hpcanswers - Slashdot User

Comment Re:beowulf (Score 1) 108

by hpcanswers on Tuesday November 14, 2006 @11:08AM (#16837798) Attached to: TOP500 Supercomputer Sites For 2006

just beowulf 100 PS3s together, that should be able to pull it off

Humor aside, I'm afraid some jackass would actually try this. First off, the PS3 doesn't support high-speed networks such as Myrinet or InfiniBand. And secondly, Sony is unlikely to ever provide support for any institution that uses a video game console in this manner, unlike IBM or Cray. I have a blog post specifically about this.

Why is OSS Commercial Software So Expensive? 718

Posted by Cliff on Wednesday October 04, 2006 @07:04PM from the not-cost-competitive dept.

An anonymous reader asks: "Our startup honestly wanted to use OSS products. We do not want to spend time for any OSS bug fixing so our main requirement was -official support for all OSS products-. We thought were prepared to pay the price for OSS products, but then we got a price sticker shock. Now behold: QT is $3300 per seat. We have dropped the development and rewrote everything to C# (MSVS 2005 is ~$700). Embedded Linux from a reputable RT vendor is $25,000 per 5 seats per year. We needed only 3 seats. We had to buy 5 nevertheless. The support was bad. We will go for VxWorks or WinCE in our next product. Red Hat Linux WS is $299. An OEM version of Windows XP Pro is ~$140. A Cygwin commercial license will cost tens of thousands of dollars and is only available for large shops. We need 5 seats. Windows Unix services are free. After all, we have decided that the survival of our business is more important for us then 'do-good' ideas. Except for that embedded Linux (slated for WinCE or VxWorks substitution), we are not OSS shop anymore." Why are commercial ports of OSS software so expensive, and what would need to happen before they could be competitive in the future?

Globalization Decimating US I.T. Jobs 1102

Posted by kdawson on Monday October 02, 2006 @12:08AM from the we-knew-that dept.

mrraven writes, "According to Ronald Reagan's former deputy secretary of the treasury in this article in Counterpunch, globalization is destroying US I.T. jobs. From the article: 'During the past five years (January 01 – January 06), the information sector of the US economy lost 644,000 jobs, or 17.4 per cent of its work force. Computer systems design and related work lost 105,000 jobs, or 8.5 per cent of its work force. Clearly, jobs offshoring is not creating jobs in computers and information technology.'" Paul Craig Roberts quotes a number of formerly pro-globalization economists who are now seeing the light of the harrowing of the US middle class. It's not limited to I.T. Roberts quotes one recanting economist, Alan Blinder, as saying that 42–56 million American service-sector jobs are susceptible to offshoring.

Yahoo To Open Up Email Authentication 75

Posted by kdawson on Sunday October 01, 2006 @12:10AM from the let-a-thousand-mashups-bloom dept.

Aditi.Tuteja writes, "Yahoo has announced it will give away the browser-based authentication used in its email service, considered to be the company's 'crown jewels.' Yahoo made the announcement ahead of a 24-hour 'Yahoo Hack Day,' where it had invited more than 500 mostly youthful outside programmers to build new applications using Yahoo services. Considering the different needs of its huge user base (257 million people use Yahoo Mail), Yahoo has decided it can't build or buy enough innovation, so they are enlisting the worldwide developer community." The code will be released late in 2006. Yahoo notes that there are 'no security risks' since they keep absolute control of usernames and passwords.

MS Planning Free Web-Based Business Software 132

Posted by Zonk on Friday September 22, 2006 @12:20PM from the word-gets-online-calls-some-folks-newbs dept.

nieske writes "In response to Google Apps for Your Domain, Microsoft is also planning to release free web-based business software. The software will be ad-supported, but a paid, ad-free version will also be available. From the article: 'Revenue from software licenses for Office and the Windows operating system accounts for a bulk of Microsoft revenues. The challenge for Microsoft will be to make sure a free or, possibly, a subscription-supported version of Works won't hurt sales of its dominant Office software, which accounted for a quarter of the company's $44 billion in sales last year.' Would you choose an ad-supported online version of Microsoft Office over other free options like OpenOffice or Google Apps for Your Domain?"

Apple's Moment — Consumers Want To Download To TV 295

Posted by kdawson on Thursday September 21, 2006 @10:26AM from the last-10-feet dept.

ack154 writes, "With so much recent news surrounding Apple's upcoming iTV system, their timing may be nearly perfect. Ars Technica gives the rundown on a recent report, released from Accenture, stating that about half of users surveyed across the globe are now looking to get downloadable videos, movies and other content onto their TV. Based on the article, if Apple can get the right combination in features, price, and usability, many consumers may be ready to eat it up. Macworld has more speculation on Apple's potential living room dominance."

Would You Date Microsoft? 247

Posted by Zonk on Saturday September 16, 2006 @03:39AM from the i-will-refrain-from-comment dept.

teslatug writes "Channel9 has an interview with Bill Hilf of the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft. Hilf argues that the majority of companies advocate open source solely so that they can drive customers to their core business, which is not open source. He calls this his 'donut theory.' Hilf also sees RedHat in this model, with support being their core. He compares this to dating, where you have to offer your date value in order to entice them. In his view, Microsoft offers developers a platform where they can make money selling their software. The virtues of 'free as in freedom' and the value of open source to the desktop users are skirted, but he makes an interesting point about big businesses like IBM and Oracle."

HP's Dunn Stepping Down 301

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday September 12, 2006 @10:34AM from the backlash dept.

XJHardware writes "Yahoo news is reporting that Patricia Dunn is stepping down from the chair of HP." From the article: "Hurd will retain his existing positions as chief executive and president and Dunn will remain as a director after she relinquishes the chair on Jan. 18. 'I am taking action to ensure that inappropriate investigative techniques will not be employed again. They have no place in HP,' Hurd said in a statement. Dunn apologized for the techniques used in the company's probe, which included 'pretexting' in which private investigators impersonated board members and journalists to acquire their phone records."

YouTube Growing ... Like Cancer? 174

Posted by Zonk on Friday September 08, 2006 @11:53AM from the i-want-that-kind-of-disease-problem dept.

PreacherTom writes "The success of YouTube has been staggering: they currently field 100 million videos per day and have attracted the attention of influential people like Bill Gates, who may be planning his own video hosting service. However, growth does not always equal profitability. Incorporation of ads risks their very base. If that were not enough, like Kazaa, they struggle with the Damocles' Sword of Litigation hanging over their head each day while bandwidth and server costs continue to rise. Is this phenomenal growth only rapidly killing our favorite video warehouse?" From the BusinessWeek article: "YouTube could easily alienate its users by overwhelming them with ads. And the startup has to figure out how to attract a broader group of marketers by filtering more for copyrighted or offensive videos and by creating more channels of similar content. Aware of the risks, YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen are moving slowly to ramp up advertising. They have been wary of asking viewers to sit through a 30-second ad before a two- to three-minute clip. Instead, YouTube is developing new formats, like ones rolled out in August that let marketers build their own video channels or pay to place a video on YouTube's popular front page."

Xbox for Stroke Rehabilitation 147

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday September 07, 2006 @02:30AM from the play-your-way-to-a-healthier-you dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Using an Xbox modified to run Linux, researchers have developed virtual reality hand exercises for rehabilitating stroke patients. An inexpensive glove controller is used to interact with the Xbox. The hardware cost is a tenth of a comparable commercial hand rehabilitation system, leading to the possibility of deployment in patients' homes."

IronPython 1.0 is Born 285

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday September 06, 2006 @06:34PM from the metal-snakes dept.

dougblank writes "IronPython version 1.0 was just released after 3 years of development. Jim Hugunin, the creator of Jython and the lead developer of the Shared Source IronPython, made the birth announcement earlier this week. From the announcement: 'I wanted to understand how Microsoft could have screwed up so badly that the CLR was a worse platform for dynamic languages than the JVM... I found that Python could run extremely well on the CLR — in many cases noticeably faster than the C-based implementation. [...] Shipping IronPython 1.0 isn't the end of the road, but rather the beginning. Not only will we continue to drive IronPython forward but we're also looking at the bigger picture to make all dynamic languages deeply integrated with the .NET platform and with technologies and products built on top of it. I'm excited about how far we've come, but even more excited by what the future holds!'"

PS3 Client for Folding@Home Debuts, ATI GPU Version Soon 177

Posted by timothy on Thursday August 24, 2006 @08:18AM from the fwip-fwip-fwip dept.

eliot1785 writes "Stanford's Folding@Home project is reporting that Sony debuted a Folding@Home client for the PlayStation 3 today in Germany. Researchers hope to use the power of the PS3's Cell processor to greatly expand the number of FLOPS of which their network is capable. F@H also announced today that they will release a client capable of running on ATI graphics processors. With these two new developments, F@H hopes to raise the total power of their distributed computing network to 1-10 petaflops. At the upper end of that target, the network would be faster than any current supercomputer, at least in terms of FLOPS." Reader TommyBear points out a collection of papers showing scientific advances made by the F@H researchers.

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