@40K up until this fall (and 35K now), I would hardly say that is "being given away" prices.
159 karma · joined May 25, 2010
https://plus.google.com/photos/108306457281321389001/albums/...
I haven't been a 'coder' since 1994 yet I'm defiantly "technical". The teams I lead, AFAIK, don't question my contributions because I don't code. Nor are my designs less valid.
In fact, my years of involvement on the operations side of the house sometimes make my choice 'technical' choices more informed than what straight coders cook up.
Again, phooey.
How is that faster than using a local DNS server?
Also, the market for good digitizing hardware is drying up too.
The moral, hurry up and digitize now before the equipment use for this purpose drys up.
Still, an SSD makes this all better. When I was using virtual memory on a Ubuntu server and put the swap partition on an SSD, everything worked great. On a rotating platter, not so much.
This might be a horrible example but my one friend had a installation of FileMaker Pro running on a completely tricked out XServer (RAID with 15K SAS drives). With 250 concurrent users he was completely max out on CPU and many queries took minutes to complete.
When he moved to a 256GB SSD his CPU load now never goes above 20% and not one query takes more than five seconds, period.
Also, please reference my old HN post from over a year ago.
Paging out to a normal "disk" was not even an option, the performance ranged incredibly horrible to completely unusable.
Paging out to SSD was not only usable, it was only a percentage slower than 'real' RAM.
I think that's amazing. Having the option to use SSD as memory in a pinch is a great 'win'.
A few months ago I had to help one of our scientists (the company is called 5AM Solutions.. they the awesome) run a bioinformatic job written in Perl and R. As it turned out, for long stretches of the processing the job required around 20 GB of memory. The one server that had all the required dependencies installed had only 8 GB at the time.
When I let the job run the first time, it started to page out memory to hard disk. The job ran for about four days, was only about 25% complete and during that time frame the server was un-useable for any other functions. Pretty much everything came to grinding halt.
Between that first run and the time our new RAM would be installed, just for grins, I gave the system 30 GB of swap space on the locally attached SSD. With that configuration the job finished in 19 hours and during that time the server was still responsive of other tasks.
When we finally added the appropriate amount of physical RAM the job took only 15 hours to complete.
It is the first time I have ever seen virtual memory be useful.
My main Linux workstations are a three year old QUAD core Shuttle XPC and a Dell business workstation. I religiously upgrade to each Ubuntu distro release every six months. Some things have gotten a lot better (like sound), then other stuff breaks. In particular, the Intel graphics drivers (like mentioned in this article) still are not quite right.
It's a little depressing how the fundamentals still are still not solid.
ZOMG, I forgot about my ASUS 1000 netbook.. The wireless get WORSE and WORSE every release. The wireless driver with 9.10 were awesome and now I can barely connect anywhere.
DE-PRESS-ING..
Arg.
Search #vmdd (Virgin Mobile Data Down) on Twitter and follow the fun.
I'll add one more thing: horrible network filtering.
Awesome.
If anything, I'm going to 'port' this post to an bcfg2 example.
The pdf's it created were pretty small and the result of the project fits into a very small chunk of my Dropbox account (50GB). Its great having all my files for the past 20 years available everywhere I go.
BTW, it turns out there ARE atheists in foxholes.
When I look back, everything succeeded or failed based on timing and execution.