Do you really think that Apple would use liquid cooling if the processors only released 65W ? I think the liquid cooling was implemented for the same reason that the G5 minitower case has 9 fans -- to keep the machine cool, even in a warm room, while running no louder than the hard drives or gfx card fan.
Apple also seems to be very conservative with their heatsinks. The heatsink in my PowerMac 8500 was HUGE. The CPU itself was a 120 MHz 604, which according to Motorola/Freescale, was only a 16.5 watt proc. The heatsink on the CPU card was at least as large as a 4" x 6" photograph, had a solid 1/4" base, and lots of huge fins. A smaller "ramsink" heatsink covered the L2 cache chips.
I saw something similar at CompUSA on the blue-and-white G3 minitowers -- though the 300 MHz G3 consumed only 7 watts, the heatsink Apple used to cover the G3 and the L2 cache chips was about the size of a 12oz beer can!
Does anyone have the numbers to compare how many watts of power the G5 uses vs a similar AthlonXP or AMD64? Ie, I'd like to see how a 2.0 or 2.5 GHz G5 compares to a 2.0 or 2.5 GHz AMD processor.
Mac OS X requires more horsepower than XP. There's more overhead with Mach, the Unix underpinnings, the Cocoa classes, and the Quartz PDF graphics engine. It's a tradeoff between the original (but old) NeXT code and modern clean design.
That said, I've found Mac OS X 10.3.x to run fine on a 500 MHz G3 with 384 MB of RAM and Rage 128 graphics. 10.3 will work "OK" on 350 MHz with 256 MB (basiclly the slowest slot-load iMac or slowest blue & white G3 tower). 10.2 and older are far slower, and performance on a first-generation tray-load iMac or a beige G3 is slower yet.
Rule of thumb: With 256+ MB RAM, OS X on Beige or Black hardware: SLOW OS X on Colorful (slot-load) hardware: OK OS X on Silver hardware: AWESOME
A default install of WinXP SP1a is quite sluggish on my Dell: PII/350, 192MB, RagePro. Disabling the appearance manager service (giving it the WinNT4/Win2K look) makes it quite a bit faster.
I think that he's right that MacOS X is too complex to be a simple appliance.
And so were the NeXT machines. Corporations that bought NeXT systems for use with a single custom application (as was usually the case) plus maybe WordPerfect and/or NeXTmail often said the complete system was overkill. Come upgrade time, many opted for Windows systems (funny, but cheap).
Mac OS X is probably the simplist complex OS there is, and that's why I love it. And why I loved NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP as well.
I used to say that Apple should keep the one-button mouse to help the novice users, but times have changed. **VERY FEW** novice users even have access to Macs. Face it, Windows is the new Mac. Newbies buy $399 HP specials at WalMart, they don't buy Macs. Most new-to-Apple users are switchers / curious users who have experience with Windows (or are Unix greybeards).
The NeXT machines had two button mice, it's time for Apple to ship a modern scroll wheel mouse with their Macs. (And maybe try to invent a multi-button laptop trackpad that doesn't require the user to dislocate their thumb to hit the right button).
Windows 2000 (NT 5.0) is NT 4 with minor kernel updates and modern DirectX support. (I think NT 4 was limited to DX4!) There are also some minor control panel and admin application updates.
Windows XP is NT 5.0 with minor kernel updates and a new appearance manager. There are also some minor control panel and admin application updates.
Interestingly, XP SP2 has a very significant update: out-of-the-box support for multiple simultaneous users, via the local console and/or remote desktop.
I personally find Mac OS X to be rather simple (unless you dig into the NetInfo database or fire up terminal.app). There aren't that many applications or control panels in a default install. Adjusting settings are also much easier these days in 10.3 Panther than they were in the wild days of 10.0 Public Beta in 1999.
Mac OS X is only slightly more complex than NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP of 1988/1994. (Unless you're a developer... not just ObjC and NSAPI, now you have C++, Java, OpenGL, OpenAL, CoreThis and CoreThat, etc...)
It's easy to write a concise Mac OS "Classic" manual when there's no command-line interface, nor are there any Unix underpinnings.
A default install of Mac OS X contains a full Unix environment. (You can opt to not install the "BSD Subsystem", which just doesn't install terminal.app and several Unix userland applications).
I've seen emacs books that are 400+ pages and I've seen a 700 page sendmail manual. There are entire volumes of perl manuals. One could easily write a 10,000 page Mac OS X "Manual".
Maybe Apple should team up with ORA to write a 100 page getting started / user manual, like NeXT did in 1988. The Mac OS X interface is actually pretty simple, and an average user can only initially see about 20 control panels, about 15 applications, and about 15 utility applications. As long as you ignore the command-line world and don't write chapters on file sharing fundamentals or netbooting, I'll bet a 100 page manual would be quite sufficent.
When Apple bought NeXT (and Steve Jobs) in 1997, the joke was "NeXT was paid to take over Apple". Indeed, Apple today is just a consumer/prosumer version of NeXT.
The original Macintosh and the original Macintosh OS had input from Raskin, but also from a whole score of designers working to make a GUI-based computer for "the rest of us". (http://www.folklore.org). Over time, Apple added more and more features to Mac OS until it became the Mac OS 9 horrible mess.
Mac OS X **IS NOT** the "Classic" Mac OS by any stretch of the imgination, the GUI and system design are 90% NeXT. Even most of the codebase is derrived from OpenStep 4.x. (And updated, obviously, also borrowing from newer versions of Mach and BSD). If you run across something about Mac OS X that seems un-mac-like or just plain weird (and isn't a true bug), it's probably an intentional NeXTism.
Raskin didn't like the NeXT in 1988, there's no reason why he'd like Mac OS X in 2004.
Philosophiae Doctor (PhD) (n.) A reclusive being possessing distinguished academic achievement and mental superiority; Generally found with an abundance of long gray facial hair and overall poor hygiene; To be highly skilled in one field, while totally inept at trivial common tasks.
when they had just moved to their new facility (which used to be the sun micro building).
Bzzzt! It used to be a Silicon Graphics building. It was their first funky-style building, actually. It was sold when they built 4 more buildings down the street closer to shoreline amphitheatre. Google now lives in those buildings, SGI now lives in a couple huge nondescript 4 story buildings a couple blocks further down the road, I think they built them a few years ago. Several other older buildings in the area also have "sgi" signs too.
Sun was close though, they had Adobe's old campus for a few years, just across the street from SGI/Google funkytown.
In the end, the small towns are screwed either way. With the "walmartification" of small towns, the main street stores are being run out of business. Even some large regional grocery stores are having a difficult time fighting the Super Walmart stores. The result is fewer store choices in a small town, generally low wages for employees, and most of the profit being pumped out of the state.
Now, without Walmart we'd probably have far more locally-owned mom-and-pop businesses in small towns. But there would be fewer product choices in each of these small stores. Also, due to the low volume purchased and sold by mom-and-pop, the prices would be higher. The winner is the supplier, who is probably out of state anyway. How many employees do these small stores have? Maybe a high school kid to stock shelves or deliver grocerys in the afternoons.
Walmart sucks, yes. But small town mom-and-pop stores aren't all that great either. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
But I've got relatives that live in Florida, and they don't say "Store" or "Supermarket" anymore. They say, "Oh, we're out of soda... I need to run to the Walmart". "Oh, we need a new TV... I need to head up to the Walmart."
I have seen something similar. I used to live about a mile from both a Walmart and a Kmart. Both were on the same side of a major street in my city, seperated by a smaller side street. Both stores were about the same size and about the same age. Guess which had more visitors and cars in the parking lot? Walmart, by a factor of 10.
Walmart had a bit more stuff in the store than the "Big K" next door, but the prices were about the same. The largest difference was the amount of time required to stand in line to check out. There was always an open cashier at Kmart, but I usually had to wait 6+ minutes at Walmart. The other difference was the smell of the store. Kmart had a little ceasars pizza, which wasn't good. Walmart was worse, there always seemed to be a cloud of blue smoke from something burning in their little cafe near the front door.
Needless to say, I did 95% of my discount retail shopping at Kmart.
Not trolling, but (with one obvious exception - Virgin Galactic) when has Branson innovated? Heh. Pam-Am Airlines (a huge airline at one time, now long since bankrupt) gave away "free moon flight" tickets years ago. They wanted (and believed) they would be the first airline to offer flights into space.
Do you improve the audio quality of your CDs with a green marker as well?
It's not just your university
on
Less Might Be More
·
· Score: 5, Informative
It's not just your university, this is happening at most universities. At my state university, the library has probably 200 public use PCs spread in out in groups of four thruout the building. They're currently 3.2 GHz P4 systems with 17" LCD monitors. Last year they were different PCs, 2.8 GHz with 15" LCDs. Nobody seems to know where exactly the old machines went.Unlike the lab machines you mentioned, our library machines are mostly used to access the card catalog software and hotmail.com
Most of the labs on our campus are updated to the latest and greatest Dell models every 2 years. Thankfully they usually have plenty of ram, but the hard drive size is usually insanely large. I think most of the actual deparment labs now have 200+ GB drives---that's pretty big for machines that get reimaged via Norton Ghost every Saturday morning.
And yet, we still have neglected labs. You know the type, the labs that look like what you find in most highschools---Pentium 1 systems running an unoptimized stock install of Win98, running slow. For some reason, our most neglected labs are those that get the most real usage.
Next time you pay your tuition, check the fees section. This semester my tuition included ~$400 "Campus Technology Fee".
NeXTstation still beats them all
on
iMac G5 Porn Roundup
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The NeXTstation slab was built with the precision of a swiss watch and the strength of a bulldozer. The 4 screws were just about perfect -- they kept tool-less folks from poking around inside, and the prevented the need for cheap "easy to use" latches and such.
Still, my favorite part of the NeXTstation was the airflow design. Air was pulled in through a row of holes across the top of the rear of the case, flowed past the CPU heatsink, pushed out via a downward-facing fan near the front of the case, then back under the case past the power supply heatsink, and finally out the lower left rear of the case.
The NeXT keys and mouse were awesome too -- control key where it belongs, no traditional "caps lock" key. Full size power, brightness, and audio keys above the arrow keys. And the best part? The keyboard and mouse were surrounded by a thin rubber bumper to muffle any plastic "clump" sound that would otherwise be made if the mouse were to bump into the keyboard.
SGI made two batches of PCs. Their first batch, the Visual Workstation 320 and 540 were dual and quad Xeons based on the architecture of their (MIPS/IRIX) O2 workstation. The 320/540 didn't have a traditional BIOS as you pointed out, instead it had an ARCS loader and a PROM, like their MIPS/IRIX workstations. To the end user, this meant a pretty boot screen with an option to go into an equally pretty pointy-clicky GUI "Settings" mode.
Because of this, the 320 and 540 worked best with NT 4.0. Support was later released for Win2K, but it was never 100% fully supported. XP has never and will never work on the 320/540, the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) was never written. A Linux port was demoed but never released. Back in the days of NT, the 320/540 were by far the nicest PCs to work with, especially with the onboard video I/O and uber cool SGI 1600sw flat panel that had a direct LVDS (pre-DVI, *sigh*) connection to the graphics.
The 320/540 were very late to market (= oldschool OpenGL performance) and were never really accepted by traditional PC users. SGI later released a series of generic PCs and even eventually bought Intergraph's Zx10 product line. All of these ventures were huge failures for SGI. (But then, what venture hasn't?)
My PowerBook and I would love this! Finally something to make use of those USB 2.0 ports. With FireWire 400 and FireWire 800, I haven't had a need to buy any gear that makes use of anything faster than USB 1.1.
Plus using my existing laptop as a tuner+PVR would be awesome!
Fortan is just as scalable as C. And with modern supercomputing libraries and toolsets, it's probably even better suited to the task. Companies like IBM, SGI, and Intel continue to tune and tweak their Fortran compilers for the latest CPUs (R16K, Pentium 4, Power5, Itanium2, etc).
There are a lot of existing, hightly tuned fortan algorithms out there and plenty of scientists to keep the code running.
You don't know too many scientists-turned-programmers do you? Fortran is still alive and well in scientific circles. Companies like IBM and SGI still write and optimize Fortran compilers for their newest CPUs. Even Intel recently released a major update to their P4 and Itanium2 Fortran compilers.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you really think that Apple would use liquid cooling if the processors only released 65W ?
I think the liquid cooling was implemented for the same reason that the G5 minitower case has 9 fans -- to keep the machine cool, even in a warm room, while running no louder than the hard drives or gfx card fan.
Apple also seems to be very conservative with their heatsinks. The heatsink in my PowerMac 8500 was HUGE. The CPU itself was a 120 MHz 604, which according to Motorola/Freescale, was only a 16.5 watt proc. The heatsink on the CPU card was at least as large as a 4" x 6" photograph, had a solid 1/4" base, and lots of huge fins. A smaller "ramsink" heatsink covered the L2 cache chips.
I saw something similar at CompUSA on the blue-and-white G3 minitowers -- though the 300 MHz G3 consumed only 7 watts, the heatsink Apple used to cover the G3 and the L2 cache chips was about the size of a 12oz beer can!
XP SP2 has no such feature! Granted, early betas of SP2 did have this feature, but it disappeared at least 6 month ago.
Ack! You mean MS pulled that feature from the final release of XP SP2??
That was the only feature of XP Pro that I was looking forward to! (I personally use Win2K on my PC)
Does anyone have the numbers to compare how many watts of power the G5 uses vs a similar AthlonXP or AMD64? Ie, I'd like to see how a 2.0 or 2.5 GHz G5 compares to a 2.0 or 2.5 GHz AMD processor.
Mac OS X requires more horsepower than XP. There's more overhead with Mach, the Unix underpinnings, the Cocoa classes, and the Quartz PDF graphics engine. It's a tradeoff between the original (but old) NeXT code and modern clean design.
That said, I've found Mac OS X 10.3.x to run fine on a 500 MHz G3 with 384 MB of RAM and Rage 128 graphics. 10.3 will work "OK" on 350 MHz with 256 MB (basiclly the slowest slot-load iMac or slowest blue & white G3 tower). 10.2 and older are far slower, and performance on a first-generation tray-load iMac or a beige G3 is slower yet.
Rule of thumb:
With 256+ MB RAM,
OS X on Beige or Black hardware: SLOW
OS X on Colorful (slot-load) hardware: OK
OS X on Silver hardware: AWESOME
A default install of WinXP SP1a is quite sluggish on my Dell: PII/350, 192MB, RagePro. Disabling the appearance manager service (giving it the WinNT4/Win2K look) makes it quite a bit faster.
I think that he's right that MacOS X is too complex to be a simple appliance.
And so were the NeXT machines. Corporations that bought NeXT systems for use with a single custom application (as was usually the case) plus maybe WordPerfect and/or NeXTmail often said the complete system was overkill. Come upgrade time, many opted for Windows systems (funny, but cheap).
Mac OS X is probably the simplist complex OS there is, and that's why I love it. And why I loved NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP as well.
I used to say that Apple should keep the one-button mouse to help the novice users, but times have changed. **VERY FEW** novice users even have access to Macs. Face it, Windows is the new Mac. Newbies buy $399 HP specials at WalMart, they don't buy Macs. Most new-to-Apple users are switchers / curious users who have experience with Windows (or are Unix greybeards).
The NeXT machines had two button mice, it's time for Apple to ship a modern scroll wheel mouse with their Macs. (And maybe try to invent a multi-button laptop trackpad that doesn't require the user to dislocate their thumb to hit the right button).
where as XP uses an NT core
XP *is* NT.
Well, OK, XP is NT 5.1.
Windows 2000 (NT 5.0) is NT 4 with minor kernel updates and modern DirectX support. (I think NT 4 was limited to DX4!) There are also some minor control panel and admin application updates.
Windows XP is NT 5.0 with minor kernel updates and a new appearance manager. There are also some minor control panel and admin application updates.
Interestingly, XP SP2 has a very significant update: out-of-the-box support for multiple simultaneous users, via the local console and/or remote desktop.
What, you mean you don't like emacs and perl? :)
I personally find Mac OS X to be rather simple (unless you dig into the NetInfo database or fire up terminal.app). There aren't that many applications or control panels in a default install. Adjusting settings are also much easier these days in 10.3 Panther than they were in the wild days of 10.0 Public Beta in 1999.
Mac OS X is only slightly more complex than NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP of 1988/1994. (Unless you're a developer... not just ObjC and NSAPI, now you have C++, Java, OpenGL, OpenAL, CoreThis and CoreThat, etc...)
It's easy to write a concise Mac OS "Classic" manual when there's no command-line interface, nor are there any Unix underpinnings.
A default install of Mac OS X contains a full Unix environment. (You can opt to not install the "BSD Subsystem", which just doesn't install terminal.app and several Unix userland applications).
I've seen emacs books that are 400+ pages and I've seen a 700 page sendmail manual. There are entire volumes of perl manuals. One could easily write a 10,000 page Mac OS X "Manual".
Maybe Apple should team up with ORA to write a 100 page getting started / user manual, like NeXT did in 1988. The Mac OS X interface is actually pretty simple, and an average user can only initially see about 20 control panels, about 15 applications, and about 15 utility applications. As long as you ignore the command-line world and don't write chapters on file sharing fundamentals or netbooting, I'll bet a 100 page manual would be quite sufficent.
When Apple bought NeXT (and Steve Jobs) in 1997, the joke was "NeXT was paid to take over Apple". Indeed, Apple today is just a consumer/prosumer version of NeXT.
The original Macintosh and the original Macintosh OS had input from Raskin, but also from a whole score of designers working to make a GUI-based computer for "the rest of us". (http://www.folklore.org). Over time, Apple added more and more features to Mac OS until it became the Mac OS 9 horrible mess.
Mac OS X **IS NOT** the "Classic" Mac OS by any stretch of the imgination, the GUI and system design are 90% NeXT. Even most of the codebase is derrived from OpenStep 4.x. (And updated, obviously, also borrowing from newer versions of Mach and BSD). If you run across something about Mac OS X that seems un-mac-like or just plain weird (and isn't a true bug), it's probably an intentional NeXTism.
Raskin didn't like the NeXT in 1988, there's no reason why he'd like Mac OS X in 2004.
Philosophiae Doctor (PhD)
(n.) A reclusive being possessing distinguished academic achievement and mental superiority; Generally found with an abundance of long gray facial hair and overall poor hygiene; To be highly skilled in one field, while totally inept at trivial common tasks.
when they had just moved to their new facility (which used to be the sun micro building).
Bzzzt! It used to be a Silicon Graphics building. It was their first funky-style building, actually. It was sold when they built 4 more buildings down the street closer to shoreline amphitheatre. Google now lives in those buildings, SGI now lives in a couple huge nondescript 4 story buildings a couple blocks further down the road, I think they built them a few years ago. Several other older buildings in the area also have "sgi" signs too.
Sun was close though, they had Adobe's old campus for a few years, just across the street from SGI/Google funkytown.
Bay Area newspapers are reporting the congregation of a record number of virgins in Mountain View......
The number was probably higher during the peak of the dotcom bubble.
In the end, the small towns are screwed either way. With the "walmartification" of small towns, the main street stores are being run out of business. Even some large regional grocery stores are having a difficult time fighting the Super Walmart stores. The result is fewer store choices in a small town, generally low wages for employees, and most of the profit being pumped out of the state.
Now, without Walmart we'd probably have far more locally-owned mom-and-pop businesses in small towns. But there would be fewer product choices in each of these small stores. Also, due to the low volume purchased and sold by mom-and-pop, the prices would be higher. The winner is the supplier, who is probably out of state anyway. How many employees do these small stores have? Maybe a high school kid to stock shelves or deliver grocerys in the afternoons.
Walmart sucks, yes. But small town mom-and-pop stores aren't all that great either. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
But I've got relatives that live in Florida, and they don't say "Store" or "Supermarket" anymore. They say, "Oh, we're out of soda ... I need to run to the Walmart". "Oh, we need a new TV ... I need to head up to the Walmart."
I have seen something similar. I used to live about a mile from both a Walmart and a Kmart. Both were on the same side of a major street in my city, seperated by a smaller side street. Both stores were about the same size and about the same age. Guess which had more visitors and cars in the parking lot? Walmart, by a factor of 10.
Walmart had a bit more stuff in the store than the "Big K" next door, but the prices were about the same. The largest difference was the amount of time required to stand in line to check out. There was always an open cashier at Kmart, but I usually had to wait 6+ minutes at Walmart. The other difference was the smell of the store. Kmart had a little ceasars pizza, which wasn't good. Walmart was worse, there always seemed to be a cloud of blue smoke from something burning in their little cafe near the front door.
Needless to say, I did 95% of my discount retail shopping at Kmart.
Not trolling, but (with one obvious exception - Virgin Galactic) when has Branson innovated?
m l
Heh. Pam-Am Airlines (a huge airline at one time, now long since bankrupt) gave away "free moon flight" tickets years ago. They wanted (and believed) they would be the first airline to offer flights into space.
Here's a pic of one of the goodies that came in their space packet:
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~ym9n-em/about/card.ht
My preacher's sermons are so long I think he should use SQL
Do you improve the audio quality of your CDs with a green marker as well?
It's not just your university, this is happening at most universities. At my state university, the library has probably 200 public use PCs spread in out in groups of four thruout the building. They're currently 3.2 GHz P4 systems with 17" LCD monitors. Last year they were different PCs, 2.8 GHz with 15" LCDs. Nobody seems to know where exactly the old machines went.Unlike the lab machines you mentioned, our library machines are mostly used to access the card catalog software and hotmail.com
Most of the labs on our campus are updated to the latest and greatest Dell models every 2 years. Thankfully they usually have plenty of ram, but the hard drive size is usually insanely large. I think most of the actual deparment labs now have 200+ GB drives---that's pretty big for machines that get reimaged via Norton Ghost every Saturday morning.
And yet, we still have neglected labs. You know the type, the labs that look like what you find in most highschools---Pentium 1 systems running an unoptimized stock install of Win98, running slow. For some reason, our most neglected labs are those that get the most real usage.
Next time you pay your tuition, check the fees section. This semester my tuition included ~$400 "Campus Technology Fee".
The NeXTstation slab was built with the precision of a swiss watch and the strength of a bulldozer. The 4 screws were just about perfect -- they kept tool-less folks from poking around inside, and the prevented the need for cheap "easy to use" latches and such.
:)
Still, my favorite part of the NeXTstation was the airflow design. Air was pulled in through a row of holes across the top of the rear of the case, flowed past the CPU heatsink, pushed out via a downward-facing fan near the front of the case, then back under the case past the power supply heatsink, and finally out the lower left rear of the case.
The NeXT keys and mouse were awesome too -- control key where it belongs, no traditional "caps lock" key. Full size power, brightness, and audio keys above the arrow keys. And the best part? The keyboard and mouse were surrounded by a thin rubber bumper to muffle any plastic "clump" sound that would otherwise be made if the mouse were to bump into the keyboard.
Oh, and the price matched the engineering!
To clear up confusion:
SGI made two batches of PCs. Their first batch, the Visual Workstation 320 and 540 were dual and quad Xeons based on the architecture of their (MIPS/IRIX) O2 workstation. The 320/540 didn't have a traditional BIOS as you pointed out, instead it had an ARCS loader and a PROM, like their MIPS/IRIX workstations. To the end user, this meant a pretty boot screen with an option to go into an equally pretty pointy-clicky GUI "Settings" mode.
Because of this, the 320 and 540 worked best with NT 4.0. Support was later released for Win2K, but it was never 100% fully supported. XP has never and will never work on the 320/540, the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) was never written. A Linux port was demoed but never released. Back in the days of NT, the 320/540 were by far the nicest PCs to work with, especially with the onboard video I/O and uber cool SGI 1600sw flat panel that had a direct LVDS (pre-DVI, *sigh*) connection to the graphics.
The 320/540 were very late to market (= oldschool OpenGL performance) and were never really accepted by traditional PC users. SGI later released a series of generic PCs and even eventually bought Intergraph's Zx10 product line. All of these ventures were huge failures for SGI. (But then, what venture hasn't?)
My PowerBook and I would love this! Finally something to make use of those USB 2.0 ports. With FireWire 400 and FireWire 800, I haven't had a need to buy any gear that makes use of anything faster than USB 1.1.
Plus using my existing laptop as a tuner+PVR would be awesome!
Fortan is just as scalable as C. And with modern supercomputing libraries and toolsets, it's probably even better suited to the task. Companies like IBM, SGI, and Intel continue to tune and tweak their Fortran compilers for the latest CPUs (R16K, Pentium 4, Power5, Itanium2, etc).
There are a lot of existing, hightly tuned fortan algorithms out there and plenty of scientists to keep the code running.
You don't know too many scientists-turned-programmers do you? Fortran is still alive and well in scientific circles. Companies like IBM and SGI still write and optimize Fortran compilers for their newest CPUs. Even Intel recently released a major update to their P4 and Itanium2 Fortran compilers.
http://pao.cnmoc.navy.mil/pao/n_online/archive/vol 22no1/articles/2001.htm