Okay, a few things besides the obvious "buy an eMac" if you MUST MUST MUST keep this machine:
* Max the RAM (which, IIRC, is 768M), but is getting more expensive since it's special voltage RAM for this line. * Get a G3 CPU upgrade either new or used (G3 Upgrades are hundreds less than G4 Upgrades) * A new video card, if you're still using onboard video. A Radeaon 9200 PCI is $80 from Compusa and probably be several orders faster than the onboard Rage Pro chip. * Faster hard drive. If you're stuck on some old 5400RPM your perfrormance can suffer -- this goes in hand with the next thing: * New IDE controller. The onboard IDE doesn't do DMA/66/100/133 and is a real dog performance-wise. Something new can give you a surprising performance boost. * Ethernet controller. If you have to push the limits, can even think about a new ethernet controller that will have less CPU utilization.... plus, if you do this and later want to move to a slightly faster machine like a Blue&White G3 , which can be had for as little as $100 in 400mHz/0M/0M configs, the RAM and video card will carry over.
One thing the article doesn't touch on is reusability. One thing that the paving industry likes to pride itself on is that asphalt is almost totally recyclable. However, to my understanding, dense rubbers (such as car tires) aren't reuasable in that way, they can't be melted down and reused with reliability. Would the addition of the rubber have a problem with the recasting of the asphalt? With the amount of repaving that happens every year, what sort of effect will this have on the waste output of a repaving operation?
...some people will do it. It's money, and it's more money than a lot of people realize.
For example, I run a site that's pretty damn big, something like 300,000 accounts so far. I've already gotten several "business inquries" from direct marketing companies asking if I'd like to "rent" my customer data to them -- and some of these people are offering upward of 5 cents per user. And I don't have to tell you that a nickel here and a nickel adds up.
I haven't sold my user lists and never will, but rest assured that if I wanted to there is a huge market of companies that would be willing to let me name my own price.
If I may karma whore for a bit, what is this "QAM" busniess?
QAM stands for "Quadrature Amplitude Modulation" which is a fancy name for a simple concept. Also called "I/Q modulation" it's a way to transmit two data streams over the same carrier signal.
The streams are combined in such a way that they can be separated at the other end by using the two most elegant mathematical theorems of man, sine and cosine. What happens, in basic terms, the streams are at "right angles" to each other in the signal.
Being able to have two carriers worth of data can provide a geometric increase in capacity; this was also the technology that was going to be behind "Stereo AM" radio, but that never made it off the ground (Stero AM would have been cool since it would only have to use one frequency for both left and right channels unlike our current analogue sterophonic FM that uses 2 channels).
Well, static and "static" are two different thing entirly.. but yes, I neglected to say I'm on Mysql (I had it in there before, but I edited the comment and removed it in one part anticipating I'd put it somewhere else but didn't. I had the Gettysburg address in there too but I thought I'd take it out for brevity sake).
I can flame MySQL with the best of them, but it's still the one I choose because It's the one that sucks the least for what I want it to do. I have yet to find a DB engine that does not blow hard in some major way, and I expect I never will.
Here is my anecdotal evidences for the site I run:
The total outfit is 8 servers, 6 active: 1 DB Server with one hot backup (dual P-III 750, 1.5GB), 4 web servers (~1.1ghz, 1GB), 1 uniproc dedicated image server (1ghz, 1GB) with a hot backup.
The 4 web servers toss a combined total of about 1.5 million pageloads a day, of which 1.4 mil are dynamically generated using FastCGI/Perl and that others are shtml and stylesheets. A lot of the data that is queried from the DB server can and is cached on the web heads for better performance so that during peak times the server doesn't have to do much more than 80 queries/sec. The image server using stock Apache 1.3 however, does something like 3m serves a day without much sweat since it's all static content.
All told that works out to each web server doing something like 325,000 pageviews a day. I don't have a barometer of whether that's good or not, but honestly I worry more about bandwidth than computrons.
I think you should be pretty happy with what you're doing. I don't know of the current figures, but last september Slashdot was doing 2.4m pageviews a day with ~10 web heads (as gleaned from 'Taco's journal). Understand that's not an apples to apple comparison since I guess you're serving more static content while slashdot (and my site) are by and large dynamic.
Never said it was quality. It's a basic barometer of where you stand in relation to other sites. It can help you gauge where you are (at least, wher you are in relation to the type of users who want a frigging bloated toolbar on their web browser).
Funny you should ask this question as just today I got a love-not from my main avertising broker saying they wern't going to pay me as much anymore.
Anyway, I'm reminded of something someone else once told me on this front: "making money on a web site is easy; doing it without pissing off your users is hard.", and that's the truth.
Web advertising is harder then ever, at least from a publishers perspective; the breadth of sites and users that are around now make it hard to command any great sum from advertisers; Even popup ads, the little darlings of the IAB, seldom pay more than $2 per thousand.
To make a living like, say, Slashdot you either need to be lucky enough to sign on with a large advertising death floatilla (tribalfusion, 247realmedia, etc) or hire an avertising broker/PR agent to sell your site to advertisiers; These sign-up-on-a-web-page dealies sound good and by and large are goods but don't scale well when it comes to paying $1500 a month in expenses not including money for you to live on. They are good for making a little on the side, not for financing a lifestyle.
You asked "How much can a moderately popular site expect to earn from advertising revenue?". The answer as I've seen it is, unless you have a very, very, very tight demographic, the answer is not much. If your site is already running, monitor it's ranking on Alexa and see where you stand. Also, how do you define "moderately popular"? The answer varries widely depending on who you ask: A little while ago when I was lookign for advertisers, Advertising.com wouldn't even talk to me unless I had a 100,000 pageviews a day, and they consider that a "small site".
I guess what I'm trying to say is unless you have huge readership, you'll need some sort of specialized demographic (read: gimmick) to attract users and advertisers.
Also, remember that income is net: today being USA tax day and all you need to remember that you've gotta pay taxes on your monies, too, and that takes a big piece out.
If you're hell bent on doing this for a living you need to get lucky and cheat to win. Let's pick on Slashdot some more, shall we? Contrary to popular belief, it did not get popular based on those early Nude photos of Pater: it got popular largely based on riding the popularity wave of Linux and the Open Source zeitgeist. If you can find something similar, something that you can tune into, you'll stand a fighting chance.
Actually, I have no idea what I'm saying, I'm just rambling.
It may very well blow the IBM Microdrive out of the water, but please keep in mind that the Microdrive is, in fact, a five-year-old design and with something of that age a new advancement is bound to come along.
It's all evolutionary, not neccessarily revolutionary. Revolutionary would be, uhm, I don't know, using lazors to etch bit patters in my Raspberry Jello.
I was pretty sure that's what it was, either that or just a typo (gHz/mHz). Of course, if you *really* wanted to get the geek humour going you'd do "([Sideways-Eight]mHz Hammer-Class CPU)" or something equally nerdy.
What can you talk about about the machine? Do you know if the Opteron and Hammer are gonna share the same Chipsets?
Maybe I should ask something about BSD too to even things out... Uhm, In a Texas-style cage match between Tux, Beastie and that damn Mysql Dolphin, who'd win?
3 Megahertz? Whoohoo, looks like AMD is giving the Intel a run for it's money... and MOS, too.
Seriously, though, I'd eventually like to see some real world performance specs of Hammer running in 32 bit mode, just to see if it's going to suffer from the same 32-bit-on-64-bit problems that Itanic has been having. If they figured out a way around that, they could totally own the market because Itanium 1 is dead and all cursory tests on Itanium 2 show it sucks the glands of a large braying animal when it comes to 32 bit code.
On the upside, a lot of rackmout hardware is built around DC power versus AC -- 48 V DV power supplies and distribution blocks are used extensivly in Telecom and from discussion with my Hack musician cousin DC sources are prefered over AC for noise considerations.
I'm a Perlie and since it opened I've found Perlmonks totally invaluable -- their Q/A section actually has questions that I would ask if wasn't so beyond asking for help.
On that thread, My java-esque friends tell me Java Junkies is equally good if you're of the Bean persuation.
Both sites are, in case you didn't guess, based on the Everything Content Engine which is why they look so much alike.
While I'm not sure if it's specifically what you're looking for, there is the Linux Terminal Server Project. It works like Winframe but I don't think it's directly compatible with Citrix ICA. But is is on version 3.0 and a few people I know have used it -- I tried it once for a terminal my house but it was a little overkill for just wanting to make a web terminal for the living room.
Yep, Slackware was my first try at a distro. I bought the 4-disc set of Slackware 3.0 in January '96 because I wanted to buy something but I didn't have enough for a music CD and hey, this was FOUR CDS for ten bucks! Awesome!
So I got it home and read the exhaustive 48 page installation manual-cum-liner notes and figured out how to make the boot disc for my Sound Blaster OmniCD.
I never got PPP to auto dial and never had sound, but I somehow managed to wrap my 15 year old head around xf86config and all in all it was, to this day, the smoothest linux install I have ever done. It all just seemed to work. At least, that's how I remember it...
But maybe I just tell myself that to dull the pain of having no package managment. Maybe the past isn't as good as we rememeber.
Well, it's been there for the better part of a year, so "best offer" means "if you're willing to haul it you can have it". I briefly considered gettting it, gutting it, and turning it into something tech-geeky..
Then I realized that it's a 100 kilo beast of steel and plastic and I don't know if the floors in my house are rated for it...
Here at the University of Utah they have the "Property Redistribution" bullding, aka 'Surplus'. They sell everything remaindered by the university, usually really old; They've had every manner of medical electronics, musical instruments, computers and office furniture -- even cars )if you don't mind Ford Tauruses and Chevy Luminas). Right now they have a Sun 690MP and SGI Iris up for bid.
I've bought at least 500 bucks a crap fromt eh in teh alst two years: 3 Powermacs, 1 laptop, 2 monitors, 2 hubs and an SGI Multilink adpater (for $10 bucks that I sold on eBay for $300).
I've heard similar stories about UCLA, Oregon State and Texas A Basically, the universities strongest curiculae will have surplus from that, and for the UofU it's medical and computers.
Why do posters keep saying posts are wrong without even checking if they are correct.
Read the companies own spec sheets: PowerPC 7455 (G4) 1gHz: 35.5 watts. Pentium III 1gHz: 45.2 watts.
Same clock speed, 10 watts less, STFU.
And no, there is no direct corelation between between "clock speed" and power consumption (if that were true, then why does the MC68000 at 16mHz use 28 watts and the Dragonball EZ (same architecture) use 950 mW?)
And let's not forget something as equally important as clock speed: data piplelines. The Pentium 4 has a 24 stage pipeline whereas the G4e has 7: in broad terms this means that while the p4 can work on 3 times the instructions concurrently, the G4 executes it's stack in a third of the time.
Some may argue the real draw of Hyrogen is not the clean-ness of the power as much as it is the ability to store it.
Electricity is hard to store; Batteries must be huge to store large charges, and even then the larger th battery the faster it loses it's power in parasitic loss. Hydrogren, OTOH, is easy to store; presurize it, freeze it, whever. It's not as easy as a fluid such as oil, but loads easier than electrons.
So you get windmills. No, not some nebulous organization, but YOU, the consumer. You have one or two that run all the time. They generate tiny amounts of power, and this power cracks water though hydrolosis to get your hydrogen and have it in a storage tank out back of your house (like propane). When you need it, you pull it out of the tank.
Long story short: you get the same amount of energy back from a power cell as the engery it took to get the hydrogren in the first place (minus pesky thermodynaics): the good part is that using H you don't have to generate it all at one time -- you can do it over time using power from low-yield-long-investment instalation like wind, solar. geothermal, etc.
(I still understand what you're saying, though -- until efficient molecule-crackers are common, we'll probably end up using hydrocarbon fuel to power machines to produce our hyrdo, or decompose hyrocarbons directly.. but we don't have many options at the moment)
While I can't speak for programs themselves, a code module I wrote about 3 years ago id still kicking around -- the module is named parent_trap (because it checks the validity of parent data of children), with a hidden method named, of all things, halley_mills.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, a few things besides the obvious "buy an eMac" if you MUST MUST MUST keep this machine:
... plus, if you do this and later want to move to a slightly faster machine like a Blue&White G3 , which can be had for as little as $100 in 400mHz/0M/0M configs, the RAM and video card will carry over.
* Max the RAM (which, IIRC, is 768M), but is getting more expensive since it's special voltage RAM for this line.
* Get a G3 CPU upgrade either new or used (G3 Upgrades are hundreds less than G4 Upgrades)
* A new video card, if you're still using onboard video. A Radeaon 9200 PCI is $80 from Compusa and probably be several orders faster than the onboard Rage Pro chip.
* Faster hard drive. If you're stuck on some old 5400RPM your perfrormance can suffer -- this goes in hand with the next thing:
* New IDE controller. The onboard IDE doesn't do DMA/66/100/133 and is a real dog performance-wise. Something new can give you a surprising performance boost.
* Ethernet controller. If you have to push the limits, can even think about a new ethernet controller that will have less CPU utilization.
One thing the article doesn't touch on is reusability. One thing that the paving industry likes to pride itself on is that asphalt is almost totally recyclable. However, to my understanding, dense rubbers (such as car tires) aren't reuasable in that way, they can't be melted down and reused with reliability. Would the addition of the rubber have a problem with the recasting of the asphalt? With the amount of repaving that happens every year, what sort of effect will this have on the waste output of a repaving operation?
In all fairness, it shouldn't be "ATM machine", just "ATM". ATM means "Automatic Teller Machine" so adding machine is redundant.
Also, as we all know, the phrase "Automatic teller machine" is from ancient Sumerian and means "Magic Wall".
</pedant>
...some people will do it. It's money, and it's more money than a lot of people realize.
For example, I run a site that's pretty damn big, something like 300,000 accounts so far. I've already gotten several "business inquries" from direct marketing companies asking if I'd like to "rent" my customer data to them -- and some of these people are offering upward of 5 cents per user. And I don't have to tell you that a nickel here and a nickel adds up.
I haven't sold my user lists and never will, but rest assured that if I wanted to there is a huge market of companies that would be willing to let me name my own price.
And that is why companies do it.
This is such a flashback.
If I may karma whore for a bit, what is this "QAM" busniess?
QAM stands for "Quadrature Amplitude Modulation" which is a fancy name for a simple concept. Also called "I/Q modulation" it's a way to transmit two data streams over the same carrier signal.
The streams are combined in such a way that they can be separated at the other end by using the two most elegant mathematical theorems of man, sine and cosine. What happens, in basic terms, the streams are at "right angles" to each other in the signal.
Being able to have two carriers worth of data can provide a geometric increase in capacity; this was also the technology that was going to be behind "Stereo AM" radio, but that never made it off the ground (Stero AM would have been cool since it would only have to use one frequency for both left and right channels unlike our current analogue sterophonic FM that uses 2 channels).
Well, static and "static" are two different thing entirly.. but yes, I neglected to say I'm on Mysql (I had it in there before, but I edited the comment and removed it in one part anticipating I'd put it somewhere else but didn't. I had the Gettysburg address in there too but I thought I'd take it out for brevity sake).
I can flame MySQL with the best of them, but it's still the one I choose because It's the one that sucks the least for what I want it to do. I have yet to find a DB engine that does not blow hard in some major way, and I expect I never will.
Here is my anecdotal evidences for the site I run:
The total outfit is 8 servers, 6 active: 1 DB Server with one hot backup (dual P-III 750, 1.5GB), 4 web servers (~1.1ghz, 1GB), 1 uniproc dedicated image server (1ghz, 1GB) with a hot backup.
The 4 web servers toss a combined total of about 1.5 million pageloads a day, of which 1.4 mil are dynamically generated using FastCGI/Perl and that others are shtml and stylesheets. A lot of the data that is queried from the DB server can and is cached on the web heads for better performance so that during peak times the server doesn't have to do much more than 80 queries/sec. The image server using stock Apache 1.3 however, does something like 3m serves a day without much sweat since it's all static content.
All told that works out to each web server doing something like 325,000 pageviews a day. I don't have a barometer of whether that's good or not, but honestly I worry more about bandwidth than computrons.
I think you should be pretty happy with what you're doing. I don't know of the current figures, but last september Slashdot was doing 2.4m pageviews a day with ~10 web heads (as gleaned from 'Taco's journal). Understand that's not an apples to apple comparison since I guess you're serving more static content while slashdot (and my site) are by and large dynamic.
Never said it was quality. It's a basic barometer of where you stand in relation to other sites. It can help you gauge where you are (at least, wher you are in relation to the type of users who want a frigging bloated toolbar on their web browser).
At the very least, it can feed your ego.
Funny you should ask this question as just today I got a love-not from my main avertising broker saying they wern't going to pay me as much anymore.
Anyway, I'm reminded of something someone else once told me on this front: "making money on a web site is easy; doing it without pissing off your users is hard.", and that's the truth.
Web advertising is harder then ever, at least from a publishers perspective; the breadth of sites and users that are around now make it hard to command any great sum from advertisers; Even popup ads, the little darlings of the IAB, seldom pay more than $2 per thousand.
To make a living like, say, Slashdot you either need to be lucky enough to sign on with a large advertising death floatilla (tribalfusion, 247realmedia, etc) or hire an avertising broker/PR agent to sell your site to advertisiers; These sign-up-on-a-web-page dealies sound good and by and large are goods but don't scale well when it comes to paying $1500 a month in expenses not including money for you to live on. They are good for making a little on the side, not for financing a lifestyle.
You asked "How much can a moderately popular site expect to earn from advertising revenue?". The answer as I've seen it is, unless you have a very, very, very tight demographic, the answer is not much. If your site is already running, monitor it's ranking on Alexa and see where you stand. Also, how do you define "moderately popular"? The answer varries widely depending on who you ask: A little while ago when I was lookign for advertisers, Advertising.com wouldn't even talk to me unless I had a 100,000 pageviews a day, and they consider that a "small site".
I guess what I'm trying to say is unless you have huge readership, you'll need some sort of specialized demographic (read: gimmick) to attract users and advertisers.
Also, remember that income is net: today being USA tax day and all you need to remember that you've gotta pay taxes on your monies, too, and that takes a big piece out.
If you're hell bent on doing this for a living you need to get lucky and cheat to win. Let's pick on Slashdot some more, shall we? Contrary to popular belief, it did not get popular based on those early Nude photos of Pater: it got popular largely based on riding the popularity wave of Linux and the Open Source zeitgeist. If you can find something similar, something that you can tune into, you'll stand a fighting chance.
Actually, I have no idea what I'm saying, I'm just rambling.
It may very well blow the IBM Microdrive out of the water, but please keep in mind that the Microdrive is, in fact, a five-year-old design and with something of that age a new advancement is bound to come along.
It's all evolutionary, not neccessarily revolutionary. Revolutionary would be, uhm, I don't know, using lazors to etch bit patters in my Raspberry Jello.
Eh, sorry, youre' right -- I meant to say "clawhammer", not just "hammer".
Oh, BSD is dying, and everyone knows it.
It's dying in reverse
I was pretty sure that's what it was, either that or just a typo (gHz/mHz). Of course, if you *really* wanted to get the geek humour going you'd do "([Sideways-Eight]mHz Hammer-Class CPU)" or something equally nerdy.
What can you talk about about the machine? Do you know if the Opteron and Hammer are gonna share the same Chipsets?
Maybe I should ask something about BSD too to even things out... Uhm, In a Texas-style cage match between Tux, Beastie and that damn Mysql Dolphin, who'd win?
"CPU: AMD ClawHammer(tm) (3.14-MHz Hammer-class CPU)"
3 Megahertz? Whoohoo, looks like AMD is giving the Intel a run for it's money... and MOS, too.
Seriously, though, I'd eventually like to see some real world performance specs of Hammer running in 32 bit mode, just to see if it's going to suffer from the same 32-bit-on-64-bit problems that Itanic has been having. If they figured out a way around that, they could totally own the market because Itanium 1 is dead and all cursory tests on Itanium 2 show it sucks the glands of a large braying animal when it comes to 32 bit code.
On the upside, a lot of rackmout hardware is built around DC power versus AC -- 48 V DV power supplies and distribution blocks are used extensivly in Telecom and from discussion with my Hack musician cousin DC sources are prefered over AC for noise considerations.
I'm a Perlie and since it opened I've found Perlmonks totally invaluable -- their Q/A section actually has questions that I would ask if wasn't so beyond asking for help.
On that thread, My java-esque friends tell me Java Junkies is equally good if you're of the Bean persuation.
Both sites are, in case you didn't guess, based on the Everything Content Engine which is why they look so much alike.
While I'm not sure if it's specifically what you're looking for, there is the Linux Terminal Server Project. It works like Winframe but I don't think it's directly compatible with Citrix ICA. But is is on version 3.0 and a few people I know have used it -- I tried it once for a terminal my house but it was a little overkill for just wanting to make a web terminal for the living room.
I remember my first time. With linux, that is.
Yep, Slackware was my first try at a distro. I bought the 4-disc set of Slackware 3.0 in January '96 because I wanted to buy something but I didn't have enough for a music CD and hey, this was FOUR CDS for ten bucks! Awesome!
So I got it home and read the exhaustive 48 page installation manual-cum-liner notes and figured out how to make the boot disc for my Sound Blaster OmniCD.
I never got PPP to auto dial and never had sound, but I somehow managed to wrap my 15 year old head around xf86config and all in all it was, to this day, the smoothest linux install I have ever done. It all just seemed to work. At least, that's how I remember it...
But maybe I just tell myself that to dull the pain of having no package managment. Maybe the past isn't as good as we rememeber.
But I still have that CD set.
Well, it's been there for the better part of a year, so "best offer" means "if you're willing to haul it you can have it". I briefly considered gettting it, gutting it, and turning it into something tech-geeky..
Then I realized that it's a 100 kilo beast of steel and plastic and I don't know if the floors in my house are rated for it...
Here at the University of Utah they have the "Property Redistribution" bullding, aka 'Surplus'. They sell everything remaindered by the university, usually really old; They've had every manner of medical electronics, musical instruments, computers and office furniture -- even cars )if you don't mind Ford Tauruses and Chevy Luminas). Right now they have a Sun 690MP and SGI Iris up for bid.
I've bought at least 500 bucks a crap fromt eh in teh alst two years: 3 Powermacs, 1 laptop, 2 monitors, 2 hubs and an SGI Multilink adpater (for $10 bucks that I sold on eBay for $300).
I've heard similar stories about UCLA, Oregon State and Texas A Basically, the universities strongest curiculae will have surplus from that, and for the UofU it's medical and computers.
Why do posters keep saying posts are wrong without even checking if they are correct.
Read the companies own spec sheets: PowerPC 7455 (G4) 1gHz: 35.5 watts. Pentium III 1gHz: 45.2 watts.
Same clock speed, 10 watts less, STFU.
And no, there is no direct corelation between between "clock speed" and power consumption (if that were true, then why does the MC68000 at 16mHz use 28 watts and the Dragonball EZ (same architecture) use 950 mW?)
And let's not forget something as equally important as clock speed: data piplelines. The Pentium 4 has a 24 stage pipeline whereas the G4e has 7: in broad terms this means that while the p4 can work on 3 times the instructions concurrently, the G4 executes it's stack in a third of the time.
Windmills, of course.
Tidal power, too.
Solar?
Some may argue the real draw of Hyrogen is not the clean-ness of the power as much as it is the ability to store it.
Electricity is hard to store; Batteries must be huge to store large charges, and even then the larger th battery the faster it loses it's power in parasitic loss. Hydrogren, OTOH, is easy to store; presurize it, freeze it, whever. It's not as easy as a fluid such as oil, but loads easier than electrons.
So you get windmills. No, not some nebulous organization, but YOU, the consumer. You have one or two that run all the time. They generate tiny amounts of power, and this power cracks water though hydrolosis to get your hydrogen and have it in a storage tank out back of your house (like propane). When you need it, you pull it out of the tank.
Long story short: you get the same amount of energy back from a power cell as the engery it took to get the hydrogren in the first place (minus pesky thermodynaics): the good part is that using H you don't have to generate it all at one time -- you can do it over time using power from low-yield-long-investment instalation like wind, solar. geothermal, etc.
(I still understand what you're saying, though -- until efficient molecule-crackers are common, we'll probably end up using hydrocarbon fuel to power machines to produce our hyrdo, or decompose hyrocarbons directly.. but we don't have many options at the moment)
While I can't speak for programs themselves, a code module I wrote about 3 years ago id still kicking around -- the module is named parent_trap (because it checks the validity of parent data of children), with a hidden method named, of all things, halley_mills.