Moving…again

Okay…it looks like I’ll be moving again, but this time (hopefully) will be the last. “What’s the new URL?” you ask avidly, drooling over the thought of more nerd tech stuff. Well, I’ve dropped the Simplicitas title and decided upon CliftonSnyder.net. Original, no? Look there for future posts, because this bird has flown the coop!

(Thanks to WordPress.com for setting up this excellent service, and WordPress.org for the dirt-simple blogging software powering both WordPress.com and CliftonSnyder.net!)

 

Holy Heatsink, Batman

I’ve been looking for alternative cooling solutions for my home PC for a while now, as it runs pretty hot. However, most of the ones that I see are water-based, and I’m a little leery of putting anything that uses liquid that close to $3,000 worth of computer equipment. So today when I stumbled across this monstrosity, I caught myself thinking (briefly!), “Hey! Looks like Zalman might be able to help me out!” Part of what changed my mind:

“Drawing a massive 1400W of power, it comes with instructions on how to daisychain five 300W power supplies to feed it and apparently requires ’starter cartridges’ to get it spinning in the first place…”

Once again, I’m nerd enough to want one, and reasonable enough to not get one…ever.

Update: This is a replica of a considerably smaller – but still impressive! – Zalman CPU fan.

 

The eBayowulf Cluster

This may be pure, unadulterated navel-gazing, but I thought that if I didn’t have a post about the progress page that I’ve created for The eBayowulf Cluster then nobody would end up seeing it. (Who really pays attention to all the junk tucked away in the sidebar, anyway?) Check back for updates!

 

XBox 360 Architecture

Nobody who reads this will be interested at all in this (or, to put it in more flattering terms, 100% of my readership will be interested in this), but Jeffery Brown (Chief Engineer for the Xbox360 CPU Chip Development) has released an “introductory” paper on the design of the XBox 360 CPU Architecture. This is some pretty intense hardware – 3 3.2 GHz cores, a 5.4 GHz FSB with 21.6GB/sec bandwidth – and at first glance it looks like Tomasulo had a thing or two to say about its overall design.

If you have any idea what the picture above means (click for full-size), check it out. If not, I’d recommend checking out the comments on /. to find out what the Peanut Gallery has to say about all this…

 

Yellow Machine

This is (fairly) old news, too, but it came up in conversation today so I thought I’d stick it up here. What you see pictured here is known as the Yellow Machine Terabyte Storage Appliance from Anthology Solutions. It packages up  1TB of RAID-5 storage for $1,299 (or $1,999 for 1.6TB), and has an 8-port 10/100 built in. While Tom’s Hardware gave it a somewhat less-than-glowing review, I’m going to seriously consider it (or something like it) when I buy my next machine. The way I figure it, I’ll get the “best of both worlds” if I cannibalize the components on my current machine (some of which are still the best that money can buy) and only upgrade what needs upgrading.