Companies do that so that they don't get stuck short staffed in the Fall trying to get everyone's vacations in before the new year. That happened our my last job. One of my coworkers was having Twins and his wife went on bed rest so he got extra time off and a different shift for a while. We struggled to get shifts staffed properly for 3 months.
Of course you do. No one is forcing you to go to work. Though depending on the circumstances surrounding your time off, the company may have the grounds to fire you.
[quote]And what is opening are specialized niches of people who understand the business and the computer. As I work in a hedge fund I cannot imagine any fund these days not having quants or algo-programmers at their disposal. Guess what I did about 4 years ago? I switched from being a general programmer to a specializing qua[/quote]
I beg to differ. There's been a need for computer programmers who understand business and accounting since before the PC was born. IBM has made their business on providing computers and software for businesses. Even before computers, IBM was making machines for Business. Nothing new here.
Where do you live? Most places by law they have to give you minimum of 2 weeks and Stat Holidays (or atleast same number of days). I would check your rights.
What are you a Windows programmer? I have never heard of Software having a "Mean Time To Failure" but then I am more of an Administrator and haven't done much QA.
1) Lost productivity when the local ISP or some some intermediate router is down? Multiply by each user. (In a lot of places that's pretty significant. Lots of places suffer multiple hours of network down time / flaky internet every month.)
Google Chrome supports offline use of google apps.
2) Lost productivity as your employees are clicking on google ads and browsing online when they should be working on that spreadsheet or word document, or simply lost productivity as the ads become insufferably intrusive and distracting.
Only the standard free version is ad based. If you upgrade to the premium the ads are gone. For anything serious like outlook integration, you need google apps premium.
First of all the mail coming from your clients is already unsecure long before it even reaches your mail server. Using googleapps email is no more a risk that using email from another webhost. There is nothing stopping you from downloading sensitive email from google and deleting just like you would from another email service. Just because it offers online storage doesn't mean you have to use it. I am sure a lot of small doctors offices don't have their own mail servers and use their ISP or a web hosting company. The question really comes down to whether you trust the company offering your mail service or not.
While generally I will concede that Nvidia has better drivers however I have had issues at times with Nvidia video cards and drivers. There was an issue with my GeForce FX 5200 and the newest drivers: Some games worked great, some would hang partway through the game. So I ended up having to install 6 month old drivers to get all the games to work. It was a performance hit though on some of my games.
My newest card is an x700 (well if you don't count the 73002go in this laptop) and I find it to be and adequate card and really don't have a complaint with it. It's not the fastest but it does the job good enough. I have had no driver issues with it since it was installed.
Sometimes it's not necessarily the drivers as much as the hardware. ATI has a tendency to make oddball cards that might even have names similar to good working cards but just don't work. It's always best to check out the reviews and comments on any card before buying it.
I think the worst case of this is my TVWonder. The card works great under windows, albeit an old card. SVGA, Composite capture under Linux works very well. But I can't for the life of me get the tuner frequencies right in Linux. That version of the card miss identifies itself as a PAL tuner instead of NTSC. Now what baffles me most is that I have even tried to create my own frequency table and I just can't sync up more than 1 or 2 channels. It's never been a big deal as I just use SVGA in from my cable box. Other version of this card work fine under Linux.
Hmm where are you shipping these machines? I can ship two 700 dollar 1Us from Canada to the states for under $75 US.
Oh and that price doesn't even include the PCIe riser.
BTW what RAID cards where you suggesting to put in the PCIe slot? Last I checked none available. Hmm now wouldn't it be nice to have a PCI-X slot like a real server?
Pretty much every server level machine we sell can be upgraded to support IPMI 1.5 or 2.0 and we use commodity boards. The upgrade price depends on the motherboard manufacturer but generally ranges from $40-140. Dell is offering nothing special here.
Okay explain this "Even with the evolution of SATA for slower mass storage".
How is SATA "slower mass storage"? What's faster? You will have trouble convincing me that a large SCSI array is faster than a large SATA array given the same interconnect. Once hit an array of 4 drives or more, your individual drive speed is no longer an issue as the connection between your system and array is the bottle neck and not the drive speed. With enough cache and a battery backup on your raid controller, the speed of your individual disks will pretty much never be a factor.
First you are talking about desktop components and this discussion is about Servers.
ASUS has just gotten into server level boards and they are alright but fairly lowend.
MSI really shouldn't be used in a server. They make desktop boards.
DVDRWs in servers? Now really again this is a desktop component. But if we are going to discuss DVD-RWs, why would I pay 2 to 3 times more for Plextor when LiteOn are just as good. Plextor use to be heads and shoulders above the rest but now you just paying for the name.
When it comes to drives, Maxtor is now pretty much a complete joke. They have higher failure rates than rest and are in financial trouble. Sure maybe they give a nice warranty but it's useless if they fold a year into the warranty.
The advantage of calling IBM, HP, or even Dell, is not simply the service contract (though your time is worth something), or the fact that their QC is superior to wherever you're getting your parts from, but that they have real engineers, who worry about such issues as optimizing air-flow, choosing proper fan-sizes, etc. Take apart an IBM xSeries 345 some time, then try to decide if you could actually buy parts to build a machine like that, for less than just calling IBM.
We're a small shop and our cooling designs is as good or better than pretty much any designs from the big boys. I seen lots of "Brand Name" designs that do not offer proper cooling. Especially with the current power hungry offerings from Intel.
Well yes and no. It is true that for some highend RAID solutions that you need matched drives. But they are still regular HardDisks for the most part just with all the same specs and firmware. As such you want to return the faulty drive to the manufacturer for a matched replacement. Because Dell, HP and IBM buy these drives on OEM contracts, you are often required by the drive manufacturer to system manufacturer to get warranty service.
No in some cases you might have a setup that uses High Voltage Differential instead of LVD. In that case yeah those aren't the run of the mill drives you buy a computer store. But how many webservers ship with HVD drives?
While Qmail is probably the fastest sending email server going, How do you expect it to replace exchange? Exchange has features Qmail doesn't touch like colaboration and calendaring.
No one in there right mind is going to use 4 Raid cards to run 16 Drives. They would use 2 8 port cards. Some who don't know better thinking they will get better performance may but they really don't understand the technology. PCI multiple and PCI-X slots share the same bus and thus bandwidth so splitting up the cards across more slots doesn't get you more bandwidth. Most server boards only come with like 2 PCI-X buses and each bus only supports 133 MHz slot (if that).
Modern SATA/IDE drives run at about 7 Watts under load and 15 Watts at startup. The problem with raid array is always startup so you need to have enough power to start the system up. So for a 16 Drive SATA setup you only need an extra 240W. So since I can build a dual core opteron box that only requires about 300-320 at startup at 600 or 650 Watt power supply is adequate. Now you want to make sure the power supply actually gives 600 or 650 watts of power so you will want a power factor corrected power supply. Often lower end power supplies don't correct for the power factor when rating the power of the supply so you won't actually get the rated power.
Now SCSI is another animal. You probably want at least 25W per drive at startup or you definitely need to stagger drive spinup. Often when designing systems we don't ship systems that can handle all drives being spun up at the same time. Why? Because we can't prevent the user from changing the setup from staggered spinup to normal.
So for a 16 Drive SCSI system you want to allow 400Watts for the Drives or with my previous example dual core opteron a 750Watt power supply.
Oh look we still aren't at 1000Watts.
One advantage of having more power than you need is that power supplies like cars last longer when then aren't driving hard. So you could go with a larger power supply to help extend it's life.
Though even taking that into account unless this enermax isn't power factor corrected, you still have a lot of extra power.
The only thing I can think of that might be a reason for this big of a workstation power supply is a high end graphics box with multiple high power graphics cards and a raid array to boot.
Information? Wikipedia is at best filled with commonly accepted myths and partial truths. Even a hard cover Encyclopedia is not considered a good resource of information. It's just a starting point for your research which hopefully points you in the right direction. There's a reason encyclopedia's aren't accepted as more than research tools at the Post Secondary level and not authoritative sources.
In a lot of ways wikipedia is worse. If I post something to wikipedia that's factually incomplete or incorrect, it stays like that until someone changes it for better or for worse.
It's fine as a general purpose research tool but anyone using it as a factual source in an argument is naive at best and probably a fool.
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Companies do that so that they don't get stuck short staffed in the Fall trying to get everyone's vacations in before the new year. That happened our my last job. One of my coworkers was having Twins and his wife went on bed rest so he got extra time off and a different shift for a while. We struggled to get shifts staffed properly for 3 months.
Of course you do. No one is forcing you to go to work. Though depending on the circumstances surrounding your time off, the company may have the grounds to fire you.
Us Canadians pay for the right to trade music every time we buy blank media. For now, downloading music is legal not a protest.
Umm our satellite service most definitely offers Pay Per View. What it doesn't offer is Video On Demand and the reception sucks during a hard rain.
[quote]And what is opening are specialized niches of people who understand the business and the computer. As I work in a hedge fund I cannot imagine any fund these days not having quants or algo-programmers at their disposal. Guess what I did about 4 years ago? I switched from being a general programmer to a specializing qua[/quote]
I beg to differ. There's been a need for computer programmers who understand business and accounting since before the PC was born. IBM has made their business on providing computers and software for businesses. Even before computers, IBM was making machines for Business. Nothing new here.
Where do you live? Most places by law they have to give you minimum of 2 weeks and Stat Holidays (or atleast same number of days). I would check your rights.
What are you a Windows programmer? I have never heard of Software having a "Mean Time To Failure" but then I am more of an Administrator and haven't done much QA.
Hmm, twitter is up is it? I don't think so.
1) Lost productivity when the local ISP or some some intermediate router is down? Multiply by each user. (In a lot of places that's pretty significant. Lots of places suffer multiple hours of network down time / flaky internet every month.)
Google Chrome supports offline use of google apps.
2) Lost productivity as your employees are clicking on google ads and browsing online when they should be working on that spreadsheet or word document, or simply lost productivity as the ads become insufferably intrusive and distracting.
Only the standard free version is ad based. If you upgrade to the premium the ads are gone. For anything serious like outlook integration, you need google apps premium.
First of all the mail coming from your clients is already unsecure long before it even reaches your mail server. Using googleapps email is no more a risk that using email from another webhost. There is nothing stopping you from downloading sensitive email from google and deleting just like you would from another email service. Just because it offers online storage doesn't mean you have to use it. I am sure a lot of small doctors offices don't have their own mail servers and use their ISP or a web hosting company. The question really comes down to whether you trust the company offering your mail service or not.
Yeah that would be good. A bunch of people who barely know english providing content.
All your base are belong to us
I don't think Blizzard is dumb enough to block the world's largest market.
How Can you violate a Graphical User Interface?
While generally I will concede that Nvidia has better drivers however I have had issues at times with Nvidia video cards and drivers. There was an issue with my GeForce FX 5200 and the newest drivers: Some games worked great, some would hang partway through the game. So I ended up having to install 6 month old drivers to get all the games to work. It was a performance hit though on some of my games.
My newest card is an x700 (well if you don't count the 73002go in this laptop) and I find it to be and adequate card and really don't have a complaint with it. It's not the fastest but it does the job good enough. I have had no driver issues with it since it was installed.
Sometimes it's not necessarily the drivers as much as the hardware. ATI has a tendency to make oddball cards that might even have names similar to good working cards but just don't work. It's always best to check out the reviews and comments on any card before buying it.
I think the worst case of this is my TVWonder. The card works great under windows, albeit an old card. SVGA, Composite capture under Linux works very well. But I can't for the life of me get the tuner frequencies right in Linux. That version of the card miss identifies itself as a PAL tuner instead of NTSC. Now what baffles me most is that I have even tried to create my own frequency table and I just can't sync up more than 1 or 2 channels. It's never been a big deal as I just use SVGA in from my cable box. Other version of this card work fine under Linux.
Hmm where are you shipping these machines? I can ship two 700 dollar 1Us from Canada to the states for under $75 US.
Oh and that price doesn't even include the PCIe riser.
BTW what RAID cards where you suggesting to put in the PCIe slot? Last I checked none available. Hmm now wouldn't it be nice to have a PCI-X slot like a real server?
Pretty much every server level machine we sell can be upgraded to support IPMI 1.5 or 2.0 and we use commodity boards. The upgrade price depends on the motherboard manufacturer but generally ranges from $40-140. Dell is offering nothing special here.
Okay explain this "Even with the evolution of SATA for slower mass storage".
How is SATA "slower mass storage"? What's faster? You will have trouble convincing me that a large SCSI array is faster than a large SATA array given the same interconnect. Once hit an array of 4 drives or more, your individual drive speed is no longer an issue as the connection between your system and array is the bottle neck and not the drive speed. With enough cache and a battery backup on your raid controller, the speed of your individual disks will pretty much never be a factor.
First you are talking about desktop components and this discussion is about Servers.
ASUS has just gotten into server level boards and they are alright but fairly lowend.
MSI really shouldn't be used in a server. They make desktop boards.
DVDRWs in servers? Now really again this is a desktop component. But if we are going to discuss DVD-RWs, why would I pay 2 to 3 times more for Plextor when LiteOn are just as good. Plextor use to be heads and shoulders above the rest but now you just paying for the name.
When it comes to drives, Maxtor is now pretty much a complete joke. They have higher failure rates than rest and are in financial trouble. Sure maybe they give a nice warranty but it's useless if they fold a year into the warranty.
The advantage of calling IBM, HP, or even Dell, is not simply the service contract (though your time is worth something), or the fact that their QC is superior to wherever you're getting your parts from, but that they have real engineers, who worry about such issues as optimizing air-flow, choosing proper fan-sizes, etc. Take apart an IBM xSeries 345 some time, then try to decide if you could actually buy parts to build a machine like that, for less than just calling IBM.
We're a small shop and our cooling designs is as good or better than pretty much any designs from the big boys. I seen lots of "Brand Name" designs that do not offer proper cooling. Especially with the current power hungry offerings from Intel.
Well yes and no. It is true that for some highend RAID solutions that you need matched drives. But they are still regular HardDisks for the most part just with all the same specs and firmware. As such you want to return the faulty drive to the manufacturer for a matched replacement. Because Dell, HP and IBM buy these drives on OEM contracts, you are often required by the drive manufacturer to system manufacturer to get warranty service.
No in some cases you might have a setup that uses High Voltage Differential instead of LVD. In that case yeah those aren't the run of the mill drives you buy a computer store. But how many webservers ship with HVD drives?
hmm last time I checked 86.4s is not 1min 24s but 1 minute 26.4 seconds.
While Qmail is probably the fastest sending email server going, How do you expect it to replace exchange? Exchange has features Qmail doesn't touch like colaboration and calendaring.
No one in there right mind is going to use 4 Raid cards to run 16 Drives. They would use 2 8 port cards. Some who don't know better thinking they will get better performance may but they really don't understand the technology. PCI multiple and PCI-X slots share the same bus and thus bandwidth so splitting up the cards across more slots doesn't get you more bandwidth. Most server boards only come with like 2 PCI-X buses and each bus only supports 133 MHz slot (if that).
Modern SATA/IDE drives run at about 7 Watts under load and 15 Watts at startup. The problem with raid array is always startup so you need to have enough power to start the system up. So for a 16 Drive SATA setup you only need an extra 240W. So since I can build a dual core opteron box that only requires about 300-320 at startup at 600 or 650 Watt power supply is adequate. Now you want to make sure the power supply actually gives 600 or 650 watts of power so you will want a power factor corrected power supply. Often lower end power supplies don't correct for the power factor when rating the power of the supply so you won't actually get the rated power.
Now SCSI is another animal. You probably want at least 25W per drive at startup or you definitely need to stagger drive spinup. Often when designing systems we don't ship systems that can handle all drives being spun up at the same time. Why? Because we can't prevent the user from changing the setup from staggered spinup to normal.
So for a 16 Drive SCSI system you want to allow 400Watts for the Drives or with my previous example dual core opteron a 750Watt power supply.
Oh look we still aren't at 1000Watts.
One advantage of having more power than you need is that power supplies like cars last longer when then aren't driving hard. So you could go with a larger power supply to help extend it's life.
Though even taking that into account unless this enermax isn't power factor corrected, you still have a lot of extra power.
The only thing I can think of that might be a reason for this big of a workstation power supply is a high end graphics box with multiple high power graphics cards and a raid array to boot.
A regular encyclopedia is produced by a respected publisher not a bunch of internet geeks who think they know something.
Information? Wikipedia is at best filled with commonly accepted myths and partial truths. Even a hard cover Encyclopedia is not considered a good resource of information. It's just a starting point for your research which hopefully points you in the right direction. There's a reason encyclopedia's aren't accepted as more than research tools at the Post Secondary level and not authoritative sources.
In a lot of ways wikipedia is worse. If I post something to wikipedia that's factually incomplete or incorrect, it stays like that until someone changes it for better or for worse.
It's fine as a general purpose research tool but anyone using it as a factual source in an argument is naive at best and probably a fool.