I could build a datacenter that had little to no draw on the grid using solar, wind, even micro-hydro if available, direct DC power as much as possible to cut the loss inherent in AC inverters, and using mostly natural HVAC methods.
Sure the initial cost would likely be considerably more than the average datacenter, but it could be done and the overall life cost would probably be less.
Currently I have a secure, remote location/structure that could support a small datacenter such as this and have considered it, but alas I don't have a few hundred K just sitting around.
Hibernation works fine for me. It doesn't work in Ubuntu however (at least with the most recent kernel), and a lot of people have complained about it. I have an issue with hibernation on my laptop with Slackware, at least I think I do - it's not really an important feature for me so I haven't really bothered testing it. Anyway I know I have an issue with related things such as battery status being reported properly. This is actually due to an ACPI bug in the BIOS on certain Acer laptops which happen to include the model I have. The issues with ACPI seem to vary a little depedning on which kernel I use and last I checked my specific issues where still an open bug report though it looks like there is a hack or two that has been come up with for the Acer DSDT.
There's also the bit that if you're a Linux shop, you don't HAVE to go to the community and use the latest flavor of Exchange killer... there's always Domino. Not free or Free, but if you're trying to push Microsoft out of the environment, it might be a worth looking at. Besides the various mail server options and clients like Evolution and Chandler there's also Zimbra.
Try telling this to a large company that is current running Windows Server 2003 servers with hundreds, if not thousands of, Windows XP clients. Yeah I'm sure it would be worth it for them to completely up and move their infrastructure to OSS. Exactly, if what they have is working there is no point in up and changing just for the hell of it. However, when it comes to upgrading the OS/software those hundreds/thousands of machines and users having to relearn all the changes made to the GUI anyway along with the license costs it becomes an opportune time to perform a TCO study as part of the upgrade decision process.
I use Linux at home. It's great for home and does exactly what I want and need it to do. We run Windows at work. It's great for work and does (mostly) what we want and need it to do. Clients integrate nicely with the Active Directory system, with the Exchange server, we get a decent Office suite, and most importantly we get centralized support. I can't say from experience how well MS support actually is, but I can't imagine FOSS giving much phone support if my NFS server goes down for some reason. There are certainly cases where Windows is a better platform. In my mind, this is mostly based upon the business need for certain software which is only available for Windows and a few other various related considerations. NFS or SMB, I'm sure there is some source for phone support - be it RedHat, some local Linux geek, some company like Progent, etc.
What about all the various backup products, such as tape backups and seamless server redundancy? Are there alternatives for this for Linux? What assurances does a large company who absolutely can not afford significant downtime have that the software is well supported by professionals on call and that bugs are constantly being fixed? There are several backup solutions for GNU/Linux and IMHO redundancy is actually easier to implement/maintain on Linux than Windows. I'll forego the entire Linux vs Windows stability/downtime arguments and only say that generally Linux itself is more stable, though on Windows the stability is somewhat proportionally related to how well the system is setup.
As to support as well as bug fixes, I'd say there's not much of a difference. You have relatively the same variation of extremely helpful to practically useless depending on the vendor (commercial) or project team (open source). The main difference being that most commercial vendors provide a call-center helpdesk, whereas OSS projects for the most part don't and provide support via forum/mailing-list/email. Otherwise the options for on-site type support is the same, though generally there is probably a higher percentage of paper professionals supporting Microsoft than one would find elsewhere.
This isn't all just Microsoft, this is the entire MS platform. There are thousands of tools that are necessary for full production environments that were designed specifically for Windows. Companies need this stuff. I won't disagree. There are certainly more graphical management tools for Windows networks than *nix networks.
Though I may not like Microsoft much, I do admit they have a nice overall package for easily setting up and maintaining a production network. They have lots of tools that fit together easily. So does Novell last I checked.:)
While there may be Linux alternatives for some of this stuff, if you go to a business and tell them that they will likely say, "and what happens if it goes down?" Same thing they would do when their Windows system goes down.
"Cutting and pasting a lot of content into a blog is not what we want to see," he said. "It is more consistent with the spirit of the Internet to link to content so people can read the whole thing in context." BS! It's certainly more consistent with the spirit of the Internet to take direct quotes and use them completely out of context for the pure humor of it and provide a link to the original content so that the reader can choose to review such if they're really that interested in proper context.
was formatting my/home partition after replacing the failed drive which held / and other general sys partitions. During the Slackware install for the new drive I neglected to tell the installer NOT to format my already existing/home partition. In my own defense I was doing the install at like 4am and was nodding off in the process. Which serves as a reminder that once one starts to fall asleep at the keyboard it's time to cease and desist with any important operations, particularly those which may cause massive data loss.
Of course, I hadn't made a backup recently and an extfs isn't the easiest thing to recover from a format. Fortunately, most important recent data I had copies of on either the laptop or the server and any important old archive stuff is on tape and I was also able to recover a fair amount of anything otherwise irreplaceable.
At least I think so - I have yet to sort through gigs of recovered files to find out, but then it must not be that important if I haven't looked for it yet, huh?
Veering a bit off-topic but - This is part of the reason I'm self-employed. Although it's not a whole hell of alot better, at least I get to do more work that actually lines up with my qualifications than I do dealing with cleaning virus-ridden windows machines, diagnosing why there's no display or interweb connection, etc.
There are too many that expect to pay US$15-$20/hr for a networking or security specialist and offshore it's not too difficult to find talent that will glady accept that, no questions, even with the dollar falling.
Worse off, the grade book program was accessible from any networked machine (thanks Novell)
Thank god this was nearly a decade ago... So, one could pick a random terminal in the school and make subtle changes to their own (or perhaps someone elses) grades. I don't believe Novell is the one to blame for that. The admin not being familiar with NDS or being unexcusably lazy however would be. This would not be too surprising since at least about ten years ago when I was a tech/admin for a school district it was not all that uncommon for the Network Admin or whatever head IT title to be just some school administrator type that was good at writing grant proposals and also happened to be at least computer literate enough to be dangerous.
I dealt with student databases which contained SSNs and I was always paranoid about about the security and access to such data. It seemed as if I was the only one that really cared though. Schools are probably one of the largest examples of security theater in action.
I used to think "I wish that I was alive during the 80's so that I could have been part of the cracking scene there". In hindsight, I could have done such bad things during the 90's, when I grew up. I was part of the scene in the early 90's and did "bad things" then, but that was also when they really started getting serious and passing laws (or applying ones that were close enough) related to cracking. When I realized I would either end up in jail or working for Uncle Sam I stopped all blackhat and for the most part any questionable greyhat hacking activities.
I agree. TFA hints at legal issues although it does so WRT security of the code which is the primary focus.
Common sense should dictate that any 3rd party code, where used, is notated as such in order to facilitate security related patching if/when needed and to possibly indicate further review as to how it relates with the rest of the code. But then again common sense isn't so common and introducing 3rd party code into another codebase has the potential to open up an entirely different can of worms as to the security of the application which should naturally be audited.
So what I read the article as saying is that there is a greater chance of applications being insecure of the type which were part of this sample base and that the FSF is now looking for more volunteers in the enforcement department.:)
Unless users actually want to utilize the full capabilities of USB 3.0, which would require proper cabling. Then it may affect a higher percentage when it comes time to blow up that bridge, but otherwise right now I think you're right.
Though I'm sure Denon will be the first to come out with a super USB 3.0 optical cable for the bargain price of $750 as an upgrade to their $500 Ethernet cable which seems to have an issue with clearly transmitting the frequencies that dogs hear.
So hopefully in a year or two Fido can enjoy every nuance of crashing cymbals in music and the always interesting noises that didn't get filtered out in the studio, even if I can't.
Love didn't specify where this $40B figure came from, but is also from the year 2000. The AC alludes to possibility of there being some magical average (20c) that artists make from every dollar spent on music. Even that the 20c figure needs to be divided by an average of five to arrive at what each member of the band's share is. The problem with this is that there seem to be no rules upon which to base such an average on in the industry. There are artists with platinum selling records that haven't received a penny in royalties from those sales. What can be said is that the whole system is rather screwed.
I understand that musicians (especially those with record company contracts) only really make money on touring (playing gigs) and to a lesser extent on selling merch., though still more than royalties on record sales or some convoluted guesstimate of airplay, etc.
I foresee more artists going the Creative Commons route and whatever record/distribution/etc. companies that fill in the gap that actually respect the fact that the musicians are the ones that deserve a greater percentage of the money than they do will pretty much make RIAA and friends obsolete.
I especially like:
harry potter [huh??? wtf kind of tag is that for this]
itsjustadamneth ernetcable
auto-erotic asphixiation
But the best tag has to be: i can not belive it is not butter
The RIAA is a sinking ship and they're trying to make as much as they can as long as there are judges and courts that are still sympathetic to their rhetoric.
The four major record corporations fund the RIAA. These companies are rich and obviously well-represented. Recording artists and musicians don't really have the money to compete. The 273,000 working musicians in America make about $30,000 a year. Only 15 percent of American Federation of Musicians members work steadily in music.
But the music industry is a $40 billion-a-year business. One-third of that revenue comes from the United States. The annual sales of cassettes, CDs and video are larger than the gross national product of 80 countries. Americans have more CD players, radios and VCRs than we have bathtubs.
Story after story gets told about artists -- some of them in their 60s and 70s, some of them authors of huge successful songs that we all enjoy, use and sing -- living in total poverty, never having been paid anything. Not even having access to a union or to basic health care. Artists who have generated billions of dollars for an industry die broke and un-cared for.
And they're not actors or participators. They're the rightful owners, originators and performers of original compositions.
This is piracy." - Courtney Love
Me would think a Fiber cable would be considerably cheaper and ultimately provide a cleaner digital signal to boot. Not to mention that fiber doesn't have the issues of being affected by interference like copper is.
I finally could no longer stand the elcheapo task chair (you know the one - the $20 walmart special that's typically marketed as a student desk chair with about 3/8" worth of padding in it) which the back broke on about a year ago and is uncomfortable to sit in for more than a few minutes. I was spending more time leaning on the desk or hunched over and my wife's comments on my posture increased as the time I've spent coding (rather than goofing off and browsing/.) increased. So I've spent the past few weeks looking into getting a new chair myself and lucked out on finding a really nice one cheap.
One of my issues in finding a chair was that I wanted to actually sit in it before I shelled out the cash for good chair. I definitely wanted one that had a decent recline to it and that would do so easily. Being 5'8" and ~130# I've come across alot of chairs that no matter the adjustment just don't want to lean back, much less stay there, with such little weight. If money wasn't an issue I would have probably gone with just ordering the HumanScale Liberty or maybe one of those zero-gravity setups.
The wife and I went on a search one day and our first stop was the local Office Depot. After she reminded me that we were looking for a chair and dragged me from looking at all the other cool toys between the entrance and the furniture area, I checked out a couple chairs and found a ErgoHuman ME7ERG floor display on clearance for a little less than $250. Looked like they were stocking a newer model now. *She* didn't want to get out of this chair and I love it.
I couldn't pass up that deal on $600 chair, especially since it wasn't a beat up floor display, was already assembled, and looked like it had just been setup.
Slashdot Mirror
Who said anything about hiring human talent?
Everyone knows that monkeys are great to have in IT and there should be some in every datacenter.
Besides, monkeys are cheap and work for bananas, which just happen to be rather plentiful in Hawaii.
Oh wait, maybe that's the problem...
I could build a datacenter that had little to no draw on the grid using solar, wind, even micro-hydro if available, direct DC power as much as possible to cut the loss inherent in AC inverters, and using mostly natural HVAC methods.
Sure the initial cost would likely be considerably more than the average datacenter, but it could be done and the overall life cost would probably be less.
Currently I have a secure, remote location/structure that could support a small datacenter such as this and have considered it, but alas I don't have a few hundred K just sitting around.
As to support as well as bug fixes, I'd say there's not much of a difference. You have relatively the same variation of extremely helpful to practically useless depending on the vendor (commercial) or project team (open source). The main difference being that most commercial vendors provide a call-center helpdesk, whereas OSS projects for the most part don't and provide support via forum/mailing-list/email. Otherwise the options for on-site type support is the same, though generally there is probably a higher percentage of paper professionals supporting Microsoft than one would find elsewhere. This isn't all just Microsoft, this is the entire MS platform. There are thousands of tools that are necessary for full production environments that were designed specifically for Windows. Companies need this stuff. I won't disagree. There are certainly more graphical management tools for Windows networks than *nix networks. Though I may not like Microsoft much, I do admit they have a nice overall package for easily setting up and maintaining a production network. They have lots of tools that fit together easily. So does Novell last I checked.
was formatting my /home partition after replacing the failed drive which held / and other general sys partitions. During the Slackware install for the new drive I neglected to tell the installer NOT to format my already existing /home partition.
In my own defense I was doing the install at like 4am and was nodding off in the process. Which serves as a reminder that once one starts to fall asleep at the keyboard it's time to cease and desist with any important operations, particularly those which may cause massive data loss.
Of course, I hadn't made a backup recently and an extfs isn't the easiest thing to recover from a format. Fortunately, most important recent data I had copies of on either the laptop or the server and any important old archive stuff is on tape and I was also able to recover a fair amount of anything otherwise irreplaceable.
At least I think so - I have yet to sort through gigs of recovered files to find out, but then it must not be that important if I haven't looked for it yet, huh?
Veering a bit off-topic but - This is part of the reason I'm self-employed. Although it's not a whole hell of alot better, at least I get to do more work that actually lines up with my qualifications than I do dealing with cleaning virus-ridden windows machines, diagnosing why there's no display or interweb connection, etc.
There are too many that expect to pay US$15-$20/hr for a networking or security specialist and offshore it's not too difficult to find talent that will glady accept that, no questions, even with the dollar falling.
I dealt with student databases which contained SSNs and I was always paranoid about about the security and access to such data. It seemed as if I was the only one that really cared though. Schools are probably one of the largest examples of security theater in action. I used to think "I wish that I was alive during the 80's so that I could have been part of the cracking scene there". In hindsight, I could have done such bad things during the 90's, when I grew up. I was part of the scene in the early 90's and did "bad things" then, but that was also when they really started getting serious and passing laws (or applying ones that were close enough) related to cracking. When I realized I would either end up in jail or working for Uncle Sam I stopped all blackhat and for the most part any questionable greyhat hacking activities.
a nice demotivational poster or two. There's also a few computer related one's here.
I agree. TFA hints at legal issues although it does so WRT security of the code which is the primary focus.
:)
Common sense should dictate that any 3rd party code, where used, is notated as such in order to facilitate security related patching if/when needed and to possibly indicate further review as to how it relates with the rest of the code. But then again common sense isn't so common and introducing 3rd party code into another codebase has the potential to open up an entirely different can of worms as to the security of the application which should naturally be audited.
So what I read the article as saying is that there is a greater chance of applications being insecure of the type which were part of this sample base and that the FSF is now looking for more volunteers in the enforcement department.
Documentation!?
We don't need no steenkin documentation!
Unless users actually want to utilize the full capabilities of USB 3.0, which would require proper cabling. Then it may affect a higher percentage when it comes time to blow up that bridge, but otherwise right now I think you're right.
Though I'm sure Denon will be the first to come out with a super USB 3.0 optical cable for the bargain price of $750 as an upgrade to their $500 Ethernet cable which seems to have an issue with clearly transmitting the frequencies that dogs hear.
So hopefully in a year or two Fido can enjoy every nuance of crashing cymbals in music and the always interesting noises that didn't get filtered out in the studio, even if I can't.
Viva IEEE 1284 FTW
Love didn't specify where this $40B figure came from, but is also from the year 2000. The AC alludes to possibility of there being some magical average (20c) that artists make from every dollar spent on music. Even that the 20c figure needs to be divided by an average of five to arrive at what each member of the band's share is. The problem with this is that there seem to be no rules upon which to base such an average on in the industry. There are artists with platinum selling records that haven't received a penny in royalties from those sales. What can be said is that the whole system is rather screwed.
I understand that musicians (especially those with record company contracts) only really make money on touring (playing gigs) and to a lesser extent on selling merch., though still more than royalties on record sales or some convoluted guesstimate of airplay, etc.
I foresee more artists going the Creative Commons route and whatever record/distribution/etc. companies that fill in the gap that actually respect the fact that the musicians are the ones that deserve a greater percentage of the money than they do will pretty much make RIAA and friends obsolete.
I especially like:
harry potter [huh??? wtf kind of tag is that for this]
itsjustadamneth ernetcable
auto-erotic asphixiation
But the best tag has to be:
i can not belive it is not butter
If it doesn't go to 42 it's useless.
Me would think a Fiber cable would be considerably cheaper and ultimately provide a cleaner digital signal to boot. Not to mention that fiber doesn't have the issues of being affected by interference like copper is.
I finally could no longer stand the elcheapo task chair (you know the one - the $20 walmart special that's typically marketed as a student desk chair with about 3/8" worth of padding in it) which the back broke on about a year ago and is uncomfortable to sit in for more than a few minutes. I was spending more time leaning on the desk or hunched over and my wife's comments on my posture increased as the time I've spent coding (rather than goofing off and browsing /.) increased. So I've spent the past few weeks looking into getting a new chair myself and lucked out on finding a really nice one cheap.
One of my issues in finding a chair was that I wanted to actually sit in it before I shelled out the cash for good chair. I definitely wanted one that had a decent recline to it and that would do so easily. Being 5'8" and ~130# I've come across alot of chairs that no matter the adjustment just don't want to lean back, much less stay there, with such little weight. If money wasn't an issue I would have probably gone with just ordering the HumanScale Liberty or maybe one of those zero-gravity setups.
The wife and I went on a search one day and our first stop was the local Office Depot. After she reminded me that we were looking for a chair and dragged me from looking at all the other cool toys between the entrance and the furniture area, I checked out a couple chairs and found a ErgoHuman ME7ERG floor display on clearance for a little less than $250. Looked like they were stocking a newer model now. *She* didn't want to get out of this chair and I love it.
I couldn't pass up that deal on $600 chair, especially since it wasn't a beat up floor display, was already assembled, and looked like it had just been setup.