Amen to this. I count the $8 I send to Netflix as some of the best value for the money I get all month.
The ability to queue up movies or TV shows as a time-limited rental would make Netflix even better.

If "full GPL compliance" is a goal of the project, then it's doomed to mediocrity. Real chip vendors are not going to share their secret sauce, either because they can't due to patent/IP agreements or because they don't see a reason to risk handing the crown jewels to their competition. It just ain't gonna happen.

That is definitely worth considering, if the point of your degree is purely employment-driven. If your goal is to teach, you probably need to keep going to reach the "terminal" degree in your field. There are also employment opportunities in some university-affiliated research positions, and there are still corporations looking for Ph.D holders, but you'd better be sure that your thesis topic is impressive enough to put you to work. Most places I've worked look at a Ph.D holder as "BS + 6 years of experience".

As to getting the Masters, I'll close on the experience of one of my best friends. Hugely brilliant guy; finished an honors BS in Chemistry, then went to a Ph.D. program in the same. As he tells it, from the first day on campus until he finally had to quit the program 6 years later, he was always "4 years away from finishing." He lived and breathed chemistry, was pursuing it out of love of the field and intended to end up as a researcher somewhere. He and his wife were involved in a nasty car accident 5 years into his studies, and was unable to keep up his research and teaching responsibilities for the next 6-9 months. They had two kids to support, and they just had to decide that a Real Job was what was best for their family. He very much regrets that he didn't first get the Masters done before starting the Ph.D., since now his resume shows a Bachelor's + lots of post grad work.

Before I dumped all my hardware and got out of the mining business, I was getting 300MH/s from each of my 5830s in non cross-fire mode. I had one card that could run solid at 330MH/s, but the others became flakey at anything over 305 or so. Try slightly overclocking?

Moving cars and people around is energy intensive. Any battery technology is lossy; it's all about storing the electrical energy in chemical form to make it transportable.

You are correct: this is about coal-powered cars until we have some better way to generate electricity.

Would it not make sense to alter your AV scan and backup scripts to do their thing, then put the machines to sleep afterwards?

If the goal is truly to "go green", using less electricity is the only way. If you're not looking to go green, but are instead looking to offset some of the money that you're spending now on electricity, turning the machines off will be orders of magnitude more effective than trying to offset the cost by mining and selling BitCoins.

Plus, running 18,000 desktop machines at 100% will put an extra heat load on your HVAC systems, which aren't free to run from either environmental or monetary costs.

Being persecuted is often viewed as a badge of honor or justification that their view is correct by many religious people.

Just so I'm clear... we're talking about Westboro Baptist Church now, right?

You two are discussing different markets; there's really no point arguing either side. Porsche and Kia will continue to build cars that can be used to buy groceries, and there will still be a market for both. $3000 desktop machines with DVD drives will still have their place, even with the existence of $49 DVD players.

If only there was a clear-cut way to tell Google, "Please hide all of the results that are on a forum with only one post in the thread". My 2nd biggest pet peeve about Googling for answers this way is the huge amount of search results asking the same question I have, with no answers.

My #1 peeve is people taking a crack at answering the question with no understanding themselves about the problem. Answers like "I've never done this myself, but I think blah blah blah" or "Why would you want to do that? Boost already has a function that mostly solves this problem."

And that is exactly why stackoverflow is great: these answers get voted down to oblivion and out of the way.

No arguments on your last point about virtualization on appropriate hardware. I do wonder, though, on the need for better cooling. In an appropriate rack, with forced air cooling in a properly designed server room, is the cooling really that much of an issue? I just popped over to Apple's website; it states a maximum power draw of 85W, which is not exactly unmanageable.

But even for $8k, Dell can't sell you hardware that can run a blessed version of Apple's applications. That seems to be the only reason to go the Mac Mini route.

Then it's up to the whims of the overcommit memory killer in Linux. I'm not sure if turning that off will cause fits in Android...

Well, it's about time they passed a budget for 2010. Think they'll have the 2011 budget ready and approved for 2014?

Odd that Google doesn't just push to extend the supported compression formats to include more of these more modern compression libraries if this is a serious concern for them. This sounds like two guys using their 20% time to figure out a way to optimize the deflate algorithm. Kudos to them, but this is not comparable to releasing a royalty-free video codec or other large Googly-type project.

According to the article, "Zopfli is 81 times slower than the fastest measured algorithm gzip -9" Almost two orders of magnitude of time taken, in return for a compression gain of 3%-8%. It would have been informative to know how much working memory was used vs. what gzip requires. This is a small gain of network bandwidth; trivial, even. But, if you're Google and already have millions of CPUs and petabytes of RAM running at less than 100% capacity, this is the type of small gain you might implement.

So the obvious conclusion is that what we need is a gzip -11 option.