Superman, Up in the Sky

A while back, in some venue (may be even here), I opined that the coder cabal is the apotheosis of destroyed productivity. That building Organic Normal Form™ relational databases on a $10K Xeon machine, at 1/10 the annual cost of a cowboy coder, is where the real productivity lies. If The Suits (ever the bureaurats, looking only to fatten their org chart) would only look past the ends of their noses. Fat chance.

Anyway, the $10K number was actually kind of old and arbitrary; I haven't been on the lookout for such a machine here. But then, looky here. AnandTech does a (Brit) look at a Supermicro quad Xeon machine. The nature of the test presented doesn't have much direct bearing on RDBMS, that's true. I spent some time at the Supermicro site, but didn't see price lists. However, one of the comments allowed as how the machine in question was £16K. So, a bit more than the $10K, but still.