It was the most powerful 64bit computer per dollar; that is why Virginia Tech chose the G5 over all other competitors
You transitioned very nicely to the new marketing bullet point, there, astroturfer.
The Va Tech case is much more complicated, however, not just price-performance. The VA crew needed something they could get running in a very short window of time, in order to get the benchmark in time for the dog-n-pony show. It was essentially a dicksize thing for them. They should actually be called on that, as a solution that might have taken a few weeks or months longer to arrive might have been cheaper. Also it might not have immediately been replaced *after* the benchmarking, at whatever that cost.
It seems to me, and to a fair number of people, like the whole VA Tech thing was a marketing stunt. Lord knows there'd be a hue and cry about that if it had been a Microsoft stunt and not dear sweet Apple.
What apple should do......is have a "Apple challenge"
John Scully doesn't work there anymore. Although Steve Jobs and the iTunes pop bottlecap marketing shindig does make it seem Apple is now in the business of selling sugar water.
I have a 4-way PPro box at home. It's the size of a two drawer file cabinet, has two six element raid controllers, and runs Slackware 9.1 with a SMP kernel.
"Intel, HP, IBM, and AMD were all trying to come up with ways to work with us," says Lockhart."But the prices were out of reach and IBM's 970 chip would not be available in time to allow the new Virginia Tech cluster to be ranked."
So the guy says right out there, and in plain public that the cluster wasn't about crunching numbers at all. The hasty decision to use Apple's 'G5' hardware was because of the rush to get in the dicksize lineup. There was a deadline for the machine to get 'ranked.'
Why does that sound so much like a deparment secretary being proud that she has the fastest, biggest fax machine in the company? Why does this guy sound like an Apple marketing shill?
My collection of little lunchbox Sparc Boxes are really, really well designed boxes and don't take up a lot of space. And IPX boxes are renown for running forever.
And they're nice small boxes. Beautiful as small servers, even today, with a serial console to set them up and run as headless servers afterwards. Not much extra room for drive expansion, of course. There's a nice SCSI jack on the back for that.
My SparcStation 5's, 10's and Ultra 1 boxes are nice low profile pizzaboxes. Also designed with a focus on maintainability. They're built to last, and damn they're heavy for what's inside. But they're nice and small (relatively speaking).
That Sun stuff is all 'heavy duty workstation hardware' that Apple just dreams of one day having the rep as producing.
So why is the G5 such a big hulk? The Sun gear I have that is a big hulk has room in it for about 18 drives.
They probably run their website on a G5 box running FreeBSD or a Linux.
The fans all run at screaming loud full speed (as punishment) if you run a non-Apple OS on the box. The weekend cleaning crew couldn't stand it anymore and they unplugged the box.
In the context of this discussion, why did you think it was worth discrediting the BBB over this Apple matter, then? Do you consider Apple computer a 'fly-by-night' operation?
The cost of cleanup is typically less than an auto accident, if it comes to that.
Auto accidents don't typically ensue because someone spilled a little pea gravel at a spot on the road where some biker noticed 'some groovy chick' and dumped his bike showing off.
Getting _further_ off topic: why do motorcycles, with limited one/two passenger capacity, make MORE noise that cars with 4-6 passenger capacity.
Muffle that fucking thing, Harley rider. It sounds like a flatulent anal-sex enthusiast.
"And said citizen, who crosses the ocean to fight for democracy, will find a 'Democratic' political party back at home vigorously working to nullify or cancel his/her absentee vote."
Ummm, when people 'reload that page just so see how fast the counter goes up' they are loading the images from a local cache on their machine. IOW get a damned clue. They're not chewing up that much bandwidth. In addition, it's an angelfire site, I doubt if the woman who put up the site is directly paying for the bandwidth consumed.
What are future civilisations going to think when all they find of ours are plastic baby dolls?
They will find the plastic and think 'thank goodness they didn't burn up ALL the petrochemicals' and then they will scoop it up into the bin so it can be processed into something useful.
Seriously. In a few hundred years some of the most valuable land on earth will be the landfills.
Likewise, a photo or two of a burning building underscores, where words alone are hopelessly inadequate, the depraved hubris in thinking we've "tamed fire".
I've often felt that in states where there is a mandatory helmet law, riders should be allowed to ride without a helmet. As long as they're identified as an 'organ donor' on their driver's license.
A 'poorly ventilated house' is also known as a 'modern, energy-efficient house,' since a big part of the energy-efficiency is the house is more tightly sealed. Hence it holds in the radon gas much more 'efficiently.'
I remember installing MacOS 8 and CyberDog being part of the distribution. I remember installing and running it. It was pretty nice. It wasn't buggy, and I didn't feel it was slow on my 7300.
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Apple makes excellent computers.
If you can stomach the vendor lock-in.
It was the most powerful 64bit computer per dollar; that is why Virginia Tech chose the G5 over all other competitors
You transitioned very nicely to the new marketing bullet point, there, astroturfer.
The Va Tech case is much more complicated, however, not just price-performance. The VA crew needed something they could get running in a very short window of time, in order to get the benchmark in time for the dog-n-pony show. It was essentially a dicksize thing for them. They should actually be called on that, as a solution that might have taken a few weeks or months longer to arrive might have been cheaper. Also it might not have immediately been replaced *after* the benchmarking, at whatever that cost.
It seems to me, and to a fair number of people, like the whole VA Tech thing was a marketing stunt. Lord knows there'd be a hue and cry about that if it had been a Microsoft stunt and not dear sweet Apple.
What apple should do......is have a "Apple challenge"
John Scully doesn't work there anymore. Although Steve Jobs and the iTunes pop bottlecap marketing shindig does make it seem Apple is now in the business of selling sugar water.
Take a Mac apart sometime. The stuff has brand names on it. Sony, IBM, ATI, Matsushita, Apple, etc. etc.
So do all my Dell boxes. ATI embedded video (not shit Taiwan chipset stuff). 3Com embedded ethernet (not shit Taiwan chipset stuff). Sony, NEC drives.
Garbage hardware it isn't. You go to Walmart and buy a box with Linux on it for that, or to a screwdriver shop.
Yeah, but the 'desktop' operating system for the Alpha was 32-bit Windows NT. Not hardly a 64 bit OS.
Oh... wait... OSX isn't really 64 bit yet, either...
(insert your citations of weasel-word '64-bit enabled' BS from Apple marketing below, please)
I bought two skids of PII and PIII boxes last week for fourty bucks.
I bought a skid of Power Macs a few months ago for $20.
I'm getting about the same $20-50 each for them all on eBay.
Six of one, half a dozen of the other. But the very idea of buying a fricking new machine from a guy wearing a suit just makes me ill.
I have a 4-way PPro box at home. It's the size of a two drawer file cabinet, has two six element raid controllers, and runs Slackware 9.1 with a SMP kernel.
Is it a 'workstation' because I run it at home?
I would seriously prefer something from Apple or Sun before Dell.
Nope. Not going to let you get away with dropping that line.
Apple's hardware quality is at least an entire tier lower than Sun's hardware quality. Please quit spamming the discussion with BS.
Thanks.
"Intel, HP, IBM, and AMD were all trying to come up with ways to work with us," says Lockhart."But the prices were out of reach and IBM's 970 chip would not be available in time to allow the new Virginia Tech cluster to be ranked."
So the guy says right out there, and in plain public that the cluster wasn't about crunching numbers at all. The hasty decision to use Apple's 'G5' hardware was because of the rush to get in the dicksize lineup. There was a deadline for the machine to get 'ranked.'
Why does that sound so much like a deparment secretary being proud that she has the fastest, biggest fax machine in the company? Why does this guy sound like an Apple marketing shill?
My collection of little lunchbox Sparc Boxes are really, really well designed boxes and don't take up a lot of space. And IPX boxes are renown for running forever.
And they're nice small boxes. Beautiful as small servers, even today, with a serial console to set them up and run as headless servers afterwards. Not much extra room for drive expansion, of course. There's a nice SCSI jack on the back for that.
My SparcStation 5's, 10's and Ultra 1 boxes are nice low profile pizzaboxes. Also designed with a focus on maintainability. They're built to last, and damn they're heavy for what's inside. But they're nice and small (relatively speaking).
That Sun stuff is all 'heavy duty workstation hardware' that Apple just dreams of one day having the rep as producing.
So why is the G5 such a big hulk? The Sun gear I have that is a big hulk has room in it for about 18 drives.
Their sites down with 400 errors,
They probably run their website on a G5 box running FreeBSD or a Linux.
The fans all run at screaming loud full speed (as punishment) if you run a non-Apple OS on the box. The weekend cleaning crew couldn't stand it anymore and they unplugged the box.
Rob, we need a killfile feature. It would run the trolls out of business almost immediately.
Think about it.
In the context of this discussion, why did you think it was worth discrediting the BBB over this Apple matter, then? Do you consider Apple computer a 'fly-by-night' operation?
Nice looking car.
The cost of cleanup is typically less than an auto accident, if it comes to that.
Auto accidents don't typically ensue because someone spilled a little pea gravel at a spot on the road where some biker noticed 'some groovy chick' and dumped his bike showing off.
Getting _further_ off topic: why do motorcycles, with limited one/two passenger capacity, make MORE noise that cars with 4-6 passenger capacity.
Muffle that fucking thing, Harley rider. It sounds like a flatulent anal-sex enthusiast.
You and hundreds of other Slashbots who seem to have transformed into knuckle-dragging bikers at the posting of a site.
About your tagline. You should tack on:
"And said citizen, who crosses the ocean to fight for democracy, will find a 'Democratic' political party back at home vigorously working to nullify or cancel his/her absentee vote."
Ummm, when people 'reload that page just so see how fast the counter goes up' they are loading the images from a local cache on their machine. IOW get a damned clue. They're not chewing up that much bandwidth. In addition, it's an angelfire site, I doubt if the woman who put up the site is directly paying for the bandwidth consumed.
What are future civilisations going to think when all they find of ours are plastic baby dolls?
They will find the plastic and think 'thank goodness they didn't burn up ALL the petrochemicals' and then they will scoop it up into the bin so it can be processed into something useful.
Seriously. In a few hundred years some of the most valuable land on earth will be the landfills.
You're right.
It takes a lot longer to read the whole discussion on a VT100 terminal with Lynx.
Likewise, a photo or two of a burning building underscores, where words alone are hopelessly inadequate, the depraved hubris in thinking we've "tamed fire".
Hope you don't mind shivering in the cold, dude.
Put a dollar bill in an envelope. Seal. Address. Stamp.
I've often felt that in states where there is a mandatory helmet law, riders should be allowed to ride without a helmet. As long as they're identified as an 'organ donor' on their driver's license.
A 'poorly ventilated house' is also known as a 'modern, energy-efficient house,' since a big part of the energy-efficiency is the house is more tightly sealed. Hence it holds in the radon gas much more 'efficiently.'
Thank goodness I live in a house built in 1900...
I remember installing MacOS 8 and CyberDog being part of the distribution. I remember installing and running it. It was pretty nice. It wasn't buggy, and I didn't feel it was slow on my 7300.