laptop that is. Long story. Took me too long to make up my mind (more than 96 hours). At the end of the day the issue for me was not price but specific features functionality and performance. Yeah, so I am atypical. The major contenders were IBM/Lenovo, HP, Dell, Alienware, Sager/Clevo, and one or two others. No, I did not give Apple a serious look. To be frank, I can’t stand OSX.

Short post. I was having a conversation on how to do some things on a cluster, and an idea was born. I’ll flesh it out a little more later on, but the gist is, can we create an application specific language (platform independent, for the hordes of windows cluster users in addition to the Linux cluster groups) to handle job flow? Right now, the vast majority of queuing systems launch shell scripts.

Yeah, I have days like this too …

Have a look at TheFunded. Personally I think the current model of pitching one after another ad nausem may be inefficient. Knowing what we are getting into ahead of time with VCs is helpful. Its a shame that there is no real disinterested systematic vetting of business plans such that we can create a more efficient market for capital, by providing well vetted/organized/thought out business plans, and a relevant group of good VCs.

Turned required registration off for comments. I want to see if our spam filters will stop the spam before it gets posted. If any shows up, it will be deleted. I want this blog to be open and bidirectional. I don’t want it to become a repository for suppository advertising. If it works, we will keep it this way. If it doesn’t we will revert to registration for comments. This has little to do with our gentle and numerous readers, it has more to do with whether or not we have the abusers appropriately fenced off.

Saw this article linked from/. In it there was an indication that Microsoft paid some bloggers to write up stuff which later became quotes. Bloggers got income, Microsoft got leverage their quotes and their names. But is this ethical? First off, Scalability.org is not an ad-supported site. We don’t run ads. We have pretty good traffic for a small blog, but this is not anyone’s day job. The only thing it really costs me is time, and it is pretty minimal in the bigger scheme of things.

The day job has signed up with an excellent partner to help grow the market for reliable and fast HPC storage servers. We have two partners in the US, one in India, and we are still working on the EU … Update: Working with them on fixing the pricing, it appears to be off. Thanks for letting me know.

Well, the laptop is not broken, but the USB ports are. Which means my mouse doesn’t work. So I have to use the track pad. Which means as I type my mouse pointer jumps all over the place. Owie. Going to buy a new laptop soon anyway. Wish someone had a quad core out there (big evil grin) with 4 GB RAM, super nice nVidia graphics, 15.4 inch screen, 160 GB SATA 7200 RPM drive.

Go have a look at the specs. Specifically at the read and write seek latencies. Everyone say it with me now …. oooooohhhhhhhhhh aaaaaaahhhhhhhh. If this is the case, then 15kRPM FC/SCSI is pretty much over. These units come in SAS and SATA at these densities. JackRabbit will be quite happy.

Wish I was there. Have an injured foot, recovering slowly. Not sure what I did. Aside from that, costs to fly into Dresden were huge. Looked at Frankfurt, Berlin, Prague … Ugh. Maybe next year. Microsoft PR sent me some information pointers, I invited them to post here. Hopefully they will. I want adoption numbers. Looking over the PR and thinking it through, if they were having a massive adoption, I think that would be what they would talk about.