Big, Big Iron · Yesterday April 17th we did a great big honking announcement about servers, er make that an announcement about great big honking servers. Frankly, I know pretty well zilch about this class of machine; I can relate to Web pumps like the T1000/T2000, and to an x86 meat-grinder like the X4100 (which an irritated little bird working for one of our customers just told me that you can’t buy at the moment because they’re sold out); but these supertanker-scale things we cooked up with Fujitsu are from another planet. I went poking around blogs.sun.com looking for something hands-on. Bingo (but, er, anonymous bingo, which irritates me; I’ve expressed my opinion on this internally). First, “EXOTERIC” was down in the trenches with Fujitsu and the iron, see New Sun-Fujitsu SPARC Enterprise Systems. Second, “BM Seer” fires a volley of benchmarks: bangbangbangbang. I may not grok the finer points of mainframe technology but you can follow pointers from the announcement to the M9000 and look at the heavy-metal pictures. Ouf. [3 comments]
FotD: April 18 Early Azaleas · This bush, Alex Waterhouse-Hayward told me upon hearing its description, is a Japanese Azalea; distinguished by vanishing, when it’s in full bloom, behind a solid mass of blossoms. When so covered it requires substantially greater skill than mine to photograph because the all that red overloads the camera. But at the moment it’s tractable. [2 comments]
