Run out of steam?

After yesterday’s hotbed of LJ postings and comments it seems everyone’s run out of steam today.

Maybe there’s only a finite flux of comments and yesterday’s huge outpouring emptied the whole reservoir and now we’re having to wait for it to refill.

Anyway, who cares? 🙂

Today’s been a pretty dull day in more ways than one. Firstly, it’s been a day of not very interesting work and the weather’s dreary too.

Still, tomorrow afternoon there’s a Sun Technology Seminar over at the Computing Labs which includes a free lunch and (gosh) information which is not for general release on upcoming wonders of Sun marketting, sorry, technology for which I’ll have to sign a non disclosure agreement. This will be, of course, a software technology ‘cos in the hardware stakes Sun is dropping behind on the raw performance side.

If you were strapped for cash and needed a computer to do lots of number crunching, would you:-

  1. Buy a Sun Blade 1000 with twin 900MHz UltraSPARC III processors (which under benchmarking show that they are a third less efficient than the current x86 processors per clock cycle) and 1GB of RAM for around £10,000.
  2. Buy a dual Athlon MP 2000+ machine with twin processors, 1GB RAM and more disk than on the Blade 1000 plus a complete set of spare parts for £5000 which is basically twice the raw computing power.

Hmm.. tricky, eh? The Sun is more reliable, yet the Athlon box is almost disposable but you can maintain it yourself for half the cost.

What an honour.

It seems that I’ve been given the honour of a special community by kickadee because, unlike Ian I didn’t have one already. How nice of her. Still, I’m not sure being in the shadow of Ian is such a good idea. 🙂

Jen’s entry in her journal yesterday has got me thinking a great deal too.. both about the ephemeral nature of life and of word contruction. It’s good to think.

PS. Here’s a link to the community.