As an Apple evangelist at heart, I was trying to connect a friend of mine, who used to work at the Theory Center and now works for the National Institutes of Health in DC on the human genome project, with someone at Apple who could get him an evaluation account on an Xserve. The Xserve is Apple's new rackmount server, and George is pretty sure the dual-processor model would blow away the DP Pentium systems they've been testing their number-crunching stuff on lately.Through some fairly amusing (and aggravating) lack of attention to detail on the part of the folks I've been talking to, enough people at Apple assumed there was someone at Cornell who wanted to test the thing that a unit was shipped from Atlanta to our system engineer in Syracuse, for him to hand me.
So I set it up this morning (it's a loud son of a bitch) and gave George an account. The twin rows of little blue lights, which indicate CPU activity on the dual processors (1 GHz PowerPC G4 chips), show George has the thing pegged with his test code! The iPod is sitting on top to give an idea of scale. It's much deeper than I imagined, having only seen them front-on in photos, or actually installed in racks.
This isn't something I'm going to want on my desk for long. It's not too loud outside my office, but for Joy (office-mate) and me, it's nasty.
