Hey cool might hit repcap on two sites today

Only thing I know of servers is that they are loud, power hungry, uber redundant machines

had a proliant for a few months before I sold it

no way could I sleep through that haha

and it wasn't that fast

@Ampt 'server' used to have a connotation closer to mainframe, but that was long back. Server generally just means these days: Some x64 machine runs windows or *nix not dissimilar from your desktop, may have non-standard-desktop components such as: multiple motherboards, or motherboard with multiple CPU slots. More ram than your system may have. Higher quality more risk-averse than consumer raid controller built into motherboard. Some form of fiber-channel or other "HBA" card

The majority of servers these days are actually just for all intents and purposes souped up desktops in a rackable case... or even consumer-grade-or-below is becoming common as people are starting to just fill their racks with cheap garbage knowing replacement of the cheap stuff is cheaper over time than acquisition of the higher end stuff

Good God.

Oh, heya :)

Just peeking in :)

@MichaelT nothing from india? I call bullshit

@MichaelT : Eh. We never really got off the ground with tech-writing, I'm afraid.

We have a smattering of questions, but no critical mass. Alas.

Could be an apt descriptor for all of the SE programming sites.

Some more apt than others :P

Well, except for the critical mass part. Seems we have an ample supply of that.

haha yeah, that usually helps the decision making process

although it's been generally pretty nice where I'm at

@MichaelT I'm a few miles off the lake ;)

at least at home I am

@MichaelT 50 miles? I would actually be impressed

@rwong lots and lots of very helpful errors

and a very good documentation

also, try and be as transparent as possible

(if you can that is)

I had to do much the same thing on my last big project. Had to be simple enough for non-engineers to use, but powerful enough to allow real tools to be built on it

unfortunately, "errors" in polynomial or curve interpolations are going to be very cryptic (like, R-square is ... some 16-digit number)

well, you could call them warnings and allow them to work past them by catching them

One of my biggest downfalls was making the internals too "smart" it was too hard to explain in laymens terms what happened behind the scenes

@rwong consider warning them that the R-Square is unusually large (or small, or whatever)

@AshleyNunn I enjoyed it. Made for a nice camping trip. not too hot, not too cold

@rwong either way, silently squelching errors is a recipe for disaster

that create's those odd edge cases where someone down the line is going to be using this, and banging their head for a week before someone comes along and says "Oh yeah, it does that, so you have to do this to fix it"

Theres something to be said for forcing your users to understand the system, whether they want to or not. Not suggesting that you force them to hold you hand, but if something smells odd, or you've got an error, tell them what it is so that they can either understand it, or google it and learn.

just my $.02 :)

@MichaelT If I do any more spending, my GF is going to murder me

you should have seen her face when I bought a $2300 laptop

Oops.

@MichaelT you spelled disembowel wrong

Must... resist... urge..... to buy

Hi programmers!

Holy crap, really?