I was just about to say that M&M’s have had that figured out for years!
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Is this the place.
My colleague found this gem somewhere and I had not seen it yet so maybe some of you might also not know it:
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Meanwhile at PyCon UK: “Developers are drawn to complexity like a moth to a flame, often with the same result.”
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When did computers become so expensive?
Mine is like, 10 years old now, so I figure the only thing I can possibly carry over is the case, and therefore I might as well buy a prebuilt (partly because the discount parts market is not good in Japan). I’m looking at around ¥250,000 ($1700).
I swear decent CPUs and graphics cards used to be around $100.
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I haven’t bought hardware for a similar time span to you, so I really don’t know, but there must be a price range, yeah? Where does your number fall in the range? Anything high-end has always been silly money in my experience, but there was always a sweet spot which was comparatively good value.
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It seems that the range has shifted upwards too. At this point, you go just a little way towards the budget options, and it no longer makes sense to buy new, you are well into the second-hand market. I guess that pushes the market for new products onwards and upwards. I do kind of want to buy new - I can afford it - I’ve just been hit with sticker shock.
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I’ve been looking to buy a “family computer” that my kids can use. Yeah, I have lots of computers. I have a (10-year old) desktop (that was partly upgraded about 5 years ago with some secondhand upgrades I got on eBay), but that’s in my home office. And both my partner and I have laptops, but we really would like a family computer for the kids that is less portable and more of a “place” than a “thing” so monitoring their computer activity is easier than having to figure out where in the house they are.
I’ve been looking at refurnished mini PCs. They still seem so expensive, especially when finding one that will be able to adequately run Minecraft, which my oldest has shown interest in.
At the same time, I think, “none of this stuff has changed significantly in the last 5+” and “I don’t want to get anything too old”.
In part, I get the impression that things have changed, but you won’t really notice unless you are the type to push a computer to its performance limits. Also, I think perhaps the biggest improvements (outside of bringing more server-grade features into consumer-grade components) have been energy efficiency. Which is great, because I spend a lot of money running my home server stuff on really old server-grade hardware. But it’s hard to get excited about energy performance…
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there’s not much demand for desktop machines, most home users buy laptops. The only people buying them are business and gamers. Gamers are buying high end stuff, business uses are either engineering, so high end, or for lightweight use, so cheap. there is some midrange stuff available, but much less than there used to be, even a few years ago. I don’t even seen the range we were buying for work a few years ago (we put an SSD and more memory in them, and they were still I/O bound for the build workflow.) I suspect low demand means less competition for the remaining market, and anyone price sensitive sticks with what they have.
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Megawatts are the measure of efficiency for some parts of where I work. Like “improvements in foo resulted a a 13% reduction in run time, and 2.3 MW.” Mind you, we have more computers than you do.
Also, even the gear I run is power limited, 16.2 kw/ rack, which means we need a lot of racks, and it complicates server design (a 5000W server might be better than a 6000 W one, because 3 fit instead of just two, but you’ll need more of them, so what’s the cheapest way?).
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How anyone gets anything done on a laptop is a mystery to me, and that’s before you look at what they do to posture…
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additional monitors, keyboard and mouse.
the builtin stuff is only for those few moments where you are not in your office f.e. a presentation or those rare days on the move for working on a train or taking a boring meeting into the kitchen to begin cooking dinner,
my laptop is almost stationary.
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Well, yeah, I have the same setup for my compulsory work laptop. It’s basically just a less-good desktop, with the one advantage that it was easy to post to me.
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Laptops have the advantage it makes it easier for an employee to take work home with them, carry it to a conference room, etc. That’s a big win for employers. My current job, I have a laptop and a (incredibly overpowered) desktop. I got the desktop because it lets me set up a consistent enviornment (all my windows will be right where I left them the day before), and still use my lap top when i want to go somehwere else in the house, or to the office, or travel, or carry it around when I’m the oncall. That saves me a couple hours a week, which more than pays for the machine over the life of it. (the week i could work at all when my laptop was hosed did that in the first six months I had it) I would have been fine with a second laptop (I run a webrowser, some terminals and vs code, real work is done on remote machines, and modern laptops will drive two external displays), but it was easier to get the overkill desktop than a second laptop, and there was no other desktop on offer.
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I just wasted 1 hour of my work time filing out forms for the people on whose behalf I work on the project, because they couldn’t sent everything to me at once last night where I could have done it after work.
Also I needed to sign a couple of Word documents which of course I printed out as PDF to sign–as I did before–with my PDF reader. But recently the software I’ve been using as started insisting I need an account.
So what is a good PDF reader that allows me to put signature stamps on documents … on windows? I have a secondary solution with my ipad but for stuff that arrives on my work computer it’s really a hassle to do that.
Had an end of sprint demo to run this afternoon.
Gave it a dry run this morning and discovered I couldn’t get some of the components to connect to each other. After an hour of machine reboots, component reboots and settings twiddling, things suddenly sprang back into life.
Gave the demo a few more dry runs over the course of the morning and for good measure once more before the actual demo. All working fine.
Of course things fell apart when I was running the demo live.
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I had to demo the work of a colleague a couple of sprints ago. Of course it didn’t work when i showed it.
I recently worked on a ticket that replaced that particular implementation with something far simpler.
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The software I work on is not very visual so for demos we sometimes rely on an old, cobbled together tool to show what’s going on.
It’s this tool that decided not to play ball. It’s a pain when it doesn’t behave but also not high on the priority list to investigate and fix.
Fortunately closing and reopening it fixed it.
I also have enough experience to have had a backup plan so it was only a minor blip and an awkward chuckle in the demo.
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When I was in college we did a group project on a control system with fuzzy logic feedback. When we got to the end, we realized we had no way to show it off. So one of my collaborators wrote a little graphical display of whatever, in TCL. It crashed. A lot. So, I wrote a script that started 10 instances, and put the windows right on top of each other. One crashed the window closed, and the one below took over (he added something that detected if the window had focus, and only updated when it did). We were the only group that got through the demo with out a crash….
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If you have a rack, with two power distribution units, supplied by diverse power, it’s probably a good idea to verify that the redundant power supplies of the equipment in said rack are not plugged into the same PDU. I have no particular reason to make this observation. Not at all.
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“If you have a rack, with two power distribution units, supplied by diverse power, it’s probably a good idea to verify that the redundant power supplies of the equipment in said rack are not plugged into the same PDU. I have no particular reason to make this observation.”
I understand amusingly little (for which read absolutely nothing) of this sentence!
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