where's Ernest?
 

Does anyone know why I can't PM him lately?

For some reason his username is purple. That implies he has been banned. What craziness is going on?

[QUOTE=henryzz;354014]For some reason his username is purple. That implies he has been banned. What craziness is going on?[/QUOTE]

See The Soapbox for an explanation. After a long-running "interchange" between Ernst and Cheesehead, Xyzzy announced that both had been banned for a week.

[QUOTE=petrw1;354004]Does anyone know why I can't PM him lately?[/QUOTE]He's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy!

[QUOTE=Xyzzy;353800]Ernst and Richard have been banned for a week. They, and us, get a vacation.

Brian: Whatever you decide to do, or not do, we will fully support you. You were chosen for a very specific reason. You [U]own[/U] the Soap Box. (We think you are doing an excellent job!)

Disclosure: We have to recuse ourself from this situation because Ernst is one of our best friends. If he called in the middle of the night and asked for a gun, $1,000 and a car we would give it to him, despite how bad that scenario looks.

:mike:[/QUOTE]
.

Cheap Cycles
 

As an experiment, I wanted to see how well renting VPSes would crunch primes.

It turns out the $5/month VPS on DigitalOcean is not bad. I've run 10 of them for the last week. I found around 0.035 sec iteration times for mprime. So the speed is about 1/3rd of a Haswell core. A 4 core Haswell system costs about $600. At 0.09¢/kWh x ~170 watts, that's about $11/month.

To match the 4 core Haswell, you'd need 12 VPSes. So $60/month. You'd have to run the Haswell for 12 months before it came ahead. Food for thought...