ask | dr. root

The UltraSPARC T1 processor could certainly qualify as the coolest - Literally! As it's drawing about as much power as a light bulb...

But to me, the recently-launched Sun Fire X4500 server, code-named "Thumper", is definitely Sun's coolest product at the moment. For the first time, we get server and storage technologies together in the same box. The X4500 has been branded as the industry's first data server or 'hybrid' server, and that's a very good definition for it. Let's have a look at the specs of the X4500 - in short: It's powered by 2 dual-core AMD Opteron processors, has 4 built-in Gigabit Ethernet ports and offers RAID-Z in Solaris ZFS. But what makes this 4U server so groundbreaking (or so cool) is that it can take up to 48 * 500GB SATA II hard disks. That's a massive 24 Terabytes of storage in one server!

So what can you do with so much storage and high data throughput?

Well, other than asking your sys admin to turn off quotas, you can use the X4500 server as NFS server, HPC/Grid storage, data warehouse system, iSCSI SAN, digital media storage, web storage and more!

To quote Marc Hamilton, Sun's Director of Technology for the Global Education and Research Group, "Thumper does it all. It is one hot box."

I couldn't agree more.

(If you'd like to find out more about the specs of the Sun Fire X4500, check out our website at www.hos.horizon.ie/x64)

What you're referring to is a favicon (favorites icon). They're easy to generate and display.

First, you need to generate a standard Windows icon file of your company logo. The .ico file needs to be in standard Windows icon file format, or it may not work. There are many ways to create a .ico file from scratch, but the easiest way is to use one of the free favicon generators available online - e.g. Dynamic Drive's FavIcon Generator.

Simply upload a GIF, JPEG, PNG or BMP version of your logo and FavIcon Generator will instantly create the necessary 16x16 favicon.ico file.

Once downloaded, place this favicon.ico file in the 'root' directory on your web server - i.e. where your main index page is located. And voila!

Whenever your site is bookmarked, the icon will subsequently show up on the user's Favorites list. And when users visit your site, the icon will also be displayed in the location bar.