[AccessD] The Business Side Of Databases

Hi John:

There is this fellow who set up his system to do backups for clients. The
initial backup he does directly through tapes to his equipment but after
that he just syncs his servers with theirs and the whole nightly process is
done in minutes. The backup software he uses was free; the server OS
software was free (Linux); he initially assembled all his servers with old
boxes and new motherboards/memory/hard-drives and as per last conversation
he is well on his way to becoming 'comfortably off' and is planning on
retiring at 35 or 40.... unlike many of our 'freedom 85 plans'.  

Jim 

-----Original Message-----
From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of jwcolby
Sent: Thursday, June 28, 2007 10:25 AM
To: 'Access Developers discussion and problem solving'
Subject: Re: [AccessD] The Business Side Of Databases

Well, I like the slower machine idea!!!  Great minds think alike.  In fact I
am searching EBAY for some old Commodore 64 machines to make my servers.
;-)

Seriously though, I have no idea how to calculate FLOPS, never mind the fact
that FLOPS stands for FLOATING POINT operations per second.  So do you mean
FLOPS committed to a specific process or time scaled by FLOPS capability of
the specific machine?  Then you get into "what about disk access time", and
"speed of network connection" and whatever you can think of.  

In fact I used an "older" machine (a single core AMD X64 @ 3.0 GHz with 3 GB
ram BTW) to run the address validation because that process required a LOT
of memory and thus choked when run on one of my newer machines running SQL
Server.  SQL Server tends to grab all of the memory for itself and needs a
lot anyway.  Thus the "older" machine is not a slacker by any means, it is
just not one of my new dual core SQL Server machines.

For the moment I am just using crude manual adjustments of the $/hour for a
specific job.  I can make that more or less depending on the machine on
which the job runs.  I am logging the machine that runs the job.  

I do like the idea of using a FLOP calculation though.  This fall I will be
buying another server with 8 cores and a ton of memory.  Obviously the cost
of, and thus the value of time on a machine is related to it's power so
knowing the power of the machine and charging based on the machine
processing power will make sense.  Thanks for mentioning that.

John W. Colby
Colby Consulting
www.ColbyConsulting.com 
-----Original Message-----
From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Gustav Brock
Sent: Thursday, June 28, 2007 12:36 PM
To: accessd at databaseadvisors.com
Subject: Re: [AccessD] The Business Side Of Databases

Hi John

Great idea! Slow machine => longer computing time => larger bill => big
pockets at John.

Or should you charge by the flop?

/gustav

>>> jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com 28-06-2007 18:23 >>>
One of the things I am doing to generate an income stream is to "rent
computer time" - NOT what you might imagine!!  

.. I can have (as an example) one of my old machines running the address
validation job. ..



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