may have just helped in intercepting a key decision and plan. It was the plan of our Division to convert a Linux HPC cluster into a Windows Compute Server, deploying it across approximately 32 nodes.

Not everybody was happy with this decision which made by just one junior staff, especially after I had voiced my own opinions. That guy, a regular Windows user, was rather frustrated. He wanted to convert a perfectly-operational Linux cluster into something else. He wanted to do so because the *nix system administrator who runs the Linux supercomputer has recently left. Without much clue about the alternative route, he went ahead and made a proposition to the management, contacting Microsoft in the process.

It worries me when such decisions are pushed forward by people who are not qualified to judge. The initiator does not know anything but Windows, let alone is able to draw a comparsion between different high-performance solutions (IBM have clearly stated that Linux is superior in that arena).

The person in question was/is bound to go to a training course on using Windows supercomputing, but an afternoon IT staff meeting will review the whole plan and possibly scrape it. I feel as though I have, to some extent, prevented a huge and expensive mistake from being made. That was my Linux advocacy for today and it was done locally, where it truly matters, rather than over cyberspace.

Not the actual box. Treat as
placeholder for illustrational purposes.

When you see a great deal, you simply know it! 149.95 dollars will buy you:

• AMD Duron 2.8 GHz Processor with 800 MHz FSB
• 180 Gigabyte Hard Drive
• 256 Megabytes of RAM
• K7MNF-64 nVidia nForce2 Socket A Motherboard
• nVidia nForce2 chipset

[...]

The machine will of course run GNU/Linux. It seems too good to be true, so I remain skeptic. Having toyed with the cart feature, it seems to be genuine though. The site statistics (Alexa, Netscraft), as well as some other available products, seem to suggest it is real.

Noteworthy: get Windows and double the cost of the worktstation…

Related item: Expensive Developers, Cheap Hardware

Screen-shot of Metisse for FVWM

ESTERDAY I read about three-dimensional displays, which are said to require no glasses and make stereo-vision a reality. This seemed like ‘queue hopping’ from a scientific point-of-view, so I had to read it carefully and identify some points of skepticism. I was successful in finding some gaps and deficiencies, which a careful read would quickly reveal (albeit the headline is very eye-catching — an exaggeration within or even beyond reason).

If you have some idiosyncratic interests which pertain to the study of vision and human-computer interaction (HCI), you may find some of my past essays on the topic intersting:

• Spherical Display
• The User Interfaces of Tomorrow
• 3-D Interaction on the Desktop
• Accelerated X Draws Competition
• The Desktop Sphere
• Next Generation of X
• Spherical Desktop

A shrimpy yet fully-functional USB drive

Here are a couple of fun lists which I have recently come across:

• Top 10 Strangest Custom Gaming Systems
• Ten Products Google Should Develop (hypothetical)

Some even contain videos.

OME time ago I linked to a screenshot showcasting Boot Camp. This involved Mac OS X, Ubuntu Linux, and Windows running simultaneously. There now exists a public video, which illustrates this rather exciting experience. Well, it is exciting to folks like me…

[Video omitted one week later]

This shows nothing unprecedented or novel, but it can be pleasant to watch if you fancy operating systems.

The last time I embedded an off-site video, this led to trouble and invalidated the markup. Let us hope for better luck this time around.

The little ‘object’ on the left has the most responsibility. The laptop may act as merely a relic, a host.

The title says it all. It is
Booting Linux on a Mac from an iPod”>yet another story which illustrates the versatility of GNU/Linux.

Think about this scenario for a moment: Using an iPod to boot Linux on a Mac. No, we’re not kidding. This is exactly what writer Dave Taylor describes in a new online article at LinuxJournal.com entitled “Yellow Dog Linux Installs Neatly on an iPod.”

What happens when every time you receive a product and it breaks, time after time? You lose confidence, right? Here is the story of a rather stubborn guy.

Apparently, Szarek has had not one faulty Xbox 360, not two, not even three. No, he’s had four, count ‘em, four malfunctioning Xboxes, and he’s pissed, especially since he read that the console’s maker, Microsoft, feels customers who complain about faulty Xboxes should take their gripes elsewhere.

Older item: Xbox 360 Off to a Slow Start in Japan