Hear hear. You're Mum works on system a million times more complex, that comes with no manual.
I am always telling this to people - if it breaks, how is it your fault? If the wheels fall off your car, do you assume it's the way you hold the wheel?
I get about 100 SPAMS per day, with a breakdown of about 50% Asian, 40% USA, 5% "other", 5% "Good to pass on my solications on this sad but fine weather day, I am president of XXX in Nigeria, and [My father|mother|uncle died|was deported|fled the country becuase of a revolution|coup|shortage of cigarettes...] and I need to give you a ton of cash"
Anyway - I set up sendmail to reject stuff and send custom reject messages like "Not even the right continent you losers - now sod off!" or "too much spam from yahoo|hotmail|aol - entire domain blocked"
I got a couple of messages from idignant recipients too - outraged at my trying to sell them sex aids, penis enlergement kits and so on - hell I even get spam apparentley from myself!
One problem I have with using IP addresses, is that I don't have the luxury of a broadband connect (as I live in the sticks), so I use fetchmail to get my stuff from a POP3/IMAP server. The mail is then passed to my local sendmail MTA for local routing. Trouble is, the IP that sendmail gets is my ISP's IMAP server, so blocking 151.* doesn't work. Anyone got any thoughts on doing that?
I'm seriously considering making my email domain an "opt in" scheme - ie reject all mail unless the sender is on my list.
The company I work for is a massive global corporation - and we even get *internal* spam ffs - if I ever find that Charles Reid... Endless crud about car washing, charity fun runs, items for sale...
Oh for goodness sake - there are only about 8 plots in the broadest sense anyway - Lucas rips off Dune? why? becasue there's a "saviour" who was prophecied? One who will be more powerful than any before him and will set the world to rights? Come on - Herbert didn't invent that - try Mallory's Mort D'Arthur, "The Return of the King" - LOTR, or Jesus Christ if it comes to it. Honestly - Frank Herbert needs to climb out of his own arse if he seriously thought there are more similarities between SW and Dune than SW and a hole host of other films/books etc etc. I mean yes, veryone gets inspiration from things they;ve read or seen, childhood memeories and so on, but seriously - did anyone else apart from him actually think to themselves "hmm Star Wars - it's a bit like Dune" Only after sucking on some serious Jamaican Woodbines.
Yeah - I knew there was probably a real reason - but it still made me laugh:) Typical "and now the science bit" journalism - they often miss the point (ie it's not that they can share files - it's that they can share massive files).
It's very impressive what they've built, and I'm not knocking it, but I nearly split my sides at some of the quotes not directly related to the speed or hardware architecture of the thing:-
"We have been using the File Transfer Protocol over Gigabit Ethernet, but now we will be able to read files directly from any available disk,"
Well - like wow - NFS/CIFS anyone. They've been ftp'ing docs to each other? ROFL:)
"Being able to share data across the enterprise is an exciting new capability. It will allow more collaboration among research projects,"
Ahh my sides are splitting - "shock news, scientists discover file sharing" heheh. Don't these guys have a file server? Guys listen up - you didn't need to design a world beating clusterbeast with 10Tflops just to share some files! LOL all that power just to let Larry from Sub-Atomic Meddling dept. look at a paper from Dave from the Induced Super Novae Working Comittee heheheh. These guys need to get out more: imagine their annoyance when they made this big announcement only to discover that not only has Novell, Microsoft/SAMBA, Unix/NFS done this already - they did it with only one CPU in the server!
"This network approach is nice because we can use a standard PCI slot on each processor node, "
Hmm like any network card you care to mention then really... Heheh "Hey like.. this network stuff is like - cool man!" What next? They invent a board with a button for each character they need to type? Priceless.
I'm sure it's great but I only just stopped laughing at those quotes. I can only imagine (or hope) it's a case of clueless journo mis-quoting or quoting out of context or just completely missing the point of the project.
I did a short contract for a railway maintenance company back in 1999, and the y2k compliance guy was constantly getting requests for y2k compliance certificates for stuff like railway sleepers, bolts, and well - anything really. Must have done wonders for his self image - knowing what a vital job he was doing LOL:)
I got out with the wossname some 12 years ago (it was one of the earliest versions to be called "NetHack" rather than "Hack" so perhaps it was easier then). Played as a Wizard, had 3 pet dragons called Huey Duey and Luey, and a dog called Dave:)
My modus operandi for big battles towards the end was to teleport in (ring of teleportation control, plus an early diet of quantum mechanics/leprechauns) summon my Dragon "horde" (magic whistle) and teleport out again..
The Dragons could be a right nuissance mind - more than once I died from a thermonuclear explosion when my pets fired on a monster on the other side of me, causing my scrolls and potions to catch fire, and all manner of unwanted magical happenings that invariably ended up with me dead.
If I recall correctly, the thing I spent longest on was becoming fireproof - can't remember why now but I kept getting burnt to death on the last level.
We played that far too much at university. My mate Dave was a born cheater, and it very amusing watching the game trap his early efforts - like the time he just wished for the amulet with a wand of wishing, got it, and greedily exited the dungeon.....
Or my favourite - the time he edited the save file and successfully gave himself max hit points. He then killed some monster, went up an XP level and the signed integer holding the HP clocked round to a negative number and he died... the look on his face..
That's why you play Nethack - its the closest you;ll get to that atmosphere you get in a well run AD&D game with the inventiveness (especially on the magic front - a la Vance) It's the problem solving element - the amusing combinations of items + actions, and the awful puns (magic marker, quantum mechanics, and so on).
The first time I burst into a room of Demons and instead of them beating me to a pulp they said "go away! go away!" and ran off.... It's those bits.
Another friend of mine, actually bought a second hand DEC Rainbow just to play Nethack (this was before PC's were "affordable").
Yeah _ mean _ love PHP - my own website is written in it but Yahoo? I wonder if they've thought about the performance hit - my previous news type siste was written in C and pretty damm well instant. The PHP equivalent. whilst a doddle to write, is a damm site slower. Mind you I expect they'll ahve invested in the Zend compiler.
Not sure if this counts as datacentre, but we had a brand new generator installed at a place where I worked once. The thing was the size of a shipping container (you know, those huge metal boxes) and contained a Volvo marine diesel engine, a 400 litre tank, 4 batteries (for the starter) intake filters the size of beer barrels and on the roof, a silencer the size of an oil drum with a 8 inch outlet.
The project to get this installed had run for months, with legal difficulties, environmental people, the simple logistics of getting the thing craned over the building as there was no access etc etc. All this meant it had cost a packet - but we had to have a generator to satisfy the banking authorities.
So, the fateful day arrives and it's fueled up, and plumbed into the building power supply. The "dashboard" for the engine is in the building plant room and you can't see the generator from there. We switch the bypass circuit in and fire it up for a test run.
Now, this engine had never been run since it was signed off at the factory, so it contained a lot of protective oil coatings which added to the already substatntial smoke that would normally exit the tailpipe of a 7 litre turbo diesel. After the rev counter hits a steady 1500 rpm , I go round to look at it running.
Yep - there it is chugging away, with smoke like black toothpaste falling out of the exhaust. Within seconds, I couldn't see my own hand, let alone the generator or the building beyond.
After 2 minutes or so, I reckon we've seen enough for now, so I go back to the plant room.... to discover that it has filled the building with toxic fumes, the fire alarm has gone off, and the entire staff are down the bottom of the car park behind 2 fire engines....
Bit of a design flaw that - turns out the air intake for the building AC is right next to the generator exhaust... (not my doing I hasten to add - it was all perpetrated before my arrival). Needless to say, the generator was never switched out of bypass - we couldn't take the risk that it might actually start - it might keep the computer systems running, but would kill all the users... hmm wait a second..:P
Thats a slightly different issue though isn't it? You are a Solaris on Sparc shop - so of course *anything* that isn't Solaris on Sparc is going to upset the standards apple cart, and increase the cost of running the data centre.
If you were a HPUX shop, Solaris would be a problem for you, and so on.
Million dollar apps can run on Linux - it just doesn't make sense for your particular scenario as your company has a large investment in Sun hardware, software, and support skills. If you'd started out with Linux on Intel (for example) then I dare say your current day requirements might be met by it.
Good point - but it's not only hackers using Linux - as previous posts have discussed, Avaya have RedHat in their boxes now, and they have shedloads of hardware to develop drivers for.
Mind you though, the traffic can be shifted about internally over IP (or some other protocol) over standard 100base or 1000base ethernet devices. The only wierd hardware is at the interface with the PSTN.
" they did not preface their findings by "Scientists say..."
I hate that phrase - does any self respecting academic or research expert ever call themselves a "scientist"? Surely they'd be a bit more specific and call themselves a biologist, chemist, geologist etc etc...
Its almost like saying "some people say..." - like it's a ghost story or something. Sounds like the joke item at the end of the TV news..
wow! I must quickly right a report reccomending my employers ditch all those expensive ATM WAN links and use cell phones - we'll have U's of rackage full of them! Hell we'll run the LANs off of them too - bits the crap out of 802.11b !
Wait! whats that strange bleeping sound? oh right - it's my bullshit detector...
Rick McCallum - producer of a series of films that along with perhaps only a handful of other films - people actually queue up months in advance to see the thing in a theatre, claims the movie theatre is dead?
LOL:) Better tell that to the guy in the tent round the local cineplex...
He's right of course - for the reasons everyone's citing on this thread.
Personally, it takes a lot to drag me into a movie theatre ( and yes Rick, don't worry - about the only thing that will make me put up with the smell of stale sweat, sticky floors, some dude with his knee in the back of my seat, the cellphones etc is the next Star Wars (and the next LOTR episode)).
And he IS right about DVD and home theatre - it fecking well IS better. The picture quality for a start, is abysmal in every thatre I've been in. You can go on all day about the resolution of a big projector screen versus DVD but the end result is - those back projector movie theatre screens suck - the colours are washed out, the scratches are unacceptable, and just where in the name of panaflex do those HAIRS come from ffs!!
Add to this the fact that you're always too damm close to the screen - close enough for the judder between frames to be noticable and close enough to have to move your head to follow the action, and close enough that the corners of the damm screen are darker than the middle. Yes - back projection sucks. My 32" TV may not have the same resolution, but each part is lit indiviudally, the phosphors have a bit of persistence, and I don't sit close enough to feel the static on my eyebrows.
At least the last time I went you could pay a bit more for a theatre with a bar and some decent chairs. You still can't SMOKE though.
To add insult to injury, our local pit "cineworld" or something - has some daft self advertising that ends with the phrase "see it your way". Do wot? If I was seeing it my way, I'd have to bring my own screen, a decent Beef Satay, some beers, a sofa, a big cigar and chuck everyone else out of the room. No wait - thats my house I'm thinking of - geez Rick - and you just realised this?
I went to to see clones in the theatre, but I won't have really seen it til I get the DVD on.
Day 1 - a new Windows OS appears.. Day 2 - Large book with 1000 pages of screenshots entitled - "Windows xxx - the bleedin obvious" is published:)
Day 7 - "Instant Experts" return from MS certified class where they were taught 30 hours of "The Bleedin Obvious Admin 101" - how to fill out properties forms and click buttons. "Don't try to peek behind the curtain now - just click the buttons. To make the OS secure, for example, click the button marked "make my computer secure". No actual networks/computing/API etc knowledge required!, and certainly none imparted on this course!"
From my understanding of the article - HT (with appropriately written code excuting) drastically reduces wasted cyles in the execution core - so what you should be comparing is 4 or 8 normal cpu's with 4 or 8 HT capable cpus - and yes I'm sure they'll cost more, at least at first - a Porsche 993 costs 10 times as much as a Ford Focus, but only goes less than twice as fast but in certain circumstances it's useful to have all the power in one unit.
I would agree that it makes no sense right now to buy a 2 CPU HT architecture system over an 8 way (or however many you can get for the same cash) SMP system, but as the technique is perfected the price of these CPU's will come down, and as compilers and application/OS developers use more multi-threading in their products, it will make more sense.
Indeed - if your brower's never heard of the signing authority (and that signing authority's intermediate certificate is not, in turn signed by a recognised CA) then you may as well self sign and have it for free.
I've even had certificates from Verisign that browsers had not heard of - 128 bit Global Cert was signed by an unknown Verisign subsidiary - you had to grab an intermediary for it from the "real" Verisign (ie the one the browser's already had signed certs for). I found this incredible - and unworkable at the time as our useless Oracle App Server 4 system had no truck with the concept of certificate chains.
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Hear hear. You're Mum works on system a million times more complex, that comes with no manual.
I am always telling this to people - if it breaks, how is it your fault? If the wheels fall off your car, do you assume it's the way you hold the wheel?
Notice on the disk will read "You have 8 hours to listen to this music"
Geek reads "You have 8 hours to rip this data to your RAID 5 dedicated music storage facility".
hehe.
I get about 100 SPAMS per day, with a breakdown of about 50% Asian, 40% USA, 5% "other", 5% "Good to pass on my solications on this sad but fine weather day, I am president of XXX in Nigeria, and [My father|mother|uncle died|was deported|fled the country becuase of a revolution|coup|shortage of cigarettes...] and I need to give you a ton of cash"
Anyway - I set up sendmail to reject stuff and send custom reject messages like "Not even the right continent you losers - now sod off!" or "too much spam from yahoo|hotmail|aol - entire domain blocked"
I got a couple of messages from idignant recipients too - outraged at my trying to sell them sex aids, penis enlergement kits and so on - hell I even get spam apparentley from myself!
One problem I have with using IP addresses, is that I don't have the luxury of a broadband connect (as I live in the sticks), so I use fetchmail to get my stuff from a POP3/IMAP server. The mail is then passed to my local sendmail MTA for local routing. Trouble is, the IP that sendmail gets is my ISP's IMAP server, so blocking 151.* doesn't work. Anyone got any thoughts on doing that?
I'm seriously considering making my email domain an "opt in" scheme - ie reject all mail unless the sender is on my list.
The company I work for is a massive global corporation - and we even get *internal* spam ffs - if I ever find that Charles Reid... Endless crud about car washing, charity fun runs, items for sale...
hmm so what IS the point then, if it's identical to the original? Sounds more like a case of old name applied to old game, with laser disc removed.
Oh for goodness sake - there are only about 8 plots in the broadest sense anyway - Lucas rips off Dune? why? becasue there's a "saviour" who was prophecied? One who will be more powerful than any before him and will set the world to rights? Come on - Herbert didn't invent that - try Mallory's Mort D'Arthur, "The Return of the King" - LOTR, or Jesus Christ if it comes to it. Honestly - Frank Herbert needs to climb out of his own arse if he seriously thought there are more similarities between SW and Dune than SW and a hole host of other films/books etc etc. I mean yes, veryone gets inspiration from things they;ve read or seen, childhood memeories and so on, but seriously - did anyone else apart from him actually think to themselves "hmm Star Wars - it's a bit like Dune" Only after sucking on some serious Jamaican Woodbines.
Yeah - I knew there was probably a real reason - but it still made me laugh :) Typical "and now the science bit" journalism - they often miss the point (ie it's not that they can share files - it's that they can share massive files).
It's very impressive what they've built, and I'm not knocking it, but I nearly split my sides at some of the quotes not directly related to the speed or hardware architecture of the thing:-
:)
"We have been using the File Transfer Protocol over Gigabit Ethernet, but now we will be able to read files directly from any available disk,"
Well - like wow - NFS/CIFS anyone. They've been ftp'ing docs to each other? ROFL
"Being able to share data across the enterprise is an exciting new capability. It will allow more collaboration among research projects,"
Ahh my sides are splitting - "shock news, scientists discover file sharing" heheh. Don't these guys have a file server? Guys listen up - you didn't need to design a world beating clusterbeast with 10Tflops just to share some files! LOL all that power just to let Larry from Sub-Atomic Meddling dept. look at a paper from Dave from the Induced Super Novae Working Comittee heheheh. These guys need to get out more: imagine their annoyance when they made this big announcement only to discover that not only has Novell, Microsoft/SAMBA, Unix/NFS done this already - they did it with only one CPU in the server!
"This network approach is nice because we can use a standard PCI slot on each processor node, "
Hmm like any network card you care to mention then really... Heheh "Hey like.. this network stuff is like - cool man!" What next? They invent a board with a button for each character they need to type? Priceless.
I'm sure it's great but I only just stopped laughing at those quotes. I can only imagine (or hope) it's a case of clueless journo mis-quoting or quoting out of context or just completely missing the point of the project.
I did a short contract for a railway maintenance company back in 1999, and the y2k compliance guy was constantly getting requests for y2k compliance certificates for stuff like railway sleepers, bolts, and well - anything really. Must have done wonders for his self image - knowing what a vital job he was doing LOL :)
LOL :0
:)
don't chase the #'s dude - that's the floor
I got out with the wossname some 12 years ago (it was one of the earliest versions to be called "NetHack" rather than "Hack" so perhaps it was easier then). Played as a Wizard, had 3 pet dragons called Huey Duey and Luey, and a dog called Dave :)
.....
My modus operandi for big battles towards the end was to teleport in (ring of teleportation control, plus an early diet of quantum mechanics/leprechauns) summon my Dragon "horde" (magic whistle) and teleport out again..
The Dragons could be a right nuissance mind - more than once I died from a thermonuclear explosion when my pets fired on a monster on the other side of me, causing my scrolls and potions to catch fire, and all manner of unwanted magical happenings that invariably ended up with me dead.
If I recall correctly, the thing I spent longest on was becoming fireproof - can't remember why now but I kept getting burnt to death on the last level.
We played that far too much at university. My mate Dave was a born cheater, and it very amusing watching the game trap his early efforts - like the time he just wished for the amulet with a wand of wishing, got it, and greedily exited the dungeon
Or my favourite - the time he edited the save file and successfully gave himself max hit points. He then killed some monster, went up an XP level and the signed integer holding the HP clocked round to a negative number and he died... the look on his face..
That's why you play Nethack - its the closest you;ll get to that atmosphere you get in a well run AD&D game with the inventiveness (especially on the magic front - a la Vance) It's the problem solving element - the amusing combinations of items + actions, and the awful puns (magic marker, quantum mechanics, and so on).
The first time I burst into a room of Demons and instead of them beating me to a pulp they said "go away! go away!" and ran off.... It's those bits.
Another friend of mine, actually bought a second hand DEC Rainbow just to play Nethack (this was before PC's were "affordable").
Fantastic.
Er.. this is just a study dude - they're not spending 250K on migrating every computer withtin the EU.
What on Earth are you on about?
Yeah _ mean _ love PHP - my own website is written in it but Yahoo? I wonder if they've thought about the performance hit - my previous news type siste was written in C and pretty damm well instant. The PHP equivalent. whilst a doddle to write, is a damm site slower. Mind you I expect they'll ahve invested in the Zend compiler.
LOL - I suspect you're meant to season it yourself.
:)
Mind you you're probably right - that's probably why we all eat Indian, Chinese and Italian food in the UK....
If you think the fish and chips was an experience - try a doner kebab next time you're over
Not sure if this counts as datacentre, but we had a brand new generator installed at a place where I worked once. The thing was the size of a shipping container (you know, those huge metal boxes) and contained a Volvo marine diesel engine, a 400 litre tank, 4 batteries (for the starter) intake filters the size of beer barrels and on the roof, a silencer the size of an oil drum with a 8 inch outlet.
:P
The project to get this installed had run for months, with legal difficulties, environmental people, the simple logistics of getting the thing craned over the building as there was no access etc etc. All this meant it had cost a packet - but we had to have a generator to satisfy the banking authorities.
So, the fateful day arrives and it's fueled up, and plumbed into the building power supply. The "dashboard" for the engine is in the building plant room and you can't see the generator from there. We switch the bypass circuit in and fire it up for a test run.
Now, this engine had never been run since it was signed off at the factory, so it contained a lot of protective oil coatings which added to the already substatntial smoke that would normally exit the tailpipe of a 7 litre turbo diesel. After the rev counter hits a steady 1500 rpm , I go round to look at it running.
Yep - there it is chugging away, with smoke like black toothpaste falling out of the exhaust. Within seconds, I couldn't see my own hand, let alone the generator or the building beyond.
After 2 minutes or so, I reckon we've seen enough for now, so I go back to the plant room.... to discover that it has filled the building with toxic fumes, the fire alarm has gone off, and the entire staff are down the bottom of the car park behind 2 fire engines....
Bit of a design flaw that - turns out the air intake for the building AC is right next to the generator exhaust... (not my doing I hasten to add - it was all perpetrated before my arrival). Needless to say, the generator was never switched out of bypass - we couldn't take the risk that it might actually start - it might keep the computer systems running, but would kill all the users... hmm wait a second..
$100,000 worth of useless metal!
And their phones worked 10,000 ft above the ground? What were they - I must get one of these!
Thats a slightly different issue though isn't it? You are a Solaris on Sparc shop - so of course *anything* that isn't Solaris on Sparc is going to upset the standards apple cart, and increase the cost of running the data centre.
If you were a HPUX shop, Solaris would be a problem for you, and so on.
Million dollar apps can run on Linux - it just doesn't make sense for your particular scenario as your company has a large investment in Sun hardware, software, and support skills. If you'd started out with Linux on Intel (for example) then I dare say your current day requirements might be met by it.
Good point - but it's not only hackers using Linux - as previous posts have discussed, Avaya have RedHat in their boxes now, and they have shedloads of hardware to develop drivers for.
Mind you though, the traffic can be shifted about internally over IP (or some other protocol) over standard 100base or 1000base ethernet devices. The only wierd hardware is at the interface with the PSTN.
" they did not preface their findings by "Scientists say..."
I hate that phrase - does any self respecting academic or research expert ever call themselves a "scientist"? Surely they'd be a bit more specific and call themselves a biologist, chemist, geologist etc etc...
Its almost like saying "some people say..." - like it's a ghost story or something. Sounds like the joke item at the end of the TV news..
so my 16K SIM will be full in 0.007 seconds!
wow! I must quickly right a report reccomending my employers ditch all those expensive ATM WAN links and use cell phones - we'll have U's of rackage full of them! Hell we'll run the LANs off of them too - bits the crap out of 802.11b !
Wait! whats that strange bleeping sound? oh right - it's my bullshit detector...
Rick McCallum - producer of a series of films that along with perhaps only a handful of other films - people actually queue up months in advance to see the thing in a theatre, claims the movie theatre is dead?
:) Better tell that to the guy in the tent round the local cineplex...
LOL
He's right of course - for the reasons everyone's citing on this thread.
Personally, it takes a lot to drag me into a movie theatre ( and yes Rick, don't worry - about the only thing that will make me put up with the smell of stale sweat, sticky floors, some dude with his knee in the back of my seat, the cellphones etc is the next Star Wars (and the next LOTR episode)).
And he IS right about DVD and home theatre - it fecking well IS better. The picture quality for a start, is abysmal in every thatre I've been in. You can go on all day about the resolution of a big projector screen versus DVD but the end result is - those back projector movie theatre screens suck - the colours are washed out, the scratches are unacceptable, and just where in the name of panaflex do those HAIRS come from ffs!!
Add to this the fact that you're always too damm close to the screen - close enough for the judder between frames to be noticable and close enough to have to move your head to follow the action, and close enough that the corners of the damm screen are darker than the middle. Yes - back projection sucks. My 32" TV may not have the same resolution, but each part is lit indiviudally, the phosphors have a bit of persistence, and I don't sit close enough to feel the static on my eyebrows.
At least the last time I went you could pay a bit more for a theatre with a bar and some decent chairs. You still can't SMOKE though.
To add insult to injury, our local pit "cineworld" or something - has some daft self advertising that ends with the phrase "see it your way". Do wot? If I was seeing it my way, I'd have to bring my own screen, a decent Beef Satay, some beers, a sofa, a big cigar and chuck everyone else out of the room. No wait - thats my house I'm thinking of - geez Rick - and you just realised this?
I went to to see clones in the theatre, but I won't have really seen it til I get the DVD on.
That is so true...
:)
Day 1 - a new Windows OS appears..
Day 2 - Large book with 1000 pages of screenshots entitled - "Windows xxx - the bleedin obvious" is published
Day 7 - "Instant Experts" return from MS certified class where they were taught 30 hours of "The Bleedin Obvious Admin 101" - how to fill out properties forms and click buttons. "Don't try to peek behind the curtain now - just click the buttons. To make the OS secure, for example, click the button marked "make my computer secure". No actual networks/computing/API etc knowledge required!, and certainly none imparted on this course!"
for 50c could they not just ring up and ask you ? :P
From my understanding of the article - HT (with appropriately written code excuting) drastically reduces wasted cyles in the execution core - so what you should be comparing is 4 or 8 normal cpu's with 4 or 8 HT capable cpus - and yes I'm sure they'll cost more, at least at first - a Porsche 993 costs 10 times as much as a Ford Focus, but only goes less than twice as fast but in certain circumstances it's useful to have all the power in one unit.
I would agree that it makes no sense right now to buy a 2 CPU HT architecture system over an 8 way (or however many you can get for the same cash) SMP system, but as the technique is perfected the price of these CPU's will come down, and as compilers and application/OS developers use more multi-threading in their products, it will make more sense.
Indeed - if your brower's never heard of the signing authority (and that signing authority's intermediate certificate is not, in turn signed by a recognised CA) then you may as well self sign and have it for free.
I've even had certificates from Verisign that browsers had not heard of - 128 bit Global Cert was signed by an unknown Verisign subsidiary - you had to grab an intermediary for it from the "real" Verisign (ie the one the browser's already had signed certs for). I found this incredible - and unworkable at the time as our useless Oracle App Server 4 system had no truck with the concept of certificate chains.