OT: geek stuff / discussion.

[Geek]

Doh! I've got some work to do. I didn't expect this to get here until next week



Now to find the time

Anyone wanna come spend a day putting this crap together for me?

[Geek]

guess what shirt I was wearing when I opened the boxes

[doc_ricketts]

It all started with the Altair and will end up here:


http://discovermagazine.com/2007/may/quantum-leap

[Milhaus]

Originally Posted by Geek

Doh! I've got some work to do. I didn't expect this to get here until next week



Now to find the time

Anyone wanna come spend a day putting this crap together for me?

Sweet!! I love putting these things together!! I haven't built a PC from scratch in a couple of years though. All the new stuff is sooo fast and so sweet!

[Geek]

Jim: both my new motherboard and power supply strongly promote "Japan-made Solid Capacitors" because this is a known issue when "acceptable substitutes" occur in manufacturing.. When I was the president of Odyssey Group (manufacturer of the HALO line of computerized paintball loaders) we had 30,000 units fry because our taiwan manufacturer "bought capacitors from down the street" when they ran out of our specified requirements making our circuit boards. They called it an "acceptable substitute!" without our knowing and we ended up with buckets full of circuit boards that looked just like that

This sticker on on my mb box says "so it won't do what Captain Kirk's did!"

:)

[Geek]

Originally Posted by doc_ricketts

It all started with the Altair and will end up here:

....implanted behind your ear.

[Geek]

Originally Posted by Milhaus

Sweet!! I love putting these things together!! I haven't built a PC from scratch in a couple of years though. All the new stuff is sooo fast and so sweet!

One immediate issue. I don't know if this case will fit under my desk

I better get some work done if I want any chance of freeing up the time to build this before its obsolete

[Milhaus]

Originally Posted by Geek

One immediate issue. I don't know if this case will fit under my desk

I better get some work done if I want any chance of freeing up the time to build this before its obsolete

I'll bunny hop my Kool-Aid machine off of it and then I bet it'll fit under your desk!!

[Milhaus]

Originally Posted by Geek

Jim: both my new motherboard and power supply strongly promote "Japan-made Solid Capacitors" because this is a known issue when "acceptable substitutes" occur in manufacturing.. When I was the president of Odyssey Group (manufacturer of the HALO line of computerized paintball loaders) we had 30,000 units fry because our taiwan manufacturer "bought capacitors from down the street" when they ran out of our specified requirements making our circuit boards. They called it an "acceptable substitute!" without our knowing and we ended up with buckets full of circuit boards that looked just like that

This sticker on on my mb box says "so it won't do what Captain Kirk's did!"

:)

It is funny to me that this is still happening. I was a busy, busy boy back in the early 2000's redesigning tons of circuit boards to take ceramic and electrolytic caps out and replacing them with either Tantalum caps or "Jap Caps". Sorry if that is not p/c, but that is what they call them in the industry. If you had a really critical application you would use Wima Caps, which are German, but they are $$$!

[BikePilot]

Originally Posted by pfb

So my question...

I've had data centers that could consume as much CPU, memory and disk resource that would physically fit. But that was due to huge, redundant databases, lots of analytical reporting and tons of distributed users in a corporate environment.

And I certainly understand how somebody who edits tons of digital video for a living (or as a serious hobby) could also consume beaucoup compute resources...

But what exactly are you guys doing that you need, -or even notice-, ultra fast raid drives & hundreds of gigaflops of CPU resource? Do today's games use that much resource? Other applications?

I certainly understand it just as a hobby for fun, or building it yourself to develop the knowledge to help your company or clients if you are in the industry, but as an individual user, I'm just wondering if you really can put that hardware to the test....

For me its a few things. First, I just don't like crappy stuff (tools, computers or whatever) and the off the shelf Dell's and such just bother me. Second, I'm really impatient. I built my fairly fast (though slow compared to Geek's rig) computer for less than a mid-level Dell would cost and its faster in most applications than most any big box off the shelf machine. I do a bit of photoediting and a lot of photostorage. I needed around a tetrabyte of storage and wanted it fast and backed up. I also had 3 old 500gb hard drives laying around. The high end motherboard let me take advantage of Intel's excelent matrix raid to turn the 3 old, slwo 500gb drives into one rather faast 1.5tb drive. Then I snagged a cheap, lower power 1tb drive for backup.

The only truely processor intensive stuff I do is the occasional flight simulator time (FSX) which will use as much processor as you can give it (though surprisingly it doesn't take advantage of the GPU all that much).

Where I notice the added performance over say the Dell I have at work is on bootup, opening files, launch applications, moving large amounts of data around, installing stuff and even copying and pasting or alt-tabing between windows. My home machine is nearly instant for most things I might want to do other than bootup (and that's pretty quick). If I want to copy and paste a bunch of text from westlaw to word on my work machine it hangs for a couple of seconds (most annoying). The work machine isn't old either, its probably less than a year old business-class dell core 2 duo box (probably cost at least 2x my home machine). For me, moving from my current home machine to the latest i7 quad core would probably not net a noticeable improvement, so I'll hold off on that (not that I could afford it anyway).

[BikeSDP]

It's amazing how much stuff you've got on that table, Geek. I've worked for a big SW company for a number of years and here's a requisition (still in my history) for some Toshiba notebook RAM in 1999. Look at how much 128MB cost nearly 10 years ago




By my calculations, that's about $1800 per gigabyte.

[abruzzi]

Originally Posted by BikePilot

The only truely processor intensive stuff I do is the occasional flight simulator time (FSX) which will use as much processor as you can give it (though surprisingly it doesn't take advantage of the GPU all that much).

I do a lot of video editing and music production on my systems. My desktop is an 8 core Nahlem Mac Pro with 16gb of ram, and I still still have to take extended coffee breaks while I wait for Shake or FCP to render. I've yet to push up against the cpu in my music production, but 32bit application RAM limitations hit me all the time.

The big benefit with RAIDs is to take three 1tb drives and set them up as RAID5, that way the failure of one disk doesn't lose my data. When you active dataset approaches 500gb, backup is of limited use.

Geof

[Geek]

Originally Posted by BikeSDP

It's amazing how much stuff you've got on that table, Geek. I've worked for a big SW company for a number of years and here's a requisition (still in my history) for some Toshiba notebook RAM in 1999. Look at how much 128MB cost nearly 10 years ago




By my calculations, that's about $1800 per gigabyte.

In 1989 I was working for the University of Waterloo's Department of Computer Services. Back then, computers had less than 640 kilobytes of RAM for the most part...

WatStar1 was one of the University's main AIX servers - a unix box that literally thousands of students logged into with termainals. It had 512 MB of ram at the time (or about 1/4 of what my new video card has ).

It was time to upgrade. We were going to double the RAM and add another 512 MB (a gig of RAM! in 1989 that would be like a Terraybyte of RAM now).

The package arrived and I went down and grabbed it (I knew it was RAM, I didn't know what it was for or how much it was). I had it under my arm and came strolling into my boss's office.

"EASY WITH THAT!" he shouted at me.
"Its just RAM" I said

He pulled out the invoice and showed it to me. The box under my arm cost the University $380,000

[Mortis]

Originally Posted by abruzzi

I do a lot of video editing and music production on my systems. My desktop is an 8 core Nahlem Mac Pro with 16gb of ram, and I still still have to take extended coffee breaks while I wait for Shake or FCP to render. I've yet to push up against the cpu in my music production, but 32bit application RAM limitations hit me all the time.

The big benefit with RAIDs is to take three 1tb drives and set them up as RAID5, that way the failure of one disk doesn't lose my data. When you active dataset approaches 500gb, backup is of limited use.

Geof

Dunno if you do a lot of file type conversion but if you have not checked out Episode, you should. And if you are a high high volume transcode shop Episode Engine is an amazing piece of software. We used Engine at my last job, had 5 Mac Pros hooked to a 100TB SAN via 4Gb fibre for transcoding. Pretty cool seeing what 40 cores processing one file can accomplish

Man I really miss all the cool stuff I used to get to play with on a daily basis.

[Mortis]

Anyone recommend a good teach yourself PHP book? I need to do just that.