On Wed, 21 Nov 2007, Tim Cutts wrote:
I have to say I have some sympathy with that view. Much though I love OS X as a desktop OS, I have to wonder why anyone would jump through hoops building a cluster running just Darwin, when they could probably have done it much more easily, and with much more community support, if they used Linux... It just seems like a lot of extra pain and difficulty for no tangible benefit.
And at premium prices for the hardware. Apple's OS is constrained, as I understand it, to run only on Apple hardware. So instead of actually tuning the cluster to the application with the full palette of available hardware, packaging, networks, vendors, service plans, and more, you're pretty much reduced to picking items off of a single catalog with a limited set of configuration options that without exception are resold to you at top dollar. One day Apple will make up its mind about whether it is a hardware company or a software company. I vote soft, and thought that once they supported generic Intel even their main company management would "get it". It continues to think "hard" though, probably because they armtwist a significant premium out of their customers for buying their stuff and because it locks many of those customers mentally into buying apple forever as they identify apple AS a computer company and say they like apple computers, when what they really like is apple's software. Sun needs to make the same choice. rgb
Tim
-- Robert G. Brown Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305 Durham, N.C. 27708-0305 Phone(cell): 1-919-280-8443 Web: http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb Lulu Bookstore: http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=877977 _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
