Stealing from a post I wrote earlier this year on a similar subject, I will agree with the folks pushing for name brand hardware instead of hand-building each machine:
Resist the urge to buy/build one-off servers because they are cheap. The $300 one-off computer that some kid built in his garage is going to cost you way more than the difference it would have cost going with a single standardized platform - over the life of the machine.
One person can maintain 300 machines if they are all exact clones of each other. If every machine is unique it would take you 5-6 people keeping the same network fully operational. At $65k apiece fully loaded salary that's a third of a million dollars more per year to support the same 300 machines. At four year turnover on computers, you are talking about an EXTRA $4,000 per computer to save $200 total on purchase price.
Yea but 95% of it is going to consist of bubble sorts, massive pyramid if/then/else if/then/else if/then/else blocks, and other crap code that will be copied verbatim from the first page that comes up in Google. I would buy lunch for random strangers off the street for a week if someone over there would start teaching the concepts of iteration, code reuse via parameterization, and the switch statement.
Re:/. Owes me at least $500,000
on
Webhost Sues Google
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Actually it is more insidious than that.
Google 'india job clicking ads' and you get over half a million hits, a great many of them describing in detail a digital evolution of the sweatshops from the turn of the last century, but instead of making clothing they are sitting there clicking on Google ads. A whole army of clickers, their only job being to drive click-through ad revenue for web-sites made specifically to drive this revenue.
Sure would suck to be some company in the US (such as AIT) that made a good-faith business deal with Google only to have half a million dollars sucked out of your company by an army of parasites. I'm not saying it is Google's fault, but I can see where it would be in Google's best interest to tweak their paradigm to prevent it from happening.
Whatever you measure, that is what changes (improves, hopefully.)
What was meant by It runs their custom software under QNX and only using their own dialup service was 'It was intended to run their custom software under QNX and only using their own dialup service, but it has been hacked and runs all kinds of good operating systems, here are some pictures of it running Linux, Win98, and BeOS.
Google the i-opener (or iopener). Cost $100 Came with a smallish LCD screen and if you hacked it just right it would run Linux (cost another $50 or so in parts, including a cheap small hard drive.)
Doing the 10 letter word problem is totally simple : add "nonesevent" to the dictionary.
http://www.answers.com/nonesevent Nonesevent (nôns-E-vent') pronunciation noun 1. This is the word that Ted Clarke, 79, a British engineer invented to force his solution to the 10 letter acrostic puzzle to succeed.
Air is a crappy heat conductor, but in many cases it is your only option. Water conducts heat about 25x better than air (which is why hypothermia hits in minutes when you are in 35 degree water, but can stand in 35 degree air for half an hour or more with little more than a shiver) but not too many people will let you flood their homes just to keep them warm.
Modern electronics use cooling fans because they are cheap, and because they work good enough. For serious heat management, you are back to liquids (look at car engines, for example.)
It looks like the MS power supply could use some cooling fins, because dunking it in mineral oil (while effective) isn't particularly end user friendly.
I have some paper tape from 1972 that is probably readable
And that, sadly enough, is your best solution.
A few years ago I was brought in as a technical consultant for a city records office that wanted to modernize their records : a fireproof building full of flat metal storage racks full of deeds, records, and drawings (think civil engineering dating all the way back to the 1600's.) They needed to insure that whatever direction they went in modernizing the office would be viable not 5, 10, or even 50 years down the road... but 300~500 years from now.
I recommended that they stick to paper. They agreed.
The only suitable alternative is to go with near line storage that you migrate to popular formats every few years. Tapes get sticky, but you migrated your data from tape to CD long before that (good thing, because you can't get that kind of tape drive any more.) CD-R disks have their aluminum substrate oxidize over a few years, but luckily you migrated your data to high quality DVD-R media long before that happened. Personally I recommend moving everything off of DVD-R onto an external USB high capacity hard drive, making two copies using two different units. A few years from now, move it off those onto something more current, whatever that may be.
Ten years from now maybe you can read it, maybe you can't - but your prints (on acid-free stock) will still be around.
128 full sets of registers per processor? Holy fuck, that's wet dream material. The thought of being able to do context switching between 100+ threads without taking the performance hit of swapping in/out the registers - damn, that's nice.
What's the price of entry on a decently configured one of those?
Just a random note I will bury at the bottom of the page - your laptop doesn't have to be 'more likely to fail.'
Assuming it survives the infant mortality period (first 30 days or so) there is going to be a single point of failure : hard drive. Granted the CPU fan could fail and smoke your CPU, but that is about as likely on a laptop as on a desktop - but I'm concentrating on the 'more likely' aspects.
So your laptop is going to last until the hard drive fails. Want the laptop to last longer, figure out why the hard drives fail, and address it. What is the key difference between the use pattern in hard drives between laptops and desktops? People don't move desktops around while they are running, but don't think twice about yaw'ing a laptop all around while it is on. A hard drive is little more than an expensive gyroscope spinning at 7,200rpm. Gyroscopes resist yaw'ing, and this resistance manifests itself in the form of pressure at the load bearing points. Aww hell, I have a headache and don't feel like going into the physics, but safe it to say that if you put your laptop on a firm surface before turning it on and leave it there unmoved until you turn it off (not picking it up and moving it around, or resting it on your legs in bed) it will last a LOT longer.
Just a thought, you could also go hybrid - start with a nice low end Dell desktop like their Dimension 5150, baseline it out to use it as a barebones and add the good stuff like so :
Intel P4 HyperThreaded 3.0GHz base system with a full Gig of memory, a 160G hard drive and a 16x DVD (dual layer) burner and an Audigy 2 for about $900 shipped - including a 19" LCD and a legit license for XP.
Toss the crap video card it came with and drop in the Gigabyte Dual GF 6800 SLI card you have for $220 and you are looking at a complete system for about $1,100, including a 19" LCD, DVD burner, and licensed OS - and all the 'building' you have to do is drop in a video card. Already got a nice monitor? EBay or Craigslist the 193FP for $250 and this entire system cost you about $850 top to bottom, 100% complete and 100% as fast / powerful as the system you described - or keep the display and you are looking at a rightous rig very strongly in the $1,150 range all inclusive.
After adding a hard drive, 19" LCD monitor, DVD burner, and operating system (all from NewEgg) to your $800 system I'm coming in somewhere in the $1,250~$1,300 range - pretty much exactly the same, if not a little more expensive than the Dell + video card solution.
Lets at least compare oranges to oranges here. Hand building your box can be a very rewarding experience, but the days of handbuilding a system and saving $1,000 off the cost of a Dell are long over.
In the past five years I have YET to see a Javadoc output that doesn't completely suck ass. Ever. If Javadoc is the best you can do for support documentation, just include the source code in the jar file so we can figure out what the code is doing.
In other words, if source code documentation isn't worth doing well (by hand, while you still remember the original intent) - it isn't worth doing at all.
If you are going to pirate it, pirate Office too - it comes with a spell checker.
On second thought, I am going to stand up and say that it is morally wrong to pirate Windows XP. There are plenty of free operating systems for you to use that will give you just as good functionality - like Linux, or Windows 2000 Professional.
That said, the OP may find that if he gave us the log analysis tools and algorithms he wants to apply to the log files, a bunch of us would run the analysis on our own logs and send him the results. That way he would get the benefit of a slew of different data sets, instead of just one or two.
Companies are not too keen on sending out their internal datasets (Sarbanes / Oxley might have something to do with that, or the thought of being caught in some sort of phishing scam) but may be a bit more comfortable in simply sending him the analysis results on their data.
Two dragsters are 0.001 seconds apart ARE the same speed. From run to run if they ran 20 runs and in all 20 runs the same car was 0.001 seconds faster each and every single time, letting the drivers swap cars a few times so each driver got 10 runs in each car, I would be willing to budge a little. But you and I know that that isn't the case. The machines are the same, but one lane had a little more rubber on the ground, or the driver was a little better (or a few lbs lighter, or had on his lucky shoes, or caught the light a little better), or one lane was one degree cooler due to the cross-wind.
Compared to my ride, though, those machines are faster. Twice as fast, easily.
I can appreciate the modders hand tweaking their boxes for fun - I used to do it myself. Hell I have hand polished and deburred the blades of a ceiling fan just to make it quieter, so if anybody can relate, I can. I'm just saying that it is stupid, and that comparing two machines that are the same effective speed and trying to say one is faster than the other (however imperceivably) is also stupid. I will put my home system up against the fastest, freakiest liquid nitrogen cooled computer you can possibly put together using an unlimited budget today. And I will be significantly faster, applying those two magnificent pieces of hardware (a calendar and a credit card, by which I imply I will be using the home system I buy a year from now.)
Not 4.3% faster. Not 7.1 FPS faster. I'm talking TWICE as fast, and that is what faster really means.
Want in on a few secrets? If you have to use a stopwatch to tell which system is faster, they are the same speed. If you calculate that one system is 7% faster than another system, they are the same speed. If you have one system getting 127 frames per second, and another system getting 136 fps - they are the same speed. 103% for memory tweaks, 102% for OCing the CPU, 104% for a different tweak all add up to : same speed.
There are two magnificent pieces of equipment that are going to make your computer faster : a calendar, and a credit card. A year from now when you can buy a new box that is THREE TIMES FASTER than your current (six month old) machine, now THAT is faster.
To use the cars analogy : If I'm in a regular car and someone else is in a ricer, and he accelerates 7.1% faster when the light turns red - a block later if he and I are both waiting at the next red light together, we are going the same speed. 34mph = 37.5mph. Now if his vehicle can launch with authority and do 0-60 in under three seconds (mine can), can get to over 100mph before getting to the next traffic light and gets through the next light before it turns red (keeping me from getting through) - then he is going faster than I am.
3x faster = faster. 1.05381% faster = same speed.
PS - in case you are wondering, it's a stock GSXR-1100, and 0-60mph in under 3 seconds isn't that big of a deal in my world.
It's a bogus question - no real gamer that isn't a complete waste of oxygen and silicon plays at 1280x1024. Now if he had said 1600x1200, then maybe we could have taken the question seriously - but I assure you guys that he is just yanking your chains (and you fell for it!)
That said, I second the guy that requested a roundup where they put 512M of the uber1337 memory with chrome heat-spreaders and blinkenlichten in one machine, and 2G of Crucial/Kingston budget line memory in the other - and do a full suite of testing to tell us which runs faster overall.
they can't just pick people that they think are dirty and start tracking them
Oh I assure you - they can, and they do. Just not legally. That last part doesn't bother them much, because they have grown to believe that 'they are the law' and nobody exists that can say otherwise. The difference is now they have to come up with supplimentary dirt on you via this tracking, dirt that they can reasonably justify and can come up with a description of how they obtained it in a legal manner (even if they didn't, or if it the massive coincidences that piled up to put them in the right place at the right time to 'legally' catch you.)
Don't for get the ONE MILLION H1-Bs that Bill Clinton brought in with his 'expand the H1-B program to 200,000 per year' wisdom. More than anything else on the planet, THAT is why tech is so fucked as a career in the USA.
Unless your are in East Albacore, Wyoming or something - I would wager that 'we're just picky' is right on the money.
You need a database guy, ask for a database guy. Any decent database guy with 5 years experience can pick up Oracle 10g in a few weeks (tops) - you don't need to narrow it down to 'must have five years of Oracle 10g'. Ditto with 11 years of J2EE, or 7 years of.NET And you damn sure don't need a guy with all three.
Perhaps take a few minutes to look over the job req's, and you will see what I mean.
Slashdot Mirror
Stealing from a post I wrote earlier this year on a similar subject, I will agree with the folks pushing for name brand hardware instead of hand-building each machine:
Resist the urge to buy/build one-off servers because they are cheap. The $300 one-off computer that some kid built in his garage is going to cost you way more than the difference it would have cost going with a single standardized platform - over the life of the machine.
One person can maintain 300 machines if they are all exact clones of each other. If every machine is unique it would take you 5-6 people keeping the same network fully operational. At $65k apiece fully loaded salary that's a third of a million dollars more per year to support the same 300 machines. At four year turnover on computers, you are talking about an EXTRA $4,000 per computer to save $200 total on purchase price.
Yea but 95% of it is going to consist of bubble sorts, massive pyramid if/then/else if/then/else if/then/else blocks, and other crap code that will be copied verbatim from the first page that comes up in Google. I would buy lunch for random strangers off the street for a week if someone over there would start teaching the concepts of iteration, code reuse via parameterization, and the switch statement.
Actually it is more insidious than that.
Google 'india job clicking ads' and you get over half a million hits, a great many of them describing in detail a digital evolution of the sweatshops from the turn of the last century, but instead of making clothing they are sitting there clicking on Google ads. A whole army of clickers, their only job being to drive click-through ad revenue for web-sites made specifically to drive this revenue.
Sure would suck to be some company in the US (such as AIT) that made a good-faith business deal with Google only to have half a million dollars sucked out of your company by an army of parasites. I'm not saying it is Google's fault, but I can see where it would be in Google's best interest to tweak their paradigm to prevent it from happening.
Whatever you measure, that is what changes (improves, hopefully.)
DOH - fuck me. I meant read the first link.
What was meant by It runs their custom software under QNX and only using their own dialup service was 'It was intended to run their custom software under QNX and only using their own dialup service, but it has been hacked and runs all kinds of good operating systems, here are some pictures of it running Linux, Win98, and BeOS.
The i-opener was quickly hacked and had Linux installed.
Read the second link.
Google the i-opener (or iopener).
Cost $100
Came with a smallish LCD screen and if you hacked it just right it would run Linux (cost another $50 or so in parts, including a cheap small hard drive.)
Some details here and here.
Cue the Snow Crash theme song in 3...2...1
Doing the 10 letter word problem is totally simple : add "nonesevent" to the dictionary.
http://www.answers.com/nonesevent
Nonesevent (nôns-E-vent') pronunciation
noun
1. This is the word that Ted Clarke, 79, a British engineer invented to force his solution to the 10 letter acrostic puzzle to succeed.
Air is a crappy heat conductor, but in many cases it is your only option.
Water conducts heat about 25x better than air (which is why hypothermia hits in minutes when you are in 35 degree water, but can stand in 35 degree air for half an hour or more with little more than a shiver) but not too many people will let you flood their homes just to keep them warm.
Modern electronics use cooling fans because they are cheap, and because they work good enough. For serious heat management, you are back to liquids (look at car engines, for example.)
It looks like the MS power supply could use some cooling fins, because dunking it in mineral oil (while effective) isn't particularly end user friendly.
the rest is servers bought without OS Guess what is being installed on those?
Windows 2000 Pirate Edition?
I have some paper tape from 1972 that is probably readable
... but 300~500 years from now.
And that, sadly enough, is your best solution.
A few years ago I was brought in as a technical consultant for a city records office that wanted to modernize their records : a fireproof building full of flat metal storage racks full of deeds, records, and drawings (think civil engineering dating all the way back to the 1600's.) They needed to insure that whatever direction they went in modernizing the office would be viable not 5, 10, or even 50 years down the road
I recommended that they stick to paper. They agreed.
The only suitable alternative is to go with near line storage that you migrate to popular formats every few years. Tapes get sticky, but you migrated your data from tape to CD long before that (good thing, because you can't get that kind of tape drive any more.) CD-R disks have their aluminum substrate oxidize over a few years, but luckily you migrated your data to high quality DVD-R media long before that happened. Personally I recommend moving everything off of DVD-R onto an external USB high capacity hard drive, making two copies using two different units. A few years from now, move it off those onto something more current, whatever that may be.
Ten years from now maybe you can read it, maybe you can't - but your prints (on acid-free stock) will still be around.
128 full sets of registers per processor? Holy fuck, that's wet dream material.
The thought of being able to do context switching between 100+ threads without taking the performance hit of swapping in/out the registers - damn, that's nice.
What's the price of entry on a decently configured one of those?
Just a random note I will bury at the bottom of the page - your laptop doesn't have to be 'more likely to fail.'
Assuming it survives the infant mortality period (first 30 days or so) there is going to be a single point of failure : hard drive. Granted the CPU fan could fail and smoke your CPU, but that is about as likely on a laptop as on a desktop - but I'm concentrating on the 'more likely' aspects.
So your laptop is going to last until the hard drive fails. Want the laptop to last longer, figure out why the hard drives fail, and address it.
What is the key difference between the use pattern in hard drives between laptops and desktops? People don't move desktops around while they are running, but don't think twice about yaw'ing a laptop all around while it is on. A hard drive is little more than an expensive gyroscope spinning at 7,200rpm. Gyroscopes resist yaw'ing, and this resistance manifests itself in the form of pressure at the load bearing points. Aww hell, I have a headache and don't feel like going into the physics, but safe it to say that if you put your laptop on a firm surface before turning it on and leave it there unmoved until you turn it off (not picking it up and moving it around, or resting it on your legs in bed) it will last a LOT longer.
Just a thought, you could also go hybrid - start with a nice low end Dell desktop like their Dimension 5150, baseline it out to use it as a barebones and add the good stuff like so :
Intel P4 HyperThreaded 3.0GHz base system with a full Gig of memory, a 160G hard drive and a 16x DVD (dual layer) burner and an Audigy 2 for about $900 shipped - including a 19" LCD and a legit license for XP.
Toss the crap video card it came with and drop in the Gigabyte Dual GF 6800 SLI card you have for $220 and you are looking at a complete system for about $1,100, including a 19" LCD, DVD burner, and licensed OS - and all the 'building' you have to do is drop in a video card. Already got a nice monitor? EBay or Craigslist the 193FP for $250 and this entire system cost you about $850 top to bottom, 100% complete and 100% as fast / powerful as the system you described - or keep the display and you are looking at a rightous rig very strongly in the $1,150 range all inclusive.
After adding a hard drive, 19" LCD monitor, DVD burner, and operating system (all from NewEgg) to your $800 system I'm coming in somewhere in the $1,250~$1,300 range - pretty much exactly the same, if not a little more expensive than the Dell + video card solution.
Lets at least compare oranges to oranges here. Hand building your box can be a very rewarding experience, but the days of handbuilding a system and saving $1,000 off the cost of a Dell are long over.
In the past five years I have YET to see a Javadoc output that doesn't completely suck ass. Ever.
If Javadoc is the best you can do for support documentation, just include the source code in the jar file so we can figure out what the code is doing.
In other words, if source code documentation isn't worth doing well (by hand, while you still remember the original intent) - it isn't worth doing at all.
If you are going to pirate it, pirate Office too - it comes with a spell checker.
On second thought, I am going to stand up and say that it is morally wrong to pirate Windows XP. There are plenty of free operating systems for you to use that will give you just as good functionality - like Linux, or Windows 2000 Professional.
You would be surprised what you can get for $8 and a candy bar.
That said, the OP may find that if he gave us the log analysis tools and algorithms he wants to apply to the log files, a bunch of us would run the analysis on our own logs and send him the results. That way he would get the benefit of a slew of different data sets, instead of just one or two.
Companies are not too keen on sending out their internal datasets (Sarbanes / Oxley might have something to do with that, or the thought of being caught in some sort of phishing scam) but may be a bit more comfortable in simply sending him the analysis results on their data.
Two dragsters are 0.001 seconds apart ARE the same speed.
From run to run if they ran 20 runs and in all 20 runs the same car was 0.001 seconds faster each and every single time, letting the drivers swap cars a few times so each driver got 10 runs in each car, I would be willing to budge a little. But you and I know that that isn't the case. The machines are the same, but one lane had a little more rubber on the ground, or the driver was a little better (or a few lbs lighter, or had on his lucky shoes, or caught the light a little better), or one lane was one degree cooler due to the cross-wind.
Compared to my ride, though, those machines are faster. Twice as fast, easily.
I can appreciate the modders hand tweaking their boxes for fun - I used to do it myself. Hell I have hand polished and deburred the blades of a ceiling fan just to make it quieter, so if anybody can relate, I can. I'm just saying that it is stupid, and that comparing two machines that are the same effective speed and trying to say one is faster than the other (however imperceivably) is also stupid. I will put my home system up against the fastest, freakiest liquid nitrogen cooled computer you can possibly put together using an unlimited budget today. And I will be significantly faster, applying those two magnificent pieces of hardware (a calendar and a credit card, by which I imply I will be using the home system I buy a year from now.)
Not 4.3% faster. Not 7.1 FPS faster. I'm talking TWICE as fast, and that is what faster really means.
Want in on a few secrets?
If you have to use a stopwatch to tell which system is faster, they are the same speed.
If you calculate that one system is 7% faster than another system, they are the same speed.
If you have one system getting 127 frames per second, and another system getting 136 fps - they are the same speed.
103% for memory tweaks, 102% for OCing the CPU, 104% for a different tweak all add up to : same speed.
There are two magnificent pieces of equipment that are going to make your computer faster : a calendar, and a credit card.
A year from now when you can buy a new box that is THREE TIMES FASTER than your current (six month old) machine, now THAT is faster.
To use the cars analogy :
If I'm in a regular car and someone else is in a ricer, and he accelerates 7.1% faster when the light turns red - a block later if he and I are both waiting at the next red light together, we are going the same speed. 34mph = 37.5mph. Now if his vehicle can launch with authority and do 0-60 in under three seconds (mine can), can get to over 100mph before getting to the next traffic light and gets through the next light before it turns red (keeping me from getting through) - then he is going faster than I am.
3x faster = faster.
1.05381% faster = same speed.
PS - in case you are wondering, it's a stock GSXR-1100, and 0-60mph in under 3 seconds isn't that big of a deal in my world.
It's a bogus question - no real gamer that isn't a complete waste of oxygen and silicon plays at 1280x1024.
Now if he had said 1600x1200, then maybe we could have taken the question seriously - but I assure you guys that he is just yanking your chains (and you fell for it!)
That said, I second the guy that requested a roundup where they put 512M of the uber1337 memory with chrome heat-spreaders and blinkenlichten in one machine, and 2G of Crucial/Kingston budget line memory in the other - and do a full suite of testing to tell us which runs faster overall.
Just curious - did the Crucial memory fail, or did it just cost $20 more than the Corsair value select?
they can't just pick people that they think are dirty and start tracking them
Oh I assure you - they can, and they do. Just not legally.
That last part doesn't bother them much, because they have grown to believe that 'they are the law' and nobody exists that can say otherwise.
The difference is now they have to come up with supplimentary dirt on you via this tracking, dirt that they can reasonably justify and can come up with a description of how they obtained it in a legal manner (even if they didn't, or if it the massive coincidences that piled up to put them in the right place at the right time to 'legally' catch you.)
Under clinton, we were holding a cracker
We prefer to be called 'white guy'.
Don't for get the ONE MILLION H1-Bs that Bill Clinton brought in with his 'expand the H1-B program to 200,000 per year' wisdom.
More than anything else on the planet, THAT is why tech is so fucked as a career in the USA.
Unless your are in East Albacore, Wyoming or something - I would wager that 'we're just picky' is right on the money.
.NET And you damn sure don't need a guy with all three.
You need a database guy, ask for a database guy. Any decent database guy with 5 years experience can pick up Oracle 10g in a few weeks (tops) - you don't need to narrow it down to 'must have five years of Oracle 10g'. Ditto with 11 years of J2EE, or 7 years of
Perhaps take a few minutes to look over the job req's, and you will see what I mean.