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Wednesday, October 29, 2003
![[Item Permalink]](http://radio.weblogs.com/0112083/images/ur_bullet.gif){kind=small} -- Comment()
TecCon Keynote reveals a lot of details about the Apple G5 dual supercluster at Virginia Tech.
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Smiling the Panther smile -- Comment()
I have been running Panther for a day now. Looks good, although there have been a few minor problems. I managed to get Cisco VPN 4.0 working, after a reboot. Perhaps a kernel module was not loaded properly after installing the VPN software. Currently I'm logged in as two different users, with different profiles. And I have a guest account for demonstrations. One side-effect of the ease of switching between accounts may be that people start to get sloppy about passwords. If your machine has several accounts for different users and uses, the security is weaker than when there is only one account which is carefully monitored. Anyway, I'm a happy Mac user today.
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Mac OS X 10.3 Panther Unleashed by Jeff Carlson is a nice review and introduction to Panther.
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Upgrade Could Lead Apple To Bigger Bite Of Market: "I think Panther is going to bring about a major increase in the number of people switching to Macs from Windows. Let's face it, Windows is a security nightmare." (Detroit Free Press via MyAppleMenu) [MyAppleMenu]
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George Lakoff Interview: "his George Lakoff interview about how conservatives have been successful by framing debates with language is brilliant: The phrase "Tax relief" began coming out of the White House starting on the very day of Bush's inauguration..." [onfocus.com]
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Apple G5 dual supercluster now third fastest supercomputer on Earth -- Comment()
Jack Dongarra has updated his report (in pdf) on supercomputers on October 28, 2003, and now the Apple G5 dual supercluster is third in the list of top 500 supercomputers. The R_max speed is now 9.6 teraflop/s, almost 20% improvement from the previous value last week. Apparently they are still tuning the communications network for getting maximum performance of the system. I wonder if the Infiniband network will be able to match the speed of the G5 processors. Here is a listing (updated October 28, 2003) of the top-5 systems from the draft report: Note that the Apple G5 dual result are not for the whole system of 2200 processors. All the speeds are in gigaflop/s (10^9 floating point operations per second).
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Disliking Apple G5 supercluster -- Comment()
My story on the G5 supercluster generated this strange feedback from 'Dennis Liske' (a.k.a. dislike?): "this sounds like a lot of bullshit to me! are these stock apple computers right out of the box? how do you tie them together...ethernet?! when i search our server in my work environment nobody works! does each computer need a monitor?! maybe that's where the power comsumption is. did apple donate this stuff or did you contribute to their bottom line last quarter? the last update I did to apple for osX made my old native g3 computer behave strangely...how about yours?! what kind of problems are your feeding all these apples? can you morph the situation in iraq to math and have our beloved apples solve it? oh well... have fun?" Perhaps I should not air such comments. But nice to see so fast reactions: posting a reply without reading one line of the text.
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Top Ten things I hate about Windows: "Everyone who's used Windows for any length of time is familiar with Windows rot. It is a phenomenon whereby a Windows computer gets slower from what most users would regard as normal use. Even the startup and shutdown sequences start taking longer."
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