Primitive humans see animals getting drunk, primitive humans does the same.
Primitive humans is high and is seeing the gods of the forest and the nature, start to make up stories about those trips under subjective changes in perception, thought, emotion and consciousness caused psychedelics, dissociatives, and deliriants.

That is the base of all cults/religions, whatever.

Dead Sea Scrolls are cool, but no differ from the trips written by our ancestors.

John M. Allegro was an adviser on the dead sea scrolls to the jordanian government.
In his book "The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross: A Study of the Nature and Origins of Christianity within the Fertility Cults of the Ancient Near East", he points the primitive trips from the dead sea scrolls. He points that christ is a cover up story for the use of Amanita muscaria.

*Entheogen -> psychoactive substances used in a spiritual context.

I do not know about your research/project. But, here on the university I do my research , once you get "money for something" you must apply for that... If the money is to buy a few computers for parallel programming, it must be used this way. And you can not use the same money for cloud/grid "rent a hour".

1 - is your program cpu intensive only?
2 - is your program memory intensive?
3 - how about disk usage?
4 - Are you guys "driving" a pre-made program/package/solution (like gaussian/columbus) or developing one ?
5 - How many people gonna use your cluster?

Best practices for any of those situation are, in case you are using "boring linux":
1 - customized kernel for better performance
2 - allocation of resources using CGroups
3 - in case of developing you own program you could read about "intrinsic functions" and make your program faster.

TuxOnIce do a pretty good job for me, takes like 10s ~ 12s. laptop specs are: core i3, sata HD and 4gb ddr3.

Those tests was made using default kernel specs. It would be nice, for comparison, to customize the kernel , and using the awesomeness of CGROUPS: 1 - allocate process into groups with specific memory usage, I/O usage, swapness levels; 2 - exclusive cores for the 3D processes. 3 - higher cpu shares for the 3D processes. All the nice stuff you can do with CGROUPS. One thing is testing the default spec of ubuntu, other is tuning and testing again. Tuning both of the systems to make another benchmark. Not a single mention to cgroups in that benchmark article.

Do not forget the 443 and others SSL doors. Most of those new exploit/connect back/trojans take advantage in those doors, that are generally opened without restrictions.

"The Nexus of coolness orders you to buy cool stuff." - Hans Sleiman Van der Meher - Dutch Philosopher

Now I know why they canceled the job exams (C, Perl and Linux Admin) I was about to do this week for a position at IBM-LTC. =(

I have been using xfce since 2001 on debian... Great desktop environment....

My 2 opnions 1 - lulzsec is a covert ops... from US gov. Bringing chaos to approve censorship in the internet. 2.1 - People that find out a way to exploit a big botnet network and taking advantage of the "heat of revolution" made a lot more people to "donate" their machines to a botnet, exploits, previous hacked documents. 2.2 - People that worked in a way to spread malware for a couple of months or years and built their own botnet network and taking advantage of the "heat of revolution" made a lot more people to "donate" their machines to a botnet, exploits, previous hacked documents. I strongly believe in the number 1.

I built one with Debian Lenny plus I developed a scheduling system in perl using kernel containers + CGroups. So, the research team would think they own a "real" linux and I can share resources in a better way. Also I used perl-cgi to make a containers design, this way no one touchs my real OS. The research leader just use my container design to create and deploy new containers, then the new container is booted in a testing machine so the person can install whatever he needs and cloning later to deploy on the cluster, 400 core + 1.8TB ram.

The Nexus Effect: people follow whatever others are doing to be: cool, happy, health, w/e.

Since when Japan need help from outside? Last time I went tourist to Japan-Tokyo (2009), the hotel manager went to me with a towel and a soap and said: "Thanks for stay with us you can have it." Then I was: O_o? The hell are you talking about? Why I would need hotel stuff? Then he said: Because your people not from Japan always steal it. Don't even like to remember that, went to police, embassy... Was a fucking mess. He received some sort of punishment like help to collect garbage or donations to someone, not sure.