Using memory as a baseline, we can historically see that the amount of memory in a nice high end desktop (or server) machine doubles roughly every year. Back of a napkin sketch puts us at 1000x every eight years, plus or minus three.
Your exabyte of memory on the desktop will be available (if a little pricey) in 2027, plus or minus nine years. I'm guessing that by 2027 (again plus or minus nine years) your CPU, yottabyte of drive space, and display option will also be available, for a price.
Today's hardware doesn't excite me. Tomorrow's hardware excites me not because of what it can do, but because it gives me insight into the next generation of hardware - which excites me verily.
A year from now I will still want one. In three years it will be just fast enough to run the newest games with all the options on. In four years Dell's entry level machine will smoke it, and will come with a 20" LCD for under $1,000 And five years from now they'll be using that PC-Welt machine to hold open doors.
It's called a Beowulf cluster, and is EXACTLY what you are looking for. In fact, if all you do is 3d rendering and if there's a package like the Persistence of Vision Raytracer for whatever you do... you'd be all set. Look into it.
There's plenty of desktop useful cluster software.
Like the Persistence of Vision Raytracer. After I made my Beowulf cluster I spent days and days just raytracing different pictures - I have the image of that skyvase burned into the back of my skull I've seen it so many times. I would run benchmark after benchmark, experimenting with the number of engines running on each box, playing with different machine speeds and network speeds to see what kind of effect each had, comparing my fastest runs to the Top500 numbers over the years. My best run puts me in the top 100 machines in the world, including super computers (from the very first run, which was in 1995. My cluster vs. today's supercomputers... not so much.)
And... ummm.
Well that raytracing software is plenty of fun. I highly recommend it.
Linux will run on ANY hardware that Windows XP runs on, if you don't mind running shim software. The Answer
The performance hit is minimal (like 5%, practically unnoticeable), it takes about another 128M of memory on top of any other hardware requirements, and it isn't really suitable for running games in Linux, but other than that - it's the cat's meow, a 100% solution for running Linux on any machine that will run XP. As a bonus, you can backup your entire Linux box by shutting it down and burning the VM files to a DVD, and can port the Linux VM to any other machine without reinstalling (your entire machine intact) simply by copying the VM files to the other box (and installing VMware.) As an additional bonus, now the box will also run any game that is 'Windows only' in native mode, full speed, no excuses. Talk about your best of both worlds. And yes, that's how I'm doing it. Deep beneath the covers in my Linux box is a heart of XP on Intel, and honestly given how well the rig works, I don't care one bit.
Here's a follow-on question to the OP's original, something I've been considering - would you get more functionality out of four dual CPU machines (ie, a single AMD x2 or Core 2 Duo CPU per machine) with a GigE backbone between them, two Quad CPU computers, or a single 8-way box? How would you apply the hardware to get the most out of it, assuming a single user? Assume a KVM hooking multiple machines up to a single nice display / keyboard / mouse / audio. My ideal next rig is going to be eight physical cores, but I'm still kicking around how I am going to arrive at that number - ideas here would likely influence that decision.
Screw that - I'm hoping it burns better than thermite (with is pretty much what powdered aluminum is, when you add a little iron oxide.) The only way they could make it more interesting (fun) than that would be to infuse it with a healthy chunk of sodium or potassium so all it takes to set it off is WATER.
Damn, I'm getting excited just thinking about it (in a totally platonic way, of course.)
Yea, that explains why they invented the telephone, airplace, the car, electricity, the light bulb and phonograph, the computer, the Internet, GPS, nukes, and were the first to put a man on the moon.
What's that? Those were all invented / accomplished in America? Ahhh. Well that sort of blows your whole '95% of all geniuses (by birth) will be born amongst THEM' theory.
Which leads to point number two... GP, please ask your wife to teach those little kids how to spell, the appropriate use of the apostrophe (its vs. it's, That's vs. Thats), and the importance of not ending a sentence with a preposition.
Yea, something exactly like the fictional technologies described on those wiki pages.
Someone should invent something like that. A way that the OP could use his laptop to remotely control the desktop of a really powerful (ie, SMP box with more than 4G of memory) Windows machine over the network, perhaps over the airwaves using an as of yet uninvented 'magic' signal propagation in perhaps the 2.4GHz range of the electromagnetic light waves spectrum.
That would be an excellent solution, if only it was real, available today, and affordable. Hey, if we're going to dream, dream BIG!
If only Windows 2003 Server came with some sort of terminal server software, like a VNC for Windows or something. Then he could run a termserver client on his laptop and connect to a monster desktop / server tower in the same room via wireless, and remote control the big beefy box over his wifi network.
Manhole covers are round because manholes are round.
And if Clinton hadn't cranked up the H1-B limit to a third of a million (each one at the expense of an American worker) per year, we wouldn't have the tech job death spiral we are currently facing. Bush may be a dumb fuck, but at least he cranked the insane number of H1-Bs back down from 300k+ per year to the current 65k per year (to the benefit of you and I.)
In addition to the other architectural changes, I think the biggest differences between the two generations of chip was the inclusion of 8k of onboard cache, the ability to pipeline instructions, and the ability to actually execute one instruction per clock cycle (under ideal conditions, meaning the pipeline was already populated with the correct instructions so the CPU didn't have to go fetch them one at a time, using several clock cycles to do each.)
I have a good idea - how about teaching them how to code and bring THEM over by the boatload on H1-B's instead of Indians? I mean... damn! I've met easily a few hundred Filipinas over the years and every single one of them has been hot - what does that phrase LBFM mean, anyways? Regardless, if we are going to fill our offices with foreigners, lets fill them with hot women from the Phillippines.
That would be a recruiting slant.. yea, and in this office we have hot and code running women.
Ahhh yes, the old 'let's break a guy's theory by injecting a little reality' trick... (good catch.)
In that case, as I was saying... Moore's law, which says that transistor density (which loosely translates to performance / speed) doubles every 18 months, is highly related to CPUs and memory and other chip based hardware, but has nothing to do with hard drive capacity. Moore make that observation in 1965 (long before the Winchester 30-30 hard drive made hard drives an even remotely viable consumer technology,) and to hear him recall it he asserts that the time frame is 'every 24 months.' In an amazing coincidence, however, hard drive capacity has conformed precisely to Moore's law for at least the last 15, possibly 25+ years. According to wikipedia, pixel density (for a given cost) also follows a similar growth rate.
You aren't the only one I have heard having 'issues' with Maxtor drives, although this business with having different sized 160G drives is a new twist. Personally, lately I have been sticking with drives that use the FDB (fluid dynamic bearing) technology, specifically I have been using the Hitachi Deathstar (although I did pick up a few Seagate Barracuda drives on sale recently; they also have the fluid bearings and have 5 year warranty.)
Moore's law says that transistor density (which loosely translates to performance / speed) doubles every 18 months, is highly related to CPUs and memory and other chip based hardware, but has nothing to do with hard drive capacity.
Personally my observation matches the GP's post, that drive density goes up by a factor of ten every 5 years, with drives today being approximately 1000x larger than drives 15 years ago.
Regarding the Google study, there is one statistic that was left out (primarily because it doesn't apply in rack-mount server environments) : rate and frequency of yaw. The number one thing that influences hard drive lifespans, from what I have seen, is whether you move the machine around while the drive is spinning. People with laptops that use them as desktop replacements (ie, set it down on a hard surface and leave it there, turn it on, use an external keyboard / mouse, turn it off before moving it) have (in my observations) had their drives last a LOT longer than people that use their laptops as mobile computers (ie sit them on their laps, pick them up and carry them around under their arms while running, etc.) I'm talking an order of magnitude difference in failure rates.
That was you? Damn - I still feel unloved because of how you treated me at first. Here I was a regular white guy (human) trying to hang with the bad guys and you darkies were all 'you can't camp orcs with us because you aren't evil enough' - I thought to myself, shit, I dig up dead bodies and prop them up around the campfire so I don't have to eat dinner alone and I'm not evil enough to hang with you because my skin is white? How much more evil could you possibly be?
Lucky for me I was a LOT more evil than that - made me an honorary citizen of the Nek city and everything. After that it wasn't so much a matter of skin color as it was 'come on necro, share the camp - we don't care if you can solo the whole camp or not.'
(I didn't get my taste of REAL racism until I went to the dwarf island. Those motherfuckers HATED me - I wasn't afraid of any of the monsters, but the dwarf milk-vendor-lady would put a beat-down on my necro ass that would have made a DRAGON proud.)
Did it work for me? I firmly believe that it's the only real way to get started. Kind of like the first few years of cooking, where you simply follow the recipe and put in a cup of flour, a tablespoon of baking powder and a handfull of chocolate chips, etc - you don't learn to cook by reading, you learn to cook by cooking.
And odds are, when you were eight years old computer programming was beyond you - it involved concepts way over your head. So was cooking, but that doesn't mean you couldn't open a bag of pre-mixed ingredients, add a cup of milk and pop it in the oven to make some tasty cookies. As I recall, when I was eight years old I wasn't particularly good at the syntax of English (my native language), much less a computer language.
Assuming the code is good, clean and representative of good practices in the first place, though - simply copy-typing it in and getting it to run, a couple hours per week (ok let's be honest - little compu-junkies like me did it 20+ hours a week) and your brain will recognize patterns, cause and effect, and the next step is taking what you have there and tweaking it to do what you want (ie, changing an 'if' statement in a program so you can get past that set of code and run the part you want.) The step after that is breaking down what you have into the pieces that do different things and actually constructing small programs of original design and intent, made of parts you reused from previous working applications. Finally you go on to just sitting down and cranking out code. And once you know what code can do, the next step is designing your (larger) applications around the functionality that you know you can apply using the tools (code) you know and have available.
Imagine where you would have gone had you just kept on banging on that PET / 64, copy typing in code that you didn't quite understand (and letting the natural evolution I described above happen for those seven years.)
Actually - I wonder if the iPod will be the 'Vista killer'.
Let's be real. A zillion people have iPods and run XP. Tell any of them that not only will Vista cost them an arm and a leg (need new hardware + new OS), it may have problems with their iPod and more imporantly may fuxor their iPod when they connect / disconnect it - and how many are going to be rushing out to upgrade?
Aero / glass is nice, but not nice enough to risk fuxor'ing my iPod over.
He may be overqualified on paper to work the sort of entry level jobs that would be a good start for him, and under qualified to justify the kind of money a corp might envision him wanting - but if he is 50 and retiring loves to do this as a hobby (and has some serious fiscal reserves, the kind that makes doing it as a hobby viable) - he may be just the kind of man we want teaching our next generation of entry level developers.
Think about it - how many of us started out on machines that booted directly into a shell that had BASIC built right in, let us start 'coding' little mickey mouse programs, and we spent hours and hours copying BASIC programs from magazines into our little 1MHz 6502 based computers with 32k of usable memory (if we were lucky) - but we were making the baby steps necessary to become true programmers. How many of us could bang out a bubble sort in at least one language by the time we were 15? How many 15 year olds do you know now than can do it now?
If the OP wants to make more money, not sure I can help him. If the OP wants to make a lasting and meaningful contribution - buy (or fish out of the trash) and refurb a dozen computers that are so old they don't even qualify as door-stops (ie TRS-80, C=64, VIC-20, PC-AT class machines in the MHz (not GHz) class with floppy disks and dot matrix printers and CLI tools like DOS 6.22, GWBASIC, the DOS versions of FoxPro, Borland's Turbo Pascal and C++, some terminal emulation software and dial-up modems, maybe even an assembler and the source to some of the really old viruses, and a ton of old magazines with source code in them so the kids can copy-type in the source, see what it does.
To paraphrase a touching scene from '13th Warrior' - a man whose coding skills lives on in an entire next generation of software engineers, this is a wealthy man indeed.
Which part is proprietary? They are even using regular power-supplies now, bringing them into standardization on every part I know of inside the machine.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not happy with the direction they have gone at a corporate / sales level, but proprietary parts hasn't been an issue on machines I buy from Dell in a few years now.
Given your complete inability to use the comma (,) or period (.) correctly in those sentences, prefering to use it in a manner most consistent with other Indians I have interacted with over the years, and given the trash-talking about jobs moved back to America - is it safe to assume that you are perhaps... Indian?
Slashdot Mirror
Using memory as a baseline, we can historically see that the amount of memory in a nice high end desktop (or server) machine doubles roughly every year.
Back of a napkin sketch puts us at 1000x every eight years, plus or minus three.
Your exabyte of memory on the desktop will be available (if a little pricey) in 2027, plus or minus nine years.
I'm guessing that by 2027 (again plus or minus nine years) your CPU, yottabyte of drive space, and display option will also be available, for a price.
Today's hardware doesn't excite me. Tomorrow's hardware excites me not because of what it can do, but because it gives me insight into the next generation of hardware - which excites me verily.
A year from now I will still want one.
In three years it will be just fast enough to run the newest games with all the options on.
In four years Dell's entry level machine will smoke it, and will come with a 20" LCD for under $1,000
And five years from now they'll be using that PC-Welt machine to hold open doors.
It's called a Beowulf cluster, and is EXACTLY what you are looking for. In fact, if all you do is 3d rendering and if there's a package like the Persistence of Vision Raytracer for whatever you do ... you'd be all set. Look into it.
There's plenty of desktop useful cluster software.
... not so much.)
... ummm.
Like the Persistence of Vision Raytracer. After I made my Beowulf cluster I spent days and days just raytracing different pictures - I have the image of that skyvase burned into the back of my skull I've seen it so many times. I would run benchmark after benchmark, experimenting with the number of engines running on each box, playing with different machine speeds and network speeds to see what kind of effect each had, comparing my fastest runs to the Top500 numbers over the years. My best run puts me in the top 100 machines in the world, including super computers (from the very first run, which was in 1995. My cluster vs. today's supercomputers
And
Well that raytracing software is plenty of fun. I highly recommend it.
Linux will run on ANY hardware that Windows XP runs on, if you don't mind running shim software.
The Answer
The performance hit is minimal (like 5%, practically unnoticeable), it takes about another 128M of memory on top of any other hardware requirements, and it isn't really suitable for running games in Linux, but other than that - it's the cat's meow, a 100% solution for running Linux on any machine that will run XP. As a bonus, you can backup your entire Linux box by shutting it down and burning the VM files to a DVD, and can port the Linux VM to any other machine without reinstalling (your entire machine intact) simply by copying the VM files to the other box (and installing VMware.) As an additional bonus, now the box will also run any game that is 'Windows only' in native mode, full speed, no excuses. Talk about your best of both worlds. And yes, that's how I'm doing it. Deep beneath the covers in my Linux box is a heart of XP on Intel, and honestly given how well the rig works, I don't care one bit.
Here's a follow-on question to the OP's original, something I've been considering - would you get more functionality out of four dual CPU machines (ie, a single AMD x2 or Core 2 Duo CPU per machine) with a GigE backbone between them, two Quad CPU computers, or a single 8-way box? How would you apply the hardware to get the most out of it, assuming a single user? Assume a KVM hooking multiple machines up to a single nice display / keyboard / mouse / audio. My ideal next rig is going to be eight physical cores, but I'm still kicking around how I am going to arrive at that number - ideas here would likely influence that decision.
Screw that - I'm hoping it burns better than thermite (with is pretty much what powdered aluminum is, when you add a little iron oxide.)
The only way they could make it more interesting (fun) than that would be to infuse it with a healthy chunk of sodium or potassium so all it takes to set it off is WATER.
Damn, I'm getting excited just thinking about it (in a totally platonic way, of course.)
Yea, that explains why they invented the telephone, airplace, the car, electricity, the light bulb and phonograph, the computer, the Internet, GPS, nukes, and were the first to put a man on the moon.
What's that? Those were all invented / accomplished in America?
Ahhh. Well that sort of blows your whole '95% of all geniuses (by birth) will be born amongst THEM' theory.
I'm trying to think of a group of 30 eight-year-olds being fed a steady diet of arithmetic ...
That's an easy one - just envision all us your Slashdot friends in one room.
Which leads to point number two...
GP, please ask your wife to teach those little kids how to spell, the appropriate use of the apostrophe (its vs. it's, That's vs. Thats), and the importance of not ending a sentence with a preposition.
Yea, something exactly like the fictional technologies described on those wiki pages.
;)
Someone should invent something like that. A way that the OP could use his laptop to remotely control the desktop of a really powerful (ie, SMP box with more than 4G of memory) Windows machine over the network, perhaps over the airwaves using an as of yet uninvented 'magic' signal propagation in perhaps the 2.4GHz range of the electromagnetic light waves spectrum.
That would be an excellent solution, if only it was real, available today, and affordable.
Hey, if we're going to dream, dream BIG!
Some day, I tell you, some day
Hmmm.
If only Windows 2003 Server came with some sort of terminal server software, like a VNC for Windows or something. Then he could run a termserver client on his laptop and connect to a monster desktop / server tower in the same room via wireless, and remote control the big beefy box over his wifi network.
They should invent something like that.
Manhole covers are round because manholes are round.
And if Clinton hadn't cranked up the H1-B limit to a third of a million (each one at the expense of an American worker) per year, we wouldn't have the tech job death spiral we are currently facing. Bush may be a dumb fuck, but at least he cranked the insane number of H1-Bs back down from 300k+ per year to the current 65k per year (to the benefit of you and I.)
In addition to the other architectural changes, I think the biggest differences between the two generations of chip was the inclusion of 8k of onboard cache, the ability to pipeline instructions, and the ability to actually execute one instruction per clock cycle (under ideal conditions, meaning the pipeline was already populated with the correct instructions so the CPU didn't have to go fetch them one at a time, using several clock cycles to do each.)
I have a good idea - how about teaching them how to code and bring THEM over by the boatload on H1-B's instead of Indians? ... damn! I've met easily a few hundred Filipinas over the years and every single one of them has been hot - what does that phrase LBFM mean, anyways?
.. yea, and in this office we have hot and code running women.
I mean
Regardless, if we are going to fill our offices with foreigners, lets fill them with hot women from the Phillippines.
That would be a recruiting slant
Ahhh yes, the old 'let's break a guy's theory by injecting a little reality' trick ... (good catch.)
... Moore's law, which says that transistor density (which loosely translates to performance / speed) doubles every 18 months, is highly related to CPUs and memory and other chip based hardware, but has nothing to do with hard drive capacity. Moore make that observation in 1965 (long before the Winchester 30-30 hard drive made hard drives an even remotely viable consumer technology,) and to hear him recall it he asserts that the time frame is 'every 24 months.' In an amazing coincidence, however, hard drive capacity has conformed precisely to Moore's law for at least the last 15, possibly 25+ years. According to wikipedia, pixel density (for a given cost) also follows a similar growth rate.
In that case, as I was saying
You aren't the only one I have heard having 'issues' with Maxtor drives, although this business with having different sized 160G drives is a new twist.
Personally, lately I have been sticking with drives that use the FDB (fluid dynamic bearing) technology, specifically I have been using the Hitachi Deathstar (although I did pick up a few Seagate Barracuda drives on sale recently; they also have the fluid bearings and have 5 year warranty.)
Especially as there's two different sizes of Maxtor 160s, a 152GiB and a 149GiB, just to confuse matters (160,000,000 KiB ...
Do I need to participate in this conversation?
Moore's law says that transistor density (which loosely translates to performance / speed) doubles every 18 months, is highly related to CPUs and memory and other chip based hardware, but has nothing to do with hard drive capacity.
Personally my observation matches the GP's post, that drive density goes up by a factor of ten every 5 years, with drives today being approximately 1000x larger than drives 15 years ago.
Regarding the Google study, there is one statistic that was left out (primarily because it doesn't apply in rack-mount server environments) : rate and frequency of yaw. The number one thing that influences hard drive lifespans, from what I have seen, is whether you move the machine around while the drive is spinning. People with laptops that use them as desktop replacements (ie, set it down on a hard surface and leave it there, turn it on, use an external keyboard / mouse, turn it off before moving it) have (in my observations) had their drives last a LOT longer than people that use their laptops as mobile computers (ie sit them on their laps, pick them up and carry them around under their arms while running, etc.) I'm talking an order of magnitude difference in failure rates.
That was you? Damn - I still feel unloved because of how you treated me at first.
Here I was a regular white guy (human) trying to hang with the bad guys and you darkies were all 'you can't camp orcs with us because you aren't evil enough' - I thought to myself, shit, I dig up dead bodies and prop them up around the campfire so I don't have to eat dinner alone and I'm not evil enough to hang with you because my skin is white? How much more evil could you possibly be?
Lucky for me I was a LOT more evil than that - made me an honorary citizen of the Nek city and everything.
After that it wasn't so much a matter of skin color as it was 'come on necro, share the camp - we don't care if you can solo the whole camp or not.'
(I didn't get my taste of REAL racism until I went to the dwarf island. Those motherfuckers HATED me - I wasn't afraid of any of the monsters, but the dwarf milk-vendor-lady would put a beat-down on my necro ass that would have made a DRAGON proud.)
Did it work for me? I firmly believe that it's the only real way to get started. Kind of like the first few years of cooking, where you simply follow the recipe and put in a cup of flour, a tablespoon of baking powder and a handfull of chocolate chips, etc - you don't learn to cook by reading, you learn to cook by cooking.
And odds are, when you were eight years old computer programming was beyond you - it involved concepts way over your head. So was cooking, but that doesn't mean you couldn't open a bag of pre-mixed ingredients, add a cup of milk and pop it in the oven to make some tasty cookies. As I recall, when I was eight years old I wasn't particularly good at the syntax of English (my native language), much less a computer language.
Assuming the code is good, clean and representative of good practices in the first place, though - simply copy-typing it in and getting it to run, a couple hours per week (ok let's be honest - little compu-junkies like me did it 20+ hours a week) and your brain will recognize patterns, cause and effect, and the next step is taking what you have there and tweaking it to do what you want (ie, changing an 'if' statement in a program so you can get past that set of code and run the part you want.) The step after that is breaking down what you have into the pieces that do different things and actually constructing small programs of original design and intent, made of parts you reused from previous working applications. Finally you go on to just sitting down and cranking out code. And once you know what code can do, the next step is designing your (larger) applications around the functionality that you know you can apply using the tools (code) you know and have available.
Imagine where you would have gone had you just kept on banging on that PET / 64, copy typing in code that you didn't quite understand (and letting the natural evolution I described above happen for those seven years.)
Actually - I wonder if the iPod will be the 'Vista killer'.
Let's be real. A zillion people have iPods and run XP. Tell any of them that not only will Vista cost them an arm and a leg (need new hardware + new OS), it may have problems with their iPod and more imporantly may fuxor their iPod when they connect / disconnect it - and how many are going to be rushing out to upgrade?
Aero / glass is nice, but not nice enough to risk fuxor'ing my iPod over.
He may be overqualified on paper to work the sort of entry level jobs that would be a good start for him, and under qualified to justify the kind of money a corp might envision him wanting - but if he is 50 and retiring loves to do this as a hobby (and has some serious fiscal reserves, the kind that makes doing it as a hobby viable) - he may be just the kind of man we want teaching our next generation of entry level developers.
Think about it - how many of us started out on machines that booted directly into a shell that had BASIC built right in, let us start 'coding' little mickey mouse programs, and we spent hours and hours copying BASIC programs from magazines into our little 1MHz 6502 based computers with 32k of usable memory (if we were lucky) - but we were making the baby steps necessary to become true programmers. How many of us could bang out a bubble sort in at least one language by the time we were 15? How many 15 year olds do you know now than can do it now?
If the OP wants to make more money, not sure I can help him.
If the OP wants to make a lasting and meaningful contribution - buy (or fish out of the trash) and refurb a dozen computers that are so old they don't even qualify as door-stops (ie TRS-80, C=64, VIC-20, PC-AT class machines in the MHz (not GHz) class with floppy disks and dot matrix printers and CLI tools like DOS 6.22, GWBASIC, the DOS versions of FoxPro, Borland's Turbo Pascal and C++, some terminal emulation software and dial-up modems, maybe even an assembler and the source to some of the really old viruses, and a ton of old magazines with source code in them so the kids can copy-type in the source, see what it does.
To paraphrase a touching scene from '13th Warrior' - a man whose coding skills lives on in an entire next generation of software engineers, this is a wealthy man indeed.
Which part is proprietary?
They are even using regular power-supplies now, bringing them into standardization on every part I know of inside the machine.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not happy with the direction they have gone at a corporate / sales level, but proprietary parts hasn't been an issue on machines I buy from Dell in a few years now.
Given your complete inability to use the comma (,) or period (.) correctly in those sentences, prefering to use it in a manner most consistent with other Indians I have interacted with over the years, and given the trash-talking about jobs moved back to America - is it safe to assume that you are perhaps ... Indian?
Ahhh - thought so.
So in other words, 'Do not taunt happy fun bulb.'