[Beowulf] Sidebar: Vista Rant

[Brian Dobbins]

> Wrongo.  Win2K was never REALLY pushed as a consumer product.  But now
> try getting a new system over the counter with anything but Vista on it.
> Sure, if you special order or buy online you can get XP -- probably at
> full retail.  But seriously, the market is being saturated with Vista
> systems.

Just to add two cents here: I know someone who recently purchased a new
laptop from a store, and of course, Vista was installed.  Not even one day
into its use, though, a SATA error (from a Windows Update!) caused
crashes.  They used the recovery capability, but that then led to other
problems, so they just said to hell with it and bought a copy of XP...

Then they had to get the drivers for XP, which was -mostly- painless, and
in the course of doing, came across a report from the manufacturer of the
system saying that they get countless numbers of people requesting XP CDs
in exchange for Vista due to problems.  So, yes, do systems come with
Vista?  Sure.. but a lot of people are exchanging it in frustration, and
it frustrates customers and manufacturers alike.  It'd be really
interesting to see statistics of how many people actually use Vista on a
day to day basis... I don't trust the sales numbers for the above reason!

On a completely different note, since some people were speaking about
checkpointing in the Linux kernel (which then led to this thread, I
believe!), I'd encourage everyone interested in such things to look into
the Berkeley Labs Checkpoint Restore (BLCR) software.  According to their
roadmap, they're aiming at having Torque integration complete by SC'07,
and it already works with several MPI implementations for checkpointing
parallel jobs.  The link is:

  http://ftg.lbl.gov/checkpoint/

Cheers,
 - Brian (who actually found Win2K to be quite decent!)