Oh yes, I love laptops

I'm at the Tea Garden, finishing up my paper on missing data methods for social sciences data. The power just went out - the lights went out, the stereo stopped, and a hush fell over the building. My home machine isn't responding to pings, so I'm guessing that it was the whole neighborhood.

A laptop with a battery is just like a desktop with a UPS. Power failures are an annoyance, not a catastrophe.

Interestingly, Xcel Energy doesn't have outage info on their website. My ISP does - what is Xcel ashamed of?

Finally, a 17" mac book pro

Apple released the product I wanted. A 17" mac book pro, fast Core Duo processor, and the all-important Firewire 800 port. Ordered a couple days ago, eagerly awaiting arrival. More news as it happens.

OpenStep 4.2 on Mac Book Pro

Hee hee hee - now this is the kind of legacy app support I love to see.

OpenStep 4.2 booting, in the Parallels VM environment, on a mac book pro.

Probably not work safe... but fun to read

I came across this while looking up a web link for the previous "meditate, candles, smack" posting... god, I love google.

Sayings

I saw this recently at the Tea Garden in St. Paul:

I meditate
I light candles
I drink green tea
and I still want to smack someone!

Sun T2000

We got a demo Sun T2000 server at work. I can't wait to put this puppy through its paces. We've got a couple older sun boxen coming off warranty, and need to be replaced. This thing was built to eat java-based web serving for breakfast. And this brings a note of joy to an ex-Sun employee's heart.


# prtdiag -v
System Configuration: Sun Microsystems sun4v Sun Fire T200
System clock frequency: 200 MHz
Memory size: 16376 Megabytes

========================= CPUs ===============================================

CPU CPU
Location CPU Freq Implementation Mask
------------ ----- -------- ------------------- -----
MB/CMP0/P0 0 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P1 1 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P2 2 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P3 3 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P4 4 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P5 5 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P6 6 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P7 7 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P8 8 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P9 9 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P10 10 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P11 11 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P12 12 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P13 13 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P14 14 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P15 15 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P16 16 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P17 17 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P18 18 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P19 19 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P20 20 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P21 21 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P22 22 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P23 23 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P24 24 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P25 25 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P26 26 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P27 27 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P28 28 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P29 29 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P30 30 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
MB/CMP0/P31 31 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1



I'm reminded of something I thought about Sun, Sparc, and Solaris back in 1994 or so when I started at Sun, and the SuperSparc implementation was Sun's top-of-the-line CPU... and it sucked: "If you've got slow CPUs, make sure you've got a lot of them". The UltraSPARC-T1 isn't a particularly fast CPU, but there's 8 cores and 4 threads per core, and for throughput-based load, this machine should rock. More details as we do the numbers.

Half-Life 2 on an intel iMac

OK. Now we're talking. I'd been surprised that the rumor boards I read didn't have anything to say about gaming performance on apple's intel hardware running Win XP. The above link set me straight. Looks like it rocks.

The rumor boards DO say that the 17" mac book pro might be out within the next month or so. Gotta wait for that.

The other thing I haven't heard about is Solaris 10 x86 running on a mac book pro or a mac mini. That's be sweet. I'd be game to replace my Sun E3000 with a mac mini running Solaris x86. The lack of redundant power supplies is perhaps an issue, but if the power supply fails, I can just run out to the apple store and get another, and it'd drop my power bill by quite a bit too.

Grad School!

I got notified on wednesday that I've been accepted to grad school at the U of Mn Master's of Science in Computer Science program. It may take me 6 years to finish, at one class per semester, but it'll be an interesting ride.