Few things to do first with your new powerful PC

Yeah, install an OS :) Try another. Is it XP Pro 32 that blindly wipes any other partition on your hard drive? Or was it me who fat-fingered something on this Sun-compatible keyboard wrong? Anyway, I'm out of Win XP 64 and out of Solaris X right now. So what do I do with Win XP Pro 32? Uhmm... How about Need for Speed Underground 2? I remember it sucked big time on my 2-year old Athlon powered notebook. This new thing has got Opteron and an entry-level professional graphics card from nVidia, it must handle it, no? Sorry, dude. This game is just not meant to be played on a PC. Such a poor port from PS2 must be it...
Whatever.

Next step: go onto Inet. IE is fired. What for? mozilla.org :) Firefox it is.

Third, java.com, need latest Java runtime for playing games on pogo.com

Fourth, got bored. Back to trying to get multi-boot config... What should it be this time, Solaris X again, Java Desktop 2, or Win XP Pro 64? Which is less damage if it does not work? Solaris X it is, I should really give it a try. After all, Sun Micro has given me such a great deal on this machine.

It's not my B-day, it's not New Years... why did I get this present?

It's here, and it's beautiful. My Java Workstation with Opteron 150 has been delivered yesterday! I love this thing. It's quiet, but powerful, just what I always aspired (is that the word I wanted?) to. And it's got freebies I did not expect to get: it's got both Serial ATA and SCSI 320 interfaces! You will never find the info on this at the Sun Micro website, since the only drive installed is plain ATA, but these interfaces are there! This machine has such a great upgradeability potential. It's a pity Sun Micro would not divulge the details on some of the features of this workstation, like, they would not say if dual-core Opterons are going to work in it, since dual-core Opterons were not made available yet. (I should post few pictures, probably.) There is that thing on the side of the processor, two raised connectors that are HyperTransport connectors. What are these for? Can a daughterboard with (gasp!) second processor be installed into the case? Please, nobody tell me the truth if not :)

So, what did I do first once I got my hands on it? Well, I did boot it into Java Desktop 2, but after just a half an hour of browsing around, I popped in the Solaris X installation CDs (burned those couple of weeks in advance) and installed this 64-bit OS. Man, this machine truly ROCKS! They don't call this desktop a Java Desktop v. 3 for nothing, as many-many interfaces are written in Java. And it runs on what people used to tease as "slowaris". Yet it all runs so fast, so snappy!

That's enough of exclamation points for first post on the subject, thank you.

Important lesson

Boy, am I glad I'm not the one reponsible for this atrocious architecture I'm dealing with! It's nice to extract this important lesson, never distribute application components alongside data flow. Now the question is, will I be able to fix it? Seems worth trying.

Shocker: SUV drivers are patriotic, after all...

Who would have thought? All those drivers of SUVs, light and not-so-light trucks (it's kind of funny to see trucks in the parking lot of likes of Cisco Systems) are serving their country well on more than one count. One, obvious, they're predominantly buying US-made vehicles. Two, they usually tax-deduct the expenses. Three, they're helping to drive oil demand (and, consequently, price) up, up and beyond.

Leaving two aside, why three is good for developed nation like US? Easy, third-world (in fact, those anything-but G7 members) nations that are not themselves exporters of oil are thus denied this now precious resource to get developed. And those with meaningful export capability are made dependent on oil exports for attaining GDP (or whatever other benchmark measuring development), which makes such development unstable, unsustainable. And, curiously, when oil prices are high enough, globalization will take an interesting turn, isolating the countries physically. Thus, the time for gaining profits from outsourcing to likes of India and China is nearly over. Heck! It's aleady over, if executives' airfare is factored in :)

Thank you, gas-guzzler drivers!