There are these extremely expensive cables made of glass under the ocean connecting various land masses.
More importantly, the fibers themselves aren't that expensive anymore as you can see from FiOS/FTTH deployment. Getting new cables in place is what costs an arm and a leg. So more capacity over same cable is very, very cost efficient.
Also a comment to the GP:
It's an honest question as I've always been lead to believe that data storage is the bottleneck.
If you have streaming, is storage really all that necessary? With Spotify etc. for music, Netflix etc. for movies - and assume you can stream BluRay quality effortlessly, what do most people need TBs to local storage for? Yes, there are niches like when you're going on the road (even though mobile bandwidth is also going way up), what to watch if your line is down and storing your own home videos, but those are minor.
Amazon.com currently lists 13281 blurays. * 50 GB / 3 TB disks = 222 disks to store everything. The reason it always seems we need more storage is that there's millions of copies of each.
Probably because they've only looked deeply into US copyright law and precedents, despite the US' best efforts there's not one world law. Europe for example is still two dozen sets of laws, despite the EU constitution and common EU directives. It's a huge market to launch in, this isn't like Spotify starting in Scandinavia. If this is a hit it'll quickly be worldwide I think.
It's like stuffing your suitcase really, really full. Very neat, but takes a long time and if you ever have to repack or add one more thing it's hell. Better to have a bit bigger suitcase and some leeway.
Personally I have 500 sqf to myself and is moving into something bigger, not smaller. About 750 I think would be ideal for me. And I would take 1000+ and a pool room in the cellar too, except it costs more than it tastes.
Well, most of the time you are in a class with a lot of other people and the level of the class will reflect their average skill. A lot of the corporate training I've seen has been crutches for people who can't figure it out on their own, people that have drawn the short straw and say "really, I know nothing about this I need some training at least". Very often the advanced topics only give you one specialization when what you'd really want is a general course on speed, either in half the time or going twice as complex. Practically though they typically hold courses more often and better geographically distributed rather than divide it that way. So yes, for the most part I've said give me access to the tech, the docs and if I can't whip something up relatively quickly, then we'll look at a class.
Well, with Ubuntu becoming more and more mainstream, I wonder how this will affect other Linux distributions.
Except that they're not. Statcounter has Linux at 0.76%, Hitslink at 0.94% and no matter what you say about Linux desktops that aren't browsing the net there are millions and millions of Windows desktops that don't either. Lately it seems the desktop environments are just scrambling from one paradigm to the other wondering why the 200 million users are nowhere in sight. There's a lot more to copying iOS than just making every app fullscreen, if that is a honey trap Linux is a six feet tall burly drag queen who can't figure out why no one is falling for it.
All Netflix needs is the consumer on their side. They have that, already. Just not enough, yet. Right now, it's about 7% of the population with Netflix accounts
Exactly, why go to open war when you're slowly winning? He'd be wise to let the cable companies attack Netflix, like they are the aggressors. Like they are the one trying to hold onto a golden past. He wants the TV industry to suddenly find themselves in the same place as the music industry, the world is moving to streaming whether you like it or not.
The difference is that in the US you can't practically get *anywhere* without a car except downtown, while in the rest of the world you can at least get around the city and suburbs. But if you're going somewhere relatively unpopulated, good luck where ever you are. The car is always going to be first choice to get to your cabin in the middle of nowhere.
I've never found a piece of hardware that didn't work at all once when the machine was booted as GNU/Linux instead of MS/Windows. (...) I have, however, discovered that a device's driver software was not portable to Linux, and that the manufacturer only provided support for Windows.
You've never found hardware that didn't work, except it didn't work? Or does coming to POST and that your DVD drive will open and close count as "working"?
In this instance I contact support, and if no resolution can be reached -- a source or binary for my chosen OS will not be made available -- I will simply return the device to the store or manufacturer for a full refund. (...) Unless we actively make it less profitable for such incompatible manufacturers to ignore us and not provide cross platform drivers for their hardware, your OS choices will remain limited.
So your solution to them not finding your market segment profitable is to make it appear like a market of bothersome, high return, "can't read the system requirements" buffoons who'll kill off all profit? That's not encouragement, that's teaching them to not touch that market with a ten foot pole.
Stopped reading right there. It's not private just because the URL is some randomly generated string. These sites are not designed to securely transfer files to only the recipient so this is not in any way a "weakness".
Neither is email, so I guess if you could read everyone's email that wouldn't be a weakness either. Get off your high horse, the URL is supposed to be the equivalent of an email account password, if you have it you can access the files otherwise not. You have to make sure only the right people have the URL, but anything that lets others grab the file anyway is obviously a goatse-class backdoor just as if gmail or hotmail was wide open.
Judging by the content of your post it would seem you have never experienced an A class manager.
What I said was that B-class managers also want A-class doers to cover their incompetence, while B-class seniors/leads want C-class doers that don't threaten their position. Since my point didn't really involve A class managers at all, I'm curious how you concluded I've never met any or how that was even relevant. Yes, smart people hire smart people. So do stupid people as long as you'll cover for them, not usurp them.
That seems like a tricky solution for consumers, what happens when you take your brand new EV for a battery change and you get the oldest battery in their rotation? My guess is your range goes way down and the risk it'll go defective way up. You could of course make all batteries the manufacturer's responsibility, but then you'd probably pay a high yearly fee for replacements.
The reason you don't hear about all the day jobs and side jobs those people had is that it's not very interesting that they shuffled horse manure at the stables. Those that didn't were mostly in academia, with only some rare exceptions having patrons or own wealth - that was mostly in art, not science. Even if a lot of what the universities do is applied research for corporations, just look at how many take a degree these days. There was few that could spend years training a skill before even starting to work, most people just had general education and on-the-job training. Every generation it becomes a little longer to just catch up with what the last generation knew, before you even can start to research. I've spent 17 of my years in school and still I feel I've almost only done learning, not researching. Unless you find some field that hasn't already been researched, chances are your think tank will only rediscover the same basics someone else already has.
This is something that has been known for a very long time. The NAGC (National Association for Gifted Children) was pretty much founded on the premise that intelligent kids become disruptive in schools because they're bored witless (ie: become easily distracted) with the humdrum that is necessary for everyone else.
A bored mind is an easily distracted mind, that you really don't need a scientist to tell you. But if you gave them challenges relative to their intelligence or a different kind of challenge where intelligence wouldn't matter much, are the intelligent more easily distracted than the others? The answer to that is not obvious.
Somehow I've never found that to be very accurate. The "managers" love strong "doers" because they get projects done and solve problems quickly covering for the manager's incompetence and making him look good, while requiring a completely different skill set and interests. The danger is whoever has your title with "Senior" in front of it or if you have that, then "Chief" or "Lead". They know those are the positions you will be gunning for next, the natural step up.
It is true that a central part of protestantism was "Sola scriptura", that the Bible contains all knowledge necessary for salvation and holiness. This was a rebellion against the power of the Pope and the Holy See to interpret and issue doctrine as very many of the practices that gave the Church massive power and wealth were not founded in the Bible, particularly the selling of indulgences. Also that salvation comes through faith alone, while Catholicism required rites performed by the priest - without the Church, there was no salvation. A central part of Protestantism was that all would read the Bible in their local language, back then only the priests and other highborn that learned Latin would even be able to read it. How could a Catholic have a literal interpretation of something he couldn't read? The priests told you the road to salvation and you followed.
To me it sounds like you are placing all of the Protestant groups on the "more literal" side of things. That is really not true at all, we are just far more diverse. That comes from that there is no one supreme commander of the Protestant churches, while if you're Catholic then you either yield to the Pope's authority or you're not a Catholic. And to be honest, the US seems to have far more issues with Catholic beliefs such as regarding contraception and abortion because the Pope is opposed to it while most protestant churches - at least around here - have accepted it. I think I can speak for most of Northern Europe when I say we consider the Bible to be just as much allegories as the Catholic church - perhaps even more so - and that teaching evolution here is not an issue at all. As far as I understand the main issue in the US are Baptists, which make up most of the Bible Belt. But they are something like 100 out of 800 million protestants.
Yes. This was a hard-sell item to Queen Isabella, too. Nor was Spain able to monopolize all the profits. Can you imagine how to even calculate what the "value" of those profits is? We're talking about the "New World".
No, just no. Didn't they teach you this in school? America is where they ended up, but that wasn't where they thought they were going. They were looking for an alternative to the Silk Road, the land route to India and China. The goods to be traded were luxuries such as silk, satin, hemp and other fine fabrics, musk, other perfumes, spices, medicines, jewels, glassware and rhubarb. They thought they knew approximately how long the sea route would be based on Earth's circumference, it was only a matter of finding the way and they'd have a very profitable trade route by cutting out all the middle men and not having to travel through hostile territory. That is why they called the natives they encountered Indians - they thought they had come to India. That was the business venture laid before Queen Isabella, it was a risky gambit but with a high, known reward. Quite different than space, where nobody really knows how to turn a profit yet..
My idea of freedom is not "here is a free widget, but you can't improve and sell it, you can only give it away" - WTF?
Let me try making a car analogy. Pretend that in your town there's a car pool (open source collaboration) going. People give each other free rides (source code), some drive more, some drive less, some don't even have a car (they don't code) but people are happy with it and there's enough free seats it works out well. You too have gotten many free rides (source code) from this pool, but now you've finally bought yourself a car (started coding). However, unlike the rest you install a taxi meter and charge people to ride your car (sell your software). Do you honestly expect people to be happy about it? You've been given and given, and when you have the opportunity to give back it's all my car (my code), no freeloaders. Oh, you can make an small exception for driving the little old lady on your street down to the store (providing a small bugfix) to pretend you're giving back, but you're not fooling anyone. You want to bum free rides of others and get paid when driving yourself, it's egoism put in system. The GPL is more of a membership organization than a volunteer service. If you take free rides (code) from others, then you must also give free rides (code) when you're driving. Either you're in the pool or you're out of the pool. Yes, it evicts the taxi drivers but it makes the other members of the pool happier. They know the rides they give go to others who would provide free rides in return. It's about making it a win-win for everyone in the pool since that is what lasts and grows. Because when it comes down to it, others can argue up and down but it's the contributors who choose what license is a success and not.
The BSD also offers the freedom to take that source, use it and incorporate it into a larger closed source product which implements the same standard as the original project.
Or arbitrarily change or extend it so there's no or flawed interoperability between the closed and open version. Or withhold bug fixes as a competitive advantage over the open version. The BSD license is great if everyone plays nice, but if someone wants to fuck you over you are all lubed up. If you really, really mean that you want nothing from them then choosing the BSD is fine, good for you. But if you start throwing hissy fits over asshattery when you specifically chose a license that allows it over one that doesn't, well you don't get much sympathy from me.
Most of the internet would would need downtime for reboot every night, and the cost incurred by your ISP for all the proprietary licensing would probably put the net out of reach for most common folks.
Oh please. It's not like there wouldn't be competition or demand-driven innovation without open source. Either Microsoft would have fixed their shit anyway, proprietary Unix would have gotten cheaper, IBM's OS/2 would have succeeded or maybe even Apple would have stepped in. One way or the other the BSOD hell we had in the 90s was a children's disease that we'd outgrow.
Ye gods, no. If you're going for that variety, at least use DHCP and reserve IPs at the switch. Anyway, 100 people... if they're all in one location, I'd say three managed 48-port switches in a rack and you're done. The rest is cabling and learning to use the software. Also I'd keep a fourth switch has a hot spare, today losing the network is just as bad as losing electricity.
And then on the high-ish end, AMD has nothing to compete against the i7 2600K. And it's not really that much more expensive (+$100) for the 15% extra gain in performance. It's not like their traditional $1000 high end offerings.
Intel essentially skipped a cycle on the high end because they were completely uncontested anyway. The last high-end socket was LGA 1366, then we've had two midrange sockets in a row with LGA 1156 and LGA 1155. Late this year we'll finally see LGA 2011, the high end Sandy Bridge. Expect another round of $999 extreme edition processors then - with six cores, reportedly.
Yep. And in the server world there's also consolidation, you always want fewer and more powerful processors if the cost isn't too high. The typical CPU in desktops and laptops is a different matter though. Maybe the question is more obvious the other way around "Would you like a quieter computer with longer battery life?" and with other marginal benefits like lighter heat sink, lower power bill, probably longer life because of lower temperature and so on. For example many office workers would do exactly the same even if their laptop used half power.
To take another example, if my phone uses half the power I wouldn't make twice as many calls - I pretty much stay connected 24x7 and make all the calls I'd like anyway. Same with say my TV, I wouldn't watch twice as much TV if it used half power. Of course I could start using my phone to play Angry Birds on my way to work instead of reading a book - which may or may not be a power savings depending on how "green" making and distributing that book was - potentially I could now use more power because I have a more efficient CPU. And I could get myself a new and bigger TV that is much bigger and still fills the same power envelope. Except I'll probably have to take into consideration other things like cost, size, weight so maybe I won't.
On the whole though, I think energy efficiency works out as a good thing. Look at fridges, freezers, washing machines and so on. Sure, there's a certain effect that now that we have refrigeration, we'll use it a lot more and have bigger fridges. But in the end it's easier to just make them more efficient and hope the use tops out than to say "Please eat food that doesn't need cold storage and use your clothes until they're really dirty." I think it's same with computers, make them efficient until people say "Actually, this 5w computer is enough for me. Great that there are 100w+ CPUs for those that need them, but I'll rather take the other benefits."
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There are these extremely expensive cables made of glass under the ocean connecting various land masses.
More importantly, the fibers themselves aren't that expensive anymore as you can see from FiOS/FTTH deployment. Getting new cables in place is what costs an arm and a leg. So more capacity over same cable is very, very cost efficient.
Also a comment to the GP:
It's an honest question as I've always been lead to believe that data storage is the bottleneck.
If you have streaming, is storage really all that necessary? With Spotify etc. for music, Netflix etc. for movies - and assume you can stream BluRay quality effortlessly, what do most people need TBs to local storage for? Yes, there are niches like when you're going on the road (even though mobile bandwidth is also going way up), what to watch if your line is down and storing your own home videos, but those are minor.
Amazon.com currently lists 13281 blurays. * 50 GB / 3 TB disks = 222 disks to store everything. The reason it always seems we need more storage is that there's millions of copies of each.
Probably because they've only looked deeply into US copyright law and precedents, despite the US' best efforts there's not one world law. Europe for example is still two dozen sets of laws, despite the EU constitution and common EU directives. It's a huge market to launch in, this isn't like Spotify starting in Scandinavia. If this is a hit it'll quickly be worldwide I think.
It's like stuffing your suitcase really, really full. Very neat, but takes a long time and if you ever have to repack or add one more thing it's hell. Better to have a bit bigger suitcase and some leeway.
Personally I have 500 sqf to myself and is moving into something bigger, not smaller. About 750 I think would be ideal for me. And I would take 1000+ and a pool room in the cellar too, except it costs more than it tastes.
Well, most of the time you are in a class with a lot of other people and the level of the class will reflect their average skill. A lot of the corporate training I've seen has been crutches for people who can't figure it out on their own, people that have drawn the short straw and say "really, I know nothing about this I need some training at least". Very often the advanced topics only give you one specialization when what you'd really want is a general course on speed, either in half the time or going twice as complex. Practically though they typically hold courses more often and better geographically distributed rather than divide it that way. So yes, for the most part I've said give me access to the tech, the docs and if I can't whip something up relatively quickly, then we'll look at a class.
Well, with Ubuntu becoming more and more mainstream, I wonder how this will affect other Linux distributions.
Except that they're not. Statcounter has Linux at 0.76%, Hitslink at 0.94% and no matter what you say about Linux desktops that aren't browsing the net there are millions and millions of Windows desktops that don't either. Lately it seems the desktop environments are just scrambling from one paradigm to the other wondering why the 200 million users are nowhere in sight. There's a lot more to copying iOS than just making every app fullscreen, if that is a honey trap Linux is a six feet tall burly drag queen who can't figure out why no one is falling for it.
All Netflix needs is the consumer on their side. They have that, already. Just not enough, yet. Right now, it's about 7% of the population with Netflix accounts
Exactly, why go to open war when you're slowly winning? He'd be wise to let the cable companies attack Netflix, like they are the aggressors. Like they are the one trying to hold onto a golden past. He wants the TV industry to suddenly find themselves in the same place as the music industry, the world is moving to streaming whether you like it or not.
The difference is that in the US you can't practically get *anywhere* without a car except downtown, while in the rest of the world you can at least get around the city and suburbs. But if you're going somewhere relatively unpopulated, good luck where ever you are. The car is always going to be first choice to get to your cabin in the middle of nowhere.
I've never found a piece of hardware that didn't work at all once when the machine was booted as GNU/Linux instead of MS/Windows. (...) I have, however, discovered that a device's driver software was not portable to Linux, and that the manufacturer only provided support for Windows.
You've never found hardware that didn't work, except it didn't work? Or does coming to POST and that your DVD drive will open and close count as "working"?
In this instance I contact support, and if no resolution can be reached -- a source or binary for my chosen OS will not be made available -- I will simply return the device to the store or manufacturer for a full refund. (...) Unless we actively make it less profitable for such incompatible manufacturers to ignore us and not provide cross platform drivers for their hardware, your OS choices will remain limited.
So your solution to them not finding your market segment profitable is to make it appear like a market of bothersome, high return, "can't read the system requirements" buffoons who'll kill off all profit? That's not encouragement, that's teaching them to not touch that market with a ten foot pole.
Stopped reading right there. It's not private just because the URL is some randomly generated string. These sites are not designed to securely transfer files to only the recipient so this is not in any way a "weakness".
Neither is email, so I guess if you could read everyone's email that wouldn't be a weakness either. Get off your high horse, the URL is supposed to be the equivalent of an email account password, if you have it you can access the files otherwise not. You have to make sure only the right people have the URL, but anything that lets others grab the file anyway is obviously a goatse-class backdoor just as if gmail or hotmail was wide open.
Judging by the content of your post it would seem you have never experienced an A class manager.
What I said was that B-class managers also want A-class doers to cover their incompetence, while B-class seniors/leads want C-class doers that don't threaten their position. Since my point didn't really involve A class managers at all, I'm curious how you concluded I've never met any or how that was even relevant. Yes, smart people hire smart people. So do stupid people as long as you'll cover for them, not usurp them.
That seems like a tricky solution for consumers, what happens when you take your brand new EV for a battery change and you get the oldest battery in their rotation? My guess is your range goes way down and the risk it'll go defective way up. You could of course make all batteries the manufacturer's responsibility, but then you'd probably pay a high yearly fee for replacements.
The reason you don't hear about all the day jobs and side jobs those people had is that it's not very interesting that they shuffled horse manure at the stables. Those that didn't were mostly in academia, with only some rare exceptions having patrons or own wealth - that was mostly in art, not science. Even if a lot of what the universities do is applied research for corporations, just look at how many take a degree these days. There was few that could spend years training a skill before even starting to work, most people just had general education and on-the-job training. Every generation it becomes a little longer to just catch up with what the last generation knew, before you even can start to research. I've spent 17 of my years in school and still I feel I've almost only done learning, not researching. Unless you find some field that hasn't already been researched, chances are your think tank will only rediscover the same basics someone else already has.
This is something that has been known for a very long time. The NAGC (National Association for Gifted Children) was pretty much founded on the premise that intelligent kids become disruptive in schools because they're bored witless (ie: become easily distracted) with the humdrum that is necessary for everyone else.
A bored mind is an easily distracted mind, that you really don't need a scientist to tell you. But if you gave them challenges relative to their intelligence or a different kind of challenge where intelligence wouldn't matter much, are the intelligent more easily distracted than the others? The answer to that is not obvious.
How big exactly is an enormous powerpoint presentation? How big are these spreadsheets. Excel only handles 65,000 rows
Your information is way out of date. Both Excel 2007 and 2010 support a million rows or thereabouts, and yes it does get abused that way.
Somehow I've never found that to be very accurate. The "managers" love strong "doers" because they get projects done and solve problems quickly covering for the manager's incompetence and making him look good, while requiring a completely different skill set and interests. The danger is whoever has your title with "Senior" in front of it or if you have that, then "Chief" or "Lead". They know those are the positions you will be gunning for next, the natural step up.
It is true that a central part of protestantism was "Sola scriptura", that the Bible contains all knowledge necessary for salvation and holiness. This was a rebellion against the power of the Pope and the Holy See to interpret and issue doctrine as very many of the practices that gave the Church massive power and wealth were not founded in the Bible, particularly the selling of indulgences. Also that salvation comes through faith alone, while Catholicism required rites performed by the priest - without the Church, there was no salvation. A central part of Protestantism was that all would read the Bible in their local language, back then only the priests and other highborn that learned Latin would even be able to read it. How could a Catholic have a literal interpretation of something he couldn't read? The priests told you the road to salvation and you followed.
To me it sounds like you are placing all of the Protestant groups on the "more literal" side of things. That is really not true at all, we are just far more diverse. That comes from that there is no one supreme commander of the Protestant churches, while if you're Catholic then you either yield to the Pope's authority or you're not a Catholic. And to be honest, the US seems to have far more issues with Catholic beliefs such as regarding contraception and abortion because the Pope is opposed to it while most protestant churches - at least around here - have accepted it. I think I can speak for most of Northern Europe when I say we consider the Bible to be just as much allegories as the Catholic church - perhaps even more so - and that teaching evolution here is not an issue at all. As far as I understand the main issue in the US are Baptists, which make up most of the Bible Belt. But they are something like 100 out of 800 million protestants.
Yes. This was a hard-sell item to Queen Isabella, too. Nor was Spain able to monopolize all the profits. Can you imagine how to even calculate what the "value" of those profits is? We're talking about the "New World".
No, just no. Didn't they teach you this in school? America is where they ended up, but that wasn't where they thought they were going. They were looking for an alternative to the Silk Road, the land route to India and China. The goods to be traded were luxuries such as silk, satin, hemp and other fine fabrics, musk, other perfumes, spices, medicines, jewels, glassware and rhubarb. They thought they knew approximately how long the sea route would be based on Earth's circumference, it was only a matter of finding the way and they'd have a very profitable trade route by cutting out all the middle men and not having to travel through hostile territory. That is why they called the natives they encountered Indians - they thought they had come to India. That was the business venture laid before Queen Isabella, it was a risky gambit but with a high, known reward. Quite different than space, where nobody really knows how to turn a profit yet..
My idea of freedom is not "here is a free widget, but you can't improve and sell it, you can only give it away" - WTF?
Let me try making a car analogy. Pretend that in your town there's a car pool (open source collaboration) going. People give each other free rides (source code), some drive more, some drive less, some don't even have a car (they don't code) but people are happy with it and there's enough free seats it works out well. You too have gotten many free rides (source code) from this pool, but now you've finally bought yourself a car (started coding). However, unlike the rest you install a taxi meter and charge people to ride your car (sell your software). Do you honestly expect people to be happy about it? You've been given and given, and when you have the opportunity to give back it's all my car (my code), no freeloaders. Oh, you can make an small exception for driving the little old lady on your street down to the store (providing a small bugfix) to pretend you're giving back, but you're not fooling anyone. You want to bum free rides of others and get paid when driving yourself, it's egoism put in system. The GPL is more of a membership organization than a volunteer service. If you take free rides (code) from others, then you must also give free rides (code) when you're driving. Either you're in the pool or you're out of the pool. Yes, it evicts the taxi drivers but it makes the other members of the pool happier. They know the rides they give go to others who would provide free rides in return. It's about making it a win-win for everyone in the pool since that is what lasts and grows. Because when it comes down to it, others can argue up and down but it's the contributors who choose what license is a success and not.
The BSD also offers the freedom to take that source, use it and incorporate it into a larger closed source product which implements the same standard as the original project.
Or arbitrarily change or extend it so there's no or flawed interoperability between the closed and open version. Or withhold bug fixes as a competitive advantage over the open version. The BSD license is great if everyone plays nice, but if someone wants to fuck you over you are all lubed up. If you really, really mean that you want nothing from them then choosing the BSD is fine, good for you. But if you start throwing hissy fits over asshattery when you specifically chose a license that allows it over one that doesn't, well you don't get much sympathy from me.
Most of the internet would would need downtime for reboot every night, and the cost incurred by your ISP for all the proprietary licensing would probably put the net out of reach for most common folks.
Oh please. It's not like there wouldn't be competition or demand-driven innovation without open source. Either Microsoft would have fixed their shit anyway, proprietary Unix would have gotten cheaper, IBM's OS/2 would have succeeded or maybe even Apple would have stepped in. One way or the other the BSOD hell we had in the 90s was a children's disease that we'd outgrow.
And users say "stupid computer", it's easier to blame the tools than the one who wields it.
Somewhere, there's an irony in that post....
Stupid English language!
And users say "stupid computer", it's easier to blame the tools than one who wields it.
Ye gods, no. If you're going for that variety, at least use DHCP and reserve IPs at the switch. Anyway, 100 people... if they're all in one location, I'd say three managed 48-port switches in a rack and you're done. The rest is cabling and learning to use the software. Also I'd keep a fourth switch has a hot spare, today losing the network is just as bad as losing electricity.
And then on the high-ish end, AMD has nothing to compete against the i7 2600K. And it's not really that much more expensive (+$100) for the 15% extra gain in performance. It's not like their traditional $1000 high end offerings.
Intel essentially skipped a cycle on the high end because they were completely uncontested anyway. The last high-end socket was LGA 1366, then we've had two midrange sockets in a row with LGA 1156 and LGA 1155. Late this year we'll finally see LGA 2011, the high end Sandy Bridge. Expect another round of $999 extreme edition processors then - with six cores, reportedly.
Yep. And in the server world there's also consolidation, you always want fewer and more powerful processors if the cost isn't too high. The typical CPU in desktops and laptops is a different matter though. Maybe the question is more obvious the other way around "Would you like a quieter computer with longer battery life?" and with other marginal benefits like lighter heat sink, lower power bill, probably longer life because of lower temperature and so on. For example many office workers would do exactly the same even if their laptop used half power.
To take another example, if my phone uses half the power I wouldn't make twice as many calls - I pretty much stay connected 24x7 and make all the calls I'd like anyway. Same with say my TV, I wouldn't watch twice as much TV if it used half power. Of course I could start using my phone to play Angry Birds on my way to work instead of reading a book - which may or may not be a power savings depending on how "green" making and distributing that book was - potentially I could now use more power because I have a more efficient CPU. And I could get myself a new and bigger TV that is much bigger and still fills the same power envelope. Except I'll probably have to take into consideration other things like cost, size, weight so maybe I won't.
On the whole though, I think energy efficiency works out as a good thing. Look at fridges, freezers, washing machines and so on. Sure, there's a certain effect that now that we have refrigeration, we'll use it a lot more and have bigger fridges. But in the end it's easier to just make them more efficient and hope the use tops out than to say "Please eat food that doesn't need cold storage and use your clothes until they're really dirty." I think it's same with computers, make them efficient until people say "Actually, this 5w computer is enough for me. Great that there are 100w+ CPUs for those that need them, but I'll rather take the other benefits."