This goes against the prevailing wisdom here, but Linux is not necessarily the best OS for netbooks.
The newest netbooks have about as much CPU power and memory as a notebook computer made 3 years ago. That's enough to run windows XP and older Microsoft applications such as office 2003.
And, Windows has the overwhelming advantage it always did : it has an enormous existing software library that still dwarfs that of Linux. An operating system is an enormously powerful natural monopoly. It's time to admit that the only way Linux or MacOS could ever pull ahead and have the diversity of software Windows has is if Microsoft royally screws up over a period of years. Windows ME didn't even scratch Microsoft's monopoly, because everyone kept using Win98, and it appears that Vista is the same way.
Finally, I've heard many complain that the netbook manufacturers don't properly choose a good Linux distro and configure it with all the software a user is likely to ever need. If the manufacturers did that, pre-installing open office and VLC media player and firefox and the rest, and tuned the distro behind the scenes to run blazing fast on a flash disk, then Linux might have stayed a viable option.
I would assume Microsoft has also adapated to this market : they must be offering a substantial discount on the software license for a netbook. Wouldn't surprise me if they were selling "XP for netbook use" for $20 a license. It could very well be that it is cheaper to pay Microsoft than it is to pay the technical support costs for Linux.
Ha Ha. Point is, if the wind turbine engieers fall asleep on the job, and the turbines are made in some shoddy factory in China by disgruntled factory workers (or worse, a GM plant by disgruntled union auto workers), then the worst case scenario, the turbines break prematurely or fall over and kill a couple of people.
Radiation from a nuclear meltdown might only kill a hundred people or so, but the cleanup costs can eat the labor of thousands of people's lifetimes.
False. The fissioning mass was several thousand pounds of enriched uranium. Had it been able to consolidate into a single mass, it could have melted straight through the concrete and down into the groundwater. That's what the "China Syndrome" fear was, as there would be jets of highly radioactive steam erupting from all around the plant, contaminating an area as widely and seriously as Chernobyl.
The fact is, it's pretty dangerous to have enough nuclear fuel in one spot to generate gigawatts of power over years to decades. There's a vast amount of energy there, and it can be released much more rapidly than the reactor is designed for if the control systems fail.
With wind, there zero risk. Absolutely none, there's simply no way a wind farm can ever go south and harm large numbers of people even if no one does ANY safety engineering or maintainence.
That's the big thing : sure, a nuclear reactor, if built by highly educated workers and engineers with many redundant safety systems, is 'safe'. It's 'safe' as long as a team of technicians watches the plant day and night, and repairs things as they break.
The problem is, that costs a fortune : the true costs of nuclear power are greater than wind costs today. End of story.
Perhaps I don't understand what "ownership" means. If I "own" an 80% share in a gas station, and the gas station is suing someone, I have the right to call up the station and say "drop the lawsuit, and fire whoever thought of the lawsuit". By the same logic, a representative of the Federal government should be able to personally order the person who is responsible for this suit fired immediately.
By a similar reasoning, if I own 80% of the business, and there is some question over whether an employee is owed a large bonus, as owner I can say "nope, don't pay the bonus". Even if my order violates a written contract, the employee would have to sue to get their money. And there's unlikely to be a single jury in the United States that would allow AIG execs to collect a few million dollars in return for making financial decisions that have destroyed the savings of millions of people.
I read the article in it's entirety. One thing that I was impressed by was the tremendous power of internet hardware reviewers. The reviewer in the article is some geek with a website, but he influences thousands, probably millions of dollars in sales. In the article, he figures out that the OCZ Vertex is an SSD that actually offers a good price/performance ratio. After reading that, I check newegg.com : yep, the top selling SSDs are the OCZ Vertex and Intel's. Geeks really do look for objective, hard benchmarks to decide what to spend their hard earned cash on.
More than that, OCZ actually revised their firmware to meet the reviewer's demands. They would not have done this at all if they had been left to their own devices, and the final product is actually usable.
Finally an SSD upgrade is viable : on newegg, the smallest OCZ Vertex drive is 30 gigs, for $108. Two of those in a RAID 0 configuration would be ideal, giving performance exceeding the Intel X-25M for half the cost. ($216 versus $350 for the X-25M)
I'm strongly tempted to make the purchase, although I know it'll be even cheaper if I just wait a few more months...
Hmm. I run an XP x64 box with 4 gigs. Everything just gets so bloated, so fast. These days, firefox alone can gobble up 400 megs of RAM. A game can grab 700 or 1.5 gigs. I just checked Task Manager : I'm also running IE, and it's eating another 400 megs of RAM as well. I have just 1 pdf document open that is 1 page long and nothing but text. 50 megs of RAM. Another 50 to "winword".
So I want my next desktop, when I build it in a year or 2, to have at least 12 gigs of RAM, and a laptop needs at least 4.
Newegg doesn't actually have the cheapest TVs. BC photo and Amazon.com do. And yeah, they're cheaper than Best Buy.
What does it have to do with how much it costs you? A lot. In practice, because it costs the online store less to sell the TV than it costs Best Buy in almost ALL situations, you cannot get a TV from best buy cheaper than you can find it somewhere on the internet unless BB is selling at a loss. Occasionally, yeah, they sell at a loss and try to make it up on those $200 HDMI cables or that extended warranty.
I've found that even when BB is having a blowout sale, you can usually find somewhere on the internet that matches their price.
As for newegg pushing extended warranties...please don't try to compare the two. Newegg sticks those links conveniently at the bottom of a single page you can quickly click past. Massively difference between that and a pushy, charismatic salesman right there in your face, asking you multiple times and telling you all the bad things that could potentially happen to the set if you don't buy an overpriced extended warranty.
I'd like an Air, but 2 gigs of RAM is grossly inadequate for a computer one intends to keep using for several years. On the other hand, I don't really trust Dell to make hardware to the relatively high standards of Apple...
Economic costs. Assume both Circuit City and www.newegg.com set their prices and sales strategies to achieve the same profit margin.
Then, every extra dollar that Circuit City spends to sell a good to you increases the average price of the merchandise by $1 + profit margin.
Thus, average prices at Circuit City are lots higher. Furthermore, unless you managed to find them selling an item below cost, it will always cost more to buy from them than a cut-rate online merchant.
Forgot to mention : the "last mile" cost for a big TV means maybe a $50 premium on the shipping from an online store versus what a big box retailer has to pay. Well, what's sales tax for a $1000 LCD TV? In my state, $80. Thought so.
Have you actually tried comparison shopping? TVs and other big items are actually cheaper online, even with shipping. The reason is pretty simple : a TV depreciates rapidly, and so it costs a lot of money for Best Buy to have several of each model of TV in stock at a physical store. (versus a single warehouse with just enough TVs in inventory to keep up with online sales for the next 2 weeks)
The other reason is : yeah, it costs money to ship a TV to you....how do you think the TV got to THE STORE? That's right, someone shipped it.
Consider two journeys for a big TV box. One starts at a warehouse, gets loaded onto a semi, and hauled along with other boxes to a big box retailer. Another box starts at a warehouse, gets loaded onto a semi, and hauled to a city. It gets unloaded, and loaded onto a smaller delivery truck, which goes around town delivering all the TVs in the back.
How much money does that "last mile" cost in economic terms? Maybe $30-$50. That's the price premium an online retailer pays to get the TV to you. In turn, the online retailer doesn't have to pay for real estate, energy, labor, taxes, security, advertising, and hundreds of other things a brick and mortar store has to pay. That's why on average amazon.com and newegg.com have the nice expensive TVs for less money than even Sam's club.
Answer to all of those questions is "www.newegg.com". No, I don't work for them.
1. Check every hardware site : everyone likes newegg.
2. Newegg will replace your item for the cost of a shipping fee. Not quite the "free" return you can do at Best Buy, but shipping fees are cheap relative to most computer parts. Given how seldom you have to return something, you always come out ahead with newegg.
3. Even for those items, newegg gives you 30 days
4. It's called hardware review sites. For computer components, they can do much more exhaustive testing than you have the equipment or time to do yourself.
5. Not with newegg
6. They always respond to emails relatively rapidly, and I have gotten them to agree to waive restock fees.
Good point, sorta. To be honest, I feel like online reviews, as long as I read a variety of professional and amateur reviews from a wide variety of places, give more accurate information than my own 2 eyes. The reason is that even if I physically go to see a demo, Best Buy doesn't have every product available, while online reviewers, especially the pros, have the experience to compare a product to all that are available in the market.
Another excellent source of information is message boards : overall, I think message boards provide the most accurate, unbiased information for a particular subject.
That's a pretty clever idea, actually. If Microcenter maintained just one combined warehouse/store in every major U.S. city, they could provide super fast shipping to most customers in the United States AND keep those that want instant gratification supplied with electronics.
Why the heck does anyone buy electronics from brick and mortar stores any more? Yes, occasionally you can find "deals" compared to online - but those always HAVE to be at a loss compared to online stores.
The reason is that online stores have several massive advantages. Economies of scale are one : newegg.com and the others can supply the entire United States with electronics using just a few large warehouses, with heavy use of automation. The real estate, labor, energy usage, advertising costs, management...it's all cheaper with a few large warehouses.
The second massive advantage is that electronic goods inherently plummet in value very rapidly. The longer something sits in inventory, the less money the store makes by selling it. Again, the online stores need vastly smaller inventories relative to their total sales, and I suspect sometimes work so efficiently as to unload goods from the shipping containers from china and immediatly send it on the buyers.
I know what most of you are going to say : "instant gratification" isn't there. True. Still, electronics are cheap and light to ship. It's cheaper to have a video card overnighted from newegg than it is to pay the usual price the same video card is listed at in Best Buy.
The overwhelming majority of us don't need instant gratification, we can wait 2 days. If we are doing something where high uptime is critical, then it's still cheaper to order a few extra parts from newegg as spares than it is to buy stuff from Best Buy or Fry's. Or just keep your old stuff for spares.
Actually, that unit is fine. If you're comparing two alternatives, you just need to make sure the time unit is the same. It could be million instructions per hour, second, million years, whatever. Doesn't matter.
Well, the part was only released a month ago. There's a significant speed boost per processing core versus the older core 2/core quad line, and a new socket type/new ram type. As of right now, there's nothing faster that money can buy in the x86 architecture. Heck, for generalized processing it's probably the fastest chip money can buy. A new supercomputer would likely run best with a massive array of thousands of these things.
The thing is, insurance companies don't stereotype. Actuaries very carefully calculate the average costs of insuring someone, and older people cost a lot more. It's a few extremely expensive people sucking up all the funds, of course. For instance, an older person is more likely develop a treatable form of cancer, which required radiation/surgery and chemo as well as numerous MRIs. Or heart disease, or hundreds of other causes. It isn't discrimination on the part of insurance companies, it does cost more.
The companies I'm thinking of are called Halliburton and a smaller oil firm. Both were self insured, but used Blue Cross/Blue shield to administer the plan. Essentially, the company bears the financial risk, but BC/BS is the "front end" and pays claims based on the same rules that apply to all BC/BS members. In the long run, it would cost the company a bit less than paying for the insurance premiums directly, but a single employee in a hundred developing a "million dollar illness" obviously can break the bank. Truth is, this is vastly more likely to happen to someone older.
Anyways, it seems to me that you should be able to take advantage of the situation. If you contract for several companies, and raise your rates whenever you get overbooked, you should be able to make a lot more money in the long run. The extra money you are paid over what a salaried employee makes (after paying the self employment tax and for your own benefits) should be saved in a sound investment plan, of course.
In a way, what you want is a company to use it's own funds to bear the financial risks of market fluctuations, keeping you employed as a salaried employee no matter what the market does. If you use your own funds to do this, you're basically doing the same thing...except that a company can screw you over and fire you in a market downturn, while your "rainy day fund" won't go anywhere. Assuming you followed a sensible investment strategy, of course, and spread your money between stocks, bonds, gold, and foreign markets.
There's also a lot more ways you can market yourself when you're a contractor working for several firms. One simple way is to only take jobs that you have the specialized skills to knock out easily, with impressive appearing, rapid results. Unlike a salaried employee, if they tell you they want something you aren't good at, you can just refer them to another contractor and say "I don't do windows" or whatever.
I have to ask : why Nehalem EP Xeons? Those are the absolute bleeding edge chips that Intel manufactures, and as such as the most expensive by a significant margin. Newegg doesn't even have the chip listed on their website, yet carries 91 different server CPU models. While space inside the data center does cost money, and so does electricity, is it really so expensive as to be worth paying for a chip that is probably 10 times as expensive per MIP as cheaper alternatives? The motherboards are more expensive as well, especially when you factor in the huge markup for server grade parts.
The only advantage of the Nehalem is that it is SLIGHTLY faster per processing thread, but networking is usually an "embarassingly parallel" problem.
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If I pay $2000 for a laptop computer, it needs to be a state of the art, high performance beast.
You're a competent computer user, relative to the average user. You are not the bread and butter customer being catered to by MSI.
This goes against the prevailing wisdom here, but Linux is not necessarily the best OS for netbooks.
The newest netbooks have about as much CPU power and memory as a notebook computer made 3 years ago. That's enough to run windows XP and older Microsoft applications such as office 2003.
And, Windows has the overwhelming advantage it always did : it has an enormous existing software library that still dwarfs that of Linux. An operating system is an enormously powerful natural monopoly. It's time to admit that the only way Linux or MacOS could ever pull ahead and have the diversity of software Windows has is if Microsoft royally screws up over a period of years. Windows ME didn't even scratch Microsoft's monopoly, because everyone kept using Win98, and it appears that Vista is the same way.
Finally, I've heard many complain that the netbook manufacturers don't properly choose a good Linux distro and configure it with all the software a user is likely to ever need. If the manufacturers did that, pre-installing open office and VLC media player and firefox and the rest, and tuned the distro behind the scenes to run blazing fast on a flash disk, then Linux might have stayed a viable option.
I would assume Microsoft has also adapated to this market : they must be offering a substantial discount on the software license for a netbook. Wouldn't surprise me if they were selling "XP for netbook use" for $20 a license. It could very well be that it is cheaper to pay Microsoft than it is to pay the technical support costs for Linux.
Ha Ha. Point is, if the wind turbine engieers fall asleep on the job, and the turbines are made in some shoddy factory in China by disgruntled factory workers (or worse, a GM plant by disgruntled union auto workers), then the worst case scenario, the turbines break prematurely or fall over and kill a couple of people.
Radiation from a nuclear meltdown might only kill a hundred people or so, but the cleanup costs can eat the labor of thousands of people's lifetimes.
False. The fissioning mass was several thousand pounds of enriched uranium. Had it been able to consolidate into a single mass, it could have melted straight through the concrete and down into the groundwater. That's what the "China Syndrome" fear was, as there would be jets of highly radioactive steam erupting from all around the plant, contaminating an area as widely and seriously as Chernobyl.
The fact is, it's pretty dangerous to have enough nuclear fuel in one spot to generate gigawatts of power over years to decades. There's a vast amount of energy there, and it can be released much more rapidly than the reactor is designed for if the control systems fail.
With wind, there zero risk. Absolutely none, there's simply no way a wind farm can ever go south and harm large numbers of people even if no one does ANY safety engineering or maintainence.
That's the big thing : sure, a nuclear reactor, if built by highly educated workers and engineers with many redundant safety systems, is 'safe'. It's 'safe' as long as a team of technicians watches the plant day and night, and repairs things as they break.
The problem is, that costs a fortune : the true costs of nuclear power are greater than wind costs today. End of story.
You've got to be able to see well to pwn enemies with headshots and get first post!
Perhaps I don't understand what "ownership" means. If I "own" an 80% share in a gas station, and the gas station is suing someone, I have the right to call up the station and say "drop the lawsuit, and fire whoever thought of the lawsuit". By the same logic, a representative of the Federal government should be able to personally order the person who is responsible for this suit fired immediately.
By a similar reasoning, if I own 80% of the business, and there is some question over whether an employee is owed a large bonus, as owner I can say "nope, don't pay the bonus". Even if my order violates a written contract, the employee would have to sue to get their money. And there's unlikely to be a single jury in the United States that would allow AIG execs to collect a few million dollars in return for making financial decisions that have destroyed the savings of millions of people.
Does he have an engineering degree? Could he have made the change to the firmware himself? Does anyone but other geeks know who he is?
I'm not trying to badmouth him, it's amazing that he does what he does, but it isn't immediately obvious why he carries so much respect.
I read the article in it's entirety. One thing that I was impressed by was the tremendous power of internet hardware reviewers. The reviewer in the article is some geek with a website, but he influences thousands, probably millions of dollars in sales. In the article, he figures out that the OCZ Vertex is an SSD that actually offers a good price/performance ratio. After reading that, I check newegg.com : yep, the top selling SSDs are the OCZ Vertex and Intel's. Geeks really do look for objective, hard benchmarks to decide what to spend their hard earned cash on. More than that, OCZ actually revised their firmware to meet the reviewer's demands. They would not have done this at all if they had been left to their own devices, and the final product is actually usable. Finally an SSD upgrade is viable : on newegg, the smallest OCZ Vertex drive is 30 gigs, for $108. Two of those in a RAID 0 configuration would be ideal, giving performance exceeding the Intel X-25M for half the cost. ($216 versus $350 for the X-25M) I'm strongly tempted to make the purchase, although I know it'll be even cheaper if I just wait a few more months...
Hmm. I run an XP x64 box with 4 gigs. Everything just gets so bloated, so fast. These days, firefox alone can gobble up 400 megs of RAM. A game can grab 700 or 1.5 gigs. I just checked Task Manager : I'm also running IE, and it's eating another 400 megs of RAM as well. I have just 1 pdf document open that is 1 page long and nothing but text. 50 megs of RAM. Another 50 to "winword". So I want my next desktop, when I build it in a year or 2, to have at least 12 gigs of RAM, and a laptop needs at least 4.
Newegg doesn't actually have the cheapest TVs. BC photo and Amazon.com do. And yeah, they're cheaper than Best Buy.
What does it have to do with how much it costs you? A lot. In practice, because it costs the online store less to sell the TV than it costs Best Buy in almost ALL situations, you cannot get a TV from best buy cheaper than you can find it somewhere on the internet unless BB is selling at a loss. Occasionally, yeah, they sell at a loss and try to make it up on those $200 HDMI cables or that extended warranty.
I've found that even when BB is having a blowout sale, you can usually find somewhere on the internet that matches their price.
As for newegg pushing extended warranties...please don't try to compare the two. Newegg sticks those links conveniently at the bottom of a single page you can quickly click past. Massively difference between that and a pushy, charismatic salesman right there in your face, asking you multiple times and telling you all the bad things that could potentially happen to the set if you don't buy an overpriced extended warranty.
I'd like an Air, but 2 gigs of RAM is grossly inadequate for a computer one intends to keep using for several years. On the other hand, I don't really trust Dell to make hardware to the relatively high standards of Apple...
That's what amazon and ebay is for :P
Ok, for clothes I sometimes hit up a factory outlet store.
Economic costs. Assume both Circuit City and www.newegg.com set their prices and sales strategies to achieve the same profit margin.
Then, every extra dollar that Circuit City spends to sell a good to you increases the average price of the merchandise by $1 + profit margin.
Thus, average prices at Circuit City are lots higher. Furthermore, unless you managed to find them selling an item below cost, it will always cost more to buy from them than a cut-rate online merchant.
Forgot to mention : the "last mile" cost for a big TV means maybe a $50 premium on the shipping from an online store versus what a big box retailer has to pay. Well, what's sales tax for a $1000 LCD TV? In my state, $80. Thought so.
Have you actually tried comparison shopping? TVs and other big items are actually cheaper online, even with shipping. The reason is pretty simple : a TV depreciates rapidly, and so it costs a lot of money for Best Buy to have several of each model of TV in stock at a physical store. (versus a single warehouse with just enough TVs in inventory to keep up with online sales for the next 2 weeks)
The other reason is : yeah, it costs money to ship a TV to you....how do you think the TV got to THE STORE? That's right, someone shipped it.
Consider two journeys for a big TV box. One starts at a warehouse, gets loaded onto a semi, and hauled along with other boxes to a big box retailer. Another box starts at a warehouse, gets loaded onto a semi, and hauled to a city. It gets unloaded, and loaded onto a smaller delivery truck, which goes around town delivering all the TVs in the back.
How much money does that "last mile" cost in economic terms? Maybe $30-$50. That's the price premium an online retailer pays to get the TV to you. In turn, the online retailer doesn't have to pay for real estate, energy, labor, taxes, security, advertising, and hundreds of other things a brick and mortar store has to pay. That's why on average amazon.com and newegg.com have the nice expensive TVs for less money than even Sam's club.
Answer to all of those questions is "www.newegg.com". No, I don't work for them.
1. Check every hardware site : everyone likes newegg.
2. Newegg will replace your item for the cost of a shipping fee. Not quite the "free" return you can do at Best Buy, but shipping fees are cheap relative to most computer parts. Given how seldom you have to return something, you always come out ahead with newegg.
3. Even for those items, newegg gives you 30 days
4. It's called hardware review sites. For computer components, they can do much more exhaustive testing than you have the equipment or time to do yourself.
5. Not with newegg
6. They always respond to emails relatively rapidly, and I have gotten them to agree to waive restock fees.
Please show some benchs. The numbers I looked at shows the i7 spanks the Core2 even for single process execution, assuming equal clock speeds.
Good point, sorta. To be honest, I feel like online reviews, as long as I read a variety of professional and amateur reviews from a wide variety of places, give more accurate information than my own 2 eyes. The reason is that even if I physically go to see a demo, Best Buy doesn't have every product available, while online reviewers, especially the pros, have the experience to compare a product to all that are available in the market. Another excellent source of information is message boards : overall, I think message boards provide the most accurate, unbiased information for a particular subject.
That's a pretty clever idea, actually. If Microcenter maintained just one combined warehouse/store in every major U.S. city, they could provide super fast shipping to most customers in the United States AND keep those that want instant gratification supplied with electronics.
Why the heck does anyone buy electronics from brick and mortar stores any more? Yes, occasionally you can find "deals" compared to online - but those always HAVE to be at a loss compared to online stores.
The reason is that online stores have several massive advantages. Economies of scale are one : newegg.com and the others can supply the entire United States with electronics using just a few large warehouses, with heavy use of automation. The real estate, labor, energy usage, advertising costs, management...it's all cheaper with a few large warehouses.
The second massive advantage is that electronic goods inherently plummet in value very rapidly. The longer something sits in inventory, the less money the store makes by selling it. Again, the online stores need vastly smaller inventories relative to their total sales, and I suspect sometimes work so efficiently as to unload goods from the shipping containers from china and immediatly send it on the buyers.
I know what most of you are going to say : "instant gratification" isn't there. True. Still, electronics are cheap and light to ship. It's cheaper to have a video card overnighted from newegg than it is to pay the usual price the same video card is listed at in Best Buy.
The overwhelming majority of us don't need instant gratification, we can wait 2 days. If we are doing something where high uptime is critical, then it's still cheaper to order a few extra parts from newegg as spares than it is to buy stuff from Best Buy or Fry's. Or just keep your old stuff for spares.
Actually, that unit is fine. If you're comparing two alternatives, you just need to make sure the time unit is the same. It could be million instructions per hour, second, million years, whatever. Doesn't matter.
Well, the part was only released a month ago. There's a significant speed boost per processing core versus the older core 2/core quad line, and a new socket type/new ram type. As of right now, there's nothing faster that money can buy in the x86 architecture. Heck, for generalized processing it's probably the fastest chip money can buy. A new supercomputer would likely run best with a massive array of thousands of these things.
The thing is, insurance companies don't stereotype. Actuaries very carefully calculate the average costs of insuring someone, and older people cost a lot more. It's a few extremely expensive people sucking up all the funds, of course. For instance, an older person is more likely develop a treatable form of cancer, which required radiation/surgery and chemo as well as numerous MRIs. Or heart disease, or hundreds of other causes. It isn't discrimination on the part of insurance companies, it does cost more.
The companies I'm thinking of are called Halliburton and a smaller oil firm. Both were self insured, but used Blue Cross/Blue shield to administer the plan. Essentially, the company bears the financial risk, but BC/BS is the "front end" and pays claims based on the same rules that apply to all BC/BS members. In the long run, it would cost the company a bit less than paying for the insurance premiums directly, but a single employee in a hundred developing a "million dollar illness" obviously can break the bank. Truth is, this is vastly more likely to happen to someone older.
Anyways, it seems to me that you should be able to take advantage of the situation. If you contract for several companies, and raise your rates whenever you get overbooked, you should be able to make a lot more money in the long run. The extra money you are paid over what a salaried employee makes (after paying the self employment tax and for your own benefits) should be saved in a sound investment plan, of course.
In a way, what you want is a company to use it's own funds to bear the financial risks of market fluctuations, keeping you employed as a salaried employee no matter what the market does. If you use your own funds to do this, you're basically doing the same thing...except that a company can screw you over and fire you in a market downturn, while your "rainy day fund" won't go anywhere. Assuming you followed a sensible investment strategy, of course, and spread your money between stocks, bonds, gold, and foreign markets.
There's also a lot more ways you can market yourself when you're a contractor working for several firms. One simple way is to only take jobs that you have the specialized skills to knock out easily, with impressive appearing, rapid results. Unlike a salaried employee, if they tell you they want something you aren't good at, you can just refer them to another contractor and say "I don't do windows" or whatever.
I have to ask : why Nehalem EP Xeons? Those are the absolute bleeding edge chips that Intel manufactures, and as such as the most expensive by a significant margin. Newegg doesn't even have the chip listed on their website, yet carries 91 different server CPU models. While space inside the data center does cost money, and so does electricity, is it really so expensive as to be worth paying for a chip that is probably 10 times as expensive per MIP as cheaper alternatives? The motherboards are more expensive as well, especially when you factor in the huge markup for server grade parts.
The only advantage of the Nehalem is that it is SLIGHTLY faster per processing thread, but networking is usually an "embarassingly parallel" problem.