Deathangel 3.0

Upgrading

I've just read http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001316.html. Now I'm in the mood for upgrading. But not hardware. My Deathangel 2.0 has been running some pretty heavy hitting hardware since April 2008, like a 10k Raptor boot drive, 3.2 GHz AMD dual core beast, 8 gigs ram, nothing to laugh at. We're at a point in the software industry that, arguably, we're not going to see a performance increase going from 2 to 4 cores.

It's Still Speed Baby

I'm still a fan of purchasing the fastest CPU you can afford. Currently(and I really emphasize currently because it will change in the near future), at the end of the day, if you can do more things per second with a fast cpu versus a slower cpu, you will notice a difference. Until tools like Visual Studio are refactored to take advantage of multiple-cpus, chips with greater than 2 cores are not going to help performance.

I Heart MonoDevelop

I'm upgrading my bomb-ass Windows 2003 server to some flavor of 64-bit Linux. This past weekend I installed Ubuntu 9.10. I installed the OS on my lesser of two remaining desktops, just the 32 bit edition since that machine only has 2 gigs of RAM. Then I installed MonoDevelop. WOW. I only played with it a little bit, console app thing, but way cool. Just a fresh perspective on a .NET IDE. Me likes, I'll post an update after I get Deathangel 3.0 built.

Why Am I Fucking Around With Linux?

I originally installed Windows XP on my other box(the one that now has Linux). After I started applying service packs, etc., the reboots would take literally minutes, like more than 5 minutes(c'mon, it's an MSI board, Athlon x2 2.2 GHz cpu with 2 gigs of RAM, this should not be happening). I applied all of the updates I could find, and nothing helped. Since I didn't feel like fucking around with figuring out why XP didn't work, I repaved it with Ubuntu 9.10. XP required me to go to MSI to download drivers to get the mo/bo to work(built in networking, etc); as well as going to my video card's manufacturer's site to download those drivers. Ubuntu just worked out of the box(well that's not totally true, the audio still isn't working, but I'm using built in audio to the mo/bo and have not investigated anything).

Back To Upgrading

So I'm going to try one of 3 flavors of Linux on my main beefy machine. CentOS, Suse, and Ubuntu. I have a strong feeling I'll be using Ubuntu but I've wanted to use those other two for awhile now. No new hardware, I just can't justify it, my hardware is fast, really fucking fast, there is no compelling reasaon right now that I'd need better hardware.