Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) | by Linux fortune |
Cancel me not -- for what then shall remain? Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes, A root or two, a torus and a node: The inverse of my verse, a null domain. -- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad" | |
I'll grant thee random access to my heart, Thoul't tell me all the constants of thy love; And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove And in our bound partition never part. Cancel me not -- for what then shall remain? Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes, A root or two, a torus and a node: The inverse of my verse, a null domain. I see the eigenvalue in thine eye, I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh. Bernoulli would have been content to die Had he but known such a-squared cos 2(thi)! -- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad" | |
New Linux Companies Hope To Get Rich Quick (#1) Adopt-A-Beowulf: the latest company to hop the Linux bandwagon as it tramples down Wall Street. Every geek dreams of owning their own Beowulf supercomputer. Very few people (except for dotcom billionnaires) can afford to build one, but the folks at Adopt-a-Beowulf can provide the next best thing: a virtual beowulf. For US$49.95, you can "adopt" your own 256-node Beowulf cluster. You won't own it, or even get to see it in person, but you will receive photos of the cluster, a monthly newsletter about its operation, and a limited shell account on it. The company hopes to branch out into other fields. Some slated products include Adopt-A-Penguin, Lease-A-Camel (for Perl mongers), and Adopt-A-Distro (in which your name will be used as the code-name for a beta release of a major Linux distribution or other Open Source project). | |
Excerpts From The First Annual Nerd Bowl (#7) JOHN SPLADDEN: In this final round, the two teams must assemble a 16-node Beowulf cluster from scratch, install Linux on them, and then use the system to calculate pi to 1 million digits. This is the ultimate test for nerds... only people in the Big Leagues should attempt this... [snip] BRYANT DUMBELL: Look at that! Instead of messing with screws, the Portalbacks are using duct tape to attach their motherboards to the cases! That should save some time. [snip] They've done it! The Mad Hatters have completed the Final Round in 2 hours, 15 minutes. That's one hell of a Beowulf cluster they produced... drool. SPLADDEN: With that, the Mad Hatters win the Nerd Bowl 105 to 68! There's going to be some serious beer-drinking tonight back at the Red Hat offices. DUMBELL: Linus Torvalds has emerged from the sidelines to present his Linus Torvalds Trophy to the winners. What a glorious sight! This has definitely been the best Nerdbowl ever. I pity those people that have been watching the Superbowl instead. | |
Affordable Virtual Beowulf Cluster Every nerd drools over Beowulf clusters, but very few have even seen one, much less own one. Until now, that is. Eric Gylgen, the open source hacker famous for EviL (the dancing ASCII paperclip add-on to vi), is working on a program that will emulate Beowulf clusters on a standard desktop PC. "Of course," he added candidly, "the performance of my virtual cluster will be many orders of magnitude less than a real cluster, but that's not really the point. I just want to be able to brag that I run a 256 node cluster. Nobody has to know I only spent $500 on the hardware it uses." Eric has prior experience in this field. Last month he successfully built a real 32 node Beowulf cluster out of Palm Pilots, old TI-8x graphing calculators, various digital cameras, and even some TRS-80s. He demonstrated a pre-alpha version of his VirtualEpicPoem software to us yesterday. His Athlon machine emulated a 256 node Beowulf cluster in which each node, running Linux, was emulating its own 16 node cluster in which each node, running Bochs, was emulating VMWare to emulate Linux running old Amiga software. The system was extremely slow, but it worked. |