i made it one day after being annoyed with all the junk on weather.com. i just wanted a simple answer whether it was going to rain so i knew which car i could drive that day.

Sure humans have affected the climate, but I'm scared by the level of religious language and fanaticism:

"Repent of your carbon emissions!"

"The world will be destroyed in ten years!"

It used to be like 75 years but I guess people didn't really care so now they employ all these fear tactics. New York will be under water in our lifetime? Seriously? Many alarmists employ the same language that Pat Robertson does about the second coming and that Bush does about the terrorists.

As soon as I think I'm being manipulated by fear I get really skeptical. Al Gore IS a politician and his messianic message is demagogy as much as anything.

"There is no relationship between CO2 and temperature". Please.

The real shame is that although I believe that global warming is man-made I am genuinely open to being persuaded otherwise. But I've yet to hear a counter argument that isn't self contradicting, dishonest or full of cherry-picked data and ad hominems. It suggests the 'climate-skeptic' camp is dominated by people who have (perhaps involuntary) ulterior motives.

First go to the Dell website and price out the equipment. Then when you're speaking to the sales guy, tell him you priced it out on the website and it came out to about 88% of the actual price the site gave you.

Then tell him you've heard that talking to the sales guy is the way to start a business relationship and that you were hoping he could quote it out for you. Tell him you're ready to make the purchase decision immediately but the pricing has to make sense. Tell him the pricing on the website looks like it's marked up quite a bit.

It may take him a day or more to generate the quote.

Be aware that he has tremendous room to wiggle on some items, but not on others. Last order I placed the salesman could discount heavily some items but not others. You don't really care as long as the overall price makes sense. So when you eventually go over the quote with him, be sure to focus on your "budget" for the equipment, and not on where the specific pricing comes from.

You should also have a simultaneous dialog like this going with a rep from any other companies you'd buy from.

To the salesperson, the equation is effort vs time. If he knows you're ready to buy soon, then he has every incentive to make you a good deal b/c in a day the sale will be made and so he'll be willing to take a small commission in exchange for a quick sale. He has some constraints about how he can price items, but has a lot of flexibility on price.

If you're buying 10 to 20 servers you should be looking at least a 25% discount off of the website price. The only reason they publish those prices is to give the salesperson a starting point to work down from (or to sucker naive shoppers into paying full price via the web).

You want to come across as decisive and ready to buy at all times, if only he can solve the "issues with the pricing".

Frankly Dell's sales process stinks, and it is annoying to have to work with some of the salespeople there. But I've saved a substantial amount of money over the web prices by negotiating with them, so it's worth it.

You may also be able to save money by modifying some of the configurations slightly, b/c Dell lets salespeople discount based on the need to move inventory.

Don't be afraid to tell the salesperson it's OK if he needs to ask permission from his manager to make the deal, but that you're eager to get the order placed today. Tell him he can put you on hold while he speaks to the manager.

Good luck!

Innovation in Canada is a bad word as we believe that the big carriers (Rogers, Bell, Telus, etc.) must be protected at all costs. The carriers win and innovation loses.

Don't even get me started on how startups are treated outside of the small but passionate startup communities.

This is just not true. Rollbacks are always more expensive than changes, because you can't rewind time to undo the consequences of having your software be broken for minutes, hours, or days. Worse, in the absence of "checks", the cost of making a production change tends to be roughly constant as the company grows -- it takes the Amazon sysadmin no more time to type "make deploy" than it does me -- but the cost of a rollback scales directly with the size of your company's customer base.

Within a few seconds after Amazon.com breaks S3, thousands of companies begin to lose money, and they lose money second by second until the rollback happens. Even if Amazon is only down for a minute, that's one minute of downtime multiplied by its number of customers. The larger the customer base, the larger the stakes.

And, unfortunately, the cost of downtime is nonlinear. If Amazon goes down for a mere two minutes, hundreds of peacefully sleeping system administrators will get emergency pages from their uptime-monitoring systems. They will get out of bed. They will check their logs and their failover mechanisms. They will lose a lot of sleep, and soak up a bunch of overtime pay, and a lot of their good will towards Amazon will dissipate like the morning dew. Once you lose your reputation for quality it takes a lot of work to get it back.

This is why larger companies have more controls. The controls are in place to try and pass the ever-increasing cost of a rollback back to the team that causes the rollbacks. The reason it seems so gosh-darned expensive to add a trivial feature to your flagship app is that it is expensive: If the average rollback costs $1m in revenue and every new feature is only 95% reliable, every new feature costs the company $50k to deploy.

The secret here is: If you want to deploy changes rapidly, don't work on a product that has a lot of uptime-sensitive customers! Start a different product line, or start a beta program, or found a smaller company.

I really see no connection.

You're making the right choice on 1U 8-core boxes. We've done the math and there's no better combination of price, performance, density, and power consumption out there.

-Kyle

Want javascript.

By the way, why don't you have a blog? You post some interesting stuff to your twitter sometimes, but it would take a few hours at most to set up a Wordpress site.

This was two years ago. Unfortunately since then I did not have any troubles with my Notebook, so I had no opportunity to call in the Dell support. Actually back then I did not have a problem either, but I was not sure about that. My notebook's hard drive would emit a faint clicking sound occasionally - only noticeable because being fanless, this was the only noise the notebook would create at all.

Apparently it is normal, but when I called Dell about it, they insisted on exchanging the drive just in case. Because I was contracting at the time, they offered to come around to the office at the company where I worked. When the Dell technician arrived the next day, I went into an empty room with him and he exchanged the hard drive within minutes. Then he left.

My notebook has worked without any problems ever since.

I didn't tell my girl-friend about it, because she doesn't care, but whenever I see a chance to recommend a Dell product, I wholeheartedly do so.

Hm, this would have made a great blog post, but now I wasted the story on HN already. Ah well...