To code or not to code … that is the question. Seriously … my time is a zero sum game. I can’t run as many threads on my CPU as I wish … its hard to code and debug and sell and service all at once. Gonna have to get some hiring going. Or some cloning. Gaak …

This is the question I have for dust. Almost ready for initial release. Fixed most everything, and the one thing we are “punting” on is actually less being punted and more being worked around until we can get a better solution in place. The spec’s for it will be on the site too soon. Ok … so assume a pure Redhat or Centos system (will work with others as well) for the moment.

Saw a link to this at troglopundit after hearing that the Detroit Lions had somehow miraculously, won another game. Restore the roar [ ](http://troglopundit.wordpress.com/about/computertechnology/) Heh! (don’t know if I agree with the reading material on the lower left … we have lots of kids books, fiction, histories, and other as our “supplementary data” … to each their own). Follow the link (if you dare) by clicking on the image. This will take you to the page it was on (where I found it linked from after the search), where they have the Zombie food group.

See this. The concept, review programs for something potentially wasteful, is great. Thats wonderful. Looks like @GOPWhip was busy getting concepts together. Whats really bad about this? It starts out targetting the NSF, which is a miniscule … tiny … fraction of the federal budget, and one of the only aspects of the federal budget that has a net ROI. We get positive impact from this investment. Which apart from the NIH and a few other programs, we don’t get in general from government expenditure.

This is more of a business general issue than an HPC business issue per se. We have lots of conversations with customers. We do lots of RFP responses. And we win some and we lose some. But the thing I find hardest to deal with are potential customers going mute for long durations. Maybe there is nothing to report, maybe people don’t want to speak after making their decisions. Whatever the reason.

Sigh. money quote Yeah, these are older data, but the problem is … The Walmartization of security. and then So … they seem to have not noticed that these new techniques and machines … don’t really help. Our tax dollars at work.

So we have a number of customers looking at particular configurations. Like many others, they get quotes from all over. Including from companies that don’t really have the slightest clue about what is being asked of them. Which means, we as often as not, get quotes tossed back to us with a note saying “you are at too high a price”. While the quotes they are comparing to aren’t even meeting the basic spec.

We’ve been looking at building a gateway/firewall machine, with load balancing, failover, and many other nice features. For security purposes, we’ve wanted to run it in a very particular way. All the distributions we’ve tried: clearOS, Vyatta, Endian, IPFire, Zentyal … all of them … sorta … kinda … did what we wanted. Sorta. Kinda. But not quite. ClearOS never worked. I mean it installed, configured, but it could never pass packets correctly.

Basically we have changed the chassis we use to one providing better cooling, and better OS drive access. In the case of the JR4, we should have better backplane fault isolation, at the cost of a few more wires to deal with internally (e.g. shouldn’t impact customers at all). Costs will be about the same, but serviceability will be easier. All fans are hot swappable, as are power supplies, and disks, including OS drives.

We’ve had issues in the past with ‘partners’ taking advantage of our willingness to work with them, in order to have everyone come out ahead … the customer, the partner, and us. This approach to partnership means all sacrifice a little, but everyone wins. Unfortunately, it also requires that everyone behave in an honest manner, honor their agreements. We are treating all discount requests as a partnership request. A customer wants a lower price on something.