[geeks] Second Life is not a game?

[Mike Meredith]

On Wed, 1 Aug 2007 08:28:29 +0300, Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 31, 2007 at 05:20:26PM -0400, Joshua D. Boyd wrote:
> > Anyone who can't afford a $17,000 Mercury Cell Accelerator cards,
> > or the unknown price IBM Cell blades?
> 
> I guess so, but I have a stupid question. Since Linux is so similar
> on any platform it runs, why? Since you can get a quad processor 
> (actually 4 "core") 64 bit X86 computer for so little, why buy
> a PS/3? What does it offer?

Because it's faster :-

http://dl.alphaworks.ibm.com/technologies/cellsw/cellFMwhitepaper.pdf

Of course this only works for those who write their own code, but some
people do.

If you've laid down a big chunk of cash on a large box to run
computational tasks on, buying a PS3 for the associated developers
makes a lot of sense.

> I don't know again. I don't see them getting a lot of income from
> a company using them. A company would probably buy one boxed set,
> and possibly join their "network" for online support and early access
> to their releases, but that's what a $100 a year? 

Look, go and have a look at their list of customers. Does that seem
like a company having trouble making ends meet ? They may be lying of
course, but for the purposes of this discussion we can assume they're
telling the truth.

-- 
Mike Meredith (http://zonky.org/)
        It's a bad idea to let third parties generate outbound mail
        traffic from your mail system to destinations of THEIR choice.