Monday, June 21, 2004

MGM is releasing this as a Director's Cut Michael Cimino: "Heaven's Gate" 8:05:20 PM    comment []

Apple sells supercomputer sequel. U.S. Army contractor snaps up $5.8 million, 1,566-server supercomputer, as Mac maker angles for its share of the market. [CNET News.com] First trunking software is announced today and now this! Apple's sure on a wild tear to convince people it has the most kick-ass products out there on the desktop. Hopefully they will continue to reap good press with these supercomputer installations. I'm amazed the Army supercomputer only needs the 1Ghz Ethernet connections to run well. I would have thought they needed the Infiniband links like VA Tech is using. But I'm sure that cut a million dollars of the final cost right there. Those Vixel Infiniband PCI-X boards and switches CANNOT be cheap. 7:22:22 PM    comment []

Unisys pushes the ES7000 envelope. Performance up, cost down By Datamonitor . [The Register] A 16 CPU ES7000 using Itanium chips has one of the lowest cost per transaction per minute of all the servers out on the market. And this is running a re-compiled Itanium version of Windows. Amazing stuff, I thought I would never see on Intel. Maybe they will get the big payday they always hoped for Itanium. That kind of performance is pretty amazing and if you add the cost savings for the SysAdmins with Windows experience (not Un*x experience), you're talking a still lower cost TPC. 7:17:01 PM    comment []

Link Aggregation networking software for Macs updated. Small Tree Communications today released version 1.4 of its IEEE 802.3ad Link Aggregation networking... [MacNN | The Macintosh News Network] It's kind of gratifying to think someone, anyone has gone to any trouble to make the Mac software necessary to allow trunking to work correctly. Back in the bad ole' Mac OS 9 days I didn't hold out much hope for Macs ever being able to take advantage of this feature in some Cisco switches. Now, just pay your money, install the software, configure the switch and you're moving date at 400Mbits/sec (on a four port NIC)! It shows how fast OS X is attracting interest from the development community. It really isn't that hard to have the same functionality most commercial Un*xes have (like Solaris, HP-UX and AIX). 7:13:53 PM    comment []

Foveon 1/1.8" X3 Image Sensor. Foveon has today issued a press release announcing the F19 1/1.8" Type CMOS 'Direct Image Sensor'.[Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)] Things are still looking good for that low-end Polaroid digital camera using a Foveon X3 chip. Can't wait to see it come out and reviewed by dpreview. Hopefully it will be as good as the high-end product using the X3 chip. If it is, I'm going to finally buy a nice high end camera. Unless of course Smal Camera continues to improve the capabilities of it's own camera kit and SDK's. 6:44:39 PM    comment []