The most common thing I see done to save money with Linux is build a
router or firewall with an old computer. The problem I have with that
is the computer's power costs will exceed the cost of a band new router
within just a month or two. Even if you specifically want to run a full
copy of Linux and need more computing power than what you will get from
a home router you can get any one of the ARM based boards that are
around these days and they will sip power compared to an old computer
quickly paying for their additional cost.
You have to think of long term cost benefit. All too often I see
programmers tell me they pick a particular language because it's quick
and easy for them, adding "Computers are so fast these days they have
CPU and memory to burn" They don't think about the tens of thousands of
computers that are going to run their code and how much extra power they
are going to eat in order to run it because the programmer was lazy.
This country has had to build whole power plants to supply additional
capacity for lazy programmers.
I think thats enough random, yet oddly similar themed, thoughts for this
message.
Brian Cluff
On 06/22/2014 07:09 AM,
techlists@phpcoderusa.com wrote:
> It is amazing - the transformation of computers since my first exposure
> in 1983. My first experience was intro to computers - Fortran
> programming using punch cards. It was 1985 before I saw a full screen
> editor. In 1986 I bought a Commodore 64 that had 64kb of RAM. It was
> plenty powerful to automate book keeping and other useful stuff. In 87
> I bought an 8088 with an upgrade to 640kb of RAM. It had two disk
> drives, a 14" monochrome monitor, and a 300 baud modem. I acquired a
> copy of dBaseIII and I was having the time of my life. The next year I
> bought a 20MB HD. I thought I had arrived.
>
> I am a purist in so may ways. I struggle with the business vs purist
> approach. I've argued in the past that it is better to spend $50 more a
> month on hardware than it is to spend hours each month trying to make
> something more efficient. From a truly business stand point it is more
> efficient to make up the difference by spending a little more on
> hardware than man hours.
>
> Case in point. I am a lamp dev. I am looking at Drupal for a future
> project. Most would consider Drupal bloatware. I think at a minimum it
> is a recourse hog. If all things were equal I would rather build the
> app from scratch and make it as efficient as I can. The interesting
> thing is I might be able to get Drupal to do what I want in half the
> time. That equates to a lot of savings. The cost will be that it will
> require a server that cost $50 more a month.
>
> It amazes me the amount of power it takes to run modern apps. My main
> box is an i5 with 8GB of RAM. That is a lot of power. I assume it will
> be viable for 7 - 10 years. Maybe in it's latter life it will not be my
> primary workstation, however it surely could be a test server or
> something along those lines.
>
> On the other hand it amazed me when I was able to build a mail server
> running Centos 5 and Qmailtoaster on an old laptop running a 1Ghz
> Celeron w/ 256MB of RAM.
>
>
> On 2014-06-22 00:32, kitepilot@kitepilot.com wrote:
>> To me bloat would be a bunch of daemons eating resources to the point
>> of exhaustion.
>> I installed KDE (had not done it in years) and seems to hug less
>> resources now.
>> Still testing...
>> ET
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Dennis Kibbe writes:
>>
>>> techlists@phpcoderusa.com writes:
>>>> What a great rant!! I was on my way to look for a video on HULU.... I
>>>> enjoyed this much more.
>>>
>>> LOL I've enjoyed it as well. "Bloat" is one of those words that get
>>> thrown
>>> around without really knowing what it means. (no offense to OP) If I
>>> see the word in an article I want to know how the author measures
>>> "bloat." To me bloat would be code loaded into memory that is never
>>> executed. dennisk
>>> -- 27 Years 1987-2014
>>> SDF Free Public Access UNIX System
>>> http://www.sdf.org
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