Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:Tdarcos wrote:How about I give you a piece of information that leverages my 34 years as a computer programmer and probably 30 years I've been using a computer nearly every single day, and if you knew what you were talking about you would have known this.
You've got 34 years in as a computer programmer? Who are you doing computer programming for right now?
Different places. I answer bids on sites like
http://www.vworker.com where someone will put in a request for a proposal. It's sometimes hard when you get people in India or Russia who can bid $2 an hour on a job and that's equivalent purchasing power to $200 a day here, but when someone wants esoteric work it's possible you can do reasonably well.
Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:Who is paying you to do that? You've been using one for that time, maybe. But this is like me driving a car to work every day for a few years and pronouncing myself an automotive engineer.
I just finished one in which the guy wanted some tweaks to his website, and I fixed a number of errors including a nasty hole that would have allowed SQL injection.
Another one involved changing a program written in Fortran - it's really hard to find people who still know Fortran - to use an array in COMMON instead of passing the array in a subroutine call. I added an additional feature: I changed all of the write statements to use a defined constant instead of a unit number. Means when he goes to change to using, say, a subroutine to do graphic output in the future, he can search by the defined constant and thus change all the write statements.
My disability makes it no longer possible for me to work full time, but I can do part-time work.
Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:I'm telling you my experiences with the cheapest consumer-grade KVM switches sold in computer stores, because I'm the cheapest son-of-a-bitch in town and I buy the least expensive solution that works.
My KVM is one I grabbed from a company I used to work for, where I did the ordering for all the stuff we needed. It was expensive. $4-500. I am not saying this because I disagree with anything you said up here, I am just setting scope for everyone.
Okay, we're both right and both wrong, because we're coming from two different places, and I realized it afterwards. I'm coming from use of cheap KVMs I have to buy with my own money out of pocket; you were referring to much higher grade ones that you basically got as abandoned equipment.
Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:The KVMs that I use have the habit of not syncing the video properly if you boot the machine without the monitor being focused for that machine.
OK, at least we both agree that you were wrong to call anyone stupid on this subject. I accept your apology.
I kind of think the issue got a little overheated here. But I did not call you stupid; I asked "Who would be stupid enough to" and so I didn't actually insult anyone directly. I meant it as more of a rhetorical question than anything. I was presuming at the time the use of consumer grade KVMs such as I use, not realizing that there are better features in the horrendously expensive ones.
Sometimes you find that someone offers a horrendously expensive solution that doesn't give you a single advantage and in fact is worse than a much less expensive one.
I mean, I have a corporation and an LLC chartered in Colorado. Each year I have to file an annual report, which you can do over the web and costs $10 charged to your credit card. Do that, and your corporate/LLC charter is renewed for another year.
Or you can fill in the form and mail it in, that costs $120.
So some company sent me a letter in the mail saying that I could submit the annual renewal to them, and they would handle it for $250. Basically they're charging $100 to put a stamp on an envelope and mail the form in, or charging over $200 to fill out the exact same information that you supply to the Colorado Secretary of State's website with $10.
Absolutely no difference, and charging over $200 extra.
In case you're wondering why I have a Colorado corporation and an LLC, Colorado turns out to be the cheapest place in the country to incorporate or register an LLC. When I chartered them in 2007, it was only $25 and you did it using the Secretary of State's website and a credit card. Renewal was $10 a year after the first year.
Now, it's $50 to charter and still $10 to renew, you still use their website, and Colorado is still the cheapest place in the country to incorporate. Plus if you don't operate in Colorado you don't file state corporate income tax forms.
So for an extra $20 a year I have a spare corporation and an LLC available instantly if I need them. Plus every year I leave them means they're one year older which may be useful at some point for use in obtaining financing.
Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:No kidding. Google can afford to buy 100,000 identical machines in racks and configure them exactly the same.
I read something the other day that said that the #2 manufacturer of computers in the US was Google, and they all go to Google. A fun fact, not sure if it's true, but I hadn't heard anything like it before.
It would make sense. Google uses a lot of computers; when you're trying to get fast performance you need a lot of machines. However, Google might just be at the point where they could conceivably get better performance by switching to mainframe computers. I understand that in some cases where you do huge transaction volumes a mainframe may make more sense than lots of pizza boxes.
(For those not familiar with this term, a computer designed to run rack-mounted using one rack slot is referred to as a "pizza box" as that's about how big it is; it's basically a processor, a motherboard and memory. The hard drive and any other specialized components are often shared or multiplexed.)
Of course, Google has done a lot of tweaks with the stuff they do and bringing it over to mainframes might not work. They use their own file systems, and we're talking huge databases. It might be they tweaked their stuff for such optimal performance that a general purpose solution like Oracle or DB2 on a mainframe won't do as well as their highly-optimized special file system on specialized operating systems designed for enhancing web serving and special PC-type hardware.
The equivalent of a specialized BSD or Linux with Apache running in the Kernel and Google File System using threads rather than task switches might provide huge increases in performance over a typical LAMP stack.