You (and Geekbench) may not be taking turbo mode into account. Quad-cores generally turbo to the same frequency as duals when you're only using one core.

IIRC Thumper had 48 drives in 4U but Facebook's new hinged storage server has 15 drives per U, so it's even denser.

Google doesn't do things the cheapest way because they're thinking long-term. They want to have everything in house. They may (accidentally, I'm sure) destroy some of the companies you mentioned, so Google doesn't want to be their customer when that day comes. Google also thinks (rightly or wrongly) that at scale they can always design something cheaper than anyone else.

I think the $30 spike was more likely caused by an influx of noobs who found out that their GPU could print money.

Your development background will be very useful in a QA / Test Engineer role, assuming you are considering joining a technically competent organization.

I say this because many companies have an antiquated view of "testers" as low skilled keyboard jockeys able to bang keys and input fields like monkeys on ritalin. Avoid these places like the plague...

A premium QA/Test Engineer will apply development and other solid technical skills to:

- Provision test systems spanning wide varies of operating systems, network configuration, applications and settings, in short: be able to build everything you need to test the systems tasked of you.

- Obtain a deeper understanding of the system under test; able to dig into code to discern logical errors and oversights, triage down to root cause and even suggest a fix/patch.

- Integrate test automation technologies into the software process so regression and performance testing is part of a continuous integration & test lifecycle. Manual testing should only be a part of your efforts, as software systems continually expand in scope and a manual-only test process will eventually be overwhelmed by progress.

- Extend and apply third party tools, ranging from code performance analyzers to network traffic capture/replay, code coverage analysis and unit test frameworks, fuzzers and chaos monkeys, etc.

- Understand security risks and defensive coding techniques to identify deficiencies in a code base or implementation/design which introduce vulnerabilities. Catching these defects before a product goes live is very rewarding and can be exceptionally cost effective.

- Develop internal tools or customize existing software using Shell, PERL, Python, Ruby, Java, C/C++, and other languages as required or appropriate for the task at hand.

- Communicate effectively with multiple stake holders in an organization: development, product support, marketing, administration, operations. These will all be interfacing with you and the ability to tailor the technical depth and nomenclature of your written and oral communications to each of these groups is critical to being an effective QA/Test Engineer.

And many other skills and capabilities I've not listed, depending on the context of your role in the group and the domain of the organization you work for.

Many people still consider QA a less important or prestigious occupation compared to other technical professions, like software development. While the prestige may be lacking, the job satisfaction of a competent QA/Test Engineer who applies development, operations, and security analysis skills to improve a product is significant.

The many varied resources you should incorporate into your tester toolbox is too long to list here. Many sites exist devoted to QA toolsmith / test automation / security analysis roles, and you're going to want some skills and tools from all of these specialties at your disposal.

Good luck! I hope you consider the switch; the world needs more competent QA/Test Engineers.

Haven't people been reflowing PS3s and Xboxen in their kitchen ovens? Or does that only work for re-reflowing?

The next generation Cray (XE7?) will attach to the processor via PCIe, so they can use Intel or AMD. They're definitely not going to use IB when their Gemini interconnect is better.

Yes; but knowing how to programming those matter compilers, ... GOTO 10

They'll probably make a Windows 8 version (locked) and an Android version (also locked) of each tablet. The demand for anything else is too small to bother with. People who want regular Linux will have to jailbreak.

commodity based you can at least barter with or consume; in general you are correct and we agree.

they all have trade off's. i'll take decentralized, secure (potentially anonymous) Bitcoin and fend off the hackers while others pay banking intermediaries high fees for transactions performed at their leisure, presumably with less risk.

to each their own... ;)

absolutely true!

fiat currencies are just as much a shared hallucination as bitcoin.

    at least bitcoins may provide more privacy...

You might enjoy this proposal: http://www.jordanpollack.com/softwaremarket/

Such a market would annoy customers because it uses DRM and it would annoy sellers because they would make less money.

Microsoft and Cisco do it. That used router you bought? Its firmware was fully licensed, but since it's non-transferable you have to buy it all over again. (And since the router is a brick without firmware, they have you over a barrel on pricing.) I always thought it was unfair that such practices are allowed when they only hurt businesses even though people would scream were they applied to consumer goods.

I agree. But given that I have already agreed to DRM in many cases (e.g. Steam), allowing resale/lending would at least give me some benefits to offset the costs of DRM.

You just pretty much described the "UltraViolet" locker service; unfortunately the implementation is buggy and laden with DRM.