[Tig] where.. neutral review RED?

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Fri, 4 Jul 2008, Rob Lingelbach wrote:
>
> Condition 1: background rendering on machines that were in use - at their 
> respective consoles- was not possible.  This due to the inherent problem, as 
> I understood at the time, that Windows was essentially not multi-user.  In 
> other words, it had no way to 'nice - down' the background processes to allow 
> foreground work by the user at the console.

Windows is sort of multi-user, but it seems that if someone is logged 
in at the console then there are severe limitations with using the 
network.  I learned the hard way, that if I was logged in at the 
console, that if I logged in a second time over the network, it was 
not possible for that second login to see any SMB shares, even if it 
was the same user ID.  If no one was logged in at the console, then 
the SMB shares were available.  It is likely that the expensive server 
versions avoid this problem as long as you use terminal services to 
access per-user virtual consoles.

When I visited Rhythm and Hues, I was impressed that most of their 
computing platform was based on single-slot Linux blades with two 
ethernets and two fiber channel links each.  Each compute blade was 
perhaps 3/4" wide and 12" tall and plugged into a backplane chassis 
for power and cooling.  The storage was in entirely different chassis. 
The compute frames and storage frames were extremely compact and 
efficient.  A typical "PC" solution would have taken 10X or 20X the 
space and be much more expensive to maintain.  The OS and application 
load for the hardware was entirely remotely administered and could 
easily be rolled back if there was any problem.  This sort of 
configuration is not really feasable with Windows, and definitely not 
with Mac since there is no server blade hardware.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/