engineers and libertarians, mostly. Nowadays, no one needs to waste the bandwidth on OS fundamentalism, unless they're truly in need of a life. Cheese Louise. Apple's painted itself into a nice little corner with its closed, proprietary system 'for the rest of us.' No problem. Y'all have yourselves a field day.
But when I want a scalable, enterprise strength platform, it's going to be either Wintel, or something with dual MIPS cores running whatever RTOS and/or Unix variant the work demands.
When I want an industrial strength database engine, guess where I'm goingto look - it won't be in Apple's direction, that's for sure.
For a real rubber-meets-the-road experience, check out data center infrastructures. Go visit your local ISP. Apple's MIA, and rightly so, 'cause it doesn't have the stuff.
Moral of the Story: pick the right tool for the job, and don't expect a toy to do an industrial tool's job....
Has it ever occurred to you that you might want to actually know a few things about the computers that Apple sells, BEFORE you say things in a public forum that make you look foolish??
15 gigaflops and a BSD based OS aren't enough to suit you?? (you claimed WINTEL as being enterprise capable so BSD based ought to be PLENTY strong enough for you)
Since you CLAIM to be a geek, perhaps you will find Wired to be a credible source of information where Hardware is concerned.
If so, then DON'T click here (That's a Whole Lot of Power, Mac) unless you want to face your foolish inaccurate bigoted biases.
| Apple promises the dual-processor machine can perform an amazing 15 billion floating-point operations per second, or 15 gigaflops. According to Apple, this allows the machine to run Adobe Photoshop about 70 percent faster than an Intel Pentium 4 at 2 GHz. And encoding video is 300 percent faster, Apple claims. At 15 gigaflops, the new PowerMac is firmly in supercomputer territory. When Steve Jobs unveiled the first G4 PowerMac two years ago, the 500-MHz chip performed at up to one gigaflop. |
| The new PowerMac is stimulating a lot of people's techno lust, including the nerds at Slashdot, who until recently were cool on Apple. But Mac OS X, which is based on Unix, is steadily drawing Linux aficionados into the Macintosh fold. The new PowerMac is especially attractive to scientists who build supercomputers from clusters of Macintosh machines. "It looks like dynamite," said Victor Decyk, a physicist at University of California, Los Angeles, who recently helped to build the largest Macintosh cluster yet, by hooking together 56 dual-processor G4s. "I'm going to order one as soon as I can." A few years ago, Decyk and a pair of colleagues began playing around with G3 Macintoshes and were impressed with their performance. "Not only was the performance faster than the Pentiums but it was comparable to the performance achieved on some Crays," the team said in a report. Further investigation showed that Macs are very easy to hook into parallel clusters and perform extremely well, thanks to the PowerPC chips and Mac OS X. Dean Dauger, one of the team members, recently got an 8-node Mac cluster to perform an ultra-complex calculation that contains 100 million mutually interacting particles. A few years ago, the same calculation could only be performed on the world's largest supercomputers, he said. Clusters are becoming an increasingly common way to perform supercomputer tasks on the cheap. Simply hook up a bunch of off-the-shelf computers and set them to work in parallel on complex problems. Most clusters are based on Pentium machines that run Linux. But according to Dauger, Linux clusters require a PhD to set up and to run. By contrast, Mac clusters are so easy to make, even 11-year-olds can do it. "There's a book called How to Build a Better Beowulf that's 230 pages long and tells you how to set up clusters with Linux," Dauger said. "We have a one-page manual (PDF) that shows you how to do it on PowerMacs. We've had high school students do it. We've had junior high school students do it. We even had a sixth grader in Hawaii do it." "It took NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory two weeks to put together a 16-node Linux cluster." he added. "I could do the same thing in less than an hour." Dauger added that Linux clusters are extremely fragile: If all the machines in the cluster aren't running the same version of the kernel, everything grinds to a halt. By contrast, a Macintosh cluster can be made from a mix of G3 and G4 Macs running Mac OS 9 or X. Dauger, who is 29 and a recent graduate of UCLA with a physics doctorate, formed Dauger Research a short time ago to commercialize his expertise in Macintosh cluster computing. He sells parallel-processing software, called Pooch, and offers his services as a consultant to help build clusters. However, he hasn't done any consulting yet because all of his clients have figured it out for themselves. All they need are a few G4 Macs, some Ethernet cables, a hub and the Pooch software. Getting it up and running is as simple as installing the software and configuring it through a couple of dialog boxes. |