If you have a couple of hundred PCs you can expect a couple of failures a week. I know people who run labs of Dells and that's the failure rate they have. Things like hard drives, fans, and other random parts die quite often and for no particular reason when you have hundreds of the things.
I'm very happy for you. The problem is, what if something does fail? If you don't mind the server being down for a few hours for a scheduled (or unscheduled) outage, then this is the right solution for you. If your business depends on that server, then it probably isn't.
What if a hard drive dies? What if network card dies? What if the power supply gives up the ghost? You have to power the box down and manually replace the offending component, while your business grinds to a halt. If you are lucky, you get a replacement quickly. If you aren't, you start updating your resume. Not a good situation to be in.
I've had several desktops working as servers over the years, and for the most part they all work flawlessly.
"For the most part" is the key thing here. They'll work fine if your expectations aren't too high. If you can tolerate a dead hard drive/power supply/network card bringing down a server, desktops are fine.
If the cost to the company of a 5-hour server outage is less than the cost of a real server, go ahead and use desktops. However, most places, even small businesses, lose thousands of dollars each hour a critical server is down. Sometimes, it's thousands of dollars per minute the server is down. Therefore, it usually makes sense to spend tens of thousands of dollars on real server hardware with hotswap capability rather than pinching pennies.
Reliability is the only difference between a desktop and a server system. If you can tolerate an outage every few weeks, go ahead and use desktops. If you need 100% uptime, get a real server, it will pay for itself many times over.
What if a hard drive dies? In a server, you pull it out, pop in a new one, and the RAID array fixes itself. The users don't notice a thing. In a desktop machine, you have to turn it off, unplug everything, open the case, unscrew the screws, unplug the cables, remove the drive, put in the new drive, put everything back together, restore the array manually, and hope you didn't lose some data. And all while you do this, the server is down and nobody can do anything.
Just keep one thing in mind. If you pay too much, nothing will happen. If you get a crappy system, you will get fired.
You can buy a perfectly decent PC for about $400 these days (monitor included). Obviously, it's not high end, but it can do everything a $2000 G5 can do. It might not have the best components, but who cares? You could go through 5 of them and still save money over a G5 -- and generally they last for about as long. If you REALLY care, replace the power supply and the RAM and they'll be just as reliable. If you need 3D, add a nice videocard. The computer will still be a lot less than $700. As far as electricity consumption of CRTs vs. LCDs: unless you use your computer 24 hours a day, the energy difference will be negligible (less than a dollar per month). Monitors spend most of the time in powersave mode anyway.
It's not like Apple has exclusive suppliers or something. They get the same hard drives, videocards, and memory chips eMachines does. Unless you actually care how many cables it has coming out of the back, a cheap PC is a much better value than anything Apple offers, hardware-wise.
I agree. Looks like the Tom Hayes guy is trying to make a name for himself. Pretty unlikely that the jackass will get reprimanded, since his boss is the state governor (who chose him in the first place).
Bullshit. SETI is a CPU and memory hog, and if he kept running it, the server would become bogged down and would probably crash more often. This reduces productivity. It would also be a reason to prematurely upgrade the server. It might also endanger the security of records located on the server. Finally, it wastes bandwidth that could be used for something else. It also shows the man is not fit to be a sysadmin -- what if he decided to contribute to some other worty causes by running, say, a Kazaa server? Or hosting personal websites? Basically, they had every reason in the world to fire him.
It's not subjective vs. objective, it's fact vs. opinion. Saying someone is an idiot is an opinion, not a fact, and is perfectly permissible. Saying someone has sex with goats would be slander if such an accusation cannot be substantiated.
You people just don't get it. The guy was doing something he wasn't supposed to with his employer's PCs. Nobody would question his firing if he was using the state's computers to host a commercial website for his own profit. However, using the same server for SETI@home is somehow better, right?
Really, would you think it would be discrimination if he decided to donate some of his employer's PCs to Goodwill and got fired? Or if he decided to help poor families by giving away office furniture? Basically, he was doing something that constitutes theft of service, with somebody else's computer.
With paging, you can address any amount of memory with any processor; it's just a question of how fast it can be accessed and how convenient it is to do it. It's very much possible to address many megabytes of memory with a 4-bit CPU. It's just that programming it would involve a lot of 4-letter words. Also, games require many of the same capabilities as scientific environments. They also benefit significantly from fast 64-bit arithmetic.
What are you smoking? Copyright does not prevent you from excluding fair use exceptions. If I want to write a book and make every reader sign an NDA, it's perfectly permissible (and is quite often done -- technical specs, for instance). If you don't want to sign the NDA, you always have the option of not reading the book. The reason it's not done normally is because it's quite a hassle to make every book purchaser enter a contract. However, there is no reason it couldn't be done.
Books have been written for a lot longer than copyright has been around. In most cases, authors don't make nearly enough money in royalties from their books to justify writing them in the first place. For the most part, copyright benefits publishers, not authors.
I don't care about the licensing issues Google has to contend with. It's their problem. However, disabling browser features does IMHO constitute denial of service, and the security hole does need to be fixed.
What if someone made a website that maximizes your browser, disables all window manager buttons, and makes you watch advertisements? This would be another example of a DoS attack, even if the website needs it to achieve their commercial goals.
So, according to you, a 64-bit processor is slower than a 32-bit one? So why aren't we using 4-bit CPUs? Obviously, if you need to work with 64-bit words, a 64-bit CPU will be dramatically faster.
Call the police. This is most likely a criminal matter, so they would be the ones to contact first. There was a news story about a similar situation where a landlord was doing this exact thing. Needless to say, he got busted for a plethora of laws including child porn.
As if the kernel actually uses all those streaming SIMD instructions or 3Dnow to do its thing. If it's already compiled for a 586, there will be no performance difference if you recompile it for something else. The kernel does little besides integer math.
All the Mozilla apps are known for loading slowly and taking up lots of memory with their reimplemented widgets.
This just proves you haven't used Firefox in the last year or so. On all of my computers (and they are fairly old), it takes less time to load than MSIE does. Opera (at least version 5) always took a lot longer than MSIE.
As for your last comment: Firefox is probably the most standards-compliant browser out there. I never seen it render Slashdot incorrectly, and the only thing it doesn't work with is MSIE-specific code.
Whatever. Firefox has about the same installer size as Opera (4mb vs 3.5), it loads and runs just as fast, and the rendering engine is far less buggy. If you prefer Opera, fine, but don't diss Firefox.
If you like Win95 so much, why don't you keep using it? It will still run on most modern hardware with no problems. Oh, wait, you want to take advantage of all the new XP features and have it be as efficient as Win95. Yeah, that will work well.
Registering a trademark is not like registering a domain. Registering one only establishes the date when you started using it. If you can show that you were using the trademark before the date it was registered by another company, you are in the clear, and they would be the ones infringing.
In free software, holes are generally found and fixed by developers before they are found by hackers. Microsoft fixes most security holes only after someone writes a worm. Linux has a much better security model -- it's not easy to get spyware onto a Linux machine. Sure, in theory, Linux developers find lots of holes. But I've yet to see a worm.
As far as educating your users: that is not usually possible. It's not a problem when they are programmers or engineers. But then you don't even need an IT department. It is a problem when their profession is not related to computing, and it is IT's responsibility to keep things working.
In DC, basic possession of lockpicking instruments is illegal, unless you are a licensed locksmith. You don't have to prove intent. This is the same in many other states. Be careful and don't do anything stupid.
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If you have a couple of hundred PCs you can expect a couple of failures a week. I know people who run labs of Dells and that's the failure rate they have. Things like hard drives, fans, and other random parts die quite often and for no particular reason when you have hundreds of the things.
I'm very happy for you. The problem is, what if something does fail? If you don't mind the server being down for a few hours for a scheduled (or unscheduled) outage, then this is the right solution for you. If your business depends on that server, then it probably isn't.
What if a hard drive dies? What if network card dies? What if the power supply gives up the ghost? You have to power the box down and manually replace the offending component, while your business grinds to a halt. If you are lucky, you get a replacement quickly. If you aren't, you start updating your resume. Not a good situation to be in.
I've had several desktops working as servers over the years, and for the most part they all work flawlessly.
"For the most part" is the key thing here. They'll work fine if your expectations aren't too high. If you can tolerate a dead hard drive/power supply/network card bringing down a server, desktops are fine.
If the cost to the company of a 5-hour server outage is less than the cost of a real server, go ahead and use desktops. However, most places, even small businesses, lose thousands of dollars each hour a critical server is down. Sometimes, it's thousands of dollars per minute the server is down. Therefore, it usually makes sense to spend tens of thousands of dollars on real server hardware with hotswap capability rather than pinching pennies.
Reliability is the only difference between a desktop and a server system. If you can tolerate an outage every few weeks, go ahead and use desktops. If you need 100% uptime, get a real server, it will pay for itself many times over.
What if a hard drive dies? In a server, you pull it out, pop in a new one, and the RAID array fixes itself. The users don't notice a thing. In a desktop machine, you have to turn it off, unplug everything, open the case, unscrew the screws, unplug the cables, remove the drive, put in the new drive, put everything back together, restore the array manually, and hope you didn't lose some data. And all while you do this, the server is down and nobody can do anything.
Just keep one thing in mind. If you pay too much, nothing will happen. If you get a crappy system, you will get fired.
You can buy a perfectly decent PC for about $400 these days (monitor included). Obviously, it's not high end, but it can do everything a $2000 G5 can do. It might not have the best components, but who cares? You could go through 5 of them and still save money over a G5 -- and generally they last for about as long. If you REALLY care, replace the power supply and the RAM and they'll be just as reliable. If you need 3D, add a nice videocard. The computer will still be a lot less than $700. As far as electricity consumption of CRTs vs. LCDs: unless you use your computer 24 hours a day, the energy difference will be negligible (less than a dollar per month). Monitors spend most of the time in powersave mode anyway.
It's not like Apple has exclusive suppliers or something. They get the same hard drives, videocards, and memory chips eMachines does. Unless you actually care how many cables it has coming out of the back, a cheap PC is a much better value than anything Apple offers, hardware-wise.
I agree. Looks like the Tom Hayes guy is trying to make a name for himself. Pretty unlikely that the jackass will get reprimanded, since his boss is the state governor (who chose him in the first place).
Bullshit. SETI is a CPU and memory hog, and if he kept running it, the server would become bogged down and would probably crash more often. This reduces productivity. It would also be a reason to prematurely upgrade the server. It might also endanger the security of records located on the server. Finally, it wastes bandwidth that could be used for something else. It also shows the man is not fit to be a sysadmin -- what if he decided to contribute to some other worty causes by running, say, a Kazaa server? Or hosting personal websites? Basically, they had every reason in the world to fire him.
It's not subjective vs. objective, it's fact vs. opinion. Saying someone is an idiot is an opinion, not a fact, and is perfectly permissible. Saying someone has sex with goats would be slander if such an accusation cannot be substantiated.
You people just don't get it. The guy was doing something he wasn't supposed to with his employer's PCs. Nobody would question his firing if he was using the state's computers to host a commercial website for his own profit. However, using the same server for SETI@home is somehow better, right?
Really, would you think it would be discrimination if he decided to donate some of his employer's PCs to Goodwill and got fired? Or if he decided to help poor families by giving away office furniture? Basically, he was doing something that constitutes theft of service, with somebody else's computer.
I think people will upgrade to XP anyway, if simply for the reason that it doesn't crash every five minutes.
With paging, you can address any amount of memory with any processor; it's just a question of how fast it can be accessed and how convenient it is to do it. It's very much possible to address many megabytes of memory with a 4-bit CPU. It's just that programming it would involve a lot of 4-letter words. Also, games require many of the same capabilities as scientific environments. They also benefit significantly from fast 64-bit arithmetic.
What are you smoking? Copyright does not prevent you from excluding fair use exceptions. If I want to write a book and make every reader sign an NDA, it's perfectly permissible (and is quite often done -- technical specs, for instance). If you don't want to sign the NDA, you always have the option of not reading the book. The reason it's not done normally is because it's quite a hassle to make every book purchaser enter a contract. However, there is no reason it couldn't be done.
Books have been written for a lot longer than copyright has been around. In most cases, authors don't make nearly enough money in royalties from their books to justify writing them in the first place. For the most part, copyright benefits publishers, not authors.
I don't care about the licensing issues Google has to contend with. It's their problem. However, disabling browser features does IMHO constitute denial of service, and the security hole does need to be fixed.
What if someone made a website that maximizes your browser, disables all window manager buttons, and makes you watch advertisements? This would be another example of a DoS attack, even if the website needs it to achieve their commercial goals.
So, your definition of a security hole is an intrusion? Easy ways to do DoS are security holes, as well, and this constitutes denial of service.
So, according to you, a 64-bit processor is slower than a 32-bit one? So why aren't we using 4-bit CPUs? Obviously, if you need to work with 64-bit words, a 64-bit CPU will be dramatically faster.
Call the police. This is most likely a criminal matter, so they would be the ones to contact first. There was a news story about a similar situation where a landlord was doing this exact thing. Needless to say, he got busted for a plethora of laws including child porn.
As if the kernel actually uses all those streaming SIMD instructions or 3Dnow to do its thing. If it's already compiled for a 586, there will be no performance difference if you recompile it for something else. The kernel does little besides integer math.
All the Mozilla apps are known for loading slowly and taking up lots of memory with their reimplemented widgets.
This just proves you haven't used Firefox in the last year or so. On all of my computers (and they are fairly old), it takes less time to load than MSIE does. Opera (at least version 5) always took a lot longer than MSIE.
As for your last comment: Firefox is probably the most standards-compliant browser out there. I never seen it render Slashdot incorrectly, and the only thing it doesn't work with is MSIE-specific code.
Whatever. Firefox has about the same installer size as Opera (4mb vs 3.5), it loads and runs just as fast, and the rendering engine is far less buggy. If you prefer Opera, fine, but don't diss Firefox.
What's your source for the 9% transmission losses? I have always heard a figure of about 2%, which is a lot more reasonable.
If you like Win95 so much, why don't you keep using it? It will still run on most modern hardware with no problems. Oh, wait, you want to take advantage of all the new XP features and have it be as efficient as Win95. Yeah, that will work well.
Registering a trademark is not like registering a domain. Registering one only establishes the date when you started using it. If you can show that you were using the trademark before the date it was registered by another company, you are in the clear, and they would be the ones infringing.
In free software, holes are generally found and fixed by developers before they are found by hackers. Microsoft fixes most security holes only after someone writes a worm. Linux has a much better security model -- it's not easy to get spyware onto a Linux machine. Sure, in theory, Linux developers find lots of holes. But I've yet to see a worm.
As far as educating your users: that is not usually possible. It's not a problem when they are programmers or engineers. But then you don't even need an IT department. It is a problem when their profession is not related to computing, and it is IT's responsibility to keep things working.
In DC, basic possession of lockpicking instruments is illegal, unless you are a licensed locksmith. You don't have to prove intent. This is the same in many other states. Be careful and don't do anything stupid.