Monday, November 27, 2006

Sun/Opteron 4x cheaper than Bluegene

Simon Bullen's Weblog : Weblog
Nice comparison of supercomputing performance. Sun is 4x more cost effective than IBM's bluegene, plus you have ongoing savings in the maintenance. It looks like the difference is driven by the difference in number of processors, which could be attributed to the parallel intensity of the test program. However, it does raise some interesting questions about the economics of grid computing.

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

MSFT sticks a fork in OpenOffice

Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog : Licensing the 2007 Microsoft Office User Interface: "There's only one limitation: if you are building a program which directly competes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, or Access (the Microsoft applications with the new UI), you can't obtain the royalty-free license."

I wonder if the DOJ will take issue with this? So much for Office embracing open standards.

Friday, November 17, 2006

Ballmer on Novell, Linux and patents

Ballmer on Novell, Linux and patents: "Linux comes from the community -- the fact that that product uses our patented intellectual property is a problem for our shareholders."