No. The Sun has set but there will be contenders to their throne. A creative guy with a good budget could crack the top 10 for under a million bucks and the top 100 for under 100K incredibly shrinky greenbacks. Think GPGPU and PCIe as an interconnect. I could put that in three racks. Smart guys could do a petaflop in one. In the end it's all about the thermals.
Very little in the way of wasted effort. What this needs is a promise that Office 2007 and this API will be synced to the ISO specification.
Others have said no, it needs (x) so let me add one.
No, it needs to be ignored. Let's talk to the customers on this one.
A businessman's hope for his business is that it persist and grow for several decades at least, until he can reap his reward and exit phenomenally wealthy. If you architect your business intelligence on the platform of a corporation whose business model is to obsolete its platforms every five years at the most, you're an idiot and you deserve to be have your resources drained by this decade's P.T. Barnum until in the ferocious environment of the day you and your grand ideas are forgotten.
In the public sector the objective is to conduct the public's business in such a way that resources are not wasted and required openness can be delivered. It's essential that the public's investment in creating information is well preserved. If you're in the public sector and architect public infrastructure on such a platform as Office 2007 OXML you're worse than incompetent - you're a traitor to the cause of public service.
OOXML is irrelevant. The problem of construction of a document is solved. The user interface is an interesting diverse field where members compete but all the options that don't lead to truly open documents are blind alleys. Office 2007 formats are some of these blind alleys that will yield only wasted efforts because the vendor needs to obsolete your documents every five years in order to maintain its current cash flow. If you succeed in hitching your cart to this train it will come off its rails in less than five years when the provider needs to sell you new applications. Why would you do that? Trust me, if you're in public service and you choose to do that eventually somebody is going to follow the money right to you. Have you got longer than that to retirement? If you're in business the problem will solve itself and not to your benefit.
We were talking about a particular rock, not rocks in general. A ELE object would of course throw off objects of sufficient mass for embedded life to survive reentry. Our planet is known to have been hit by these objects several times while life was present. This happens considerably less frequently than the passing meteor scenario - perhaps frequently enough to be a vector within our solar system but not frequently enough for reliable interstellar diaspora.
But thinking "ZOMG there were living cells in the meteorite!" is just crossing the line.
Of course that would be silly. The living cells trapped inside the meteorite would have been baked into the material these researchers found. It's the light fluffy life forms on the exterior of the meteorite that would have been brushed off the surface of the meteorite on first contact with the atmosphere and drift gently down to the nutrient rich sea that covers most of our planet. There these hypothetic organisms would breed and diversify until they filled every sea, covered every continent and dwelled deep within the crust.
Eventually a form would evolve, such as a lichen or mold, that bred with colonies so small and potentially electrostatically charged by sunlight that they might rise to the highest reaches of the atmosphere - to be scooped up by passing meteors on their way to the unknown depths of space. Perhaps they might by a fluke of trajectory be thrown clear of the solar system altogether. Frozen in the cold of space these breeding colonies might last millions of years. The vast majority of these would wander 'twixt the stars eternally, finding no place they might rest or fall on a hostile environment and die. Given enough of them, though -- perhaps millions an hour for a billion years -- some few might land someplace they can start anew.
Both pie charts have the same date, November 2007.
The list is compiled every six months. It takes a while for the results to be tabulated and validated. New results for May 2008 will be available soon.
The upper pie is based on the share of systems by operating system family. That giant pac-man shape represents the 85% share tux had in November. The Windows sliver represents 1.2% or roughly six or seven systems in the top 500 most powerful computers publicly known, for all versions of Windows.
The bottom pie is different because it represents the operating system family's share of processing power. Here you'll note the Windows systems have disappeared entirely. Usually this represents that the scarce Windows systems were in the bottom end of the range or older systems that are not maintaining a proportional share of processing power.
Since you're making the observation that the data is seven months old, are you anticipating some upswell in adoption of Windows among the HPC crowd, who are presumed to know what they're doing and be unswayed by political or marketing concerns? That would be remarkable. If the petaflop Cell processor supercomputer IBM just built called RoadRunner runs Windows I'll eat an original IBM punch card.
What's also remarkable is that Microsoft with its billions can't build and keep a few in-house systems high in this list just to build their HPC credibility and assist their marketing in this area - which they would dearly like to have.
Now go back to the kid's table and play with your toys. The grownups are talking important business. We know you're enthusiastic about today's fad but we don't care. We have work to do and that means using tools that don't have the lifespan of a McDonald's Happy Meal toy.
A good use for this technology would be to milk the recording industry yet again for millions of dollars up front by promising a new and improved but equally doomed Yet-Another-DRM scheme.
These guys will buy anything if you promise them it will lead to DRM that works that the customer will accept.
They don't even get that most of the pirated product is distributed before the content reaches its final form -- let alone after they've had a chance to encrypt it. Cocaine causes brain damage. They can't help it. I'll bet we could each come up with a fatally flawed DRM scheme that they would gobble up, and make a mint. Here's mine: content distributed on read-once media. A special evolution of SD flash that wipes its content as it disgorges it. Guys, if you're reading this, you can split my check between the FSF and Project Gutenberg - thanks.
The consumers that buy into this junk and wind up buying the White Album again are collateral damage. PT Barnum would value them highly but anybody with an IQ over 80 should eye them with sad contempt.
Thank you for that. I haven't read good work like that in a long time. It's directly on point.
It's almost enough to make me think he had a time machine, so thoroughly did he cover the IP issues of our day. I wonder where men of this quality went. Do we not deserve them any more?
It's an installation packager or package builder. It monitors all of these things for you and builds a script that basically replicates the installation.
I've tried several and my experience is so spotty that I can't recommend one. There are issues with interdependent packages, user account issues, variability in platforms and auditability of success among other things.
Still, they can be useful sometimes and can get around installer stupidness like only installing from CD or floppy, multi-reboot installs and building a single installer that installs almost all of your apps. Developing a process like this for an enterprise is at least one full time job. For a household or small business it's just not worth the effort.
Do I just not know some Windows Admin secret magic, or is it true that I really can't back up my applications. I'd like to be able to reinstall Windows and then restore all of my applications.
I wrote about it here years ago. It's called incremental imaging. I covered it in my journal. It works.
Basically during a very careful system build you make a series of snapshot images of the system. If you do the steps in the right order and label your images correctly you can restore your system to any point that you saved in the system building process. It's much preferable to revert to an image that didn't contain a software package and install the new version than to uninstall the old version and install the new. These days building the whole thing in a virtual machine is also a common recommendation. It makes the snapshots quick and easy and virtual machines can be moved from any platform that supports that style of virtual machine to any other without reinstallation. Do pay attention to your licensing though.
If you're hoping for a system where you can take a Windows installation and run one restore that adds back to it all your applications, no you can't do that unless you have a system snapshot with backup software and a "differential backup" with all your software installed. I don't recommend this because the slightest missed trick and applications will fail inexplicably.
Basically my opinion is that if you're restoring applications from backup you've already horribly failed. You're better off with a clean image and/or a clean install for reliable performance. And by reliable performance I mean best replicating the environment that ended with you restoring in the first place. If you're rebuilding for some reason other than catastrophic hardware failure or platform migration your efforts might be better spent in a total rethink of why you're doing what you're doing and how.
Nice try, but all work produced by the government is public domain.
BTW, your statement applies to the federal government only. The IP nature of information produced by states, counties and municipalities varies. And so it is that the law is protected from the prying eyes of the citizen.
Freeing up IP is essential for making health, education and the energy market cheaper and more universal. In the last 5 to 10 years, first world governments have been 'pulling up the ladder' in this regard rather than opening up to the people. It's almost as though they are anticipating something
Progress is made by shared invention. Once upon a time invention sharing was universal but progress was slow. Then we had copyrights and patents and the intent of these was to encourage investment in invention by granting a temporary monopoly on it. That worked for a while. Economic interests have spoiled this by extending the monopoly into eternity and twisting the word invention to absurdity. These days people are choosing to share their invention from the beginning or not at all.
It may be time to end the zenlike "temporary yet eternal" monopolies granted under copyright and patent.
It is the duty of the State to make available to the citizen what the law is. It is the option of the citizen to remain ignorant at his own peril because ignorance is not protection under the law. It is the duty of the citizen to push but not break the boundaries of the law. Some would argue it's the duty of the citizen to break the law when the law is wrong.
Of course this not being a sane world, in fact being firmly in the asylum, none of that would matter should the "International Court of Justice" get it's hands on Bush or Cheney it would be an orgy of hate ending in an execution.
If being an idiot were a capital offense the world would have far fewer people. With the reduced demand gas would be $.50/gallon. We'd have a new president every few weeks. Orgy of hate and execution? You ain't seen nuthin yet. In 20 years the current troubles will be long forgotten. They'll be trivial by comparison to the issues of the day.
Yes our president is an idiot. I'm saddened both that I voted for him and that I'd do it again. I knew he was an idiot at the time. An idiot is by chance only wrong half the time. I'll still take an idiot over a coward every time because a coward is by definition always wrong. Who is responsible for offering me this painful choice? That's who I'm mad at.
BTW, I'm not disagreeing with you -- spies, saboteurs, unlawful enemy combatants, the falsely surrendered = shot on site or exploited for information and then dealt with in the most profitable way. War is a cruel sport. Neither the Geneva Convention nor any other treaty I know of that the US is a party to offer any protection for these sorts of combatant. This is the way it must be. Otherwise the common mode of conflict would be espionage, sabotage, terror and betrayal. Machiavelli and Byzantium would be the chaotic order of the day.
Is it a good rule? I don't know. It may be useful to remember that in war the history of whose cause was just, whose heros the most noble, which side was divinely favored is written by the survivors.
This statement, which is a paraphrase of what the president said once, is actually true in this case.
The authority that protects classified documents lies with the executive branch of government, and as the head of that branch the chief executive holds ultimate authority to classify, declassify, disclose or deny any material information held by the government.
Which doesn't mean the action and the statement weren't dumb. They were. But as regards disclosure of classified information: When the president does it, it's not illegal. Really.
In the US the database of law as it applies in practice - the rulings whether a law is valid or not; whether a law can be applied to a particular circumstance - is itself a work protected under copyright.
I can think of no better argument against copyright than it prevents citizens from knowing what the law is.
Where are all the guys that stay here commenting 24/7 so that when other access they actually have what to read?
That was me. Sorry. Pepsi syndrome. What were we discussing? OOXML?
"ISO diverts OOXML spec to standard track for further improvement before adoption" is not an available future headline. "ISO rejects DIS 29500" and "New standards body gaining acceptance" are still available at this time.
The nettop is not intended to replace your laptop. That is what your "desktop replacement" laptop is for.
The nettops are way cooler than that and if you would get out of your "can't" rut you could probably think of a few applications in your life that are worth the three hundred bucks to you.
This is exactly it. Manufacturers are learning that if they ignore the WinTel platform definitions and just give us the good tech that makes sense, we'll gobble it up.
Some of us will even think of new and clever things to do with it. It sounds scary, but that's where you build the brand values that matter in the long run.
Like the author didn't find the linux eee booth and decided that was a lack of marketing push, a step on the road to deprecating linux on the eee.
I don't see this at all yet, and if I did it would not worry me. There are plenty other and bigger OEMs fishing for the premium experience you get with linux on the netbook now. Asus got an early lead but if they want to throw their advantage away and return to differentiating their product only by price and color that is their right. There are more than enough other mfrs eager to push the mindshare across the threshold and bring about the unchained era of personal computing.
It will be chaotic for a while. That's when the interesting things happen.
Once Google realizes most building plans in major cities are public records accessible through FOIA requests your particular cubicle in that cubicle farm in Redmond will be accurately rendered.
It downloads and executes all forms of data from the Internet -- scripts in all languages, images, sound files, virtual machines, even x86 executables in every known executable format. It will be the most flexible web application platform ever built -- anything will run on it whether you want it to or not.
I'm thinking about calling it "Internet Explorer".
What's interesting about this is that Acer is big enough to take Microsoft's deal and develop MIDs that qualify for their reduced price licensing of XP home for low cost devices -- and they will. So they'll make their own version of the Microsoft Nettop. 10.1" screen, 1GB RAM, 80GB HDD and similar MID and differentiate that product from the rest of the market by the usual features -- color of the package and price.
The neat part is outside of that deal they've also opened up their options. It's like throwing a box of business card sized low-watt self contained computers at a gang of engineers and saying, "Well, you wanted to invent stuff. Start with this. No rules. Show us what you can do!"
Now that the chains have been broken I'm excited to see what off-the-wall stuff comes out of the minds of those engineers. After so many years of redesigning the same rectangular chassis they probably have some pent up creativity waiting to be expressed.
Idea: there's plenty of circuit board room left on a standard 3.5" HDD for an Atom processor, 4GB flash and 1GB of RAM. Is there a system architect that can explain the storage revolution inherent in a POE server scenario where every drive can be an independent server?
Slashdot Mirror
No. The Sun has set but there will be contenders to their throne. A creative guy with a good budget could crack the top 10 for under a million bucks and the top 100 for under 100K incredibly shrinky greenbacks. Think GPGPU and PCIe as an interconnect. I could put that in three racks. Smart guys could do a petaflop in one. In the end it's all about the thermals.
Others have said no, it needs (x) so let me add one.
No, it needs to be ignored. Let's talk to the customers on this one.
A businessman's hope for his business is that it persist and grow for several decades at least, until he can reap his reward and exit phenomenally wealthy. If you architect your business intelligence on the platform of a corporation whose business model is to obsolete its platforms every five years at the most, you're an idiot and you deserve to be have your resources drained by this decade's P.T. Barnum until in the ferocious environment of the day you and your grand ideas are forgotten.
In the public sector the objective is to conduct the public's business in such a way that resources are not wasted and required openness can be delivered. It's essential that the public's investment in creating information is well preserved. If you're in the public sector and architect public infrastructure on such a platform as Office 2007 OXML you're worse than incompetent - you're a traitor to the cause of public service.
OOXML is irrelevant. The problem of construction of a document is solved. The user interface is an interesting diverse field where members compete but all the options that don't lead to truly open documents are blind alleys. Office 2007 formats are some of these blind alleys that will yield only wasted efforts because the vendor needs to obsolete your documents every five years in order to maintain its current cash flow. If you succeed in hitching your cart to this train it will come off its rails in less than five years when the provider needs to sell you new applications. Why would you do that? Trust me, if you're in public service and you choose to do that eventually somebody is going to follow the money right to you. Have you got longer than that to retirement? If you're in business the problem will solve itself and not to your benefit.
We were talking about a particular rock, not rocks in general. A ELE object would of course throw off objects of sufficient mass for embedded life to survive reentry. Our planet is known to have been hit by these objects several times while life was present. This happens considerably less frequently than the passing meteor scenario - perhaps frequently enough to be a vector within our solar system but not frequently enough for reliable interstellar diaspora.
Quit modding yourself up. It's creepy.
Of course that would be silly. The living cells trapped inside the meteorite would have been baked into the material these researchers found. It's the light fluffy life forms on the exterior of the meteorite that would have been brushed off the surface of the meteorite on first contact with the atmosphere and drift gently down to the nutrient rich sea that covers most of our planet. There these hypothetic organisms would breed and diversify until they filled every sea, covered every continent and dwelled deep within the crust.
Eventually a form would evolve, such as a lichen or mold, that bred with colonies so small and potentially electrostatically charged by sunlight that they might rise to the highest reaches of the atmosphere - to be scooped up by passing meteors on their way to the unknown depths of space. Perhaps they might by a fluke of trajectory be thrown clear of the solar system altogether. Frozen in the cold of space these breeding colonies might last millions of years. The vast majority of these would wander 'twixt the stars eternally, finding no place they might rest or fall on a hostile environment and die. Given enough of them, though -- perhaps millions an hour for a billion years -- some few might land someplace they can start anew.
It's called panspermia
The list is compiled every six months. It takes a while for the results to be tabulated and validated. New results for May 2008 will be available soon.
The upper pie is based on the share of systems by operating system family. That giant pac-man shape represents the 85% share tux had in November. The Windows sliver represents 1.2% or roughly six or seven systems in the top 500 most powerful computers publicly known, for all versions of Windows.
The bottom pie is different because it represents the operating system family's share of processing power. Here you'll note the Windows systems have disappeared entirely. Usually this represents that the scarce Windows systems were in the bottom end of the range or older systems that are not maintaining a proportional share of processing power.
Since you're making the observation that the data is seven months old, are you anticipating some upswell in adoption of Windows among the HPC crowd, who are presumed to know what they're doing and be unswayed by political or marketing concerns? That would be remarkable. If the petaflop Cell processor supercomputer IBM just built called RoadRunner runs Windows I'll eat an original IBM punch card.
What's also remarkable is that Microsoft with its billions can't build and keep a few in-house systems high in this list just to build their HPC credibility and assist their marketing in this area - which they would dearly like to have.
The list that proves you wrong is right here
Now go back to the kid's table and play with your toys. The grownups are talking important business. We know you're enthusiastic about today's fad but we don't care. We have work to do and that means using tools that don't have the lifespan of a McDonald's Happy Meal toy.
A good use for this technology would be to milk the recording industry yet again for millions of dollars up front by promising a new and improved but equally doomed Yet-Another-DRM scheme.
These guys will buy anything if you promise them it will lead to DRM that works that the customer will accept.
They don't even get that most of the pirated product is distributed before the content reaches its final form -- let alone after they've had a chance to encrypt it. Cocaine causes brain damage. They can't help it. I'll bet we could each come up with a fatally flawed DRM scheme that they would gobble up, and make a mint. Here's mine: content distributed on read-once media. A special evolution of SD flash that wipes its content as it disgorges it. Guys, if you're reading this, you can split my check between the FSF and Project Gutenberg - thanks.
The consumers that buy into this junk and wind up buying the White Album again are collateral damage. PT Barnum would value them highly but anybody with an IQ over 80 should eye them with sad contempt.
Thank you for that. I haven't read good work like that in a long time. It's directly on point.
It's almost enough to make me think he had a time machine, so thoroughly did he cover the IP issues of our day. I wonder where men of this quality went. Do we not deserve them any more?
It's an installation packager or package builder. It monitors all of these things for you and builds a script that basically replicates the installation.
I've tried several and my experience is so spotty that I can't recommend one. There are issues with interdependent packages, user account issues, variability in platforms and auditability of success among other things.
Still, they can be useful sometimes and can get around installer stupidness like only installing from CD or floppy, multi-reboot installs and building a single installer that installs almost all of your apps. Developing a process like this for an enterprise is at least one full time job. For a household or small business it's just not worth the effort.
I wrote about it here years ago. It's called incremental imaging. I covered it in my journal. It works.
Basically during a very careful system build you make a series of snapshot images of the system. If you do the steps in the right order and label your images correctly you can restore your system to any point that you saved in the system building process. It's much preferable to revert to an image that didn't contain a software package and install the new version than to uninstall the old version and install the new. These days building the whole thing in a virtual machine is also a common recommendation. It makes the snapshots quick and easy and virtual machines can be moved from any platform that supports that style of virtual machine to any other without reinstallation. Do pay attention to your licensing though.
If you're hoping for a system where you can take a Windows installation and run one restore that adds back to it all your applications, no you can't do that unless you have a system snapshot with backup software and a "differential backup" with all your software installed. I don't recommend this because the slightest missed trick and applications will fail inexplicably.
Basically my opinion is that if you're restoring applications from backup you've already horribly failed. You're better off with a clean image and/or a clean install for reliable performance. And by reliable performance I mean best replicating the environment that ended with you restoring in the first place. If you're rebuilding for some reason other than catastrophic hardware failure or platform migration your efforts might be better spent in a total rethink of why you're doing what you're doing and how.
BTW, your statement applies to the federal government only. The IP nature of information produced by states, counties and municipalities varies. And so it is that the law is protected from the prying eyes of the citizen.
Progress is made by shared invention. Once upon a time invention sharing was universal but progress was slow. Then we had copyrights and patents and the intent of these was to encourage investment in invention by granting a temporary monopoly on it. That worked for a while. Economic interests have spoiled this by extending the monopoly into eternity and twisting the word invention to absurdity. These days people are choosing to share their invention from the beginning or not at all.
It may be time to end the zenlike "temporary yet eternal" monopolies granted under copyright and patent.
Shall we quibble about the meaning of "is"? I believe a President was once impeached for just that.
It is the duty of the State to make available to the citizen what the law is. It is the option of the citizen to remain ignorant at his own peril because ignorance is not protection under the law. It is the duty of the citizen to push but not break the boundaries of the law. Some would argue it's the duty of the citizen to break the law when the law is wrong .
If being an idiot were a capital offense the world would have far fewer people. With the reduced demand gas would be $.50/gallon. We'd have a new president every few weeks. Orgy of hate and execution? You ain't seen nuthin yet. In 20 years the current troubles will be long forgotten. They'll be trivial by comparison to the issues of the day.
Yes our president is an idiot. I'm saddened both that I voted for him and that I'd do it again. I knew he was an idiot at the time. An idiot is by chance only wrong half the time. I'll still take an idiot over a coward every time because a coward is by definition always wrong. Who is responsible for offering me this painful choice? That's who I'm mad at.
BTW, I'm not disagreeing with you -- spies, saboteurs, unlawful enemy combatants, the falsely surrendered = shot on site or exploited for information and then dealt with in the most profitable way. War is a cruel sport. Neither the Geneva Convention nor any other treaty I know of that the US is a party to offer any protection for these sorts of combatant. This is the way it must be. Otherwise the common mode of conflict would be espionage, sabotage, terror and betrayal. Machiavelli and Byzantium would be the chaotic order of the day.
Is it a good rule? I don't know. It may be useful to remember that in war the history of whose cause was just, whose heros the most noble, which side was divinely favored is written by the survivors.
This statement, which is a paraphrase of what the president said once, is actually true in this case.
The authority that protects classified documents lies with the executive branch of government, and as the head of that branch the chief executive holds ultimate authority to classify, declassify, disclose or deny any material information held by the government.
Which doesn't mean the action and the statement weren't dumb. They were. But as regards disclosure of classified information: When the president does it, it's not illegal. Really.
In the US the database of law as it applies in practice - the rulings whether a law is valid or not; whether a law can be applied to a particular circumstance - is itself a work protected under copyright.
I can think of no better argument against copyright than it prevents citizens from knowing what the law is.
Blog pimp: Why not hop on over and help?
Full disclosure: I was involved in setting this site up. It's brand new and may come to nothing. Still... It's what you make of it.
That was me. Sorry. Pepsi syndrome. What were we discussing? OOXML?
"ISO diverts OOXML spec to standard track for further improvement before adoption" is not an available future headline. "ISO rejects DIS 29500" and "New standards body gaining acceptance" are still available at this time.
The nettop is not intended to replace your laptop. That is what your "desktop replacement" laptop is for.
The nettops are way cooler than that and if you would get out of your "can't" rut you could probably think of a few applications in your life that are worth the three hundred bucks to you.
This is exactly it. Manufacturers are learning that if they ignore the WinTel platform definitions and just give us the good tech that makes sense, we'll gobble it up.
Some of us will even think of new and clever things to do with it. It sounds scary, but that's where you build the brand values that matter in the long run.
Like the author didn't find the linux eee booth and decided that was a lack of marketing push, a step on the road to deprecating linux on the eee.
I don't see this at all yet, and if I did it would not worry me. There are plenty other and bigger OEMs fishing for the premium experience you get with linux on the netbook now. Asus got an early lead but if they want to throw their advantage away and return to differentiating their product only by price and color that is their right. There are more than enough other mfrs eager to push the mindshare across the threshold and bring about the unchained era of personal computing.
It will be chaotic for a while. That's when the interesting things happen.
Once Google realizes most building plans in major cities are public records accessible through FOIA requests your particular cubicle in that cubicle farm in Redmond will be accurately rendered.
This can be written also as "Intel serves over 80% of the microprocessor market and their open standards like PCI are widely accepted."
Every time Intel has started acting like it "owned" the market, somebody has started drinking their milkshake.
It downloads and executes all forms of data from the Internet -- scripts in all languages, images, sound files, virtual machines, even x86 executables in every known executable format. It will be the most flexible web application platform ever built -- anything will run on it whether you want it to or not.
I'm thinking about calling it "Internet Explorer".
What's interesting about this is that Acer is big enough to take Microsoft's deal and develop MIDs that qualify for their reduced price licensing of XP home for low cost devices -- and they will. So they'll make their own version of the Microsoft Nettop. 10.1" screen, 1GB RAM, 80GB HDD and similar MID and differentiate that product from the rest of the market by the usual features -- color of the package and price.
The neat part is outside of that deal they've also opened up their options. It's like throwing a box of business card sized low-watt self contained computers at a gang of engineers and saying, "Well, you wanted to invent stuff. Start with this. No rules. Show us what you can do!"
Now that the chains have been broken I'm excited to see what off-the-wall stuff comes out of the minds of those engineers. After so many years of redesigning the same rectangular chassis they probably have some pent up creativity waiting to be expressed.
Idea: there's plenty of circuit board room left on a standard 3.5" HDD for an Atom processor, 4GB flash and 1GB of RAM. Is there a system architect that can explain the storage revolution inherent in a POE server scenario where every drive can be an independent server?