[Gllug] Programmer Wanted (scripter and compiler)

[Nix]

On 29 Apr 2009, Peter Corlett said:
> On 29 Apr 2009, at 12:18, Nix wrote:
>> [...] I've spent fifteen years using the 'get an almost-obsolete  
>> system, there's a huge markdown' philosophy,
>
> It's a bit different from 1994, mind. RAM and disk space was small and  
> expensive and CPUs were not featureful. These days, a gig of RAM costs  
> less than a round of drinks, disk space is infinite for most purposes,  
> and you have to go out of your way to not end up with a multi-core 64  
> bit processor.

Indeed. I actually spent more on my disk controller than the disks,
because a PCIe RAID controller with half a gig of cache RAM and battery
backing simply seems like a good long-term investment :) and it can
cache the whole of the firefox source tree without breaking a sweat. I
can slam bigger disks in there as needed.

>> and this time I looked at the top-of-the-line stuff too and it  
>> wasn't terribly much more expensive, probably because the executive  
>> fodder is all laptops now.
>
> When I spotted a quad-core CPU, board and 8GB of RAM for £300, it was  
> an easy purchase. Runs Debian like the proverbial off a shovel. I've  
> still managed to push it into swap with some rather dodgy code, mind :)

Multigigabyte RSS-r-us :)

I backed up the whole OS-as-delivered on the smaller of my new boxes and
it used less than a third of the RAM caching the lot. I suspect
virtualization is the *only* way I'll ever use all this RAM up...


You haven't seen the proverbial off a shovel until you've seen a
Nehalem, mind. Both my new machines are quad-core Nehalems (one a Core
i7, one a Xeon L5520), and, well, they're searingly fast. My old 1.2GHz
Athlon IV builds-and-tests glibc in three hours (if you arrange for it
to not swap in the process, which is somewhat tricky). The Core i7
builds and tests it in six minutes... all of a sudden I'm very
interested in parallelizing everything.

You couldn't get 8Gb of RAM for one though: they do everything in
threes, like the Ramans. 12Gb is practical (as is 24Gb ;) ).
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