[update: 8:49am 27-Jan-2009] Yup … my spam-box is at 20012 and counting. [update 2: 8:29am 31-Jan-2009] 25188 and counting … wassamatta, they couldn’t get me to 30k by the end of the month (16 hours away)? Sheesh … On a positive note, Thunderbird is able to handle 25188 email sized box without problem. I remember when 1000 emails would give email clients fits … Our spam filter is a pipeline. It can handle quite a load … we have been email bombed before, and far from causing the server conniptions, it handles it quite well.

Having used it, watched it crash, hog memory, stall, screw up rendering, … I have to wonder exactly what the Mozilla corporation is thinking by releasing this stinking pile of bits. My laptop is a dual core Intel machine with 2.5 GB ram, and a fast 7200 RPM SATA drive. And it is brought to its knees by firefox 3.0. A third of ram gets snarfed by it immediately upon running.

/. indicated that as of this moment, Redhat is worth more (higher market capitalization) than Sun. So I checked it out. As of this writing, RHT has a market cap of $2.62B, with $0.76B cash on hand. This suggests that the company has a value exclusive of cash, of about $1.9B. Not bad for a company that doesn’t actually make the technology behind its core product offerings. As of this writing, JAVA has a market cap of $2.

News (I guess not unexpected) this morning is that Microsoft is cutting staff, Intel is closing down underutilized resources and cutting staff, IBM is cutting staff, and we heard yesterday from John at InsideHPC.com of more cuts at AMD. Having been on the wrong end of RIFs before, I know what it is like. I empathize with those effected. Having run a company for 6+ years, I know the abject terror of the other side of this.

Ouch. We test our JackRabbit and Delta-V (ΔV) units extensively … long burn-in times, after any firmware updates. We like to run into the problems in-lab as compared to in-field. Some customers get annoyed at what they perceive to be slow shipping, but we want to know, when it leaves our lab, that this machine, and all its parts, works. It appears that Seagate is having an issue with this last bit.

John West has a great commentary at InsideHPC.com. First I recommend, if you haven’t read it, by all means, read it. He points out that Addison Snell (a former colleague during SGI days) stands by his HPC spending/market analysis of several months ago. Further, he notes something I saw in another press release recently, that indicates that financial services firms are remaining committed to HPC. John’s summary of Tabor’s results notes that purchases may be deferred or placed on hold.

Doug has worked his magic, and turned our … er … aggressively cold weather, into a sales tool. We are having a 10% off sale. Details here. Yesterday, when I drove into work, the car thermometer registered -18F. Yup. Thats right. Should be warming up soon though. I hear we might crack 10 degrees . On the + side of 0. Soon. Meanwhile, shoveling snow was … er … fun … (not!

So we have something like 5 different Cuda capable machines in the company. My laptop, an older Quadro FX 1400 based Opteron 275 based machine, a GeForce 8800 based machine, a dual GTX260 based machine, and a Tesla machine with 3 GPUs. The latter is to be our new desk(side|top) personal supercomputer offering. Pegasus-(I|A)(3|4)G. Complex .. dealing with case/PS issues now … rest of it works fine. Current unit is powered by a Shanghai pair which we are testing with.

Working on a quick project for a partner. I haven’t done much fortran programming in the last few years, mostly C, Perl, and a few other things. Its been a while, but now I am remembering why I disliked multi-language programming in the past. You have to fight with the linkers (and compilers) to get them to do the right thing. Stuff that should “just work” doesn’t. I really, really, just want to call c_Function(argument1, argument2, .

Seagate appears to be having an issue. A fairly large number of drive models, recent models, both enterprise and desktop, appear to have some serious failure issues. We have been using Seagates for a while, they have been reliable. We have seen a higher failure rate than they report, but we chalked that up to a assuming Seagate marketing using a somewhat optimistic interpretation of test result statistics. Call it a mis-set calibration point.