Damn it. Why'd they have to go and outdo my super-cluster here @ tech?

Maybe we'll buy a few more machines w/ all the space we're saving...

Remember the laughable excuse that the 1100 G5s sold to Va Tech caused the delay of *all* the 2GHz G5 pre-orders? Talk about the RDF in overdrive, Apple already had a signed deal with Va Tech when it said the 2.0 GHz G5s would ship on time as promised. Seemed like every iLemming bought this pitiful excuse.

This Army order will be the perfect excuse for Apple to claim that the IBM Fishkill G5 chip plant had to shift production for this order before making the 2.5 GHz G5s. Remember you heard it here first.

Back from vacation I see, RC. Who gives a s#!t if they miss a date? Your petty RDF-iLemming bitching is old and tired. Like some washed-up entertainer desparately trying to get a laugh from the jokes written 20 years ago. (What pitiful excuses will you have bought when Longhorn finally ships in 2010 and Linux on the desktop is still just over the horizon...?)

In the end, Microsoft's continual gaffes may eventually push the industry where it needs to go. People aren't the nascent techno-dolts they were even five years ago. People are wiser and a bit jaded by the pablum being force-fed to them by the WinInfo camp. Microsoft will no longer be (should never have been) the end-all/be-all of computing.

There's no bad way to "spin" this news. A few more high-profile sales like this and enterprise interest may finally reach critical mass.

Up is down, left is right, black is white. What color is the sky in your world RC?

Unemployment and wasting the day away posting on this board must really get be fun in your world, eh?

This can only be good news. Oh - BTW - Apple is catching up on their Xserve orders:
http://www.thinksecret.com/news/xservebackorders.html

Nothing like having people beat down the door for your products!

RC maybe you can convince the Army to use Linux instead of OS X. Hehehe.

$20,000,000 = 4k Itaniums = 20 teraflops (Lawrence Livermore "Thunder" machine)

$ 5,800.000 = 3.1k G5s = 15 teraflops (US Army)

What was Lawrence thinking? For 20 million dollars' worth of G5s they coulda hit 51 teraflops.

This is just a start of the big orders for super computer clusters.

The ironic thing about these deals is that it puts Apple in direct competition with IBM for super computer sales. In other words IBM's microprocessor division is beginning to compete with IBM's other divisions via of the G5 for large-scale scientific installations and at a faction of the cost of IBM's solutions.

I gotta get me one of those. I have a storage room in the basement of my house I'm building. Probably about 350 sq. ft. I wonder how many racks I could squeeze in there

...sell a few of these every year and Apple might get back into the black.

Huh? What's that you say? Apple has HOW MUCH money in the bank?

Oh. I thought they were doing poorly, y'know from reading CNet...

Well, too bad they can't touch the average consumer market.

What? HOW MANY iPods? Oh. Well, y'know from reading the news, I thought that Napster and Dell....nevermind.

That's not bad for a company that's gonna quit making computers. Or are they going out of business? I read that...somewhere....

/sarcasm

Quote

BriAnimations wrote:
Damn it. Why'd they have to go and outdo my super-cluster here @ tech?

Maybe we'll buy a few more machines w/ all the space we're saving...

Hello Folks,
I find this depressing news. Whenever technologies make killing more efficient for militaries around the world, it makes war-fighting that much easier.

I don't know what kind of simulations they'd be doing with this multi-processor practice field for killing, and I know some claim that simulations can be used to reduce civilian casualties, but Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman argues, to the contrary, that the main point of simulations is to desensitize soldiers to make them more likely to supress inhibitions against killing. The same can be applied at a larger scale if this is planned for strategic, rather than tactical, simulations.

I know the litany that "our military exists to deter wars, etc." but every nation tells themselves that - and in US history it is quite an indefensible proposition (just to look at the 19th century: see the invasions of Indian lands, the theft of 1/3 of Mexico, interventions in Central America, the theft of Hawai'i, and the colonization of Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, Guam, and Yap in what the US calls the Spanish American War) (see for example, Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States).

As Eisenhower said, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." (http://www.military-quotes.com/Eisenhower.htm)
Apple's idea of "computing for the rest of us" apparently doesn't include the civilians who this machine will, if installed, help to kill. (It hasn't been reported much in the US, but the US military killed at least 3200 Iraqi _civilians_ in the first phase of the recent Iraq war, for example (http://www.comw.org/pda/0310rm8exsum.html). And this figure, of course, also doesn't include the US soldiers ordered to their deaths by Bush, Rumsfeld, et al or the Iraqi soldiers ordered to their deaths by Saddam Hussein.)

I'm not speaking for the campaign here, but if you're interested in helping to stop merchants of death, please see http://www.warresisters.org/merchants_death.htm.
Using Apple's computing power to practice war making isn't "good for the platform, " it's a sad example of ethical bankruptcy. As General Omar Bradley said, "The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants." (http://www.hillwatch.com/PPRC/Quotes/International_Politics.aspx)

In Peace,
Sam Diener

Sam, I encourgae you to register as a member and post a new topic on this matter in our politics forum. It's apt to get more attention than a post in a topic about Apple selling a cluster to the military.