Brian Dobbins wrote:
Wrongo. Win2K was never REALLY pushed as a consumer product. But now
try getting a new system over the counter with anything but Vista on it.
Sure, if you special order or buy online you can get XP -- probably at
full retail. But seriously, the market is being saturated with Vista
systems.
Just to add two cents here: I know someone who recently purchased a new
laptop from a store, and of course, Vista was installed. Not even one day
into its use, though, a SATA error (from a Windows Update!) caused
crashes. They used the recovery capability, but that then led to other
problems, so they just said to hell with it and bought a copy of XP...
Then they had to get the drivers for XP, which was -mostly- painless, and
in the course of doing, came across a report from the manufacturer of the
system saying that they get countless numbers of people requesting XP CDs
in exchange for Vista due to problems. So, yes, do systems come with
Vista? Sure.. but a lot of people are exchanging it in frustration, and
it frustrates customers and manufacturers alike. It'd be really
interesting to see statistics of how many people actually use Vista on a
day to day basis... I don't trust the sales numbers for the above reason!
On a completely different note, since some people were speaking about
checkpointing in the Linux kernel (which then led to this thread, I
believe!), I'd encourage everyone interested in such things to look into
the Berkeley Labs Checkpoint Restore (BLCR) software. According to their
roadmap, they're aiming at having Torque integration complete by SC'07,
and it already works with several MPI implementations for checkpointing
parallel jobs. The link is:
http://ftg.lbl.gov/checkpoint/
This is good news and one that will help us a lot. Now if I can just
pry AiX of that new IBM cluster of p575's...
Cheers,
- Brian (who actually found Win2K to be quite decent!)
Nope, NT4 was the end of the evolutionary peak. It's been downhill from
there.
Gerry
--
Gerry Creager -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Texas Mesonet -- AATLT, Texas A&M University
Cell: 979.229.5301 Office: 979.458.4020 FAX: 979.862.3983
Office: 1700 Research Parkway Ste 160, TAMU, College Station, TX 77843
_______________________________________________
Beowulf mailing list, [email protected]
To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit
http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
