Heh, since the Win95 days I used to have to flatten and rebuild my Windows gaming box every 6 months or so due to driver problems and bloat. Then the last time my HDD died I just up and installed one of the pirated/cracked Russian Win7 versions (since my OEM Win7 license was spent on that dead OS disk). It runs in Test mode and doesn't get any updates, but I haven't had any problems for well over a year now of running Steam games. Whoever pwned my system does a much better job keeping it stable and running smoothly :P

Yes, look at software requirements first. FEA and CFD software can be extremely hardware specific. Cant they make use of powerful GPGPUs? Most server chassis will have great CPU/RAM but crap in the way of PCIe slots and especially GPU power plugs. What OS will the SW need to run? HP doesn't even certify "consumer grade" OSes on much of their rackmount lineup, and if you use Windows Server 20XX you often can't get the latest certified GPU drivers on the Server OSes, so you may well lose product support one way or the other. Ask me how I know.

Where are these servers/workstations going to be located? Servers are NOISY and belong in a climate-controlled server room, and then you'll need some sort of remote-access mechanism to them. Depending on latency and distance requirements, that can get pretty expensive.

If these are just headless number cruncher units, by all means absolutely use AWS (they also have some sort of CUDA farm if your software can leverage GPGPU). Then you can scale out the wazoo and pay only for what you need when you use it. Do your development work on your own mini-cluster (could be just a bunch of VMs in a workstation) if you want to keep standing operational costs down, but then farm out all of the big jobs to AWS and automatically shut those VMs down after they're done doing their thing. HPC clusters are a lot of work to design and keep running (something somewhere is always breaking once you get up past a dozen nodes or so). Unless what you're doing is classified, I doubt it's worthwhile getting into operating your own server farm, especially if you don't have one already.

Yeah, they have the portable card readers next door in Canada.

Actually, the chip on my AmEx Blue card is TOO advanced for some vendors. The reader wouldn't take the magstripe because it somehow detected that it was a chip card, so the vendor had me stick it into the contact reader. However, AmEx just upgraded my card to the RFID and got rid of the contact reader a few months ago due to "security reasons". So... my fancy new chip card wouldn't work and I had to pull out my old FCU VISA magstripe backup card instead.

I don't know why the RFID would have less security issues than a contact patch, though, but I'm sure there are decent exploits for each... probably more interesting ones with the proximity radios.

Yes, mod parent up.

Actually, if you don't like Slashdot Beta, just go to that "Ask Me Anything" reddit now, don't even open it in a new tab. It was all covered there yesterday with actual experts and stuff.

eh, I'm becoming kinda interested in energy policy, esp. since we're gradually transitioning from a production economy to a purely imaginary intellectual-property-based economy. Also timely now that we're poking/griefing at Russia's largely oil-based economy and their relationship with China.

If you have some reading on US foreign policy / military intervention strategy that's less naive than "spreading freedom and democracy" or even "cheap energy" (like the GI Joe and Transformers cartoons I grew up with), I'd gladly read it ;-)

Well, apparently there's money to be made in products that people can use worldwide.
http://www.businessinsider.com...

If 3 mediocre software engineers could match the capabilities of one good one, I'm sure we'd see more application of that principle outside of government contracting (cost-plus) work.

Well, get ready to start beating, because apparently the (interim) solution is asexual reproduction:
https://xkcd.com/1259/

I don't think NASA does insurance because it's a business decision and NASA isn't a business.

The DSCVR launch was delayed because the Air Force (which is run more like a business) insisted on taking out an insurance policy on the SpaceX launch. They were involved because they were paying for it, since DSCVR was sort of an odd collaboration between NOAA, NASA, and the USAF.

Spacecraft insurance is expensive since the insurance actuaries actually want comprehensive statistical data on each launch vehicle, and that's simply not available on new launch vehicles with less than ~21 (remember the threshold for statistical significance?) launches.

I have a stock Nexus 5 with Lollipop (Android 5.something) and they put in a pretty excellent data meter under Settings | Data Usage

It shows a cumulative graph of data usage over time, and a linear projection up to the end of the month for your billing plan, along with a customizable warning threshold. Under that it lists a histogram of how many MB is used by each app. Click on those, and you can configure background data for each app to restrict them to only update on wifi (or not at all).

This is pretty much a solved problem if you can convince your phone manufacturer to update you to Android 5 (or just flash a CyanogenMOD build yourself like I used to do on every phone I had before my Nexus 5)

Yeah, that's why they just call it "unlimited data" with 2GB of "high speed data". I don't find it confusing, though I'm a bit confused why other people do.