I thought those things got hot enough to melt tapes. Certainly the last ones I laid eyes on said explicitly that they wouldn't work for tapes. More expensive models may or may not do better, but if the assumption about the heat and duration of the fire exceeds their rating, you're still pretty screwed.
If you actually started watching at the beginning of a program, and you want to watch something else during the commercials, are any of these options at all useful with satellite TV? Could I even use a dual-tuner TiVo with two satellite receivers on top of the same TV, or am I stuck shelling out $550 for a DishPVR 721 (they won't even let you lease one yet, and even if you could you wouldn't be allowed to modify/upgrade it)?
Mine doesn't seem to do anything with its auxiliary power input; it gets power well from the keyboard port of computer #1, and does a sucky job if only computer #2 is turned on, regardless of whether the power port is powered.
Two jobs ago, the employee manual had at least half a sentence missing in the section on "advancement". Nobody else complained, and when I complained they never fixed it.
I guess they either never read it, or never cared...
Keep eggs out of one basket by rotating among three drives. At any one time, one drive will have this week's full backup, another will have last week's full backup, and a third will have this (or last, if you're in the middle of your full backup) week's incremental backups. Depending on how much you back up and how much it compresses (and on how big your backup drives are) you may be able to retain older generations without even resorting to buying more drives.
As for your cost figures, I can do better on the racks at www.cablemakers.com ($20 for a bay/tray pair, $14 for each extra tray, for a total of $48 for one bay, three trays), but not quite as good as $1/GB on the hard drives. I see $95 for an 82G Deskstar 120GXP at Hyper Micro, which makes $1.16/GB, or you can get it for $93 or so elsewhere. I see Hyper has some 80 minute CD-Rs for $35/100; this is only $0.50/GB before shipping costs.
One thing I might look into if I had a number of machines to back up like this and doing it across the network wasn't an option, would be to see if one of those removable bays fits in an external USB-IDE enclosure, which can be had for less than $100 at www.hypermicro.com...
(Disclaimer: I've bought the abovementioned racks from www.cablemakers.com, and they work okay. I've never used Hyper Micro, but they have decent prices and a decent rep at www.resellerratings.com. Also, I've never actually figured out how I'd want to do this kind of backup from Windows...)
The inks I've seen recently don't smudge unless you rub the paper pretty good or lick your fingers. On the other hand, I sometimes go weeks without printing. It's like those pre-pay cell phone deals: use your minutes/ink or they expire in 45 days/a month or three as they either clog the heads beyond cleaning or just dry up.
The only big resource ClearCase really needs that a two-year-old setup wouldn't have is low network latency. We use ClearCase and when we moved our source repository off of a hub in a room full of NT servers and out to the far side of a T3 in a different building, things got much faster. If the droids don't make you put your "server" in a "server room" with crappy network between you and there, it's not nearly as bad as it used to be. (Matter of fact, ClearCase with us in Chicagoland and the server in Akron wasn't as bad as having the server in the NT server room...)
Note that we don't use derived objects (DOs). But we don't have a full-time (or even part-time) ClearCase tuner; I'm not even 100% sure what there is that they'd need to spend all day tuning. The only thing we do beyond 100baseT and an otherwise decent piece of network is cp -R the source to a local disk so we can search for content (find |xargs grep, vs. label/branch/attribute searches) faster when the content hasn't changed recently.
I've heard the stories, but except for clearmake/derived objects I'm not quite sure what the fuss is nowadays.
I just had an 8-port fast ethernet switch (or its power supply) die on me. When I looked at the cost of replacing the switch, 4-port hubs were under $45, as were 4-port "SOHO" switches. The wimpiest of these "only" supported 1000 MAC addresses instead of 20,000 or so.
There's no price difference in "little blue/gray box" hubs vs. switches any more.
Me, I'm going to make do with my old fast ethernet hub until I have more cash, then spend the $125 (less price drops!) to get a 4-port switch with 2 printer ports.
You need: "lower" on a convenient key or button; "switch desktop" on a convenient key, especially if you get the "2D" desktop layout like fvwm and its descendents rather than the 1-dimensional previous/next like CDE; enough desktops that alt-tab is useful; alt-tab.
When we wanted an experienced C++ programmer, some of the applicants' resumes (from one recruiter) listed a score on some C++ test.
The higher the score, the fewer the clues.
And the last time I took a computerized C++ test (for the computer consulting arm of a company more known in the financial markets, though it wasn't Andersen), it had several questions where none of the answers were right...
My Silencer 275 ATX is still doing just fine, 2-3 years after I bought it. I also bought a Silencer fan around then (though I don't think it cost as little as $9 at the time), and it's been serving silently ever since in the back of the external SCSI enclosure on my desk (I did hear the Sunon fan it came with).
And if you couldn't figure out how to mount their CPU fan, and there wasn't an instruction sheet in the box like there was in my Z1, I'm sure the instructions were on the web.
On the other hand, my new Enermax power supply (not advertised as being their particularly quiet model, though it does thermal regulation on one of its fans) and Panaflo L1A fans are quiet too. And my cheapo ($10 at memman.com) cooler master heat sink/CPU fan is just about as quiet as the Z1 was (though I didn't have a Z1-Q) despite 12V and 5800 RPM.
So I can't really justify PC Power and Cooling's price premium. If you're going to get a nice ATX case, it might be worth it to have the fan grilles punched out and have grommet-mounted low-flow fans installed--for the first time, I can feel my air intake! On the other hand, I'm certain I don't need quite so much airflow, even as hard drive happy as I am sometimes.
If you want cheap, why do you want 7200 RPM? You really won't miss the seek time, trust me. Right now, 5400 RPM 40G drives from Seagate and Quantum are $115 at a favorite (reputable) vendor of mine. The same price ($110) gets you 20G of 7200 RPM, or you can pay $150 for 40G of 7200 RPM.
Me, I'd buy 2-3 drives no larger than $120, plus trays, and alternate between them. But you should size them for two full freshly-installed-system backups (e.g. the fresh 6.2 and the fresh 7.1), plus a couple full/home backups.
Add space for your incrementals if you're not burning those to CD. Add space for your 'doze boxes if you're backing them up via a small linux partition.
And be sure that if there's NFS mounting, it only flows one way. There is little more annoying than not being able to bring a box down cleanly because it has NFS mounts from a machine you've already shut down.
If someone knows what to do when the install breaks some other piece of software, they know enough to use find to look for the breakage point.
If they don't know how to use find, what use is an install log to them?
I must say that if I were writing an installer for money, I might well keep a log (though not of all modifications to all the files) but I'd certainly focus most of my time on making it work right so that nobody needs the install log, whether or not they're competent to do anything with it.
For home backup, you don't usually need to keep anything but an "I just got this new install working right" backup for any major length of time. So it sounds like the best thing is to do your full backups to IDE disks, and your incrementals to multi-session CD-R or to CD-RW (depending on how much stuff you change between incrementals).
Do back up the system separately from/home. Do use at least two separate disks, and keep your "freshly-configured new install" backups on both/all of them. Do remove the backup disks from the computer when not making backups. Nothing like lightning toasting all your backups along with the computer because you left the hard disk in.
You might want to do an incremental on/home every night, to somewhere on a different disk or system, to protect against single disk failure or accidental rm -rf. Or mirror the drives you change a lot more often than you want to back up. I've even had SCSI disks fail on me, and I don't think I was cooking them...
I don't think so. Alphas had HZ=1024 back when a 100 MHz 486 was still okay, if not great.
But x86-land is only recently catching up on the original Alpha's power requirements. 10-12A at 3.3V was quite a lot for the time, and it's no wonder the conference my co-workers first saw it at was called the "Hot Chips" conference.
Maybe your Smalltalk bytecode interpreter optimizes scalar operations so they're not message sends; maybe, like most Java implementations, it does this with strings too. But it's still a fundamental organizational flaw that all of the looping constructs (for, while, etc.) are methods on Integer. Methods on Block rather than reserved keywords, maybe. But not on Integer.
Also, call me old-fashioned, but the thing I miss the most is a filesystem. I can't use external tools like grep or find to search through my smalltalk code. I have "string search", but no "regexp search". I can't just take a file out of the Makefile and re-link to get the standard version of stuff; I can't even have two different files with different versions of something and switch between them easily. Unless I've bought Envy or some other version control tool, and even then it's not nearly so easy. It probably takes a version control tool to tar up one of my several programs and send it to someone else...
"Browse Senders" is a cool feature, but for all I know it's not smalltalk, it's just the VW IDE.
To say nothing of the fact that Smalltalk programmers are scarce enough, and Smalltalk is unpopular enough, that maintaining and developing on our Smalltalk code falls to the kids fresh out of school who don't know what they're doing even if they were taught OOD principles. (It's not just that it's unpopular; its unpopularity perpetuates its unpopularity.)
For my projects, either I want a quick scripting language (in which case I might make it past sh or awk to python or perl), or I need something big enough that I may as well pull up C++ or Java. And if the project's big enough that it isn't a trivial procedural task, I can do a good design to start with, and implement that in the language of my choice, OO features or no OO, OO design or not. OOD's just the latest crutch/club to try to force people into thinking about design, plus the first major crutch/club to get people to do good abstracion on the way to loose coupling between modules.
Unlike bonded, insured, licensed plumbers, MCSE's are not bonded, not insured, and no more licensed than anyone else.
Also unlike MCSE's, plumbers (or their company, or their insurance) will actually fix the damage they cause if they screw up your plumbing; you're lucky if an MCSE will fix a system they screwed up without charging by the hour for the fix.
When using a wheel mouse, I don't roll the wheel with my fingertip, I roll it under my finger. This doesn't work unless the wheel is fairly big (a la Logitech MouseMan+).
I really like my Logitech Marbles, by the way... The MouseMan/MouseMan+ mice are nice enough, unless you want to use the thumb button. That button's a real strain for me for some reason.
Here in Illinois, all employment is "at will", meaning neither you nor your employer need a reason to terminate you or to quit. Salaried or hourly, you could be out the door at any time in such an environment...
I have a Hawking 2-head unit, and my only complaints are that it makes my Logitech Marble trackball (no wheel) look like a generic 3-button mouse to Windows (no biggie) and, worse, that it sometimes misses fast mouse clicks, especially when I double-click or otherwise click fast some of the clicks don't get through. I haven't tried a cheaper mouse to see if that does any better, but I can't imagine it would.
Anyone else have the "miss a click" problem?
Otherwise, the hot keys seem to work fine, and the machines detect a (generic) keyboard, mouse, and monitor even when I'm switched to the other unit. Except for the missing mouse clicks, it works pretty well for a modern low-cost KVM switch.
One I had to sign said that they would pay me if the non-competition clause kept me out of work. However, I would have had to "prove" that the non-competition clause kept me out of a job, and that I was still looking dilligently for others. Dilligence being at the company's discretion, of course.
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I thought those things got hot enough to melt tapes. Certainly the last ones I laid eyes on said explicitly that they wouldn't work for tapes. More expensive models may or may not do better, but if the assumption about the heat and duration of the fire exceeds their rating, you're still pretty screwed.
If you actually started watching at the beginning of a program, and you want to watch something else during the commercials, are any of these options at all useful with satellite TV? Could I even use a dual-tuner TiVo with two satellite receivers on top of the same TV, or am I stuck shelling out $550 for a DishPVR 721 (they won't even let you lease one yet, and even if you could you wouldn't be allowed to modify/upgrade it)?
Sounds like you have a cooling problem in the HD department...
And to join this HAN, all you have to do is accelerate to 100 MPH, and if there's a collision you just back off and try again!
Mine doesn't seem to do anything with its auxiliary power input; it gets power well from the keyboard port of computer #1, and does a sucky job if only computer #2 is turned on, regardless of whether the power port is powered.
Two jobs ago, the employee manual had at least half a sentence missing in the section on "advancement". Nobody else complained, and when I complained they never fixed it.
I guess they either never read it, or never cared...
Keep eggs out of one basket by rotating among three drives. At any one time, one drive will have this week's full backup, another will have last week's full backup, and a third will have this (or last, if you're in the middle of your full backup) week's incremental backups. Depending on how much you back up and how much it compresses (and on how big your backup drives are) you may be able to retain older generations without even resorting to buying more drives.
As for your cost figures, I can do better on the racks at www.cablemakers.com ($20 for a bay/tray pair, $14 for each extra tray, for a total of $48 for one bay, three trays), but not quite as good as $1/GB on the hard drives. I see $95 for an 82G Deskstar 120GXP at Hyper Micro, which makes $1.16/GB, or you can get it for $93 or so elsewhere. I see Hyper has some 80 minute CD-Rs for $35/100; this is only $0.50/GB before shipping costs.
One thing I might look into if I had a number of machines to back up like this and doing it across the network wasn't an option, would be to see if one of those removable bays fits in an external USB-IDE enclosure, which can be had for less than $100 at www.hypermicro.com...
(Disclaimer: I've bought the abovementioned racks from www.cablemakers.com, and they work okay. I've never used Hyper Micro, but they have decent prices and a decent rep at www.resellerratings.com. Also, I've never actually figured out how I'd want to do this kind of backup from Windows...)
If you go to Jar-Jar-dum, you will die.
The inks I've seen recently don't smudge unless you rub the paper pretty good or lick your fingers. On the other hand, I sometimes go weeks without printing. It's like those pre-pay cell phone deals: use your minutes/ink or they expire in 45 days/a month or three as they either clog the heads beyond cleaning or just dry up.
The only big resource ClearCase really needs that a two-year-old setup wouldn't have is low network latency. We use ClearCase and when we moved our source repository off of a hub in a room full of NT servers and out to the far side of a T3 in a different building, things got much faster. If the droids don't make you put your "server" in a "server room" with crappy network between you and there, it's not nearly as bad as it used to be. (Matter of fact, ClearCase with us in Chicagoland and the server in Akron wasn't as bad as having the server in the NT server room...)
Note that we don't use derived objects (DOs). But we don't have a full-time (or even part-time) ClearCase tuner; I'm not even 100% sure what there is that they'd need to spend all day tuning. The only thing we do beyond 100baseT and an otherwise decent piece of network is cp -R the source to a local disk so we can search for content (find |xargs grep, vs. label/branch/attribute searches) faster when the content hasn't changed recently.
I've heard the stories, but except for clearmake/derived objects I'm not quite sure what the fuss is nowadays.
I just had an 8-port fast ethernet switch (or its power supply) die on me. When I looked at the cost of replacing the switch, 4-port hubs were under $45, as were 4-port "SOHO" switches. The wimpiest of these "only" supported 1000 MAC addresses instead of 20,000 or so.
There's no price difference in "little blue/gray box" hubs vs. switches any more.
Me, I'm going to make do with my old fast ethernet hub until I have more cash, then spend the $125 (less price drops!) to get a 4-port switch with 2 printer ports.
You need: "lower" on a convenient key or button; "switch desktop" on a convenient key, especially if you get the "2D" desktop layout like fvwm and its descendents rather than the 1-dimensional previous/next like CDE; enough desktops that alt-tab is useful; alt-tab.
Pretty much in that order.
When we wanted an experienced C++ programmer, some of the applicants' resumes (from one recruiter) listed a score on some C++ test.
The higher the score, the fewer the clues.
And the last time I took a computerized C++ test (for the computer consulting arm of a company more known in the financial markets, though it wasn't Andersen), it had several questions where none of the answers were right...
My Silencer 275 ATX is still doing just fine, 2-3 years after I bought it. I also bought a Silencer fan around then (though I don't think it cost as little as $9 at the time), and it's been serving silently ever since in the back of the external SCSI enclosure on my desk (I did hear the Sunon fan it came with).
And if you couldn't figure out how to mount their CPU fan, and there wasn't an instruction sheet in the box like there was in my Z1, I'm sure the instructions were on the web.
On the other hand, my new Enermax power supply (not advertised as being their particularly quiet model, though it does thermal regulation on one of its fans) and Panaflo L1A fans are quiet too. And my cheapo ($10 at memman.com) cooler master heat sink/CPU fan is just about as quiet as the Z1 was (though I didn't have a Z1-Q) despite 12V and 5800 RPM.
So I can't really justify PC Power and Cooling's price premium. If you're going to get a nice ATX case, it might be worth it to have the fan grilles punched out and have grommet-mounted low-flow fans installed--for the first time, I can feel my air intake! On the other hand, I'm certain I don't need quite so much airflow, even as hard drive happy as I am sometimes.
If you want cheap, why do you want 7200 RPM? You really won't miss the seek time, trust me. Right now, 5400 RPM 40G drives from Seagate and Quantum are $115 at a favorite (reputable) vendor of mine. The same price ($110) gets you 20G of 7200 RPM, or you can pay $150 for 40G of 7200 RPM.
/home backups.
Me, I'd buy 2-3 drives no larger than $120, plus trays, and alternate between them. But you should size them for two full freshly-installed-system backups (e.g. the fresh 6.2 and the fresh 7.1), plus a couple full
Add space for your incrementals if you're not burning those to CD. Add space for your 'doze boxes if you're backing them up via a small linux partition.
And be sure that if there's NFS mounting, it only flows one way. There is little more annoying than not being able to bring a box down cleanly because it has NFS mounts from a machine you've already shut down.
If someone knows what to do when the install breaks some other piece of software, they know enough to use find to look for the breakage point.
If they don't know how to use find, what use is an install log to them?
I must say that if I were writing an installer for money, I might well keep a log (though not of all modifications to all the files) but I'd certainly focus most of my time on making it work right so that nobody needs the install log, whether or not they're competent to do anything with it.
For home backup, you don't usually need to keep anything but an "I just got this new install working right" backup for any major length of time. So it sounds like the best thing is to do your full backups to IDE disks, and your incrementals to multi-session CD-R or to CD-RW (depending on how much stuff you change between incrementals).
/home. Do use at least two separate disks, and keep your "freshly-configured new install" backups on both/all of them. Do remove the backup disks from the computer when not making backups. Nothing like lightning toasting all your backups along with the computer because you left the hard disk in.
/home every night, to somewhere on a different disk or system, to protect against single disk failure or accidental rm -rf. Or mirror the drives you change a lot more often than you want to back up. I've even had SCSI disks fail on me, and I don't think I was cooking them...
Do back up the system separately from
You might want to do an incremental on
I don't think so. Alphas had HZ=1024 back when a 100 MHz 486 was still okay, if not great.
But x86-land is only recently catching up on the original Alpha's power requirements. 10-12A at 3.3V was quite a lot for the time, and it's no wonder the conference my co-workers first saw it at was called the "Hot Chips" conference.
Maybe your Smalltalk bytecode interpreter optimizes scalar operations so they're not message sends; maybe, like most Java implementations, it does this with strings too. But it's still a fundamental organizational flaw that all of the looping constructs (for, while, etc.) are methods on Integer. Methods on Block rather than reserved keywords, maybe. But not on Integer.
Also, call me old-fashioned, but the thing I miss the most is a filesystem. I can't use external tools like grep or find to search through my smalltalk code. I have "string search", but no "regexp search". I can't just take a file out of the Makefile and re-link to get the standard version of stuff; I can't even have two different files with different versions of something and switch between them easily. Unless I've bought Envy or some other version control tool, and even then it's not nearly so easy. It probably takes a version control tool to tar up one of my several programs and send it to someone else...
"Browse Senders" is a cool feature, but for all I know it's not smalltalk, it's just the VW IDE.
To say nothing of the fact that Smalltalk programmers are scarce enough, and Smalltalk is unpopular enough, that maintaining and developing on our Smalltalk code falls to the kids fresh out of school who don't know what they're doing even if they were taught OOD principles. (It's not just that it's unpopular; its unpopularity perpetuates its unpopularity.)
For my projects, either I want a quick scripting language (in which case I might make it past sh or awk to python or perl), or I need something big enough that I may as well pull up C++ or Java. And if the project's big enough that it isn't a trivial procedural task, I can do a good design to start with, and implement that in the language of my choice, OO features or no OO, OO design or not. OOD's just the latest crutch/club to try to force people into thinking about design, plus the first major crutch/club to get people to do good abstracion on the way to loose coupling between modules.
Unlike bonded, insured, licensed plumbers, MCSE's are not bonded, not insured, and no more licensed than anyone else.
Also unlike MCSE's, plumbers (or their company, or their insurance) will actually fix the damage they cause if they screw up your plumbing; you're lucky if an MCSE will fix a system they screwed up without charging by the hour for the fix.
That won't do. It just invites "mine is bigger than yours" wars.
When using a wheel mouse, I don't roll the wheel with my fingertip, I roll it under my finger. This doesn't work unless the wheel is fairly big (a la Logitech MouseMan+).
I really like my Logitech Marbles, by the way... The MouseMan/MouseMan+ mice are nice enough, unless you want to use the thumb button. That button's a real strain for me for some reason.
Here in Illinois, all employment is "at will", meaning neither you nor your employer need a reason to terminate you or to quit. Salaried or hourly, you could be out the door at any time in such an environment...
I have a Hawking 2-head unit, and my only complaints are that it makes my Logitech Marble trackball (no wheel) look like a generic 3-button mouse to Windows (no biggie) and, worse, that it sometimes misses fast mouse clicks, especially when I double-click or otherwise click fast some of the clicks don't get through. I haven't tried a cheaper mouse to see if that does any better, but I can't imagine it would.
Anyone else have the "miss a click" problem?
Otherwise, the hot keys seem to work fine, and the machines detect a (generic) keyboard, mouse, and monitor even when I'm switched to the other unit. Except for the missing mouse clicks, it works pretty well for a modern low-cost KVM switch.
One I had to sign said that they would pay me if the non-competition clause kept me out of work. However, I would have had to "prove" that the non-competition clause kept me out of a job, and that I was still looking dilligently for others. Dilligence being at the company's discretion, of course.