If you're running a FAILOVER system, well that's different. The most marketing use of the term cluster (which we define at least 6 different ways, but a good definition is "a group of machines simultaneously working on a set of tasks").
Failover doesn't really take advantage of a couple cabinets full of 2 and 4 way machines running a database. In fact, you're showing WHY I'd want a 16 or 32 CPU box running a database.
My BSD boxes running on SPARCs do this. Solaris requires lots of tools. I've got newsyslog (from netbsd) running, which sanely rotates logs, but daily reports ala BSD and lots of other self managing things just aren't IN solaris.
I've not touched a box that backends some mail stuff that was UP for 400 days and hasn't really been maintained, except for patches, for about 4 years. No, it's no directly exposed to the Internet, but I haven't manually rotated logs or ANYTHING on it for a LONG LONG time.
Sun's kernel is glorious. Their userland is pathetically outdated (can I have a vi with more than 1 undo level?). SO yeah, over 20 packages go into Solaris boxes (even Solaris A) to make it happy for me.
Most stable was Ultrix. We had a machine up for 1000 days when a DATACENTER overhaul made us shut it down (for 20 minutes. DAMN). Userland from hell. Solaris is not "most stable" by any means.
If I want to grow to a 12 or 16 way machine, from Sun, I have to BUY a 12 or 16 way chassis. Even with 2 or 4 CPUs.
Linux clusters are a great marketing word, but if you have a cluster that can do what my 12 and 16 way Oracle servers can do, let me know.
"Linux CLusters" that I've seen were all MATH clusters.
I expect that the SPARC will die and sun will be offering 4 and 8 way Athlon64 boxes REALLY soon.
Sun has (cray derived) backplane switches (not available on PCs), TREMENDOUS I/O possible. and finally some decent PCI, but even on a lame PCI E4500, I have SEVERAL separate Busses. My 4-way Intel boxes have, er 1 PCI buss. great.
Ever pull a processor board from a running PC? and it kept running?
Me neither.
Now sun's competition on cool features is SGI. Take a gang (32 of, max) 4-way SGI's and join them into a single box. scales a LOT better. But SGI isn't going to kick anyone's ass.
Won't the world be boring when nobody innovates in computers. When "BIOS"s are how people think computers should boot.
(and mcneely might eat in a New Deli, but it might be in New Delhi)
PBS/Discovery just slows the rate of burn. And discovery does a lot of bad "documentary" - filled with actors and recreations and.. and... what flaugherty would have done with a budget, I suppose.
Staring at a box
unmoving
eyes glaze
spittle forms at the edge
the eyes trick the mind into thinking it's stimultated
Even that "developers" grouping should be a giveaway.
A milter-alike is killer (make decisions on the content DURING the smtp connection). be nice if it actually used the (barely documented and evolving) milter interface - I can buy commercial Milter products from McAfee and Trend and Sendmail and others...
And IPv6! Wow, sendmail was shipping that commercially in March of 2000. (it was in the free mta before that (commercial is prebuilt mta+gui+management of gangs of machines)).
I like Postfix. I like Weitse. he, and the sendmail folk, can be really helpful and not launch ad hominum attacks on a whim. That's good.
Presuming you run Windows and a brand new video card - I *think*. It knocks me to an "unsupported browser" page (mozilla). Gee, and here I thought the web was about following HTML standards, not vendors. If I wanted proprietary, I'd still have the compuserver account I used to use on occasion in 1989.
No, you bargain and negotiate before you even talk about financing. You decide on options and a price.
If you pull out a briefcase full of cash, or money from a bank loan or deal with their company's financing subcontractor, it shouldn't affect the deal you've made.
As for "pay as little as you can", a friend bought an insane $30k car when he could barely afford it. The car he still drives, 14 years later.
AND if you have equity in a house, banks will bend over backwards to lend you money. But then, if you need money, perhaps you should draw out some equity. But then you risk the house. But the OP wasn't "there" yet. I didn't buy a house for YEARS because I moved a fair amount. Coast, country, city.
And some people do better spending some time with disposable income and playing for a while. Other people are compelled to buy a house and get life insurance at 23 or get married before they're 20. Lord knows that's not me.
Get a VW TDI (diesel) and use biodiesel and feel good. Get a hybrid and stop paying for gas. Get a motorcycle@45MPG and have some fun (or eat a truck). Do what you do. Don't fuck up your credit rating (pay off school loans) and pay off credit card bills in full every month (handy to not carry cash, bad to carry debt). Buy things that are smaller than cars with cash (no financing) and life will be fine.
Learn to cook and use spices and love that rice and beans. Remember, beef costs TONS more per z of protein that a healthier dinner.
I bought a soekris 4521 and put a card in it. Cost me ~$340 for all that. Got a 16MB CF, put OpenBSD on it (readonly) and it's the basestation. Which runs ssh. And snmpd. And a web server. And nagios (kinda, I store to a ramdisk, so reboots kill history - every 100 days).
Same CPU as the airport.
picked up a 4801 and have 802.11g for THAT one (so freebsd). Boot from (readonly) CF, but put an old kinda iffy 12G laptop drive in it. Later on, I have to move a 160GB USB/Firewire drive so I can put THAT on it and have it NFS serve the mp3s.
Did I mention that it's my always on computer and right now has no fans, makes no noise and draws ~15watts? With the slow disk, buildworld takes several hours (over NFS it's far more).
Now why would you have an airport you can't log into?
Well, if you want diagrams, you'll have to work google for about 2 seconds.
For 10BaseT and 100baseTX (and not GigE), 2 pairs of 4 are used for data. The specs for RJ45 Ethernet allowed for the other pair to be used by PHONES (1 or 2 pair, I suppose perhaps Lucent type digital phones might use 2 pair) without conflict.
Lots of places (eg. schools with wiring already run, cheap offices, etc) break out a cat5 to be 2 ethernets.
Cisco's spec allows for 48VDC (think "telco" and bank of batteries with that number). 2 extra wires are ground, 2 extra carry power (-48vdc according to spec, but...)
My soekris accepts 12-56VDC on Eth0. higher voltage means lower amperage which means smaller wires and voltage drop over distance is less of an issue (if your wire drops 5V over a couple hundred feet, that matters a lot at 12V and little at 56V).
That said, doing PoE for an airport has been SIMPLE forever with a BOX or hacked cable. (box better). 2 RJ45s, you pass the ethernet pairs from one to the other and the other pair to a DC jack. You'd use one to introduct power, but you can just as easily pull the power out at the end and pass it to an old airport/linksys/ dlink/netgear AP via the DC in plug.
Leviton makes Quickport boxes that will do 2 RJ45s. Mr Drill puts the hole in for a regular DC plug of choice. It's a project doable in 10 minutes while watching a movie.
For the soekris, I'm using a 24VDC adapter I had (from an old old modem or laptop or something).
The Soekris (4521) uses 12 watts. Lets call it 1A @ 12V. That's 0.25A at 48VDC. Cisco's wall warts are 48VDC @ 0.5A. My solar panels are each 48VDC @ 4A. Pick one (I use one that also works at night).
I'll let my S.O. (whose now a system admin) and my 2 best friends (who design houses and do FEMA work to review plans to make sure something is sound) know that.
Perhaps the 20' of bookshelf containing lists of building materials and capacities are there for show?
Perhaps their reworking of clients sketches (we thought THIS would be kinda neat) into something that can structurally work is an illusion? (that's nice, but lets do THIS to get the same effect and something that won't cost $10,000 and perhaps fall in a 70mph wind
The one who helped a builder friend design and build a house in Tahoe who insisted that, "No, you can't have a roof with this sort of structure since it will collapse with the amount of snow that sits on the roof" was praise as his HUGE BEAMS that were insane worked fine while a shed the builder tossed up just to protect some gear over the winter collapsed in December (seems snow melts, gets a little water dense, freezes and weighs a lot as it builds up).
The certification has several really hard structural questions with variables that you just can't know. The right answer is apparently, "consult a structural engineer."
However, for most work, the architect is responsible for knowing that a 20' long 2x12 on 8" centers can support this much weight stably. I know this because I was looking to add a floor to a (tall) "crawl space" and was looking at 2x8s and it was 'splained to me that I'd be back down 5' in the dirt unless I only stored styrofoam peanuts).
"designers" say "oh this would look cool". If fact we have a lot of "systems interior designers" here developing apps.
Architects are responsible for egregious design problems, if they are involved. Builders and civil engineers are responsible for
ensuring it's sane and within code (also, because some architects DO get it wrong. Just as builders do. more eyes = GOOD in things that last 20-500 years.
building it right.
And yes, engineers have been arrested. Several in my home city for allowing substandard concrete pours (don't pour structural pieces in deeply freezing weather - they don't cure right and will collapse.)
And yes, there are plenty of degreed architects who are working under a licensed architect (with stamp) who learn this. You don't come out of ANY school and get to build a large bridge. Engineer or architect.
Sweet. Deviate from the "apple is perfect how dare you criticise" line and its a troll.
Pa-thetic.
Ok, apple should support their products better. When screens are going out bad (brand new $3000 machines with several "dead pixels" is *not* ok).
Apple should have a consistent story for the "apple tax" of $500-$1000 extra just for running OSX. They're not gaining a lot of market share. and the competition isn't the (miserable) windows line, it's also Unix with KDE/GNOME.
Apple needs tools to manage them at an enterpise level.
Apple needs to suck up to developers again to get products that make their platform rich with software (again).
They used to do that. I have an Apple//+, a MacSE, a MacCI, a couple powerbook generations and a newish one. And I'm looking at more "ok" software being built in that DESTROYS any market for third party stuff.
No software means no sales.
Psion showed that with developer hostile policies and were trounces in moments when palm came out. Oh, incidentally, SDKs were free or close to free for the Palm. Compare the palm sales to the newton and you see that making is EASY to develop for it and it will pay you back two-fold.
Or does this shake your worldview that AppleCanDoNoWrong?
Here's your win:
You have a job and no more homework or papers for school.
If you can pay rent with 1/4-1/3 of your monthly salary, eat and have fun, then seize it.
You're not getting married. If it TRULY sucks, you can leave. If you can make it a year first, great.
After that you have a track record that you can survive at a place for a year. (it's important, really).
You have something on your resume.
You get to see what work is like in the real world and what you like and don't like about this place.
A friend's dad was a job counselor. He helped his son and I go through some college selection things when we were 17. The stuff he used at work which was kinda cool. Make a list of your previous jobs.
write down 10 (or so) things you liked. This can be challenging work; babes in the office; free pizza on fridays; working with project managers to learn how it all works, whatever.
write down 10 things you DIDN'T like
Take that last list and find the opposite
"Micromanaging boss" might become "boss that lets me work on my own a bit"
Now, take the pluses and the opposite of minuses and choose 10 most important things and look around with that in mind.
I found my list from pre-college 10 years later. Where my college didn't match on that list was often where I was frustrated and annoyed. OTOH, there were things I just didn't know about and was wrong on. But it happens. And 12 of 15 things were just about right.
Learn to cook. Brown rice and beans will cost $2 and be 3 meals. Spices and garlic make it worth eating.
Learn to budget. You have $N. You can spend $F on food, $R on rent, $L on loan payback, $S on some savings. The rest is $Entertainment and fun.
Spend > $E, and you lose. Put it on Visa and you might as well surrender now.
You really don't need a new TV. You may need new clothes for work though. None of it is deductable.
Hell, burn the TV. It takes an IQ point away for every 100 hrs you watch.
Take time and save up and travel some. You're less encumbered and can have fun.
everything you do before you're 25 is overlooked in the job world
I spent 3 summers touring with bands building Rock and Roll stages. It was a blast; I made some cash; I didn't die (before I reach for that, did I clip in or not...). My crap was in storage and it had totally nothing to do with my "career." In the winter, I had some real jobs.
Perhaps you're unaware that architecture is one of the lowest paying professions there is. Most architects can make solid secretarial wages for years and years (that's AFTER the master's degree).
The few big name architects CAN make a bunch of money. And we're all Internet billionaires here too, right? (my stock options are 2-ply... mmmmm, soft)
Now an architecture firm might charge a lot for design, but that usually means that for 4 months, you are using a staff of highly trained people and their equipment (rolls and rolls of e-size paper) and resources (you must use 6x12 beams spaced on 12 inch centers here to support this amount of weight), plus the bonus that for whoever stamps the plans that are filed, they are pretty well perpetually liable.
Someone slips on an icy sidewalk? The guy who designed the building 20 years ago is in the suit.
So next time someone calls themselves a software "architect", mock them and refer to them as "software interior designers".
Real architects get 6 years training and brutal exams on par with the bar. Too many "systems architects" and the like get some training on Microsoft Project and wonder why this web application they designed isn't scaling like it should. And most often, they are NEVER accountable for systems that fail.
You should have thrown it out a long time ago. Serial ports became outdated, what, 5-6 years ago? And you expect a new computer to support such outdated technology? I find it a lot more offensive to pay for old features I know I'll never use than for new features I might use.
Damn, so that server 10,000 miles away in australia I just rebooted after a problem shouldn't have serial?
On of the PAINS of "legacy free" machines and Apples as servers is that there is no serial port.
Big kudo's for apple
never having a BIOS (garbage, all of them)
finally having OpenBoot Prom so I can do magic like "boot net" and such. But I *require* a console. I *require* that machines no use keyboards and video to be maintainable from far away.
Frankly, I'm more offended that I have to pay more to use the features for which I went out and bought things because Jobs has no concept of "TRANSITION".
I have a firewire card for my -current laptop.
I keep using the laptop in part because of the SCSI (annoyingly a deeply apple-unique connector - no joy when I forget the plug traveling and need it).
I'm offended that my trackball and bitpad became moot when Apple "introduced" USB without an ADB transition time. "Oh, if you wait 5-9 months, I'm sure someone will let you buy an USB -> ADB dongle."
Software wise? OS X (a unix) smokes Windows for ease of use and learning. For the software you can still find for the Mac. Hell, AmigaDOS smokes Windows. Sorry, corporate trouble ticket systems we evaluated only had windows support (I asked all of them, the closest I got was "web and Java" but it turned out that it had to be IE and Java on windows - idiots). We find that story over and over. And vendors are reluctant to develop for Mac when you're assured a smaller market share than Linux and Apple might just replace your software with one in the OS? Ever note the rich fabric of sound tools (developing and playing mp3's for the Mac? No? Thanks to garageband and iTunes, there's no room for something to come in unless its an order of magnitude better).
But for those of us who live in terminal windows and do system admin and don't read slashdot and ponder "maybe some day I'll use unix" - for those of us who put MachTen on Powerbook 180s...
WHat's the win of the $1000 "apple tax"?
Compare 15" notebooks. Apple "Starting at $2000".
Loaded with features we really don't need (100baseT would be fine, DVI? 80MB/s firewire attached to 6MB/s disks?
Okay, now compare to a compaq (that can use a DOCK) with ethernet, 802.11g, PS/2 *and* usb *and* firewire similar drives and works fine with BSD or linux for $1200.
Shall we touch on Apple's history of record-short warrantees (fixed after way too long)? Or current customer services that's either fantastic or abysmal? It's notable that many of the fantastic stories are along the lines of "my machine died and I hadn't paid the AppleCare protection money and the day after warrantee the BLAH stopped working. They told me I'd have to send it in and pay $400, but they sent back a new one without charging me because there are 4000 other people with the same problem and they don't want YET ANOTHER class action lawsuit for their Almost Recalled problems!"
Again, if the choice is MacOS/Windows, MacOS clearly wins.
But this is slashdot, home of the Unix wannabes who browse from Windows, so I'll assume it's a matter of "MacOS - the Mach Kernel with a (slow) proprietary windowing system and Display PDF" vs. BSD/Linux running X and GNOME/KDE with lots and lots of momentum behind it for free and commercial apps. And the ability to easily emulate Windows enough to run those "required by work" Windows apps. Microsoft now owns "virtual PC" so its fate is, er interesting.
Um, usb2 and firewire are both well faster than any 7200 RPM drive will put out (around 7MB/s in real use. dd does not count as "real use".)
So it becomes moot.
However when Apple introduced the iMac with USB and firewire, but no SCSI or ADB - meaning those of us who had spent money with Apple and their partners for parts were SOL. Apple has a long habit of burning loyal users.
Cracks in the case? Cosmetic, not covered underwarrantee (lemme tell you how good that laptop looks with epoxy holding the crack that extended from going further).
From the start of the mac, they've done this (which was odd given that they committed to open at the start and that Apple ][ cards worked in ][+ and ][e and even/// machines - they even were a big cause of IBM (of all companies) "inventing" the personal computer and using non-IBM parts - and being fairly Open such that all those machines you have are derived from PC clones)). With mac they went closed and proprietary.
Got a trackball for your Mac 512? Maybe a less painful keyboard? Sorry, we have ADB now.
Mac SE cards? Sorry, the new SE uses a different buss.
I'll just touch on iPod schemes for charging them and talking to them. The Firewire cable is simple and worked. Now I have (another) proprietary dock cable thingy to deal with. Nice "improvment."
Own a SCSI scanner, drive, tape? Yeah, we're using Firewire. No transistion machines. Sorry.
The day that Apple introduced the iMac, I was down
the street earlier that day looking at a Compaq PC. It had USB and Firewire and IDE and PS/2 connectors and serial ports. I could run a USB keyboard and a legacy trackball. With the iMac, I could run their crap keyboard and hope drivers for other things might be available. Transition is useful (surprisingly, firewire-2 works with old firewire. That's a break from their habit).
Feature for feature matching is only useful if you want those features.
Is GigE really necessary for most of us? It's cool, but my servers have GigE and use it, my desktops and laptops don't. So knock that off the comparison chart.
64bit? Hate to break it, but OS 10.3 isn't 64 bit. So the G5's only fully used by, er, Linux.
Look, if the choice is a machine running Windows or a machine running MacOS then, if you can get the apps you want, the mac is cheaper. You're not spending forever screwing around supporting and restoring the machine. My mom got a mac because I won't help her with Windows (it's like AlAnon).
OTOH, if the choice is an x86 box running *nix vs. a Mac, then the PC is cheaper by a chunk. An older 266MHz pentium with 128MB of RAM running fvwm SMOKES the G4 Tibook with 768MB of RAM. THe Terminal App leaves a huge memory footprint. Aqua is sluggish and fat. Making X11 look not-fat is a feat! Sure, at several typical end user things it's a much better machine. But really, I read mail, browse, and user terminals 90% of the time.
At work, there's a Mac and a WIndows box. The Windows box is used only for Notes and a trouble ticket system for which I have no choice. The Mac is a Lombard with 2 heads (LCD and a monitor) for everything else.
Bizarrely, I find myself using Windows for OpenOffice - because the 400MHz Mac with 256MB of RAM running firefox and terminal starts swapping (1GB of swap in use!) when I start up XWindows. Forget mail.app (I'm happy with mutt and IMAP) or iChat, terminal + X + browser kills a Mac.
so when you price compare
double the ram in the Mac, leave the PC alone for Unix and compare $2400 to $800 for a laptop configured to run your stuff. Linux runs GREAT on an $800 laptop. And on a $300 desktop system.
What's Apple's < $1000 desktop system? Oh, an eMac with a built in monitor. Gimme that for $500 without the damn monitor (17" monitors are free and there are plenty around to be had) and we can talk.
I dunno. I recall when some rework of lpd in OpenBSD removed a bunch of "dodgy code". It was fixed because it was wrong (unbounded copies and that sort of thing).
14 months later, when an exploit for lpd was found and out in the wild, OpenBSD was immune. Did they KNOW that it was exploitable? No. They simply fixed something that was wrong.
Now regarding the "for newbies" comment Though the topic itself is not for novices, Skoudis does a splendid job of reviewing the basics with each chapter
Is there any really good reason that all books must be friendly to newbies? One of the things I really dislike about current technical press is that every book I get on something, I have to deal with 30% or more that covers stuff I know.
Let's presume that the reader knows "coding". (if you actually know C or C++ or java, you can reasonably read other algol based languages.). From that we can cover PRINCIPLES of bad coding and what to look for.
I tire of each book being written for kindergardeners (metaphorically). Welcome to CS504 - writing optimizing compilers. We're going to be writing a language and developing a compiler for it for several chip platforms. But first, lets go over what a loop is. Can anyone tell me? Then we'll move to variables.
Oh sure, but it requires a working POWERBOOK under it. We're talking LCD only here.
(re solder burns: there's the occasional touch hot component - there's also been the "sit on the side of a stage with a part held against my thigh with a foot" kinda emergency work.
Burns from the iron? Never. er, 'warmth' from the thing BEING soldered - yeah.
Engineers get to sit in at a clean bench doing work that's been reviewed in meetings by committees.
Real hackers get to solder in a circuit after cutting open the cable casing to get to the wires we need:)
/me recalls yelling at the tech to bring a camera crane down 2 feet because I wouldn't solder UP over my head. He whined about resetting stepper motor counters and finally did it.
But the windows users won't know what we're talking about, so I'll quit.
In my defense (do I need a defense?), I put NeXTs on the desks of sales/marketing weenies (cause they could figure out that their HOME directory was at the little house) and my REAL users (developers) got the festival of HPUX, SGI, Sun3 & Sparcs and a fat wad of XTerminals. 14 unixes, 60 computers. 1 DOS box (it ran voicemail). Later job was 300 desktops, 4 admins (two early, two late).
20 working computers. No windows computers. (CP/M though. Unhappily, no S100 computers. THAT was the apex of computing).
Now that said, maintaining 400 Linux boxes (or Macs or any laptops) is a bitch. Us crankly old guys still have tricks for "deploy this app to 400 machines" or "change the root password in the/etc/passwd file of all machines, except where it's a machine owned by THIS group."
1 at a time is never an acceptable way to run machines. Windows, *nix, VMS.
They have some Linux around. Little utility type functions.
At a company > 10,000 people, there is a difference between "interested" & "using" and in "we are using it for critical systems and rely on it and recommend it and tell our partners to use it."
But then, lots of large fortune 100 wall st companies have had "the future" of desktop unix years ago. They just forget the part where I could fix problems around the world without moving my chair. When admins cost more, but you needed half as many.
And I *know*/. is just rife with old tyme hackers - folks with C in the heart and solder burns on their fingers (it's just those rogue 3 or 4 who actually use *windows* (spit, cough, hork)).
So who here HASN'T etched a circuit board (analog, digital, no matter)? Anyone? - see. Nobody. All l33t h@x0rs.
So fess up, how do I take apart my Powerbook 180 and get it to work with a Radeon card so I can stuff it into my Kaypro "Portable" case and bring it to Usenix with a dual Athlon64 mobo inside (the power supply in that box is HUGE).
And how often do they fail if they are ONLY used for backups?
How often do tapes fail when they are ONLY used for backups?
How about "more than NEVER"?
I have perhaps 50 8mm tapes. I intend to go
through them and toss most of them because several
of them are duplicates but for the TIME they represent.
They are virtually mechanically bullet proof - I've had no qualms putting a tape in its case and tossing it across the room. Sometimes it will bounce. Never had one go INTO fail mode.
Do tapes fail? Occasionally. If you write them and then don't READ them to verify, you'll have more problems. My level 0 backups (if you don't know the term, then you're not tall enough) get written and then restored to/dev/null. And yeah, I've had it fail on those restores. The night the backup happened. And I toss the tape and use a new one.
|> Have you ever sent drives offsite with a
messenger service?
|>And expected them to live?
| Anybody who does this is an idiot and should not themselves expect to live.
Right. And yet, every week, a box of tapes was sent out to reception and picked up by a messenger and taken away.
At $CurrentJob, it's a truck full of tapes that goes off every month - with 4 10drive jukeboxes, you make more media.
So with your disk backups, can you get me a copy of your home dir as it was July 1, 2002?
Slashdot Mirror
database? Shell? Marathons?
If you're running a FAILOVER system, well that's different. The most marketing use of the term cluster (which we define at least 6 different ways, but a good definition is "a group of machines simultaneously working on a set of tasks").
Failover doesn't really take advantage of a couple cabinets full of 2 and 4 way machines running a database. In fact, you're showing WHY I'd want a 16 or 32 CPU box running a database.
And I think their financial straights/straits will keep them from ever putting it out under an Open Source license.
I've not touched a box that backends some mail stuff that was UP for 400 days and hasn't really been maintained, except for patches, for about 4 years. No, it's no directly exposed to the Internet, but I haven't manually rotated logs or ANYTHING on it for a LONG LONG time.
Sun's kernel is glorious. Their userland is pathetically outdated (can I have a vi with more than 1 undo level?). SO yeah, over 20 packages go into Solaris boxes (even Solaris A) to make it happy for me.
Most stable was Ultrix. We had a machine up for 1000 days when a DATACENTER overhaul made us shut it down (for 20 minutes. DAMN). Userland from hell. Solaris is not "most stable" by any means.
If I want to grow to a 12 or 16 way machine, from Sun, I have to BUY a 12 or 16 way chassis. Even with 2 or 4 CPUs.
Linux clusters are a great marketing word, but if you have a cluster that can do what my 12 and 16 way Oracle servers can do, let me know.
"Linux CLusters" that I've seen were all MATH clusters.
I expect that the SPARC will die and sun will be offering 4 and 8 way Athlon64 boxes REALLY soon.
Sun has (cray derived) backplane switches (not available on PCs), TREMENDOUS I/O possible. and finally some decent PCI, but even on a lame PCI E4500, I have SEVERAL separate Busses. My 4-way Intel boxes have, er 1 PCI buss. great.
Ever pull a processor board from a running PC? and it kept running?
Me neither.
Now sun's competition on cool features is SGI. Take a gang (32 of, max) 4-way SGI's and join them into a single box. scales a LOT better. But SGI isn't going to kick anyone's ass.
Won't the world be boring when nobody innovates in computers. When "BIOS"s are how people think computers should boot. (and mcneely might eat in a New Deli, but it might be in New Delhi)
Staring at a box
unmoving
eyes glaze
spittle forms at the edge
the eyes trick the mind into thinking it's stimultated
Or, if you have to ask, you should be elsewhere.
Even that "developers" grouping should be a giveaway.
A milter-alike is killer (make decisions on the content DURING the smtp connection). be nice if it actually used the (barely documented and evolving) milter interface - I can buy commercial Milter products from McAfee and Trend and Sendmail and others...
And IPv6! Wow, sendmail was shipping that commercially in March of 2000. (it was in the free mta before that (commercial is prebuilt mta+gui+management of gangs of machines)).
I like Postfix. I like Weitse. he, and the sendmail folk, can be really helpful and not launch ad hominum attacks on a whim. That's good.
Presuming you run Windows and a brand new video card - I *think*. It knocks me to an "unsupported browser" page (mozilla). Gee, and here I thought the web was about following HTML standards, not vendors. If I wanted proprietary, I'd still have the compuserver account I used to use on occasion in 1989.
If you pull out a briefcase full of cash, or money from a bank loan or deal with their company's financing subcontractor, it shouldn't affect the deal you've made.
As for "pay as little as you can", a friend bought an insane $30k car when he could barely afford it. The car he still drives, 14 years later.
AND if you have equity in a house, banks will bend over backwards to lend you money. But then, if you need money, perhaps you should draw out some equity. But then you risk the house. But the OP wasn't "there" yet. I didn't buy a house for YEARS because I moved a fair amount. Coast, country, city.
And some people do better spending some time with disposable income and playing for a while. Other people are compelled to buy a house and get life insurance at 23 or get married before they're 20. Lord knows that's not me.
Get a VW TDI (diesel) and use biodiesel and feel good. Get a hybrid and stop paying for gas. Get a motorcycle@45MPG and have some fun (or eat a truck). Do what you do. Don't fuck up your credit rating (pay off school loans) and pay off credit card bills in full every month (handy to not carry cash, bad to carry debt). Buy things that are smaller than cars with cash (no financing) and life will be fine.
Learn to cook and use spices and love that rice and beans. Remember, beef costs TONS more per z of protein that a healthier dinner.
Same CPU as the airport.
picked up a 4801 and have 802.11g for THAT one (so freebsd). Boot from (readonly) CF, but put an old kinda iffy 12G laptop drive in it. Later on, I have to move a 160GB USB/Firewire drive so I can put THAT on it and have it NFS serve the mp3s.
Did I mention that it's my always on computer and right now has no fans, makes no noise and draws ~15watts? With the slow disk, buildworld takes several hours (over NFS it's far more).
Now why would you have an airport you can't log into?
For 10BaseT and 100baseTX (and not GigE), 2 pairs of 4 are used for data. The specs for RJ45 Ethernet allowed for the other pair to be used by PHONES (1 or 2 pair, I suppose perhaps Lucent type digital phones might use 2 pair) without conflict.
Lots of places (eg. schools with wiring already run, cheap offices, etc) break out a cat5 to be 2 ethernets.
Cisco's spec allows for 48VDC (think "telco" and bank of batteries with that number). 2 extra wires are ground, 2 extra carry power (-48vdc according to spec, but...)
My soekris accepts 12-56VDC on Eth0. higher voltage means lower amperage which means smaller wires and voltage drop over distance is less of an issue (if your wire drops 5V over a couple hundred feet, that matters a lot at 12V and little at 56V).
That said, doing PoE for an airport has been SIMPLE forever with a BOX or hacked cable. (box better). 2 RJ45s, you pass the ethernet pairs from one to the other and the other pair to a DC jack. You'd use one to introduct power, but you can just as easily pull the power out at the end and pass it to an old airport/linksys/ dlink/netgear AP via the DC in plug.
Leviton makes Quickport boxes that will do 2 RJ45s. Mr Drill puts the hole in for a regular DC plug of choice. It's a project doable in 10 minutes while watching a movie.
For the soekris, I'm using a 24VDC adapter I had (from an old old modem or laptop or something).
The Soekris (4521) uses 12 watts. Lets call it 1A @ 12V. That's 0.25A at 48VDC. Cisco's wall warts are 48VDC @ 0.5A. My solar panels are each 48VDC @ 4A. Pick one (I use one that also works at night).
well, in the band days, by day job was in claymation...
"having to explain yourself" was not an issue.
And screw the sunscreen - the tan looks good.
Perhaps the 20' of bookshelf containing lists of building materials and capacities are there for show?
Perhaps their reworking of clients sketches (we thought THIS would be kinda neat) into something that can structurally work is an illusion? (that's nice, but lets do THIS to get the same effect and something that won't cost $10,000 and perhaps fall in a 70mph wind
The one who helped a builder friend design and build a house in Tahoe who insisted that, "No, you can't have a roof with this sort of structure since it will collapse with the amount of snow that sits on the roof" was praise as his HUGE BEAMS that were insane worked fine while a shed the builder tossed up just to protect some gear over the winter collapsed in December (seems snow melts, gets a little water dense, freezes and weighs a lot as it builds up).
The certification has several really hard structural questions with variables that you just can't know. The right answer is apparently, "consult a structural engineer."
However, for most work, the architect is responsible for knowing that a 20' long 2x12 on 8" centers can support this much weight stably. I know this because I was looking to add a floor to a (tall) "crawl space" and was looking at 2x8s and it was 'splained to me that I'd be back down 5' in the dirt unless I only stored styrofoam peanuts).
"designers" say "oh this would look cool". If fact we have a lot of "systems interior designers" here developing apps.
Architects are responsible for egregious design problems, if they are involved. Builders and civil engineers are responsible for
ensuring it's sane and within code (also, because some architects DO get it wrong. Just as builders do. more eyes = GOOD in things that last 20-500 years.
building it right.
And yes, engineers have been arrested. Several in my home city for allowing substandard concrete pours (don't pour structural pieces in deeply freezing weather - they don't cure right and will collapse.)
And yes, there are plenty of degreed architects who are working under a licensed architect (with stamp) who learn this. You don't come out of ANY school and get to build a large bridge. Engineer or architect.
Pa-thetic.
Ok, apple should support their products better. When screens are going out bad (brand new $3000 machines with several "dead pixels" is *not* ok).
Apple should have a consistent story for the "apple tax" of $500-$1000 extra just for running OSX. They're not gaining a lot of market share. and the competition isn't the (miserable) windows line, it's also Unix with KDE/GNOME.
Apple needs tools to manage them at an enterpise level.
Apple needs to suck up to developers again to get products that make their platform rich with software (again).
They used to do that. I have an Apple //+, a MacSE, a MacCI, a couple powerbook generations and a newish one. And I'm looking at more "ok" software being built in that DESTROYS any market for third party stuff.
No software means no sales.
Psion showed that with developer hostile policies and were trounces in moments when palm came out. Oh, incidentally, SDKs were free or close to free for the Palm. Compare the palm sales to the newton and you see that making is EASY to develop for it and it will pay you back two-fold.
Or does this shake your worldview that AppleCanDoNoWrong?
You have a job and no more homework or papers for school.
If you can pay rent with 1/4-1/3 of your monthly salary, eat and have fun, then seize it.
You're not getting married. If it TRULY sucks, you can leave. If you can make it a year first, great.
After that you have a track record that you can survive at a place for a year. (it's important, really).
You have something on your resume.
You get to see what work is like in the real world and what you like and don't like about this place.
A friend's dad was a job counselor. He helped his son and I go through some college selection things when we were 17. The stuff he used at work which was kinda cool. Make a list of your previous jobs.
- write down 10 (or so) things you liked.
- write down 10 things you DIDN'T like
- Take that last list and find the opposite
Now, take the pluses and the opposite of minuses and choose 10 most important things and look around with that in mind.This can be challenging work; babes in the office; free pizza on fridays; working with project managers to learn how it all works, whatever.
"Micromanaging boss" might become "boss that lets me work on my own a bit"
I found my list from pre-college 10 years later. Where my college didn't match on that list was often where I was frustrated and annoyed. OTOH, there were things I just didn't know about and was wrong on. But it happens. And 12 of 15 things were just about right.
Learn to cook. Brown rice and beans will cost $2 and be 3 meals. Spices and garlic make it worth eating.
Learn to budget. You have $N. You can spend $F on food, $R on rent, $L on loan payback, $S on some savings. The rest is $Entertainment and fun.
Spend > $E, and you lose. Put it on Visa and you might as well surrender now.
You really don't need a new TV. You may need new clothes for work though. None of it is deductable.
Hell, burn the TV. It takes an IQ point away for every 100 hrs you watch.
Take time and save up and travel some. You're less encumbered and can have fun.
everything you do before you're 25 is overlooked in the job world
I spent 3 summers touring with bands building Rock and Roll stages. It was a blast; I made some cash; I didn't die (before I reach for that, did I clip in or not...). My crap was in storage and it had totally nothing to do with my "career." In the winter, I had some real jobs.
Of course, they would have still been in .de at the take-off point sitting on the ground... But they'd be safe!
The few big name architects CAN make a bunch of money. And we're all Internet billionaires here too, right? (my stock options are 2-ply ... mmmmm, soft)
Now an architecture firm might charge a lot for design, but that usually means that for 4 months, you are using a staff of highly trained people and their equipment (rolls and rolls of e-size paper) and resources (you must use 6x12 beams spaced on 12 inch centers here to support this amount of weight), plus the bonus that for whoever stamps the plans that are filed, they are pretty well perpetually liable.
Someone slips on an icy sidewalk? The guy who designed the building 20 years ago is in the suit.
So next time someone calls themselves a software "architect", mock them and refer to them as "software interior designers".
Real architects get 6 years training and brutal exams on par with the bar. Too many "systems architects" and the like get some training on Microsoft Project and wonder why this web application they designed isn't scaling like it should. And most often, they are NEVER accountable for systems that fail.
Damn, so that server 10,000 miles away in australia I just rebooted after a problem shouldn't have serial?
On of the PAINS of "legacy free" machines and Apples as servers is that there is no serial port.
Big kudo's for apple
Frankly, I'm more offended that I have to pay more to use the features for which I went out and bought things because Jobs has no concept of "TRANSITION".
I have a firewire card for my -current laptop.
I keep using the laptop in part because of the SCSI (annoyingly a deeply apple-unique connector - no joy when I forget the plug traveling and need it).
I'm offended that my trackball and bitpad became moot when Apple "introduced" USB without an ADB transition time. "Oh, if you wait 5-9 months, I'm sure someone will let you buy an USB -> ADB dongle."
Software wise? OS X (a unix) smokes Windows for ease of use and learning. For the software you can still find for the Mac. Hell, AmigaDOS smokes Windows. Sorry, corporate trouble ticket systems we evaluated only had windows support (I asked all of them, the closest I got was "web and Java" but it turned out that it had to be IE and Java on windows - idiots). We find that story over and over. And vendors are reluctant to develop for Mac when you're assured a smaller market share than Linux and Apple might just replace your software with one in the OS? Ever note the rich fabric of sound tools (developing and playing mp3's for the Mac? No? Thanks to garageband and iTunes, there's no room for something to come in unless its an order of magnitude better).
But for those of us who live in terminal windows and do system admin and don't read slashdot and ponder "maybe some day I'll use unix" - for those of us who put MachTen on Powerbook 180s...
WHat's the win of the $1000 "apple tax"?
Compare 15" notebooks. Apple "Starting at $2000". Loaded with features we really don't need (100baseT would be fine, DVI? 80MB/s firewire attached to 6MB/s disks?
Okay, now compare to a compaq (that can use a DOCK) with ethernet, 802.11g, PS/2 *and* usb *and* firewire similar drives and works fine with BSD or linux for $1200.
Shall we touch on Apple's history of record-short warrantees (fixed after way too long)? Or current customer services that's either fantastic or abysmal? It's notable that many of the fantastic stories are along the lines of "my machine died and I hadn't paid the AppleCare protection money and the day after warrantee the BLAH stopped working. They told me I'd have to send it in and pay $400, but they sent back a new one without charging me because there are 4000 other people with the same problem and they don't want YET ANOTHER class action lawsuit for their Almost Recalled problems!"
Again, if the choice is MacOS/Windows, MacOS clearly wins.
But this is slashdot, home of the Unix wannabes who browse from Windows, so I'll assume it's a matter of "MacOS - the Mach Kernel with a (slow) proprietary windowing system and Display PDF" vs. BSD/Linux running X and GNOME/KDE with lots and lots of momentum behind it for free and commercial apps. And the ability to easily emulate Windows enough to run those "required by work" Windows apps. Microsoft now owns "virtual PC" so its fate is, er interesting.
So it becomes moot.
However when Apple introduced the iMac with USB and firewire, but no SCSI or ADB - meaning those of us who had spent money with Apple and their partners for parts were SOL. Apple has a long habit of burning loyal users.
Cracks in the case? Cosmetic, not covered underwarrantee (lemme tell you how good that laptop looks with epoxy holding the crack that extended from going further).
From the start of the mac, they've done this (which was odd given that they committed to open at the start and that Apple ][ cards worked in ][+ and ][e and even /// machines - they even were a big cause of IBM (of all companies) "inventing" the personal computer and using non-IBM parts - and being fairly Open such that all those machines you have are derived from PC clones)). With mac they went closed and proprietary.
Got a trackball for your Mac 512? Maybe a less painful keyboard? Sorry, we have ADB now.
Mac SE cards? Sorry, the new SE uses a different buss.
I'll just touch on iPod schemes for charging them and talking to them. The Firewire cable is simple and worked. Now I have (another) proprietary dock cable thingy to deal with. Nice "improvment."
Own a SCSI scanner, drive, tape? Yeah, we're using Firewire. No transistion machines. Sorry.
The day that Apple introduced the iMac, I was down the street earlier that day looking at a Compaq PC. It had USB and Firewire and IDE and PS/2 connectors and serial ports. I could run a USB keyboard and a legacy trackball. With the iMac, I could run their crap keyboard and hope drivers for other things might be available. Transition is useful (surprisingly, firewire-2 works with old firewire. That's a break from their habit).
Feature for feature matching is only useful if you want those features.
Is GigE really necessary for most of us? It's cool, but my servers have GigE and use it, my desktops and laptops don't. So knock that off the comparison chart.
64bit? Hate to break it, but OS 10.3 isn't 64 bit. So the G5's only fully used by, er, Linux.
Look, if the choice is a machine running Windows or a machine running MacOS then, if you can get the apps you want, the mac is cheaper. You're not spending forever screwing around supporting and restoring the machine. My mom got a mac because I won't help her with Windows (it's like AlAnon).
OTOH, if the choice is an x86 box running *nix vs. a Mac, then the PC is cheaper by a chunk. An older 266MHz pentium with 128MB of RAM running fvwm SMOKES the G4 Tibook with 768MB of RAM. THe Terminal App leaves a huge memory footprint. Aqua is sluggish and fat. Making X11 look not-fat is a feat! Sure, at several typical end user things it's a much better machine. But really, I read mail, browse, and user terminals 90% of the time.
At work, there's a Mac and a WIndows box. The Windows box is used only for Notes and a trouble ticket system for which I have no choice. The Mac is a Lombard with 2 heads (LCD and a monitor) for everything else.
Bizarrely, I find myself using Windows for OpenOffice - because the 400MHz Mac with 256MB of RAM running firefox and terminal starts swapping (1GB of swap in use!) when I start up XWindows. Forget mail.app (I'm happy with mutt and IMAP) or iChat, terminal + X + browser kills a Mac.
so when you price compare
double the ram in the Mac, leave the PC alone for Unix and compare $2400 to $800 for a laptop configured to run your stuff. Linux runs GREAT on an $800 laptop. And on a $300 desktop system.
What's Apple's < $1000 desktop system? Oh, an eMac with a built in monitor. Gimme that for $500 without the damn monitor (17" monitors are free and there are plenty around to be had) and we can talk.
Oh, you'd better buy Office, because
14 months later, when an exploit for lpd was found and out in the wild, OpenBSD was immune. Did they KNOW that it was exploitable? No. They simply fixed something that was wrong.
Now regarding the "for newbies" comment
Though the topic itself is not for novices, Skoudis does a splendid job of reviewing the basics with each chapter
Is there any really good reason that all books must be friendly to newbies? One of the things I really dislike about current technical press is that every book I get on something, I have to deal with 30% or more that covers stuff I know.
Let's presume that the reader knows "coding". (if you actually know C or C++ or java, you can reasonably read other algol based languages.). From that we can cover PRINCIPLES of bad coding and what to look for.
I tire of each book being written for kindergardeners (metaphorically). Welcome to CS504 - writing optimizing compilers. We're going to be writing a language and developing a compiler for it for several chip platforms. But first, lets go over what a loop is. Can anyone tell me? Then we'll move to variables.
(re solder burns: there's the occasional touch hot component - there's also been the "sit on the side of a stage with a part held against my thigh with a foot" kinda emergency work.
Burns from the iron? Never. er, 'warmth' from the thing BEING soldered - yeah.
Engineers get to sit in at a clean bench doing work that's been reviewed in meetings by committees.
Real hackers get to solder in a circuit after cutting open the cable casing to get to the wires we need :)
But the windows users won't know what we're talking about, so I'll quit.
In my defense (do I need a defense?), I put NeXTs on the desks of sales/marketing weenies (cause they could figure out that their HOME directory was at the little house) and my REAL users (developers) got the festival of HPUX, SGI, Sun3 & Sparcs and a fat wad of XTerminals. 14 unixes, 60 computers. 1 DOS box (it ran voicemail). Later job was 300 desktops, 4 admins (two early, two late).
20 working computers. No windows computers. (CP/M though. Unhappily, no S100 computers. THAT was the apex of computing).
Now that said, maintaining 400 Linux boxes (or Macs or any laptops) is a bitch. Us crankly old guys still have tricks for "deploy this app to 400 machines" or "change the root password in the /etc/passwd file of all machines, except where it's a machine owned by THIS group."
1 at a time is never an acceptable way to run machines. Windows, *nix, VMS.
They have some Linux around. Little utility type functions.
At a company > 10,000 people, there is a difference between "interested" & "using" and in "we are using it for critical systems and rely on it and recommend it and tell our partners to use it."
But then, lots of large fortune 100 wall st companies have had "the future" of desktop unix years ago. They just forget the part where I could fix problems around the world without moving my chair. When admins cost more, but you needed half as many.
Lovely screens...
And I *know* /. is just rife with old tyme hackers - folks with C in the heart and solder burns on their fingers (it's just those rogue 3 or 4 who actually use *windows* (spit, cough, hork)).
So who here HASN'T etched a circuit board (analog, digital, no matter)? Anyone? - see. Nobody. All l33t h@x0rs.
So fess up, how do I take apart my Powerbook 180 and get it to work with a Radeon card so I can stuff it into my Kaypro "Portable" case and bring it to Usenix with a dual Athlon64 mobo inside (the power supply in that box is HUGE).
How often do tapes fail when they are ONLY used for backups?
How about "more than NEVER"?
I have perhaps 50 8mm tapes. I intend to go through them and toss most of them because several of them are duplicates but for the TIME they represent.
They are virtually mechanically bullet proof - I've had no qualms putting a tape in its case and tossing it across the room. Sometimes it will bounce. Never had one go INTO fail mode.
Do tapes fail? Occasionally. If you write them and then don't READ them to verify, you'll have more problems. My level 0 backups (if you don't know the term, then you're not tall enough) get written and then restored to /dev/null. And yeah, I've had it fail on those restores. The night the backup happened. And I toss the tape and use a new one.
|> Have you ever sent drives offsite with a messenger service?
|>And expected them to live?
| Anybody who does this is an idiot and should not themselves expect to live.
Right. And yet, every week, a box of tapes was sent out to reception and picked up by a messenger and taken away.
At $CurrentJob, it's a truck full of tapes that goes off every month - with 4 10drive jukeboxes, you make more media.
So with your disk backups, can you get me a copy of your home dir as it was July 1, 2002?