More interestingly, cutting the weight would improve the handling of the Tesla - and given that the current Tesla matched a 911 GT3 on Top Gear's test track, I'd expect to see a capacitor powered version up there in Corvette Z06 territory.

Bring it on!

If I had mod points...

Picture the scene.

A newly silicon enhanced woman arrives at the beach, removes top, lays on her back....

and deploys combination sunshades / solar arrays from her chest!

anti-speech hate laws.

Not sure whether you meant to put it that way round, but it's so much more true than 'anti hate-speech laws'.

Kudos to you if you meant it, excellent Freudian slip if you didn't.

Er...

Those cars, though built by a German company, are actually made in Cowley, Oxford.

Just sayin'

If you want to see lots of St George's cross flags, try visiting the white parts of the old industrial towns around North Manchester - it's a statement up there, much like the Confederate flag is a statement in the Southern US.

Thanks - I was after responses, not mod points, and have been educated by the responses I've got.

I was being deliberately provocative, because I wanted insightful answers why Microsoft isn't the way to go in this field.

Sorry I got modded up, but that's /.

Cobblers.

The correct reaction to 'piracy' is to enable the consumers of 'pirated' goods to access your content at reasonable cost - a cost that makes the 'pirated' goods less likely to be consumed.

The content producers have to face reality - they are charging too much for their product, especially in a world where disposable income is not only decreasing, but has other calls (mobile phones, games consoles, beer) on it.

Their problem is that their pricing model hasn't changed since the 1970s, when the other demands on disposable income did not exist, and digital formats for media did not exist either.

Now that people have less of their disposable income to spend on content, and the means exist for the virtually cost-free exchange of the content, the content producers need to bite the bullet and change their pricing and marketing models.

Face it - copyright laws intended to protect physical products aren't appropriate to the digital realm, and a new approach is needed.

That's unlikely to be the case in the HPC market, though - Microsoft will never get the penetration it would need to control that market.

Browsers are a different matter - Microsoft already had a near monopoly on the desktop when it shafted Netscape with the vastly inferior IE.

Microsoft is trying to enter a market here that they don't stand a chance of controlling, mainly for bragging rights - I think that's got to be good for the market as a whole, because as I said, they have a lot of bright people working for them, and may bring some useful tricks to the party.

I hate to defend Microsoft, but...

Crap hardware support? Who cares - you're running numerical calculations, not a bloody game on some tossy video card.

Crap vendor support? This vendor will have been given full support by Microsoft, and will be equally supportive of their users.

Performance? They're in the top 10.

Stability? If you're not dealing with odd hardware / crappy drivers, Windows Server versions are actually fairly stable.

Why not run your compute nodes under Windows?

You can actually run Windows Server 2000 and above headless, removing any GUI overhead - so why not?

I still agree that on any particular hardware configuration, Linux or another *nix will likely be faster, but your experience of desktop applications doesn't necessarily translate to HPC.

Well, since the arse is likely to fall out of the office applications market soon (due to Google Apps and Open Office), perhaps Redmond has decided to take HPC seriously?

I'm no Microsoft fan, but so long as their HPC solutions don't require any vast learning curve, then I welcome their interest in the market - they have developers (and chairs) to throw at it, and diversity is A good Thing®, surely?

Arr, ye scurvy landlubber - that be a galley ye were looking for!

An' there be plenty o' reasons for lassies on ships, me hearty :o)

The GGGP was specifically referring to using rail for long haul, trucks for short, so I was tailoring my response to that idea.

OK, so you may not have the infrastructure in place now, but for us Europeans, who are overexposed to Russia for our natural gas supplies, it's a good idea.