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A lot of networking/telco gear can run on DC, but very few servers seem to have that option...

For what it's worth, both Iron Systems and JNCS offer -48v DC power supplies on their rack-mount servers.

Have you tried J & N? Or are you more of the "Buffalo" WNY than the Rochester WNY?

I liked J & N when I was living in Rochacha.

Disclaimer: At the risk of this sounding like a plug, no I don't work for JNCS.

I buy my Office's PCs from http://www.jncs.com/ because they're local, I can swap and return parts myself, and I always get high-quality, stable components that beat the heck out of what Dell puts in their PCs. They also offer systems without OSs.

I would suggest finding a local retailer you trust and that works for your business. The service is better, the PCs are better, and the warranties are better. Support your local enthusiast PC shop.

J & N Computer Services

Two dual-core Opteron 275s (i.e., quad core), 8 Gb ECC RAM, 1 Tb SATA HDD (RAID), 1 kW PSU, NVidia GeForce 6600, 19" LCD panel. $6k when I bought my machine last November.

1. Current Xeons support what Intel calls EMT64, which is basically the same thing as what AMD does where it can do 32 or 64 bit code. There are plenty of Supermicro brand motherboards that certify 2GB sticks of memory available for Xeon processors and have at least 8 slots.

2. Tyan S2885 (dual AMD Opteron) certifys that 2GB sticks will work and has 4 slots per CPU, 8 slots total.

3. Although 16GB is not listed on their website as a possible configuration, they do sell the above configurations if you call them, they are J&N Computers, http://www.jncs.com/.

If you're looking to pay somebody a little extra to build something just how I like it, check them out.

I've purchased mine from JNCS.

I've dealt with JNCS for quite a while, for both work and personal stuff.

Their bundles are a real time saver, prices quite decent, but the best thing, by far, are their return policies. I've rarely seen better.

I had an old Cyrix board (go ahead, laugh) I bought from him a few years ago that died after about a year of being in production. I called them up, and they had me bring it in (they're local to me, but would have taken it by mail, as well). They replaced the board with a PII, as they didn't have the equivalent Cyrix board any more. For no cost. Without even testing it. Just took the return.

Now thats service.

For parts, Mwave is unbeatable.

-Erwos

Today's processors smoke themselves pretty fast if you run them without the heatsink/fan attached properly. (I forget how long the Athlon is supposed to take to burn up, but IIRC it's something like 10 or 15 seconds.)

To cope with that, there are some PC shops who will install the processor in the motherboard, power it up to test it, and them ship the assembled unit, often with some memory. You'll often see this advertised as a "bundle". Perhaps the best-known (though not always cheap) vendor is JNCS.

This is the approach one of my moderately-technical classmates took-- she was quite up for installing the OS, PCI cards, and drivers, but didn't trust herself to diagnose a machine that, say, wouldn't power-up initially.

As I recall, the reseller installed the mobo and CPU in a case, and she took it from there. That way she was able to spec out her own spiffy video-editing system without coping with the nail-biting parts. Not necessarily a bad approach for the first-time PC builder.

Trust me, there are plenty of very very smart people working on things other than the internet. Let's think of most of the really breakthrough internet-related development. The net allows people to buy stuff from vendors -- anybody from a major company (amazon, dell to some guy sitting in his basement. Also there is very available information, as well as slashdot. If somebody is in some country that's getting bombed to hell by the US, they can set up a web server and give accurate(hopefully) accounts of what's really going on that doesn't get filtered through TV. There are various projects for the distribution of software, as well as thigns like distributed.net/seti@home.
I may have missed some things, but most other sites seem to be clones of the above -- ie ppl selling stuff, distributing news, distributing programs. It doesn't take much wit to clone a website.
The development of software (ie the linux distos, BSD's, m$) also takes effort. However it seems to me that for every software engineer there is prolly a hardware engineer working on something else (intel Leadmine, the G4, whatever).
I think that there is also a very large number of people working in science. Every major university has some large portion of it devoted purely to medical research, I think, and those areas are full with very very smart individuals doing their best to cure cancer (I work in such a lab myself) or other diseases.

You can't rechannel energy from one industry to another. I can tell you that because people have different interests, they would be much less productive in a field they are not interested in. So for example if I get my thrills by making programs, I'd be quite less interested in working on a farm trying to grow a giant tomato (no offense to Lisa Simpson) or develop better diesel engines.

The point is that I believe it is a miracle that we have gotten this far already, and besides, would colonies on the moon be really worth it if you couldn't listen to mp3's (or watch DVD in linux) once you got there?