Recently I built a new PC. [...] This time I tried Mint. It installed beautifully. It was easier and quicker to install than Windows.
[..problems and solution..]
Well now my video card works but I can't map any drives and my computer is constantly flooding the network with queries (how embarrassing). Our IT department is wanting to know what I was doing. I don't know. I manage to figure out the circuitous route to accessing shared drives on the network but when I doubleclick on the openoffice document on one of those network drives, I see the open office splash screen but it never opens the document. I learn that there is more to do than just "get to" the shared drives.
I finally gave up, formatted the drive and installed Windows. I'm not a hacker or even an overclocker anymore. I'm an administrator now and the final straw was when I realized that work was piling up on me while I fiddled with my OS. Playing with linux was cool but when it all boiled down to it, I had work to do and just wanted to get my job done.
(emphasis mine)
Putting the question of "ready for the desktop" aside for a moment... As an IT manager, I found your post to be really, really funny. And really sad. I'd have hard questions for any sysadmin of mine who (1) built(!) or installed his work PC, (2) without the desktop support staff being aware of it, and (3) did it during work hours when he's supposed to be doing his real job (not doing desktop OS re-installs, letting his work stuff pile up.)
I may work in a University, but we support the Enterprise, so basic rules still apply. If you want to run Linux on your work desktop (and I do... Fedora 8 on my Dell D420 laptop... will upgrade to Fedora 9 soon) that's fine. Really. But I ask that you make sure the desktop support folks (and your manager) know about it, and that you don't mess around with the install when you're supposed to be doing other things. Other things, like your job. (We pay the desktop support staff to do desktop support... I pay you to admin the UNIX systems.)
I'm in a huge enterprise shop and we're always scratching our heads, trying to figure out how to make the latest hardware work in a supported way now when the SW vendors are saying "Yeah, that's available in the kernel now, but it'll be a while before we officially release & support it." We ask the HW vendors about official support from the distro, and they say "Isn't this supposed to be open source? Can't you just build a new kernel that supports this, with these drivers we'll give you?"
[...]
We have to figure out how to tame the chaos. Enterprises are shying away from Linux now because of the churn. All the value that is gained by using cheap x86 hardware is lost in the Engineering churn.
Then you're doing it wrong. I manage a fairly large Enterprise environment, currently 600+ servers that is about 1/3 Linux, and we don't have chaos. We've run Linux in our Enterprise since about 1999, so we're not new to this. And we're currently consolidating another 500+ servers from other parts of the Enterprise, most of which are Linux. We haven't had these problems that you describe. Why? Because we work with our vendors. We don't just buy any hardware, or any config, and hope it will run Linux. Instead, we have a process to order hardware, and we do our homework first. When we purchase hardware that we know will run Linux, we specify to the vendor "Must be certified for RHEL5" or similar. So the vendor will only give us a quote for hardware that we know will work in our environment.
And do you know what happens when we do that up front? Things work.
This is easy because IBM and Dell and all the other (major) hardware vendors know that Enterprise IT shops like yours and mine run Linux. So they work hard to ensure Linux works with the hardware they sell. And at least with IBM and Dell (we use them a lot) they will certify their hardware for several key Linux distros. RHEL is a major distro with a lot of third-party software support (Oracle, WebLogic, PeopleSoft,...) so it's often certified first.
Heck, at least in the case of IBM and Dell (and I'm sure with other vendors) you can get your Linux support directly from them. One support center if you have problems with the hardware or operating system. And with their third-party relationships, you can often call the same support center for problems with storage (EMC,..), certain software, networks, etc. (Disclaimer: while this is available to us, we prefer to use Red Hat to support our OS, and the hardware vendor to support our hardware components. This is mainly because it makes purchasing licenses simpler. To get Linux support from IBM or Dell, you need to order your RHEL entitlements from IBM or Dell. As a University, it's actually easier for us to order entitlements separately from Red Hat than to do it as a single purchase through IBM or Dell - alas, that's how our purchasing department works.)
And no, we aren't lagging behind in the latest hardware. When the latest blades came out from IBM, they supported Linux. When the latest multi-core systems came out from Dell, they supported Linux. Everything works great from the moment we take it out of the box. We've never "scratch[ed] our heads, trying to figure out how to make the latest hardware work in a supported way" and we don't compile custom kernels. If that's how you support your Enterprise, you need to re-think what you're doing.
No one has suggested it yet, but I recommend you try building a Beowulf cluster. Just for fun. And for added fun, make it a DOS Beowulf. Follow the step-by-step at building your own low-cost supercomputing cluster. If you have two or more old machines, the cost can probably be kept under $10. The machines don't need a lot of memory, but they must have a working parallel port.
But it is NOT free software.
I'm with FSF about this one. The "open source" term made it all less clear what this whole movement is all about.
While I'm not 100% with the FSF on the "open source" vs "Free software" terminology, I do think "open source" is overused and often misapplied. I said something similar to this when I criticized OpenDOS for not really being "open". They had made the source code available - to view only, you couldn't do anything with it. So they called it "open source" and "free", even though it wasn't really either. That was years ago. They've since changed back to proprietary, which (at least) is more honest.
I have another issue with the name. When I read the headline, I was convinced that this was a USENET news reader or some such, and wondered why the FSF would need to "approve" it. I was surprised to learn that gNewSense is, in fact, a complete distro.
Why do so many projects need to have difficult-to-understand names? I could have come up with a list of at least 10 names that were better for a FSF distro of Linux.
Times change, and it should be unsurprising that the dominant programming languages change along with it. Some day, Java, PHP, Visual Basic, Python, and Ruby will all be obsolescent as well. Thirty years ago, computers were vastly different than they are now. In another thirty years, there will have been another quantum leap (intended) in computing. Why should the languages we program them with remain the same?
C/C++ is really strong today, and I don't forsee it going away in the next 5-10 years. I do agree that after that time, even drivers may be written in something else. Don't worry, though. For those of us who know the languages, C/C++ will be really hot skills in about 30 years. I'll be about 65 then, ready to do some consulting/coding before I finally retire.:-)
At my work, we had a group that would regularly purchase 2 laptops for every developer: one for them to use at home, and one for them to Remote-desktop into. I think the idea was that developers could take their laptops to meetings, but would be able to Remote into it from home so they wouldn't have to replicate tools, etc. When we started purchasing centrally, we stopped that practice. If you have a laptop, it's because you need to be highly mobile, and you should take the laptop with you.
Laptops tend to disappear, no matter how well protected. During the day, not so great a risk (cable lock is sufficient.) At night, it's a greater risk because you rely on Security to keep an eye on it for you. In a cubicle, that's just a matter of time before it goes away. And all the data that was on it - are you sure none of it was sensitive data, i.e. reportable? Do yourself a favor: if you have a laptop, take it home with you. If you don't want to take it home with you, then get a desktop PC.
An awful lot of PCs are those $300 dell specials. Apple doesn't make products that crappy, but Dell moves boatloads of them... so Dell picks up a lot of unit sales eroding Apples 'market share by unit', but because the price is so low and Apple hangs onto more of the higher value sales, the erosion effect of these low end units on their 'market share by price' is considerably less.
Lets compare apples and oranges;)
I sell oranges at $1
I sell apples at $1
As you can see "Apples are no more expensive than oranges."
I also sell rotten oranges at 50 cents.
I don't sell rotten apples.
So if I sell 100 apples, 200 oranges, and 200 rotten oranges:
...
That's essentially whats happening here.
Not quite. What's happening is that Apple does sell their systems for slightly more than comparable PCs. Not 25% more, but slightly more. But the real issue is that there are a lot of other PC manufacturers out there, and they are all competing. Everyone I know who's over 40 would happily buy any PC from any vendor, without caring what label is on the front. And the market kind of runs like that; a lot of people just don't care who makes their PC. Dell and the other guys know that, so they also sell cheap PCs as well as what you might consider "workstation"-quality PCs.
So the first part of your comment is correct: "An awful lot of PCs are those $300 dell specials. [fanboy stuff removed]... so Dell picks up a lot of unit sales eroding Apples 'market share by unit'."
Here's where your analogy falls apart for me:
I also sell rotten oranges at 50 cents.
I don't sell rotten apples.
Really, you should say:
I have to sell oranges during a year when there's a bumper crop, and lots of other guys are selling pretty much the same oranges. So I sell oranges at 50 cents.
I keep selling apples at $1.
That was the Question that came out of Arthur's brain, when pulling random letters from the Scrabble tile bag in pre-historic Earth. But as Ford and Arthur pointed out just before they did so, Arthur escaped from the Earth just before his planet was destroyed. So whatever comes out probably won't be the correct Question, but it should be close.
And in fact, 6 x 7 = 42, so 6 x 9 was off by 2.:-)
Some of you with high-user-IDs may not get the Vogon reference. From The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy:
"The huge yellow somethings [Vogon Constructor Fleet] went unnoticed at Goonhilly, they passed over Cape Canaveral without a blip, Woomera and Jodrell Bank looked straight through them--which was a pity because it was exactly the sort of thing they'd been looking for all these years"
IIRC, it's the same line from the radio play, the book, and the TV miniseries.:-)
It may always seem that way, but fortunate for the rest of us in IT, it's not always the case. What you don't hear about, of course, are all the times when an organization has deleted critical data by accident, but was able to restore because they did the proper thing and had good backups of the data. That never seems to make headlines, for some reason.
This sounds really interesting, but I'm waiting to hear more about video and wireless card. Thinkpads have been very good for me in running Linux, but Linux on laptops these days often comes down to the video card, modem, and the wireless card. Modems are usually winmodems, which are hard to support - but I haven't used a modem in years. Anyone have other details to point to?
This may be construed as a troll, but it isn't.
Asking about what bugs Apple users? I have a Mac at home (my other systems run Linux) and I sometimes use it to do personal email and other "at home" things. I tripped a huge bug today: needed to email someone a snippet of a long html file. Brought up the page in my browser, View Source, copy/paste into TextEdit. Saved the file (without an extension, but that doesn't matter since it was just text.) There were no <html></html> tags around the text, just a long snippet of html source that contained a bunch of <p></p>'s and some lists. Then I quit TextEdit, since Iwas done with the file.
Went to attach that file to an email, and when I clicked on the file from the "find the file" dialog, the Mac paused for a moment, then labelled the file as an RTF file.
Hmm... didn't seem right to me. Opened the file from Finder just to double-check, and yes, the file that had originally contained nothing but a long section of html now had been magically converted to an RTF document. None of my original html was there anymore. The Mac modified my file without asking me.
Using a signed int for the score isn't a new thing - I know that gamers have experimented with this limit on other games. On one of their podcasts, Insomniac Games mentioned a gamer who had succeeded in rolling the number of bolts in 'Ratchet & Clank' to be negative, and then none of the vendors would sell him anything.
That being said, you could always get a MacBook Air. Nothing says "high technology" like a complete lack of an optical drive.;-)
Offtopic, but I know a lot of people like to beat up on Apple for the "no internal optical drive on the MacBook Air" thing. I have a Dell D420, which doesn't have a built-in optical drive (it's in the dock) and I can't say I ever use the optical drive until I need to upgrade my Linux distro. All my backups are done over my home network, or to USB storage. When's the last time you used your DVD/CDRW drive? And not having an internal optical drive saves a lot of weight and bulk in the laptop.
I'm not a Mac weenie by any stretch, but I think Apple made a good call on that for an ultralight laptop.
Based on my previous successes in getting Microsoft to release the source code to the deprecated MS-DOS 4.x (i.e. before the MS-DOS 5.0 complete re-write) under a free / open-source license, I'm confident that Microsoft will be happy to release deprecated file formats under a similar license.
Here's what I do: I lead by example. Then, when someone comes to me with his IE problem, I (honestly) tell him that I'm sorry but I can't help him with that because I use a better browser instead and point him to Firefox.
That's a rather dickish attitude. I avoided the Mac for a looooooong time because of the "what I'm using is better than what you're using" attitude of several of my Mac-using friends. (Eventually, I added a Mac to my home network, and I'm happy with it. But Linux is still my desktop of choice.)
Most people won't win others over with the response you suggest.
Certainly re-using an old PC workstation as a file server (especially after adding storage) running some distro of Linux is a good suggestion. If the original poster doesn't mind setting up the environment (I think he's ok with it) then this is a very cheap, effective solution. But the original poster also said he considered re-using older hardware and had decided not to.
What I did in my house was buy a low-end MacMini ($600) with extra external storage ($180) and enable SSH. I have a home network with wireless + wired, and the Mac is on a wired port. I use the Mac as a backup server for the Linux boxen in our house. The neat thing is that the Mac can boot itself each morning, and shut itself off each night, saving on power when I'm not likely to be using it. I have it boot at 6AM and shut down at 10PM. Also, when the system isn't being used, it goes into a low-power mode.
It's a decent solution. Works great for rsync/SSH backups, or to save off some files that don't need to be on my laptop. I also mapped a connection to it via GNOME if I want to browse for a particular file.
And yes, the MacMini can run headless just fine. Although when I later bought an HDTV, I plugged it into that via the VGA port, so now I have a 40" 1920×1080 display when I want it!:-)
Actually, I was summarizing the article with "The PlayStation 2. (Please start pushing developers to the PS3.)" For myself, I still enjoy the PS2, and still have several PS2 (and PS1) games that I will occasionally re-play. "Ico", "Shadow of the Colossus", and "Killzone" are at the top of the stack. "Tomb Raider Anniversary" was a great game, and I'll definitely play it again that this year.
Of course, those games really show what the PS2 is capable of. You can do some amazing things within PS2 limitations, if the developer is willing and able to put in the necessary effort.
But "Fun" is more important than "Impressive". I'd rather play a fun game with less-impressive visuals, than a less-fun game that looks awesome. For games that can do both, great. But if it's got to come down to one or the other, give me "Fun". That's why I sometimes go back to re-play "Spyro the Dragon" (PS1) and bought a copy on PlayStation Network - the graphics aren't that impressive compared to modern games, but the gameplay is so darned fun that I don't care.
That said, I'd like to see more PS3 games coming out. But fewer FPS's.
It's a short article, but here are the 9 things for those of you who don't want to RTFA:
The Phrase "Next-Gen". (It's not "next gen" until the PS4.)
"Halo 3". (Similar to the above, Halo is done, the fight is finished, no need to refer to the version anymore.)
Bad Virtual Console Releases. (Referring to Nintendo.)
Game Delays. (I'm with him in hating delays, but good luck on that one.)
Countdown Clocks. (I guess I never noticed a countdown clock on gaming web sites, but maybe that's because I don't really visit web sites for not-yet-released games. I suppose they have them.)
Japan-Only Releases. (If the game is done, why not also release it in the US? Maybe it will do well, maybe not. Give it a try.)
The PlayStation 2. (Please start pushing developers to the PS3.)
711 selling Video Games. (Doesn't like the idea of being able to buy a Slurpee and a video game in one stop.)
Totilo and N'Gai's Love Affair. (These guys are friends and they talk about each other in their articles, but we'd like to hear more about games than the other guy.)
This sort of thing looks just like the same kind of "quick fix", I'm really skeptical of this one too. IIRC, most of our self-repair functions happen when we sleep, so this probably has long-term implications that won't be caught in an 18 month trial.
Slashdot Mirror
(emphasis mine)
Putting the question of "ready for the desktop" aside for a moment ... As an IT manager, I found your post to be really, really funny. And really sad. I'd have hard questions for any sysadmin of mine who (1) built(!) or installed his work PC, (2) without the desktop support staff being aware of it, and (3) did it during work hours when he's supposed to be doing his real job (not doing desktop OS re-installs, letting his work stuff pile up.)
I may work in a University, but we support the Enterprise, so basic rules still apply. If you want to run Linux on your work desktop (and I do ... Fedora 8 on my Dell D420 laptop ... will upgrade to Fedora 9 soon) that's fine. Really. But I ask that you make sure the desktop support folks (and your manager) know about it, and that you don't mess around with the install when you're supposed to be doing other things. Other things, like your job. (We pay the desktop support staff to do desktop support ... I pay you to admin the UNIX systems.)
Then you're doing it wrong. I manage a fairly large Enterprise environment, currently 600+ servers that is about 1/3 Linux, and we don't have chaos. We've run Linux in our Enterprise since about 1999, so we're not new to this. And we're currently consolidating another 500+ servers from other parts of the Enterprise, most of which are Linux. We haven't had these problems that you describe. Why? Because we work with our vendors. We don't just buy any hardware, or any config, and hope it will run Linux. Instead, we have a process to order hardware, and we do our homework first. When we purchase hardware that we know will run Linux, we specify to the vendor "Must be certified for RHEL5" or similar. So the vendor will only give us a quote for hardware that we know will work in our environment.
And do you know what happens when we do that up front? Things work.
This is easy because IBM and Dell and all the other (major) hardware vendors know that Enterprise IT shops like yours and mine run Linux. So they work hard to ensure Linux works with the hardware they sell. And at least with IBM and Dell (we use them a lot) they will certify their hardware for several key Linux distros. RHEL is a major distro with a lot of third-party software support (Oracle, WebLogic, PeopleSoft, ...) so it's often certified first.
Heck, at least in the case of IBM and Dell (and I'm sure with other vendors) you can get your Linux support directly from them. One support center if you have problems with the hardware or operating system. And with their third-party relationships, you can often call the same support center for problems with storage (EMC, ..), certain software, networks, etc. (Disclaimer: while this is available to us, we prefer to use Red Hat to support our OS, and the hardware vendor to support our hardware components. This is mainly because it makes purchasing licenses simpler. To get Linux support from IBM or Dell, you need to order your RHEL entitlements from IBM or Dell. As a University, it's actually easier for us to order entitlements separately from Red Hat than to do it as a single purchase through IBM or Dell - alas, that's how our purchasing department works.)
And no, we aren't lagging behind in the latest hardware. When the latest blades came out from IBM, they supported Linux. When the latest multi-core systems came out from Dell, they supported Linux. Everything works great from the moment we take it out of the box. We've never "scratch[ed] our heads, trying to figure out how to make the latest hardware work in a supported way" and we don't compile custom kernels. If that's how you support your Enterprise, you need to re-think what you're doing.
No one has suggested it yet, but I recommend you try building a Beowulf cluster. Just for fun. And for added fun, make it a DOS Beowulf. Follow the step-by-step at building your own low-cost supercomputing cluster. If you have two or more old machines, the cost can probably be kept under $10. The machines don't need a lot of memory, but they must have a working parallel port.
While I'm not 100% with the FSF on the "open source" vs "Free software" terminology, I do think "open source" is overused and often misapplied. I said something similar to this when I criticized OpenDOS for not really being "open". They had made the source code available - to view only, you couldn't do anything with it. So they called it "open source" and "free", even though it wasn't really either. That was years ago. They've since changed back to proprietary, which (at least) is more honest.
I have another issue with the name. When I read the headline, I was convinced that this was a USENET news reader or some such, and wondered why the FSF would need to "approve" it. I was surprised to learn that gNewSense is, in fact, a complete distro.
Why do so many projects need to have difficult-to-understand names? I could have come up with a list of at least 10 names that were better for a FSF distro of Linux.
C/C++ is really strong today, and I don't forsee it going away in the next 5-10 years. I do agree that after that time, even drivers may be written in something else. Don't worry, though. For those of us who know the languages, C/C++ will be really hot skills in about 30 years. I'll be about 65 then, ready to do some consulting/coding before I finally retire. :-)
I'll take partial credit for that. You are welcome.
:-)
At my work, we had a group that would regularly purchase 2 laptops for every developer: one for them to use at home, and one for them to Remote-desktop into. I think the idea was that developers could take their laptops to meetings, but would be able to Remote into it from home so they wouldn't have to replicate tools, etc. When we started purchasing centrally, we stopped that practice. If you have a laptop, it's because you need to be highly mobile, and you should take the laptop with you.
Laptops tend to disappear, no matter how well protected. During the day, not so great a risk (cable lock is sufficient.) At night, it's a greater risk because you rely on Security to keep an eye on it for you. In a cubicle, that's just a matter of time before it goes away. And all the data that was on it - are you sure none of it was sensitive data, i.e. reportable? Do yourself a favor: if you have a laptop, take it home with you. If you don't want to take it home with you, then get a desktop PC.
Not quite. What's happening is that Apple does sell their systems for slightly more than comparable PCs. Not 25% more, but slightly more. But the real issue is that there are a lot of other PC manufacturers out there, and they are all competing. Everyone I know who's over 40 would happily buy any PC from any vendor, without caring what label is on the front. And the market kind of runs like that; a lot of people just don't care who makes their PC. Dell and the other guys know that, so they also sell cheap PCs as well as what you might consider "workstation"-quality PCs.
So the first part of your comment is correct: "An awful lot of PCs are those $300 dell specials. [fanboy stuff removed] ... so Dell picks up a lot of unit sales eroding Apples 'market share by unit'."
Here's where your analogy falls apart for me:
Really, you should say:
I have to sell oranges during a year when there's a bumper crop, and lots of other guys are selling pretty much the same oranges. So I sell oranges at 50 cents.
I keep selling apples at $1.
That was the Question that came out of Arthur's brain, when pulling random letters from the Scrabble tile bag in pre-historic Earth. But as Ford and Arthur pointed out just before they did so, Arthur escaped from the Earth just before his planet was destroyed. So whatever comes out probably won't be the correct Question, but it should be close.
And in fact, 6 x 7 = 42, so 6 x 9 was off by 2. :-)
Some of you with high-user-IDs may not get the Vogon reference. From The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy:
"The huge yellow somethings [Vogon Constructor Fleet] went unnoticed at Goonhilly, they passed over Cape Canaveral without a blip, Woomera and Jodrell Bank looked straight through them--which was a pity because it was exactly the sort of thing they'd been looking for all these years"IIRC, it's the same line from the radio play, the book, and the TV miniseries. :-)
Kudos to you for turning your response about Apple's iTMS DRM into a whack against Sony. My hat is off to you sir!
tangent (n): 3. A topic nearly unrelated to the main topic, but having a point in common with it.
It may always seem that way, but fortunate for the rest of us in IT, it's not always the case. What you don't hear about, of course, are all the times when an organization has deleted critical data by accident, but was able to restore because they did the proper thing and had good backups of the data. That never seems to make headlines, for some reason.
This sounds really interesting, but I'm waiting to hear more about video and wireless card. Thinkpads have been very good for me in running Linux, but Linux on laptops these days often comes down to the video card, modem, and the wireless card. Modems are usually winmodems, which are hard to support - but I haven't used a modem in years. Anyone have other details to point to?
This may be construed as a troll, but it isn't. Asking about what bugs Apple users? I have a Mac at home (my other systems run Linux) and I sometimes use it to do personal email and other "at home" things. I tripped a huge bug today: needed to email someone a snippet of a long html file. Brought up the page in my browser, View Source, copy/paste into TextEdit. Saved the file (without an extension, but that doesn't matter since it was just text.) There were no <html></html> tags around the text, just a long snippet of html source that contained a bunch of <p></p>'s and some lists. Then I quit TextEdit, since Iwas done with the file.
Went to attach that file to an email, and when I clicked on the file from the "find the file" dialog, the Mac paused for a moment, then labelled the file as an RTF file.
Hmm... didn't seem right to me. Opened the file from Finder just to double-check, and yes, the file that had originally contained nothing but a long section of html now had been magically converted to an RTF document. None of my original html was there anymore. The Mac modified my file without asking me.
That behavior seems very broken to me.
Using a signed int for the score isn't a new thing - I know that gamers have experimented with this limit on other games. On one of their podcasts, Insomniac Games mentioned a gamer who had succeeded in rolling the number of bolts in 'Ratchet & Clank' to be negative, and then none of the vendors would sell him anything.
Here's a video of someone doing just that in 'Going Commando'.
Offtopic, but I know a lot of people like to beat up on Apple for the "no internal optical drive on the MacBook Air" thing. I have a Dell D420, which doesn't have a built-in optical drive (it's in the dock) and I can't say I ever use the optical drive until I need to upgrade my Linux distro. All my backups are done over my home network, or to USB storage. When's the last time you used your DVD/CDRW drive? And not having an internal optical drive saves a lot of weight and bulk in the laptop.
I'm not a Mac weenie by any stretch, but I think Apple made a good call on that for an ultralight laptop.
Based on my previous successes in getting Microsoft to release the source code to the deprecated MS-DOS 4.x (i.e. before the MS-DOS 5.0 complete re-write) under a free / open-source license, I'm confident that Microsoft will be happy to release deprecated file formats under a similar license.
Oh, wait ...
That's a rather dickish attitude. I avoided the Mac for a looooooong time because of the "what I'm using is better than what you're using" attitude of several of my Mac-using friends. (Eventually, I added a Mac to my home network, and I'm happy with it. But Linux is still my desktop of choice.)
Most people won't win others over with the response you suggest.
Certainly re-using an old PC workstation as a file server (especially after adding storage) running some distro of Linux is a good suggestion. If the original poster doesn't mind setting up the environment (I think he's ok with it) then this is a very cheap, effective solution. But the original poster also said he considered re-using older hardware and had decided not to.
What I did in my house was buy a low-end MacMini ($600) with extra external storage ($180) and enable SSH. I have a home network with wireless + wired, and the Mac is on a wired port. I use the Mac as a backup server for the Linux boxen in our house. The neat thing is that the Mac can boot itself each morning, and shut itself off each night, saving on power when I'm not likely to be using it. I have it boot at 6AM and shut down at 10PM. Also, when the system isn't being used, it goes into a low-power mode.
It's a decent solution. Works great for rsync/SSH backups, or to save off some files that don't need to be on my laptop. I also mapped a connection to it via GNOME if I want to browse for a particular file.
And yes, the MacMini can run headless just fine. Although when I later bought an HDTV, I plugged it into that via the VGA port, so now I have a 40" 1920×1080 display when I want it! :-)
Actually, I was summarizing the article with "The PlayStation 2. (Please start pushing developers to the PS3.)" For myself, I still enjoy the PS2, and still have several PS2 (and PS1) games that I will occasionally re-play. "Ico", "Shadow of the Colossus", and "Killzone" are at the top of the stack. "Tomb Raider Anniversary" was a great game, and I'll definitely play it again that this year.
Of course, those games really show what the PS2 is capable of. You can do some amazing things within PS2 limitations, if the developer is willing and able to put in the necessary effort.
But "Fun" is more important than "Impressive". I'd rather play a fun game with less-impressive visuals, than a less-fun game that looks awesome. For games that can do both, great. But if it's got to come down to one or the other, give me "Fun". That's why I sometimes go back to re-play "Spyro the Dragon" (PS1) and bought a copy on PlayStation Network - the graphics aren't that impressive compared to modern games, but the gameplay is so darned fun that I don't care.
That said, I'd like to see more PS3 games coming out. But fewer FPS's.
It's a short article, but here are the 9 things for those of you who don't want to RTFA:
And you have now made me feel very, very old. Gee, thanks kid.
GET OFF MY LAWN!
Yeah, wasn't there an X-Files episode on that? :-)
It took until 12/27 to hit the newswires because the SCO press release is dated 12/27. The newswires picked it up the same day, today.