The Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man and server room computing

I remember walking out of the theater after seeing Ghostbusters for the first time and thinking ( age 8 ):

1. OhmygodthatwasawesomewhenIcangoseeitagain?

2. I’ll trade anything, including by little brother, for just five minutes with a real proton pack.

A line that I’ve used ever since to indicate what happens when something once thought impossible actually happens comes from Peter Venkman:

Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together - mass hysteria.

He happened to be talking about a 100 ft. tall demon masquerading as a giant marshmallow but it could have easily been a reference to this:

That’s IE7 running on Windows showing up a stand alone application on Mac OS X. Even though I had read about it I still didn’t believe it until I was able to see it for myself. It even caused a mini-gathering to break out around my desk this morning as four of us stared at it and tried to think of funky things to do it.

“Does having auto-hide set for the Start menu taskbar work?” — Yes.

“What happens if you move a Mac window over top of it?” — Just what you’d expect.

“What happens if you move a transparent Mac window over top it?” — That works too.

“Does each Windows window get its own focus on the Mac desktop?” — Nope, it treats Parallels like an app still.

“These guys must be selling a ton of these things.” — *Nodding*

“What if we bought some more licenses and then moved all our build machines to some big Mac Pro or Xserve?”

Hmmm.

That last question was fun because it made us then wonder what a fully pimped out Xserve would cost. I mean everything, leather seats, huge rims, LCD TV screens not only on the head rests but also as floor mats. No price was too high for awesomeness so great.

By default a standard Intel Xserve starts at $2,999.00. To that we had to “customize” a bit…

1. Two 2.0 GHz Dual Core Xeons would be way to slow, we need 3.0 GHz. Add $1799.
2. 1 GB of memory? Phbbt. My notebook has more than that. 32 GB is more like it. Add $23699.
3. Hard Drive Bay 1 comes 80 GB @ 7200 rpm. Whatever. 300 GB @ 15,000 rpm is either two or four times better depending on your math. Add $799.
4. There’s a Hard Drive Bay 2 — 300 GB more. Add $999.
5. And a Hard Drive Bay 3 — 300 GB more. Add $999.
6. Optical drive upgrade from a Combo to a Superdrive. Add $79. (What a deal compared to this other stuff.)
7. Expansion Slot 1, Dual channel 2Gb Fibre Channel card with PCIe riser. Add $499.
8. Expansion Slot 2, Dual channel gigabit ethernet card with PCIe riser. Add $199.
9. Gonna need two power supplies to fuel this beast. Add $199.
10. So far I only have 900 GB of hard drive space. A 7 TB(!) RAID will give us some extra breathing room. Add $12999.
11. Mac OS X Server maintenance program. Add $999.
12. Unlimited Apple Remote Desktop. Add $499.
13. AppleCare service parts kit for Xserve, sure, why not. Add $999.
14. Mac OS X Server Software Support - Alliance version. Add $49995. Sweet mother of all things good and right in the world.
15. AppleCare Premium Service and Support plan. Add $950.

Grand total (without sales tax):

I’ll tell you what, if I can get that price on a real proton pack I’ll still throw in my brother, even if he is 26 years old now.