You can have him send 1 or 2 of those panels my way. lol.
Off Topic: How does 03 run with games and video encoding programs? How does it compare in resource usage(mostly RAM) vs XP?
i will tell you what i tell everybody who asks, its everthing xp isnt, light, fast, stable, low on bloat, its just a joy to use, snappyer then xp, never crashes unless I CAUSE IT by installing something like a driver i know may be problematic(beta apps that use drivers and such, only happened 2times so far, and i fixed the cause myself)
on install 2003 has allmost nothing excess installed/enabled, if ur gonna use it as a server you set it up as a server using eather their wizzard/guided method or manualy.
if you want to use it as a workstation, well then just follow any one of the guides to setting windows 2003 up as a workstation(google windows 2003 workstation guide) or do what i started doing use nlite to costomize your install so it has ur drivers and prefered default settings for windows pre-enabled on install(saves you about 5-15min depending on how fast you can change all the settings manualy to dissable stuff like shutdown event tracker.)
for gaming u just gotta enable video acceleration(set to low by default for best server stab) takes a few seconds, my total tweak to gaming time after install is like 30seconds, if you want help trying it out gime a holler i have a few things that speed the prosess up
as to SGI, last i heard hey where in trouble, possably going under, and i said intium not intium2, eather way tho, they have sold far less units then server opteron's, and i would guess they even have sold less then sparc/ultra sparc in the same ammount of time!!!!
sparc is a good design, RISC multicore, VERY responcive, very powerfull, oh yeah and the ultrasparc is true 64bit, as it should be!!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC
incase you dont know what sparc is, after all unless u have delt with it personaly you probbly dont know about it, i had an old sparc system(it died to an ef gf who couldnt understand not to drink around my computer stuff, she got drunk and fell on it and crused the case(no joke) never could get it to work after that
)
i was playing with an ultra sparc laptop a that a friend has(used for developing software and scripts for sparc servers) the damn thing for 6gb ram in a laptop, running solaris10 with java desktop, it just FLYS!!!!!
as to your "ia64 can run x86 emulated" yeah at what 1/1000th real time speed?, the demo i saw of intium running x86 software was so slow it was like being back on a 486sx25mhz with 4mb ram and windows 95(HELLLL)
and to the top500, 2nd is an opteron, the cray redstorm
"The new No. 2 systems is Sandia National Laboratories’ Cray Red Storm supercomputer, only the second system ever to be recorded to exceed the 100 Tflops/s mark with 101.4 Tflops/s." most are Power Architecture based but your vaunted Itanic2....i mean Itanium 2's best showing is 7th place, behind even the xeon!!!!
"The NovaScale 5160 system built by the French company Bull and installed at France’s Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique (CEA) slipped to No. 7, despite a new Linpack measurement of 52.84 Tflops/s. The original system debuted in the No. 5 position in June."
thats your vaunted Itanium 2 in action hehe humm 52.84 tflops/s vs 101.4 tflops/s, i will take the opteron
i seem to see more opteron super computers on the top 10 then itanium2's, strange,since according to you its the better chip.........
4 Itanium2 in the top 100.....
16 opteron in he top 100........
4 vs 16 why do you think that is, if as you say ia64 and Itanium2 are better then opteron/amd64 why are there only 4 super computers using them on the top 100 vs 16 opteron systems?
http://www.top500.org/list/2006/11/100
count for your self if you like