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Apple to Award Workgroup Clusters to Scientists
Graff writes "Apple is giving away five Apple Workgroup Clusters for Bioinformatics (each worth approximately $40,000) to four higher
education researchers and one non-education researcher. A panel of independent scientists and Apple will choose the lucky researchers."
From the website "he Apple sales team will be happy to help you with the purchase of your Apple Workgroup Cluster for Bioniformatics." It's not a bunch of stuff Apple put together just for the give-away. It's a packaged product, and Slashdot has helped sell it. Haloed by thou marketing company's name. I love this company.... I love this company, but some things are just crazy.
There is a rage in me to defy the order of the stars, despite their pretty patterns.
Trust me this Xserve's are "best". We had it in our lab (we are a bioinformatics research lab at a University in Los Angeles). We liked it so much because a) We had to reboot this "Server" atleast once in a week. The reason was its "awesome" filesystem b) We had to call Apple atleast 5 times in a month and listen to their "smart" technicians. Mostly we got the same answer and that is "We don't have the required level of service subscription from Apple" c) Recently, because of this Xserve atleast 15 people in our lab did nothing, waiting for it to comeup from its crash for 2 full weeks (this 15 people includes 6 post-docs and professors, 8 graduate students and 1 undergrad) Result: We got a debian box from Fry's which has 65 days uptime with no restarts required or no problems conclusion: Xserve's are good aesthetically and they are good webservers too. But if you really want to do some bioinformatics research work instead of you and your team administering computers, DO NOT BUY THIS CRAPY BOX. IF SOMEONE GIVES IT AS A GIFT, SELL IT ON EBAY AND GET ATLEAST 5 PC BOXES FROM FRY'S. I CAN BET THAT THEY WILL MAKE YOUR LIFE MORE EASY AND YOU WON'T REPENT FOR ALL YOUR LIFE