Goat-drunk

Goat-drunk – (adj.) Made lascivious by alcohol.

According to the redoubtable Thomas Nashe, the author of The anatomie of absurditie, Christ’s teares over Jerusalem, and many other important works of English literature, there are eight types of drunkards, of which the one who is goat-drunk is seventh, although it is unclear what the order signifies. Since the OED has seen fit to include only a few from Nashe’s list I have decided to include it in its entirety, so that you may never be at a loss for words when confronted by a drunk of any sort.

1. Ape drunke – “he leapes, and sings, and hollowes, and daunceth for the heavens”.
2. Lion drunke – “he flings the pots abut the house, calls his Hostesse whore, breakes the glasse windows with his dagger, and is apt to quarrell with any man that speaks to him”.
3. Swine drunke – “heauy lumpish, and sleepie, and cries for a little more drinke”.
4. Sheepe drunke – “wise in his owne conceipt, when he cannot bring forth a right word”.
5. Mawdlen drunke – “when a fellowe will weepe for kindnes in the midst of his Ale, and kisse you, saying; By God Captaine I loue thee, goe thy waies thou dost not thinke so often of me as I do of thee, I would (if it pleased GOD) I could not loue thee so well as I doo, and then he puts his finger in his eie, and cries”.
6. Martin drunke – “when a man is drunke and drinkes himselfe sober ere he stirre”.
7. (See above)
8. Foxe drunke - “when he is craftie drunke, as many of the Dutch men bee, and neuer bargain but when they are drunke”.

From Reading the OED.

Storage vs. Developer Cost

As developers we often find ourselves tempted to optimize storage use. We almost can't help it - if something can be made to take up less storage space with a "little bit" of extra work, you can bet on us developers jumping at the opportunity.

But is it worth it? How do you weigh the time spent on optimizing storage against the cost of simply adding a few more HDs?

The answer: hourly cost of a developer in GBs of storage.

So let us calculate.

The average developer in the US makes more then $70K a year. He/she costs a lot more to the employer, mind you. Divide this by about 2000 work-hours per year and you get $35 an hour as a lower-bound for average developer cost per hour.

Now, what does storage cost? How much does 1TB of storage cost these days? Or more accurately, what's the marginal cost of adding another 1TB of storage to your company's network? Well, unfortunately the answer isn't so simple. It all depends on what types of storage you want, how secure it should be, how robust, and of course speed, latency, the type of network access, etc. For sure, the high-end storage solutions are expensive. Rediculously so. But my intuition tells me most teams can definitely settle with something saner.

So consider a rack-ready NAS solution that can hold 8 SATA drives and give you 1GBit ethernet. These start at about $1000. A single 1TB SATA drive is about $100 (though prices are dropping as I type this, and, no, wait, it's now $90). So if we want 8 of those the whole thing costs less than $2000, and with RAID-5 with 2 spares we would get 6 TB, so that's about $0.33 per GB.

Thus, assuming my napkin-math isn't seriously off, the average developer costs 105 GB per hour.

That's 1.75 GB per minute.

Keep this in mind the next time you decide to spend half a day worrying about keeping those "huge" debug symbol archives of the product's old versions, or about whether or not you should be backing up the entire DB as part of the release procedure.

Explain to your manager that the time it would take you to convince him to approve the purchase of more storage space probably costs more than the storage itself.

Save time, buy storage.