Windows Vista
While I was not privy to the phone call fielded by Kevin Turner, I’m going to assume it took place as follows (the Apple side of the conversation only):
Hello Microsoft,
We would like you to pull your ‘Laptop Hunter’ ads because, well, they are hurting our feelings.
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This article previously appeared in the July 2009 issue of The Interlocutor.
The Release Candidate of Microsoft Windows Vista, Service Pack 2, is now in public release.
This has got to be the smoothest beta ever of an existing product.
The current RC is rock solid, contains so many improvements over 6001 that in a vacuum, it should...(read more)
One of the limited editions of Windows Vista™, is the (PRODUCT) RED Windows Vista Ultimate Edition.
As you search for a lasting gift for you loved one/ones this Valentine’s Day, why not give the Windows Vista Ultimate (PRODUCT) RED ?
This is an INC(RED...(read more)
On October 26, 2008, I had the opportunity of being part of an exclusive group selected by Microsoft to participate in a Windows 7 Reviewer’s Workshop prior to the public debut of the Windows 7 beta by Steven Sinofsky on Tuesday, October 28, 2008, at the Microsoft Professional Developer’s Conference (PDC2008) in Los Angeles, California. (Read on)
For months now, I have excoriated you, both publicly, privately, and in backchannels.
Every time I read incorrect statements from supposed media hacks, I cursed you out!
Every time I read more phony assertions in the bloggorhea that sometimes consumes...(read more)
The Hewlett-Packard xw8600 Personal Workstation is the first ever recipient of The SmallBizVista.com Absolute Best Award.
Why?
The HP xw8600 is the best workstation on the market today. Period.
This workstation embodies the very best of the massive amount of engineering IP and manufacturing prowess HP has amassed over the past nearly four decades.
I have been in possession of a copy of this fine system for the past couple of months.
The HP xw8600 Personal Workstation
The xw8600 sits at the top of HP’s line of personal workstations, and is powered by your customizable choice of several Intel Xeon processors. As the top system in the workstation line, the xw8600 is configurable in so many ways that even the most demanding of users/companies will be accommodated.
Immediately, you notice that this system is built for speed, reliability, expandability, and power.
Unboxing
I took no unboxing pictures, for I was too excited tearing the box and setting the system on its testing pedestal.
However, some pictures of the unboxed xw8600 are below.
Target
The xw8600 is targeted at the upper end of the personal workstation segment. Indeed, if you require more processing power, you would have to get a cluster of these workstations together, or obtain budget authorization for a supercomputer.
For upper-echelon digital content creation producers, architectural design, engineering, oilfield and geologic/geophysical telemetry and analysis, and Wall Street types, this system is perfect. And without peer.
It is that powerful!
However, that power left me in a conundrum: how do I test such a system correctly, sufficiently reaching its performance headroom, and tasking components and subsystems in real world scenarios?
Have no fear though; I was up to the task.
Review Scenarios
In order to adequately review the xw8600, I set up a test scenario using each of the professions listed above. I also configured the system to serve as my command center for my managed services operations.
Scenario 1: Digital Content Creation
For the digital content creation or DCC testing, I used two tools to create content: Adobe Creative Suite 3 Production Premium and Microsoft Expression Studio 2.
The xw8600 seemingly made a mockery of the tasks I threw its way in this scenario, though a double-secret script I was given utilized all eight cores, and pushed the CPU’s VU meters to 100%. Even then, memory utilization was quite low.
Scenario 2: Architectural Design
Taking a different tack, I decided to be use Microsoft’s Caligari TrueSpace v7.6 to create a dream home.
While free, TrueSpace is not for the faint of heart. However, it allows even design neophytes such as yours truly, John Obeto, to be really creative.
I started with basic design, and then moved to using it to create a basic animation of the building.
The fluidity with which the twin NVIDIA FX5600 GPUs handled 3D modeling is just impressive. I was able to manipulate and modify my design very fluidly, without hiccups.
After getting somewhat depressed by the difference between what I wanted in the home as evidenced by my creation, and what I can afford, I pulled the plug.
However, I will gladly let HP provide me with the dream home I designed, so that I might re-test the xw8600.
Scenario 3: Structural Engineering
I drew on my earlier-in-life training to use AutoCAD and the xw8600 in an attempt to perform flow analysis of a part I designed.
Conclusion: design using the xw8600 = easy. Me, I need more classes, these past couple of decades away from the field having caused my design skills to atrophy.
Scenario 4: Oilfield Services and Geological Analysis
Geological analysis is one of the sectors that must be on the radar of the designers of this system.
As a result, I decided to use the xw8600 as the workstation for an oilfield services engineer.
In order to do this, I employed the resources of a client, a global oilfield services company, in the setting up of a client station with their software suite, allowing a selected user to use the xw8600 for the following:
It was cool seeing this guy warm up to the xw8600 as it performed his tasks easily, and I was most pleased when he looked totally dejected as I took his new ‘toy’ away from him.
I have informed his superiors at a certain French oilfield services company that we will be glad to furnish their entire African operation with HP xw8600 Personal Workstations. For a small fee, of course.
Scenario 5: Financial Services
Another target for this system has to be the financial analysis market.
For my review scenario here, I downloaded several client software packages from online brokerages and proceeded to install them on the xw8600.
Running all of them simultaneously, and reviewing the result of the four-monitor setup, my untrained eyes went straight into information overload.
Calming down, I tried to track trends, stocks, and futures like the pros, only using imaginary money. The week spent doing that was a revelation since it came during a time of great uncertainty in the (US) stock markets, and it provided me with results that were surprising.
Scenario 6: Remote Operations Center Console
One of the reasons I use a powerful desktop, or a converted server is that I want to have a system powerful enough to allow me to monitor and control our MSP operations from my remote locations, if required.
Enter the xw8600. This computer didn’t blink. With all the stuff I threw at it, it just kept on working. At all times, I kept a watchful eye of CPU utilization, which never seemed to want to get over 20%.
Scenario 7: Mega-tasking
The hardest task I took the xw8600 through was during my virtualization tests.
Since the system had passed each of the tests with excellence, I needed something so out there that it would bring the dual X5492s to a halt.
Mega-tasking
Mega-tasking
Mike Diehl taught me that word.When I was up at the HP Personal Workstation Business Unit in Fort Collins, Colorado, a while back, I had the privilege of being briefed by Mike, who is a Product Manager for the high-end workstations for HP.
Describing the roles and computing activities required by purchasers of such a system, and the many tasks I would perform as a power user, Mike let me know that I had gone past the power user level to a whole new realm – that of a mega-tasker. The sort of user for whom the xw8600 was conceived.
A true light-bulb moment.
What better way to task this machine to the fullest than by employing virtualization.
I cleaned out the xw8600, installed Windows Vista x64 Ultimate edition and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2* on it, and proceeded to create virtual machines, all Windows Vista Ultimate edition.
I then proceeded to replicate all of the test scenarios above, apart from the oilfield services scenario for which I did not possess the necessary software, and would not be making a return trip to their offices before I posted this review.
After setting up each scenario in a discrete VM, I brought each VM online until I had six VMs running concurrently. It was a remarkable sight!
It was at this time that the xw8600 started to show some signs of actually working, as opposed to the seemingly mocking 12% to 18% CPU utilization, I was seeing consistent readings above 50%.
Yet, my TrueSpace animation stayed fluid, indicating that even with such a heavy load, the graphics subsystem was not even doing anything more strenuous than reading the Sunday paper!
I was impressed!
*For this review, I have not used any unauthorized software. However, wink-wink, nod-nod, I know the xw8600 works well, and very well too, with both Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V, and Windows Hyper-V Server 2008.
*Furthermore, following PDC 2008, I hope to bring you a review of the xw8600 running those hypervisors, and….tada…Windows 7 alpha bits.
Conclusions
One of the things we tend to forget as a result of the Lego-like nature of the PC and workstation industry standard architecture, or ISA, is that simply plopping best-of-breed components into a fancy box does not a true workstation create.
A workstation, by its very nature, is like a tractor for the task it is designed for, unsexy, yet powerful and reliable.
HP’s Personal Workstation line embodies the very best of HP’s heralded engineering heritage, and it shows. From the entry-level xw4600, to the silent xw6600, and now the xw8600, I have reviewed a line of well-engineered and constructed workstations. (The nightmare of the beating these babies take at the physical testing and dropping facility at HP’s Workstation BU still scares me…)
The HP xw8600 is the best workstation on the market today. Period.
In every aspect, this workstation excels: engineering, build, configurability, reliability, future proofing, support, and power. The indomitable way it resolutely completes assigned tasks is just impressive
I tasked this unit to the max, each time trying to get it to sputter in protest; however, I could not achieve that. It just worked. Very well. Reliably, too. Moreover, with extreme dispatch.
There is no doubt that it will take and incredibly monstrous task to bring this system down, or at least slow it somewhat. It will do the work assigned to it in virtually all task scenarios.
The results of our review of this system placed us in a quandary: what honor do you award a product that has excelled in all facets? A product that went beyond excellence? Indeed, a product for which excellence could be described as ‘mere’, and just a starting point?
With that in mind, the editors at SmallBizVista.com decided to create an entire new class of award, one to be given only to those products we deem as going way beyond excellence.
Since the Hewlett Packard xw8600 Personal Workstation is simply the best deskside system in the world, we have honored it with the SmallBizVista.com Absolute Best Award.
Review configuration
In my review configuration, this xw8600 came with
While this system looks loaded for bear, and for most humanoid inhabitants of this planet, it might be overkill, please understand that this configuration is just about at the midlevel of what the HP xw8600 can actually do.
Apart from the wicked fast Intel X5492 Xeons (top-of-the-line) and the insanely powerful dual FX5600 graphics (top, too), everything else was pretty average.
Look at the maximum configurations you can achieve in the xw8600:
All these with configuration options allowing for 80 PLUS efficiency ratings.
For this test, I used four monitors, an HP w2207h 22” monitor (variable view, portrait or landscape), a Viewsonic vx2235 22” monitor, and dual HP w2007 20” monitors.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank everyone that made this happen, with my most gracious thanks going to Amy Reardon and HP. Jeff Wood, Will Wade, and the entire Personal Workstation team at HP, Mike Diehl for expanding my vocabulary, and finally Marco Pena and Edelman.
Light posting for the past several weeks due to being sick and completing a major migration at the day job.
I’ll be retro-posting on issues on my mind during that time.
According to a yum-yum on Cnet, it is a problem with people, not the code.
Say what now?
Describing Phalanx2 as "a self-injecting kernel rootkit designed for the Linux 2.6 branch that hides files, processes and sockets and includes tools for sniffing a tty program and connecting to it with a backdoor."
Okay…..
This drone then goes on to try to explain that while Linux may be ‘inherently more secure than Windows, as long as admins fail to secure it, it will be just as vulnerable.
That so, Sherlock?
Isn’t it amazing how the cattle try to moonwalk away from the truth every time?
Listen, dodo, that explanation holds true for every operating system.
However, since Microsoft has made ‘Secure by Design’ an architectural priority in Windows, the attack surface has decreased, and the number of vulns reported for Windows has been the best of any OS these past couple of years.
Contrast that to your stuff, yoyo!
You can now see why Linux, however much these clown bray about it, can never get traction with regular humans.
Can you imagine telling a business owner that the reason some criminal in some former Cold War country made off with their data is because it’s all about the people, not the code?
If you installed Linux as the operating system for your business, or your clients' business for that matter, he's right: it's your fault!
Linux, the favorite of the ‘live-under-the-stairs-in-my-grandma’s-basement’ crowd.
Not ready for business, Linux is!
In comments to my post, Taiwan starts orbiting the silly galaxy, reader ‘adacosta’ feels it is a sovereignty issue, while reader ‘Michael Turton’ starts back down that tired line of Windows Vista is bad.
Since I spent quite a few minutes on my reply,...(read more)
Just when you think it is safe to go outside comes the news of another formerly sensible country entering the silly constellation.
This time it is Taiwan!
In news straight out of Mad magazine, the powers that be at that manufacturing powerhouse have decided...(read more)
Sometimes, you just have to really wonder when supposedly smart folks hopelessly fall asleep at the wheel.
Case in point is the new series of ads showing real humans, not the drones at Gartner or Forrester, actually experiencing the ‘WOW!’ for the first time.
If rumors are correct, Windows 7, the next iteration of the flagship Microsoft client operating system will be publicly introduced at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in November of this year.
In order to avoid the public relations fiasco Windows Vista is today, Windows 7 must adhere to the following ten steps:
(This is a reprint from the July 2008 issue of The Interlocutor)
I have had a copy of the HP xw6600 Personal Workstation for review at the Orbiting O’odua for nearly a month.
The xw6600 is one of the smallest form factor dual-socket workstations on the market today. A product of HP’s over quarter-century of experience in workstations, this system came with an ultra quiet tool-less case*, dual quad-core Intel Xeon 5450 CPUs, and 4GB of DDR2-667 FBD RAM. This baby also came with a Quadro FX1700 with a whopping 768MB.
Workstations in general, and HP workstations in particular, were introduced to me as a viable alternative to the fully configured desktop computer system.
Pursuant to that, I received a couple of HP workstations to review. My review of the xw4600 follows below. The xw6600, which shares the same design and performance philosophies; as a result, that review will focus on the performance scenarios run by SmallBizVista.com.
Rampant shark jumping on the road to irrelevance.
For the past several months, InfoWorld, that formerly important IT tome, has been beating the Save (Windows) XP drum in an utterly transparent attempt to remain relevant in the collective minds of IT administrators.
Yesterday, I was at the HP facility in Fort Collins, Colorado, where I was briefed on HP's offerings in the workstation space.
I went in to see what the offerings were with a view to finding out more information about the systems, and to see if they would pass muster, and become Logikworx's recommended line of workstations, replacing our current line.
In a nutshell, I came away impressed.
I am in possession of the new HP 2133 Mini-Note PC for a review.
First impressions: this is a sweet baby!
Read onLast week, the news came down that the OLPC had decided to use Microsoft's Windows XP as one of the operating systems shipping with the system.
What a letdown for those folks looking to colonize the next generation of 3rd World inhabitants to satisfy their warped egos.
If the allegations made by a former OLPC drone Ivan Krstic are true, then Nicko is a real sick fucker!
Really, though, who didn't see this coming?
Who?
The unwashed mob that is known as freetards collectively by the rest of the human race (and affectionately as the Linux-heads by the open source proletariat), really, truly, wanted this to work.
When you tell a lie often enough, it takes on a patina of truth each time it is uttered, and after a while, it starts to sound like the truth.
Rumors of underhanded tactics, skullduggery, and outright bribery have been heaped on Microsoft since the win.
Microsoft has largely remained silent, in my opinion, allowing these rumors to fester.
In the just-concluded, successful standardization process for ISO 29500, aka OOXML, a lot of ink has been spent by the opposition to OOXML in trying to discredit Microsoft and the standardization process.
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