, but may be usable in others. Case in point your comment about Audigy sound cards on high end Intel servers, those very same motherboards are probably used in both servers and high end workstations, no point in having two different motherboards just to save a few pennies off of a $500+ mobo.
Why oh why do companies use mail in rebates?
so they can stick low price tags in big numbers on the shelf. That's gotten me a few times - you see, "Oh, an X for only $19.95!" so you take it up to the counter, and the cashier rings you up for $39.95 - often by then the consumer is already psychologically committed and just pays it. It's a common tactic, rebates are just one methode of exploiting consumer naivety. Bottom line is, it generates more sales.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
No VT needed the PR probably more then Apple now they get grant money out the wazoo
Please don't begrudge us this. Virginia's state legislature has cut over 28% from our 2002 level of funding, while just recently passing laws which effectively cap tuition hikes at about 5% per year. My tuition has gone from $1500/semester (2001 in state) to almost $2200/semester (2004 in state).
And please don't respond with "blah blah, if they used the money more effectively". We're up against the wall here. About 5 professors in my department (History) out of 25 or so have been laid off, or sent on research sabbatical so that they don't have to be paid. We've fired over 1/2 of the maintenance staff, and people on campus no longer have trash cans in their dorm hallways - they have to take their trash outside to a dumpster. The snow trucks in Blacksburg have far less salt than they had last year to clear the roads (I only think of this as I sit here at Netmar and watch today's 3 inches of snow fall). I now this isn't grave hardship, but seriously, we've cut about everything we can.
The supercompuer gives us both grants and positive PR. Students see that, despite the state of the economy, we're trying to push to the top of research institutes. We're trying to push ourselves above 67th (or whatever) on that college engineering school ratings, trying to compete with our neighbor down interstate 64, who, for no discernable reason, has an engineering program with the inflated ranking of ~ 15th. And yes, we get grants from the government and money from private industry in exchange for timesharing on the bigmac.
Just let this one go. We need the money, the BigMac has not only made us money, but has raised awareness of the university. It's a good thing.
~Will
sig?
I'll admit that a 6-month replacement cycle is pretty short, but it actually makes sense because they're avoiding the worst of the depreciation. I'm not up on used Mac prices, but x86 server hardware depreciates around 50% per year (refurbished 2 year old x86 servers routinely sell for around 20% - 30% of their original price; refurbished 3 year old gear sells for well under 10% of it's original price. You can get a maxed out Quad processor P-III server for well under $5000 which cost $50K when new.
That said, I don't think that this is a good deal. $200 savings on a $3000 box is only a 6.7% discount for 6 month old hardware; a 20% - 25% discount would be more in line with current market.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?