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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."
True, that. But the majority of it that doesn't run exclusively on Mac OS runs on a UNIX or on Linux, and a fully functioning Mac version is usually only a recompile away. Also, Apple is giving away the iNquiry software toolkit which claims to include over 200 applications preconfigured for the Workgroup Cluster environment, which is pretty damn spiffy.
Every cloud has a silver lining (except for the mushroom shaped ones, which have a lining of Iridium & Strontium 90)
Last time I checked, the UD client was Windows only.
Perhaps a give away to Folding@Home wouldn't be so bad.
Right, and so how does the original poster's comments that Apple would own your 'miracle drug' correct at all? It's not. They can just market the fact that the drug you still own the rights to was created/discovered with Apple tech.
You know what?
The award should be for PCs.
Apple should give away competitors' hardware? To what end?
Only a tiny fraction of the science-related software out there runs on Macintosh.
Hmm. Interesting, broad comment with no support. In the Life Sciences, my experience is that about half of us use Mac OS X. Not a bad cut of the market. If only a "tiny fraction" of the applications used are available, why do so many people use it over Linux, Windows and other platforms?
Word to the wise: think before you make senseless observations.
That's a bit broad. K-12 education, sure,
When I worked at the University of Washington doing life sciences research, my personal observation saw it to be about 50/50 pc vs mac. (And the UW is a giant in life sciences) When I left in 1999, linux was slowly creeping in but most of the unix based stuff was run by the computer center. The 50/50 number is certainly different than the 95/5 or whatever the worldwide average is/was. And my observations were only in the life-sciences. I have no idea what the ratios were in say, physics or chemistry.
My personal experience supporting Macintosh computers for a medical school suggests to me that your assertion that very little science related software runs on Macintosh computers may be a bit inaccurate.
That said, I wonder what I might do to encourage developers to write more science-related software that will run on Macintosh computers? This would appear to be a step toward that goal.
As crazy as it appears, this pretty much echos what I see at the clients I've supported - especially in the laptop arena.
At least in the graphic arts and video sector, anyone who thinks that PCs offer better TCO is oblivious to reality and/or a zealot.
Both UD and Grid are distributed systems. There's not much point in giving the hardware to them. UD and Grid work by using client resources to do the work, not a centralized server farm. Sure, they could use it for some of their backend stuff, but if you're looking to boost UD and Grid's processing power, the clusters are not going to help since UD and Grid are Windows only.
Astrophysics is dominated by Suns (as workstations), with a significant Linux presence; very few astronomers use Windows. All the analysis software I've used (in five different institutions) is Unix-based, which effectively means Suns, Linux, and Macs.
However, more and more astrophysicists are using Macs these days. Apple laptops are very popular, and people are also starting to use Macs as workstations and servers. It's hard to guess at numbers, so I'll note anecdotally that my (small) lab is in the process of replacing our 4 aging Suns with G5 towers. We're also considering an XServe cluster to run some moderately substantial simulations. I don't think we're unusual in those regards.
In physics UNIX usage is much higher and Apple usage is slightly higher than normal. Alphas are almost not used anymore and now we are in a transition from Sun to Linux. (Historically it's gone Alpha, Sparc, and now Linux on x86)
As far as clustering though, MS and Apple are insignificant. Though at least now there are Apple clusters. (The majority of Windows clusters I've seen are donated) And as far as desktops, UNIX and Apple are in the same league. Though the trend in grad students is an increasing number of Linux users.
In mathematics Apple use is very high (comparatively). I can't say anything about computational work in math as I never see those people.
And just incase you didn't know, many physicists and mathematicians are just as computer illiterate as everyone else.
A Usenet Troll Triumphs on Slashdot
How is Microsoft a Monopoly if Apple exists?
because they control the vast amount of the computing market. you don't have to own all 100% of it just to be declared a monopoly. perhaps you should also keep up with the news. the US and the EU have declared microsoft a monopoly.
If that makes Microsoft a monopoly doesn't that make Apple an even worse monopoly (they control the hardware AND the software)?
sigh. i sometimes wonder if people will ever understand the truth about apple. apple makes the case, the motherboard, the power supply, and the operating system. that's IT. every other component of a mac (including the cpu, video card, hard disk, ram, cdrom, lcds, crts, etc, etc) is standard. if some other company came along and implemented a ppc chip that implemented the same instruction set as the g3-g5 chips and used hardware components (ethernet, video, sound) that are compatible with os x's drivers and implement the openfirmware STANDARD then it will run os x. now that may not be legal according to the EULA but you can do it. worst case you can run linux on your machine, or freebsd, or the various other free *nix operating systems that run just FINE on ppc hardware. heck even windows nt 4 ran on mac hardware (albeit a long time ago, not anymore). if you want more ppc hardware, send a nice letter to amd and intel to implement more ppc compatible chips. send a letter to the various mobo manufacterers to implement more motherboards that agree to said specs. its no different than companies implementing intel's x86 specs. stop spreading FUD
- tristan
How many "ordinary scientists" have $40k burning a hole in their pocket?
At a decent research university, probably most of them. If they're comp bio, they probably have even more money than that. In bioinformatics, you don't need to spend $250 on a milliliter of antibodies or thousands of dollars on primers - the overhead for keeping a lab running is much lower. And experimentalists regularly have to spend considerably more than $40k on their equipment - as the other poster pointed out, microscopes are an excellent example. (EM systems are even worse - these are usually at least $300k.) Therefore, grant money stretches a long way.
There's a lot of statements in this thread about about Macs not being useful for science due to software support. What the hell? That's like saying that HP, Dell, etc can't be used - Mac systems can take UNIX versions just like any other computer.
I think people are confusing commercial and non-commercial apps. The commercial programs are either targeted towards industry/pharma, or are part of some other proprietary system - for example, controlling a purification or mass spec system. These are usually Windows, or sometimes platform-specific Unix. I haven't seen any of these running on Macintosh, and very few of them have been ported to Linux.
The open-source scientific software is almost exclusively Unix, and yes, it will almost always run on Mac. Virtually every piece of software I use for my research is open-source - and actually, the lone program that isn't has a Mac port anyways. In bioinformatics, almost every important program is open-source, and there's actually quite a bit of interest in getting stuff running well on Mac. The author of one of my favorite programs (PyMOL) actually recommended the dual G5 as the optimal system for running his software.
BLAST runs faster if you increase the word size. The problem with increasing the word size is that you loose sensitivity, which makes the results useless.
297 Total Unique MACs
105 Apple
58 3Com
20 HP
17 Intel
12 Sun
10 CompalElec
8 Dell
5 Sony
4 Toshiba
Dumped my database of all mac addresses into a text file, then:
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent