Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Monday, November 10, 2003

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A computer superpower is born: "In a squat cement building at the outskirts of Virginia Tech's campus, 1,100 Macintosh PCs are stacked like library books on metal racks that students helped arrange in return for football tickets and pizza. [...] The cluster of off-the-shelf G5 Power Macs was assembled in a few weeks for about $5 million. That is significantly less money than the custom supercomputers that research labs use for weather and weapons simulations, drug experiments and other highly complex projects."

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Power Mac Is Pretty On The Inside: "With its spectacular performance, Apple could have built the G5 to look like an old milk crate and still have sold a few million of them." (Boston Globe via MyAppleMenu) [MyAppleMenu]

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Apple And Microsoft: The Great Role Reversal: "In its unaccustomed position as a majority player, is Apple being a good citizen?" (Mac Night Owl via MyAppleMenu) [MyAppleMenu]

Once again, trouble starting up Matlab -- Comment()
I once again had trouble setting up Matlab so that the licence manager starts up automatically. Fortunately, the instructions at MathWorks seem to help. But I strongly dislike the flexlm system - it is fine on a multi-user system, but overkill on a personal machine.

Update: Apparently you also need to run an updater to make the graphical interface work under Panther. (The command-line version started with matlab -nojvm works ok.)

Panther: a multi-user system -- Comment()
It just now hit me that Panther is really a multi-user system. I switched between two accounts, and instead of the fine "cube" animation my display went black and switched modes. And I realized that I was using different settings in the two accounts: 85 MHz frequency vs. 100 MHz frequency. Panther was switching monitor settings between the two accounts on the fly. What other nice features are buried under the pretty surface?

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Security Flaws Rankle Microsoft: "Microsoft's campaign to snare virus writers indicates the software behemoth is finally feeling the heat of its own security woes. Analysts say Windows flaws are hurting Microsoft's ability to book new contracts with corporate customers." [Wired News]