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A Home Office FAQ

biscade.com

53 pointsbdfh4236 comments

I actually have a hard time understanding what you can do with all this hardware. The monitors; ok. Monitor real-estate is important since you don't have to use time and effort to shuffle all the windows you want to use. But what about the rest of the systems, two laptops and three servers?

I've read Stefan Didak's home office description as well, and he says that having a massive amount of storage and cycles can help you if you're doing complicated work. Does someone have an example of jobs that become easier with 4 terabytes of local storage and thirty CPU cores? It seems to me the overhead of administrating these kinds of system would dwarf any benefit.

Obviously I am wrong, but how? This stuff looks fun, and it definitely sounds fun to be more effective than your peers by making "unacceptable" choices regarding the tools you use.

[Edit: If you have the same questions, have a look at http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2007/04/03/home-office-usa.... It's really cool.]

Yeah I'm with you - I can see the need for two systems, one for real work and the other for all the other crap (email, music, etc) but not 6. I wonder if it's like getting tattoos - once you get more than one, it spirals until you're covered.

I just realized I actually do this right now - a mac mini for work and an ipod touch for music, email, etc. That's how I get away with using such a cheap system for design work - I offload everything except Fireworks on to the ipod, plus then I get a little bit of help with procrastination because the mini is for only real work during the weekdays.

Who needs it? My GF. She's an artist working with Photoshop. She works with 1G images. She has an 8G, quadcore, 1T system. Not to mention her HP z3200 printer. (Big mother.) She wants 2T raid storage for Christmas. I'm a developer, I get by with half that. :-)

Not sure how that answers why you need that many systems, sounds like she just needs one beefed up one and a lot of monitors - having extra boxes online to split up the work wouldn't help with Photoshop or her workflow, right?

I don't see how it could do anything but complicate it.

Does someone have an example of jobs that become easier with 4 terabytes of local storage and thirty CPU cores? It seems to me the overhead of administrating these kinds of system would dwarf any benefit.

If you're doing any sort of graphics or video rendering, you eat up all the CPU, RAM and a lot of the disk that you can throw at it. Regular DV digital video takes up 12 GB per hour. Uncompressed 1080/24p HD video footage can take over 320 Gigs an hour. More here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/howto/articles...

Video and graphics rendering are "embarrassingly parallel" problems, and will generally chew up any resources that you throw at them. Most semi-pro video editing/3d modeling programs have packages that let you throw up a render farm fairly quickly.

Why don't people say trivially parallel vs embarrassingly parallel? What is so embarrassing about an easily solvable problem?

Probably because, embarrassingly enough, they're implemented in a purely serial way and don't make use of parallel hardware.

The guy claims to be running about 50 VMs. I can understand how they might pile up, too. Testing across multiple platforms and browsers is probably a lot easier with a massive farm of VMs. But you need a lot of CPU for that.

Two laptops isn't hard to explain: You have the ultralight laptop to carry to the coffee shop and the somewhat-heavier laptop to take with you when you need to get real work done on the road over several days.

He said that he writes distributed software for datacenters.

Presumably he runs all that hardware so he can have a lot of VMs running his distributed software at once. It's generally cheaper to buy a lot of commodity boxes than one super-beefy box, hence the large collection.

With that much memory, it is useful to have that many cores in order to index everything quickly. Finding local information fast can be a productivity boost.

He mentions that he uses a lot of virtual machines, something with which I can sympathise. Windows VMs tend to use quite a bit of CPU power (not to mention RAM) on the host, so if I could afford it, I'd probably push my VMs to a separate machine from my main workstation, and I rarely run more than 2.

The large computing power could be useful for large compiles that would normally take a while.

The parallelism of this guy's porn consumption must be truly breathtaking.

He could invest perhaps in a better chair.

I'm always split on that - go Joel Spolsky and treat yourself right to an Aeron, or go the Paul Graham route and skimp with a cheapo? I've had nothing but Aerons at work for a few years and my butt kinda misses them now that I work from home on a folding chair.

Paul Graham and many of the YC startups have Aerons. It's not something to skimp on.

I should clarify where I got "the Paul Graham route" from: somewhere in the Hackers & Painters book, he wrote about how cheap they were in the beginning of Viaweb, with him coding in an old chair that was falling apart.

Sorry I don't have a link, google's giving me no love.

> It's not something to skimp on.

Why not? I sit in a cheap chair. It's fine. I worked for a few weeks in a cheap director's chair once. It was fine; perfectly comfortable.

Yeah I've been doing fine with my $25 Costco folding chair - I just threw a soft couch pillow on the seat and try to remember to sit up straight. I think an Aeron could actually be annoying on a hardwood floor like I have at home, with the coaster wheels on the feet sliding all around.

I suspect that you can get 80% of the comfort level of an Aeron for 20% of its price.

Almost anything beats a folding chair, couch, or bed.

Yep, I have an Aeron at work and an $80 (from Sam's Club) "Office Star Matrex Meshback" or something goofy name like that at home. I use both regularly and have no preference between the two. I would think a startup that needs the meager funding ycombinator deals in would be crazy to blow it on an Aeron.

Seriously. I use an Aeron in the office, but at home I use a ~$100 staples chair. I don't really care which I'm sitting in much.

A folding chair though..that's just plain crazy.

Yes. It's called a second hand Aeron.

I actually like the Herman Miller Mirra much better than the Aeron, and it's several hundred dollars cheaper to boot.

I've never tried an aeron chair, but with the chair I'm using I'm getting quite a lot of back ache and I can see how a good chair could increase my productivity

How is it that nerds, who question everything, never seem to doubt the relationship between chair comfort and price?

I love the setup, but I have to say that all of the most awesome work that I've seen done has been done on couches, with cheap dell laptops that have stickers all over them.

I'm not one to talk of course. My workstation is a monstrosity that grows by the year, but I miss the purity of a bunch of guys sitting around a cheap apartment on goodwill furniture, all logged into the same server, perl and python flying, as a site almost magically congeals before our eyes. Guess I'm just sentimental like that.

does having X * (PC, monitor, laptops, servers <insert hw>) make you X times more productive?

i guess not, it could be diminishing return

or even negative return (more distractions, harder to admin / sync / whatever)

Depends. Looking from a "soft" point of view, he might find having all that kit motivational or pleasing in some way.

My productivity was certainly lower when I was a PC user, as compared to the Mac. I really enjoy using my Macs and don't find work to be so grating when the system keeps out of my way and the hardware is solid.

Could I produce just as well with one machine and a smaller monitor? Sure, but I probably wouldn't be as jazzed or enthusiastic about getting started.

Could you produce just as well with one machine and a smaller monitor?

Actually, no. Studies have shown that bigger monitors make just about everyone more productive -- one estimates 2.5 hours per day in savings:

http://blogs.wsj.com/biztech/2008/03/10/bigger-computer-moni...

The study did find that extremely large monitors are less effective (this might be an ergonomic artifact. They didn't differentiate between one doubleplusbig monitor and two singleplusbig), so you'd be on firmer groud if you'd said:

"Could I produce more with ... a bigger monitor than what I've got now? Maybe yes, maybe no, but I'd definitely be more jazzed or enthusiastic about getting started."

You make a good point, but I don't think it's true for me. I just spent the last two weeks only using my MBP in the lounge, leaving my Mac Pro and 30" ACD gathering dust upstairs :) I'm now back upstairs, however.. it's all about the variety in my case.

I bought a 30 inch this summer and I love it. I really do like coming home and working. Now I need to setup a tiling window manager because it is an annoyance dragging windows all over the place.

Awesome setup!

what a show off

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