Author: Eugene

Posted on

It’s dead Jim

My wife’s cellphone has finally given up the ghost. If you squeeze and twist it just right, you can get it to start up, but then it dies again. I figure all the times she’s dropped it has knocked something loose inside the phone. So now I have to go find her another one. I was looking at the Motorola V400 because it’s a pretty nice looking phone, but it has no IR port. She uses the IR to beam stuff between her PDA and phone, so now I’m trying to decide if I should just replace the Nokia 6360 with another one or go with the 3200. The 3200 does a little more than the 6360, but it has a smaller battery which might not go over too well with the wife.
This is what Nokia puts on their cell phone battery pages:

Replacing a Battery?
A new Nokia phone may cost you less than a battery, after rebates, with a new wireless service plan.

I wonder if this is a sign of how much of a commodity cell phones have become, when your batteries last longer and cost more than your cell phone…

Posted on

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!

This would be a pretty sweet machine to get my hands on. 1024 Itanium 2 processors all acting as a single computer running off a single Linux image, rather than 1024 separate nodes like in regular clusters. Throw in 3TB RAM and 370TB of storage and you’ve got some serious computing at your fingertips. When it’s operational, it alone will account for 1/6 of NCSA‘s computing power and doubles their existing storage space.

The SGI® Altix® system, to be named Cobalt, will consist of 1,024 Intel® Itanium® 2 processors running the Linux® operating system, 3 terabytes of globally accessible memory, and 370 terabytes of SGI® InfiniteStorage that will serve as the Center’s shared file system, accessible by other high-performance computing resources within NCSA.

Found at Slashdot.

Posted on

Chillin’ on the beach.

Yesterday’s beach picnic turned out reasonably well. The rain stayed away long enough to get everything grilled, people to eat and spend some time playing on the beach. As expected, I spent most of the time walking back and forth between the two grills we had going to cook all the food. Didn’t have quite as many people come by as we expected, so there was plenty of food left over. And just as I planned, setting out the pulled pork a little after most people filled up on burgers and hot dogs (“Oh wait, there’s some pulled pork barbeque too!”) meant that there was plenty of pulled pork left over for me :). Excellent…

Posted on

Tour de France Day 16

It’s a hot toasty day after yesterday’s climbs devastated the group. Today is a relatively flat stage, which I’m sure will be used as a welcome rest stage after yesterday’s stage and in preparation for tomorrow’s stage heading into the Alps. I don’t expect too much of a change in the standings today unless something big happens. I expect Voekler may hang onto the yellow jersey for another day unless yesterday’s effort left him too drained to stay close to Armstrong.

Today’s OLN word of the day is BREAK AWAY.

Posted on

Stargate: Atlantis

I liked it. I think it’s going to be a cool spin-off with bad guys that make the Goa’uld look like playground bullies. The new digital Stargates in Atlantis are pretty spiffy looking. The only problem I had with it was that the new team had absolutely no trouble communicating with they aliens they found in a whole other galaxy millions of light years away. I’m still looking forward to the upcoming shows though. Hopefully the Stargate writers don’t fall into the same trap that the Star Trek writers seem to keep falling into and recycling plots.