Fixed that for you. The answer is no. My child will live to a see a very different world and economic reality.

This. The whole series is very well done and deeply engaging. But it is dense. It might be best described as fictional mathematical physics, but it is not your typical SF...even hard SF.

I had the Timex Sinclair 1000 as well, but not 16KB module. Paid $60 for it at Hills--I was in 6th grade. It learned quickly to be careful with my precious 2k of RAM, but I coded a fairly accurate image of the Space Shuttle and figured out how to make it "fly" across the screen. Hard to believe I have been writing code for almost 30 years!

I think the key take-away is that there is another physical signal dimension to exploit--frequency, directionality, polarization, and now orbital angular momentum. They have demonstrated that they can distinguish between two channels on the same frequency using orbital angular momentum as the differentiator. So, OAM mode can be added to the tool kit. If they can distinguish among a few dozen modes and still allow beam forming, this could provide a huge benefit for cellular and other wireless networks. If they can distinguish among hundreds or thousands of modes, it could be truly transformative. It has been a long time since my EM class, but I wonder if similar mode discrimination could be applied to waveguides.

Sandy Bridge has fused multiply-add too.

Probably referring to efuses that can be burned out on the die. These are common and allow CPU/GPUs to have unit-specific information (like serial numbers, crypto keys, etc) coded into otherwise identical parts from the fab. Video game systems like the 360 use them as an anti-hacking measure...disallowing older version of firmware to run on systems that have certain efuses "blown." Likely, there is an efuse for each core or group of cores. Those can be burned out if they are found to be defective or to simply cripple a portion of the part for down-binning. That is a practice at least as old as the Pentium 2.

Truecrypting external USB/eSATA drives are by far the better option. We also use normal 3.5" drives with external USB/eSATA docks. There are NO cheap tape solutions anymore. I'd further argue that what tape solutions exist are trumped by hard drive backup solutions for on-site backup--far slower and no more reliable than hard drives. Tape is dead. Anyone still using them is either leveraging a 5-to-10-year-old investment in a tape robot or is being sold a bill of goods by a vendor.

I have to agree about the heft. But I prefer the "old" style interface. I had to install Office 2007 to interact with some clients and I am completely lost. I've been using word processors since the C64 days, but this is the first time I decades that I have stared blankly at a program and had to click on every menu/button/active splotch trying to find out how to turn on Track Changes.

Of course, people can get used to the interface and maybe following the mythical transition, I will be enamored with its interface glory. But it just seems different for difference's sake...like .docx and .xlsx where.

To the LibreOffice folks, you really need to do a top-down performance/memory analysis. I like it and will continue to use it, but I don't see why it needs to be the resource hog it is.

I think you need more than an oven. I did this last year. This is the way to go. A few pots, some charcoal, and a leaf blower:

https://picasaweb.google.com/102078715126217612220/MeltingHardDrives

The difference is even bigger than you posted! You made a math error on the Sandy Bridge FLOP calculation:

64 Sandy Bridge Cores: 8 FLOPS/Hz * 2.8 GHz * 64 cores = 1433.6 GFLOPS

48 Magny Cours: 4 FLOPS/Hz * 2.1 GHz * 48 cores = 403.2 GFLOPS

So, Sandy Bridge is roughly 3.5 times faster than AMD.

And the original poster commented that the application was parceling out data sets and crunching on the independently, so the application is embarassingly parallel. This design would be rubbish for any *real* parallel application, but I think it is optimal for OP's stated goal.

OK, I won't be too hard on the discussions above, but I read enough to try to give some real help to the OP. I get that this is basically an embarrassingly parallel application. So, that means a gigabit network is fine. That also means that single core performance is the ONLY indicator of the speed of the application. That means investing in anything AMD is a mistake. The best bang for the buck is quad-core Sandy Bridge CPUs. 4000 pounds is about $6300. I can build a quad-core 2.8 GHz Sandy Bridge node (2GB/core in a desktop case) for under $400 each. Cables, Gbit switch, and 15-16 nodes (60-64 Sandy Bridge cores total) will fit in the budget without too much effort.

OK...so, it isn't ECC memory. And it isn't general purpose. And it isn't going to run most parallel applications worth a crap due to the gbit network, but the point of building a cluster is to design it to match the application. 64 Sandy Bridge cores will run rings around any Magny Cores solution you can build for the same price.

FORTRAN is not that uncommon, particularly among engineers.

Not enough ram. The 8 cores are still four or five years old. And the most damning thing is the gigabit interface. That severely limits what real work can be done...embarrassingly parallel stuff like rendering, primes, SETI, or folding will work. But not comp chem or CFD. We haven't built a cluster using gigE for interconnects for 3 or 4 years. And when we did, we used multiple gigE links per node to try to keep up.

This is stupid.

I am a big proponent of open-source software. I like the idea of being able to build my own versions of software, fixing bugs and adding features. I use it as a key component of my business. It is great. Moreover, most of the code that me or my employees write is or likely one day will be open source.

However...open hardware is a fundamentally different thing. No one has chip fabs in their basement. So someone will have to pay big money to make the masks and tape-out and test the hardware. Unless some major vendor picks up the design and mass produces it lots of 100s of thousands, the price per CPU is going to be stupidly more expensive than an off-the-shelf CPU/motherboard or embedded system. And, even then, you are probably buying an overpriced, underpowered CPU just because it is "free."

This is Stallmanism as its worst--"freedom" for freedom's sake without regard to functionality or practicality. Stuff like this casts a shadow of crazy.

If they want to change the name back to OpenOffice, great. But the 3.3.1 release of LibreOffice is quite nice. I've gotten sucked into a lot of document generation in the last few months and I've found it to be quite stable and usable, even when dealing with MS Office .docx and .xlsx files.