By all accounts, there's little chance Rumsfeld would listen to experts, judging by the number of career officers who've retired and called for his ouster. The point, though, was just to be a smartass. I wasn't advocating transport of an entire pre-fab suburban subdivision to Mars.
"The policy calls upon the Secretary of Defense to..."
Great. I think I can imagine Rummy's plans to improve space exploration. He'll take NASA's crew recommendations and cut them in half, send only enough fuel to get there, but not back, and ditch all the unnecessaries like food and water. It will be a leaner, more mobile space force.
It's not just a question of frequency of use. In order to have your own cluster to do this sort of work, you have to have a lot of infrastructure that many organizations can't really justify. A large datacenter can cost a fortune every year in direct power use by the computers, plus very heavy cooling requirements for the room. You also have to have one or more people running the cluster. Then, on top of all of that, you have to deal with upgrading and maintaining. It's a huge pain that a small, say, fabless semiconductor design firm, may not want to deal with. They focus on their core business of designing circuits and send those designs off to someone else's cluster to test.
The Opterons must use much less power than the Athlon64. I had to upgrade to a beefier power supply when I put in my Athlon64 mobo and CPU, and that's for a single CPU.
I have a feeling the codec will not have a practical use for everyday computer users
I don't know about that. I'd be rather pleased if MythTV could record twice the HD content on the same hard drive space on my computer, or, for that matter, if TiVo were to use it for the same purpose.
Not until we have an article on Intel chips. I wouldn't want to make a useless, smartass comment that's also offtopic. Besides, I love my smoking hot Athlons.
You kids theses days! Back in my day, we used C and we liked it. We coded uphill both ways in the driving snow. We did all this because the alternatives were *gasp* FORTRAN and Assembly. Imagine building modules with FORTRAN.
Buy the Gold edition. It includes the original Neverwinter Nights and the first expansion, Shadows of Undrentide, for around $30 at Best Buy, probably less elsewhere.
Look through some of the user-written modules in the Hall of Fame or in the Top-Rated section of the Vault. Some of them are written specifically for evil characters. Some give you options that are more interesting than the good/evil options you described. In some you get experience for accomplishing goals, rather than for killing monsters. In some you have completely customized systems of magic. It really depends on the creativity of the module designers. The engine is amazingly flexible.
If you want an experience more like pen and paper D&D, play multiplayer with a Dungeon Master. The DM has a great deal of control over what happens in the game, and can directly control NPCs to help eliminate the bad Turing Test feel of some dialog scripts.
... but the downtime and possibility of lost transactions are much more expensive than the hardware replacement. On desktops it may not matter too much, but in datacenters, frequent hardware replacement is not acceptable. In a manufacturing environment, it's very easy for a few hours of downtime on a multi-million dollar cluster to cost the company much more than the purchase price of the cluster.
That still doesn't help Sun compete with IBM and HP who have numbers and speed. I have the same experience with Sun vs. Intel hardware, but Sun vs. the other serious server companies is a very different story. With good IBM hardware, you can have CPU failures and not lose your OS, as you will with Solaris, supposedly anyway; I haven't had a chance to test that.
Sun's strength right now is more a matter of installed base. People with mission-critical Sun infrastructure are hesitant to take the risk of switching architectures, even when someone else is offering better hardware. I worked for a company in that situation. Sun won us over at hardware replacement time (E6500 cluster, among other systems) by basically giving us hardware, and by playing on our reluctance to thoroughly retest all of our Oracle Applications customizations on a new OS and hardware.
# Produce at least a 32-way POWER system that can be partitioned. G4s can be obtained from Motorola if IBM is at all hesitant.
# Revive Solaris for the POWER architecture (I remember it as an option on a 43P).
If I want an IBM system, I'll buy it from IBM. I can't see any reason to buy an inferior (assuming older CPUs) IBM from Sun. IBM already does a really good job of building IBM systems. They are somewhat hamstung by the antipathy toward AIX, rather than hardware issues, which is probably why they like Linux so much.
# License Mac OS X Server, and make changes to the kernel to allow it to fully scale.
I agree with Rasta that this doesn't make sense. They might be able to work out a deal with Apple to make OS X workgroup servers, but I doubt it. Jobs doesn't play well with others. I don't see a market for large machines running OS X Server.
Sun doesn't have the expertise to be a commodity provider of anything. They have always made their money with fat profit margins and juicy service contracts, not volume. I don't know if they have the production capacity or efficiency to even try.
They've also found postholes full of carbon-rich remains of very large wooden poles which are believed to be the remains of an even older monument built prior to the megalith. That may be one of the ways they've used carbon dating to ascribe an age to a stone monument.
The point is, though, that the number for the Dell cluster includes these costs, and it's unclear what was included in the numbers for the Mac cluster.
You need to be modded down. You are attempting to interject facts, figures, and reason into a (somewhat offtopic) slashdot argument.
It is much easier and more comforting to blame Bush, or whomever happens to hold the office, than it is to deal with complicated things like economic cycles and shifts in global economy. How can anyone work up a really good rant on general economic trends that are beyond the control of any one person or even one government? No one can come up with a really catchy.sig based on that. Get with the program.
"Third-party clients will likely be affected, but we're trying to communicate with other providers around the common goal of opening up the IM community," she said.
Hopefully they are sincere about this, and not just trying to spin it. They could possibly try to license access to their network.
You volunteer for the job of de-virginating all of the slashdotters? Do you have any idea what you're getting yourself into? Or what would be getting into you?
Slashdot Mirror
By all accounts, there's little chance Rumsfeld would listen to experts, judging by the number of career officers who've retired and called for his ouster. The point, though, was just to be a smartass. I wasn't advocating transport of an entire pre-fab suburban subdivision to Mars.
Great. I think I can imagine Rummy's plans to improve space exploration. He'll take NASA's crew recommendations and cut them in half, send only enough fuel to get there, but not back, and ditch all the unnecessaries like food and water. It will be a leaner, more mobile space force.
It's not just a question of frequency of use. In order to have your own cluster to do this sort of work, you have to have a lot of infrastructure that many organizations can't really justify. A large datacenter can cost a fortune every year in direct power use by the computers, plus very heavy cooling requirements for the room. You also have to have one or more people running the cluster. Then, on top of all of that, you have to deal with upgrading and maintaining. It's a huge pain that a small, say, fabless semiconductor design firm, may not want to deal with. They focus on their core business of designing circuits and send those designs off to someone else's cluster to test.
How is this paint going to reduce the cost of movie theater popcorn?
Perhaps it's a clever new form of flamebait?
You know it's a slow news day when slashdot is opening debate on the relevance of the capslock key. It's a topic that never occurred to me.
The Opterons must use much less power than the Athlon64. I had to upgrade to a beefier power supply when I put in my Athlon64 mobo and CPU, and that's for a single CPU.
I don't know about that. I'd be rather pleased if MythTV could record twice the HD content on the same hard drive space on my computer, or, for that matter, if TiVo were to use it for the same purpose.
That seems to answer your question, even without reading the article.
Not until we have an article on Intel chips. I wouldn't want to make a useless, smartass comment that's also offtopic. Besides, I love my smoking hot Athlons.
Clearly, you've never run your Athlon without its cooler in place.
Yeah, it won't take long before Linux is ported to them and we see roving Beowulf clusters chirping all over the place.
You kids theses days! Back in my day, we used C and we liked it. We coded uphill both ways in the driving snow. We did all this because the alternatives were *gasp* FORTRAN and Assembly. Imagine building modules with FORTRAN.
Buy the Gold edition. It includes the original Neverwinter Nights and the first expansion, Shadows of Undrentide, for around $30 at Best Buy, probably less elsewhere.
If you want an experience more like pen and paper D&D, play multiplayer with a Dungeon Master. The DM has a great deal of control over what happens in the game, and can directly control NPCs to help eliminate the bad Turing Test feel of some dialog scripts.
... but the downtime and possibility of lost transactions are much more expensive than the hardware replacement. On desktops it may not matter too much, but in datacenters, frequent hardware replacement is not acceptable. In a manufacturing environment, it's very easy for a few hours of downtime on a multi-million dollar cluster to cost the company much more than the purchase price of the cluster.
Sun's strength right now is more a matter of installed base. People with mission-critical Sun infrastructure are hesitant to take the risk of switching architectures, even when someone else is offering better hardware. I worked for a company in that situation. Sun won us over at hardware replacement time (E6500 cluster, among other systems) by basically giving us hardware, and by playing on our reluctance to thoroughly retest all of our Oracle Applications customizations on a new OS and hardware.
Sun doesn't have the expertise to be a commodity provider of anything. They have always made their money with fat profit margins and juicy service contracts, not volume. I don't know if they have the production capacity or efficiency to even try.
They've also found postholes full of carbon-rich remains of very large wooden poles which are believed to be the remains of an even older monument built prior to the megalith. That may be one of the ways they've used carbon dating to ascribe an age to a stone monument.
The point is, though, that the number for the Dell cluster includes these costs, and it's unclear what was included in the numbers for the Mac cluster.
No, but they do come with free iPod clusters.
Check the math. $38M/1000 servers = $38,000/server. I'm pretty sure Dell's 1U servers are a little cheaper than that.
It is much easier and more comforting to blame Bush, or whomever happens to hold the office, than it is to deal with complicated things like economic cycles and shifts in global economy. How can anyone work up a really good rant on general economic trends that are beyond the control of any one person or even one government? No one can come up with a really catchy .sig based on that. Get with the program.
You volunteer for the job of de-virginating all of the slashdotters? Do you have any idea what you're getting yourself into? Or what would be getting into you?