The System iWant, 2010 Edition: Midrange Boxes
25.01.10
By Timothy Prickett Morgan
The midrange of IBM 's Power Systems lineup is too complicated as it now stands, and IBM needs to once again simplify the product line while at the same time providing different chassis options to customers who have varying needs for peripheral storage such as disk, flash, and tape drives. With the launch of the Power7-based machines, due for their initial launch in February, likely with more machines rolling out as 2010 unfolds, Big Blue has a clean slate with which to work.
Last week, I talked generally about some of the things that IBM should consider doing for its high-end Power 595-class machines, which you can see here . In many ways, this is the easiest box to spec out in terms of its feeds and speeds, even if it is the most complex and expensive Power-based machine for IBM to design, build, sell, and support. The midrange might seem to present an easier set of requirements to meet, but then again, there is not one midrange customer so much as a really wide spectrum of them, all with different needs.
Source: IT Jungle
Art review: LaDuke at Angles Gallery
24.01.10
In a 1506 drawing made as a study for an altarpiece in Venice, German artist Albrecht Durer placed the dark pupil of an angel's right eye smack in the compositional center of the sheet. The eye of a mystical, mythological creature is the visual and conceptual pivot around which everything else turns, and it corresponds with the human instrument of visual perception.
Tom LaDuke is up to something similar in "A Gothic Plot," one of seven paintings and five sculptures, all recent, in a terrific show that inaugurates Angles Gallery 's new home. (It's in the space vacated last fall when Blum and Poe Gallery moved across the street.) An orange disk with a glowing yellowish pin-spot at the center peers out from a gray gloom, between thickly painted tree branches. Slowly a second eye and a black beak come into view, suggesting the fragmentary features of an owl.
In fact it's an image borrowed from "Blade Runner," the 1982 cult-classic film loosely based on Philip K. Dick's science fiction novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" The branches, plus a thick slather of white oil paint at the lower left and other splotchy shapes, come from an 1818 Caspar David Friedrich painting– a strange wedding picture in which the happy couple faces the transience of life in the form of a deep abyss plunging between chalky cliffs that overlook the sea.
Source: Los Angeles Times (blog)
