ECC ram carries about a 15% premium, which means you're only paying for that 1/8th extra memory to store that parity bit. Single-socket Xeons aren't that much costlier than their i5/i7 analogs. It's the dual-socket boards and CPUs that cost 2-3 times more.
Single-socket supermicro board ? $200 to $250 Single-socket Xeon W3520 2.66ghz ? $270 or about 10-15% more than the i7-920
Me, I want a quad-socket hexa-core system with hyper-threading, just so I can have 48 penguins when I boot. And, y'know, get KDE compiled before they release another version with even more regressions:P
Depends on the type of desktop. ECC these days doesn't cost much more than non-ECC... Dell and HP may not want to admit it, but I buy ECC DDR3 all the time as I build a lot of white-box servers, and frankly even the lamest "gaming" Ram carries a higher premium than ECC.
The tricky thing is that while most (all?) current AMD boards can take ECC ram (unbuffered, not registered), no consumer Intel boards can handle ECC - you need to step up to a Xeon processor and chipset. Luckily the single-processor setups don't cost all that much more than their mid-range consumer equivalents, but you do have to sacrifice buzzy features like USB 3.0, SLI/Crossfire, eSATA and overclocking. One exception to this is the EVGA Classified SR-2, which has absolutely everything, but it's $600 and requires a special oversized chassis (or a lot of dremel work).
I'm going to put this out there: if someone is genuinely concerned about bit errors to a degree where the loss of work due to a minor crash or reboot is significant enough, go ahead and spend an extra 10% on ECC. Even if you pack that board with 96gb of memory, it's still cheaper than six months of therapy and thorazine:P
There are thousands of important free software projects all created by developers receiving little to no compensation
Stop right there. The compensation is software that does what we need and helps us push technology forward. Even just having all that code laying around for all to see is a fantastic educational corpus i.e. "How do I do X like so-and-so-app ?" Easy, open up the C source and see how they did it.
The fact that a guy like me, bit of a jack of all tech, can download a tarball, edit a few lines of code and tweak any piece of software to my exact needs is worth more than any Microsoft support contract (to me).
That, in my opinion, is the most rewarding aspect of open source software. I do a little free work, submit a patch or test something on my many boxes, and in return I get a massive pile of ever-improving software that helps me be a happy, productive alpha geek. You just can't put a price tag on that.
No, seeing attractive celebrities is a big part of the appeal of the world wide web.
I sure as shit don't watch Breaking Bad for the "attractive celebrities". I watch it because it's an entertaining show with good writing and character development.
And frankly, tits are plentiful and cheap. Talent is scarce, and in my view, far more valuable.
Dude, welcome to 2001. People already fight anything that doesn't perfectly align with their hollywood interpretation of a normal life.
When people are scared of an unseen boogeyman, they become paralyzed. Rational thought goes out the window and they become highly susceptible to "soothing" thought control, which is how one morphs a supposed democracy into the current plutocracy. Fear makes society malleable, the greater and more ominous the scare, the less people notice when you crank up the oppression.
Same kind of people who made up all the other english words. English has got to be one of the ugliest, most incoherent messes I've ever had the displeasure of speaking my entire life. It has to be the least expressive language I know of, lacking precision, so it should be no surprise that weird compound words bubble up to fill that void - mostly patterned after romance language constructs which allow for that kind of fine-tuning of almost any qualifier.
It's like PHP. We all know that linguistically it's a steaming pile of klingon shit, but it works and it's easy and every coder knows enough to get by. Sure, it's no Smalltalk and it sure as hell ain't LISP, but it gets shit done.
I am by no means a weather geek, but it seems obvious to me. You have a cloud, by definition a body of misted water in borderline suspension, and you ram a plane through it, it's going to upset the suspension enough to change back into a liquid. We did stuff like that in science class in high school:P
I'm fond of Hackaday.com . It's not a true how-to site, but they showcase some often fascinating stuff which I often find inspiring for my own projects.
One thing I never understood is why they cling to the print edition exclusively. You'd think a hacker journal would embrace the internet with open arms. Hell, I'd gladly pay for an online subscription to 2600 if it meant there would be more timely content, and save me the lone trip to the douchey bookstore.
Another 2600 fan here, but their focus is primary on the legal and pseudo-legal entanglements of modern technology. Sure, they print a handful of hopelessly outdated how-tos on wifi sniffing and general BOFH pleasantries, but the bulk of it is now a socio-political journal. Not so much a tech zine anymore...
You have it backwards. If the only reason you go to a football game is to blow a stupid horn, maybe you should stay home and wish your father had beaten you more often as a child.
Summer course: $110 Students per class: ~30 Classroom hours: 12 weeks * 2.5hr/wk (guessing) = 30
I've made the numbers deliberately simple to prove a point: $110 * 30 students / 30 hours = $110 / hour. Does it really cost that much to stick a failed professional in a lit room ? The prof only makes $20 to $30 / hour if that. Where's all the overhead coming from ?
If the government is indeed paying a significant portion of college dues, that means the inefficiencies are far greater than our already egregious self-financed numbers suggest. Where is the money going ? One thing is certain: it is not going to better quality education, and for that, every single citizen and taxpayer should be outraged because the "poor" nations around you are outperforming your graduates. There is a sieve somewhere and it needs to be plugged.
Sure it uses GPU acceleration, but how much 3D performance is "enough" ? These cards are designed to push over a billion textured polygons per second with little regard for accuracy - speed is king in the gaming arena. It just seems like a very mismatched feature set and I can't picture a professional user wanting this noisy game card.
Heck I have two Falcons, one modded one not, and they have been flawless despite being played for 20+ hours a week in a small enclosed area. The fans get a bit loud, considering my ears are about 6 inches away from the console, but the only times I've experienced crashes were due to that disasterpiece of paper-maché-code they call Modern Warfare 2 - nothing a hop back to the dashboard couldn't fix.
Now looking at this new "slim" 360, I really don't see much of an improvement. I'm assuming they've slightly reworked the Jasper board, but the whole thing doesn't look noticeably smaller. I do find it looks very awkward with its random angles that remind me of 1996 "avant-garde" web sites. I know design was never MS' strength but they really need to fire every single artist they have. Home entertainment devices aren't supposed to look like they've been whacked in the midriff with a Volvo - they are supposed to blend in with their surroundings and not detract from the actual media experience.
I'm just pulling this out of my ass, but my impression upon seeing this "new and improved" box is that they started out with the goal of shrinking it, hit some engineering or organisational roadblocks, and released what little they had achieved to save face and justify the fruitless expenses.
The issue here is not about whether downloading movies should is illegal. The issue is that the plaintiffs cannot provide any tangible evidence that a movie was actually downloaded by the person they are accusing, because they have no control nor dominion over any of the computers and networks involved in the transaction.
They get logs from an ISP which they do not own nor manage, produced by software written by a third party, yielding IP addresses allegedly caught transmitting "illegal bits".
The whole enchilada is circumstantial evidence to the Nth degree because every step of the evidence collection is flagged with a "maybe". Maybe the ISP's logs were tampered (or redacted), maybe the software throws false positives (hint: it does), maybe you can't track an IP address to a specific person, maybe 20% of all computers are infected with malware that proxies these illegal bits via unsuspecting users, maybe those zeroes and ones actually make up a picture of my scrotum that just happens to look like Alone In The Dark 1 and 2.
There is a very plain reason why the film companies settle with the defendants: they know full well that their court game is weak, and the threat of financial intimidation is far more chilling than a fair fight in front of a jury of "small people" who just might sympathize with the defendant. The MPAA knows this far too well, and are careful to steer clear of such risky assaults. After all, if they could prove your guilt without question, they wouldn't need a trial.
Agreed. If someone else is willing to damage their sanity by working too much for too little pay, by all means let them do it. It is the natural tendency of most bosses to push even long-standing employees to unreasonable extremes, but the converse is that if your skills are so diverse and valuable to the company, it means you can take those skills elsewhere with relative ease. Either they pay up, or you find someone who will.
That's because Yahoo and Hotmail probably didn't pour nearly as much effort and resources as Google. It's a shame, really, because my Yahoo mail is virtually useless due to the 100:1 spam-to-ham ratio, most of it 419 and other "busienss opportunity" types of scams. You'd think they could afford to tighten it up a little, just by looking at the bandwidth and storage savings - but that's Yahoo for ya, proudly doin' it wrong since 1994.
Yep that's my observation as well. Tapes used to be "big enough", but they didn't scale as quickly as hard disks. The fact that even today, DDS tapes only hold 160gb, is absolutely embarrassing. The tapes cost more than a same-sized hard drive, and you still need the tape drive whose price is constantly ballooning in a shrinking market.
How do they expect us to back up these 32TB+ disk arrays ? The 200 tapes would take up ten times more space than the server they're protecting, and either an expensive robotic feeder, or a suicidally bored tape monkey. Really, in this day and age, the only sane way to back up a 2TB hard disk is to another hard disk.
I think there's a big difference in your case, namely the content on the tapes is for archival purposes, not rotating backups. You don't wipe the tapes every other week to put new shows on them. Frankly I'm surprised they don't just have you burn them off to write-once media like 50gb BluRay discs. Seems like that would fit the usage better than an erasable tape. Sure, discs rot over the years but when's the last time you heard of a sysadmin successfully recovering 20 year old tapes ?
Cloud backup is illusory anyway, if you don't own the cloud then you're basically entrusting your data to an unknown 3rd party, and no storage provider will give you a warranty where they will recreate your data bit-by-bit in the event of a disaster - that's why underwriters won't swing it.
Yeah, I get that everyone's drinking the LTO kool-aid, but as a boot-strapper I never saw the appeal of tapes. I've been a fan of big dumb hard disk arrays since the day I scored four 40gb drives on eBay at $300 apiece, strapped them into a frankenputer with a hardmodded Promise fakeraid controller, and watched my transfer rates shoot for the sky (and my failure rate : bad Maxtor!).
I spend most of my days dreaming up ways to cram more terabytes per rack, more gigabytes per second. A tape system would take up more space than the hard disk system it is backing up. Sure, it's portable in the sense that you can toss 100 tapes into several rubbermaid bins and tow them away to a serene place, but you could do the exact same thing with another disk array. If you rig your nodes with a fast interconnect like 10gbe or Infiniband, you can easily outpace a tape system by an order of magnitude.
If you think the extra capital investment of a disk-to-disk system is excessive, I see two possibilities: either you don't value your time, or you don't value your data. Me, I have a freakin' Infiniband port on my desktop machine! It gets backed up to the 32TB Linux-based file server, then the extra-important bits are rsynced to another box offsite. Cheap, fast, lazy-sysadmin-proof (that's me). Who needs a tape monkey when a 40-line shell script can do it better ?
Slashdot Mirror
ECC ram carries about a 15% premium, which means you're only paying for that 1/8th extra memory to store that parity bit. Single-socket Xeons aren't that much costlier than their i5/i7 analogs. It's the dual-socket boards and CPUs that cost 2-3 times more.
Single-socket supermicro board ? $200 to $250
Single-socket Xeon W3520 2.66ghz ? $270 or about 10-15% more than the i7-920
Dual-socket supermicro board ? $500 to $750
Dual-socket Xeon quad 2.66ghz ? $950 each!
Me, I want a quad-socket hexa-core system with hyper-threading, just so I can have 48 penguins when I boot. And, y'know, get KDE compiled before they release another version with even more regressions :P
Depends on the type of desktop. ECC these days doesn't cost much more than non-ECC... Dell and HP may not want to admit it, but I buy ECC DDR3 all the time as I build a lot of white-box servers, and frankly even the lamest "gaming" Ram carries a higher premium than ECC.
The tricky thing is that while most (all?) current AMD boards can take ECC ram (unbuffered, not registered), no consumer Intel boards can handle ECC - you need to step up to a Xeon processor and chipset. Luckily the single-processor setups don't cost all that much more than their mid-range consumer equivalents, but you do have to sacrifice buzzy features like USB 3.0, SLI/Crossfire, eSATA and overclocking. One exception to this is the EVGA Classified SR-2, which has absolutely everything, but it's $600 and requires a special oversized chassis (or a lot of dremel work).
I'm going to put this out there: if someone is genuinely concerned about bit errors to a degree where the loss of work due to a minor crash or reboot is significant enough, go ahead and spend an extra 10% on ECC. Even if you pack that board with 96gb of memory, it's still cheaper than six months of therapy and thorazine :P
There are thousands of important free software projects all created by developers receiving little to no compensation
Stop right there. The compensation is software that does what we need and helps us push technology forward. Even just having all that code laying around for all to see is a fantastic educational corpus i.e. "How do I do X like so-and-so-app ?" Easy, open up the C source and see how they did it.
The fact that a guy like me, bit of a jack of all tech, can download a tarball, edit a few lines of code and tweak any piece of software to my exact needs is worth more than any Microsoft support contract (to me).
That, in my opinion, is the most rewarding aspect of open source software. I do a little free work, submit a patch or test something on my many boxes, and in return I get a massive pile of ever-improving software that helps me be a happy, productive alpha geek. You just can't put a price tag on that.
No, seeing attractive celebrities is a big part of the appeal of the world wide web.
I sure as shit don't watch Breaking Bad for the "attractive celebrities". I watch it because it's an entertaining show with good writing and character development.
And frankly, tits are plentiful and cheap. Talent is scarce, and in my view, far more valuable.
Dude, welcome to 2001. People already fight anything that doesn't perfectly align with their hollywood interpretation of a normal life.
When people are scared of an unseen boogeyman, they become paralyzed. Rational thought goes out the window and they become highly susceptible to "soothing" thought control, which is how one morphs a supposed democracy into the current plutocracy. Fear makes society malleable, the greater and more ominous the scare, the less people notice when you crank up the oppression.
So they took the old 1.0 iPhone firmware, skinned the chrome like Windows and called it a day ?
Same kind of people who made up all the other english words. English has got to be one of the ugliest, most incoherent messes I've ever had the displeasure of speaking my entire life. It has to be the least expressive language I know of, lacking precision, so it should be no surprise that weird compound words bubble up to fill that void - mostly patterned after romance language constructs which allow for that kind of fine-tuning of almost any qualifier.
It's like PHP. We all know that linguistically it's a steaming pile of klingon shit, but it works and it's easy and every coder knows enough to get by. Sure, it's no Smalltalk and it sure as hell ain't LISP, but it gets shit done.
Sure it's cheaper, until they run out of zinc and copper and prices skyrocket.
Then they're fucked.
Hell, many of them probably eat better than we do... less reliance on hyper-processed junk.
I am by no means a weather geek, but it seems obvious to me. You have a cloud, by definition a body of misted water in borderline suspension, and you ram a plane through it, it's going to upset the suspension enough to change back into a liquid. We did stuff like that in science class in high school :P
Yep Make went too trendy and vapid.
I'm fond of Hackaday.com . It's not a true how-to site, but they showcase some often fascinating stuff which I often find inspiring for my own projects.
One thing I never understood is why they cling to the print edition exclusively. You'd think a hacker journal would embrace the internet with open arms. Hell, I'd gladly pay for an online subscription to 2600 if it meant there would be more timely content, and save me the lone trip to the douchey bookstore.
Another 2600 fan here, but their focus is primary on the legal and pseudo-legal entanglements of modern technology. Sure, they print a handful of hopelessly outdated how-tos on wifi sniffing and general BOFH pleasantries, but the bulk of it is now a socio-political journal. Not so much a tech zine anymore...
You have it backwards. If the only reason you go to a football game is to blow a stupid horn, maybe you should stay home and wish your father had beaten you more often as a child.
Let's do some basic math here:
Summer course: $110
Students per class: ~30
Classroom hours: 12 weeks * 2.5hr/wk (guessing) = 30
I've made the numbers deliberately simple to prove a point: $110 * 30 students / 30 hours = $110 / hour. Does it really cost that much to stick a failed professional in a lit room ? The prof only makes $20 to $30 / hour if that. Where's all the overhead coming from ?
If the government is indeed paying a significant portion of college dues, that means the inefficiencies are far greater than our already egregious self-financed numbers suggest. Where is the money going ? One thing is certain: it is not going to better quality education, and for that, every single citizen and taxpayer should be outraged because the "poor" nations around you are outperforming your graduates. There is a sieve somewhere and it needs to be plugged.
You know the stock market game is crooked when possessing knowledge is considered cheating.
Sure it uses GPU acceleration, but how much 3D performance is "enough" ? These cards are designed to push over a billion textured polygons per second with little regard for accuracy - speed is king in the gaming arena. It just seems like a very mismatched feature set and I can't picture a professional user wanting this noisy game card.
Heck I have two Falcons, one modded one not, and they have been flawless despite being played for 20+ hours a week in a small enclosed area. The fans get a bit loud, considering my ears are about 6 inches away from the console, but the only times I've experienced crashes were due to that disasterpiece of paper-maché-code they call Modern Warfare 2 - nothing a hop back to the dashboard couldn't fix.
Now looking at this new "slim" 360, I really don't see much of an improvement. I'm assuming they've slightly reworked the Jasper board, but the whole thing doesn't look noticeably smaller. I do find it looks very awkward with its random angles that remind me of 1996 "avant-garde" web sites. I know design was never MS' strength but they really need to fire every single artist they have. Home entertainment devices aren't supposed to look like they've been whacked in the midriff with a Volvo - they are supposed to blend in with their surroundings and not detract from the actual media experience.
I'm just pulling this out of my ass, but my impression upon seeing this "new and improved" box is that they started out with the goal of shrinking it, hit some engineering or organisational roadblocks, and released what little they had achieved to save face and justify the fruitless expenses.
The issue here is not about whether downloading movies should is illegal. The issue is that the plaintiffs cannot provide any tangible evidence that a movie was actually downloaded by the person they are accusing, because they have no control nor dominion over any of the computers and networks involved in the transaction.
They get logs from an ISP which they do not own nor manage, produced by software written by a third party, yielding IP addresses allegedly caught transmitting "illegal bits".
The whole enchilada is circumstantial evidence to the Nth degree because every step of the evidence collection is flagged with a "maybe". Maybe the ISP's logs were tampered (or redacted), maybe the software throws false positives (hint: it does), maybe you can't track an IP address to a specific person, maybe 20% of all computers are infected with malware that proxies these illegal bits via unsuspecting users, maybe those zeroes and ones actually make up a picture of my scrotum that just happens to look like Alone In The Dark 1 and 2.
There is a very plain reason why the film companies settle with the defendants: they know full well that their court game is weak, and the threat of financial intimidation is far more chilling than a fair fight in front of a jury of "small people" who just might sympathize with the defendant. The MPAA knows this far too well, and are careful to steer clear of such risky assaults. After all, if they could prove your guilt without question, they wouldn't need a trial.
Agreed. If someone else is willing to damage their sanity by working too much for too little pay, by all means let them do it. It is the natural tendency of most bosses to push even long-standing employees to unreasonable extremes, but the converse is that if your skills are so diverse and valuable to the company, it means you can take those skills elsewhere with relative ease. Either they pay up, or you find someone who will.
http://twitter.com/shitmydadsays
Everyone else can eat a bag of dicks. Twitter is, to me, a one-liner joke delivery mechanism.
That's because Yahoo and Hotmail probably didn't pour nearly as much effort and resources as Google. It's a shame, really, because my Yahoo mail is virtually useless due to the 100:1 spam-to-ham ratio, most of it 419 and other "busienss opportunity" types of scams. You'd think they could afford to tighten it up a little, just by looking at the bandwidth and storage savings - but that's Yahoo for ya, proudly doin' it wrong since 1994.
Yep that's my observation as well. Tapes used to be "big enough", but they didn't scale as quickly as hard disks. The fact that even today, DDS tapes only hold 160gb, is absolutely embarrassing. The tapes cost more than a same-sized hard drive, and you still need the tape drive whose price is constantly ballooning in a shrinking market.
How do they expect us to back up these 32TB+ disk arrays ? The 200 tapes would take up ten times more space than the server they're protecting, and either an expensive robotic feeder, or a suicidally bored tape monkey. Really, in this day and age, the only sane way to back up a 2TB hard disk is to another hard disk.
I think there's a big difference in your case, namely the content on the tapes is for archival purposes, not rotating backups. You don't wipe the tapes every other week to put new shows on them. Frankly I'm surprised they don't just have you burn them off to write-once media like 50gb BluRay discs. Seems like that would fit the usage better than an erasable tape. Sure, discs rot over the years but when's the last time you heard of a sysadmin successfully recovering 20 year old tapes ?
Cloud backup is illusory anyway, if you don't own the cloud then you're basically entrusting your data to an unknown 3rd party, and no storage provider will give you a warranty where they will recreate your data bit-by-bit in the event of a disaster - that's why underwriters won't swing it.
Yeah, I get that everyone's drinking the LTO kool-aid, but as a boot-strapper I never saw the appeal of tapes. I've been a fan of big dumb hard disk arrays since the day I scored four 40gb drives on eBay at $300 apiece, strapped them into a frankenputer with a hardmodded Promise fakeraid controller, and watched my transfer rates shoot for the sky (and my failure rate : bad Maxtor!).
I spend most of my days dreaming up ways to cram more terabytes per rack, more gigabytes per second. A tape system would take up more space than the hard disk system it is backing up. Sure, it's portable in the sense that you can toss 100 tapes into several rubbermaid bins and tow them away to a serene place, but you could do the exact same thing with another disk array. If you rig your nodes with a fast interconnect like 10gbe or Infiniband, you can easily outpace a tape system by an order of magnitude.
If you think the extra capital investment of a disk-to-disk system is excessive, I see two possibilities: either you don't value your time, or you don't value your data. Me, I have a freakin' Infiniband port on my desktop machine! It gets backed up to the 32TB Linux-based file server, then the extra-important bits are rsynced to another box offsite. Cheap, fast, lazy-sysadmin-proof (that's me). Who needs a tape monkey when a 40-line shell script can do it better ?