91–100 of 269 posts
Of course building is cheaper than AWS... It also means you need to build the computer, maintain it, upgrade it, store it somewhere, connect it to the internet, and so on. And you can't just scale it if you need to. I mean, the cloud's here for a reason...
> Of course building is cheaper than AWS... Why "of course"? Last time I checked baking my own cookies is more expensive than just buying a bag at Walmart.
You're forgetting the cost of fighting IT in a bureaucratic corporation to get them to let you buy/run non-standard hardware Much easier to spend huge amounts of money of Azure/AWS and politely tell them it's their own fucking fault when they complain about the costs. (what me? no I'm not bitter, why do you ask?)
They seriously can't buy a graphics card and slap it in the PCIe slot?
I don't see what's surprising here. This is the ski rental problem [0]. Would it surprise anyone to learn that renting a car is more expensive in the long run compared to buying one? This is the same thing, only the time scales are different. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ski_rental_problem
The analogy doesn't quite map for all aspects so I'll stick with the ski example to show it's not specific to cloud computing: Owning skis has a load of associated costs ranging from simple to more complex: storage, maintenance, carrying them to and from the airport, having to spend a lot of energy on the decision of which pair to buy as it will be expensive to change my decision later, having the general background burden of owning another thing that I have to think about on some level even when I am not skiing.
All these things are ultimately paid for with money directly, or time, or mental energy that I could be spending on other things. What's the cost of all those combined? It's really hard to say and may even extend beyond a simple economic function and get into the philosophical arena. But you can't deny there is a cost and you can't ignore that cost when evaluating if renting is more or less expensive than owning, over an arbitrary time period.
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They seriously can't buy a graphics card and slap it in the PCIe slot?
They seriously can't buy a graphics card and slap it in the PCIe slot? Well I mean they obviously can... First of all you're assuming IT will just let you have a decent machines with PCIe slots. It's all about laptops don't you know. Workstations are so 2012. Secondly while they might, after much begging, let me have one graphics card to put into this one old workstation I've scavenged, they certainly won't let me ha…
At our enterprise, we have HP ultrabooks or however they are called. Windows 7, 32 Bit. You know, it has a decent i5 on it, but there is some specific bottleneck making it terrible. Every employee that sits in an office has this piece of crap.
Takes 3 minutes to start IntelliJ. Since some years ~50 developers were able to get Macbooks, luckily I am one of them, else I'd just be pissed off every single work day.
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They seriously can't buy a graphics card and slap it in the PCIe slot?
They seriously can't buy a graphics card and slap it in the PCIe slot? Well I mean they obviously can... First of all you're assuming IT will just let you have a decent machines with PCIe slots. It's all about laptops don't you know. Workstations are so 2012. Secondly while they might, after much begging, let me have one graphics card to put into this one old workstation I've scavenged, they certainly won't let me ha…
You need to repeat that every couple years though.
For me, one of the main reasons for building a personal deep learning box was to have fixed upfront cost instead of variable cost for each experiment. Not an entirely rational argument, but I find having fixed cost instead of variable cost promotes experimentation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They seriously can't buy a graphics card and slap it in the PCIe slot? Well I mean they obviously can... First of all you're assuming IT will just let you have a decent machines with PCIe slots. It's all about laptops don't you know. Workstations are so 2012. Secondly while they might, after much begging, let me have one graphics card to put into this one old workstation I've scavenged, they certainly won't let me ha…
Ahh yes, corporate laptops. At our enterprise, we have HP ultrabooks or however they are called. Windows 7, 32 Bit. You know, it has a decent i5 on it, but there is some specific bottleneck making it terrible. Every employee that sits in an office has this piece of crap. Takes 3 minutes to start IntelliJ. Since some years ~50 developers were able to get Macbooks, luckily I am one of them, else I'd just be pissed off…
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I've seen just the opposite. A VPS from a cloud provider is often 2-3x the cost of an equivalent Linode.
I think your pricing information might be slightly out of date. AWS Lightsail's $5 plan is equivalent or better than Linode's $5 plan. Plus AWS Lightsail has an even more barebones plan at $3.5 per month. Two years ago you would be perfectly correct. The cheapest AWS option back then would be a micro EC2 instance at around $20 per month IIRC.
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Where in the world are you? It's my normal human experience from both the UK and Sweden. Of course the stuff you make from scratch will often have a higher quality (or at least be made from higher quality ingredients) and if you want to buy similar or better quality then it will cost more. But the cheapest chocolate chip cookies you can find in the food store will be cheaper than buying ingredients and baking.
So, whatever bakery paid for ingredients, wages and owner's profit is still less that what you'd just pay for just the ingredients? What are they putting into these cookies, sawdust?
The comments on cheap low quality ingredients and bulk pricing are true as well.
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They seriously can't buy a graphics card and slap it in the PCIe slot?
When I worked at Google, I really missed the dual monitor setup I had had at my previous job. I asked my manager how to get a 2nd monitor. Apparently, since I had the larger monitor, I was not allowed to get a 2nd one without all kinds of hassle. I asked if I was allowed to just buy one from Amazon and plug it in, and I was told no. I finally just grabbed an older one that had been sitting in the hallway of the cube-…
Amazon also allows you to byoc and image it. Images are easily available. Bias for action gets u far.