[AccessD] The Business Side Of Databases

Hi John

Too bad. I was just about dusting off two old Pentium 266 MHz IBMs I planned to send to you proposing a commission deal.

Seriously, I think you go too much into detail. The clients probably don't care about FLOPs or CPU minutes, they are just happy having you to take care to get the job done. We do something similarly and simply charge individual flat rates per month which the clients find fair.

/gustav

>>> jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com 28-06-07 19:25 >>>
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. ..