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Worst Developers Machines

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  • D Dave Parker

    He keeps getting promised it but it never seems to happen. TBH it was taking me forever to get an upgrade from 1 GB to 2GB through - despite it being almost free it cost way more than just the price of the memory due to all the hours of meetings and performance logging and analysis etc to justify it. Then someone suggested an external RAM drive as an alternative which just delayed the whole thing even more :sigh: Eventually the computer I had went out of the "support" period so I got a brand new one anyway, which has 8 GB of RAM. Pretty sure the other guys has gone way past that point as well so dunno what's going on there.

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    wout de zeeuw
    wrote on last edited by
    #25

    Dave Parker wrote:

    Eventually the computer I had went out of the "support" period

    Aha! Will throwing a machine out of the window make it go out of the support period? May still be cheaper than all those meetings.

    Wout

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    • M Mark_Wallace

      Well, I was being just a little bit sarcastic. Mind you, it would probably be better for everyone if games developers had their ankles shackled, so to speak.

      I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!

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      Simon P Stevens
      wrote on last edited by
      #26

      Doh. At least I can blame the fact that sarcasm and text don't go together well.

      Simon

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      • S Simon P Stevens

        Doh. At least I can blame the fact that sarcasm and text don't go together well.

        Simon

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        Mark_Wallace
        wrote on last edited by
        #27

        Simon P Stevens wrote:

        At least I can blame the fact that sarcasm and text don't go together well.

        You obviously haven't reviewed my code.

        I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!

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        • J Jorgen Andersson

          If developers have bad machines they have a better incentive to make efficient code.

          List of common misconceptions

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          fjdiewornncalwe
          wrote on last edited by
          #28

          Wrong. It just means we do a "Rebuild entire solution" more often and go for coffee.

          I wasn't, now I am, then I won't be anymore.

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          • F fjdiewornncalwe

            Wrong. It just means we do a "Rebuild entire solution" more often and go for coffee.

            I wasn't, now I am, then I won't be anymore.

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            Jorgen Andersson
            wrote on last edited by
            #29

            You make it sound like it is a bad thing.

            List of common misconceptions

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            • P peterchen

              (I hope you are missing the sarcasm icon) Creting efficient code means comparing different versions, run decent timing stats, more test cases, more tests to run etc. A slow machine is the best incentive to make your compiler shut up and let QA sort out the rest.

              FILETIME to time_t
              | FoldWithUs! | sighist | WhoIncludes - Analyzing C++ include file hierarchy

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              Jorgen Andersson
              wrote on last edited by
              #30

              peterchen wrote:

              (I hope you are missing the sarcasm icon)

              Make a guess. :rolleyes: On a more serious note, I do believe developers should be forced to regularily test their software on slow machines. But developing on them would be wasting both time and nerves.

              List of common misconceptions

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              • J Jorgen Andersson

                You make it sound like it is a bad thing.

                List of common misconceptions

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                fjdiewornncalwe
                wrote on last edited by
                #31

                Only when something actually needs to get done. :)

                I wasn't, now I am, then I won't be anymore.

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                • A Albert Bezzina

                  Hi all, Just out of curiosity which is your worst developer machine? In our room, 3 developers, 10 machines [2 Core2Duo, 2 Pentium D & 6 Pentium 4], the best developers machine is Core2Duo E7300 4Gb ram and the worse machine is: Intel Pentium 4 3.40GHz, 2GB, Time taken to boot a windows server 2008 is 4 minutes. NOTE that in our organization there is an impression that we have the best machines :doh:

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                  Gary Wheeler
                  wrote on last edited by
                  #32

                  My current work machine: Intel Core 2 Duo, 2.66 GHz, 4G RAM. Pathetic, no?

                  Software Zen: delete this;

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                  • A Albert Bezzina

                    Hi all, Just out of curiosity which is your worst developer machine? In our room, 3 developers, 10 machines [2 Core2Duo, 2 Pentium D & 6 Pentium 4], the best developers machine is Core2Duo E7300 4Gb ram and the worse machine is: Intel Pentium 4 3.40GHz, 2GB, Time taken to boot a windows server 2008 is 4 minutes. NOTE that in our organization there is an impression that we have the best machines :doh:

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                    Vark111
                    wrote on last edited by
                    #33

                    Psh. None of y'all know what a pathetic dev box is. My current machine is a P4. No core anything duo. 2Gb of Ram. Had to scrape through the reject pile to get that. It has 2 hard drives. Each is 30Gb. I didn't miss a zero in that. A total of 60 Gb HD space. And the only reason I have the second drive is because I found it while I was scrounging for the extra RAM. Is it any wonder I prefer to work from home? (Core i7, 12 Gb RAM, SSD system drive + 500 Gb secondary drive)

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                    • G Gary Wheeler

                      My current work machine: Intel Core 2 Duo, 2.66 GHz, 4G RAM. Pathetic, no?

                      Software Zen: delete this;

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                      Dan Neely
                      wrote on last edited by
                      #34

                      Gary Wheeler wrote:

                      My current work machine: Intel Core 2 Duo, 2.66 GHz, 4G RAM. Pathetic, no?

                      Only 2.53 ghz here; and about 2 or 2.5 years left before lifecycle replacement; OTOH my last 2 replacements were about a year prior to when they were due to be lifecycled. The 1st because when my XP install got overly crufty it was old enough there wasn't a company image for it and they discovered that the dell image was responsible for weird performance glitches. The second because when the win7 push came mine was 3 years old and they needed to get the interns newer laptops than they were using at the time; so they picked people with less than a year left who were power users and upgraded us early. OTOH I've been promised an upgrade to 8GB once the next batch of 4gb sodimms are ordered...

                      3x12=36 2x12=24 1x12=12 0x12=18

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                      • V Vark111

                        Psh. None of y'all know what a pathetic dev box is. My current machine is a P4. No core anything duo. 2Gb of Ram. Had to scrape through the reject pile to get that. It has 2 hard drives. Each is 30Gb. I didn't miss a zero in that. A total of 60 Gb HD space. And the only reason I have the second drive is because I found it while I was scrounging for the extra RAM. Is it any wonder I prefer to work from home? (Core i7, 12 Gb RAM, SSD system drive + 500 Gb secondary drive)

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                        G Offline
                        Gary Wheeler
                        wrote on last edited by
                        #35

                        I'm afraid you, er, win.

                        Software Zen: delete this;

                        1 Reply Last reply
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                        • A Albert Bezzina

                          Hi all, Just out of curiosity which is your worst developer machine? In our room, 3 developers, 10 machines [2 Core2Duo, 2 Pentium D & 6 Pentium 4], the best developers machine is Core2Duo E7300 4Gb ram and the worse machine is: Intel Pentium 4 3.40GHz, 2GB, Time taken to boot a windows server 2008 is 4 minutes. NOTE that in our organization there is an impression that we have the best machines :doh:

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                          Jason Christian
                          wrote on last edited by
                          #36

                          That's ridiculous when for $300 you can get a Core2 Duo with 4GB RAM. The productivity increase would pay for itself with a couple months at most.

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                          • V Vark111

                            Psh. None of y'all know what a pathetic dev box is. My current machine is a P4. No core anything duo. 2Gb of Ram. Had to scrape through the reject pile to get that. It has 2 hard drives. Each is 30Gb. I didn't miss a zero in that. A total of 60 Gb HD space. And the only reason I have the second drive is because I found it while I was scrounging for the extra RAM. Is it any wonder I prefer to work from home? (Core i7, 12 Gb RAM, SSD system drive + 500 Gb secondary drive)

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                            asoo
                            wrote on last edited by
                            #37

                            Yeah, Similar specs here, except 2.8GHz Celeron :wtf: CPU. And i've been on a waiting list for a replacement for god knows how long (faulty motherboard, but hey, IT WORRKSSS).

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                            • J Jorgen Andersson

                              If developers have bad machines they have a better incentive to make efficient code.

                              List of common misconceptions

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                              J Offline
                              Johann Gerell
                              wrote on last edited by
                              #38

                              Jörgen Andersson wrote:

                              If developers have bad machines they have a better incentive to make efficient code.

                              Maybe add that to the List of common misconceptions[^] ... ;P

                              Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time - Bertrand Russel

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                              • A Albert Bezzina

                                Hi all, Just out of curiosity which is your worst developer machine? In our room, 3 developers, 10 machines [2 Core2Duo, 2 Pentium D & 6 Pentium 4], the best developers machine is Core2Duo E7300 4Gb ram and the worse machine is: Intel Pentium 4 3.40GHz, 2GB, Time taken to boot a windows server 2008 is 4 minutes. NOTE that in our organization there is an impression that we have the best machines :doh:

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                                R Erasmus
                                wrote on last edited by
                                #39

                                O, that would most certainly be the one I'm currently working on... Intel Core2 CPU, 1.86HGHz with 2GB, Takes bout 10 minutes to completely boot, about a further 5 minutes to warm up. Once its heated up it speeds up to normal, manageable speeds. I like it though... It gives me an excuse to go light up a cigarette and drink some coffee in the morning while it boots up. :-D

                                "Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence." << please vote!! >>

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                                • M Mark_Wallace

                                  I think that developers should be issued nothing better than a Pentium 2. That way, when their product goes to market, instead of customers not being able to run it, because it requires the biggest, fastest computers, if it's to to crawl out of its box, it'll go like sh1t off a shovel. Result: Happier customers, and better-paid devs. Suck it in and use the worst one.

                                  I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!

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                                  A Offline
                                  asoo
                                  wrote on last edited by
                                  #40

                                  I did read that first as: Result: Happier customers, and better-paid devs slaves.

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                                  • A Albert Bezzina

                                    Hi all, Just out of curiosity which is your worst developer machine? In our room, 3 developers, 10 machines [2 Core2Duo, 2 Pentium D & 6 Pentium 4], the best developers machine is Core2Duo E7300 4Gb ram and the worse machine is: Intel Pentium 4 3.40GHz, 2GB, Time taken to boot a windows server 2008 is 4 minutes. NOTE that in our organization there is an impression that we have the best machines :doh:

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                                    A Offline
                                    Anna Jayne Metcalfe
                                    wrote on last edited by
                                    #41

                                    Our "worst" dev machine is a Samung netbook - it takes over an hour to do a full rebuild of our main solution (330kLOC in 29 projects) on it, and (of course) has an absolutely tiny screen. On the plus side the battery life is immense so you can do smaller development tasks on it while travelling without fuss (I was doing exactly that while travelling yesterday, in fact). By comparison my main dev box (a dual core Win2k8 Opteron with 5GB RAM) builds the same code in about 20 minutes and the i7 based laptop (which I've just had to return with a graphics adaptor fault - damn!) in a quite astonishing 9.5 minutes. The Opteron is a good compromise between speed and realism though; it's a nice and easy to expand machine (HP Proliant Server) and I can't see myself replacing it for a while yet.

                                    Anna :rose: Tech Blog | Visual Lint "Why would anyone prefer to wield a weapon that takes both hands at once, when they could use a lighter (and obviously superior) weapon that allows you to wield multiple ones at a time, and thus supports multi-paradigm carnage?"

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                                    • D Dan Mos

                                      You got me. I know of a 386. But this are not developer machines. :)

                                      All the best, Dan

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                                      Kerrash
                                      wrote on last edited by
                                      #42

                                      We've still got a few WinNT machines in production the people refuse to let go of! :confused: Personally I'm happy with my Quad Core Xeon, With 8GB RAM and a C1060 for GPGPU fun. :-D

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                                      • A Albert Bezzina

                                        Hi all, Just out of curiosity which is your worst developer machine? In our room, 3 developers, 10 machines [2 Core2Duo, 2 Pentium D & 6 Pentium 4], the best developers machine is Core2Duo E7300 4Gb ram and the worse machine is: Intel Pentium 4 3.40GHz, 2GB, Time taken to boot a windows server 2008 is 4 minutes. NOTE that in our organization there is an impression that we have the best machines :doh:

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                                        B Offline
                                        Behzad Sedighzadeh
                                        wrote on last edited by
                                        #43

                                        This is the same situation in our office. I think this is not so bad, because you have take into account machines that will run your code may not be as good as yuors.

                                        Behzad

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                                        • A Albert Bezzina

                                          Hi all, Just out of curiosity which is your worst developer machine? In our room, 3 developers, 10 machines [2 Core2Duo, 2 Pentium D & 6 Pentium 4], the best developers machine is Core2Duo E7300 4Gb ram and the worse machine is: Intel Pentium 4 3.40GHz, 2GB, Time taken to boot a windows server 2008 is 4 minutes. NOTE that in our organization there is an impression that we have the best machines :doh:

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                                          H Offline
                                          Hardik Varma
                                          wrote on last edited by
                                          #44

                                          First dev machine... Windows XP, Pentium 3 processor @ 800 MHz, 256 MB of RAM.... running two instances of vs2005 and an instance of firefox 2.x (the bloated generation) Your move.

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