At work, our wireless networking people use laptops with wireless cards and (sometimes) GPS units attached. They change the BIOS so that the machines stay on with the lid closed, throw the laptop in a backpack, then go for a leisurely walk.
Why spend money on a single-purpose PDA with hard-to-find software?
Personally, I like to group services by function and politics. You never want a low-priority function running on the same machine as a high-priority function. You never want to have two different managers arguing about who gets to decide how the machine's used. You DO want interdependent services to be on the same machine if the load is low enough to allow it -- it lets you eliminate a whole pile of variables if something goes wrong.
The DHCP server, DNS server, NTP server, etc. all live on several identical boxes. Network services are nice in that, so long as you have redundant machines, you can take down any single machine w/o any notice at all. That means that isolation doesn't matter much. I upgrade one machine at a time (in case something goes wrong), but I use an automated script so that the upgrades are painless and identical. I use cnames extensively, so network1 is also dhcp1, dns1, and ntp1.
Mail servers tend to have their own special problems and service levels, so I never let a mail machine do anything but mail, though I'm willing to allow it to do everything mail related (MX, SMTP, POP, etc.). Redundancy and cnames are your friend. Mail1 is mx1, smtp1, and pop1.
File servers tend to have weird setup, so they usually need to be dedicated machines. If you're in a multiplatform environment, it's nice to be able to serve the same files via SMB, NFS, and AFP from the same machine.
Your webserver and database machines will vary wildly in importance from company to company. Again, politics matter. At most places, the DBAs don't play nicely with anyone else. Give them their own machine(s). On the other hand, if you're selling stuff on the web (low-volume) with a LAMP setup, screw it. Put everything onto one machine. Better yet, set up a Yahoo store and get rid of that machine.
KDCs, NIS, Windows domain controllers, and network log machines are each their own special class of single-purpose machines. No other services running (except maybe an NTP client). Gotta log in at the console to make changes. These are critical pieces of the security infrastructure, so the pain is worthwhile. These are also the first machines to be patched when a new vulnerability comes out. Again, apply patches with a script to ensure that you don't make a typo and to ensure that redundant machines are identical.
And, of course, you need a firewall. Even if you're a university and the firewall does nothing except filter invalid IPs on ingress and egress, it's necessary when the DOS attacks come.
I really like There. Disclaimer: I'm far more familiar with it than I am with the other "social MMOGs". As I understand it, everything I say also applies to SecondLife.
I've played a few of the other MMORPGs like Everquest and Anarchy Online, and the "level treadmill" always annoyed me. I have a job in IT. I spend days doing stupid crap so that I can implement something cool. The last thing I want in a game is something where I spend days wandering around killing boring monsters so that I can have something cool.
In There (yes, the name gets annoying really fast in spoken conversation), you can either put a lot of in-game time toward earning money, or you can just plunk down real cash to buy "Therebucks" (T$) that can be used to purchase anything in the game. So, people with jobs can actually enjoy the game. In EQ, the people at the top are all 15-year-olds (or unemployed dotcommers who are too proud to work at Burger Kind) with lots of free time. In There, the most respected people in the game are the friendliest, so the annoying "I wish I could PK here" crowd that rules in AO or Everquest is marginalized.
Most importantly, "stuff" or "level" aren't the important part: the people are. There is currently in beta, so it's not open 24/7 yet, but when it's open, I can jump in at any time and get into my choice of coversations with people from half a dozen different time zones. Unlike IRC or a MUD, There was designed assuming modern hardware: you can put on a headset and use voice chat, and there are a ton of 3D expressions ("emotes") and outfits. Somehow, the extra realism prevents a lot of the more annoying behaviour that you see on IRC even though it allows for a whole new level of obnoxiousness. I don't know why -- maybe it's just more obvious when you piss people off.
Like real life, people are judged on appearance. If you run around in a leopard-skin thong and a t-shirt that says "spank me", you'll attract a different crowd than you would with a tux.:) Unlike real life, you can have any appearance you want, so it's not horribly unfair.
The other thing that's nice: there are places to explore. The game's pretty, but some of the best stuff is player-created. There are times when I don't want to chat. When I'm in that mood, I hop on my hoverboard and cruise the islands looking for cool creations. I like to explore: one of the things that annoyed me most about Everquest was the knowledge that I'd never be able to endure enough levelling to ever see some of the cooler parts of the game. In There, I can teleport to any location in the game instantly. The tricky part is finding the cool stuff for the first time, but I enjoy that.
In answer to your question: sitting on a virtual beach is no fun at all UNLESS you're doing it with cool people from around the world who'd never make the trip to do it in real life. How much fun is it to scale a mountain or explore an alien landscape without packing or breaking a sweat?
That's already happening. We're seeing much more social MMOGs emerging: they're much closer to MUSHes than MUDs. The other characters that you interact with are real humans. The downside of this is that unless you want a PK frenzy, you need to impose artificial combat limits.
Check out Virtual Worlds Review for an overview of some of these emerging environments. (I have no affiliation with VWR, but I have played some of the games they discuss)
Why's it always the assholes who pass the test?
on
Mplayer Revisited
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· Score: 1
It seems that a lot of the innovative "best of breed" open source projects are run by utter assholes: Mplayer, Qmail, OpenBSD, etc.
I suspect that it's not coincidence. Building concensus and playing well with others means making compromises. Compromises are the enemy of innovation. It's the people who take their ball and go home who crack the mold. They go off in "unprofitable" directions. Most of them labor in obscurity. A few of them turn out to be right and manage to produce something useful.
Condensing phone and something else is easy. You can get phone and PDA, phone and mp3 player, or phone and game player. You can sometimes find 3 of them in one package, but it starts to get bulky. Leatherman can go in your pants pocket.
That said, you have a few approaches to the stuff that's left:
Embrace your inner geek. Go with a vest or utility belt and wear all of your crap with pride While you're at it, grow a beard, put on a few pounds, and shower less often.
Bring a bag. Brief case, backpack, belly pack, courier bag, whatever. Courier bag if you have to use the bus/subway, backpack if you walk, other stuff if you want to look like a corporate drone or a tourist.
Move somewhere cold. As winter's setting in, I need my backpack less frequently. Heavy coats have lots of pockets.
If you're at work, the first rule is "bring only what you need". You don't need the gameboy or mp3 player when you leave your desk. You probably don't need the cell, either. If you have a job where you can't return to your desk often, pick up a sportcoat: tons of pockets for your stuff, and it drives chicks crazy. Or, at least, employers.
I've never been fired. I'm more of a "quit in disgust" kind of guy. I did have an experience straight out of the movie Office Space (but preceding the movie by several years).
I had a job where I really didn't get along with my boss, and I really didn't like the way the organization was run. I'd said so multiple times, sometimes very loudly and publicly.
Then one day, the re-org hit the fan. We were told that we'd have to re-interview for our own jobs. I knew which way it was going to go, so I decided to have fun. I blew into the interview, and was brutally honest about everything. My interviewer was shell-shocked by the time I was done.
Short form: I was one of the only people in my group to keep my job. The carnage was bad: maybe 90% of my coworkers and even most of the managers were canned. It turned out that one of the people in charge of the re-org really liked me because I was the only one with enough of a spine to talk honestly about the problems in the organization. Everyone else just kissed ass and pretended that everything was okay.
A minor nitpick: "Thin clients" is the trendy new name for terminals. Technically, teletype machines were thin clients. So were VT-100s and X servers. Java entered the picture waaay after thin clients.
Other people have already commented on the number of users per server. Short form: buy decent servers and assume 50:1 for now. Use Citrix, not Windows Terminal Services.
Look at costs and ROI and decide on a minimum acceptable ratio before you start. Is 10:1 worth it? How about 20:1? 50:1? 100:1?
The important thing is that you TEST before you deploy across the company. Find a few people IN DIFFERENT DEPARTMENTS who are willing to help (or be coerced) with your testing. Different departments are important because you want all of the pieces tested. For the salespeople, Powerpoint matters; for the bean counters, Excel. Buy one decent server. Worst case is that you get to replace the oldest machine in the shop a year sooner than planned. Convince Citrix to give you a trial license for a few months. Tell them that there'll be plenty of other purchases if the trial goes well.
Dedicate at least one full-time person to setting up the server. Remember- you're on the clock with the trial license. Get a client set up ASAP. Do what work you can through the client -- it's more testing. Deploy 5-10 clients for a week (few enough that you can visit all of them in-person in a short amount of time if there are problems) while you iron out replication and performance issues. If all's good, add another 10 each week in a controlled test roll-out until things bog down. If things are looking good, pull in any documentation or training people NOW, before the test users get too comfortable with the system.
Once things have bogged down, look at your target number. If you beat it, great! Run with it. If you didn't, how close were you? If you need 100:1 and you bogged down at 20:1, it's time to give up. If you bogged down at 90:1, maybe it's worth looking at tweaks to the server or network. Remember that at this point, Citrix is hoping to make a pile of money from you, so they may be willing to lend engineering help to your cause.
Reading and research is good, but not sufficient. Your environment is like nobody else's except perhaps your closest competitor -- and they're not going to help you out. You need to test YOUR setup and YOUR users.
If dollars are tight but your time's free, buy a big-ass server case, tremendous power supply, and a pile of the biggest SATA drives you can find. Spin 'em up one-at-a-time if they're all stacked. Otherwise, the gyroscopic forces will tilt your PC.
Realistically, if you're buying a terabyte (tibibyte?) or more of space, you have money to spare. Just buy an Xserve and Xserve raid unit, turn on NFS or SMB, and call it a day. They're brain-dead easy to set up, relatively cheap (not much more than building your own), and supported.
There are tools to monitor CPU temperature under Linux. Most PC motherboards made in the last few years have included temperature monitoring. The biggest problem is that most motherboard makers include different "fudge factors" in their setup, so different mobos have different settings and finding the actual temperature can be tricky.
What I do:
Don't worry about the accuracy of the temperature that's being reported. It has no bearing on reality. Instead, worry about relative temperature. First, get a baseline temperature when the system's stable but busy (half an hour into a large compile is a good time to take a reading).
When the temperature's 10 above baseline, send a high-priority syslog message (which I have set to log locally, remotely, and wall to all users.) I use "Is it hot in here, or is it just me?" as my warning message.:)
When the temperature's 20 above baseline, alarm and shut down cleanly.
When the temperature's 30 above baseline, halt immediately. Better to fsck or restore from backup than melt the processor.
$30,000 - $50,000 is about what it's going to cost to employ another full-time programmer in a developed country.
Salary counts for less than half of the total costs of having a salaried employee. There are taxes, benefits, building costs, equipment costs, training, etc.
Do you really think that they can get good technical employees who are willing to work for US minimum wage (and probably less than minimum wage in France)?
I picked up a Gamecube last winter after looking at the game market.
Why a Gamecube? I don't buy a lot of games: maybe 1 per month. So, I'm only going to pick up 10-20 games before the console's obsolete. The question, then, was "What are the best few games, period, for each console?"
I'm not a huge sports game fan, I don't play FPSs on a console (I use my PC for that), and I like to play console games with friends. I don't usually bother with sequels: I have Soul Calibur for the Dreamcast, and I probably won't bother with Soul Calibur 2.
Playstation 2: GTA sequel, Tony sequel, Metal Gear sequel. Damned good games, but not too compelling if you own a PSOne. Also, only two controllers. Roughly a zillion crap games that I'd never buy, except by mistake.
Xbox: Halo, and, uh, Halo. Oh, wait. Steel Battalion (for what? $200?) and Buffy. Hardly any unique content. Plus, the damned thing is huge and Microsoft is evil.
Gamecube: Pikmin, Starfox, Zelda, Monkeyball, Super Smash Bros., Mario Sunshine, Metroid. All of these are really good games. Really good new games only come out every month or so, but that's perfect for my buying rate. I just picked up F Zero GX and have been wearing my thumbs raw with it.
Basically, quantity doesn't matter to me. I'm only going to buy a few games, so I want them to be good ones. The Gamecube wins that contest for me.
Obviously, everyone should use $MY_FAVORITE_WM. It has $OBSCURE_FEATURE, which is far less developed on $OTHER_WM. Sure, $OTHER_WM has $OTHER_MAJOR_FEATURE, but newbies don't need that.
Seriously, It really comes down to what your distro maker wants to support. The people at Redhat, SuSE, etc. are not stupid. They're worrying about the same things. Technical superiority doesn't matter. Ease of use and GOOD DOCUMENTATION counts for a lot. "Look at the source code" is not a valid response to a question from a non-developer. The desktop environment and window manager that focus on ease of SUPPORT are the ones that'll triumph.
I work at a university, and we offer our own Linux distribution. We wanted to upgrade our WM last year. We looked at KDE: it didn't compile properly in our environment. We looked at GNOME: the documentation was unusable. Our final choice: FVWM2 without either GNOME or KDE. Well documented, easily customizable (with TONS of examples), stable, and easily understood. It doesn't have the latest bling-bling like anti-aliased text, but it's a whole lot easier to support.
One of the blacklists (ORBS, maybe) used to scan for open relays. They hit the university where I work. We noticed the scan and sent a "Knock it off" letter to them.
You'd think they'd WANT people to aggressively pursue relay exploiters. Instead, for the crime of proactively noticing and refusing attempts to use us as a relays, we were permanently blacklisted by them and they didn't respond to any further attempts to contact them.
People complained when their mail to parents at podunk.net (or whatever other small-town ISP) bounced. Our response: tell your parents to use a different ISP with a smarter blacklist. Many did. Others convinced their ISPs to stop using that blacklist.
So, the economic sword can cut both ways. You're more likely to be hit by the backswing when you're too aggressive.
Oh, God. Can you imagine what'll happen when consumers demand a single plug with both a water connection and a high-voltage electrical connection? Joe Sixpack, a puddle of water, leaking oil and a bit of gas (from the mower can) on the garage floor, and enough juice to make it all go boom. It's a lawsuit waiting to happen.
My guess is that someone at Microsoft is waiting for people to forget about it so that they can re-introduce and patent the embraced, extended version for patch downloads.
Now that you've brought it up, you've set their plans back by years, you bastard!
Seriously, I pulled out the FSP sources that I had a while ago, and they didn't even compile cleanly. (I think they worked on SunOS 3 or so). I decided that using rsync would work almost as well with a lot less work.
FSP has a future, but only for non-critical software transfers, and nobody's ever willing to admit that their transfer is non-critical. So, you really do need someone like an OS vendor to sneak it in behind-the-scenes. Maybe, uh, Redhat could use it for their patch transfer system.
Sick thought: BitTorrent over FSP. After you get over the nausea, it starts to sound like an okay idea.:)
I have one of these machines, and went through the same thing myself recently. Assuming you really want to go through with this,
1) Get more RAM. As much as you can afford. At least 512MB before you start looking at anything else.
2) Get a cheap Radeon card. No point in buying a good one, but a cheap one will let the machine use Quartz Extreme graphics, which offloads a hell of a lot of work from the CPU. It's not faster for those complicated photoshop transforms, but it makes the machine feel much more responsive. If you can't do that (and maybe even if you can), turn off the graphics doodads that you can live without. Do you need anti-aliasing, transparancy, or drop shadows? Turn off the bouncing and the genie effect in the dock.
Things that aren't worth it:
-A CPU upgrade. If you go this far, just give up and buy a faster machine. CPU upgrades are expensive, the performance is usually underwhelming, and you can kiss any hope of support or resale goodbye.
-Paying full price for OS X. If you can get an academic discount ($50), a family pack, or a site license, great! Have fun. Paying $130 to upgrade hardware that's worth... about the same amount... is probably not worthwhile.
I'm an ex-member. Here's why.
on
Joining the ACLU?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I like the work that the ACLU does. I can even appreciate their stance on some issues where I disagree with them. After Sept. 11, I knew that Bad Shit (tm) would soon be coming from Washington, and they looked like the group that was most likely to do something.
I gave them $50 or so. In return, I started receiving weekly "Oh no! Those wacky republicans are at it again! Give us more money!" letters.
The info wouldn't have been bad: it's good to be informed. What bothered me was the hysterical "Be afraid!" tone, the constant pleading for money (with that sleazy "but wait, there's more!" tone that comes with offers for time-shares), and the regular deulge of thick envelopes (with a pre-paid business reply envelope in each). I suspect that the entirety of my donation was spent on the weekly pleas for more money. I felt like I was supporting the post office and the envelope industry, not civil liberties.
Now, I drop more money to the EFF, and I make a point of writing my congressmen when I think I can argue the issue intelligently. It's not the broad-based defense of liberty that I'd prefer, but it's less annoying that donating to the ACLU.
You haven't really specified the problem. "She wants to do what all of us sighted people do." What, make calls? That's easy. Is there anything else? If she just wants to make phone calls, find out how she wants to do it.
If she wants to dial the numbers, just get her a cheap Nokia "candy bar"-style phone and ensure that one or two of the keys are textured (I recommend "5" as one of them) for easy location.
If she wants to "look up" numbers, see about one of the voice-activated phones. Sprint definitely offers them, and probably other companies. With these phones, you press a button and say "Call Bob", and it calls bob's number. Programming's a bit tricky, but that's what sons are for, right?
Pay attention, too, to "handsfree" models. There's pressure on the cell phone companies to make models that are usable by drivers. That means simple, and usable without looking at the keypad. Sounds kind of like what you want.
I want this feature, but I want it to vibrate, not beep. Then I can get my SMS messages in meetings, in the theater, etc. Add in a morse response button, and I could respond w/o pulling out the phone, too.
'course, all that fiddling in my pocket might look bad...
First of all, you should have thought about this BEFORE now. If you're a decent webhosting company, disaster planning and recovery is as essential to your business as spare hard drives.
That being said, there are often companies who can provide air conditioning and/or generators on a truck. They'll block off a doorway or the loading dock and pump the air in through there. If you have a little more time (and appropriate permits, etc.), they're often willing to run temporary connections into your forced air system.
Whenever they do HVAC work on our building, they have the trucks set up and waiting. We have a few too many computers to even survive with "just the essentials" if the AC goes out.
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At work, our wireless networking people use laptops with wireless cards and (sometimes) GPS units attached. They change the BIOS so that the machines stay on with the lid closed, throw the laptop in a backpack, then go for a leisurely walk.
Why spend money on a single-purpose PDA with hard-to-find software?
Personally, I like to group services by function and politics. You never want a low-priority function running on the same machine as a high-priority function. You never want to have two different managers arguing about who gets to decide how the machine's used. You DO want interdependent services to be on the same machine if the load is low enough to allow it -- it lets you eliminate a whole pile of variables if something goes wrong.
The DHCP server, DNS server, NTP server, etc. all live on several identical boxes. Network services are nice in that, so long as you have redundant machines, you can take down any single machine w/o any notice at all. That means that isolation doesn't matter much. I upgrade one machine at a time (in case something goes wrong), but I use an automated script so that the upgrades are painless and identical. I use cnames extensively, so network1 is also dhcp1, dns1, and ntp1.
Mail servers tend to have their own special problems and service levels, so I never let a mail machine do anything but mail, though I'm willing to allow it to do everything mail related (MX, SMTP, POP, etc.). Redundancy and cnames are your friend. Mail1 is mx1, smtp1, and pop1.
File servers tend to have weird setup, so they usually need to be dedicated machines. If you're in a multiplatform environment, it's nice to be able to serve the same files via SMB, NFS, and AFP from the same machine.
Your webserver and database machines will vary wildly in importance from company to company. Again, politics matter. At most places, the DBAs don't play nicely with anyone else. Give them their own machine(s). On the other hand, if you're selling stuff on the web (low-volume) with a LAMP setup, screw it. Put everything onto one machine. Better yet, set up a Yahoo store and get rid of that machine.
KDCs, NIS, Windows domain controllers, and network log machines are each their own special class of single-purpose machines. No other services running (except maybe an NTP client). Gotta log in at the console to make changes. These are critical pieces of the security infrastructure, so the pain is worthwhile. These are also the first machines to be patched when a new vulnerability comes out. Again, apply patches with a script to ensure that you don't make a typo and to ensure that redundant machines are identical.
And, of course, you need a firewall. Even if you're a university and the firewall does nothing except filter invalid IPs on ingress and egress, it's necessary when the DOS attacks come.
I really like There. Disclaimer: I'm far more familiar with it than I am with the other "social MMOGs". As I understand it, everything I say also applies to SecondLife.
:) Unlike real life, you can have any appearance you want, so it's not horribly unfair.
I've played a few of the other MMORPGs like Everquest and Anarchy Online, and the "level treadmill" always annoyed me. I have a job in IT. I spend days doing stupid crap so that I can implement something cool. The last thing I want in a game is something where I spend days wandering around killing boring monsters so that I can have something cool.
In There (yes, the name gets annoying really fast in spoken conversation), you can either put a lot of in-game time toward earning money, or you can just plunk down real cash to buy "Therebucks" (T$) that can be used to purchase anything in the game. So, people with jobs can actually enjoy the game. In EQ, the people at the top are all 15-year-olds (or unemployed dotcommers who are too proud to work at Burger Kind) with lots of free time. In There, the most respected people in the game are the friendliest, so the annoying "I wish I could PK here" crowd that rules in AO or Everquest is marginalized.
Most importantly, "stuff" or "level" aren't the important part: the people are. There is currently in beta, so it's not open 24/7 yet, but when it's open, I can jump in at any time and get into my choice of coversations with people from half a dozen different time zones. Unlike IRC or a MUD, There was designed assuming modern hardware: you can put on a headset and use voice chat, and there are a ton of 3D expressions ("emotes") and outfits. Somehow, the extra realism prevents a lot of the more annoying behaviour that you see on IRC even though it allows for a whole new level of obnoxiousness. I don't know why -- maybe it's just more obvious when you piss people off.
Like real life, people are judged on appearance. If you run around in a leopard-skin thong and a t-shirt that says "spank me", you'll attract a different crowd than you would with a tux.
The other thing that's nice: there are places to explore. The game's pretty, but some of the best stuff is player-created. There are times when I don't want to chat. When I'm in that mood, I hop on my hoverboard and cruise the islands looking for cool creations. I like to explore: one of the things that annoyed me most about Everquest was the knowledge that I'd never be able to endure enough levelling to ever see some of the cooler parts of the game. In There, I can teleport to any location in the game instantly. The tricky part is finding the cool stuff for the first time, but I enjoy that.
In answer to your question: sitting on a virtual beach is no fun at all UNLESS you're doing it with cool people from around the world who'd never make the trip to do it in real life. How much fun is it to scale a mountain or explore an alien landscape without packing or breaking a sweat?
Check out Virtual Worlds Review for an overview of some of these emerging environments. (I have no affiliation with VWR, but I have played some of the games they discuss)
It seems that a lot of the innovative "best of breed" open source projects are run by utter assholes: Mplayer, Qmail, OpenBSD, etc.
I suspect that it's not coincidence. Building concensus and playing well with others means making compromises. Compromises are the enemy of innovation. It's the people who take their ball and go home who crack the mold. They go off in "unprofitable" directions. Most of them labor in obscurity. A few of them turn out to be right and manage to produce something useful.
That said, you have a few approaches to the stuff that's left:
- Embrace your inner geek. Go with a vest or utility belt and wear all of your crap with pride While you're at it, grow a beard, put on a few pounds, and shower less often.
- Bring a bag. Brief case, backpack, belly pack, courier bag, whatever. Courier bag if you have to use the bus/subway, backpack if you walk, other stuff if you want to look like a corporate drone or a tourist.
- Move somewhere cold. As winter's setting in, I need my backpack less frequently. Heavy coats have lots of pockets.
If you're at work, the first rule is "bring only what you need". You don't need the gameboy or mp3 player when you leave your desk. You probably don't need the cell, either. If you have a job where you can't return to your desk often, pick up a sportcoat: tons of pockets for your stuff, and it drives chicks crazy. Or, at least, employers.I've never been fired. I'm more of a "quit in disgust" kind of guy. I did have an experience straight out of the movie Office Space (but preceding the movie by several years).
I had a job where I really didn't get along with my boss, and I really didn't like the way the organization was run. I'd said so multiple times, sometimes very loudly and publicly.
Then one day, the re-org hit the fan. We were told that we'd have to re-interview for our own jobs. I knew which way it was going to go, so I decided to have fun. I blew into the interview, and was brutally honest about everything. My interviewer was shell-shocked by the time I was done.
Short form: I was one of the only people in my group to keep my job. The carnage was bad: maybe 90% of my coworkers and even most of the managers were canned. It turned out that one of the people in charge of the re-org really liked me because I was the only one with enough of a spine to talk honestly about the problems in the organization. Everyone else just kissed ass and pretended that everything was okay.
A minor nitpick: "Thin clients" is the trendy new name for terminals. Technically, teletype machines were thin clients. So were VT-100s and X servers. Java entered the picture waaay after thin clients.
Other people have already commented on the number of users per server. Short form: buy decent servers and assume 50:1 for now. Use Citrix, not Windows Terminal Services.
Look at costs and ROI and decide on a minimum acceptable ratio before you start. Is 10:1 worth it? How about 20:1? 50:1? 100:1?
The important thing is that you TEST before you deploy across the company. Find a few people IN DIFFERENT DEPARTMENTS who are willing to help (or be coerced) with your testing. Different departments are important because you want all of the pieces tested. For the salespeople, Powerpoint matters; for the bean counters, Excel. Buy one decent server. Worst case is that you get to replace the oldest machine in the shop a year sooner than planned. Convince Citrix to give you a trial license for a few months. Tell them that there'll be plenty of other purchases if the trial goes well.
Dedicate at least one full-time person to setting up the server. Remember- you're on the clock with the trial license. Get a client set up ASAP. Do what work you can through the client -- it's more testing. Deploy 5-10 clients for a week (few enough that you can visit all of them in-person in a short amount of time if there are problems) while you iron out replication and performance issues. If all's good, add another 10 each week in a controlled test roll-out until things bog down. If things are looking good, pull in any documentation or training people NOW, before the test users get too comfortable with the system.
Once things have bogged down, look at your target number. If you beat it, great! Run with it. If you didn't, how close were you? If you need 100:1 and you bogged down at 20:1, it's time to give up. If you bogged down at 90:1, maybe it's worth looking at tweaks to the server or network. Remember that at this point, Citrix is hoping to make a pile of money from you, so they may be willing to lend engineering help to your cause.
Reading and research is good, but not sufficient. Your environment is like nobody else's except perhaps your closest competitor -- and they're not going to help you out. You need to test YOUR setup and YOUR users.
If dollars are tight but your time's free, buy a big-ass server case, tremendous power supply, and a pile of the biggest SATA drives you can find. Spin 'em up one-at-a-time if they're all stacked. Otherwise, the gyroscopic forces will tilt your PC.
Realistically, if you're buying a terabyte (tibibyte?) or more of space, you have money to spare. Just buy an Xserve and Xserve raid unit, turn on NFS or SMB, and call it a day. They're brain-dead easy to set up, relatively cheap (not much more than building your own), and supported.
I made a Sinistar sound theme for my laptop a while ago. It went over pretty well in meetings -- at least among the crowd who recognized the sounds.
Startup - "I LIVE!"
Low battery - "I HUNGER"
Shutdown - "RUN, COWARD!"
There are tools to monitor CPU temperature under Linux. Most PC motherboards made in the last few years have included temperature monitoring. The biggest problem is that most motherboard makers include different "fudge factors" in their setup, so different mobos have different settings and finding the actual temperature can be tricky.
What I do:
$30,000 - $50,000 is about what it's going to cost to employ another full-time programmer in a developed country.
Salary counts for less than half of the total costs of having a salaried employee. There are taxes, benefits, building costs, equipment costs, training, etc.
Do you really think that they can get good technical employees who are willing to work for US minimum wage (and probably less than minimum wage in France)?
I picked up a Gamecube last winter after looking at the game market.
Why a Gamecube? I don't buy a lot of games: maybe 1 per month. So, I'm only going to pick up 10-20 games before the console's obsolete. The question, then, was "What are the best few games, period, for each console?"
I'm not a huge sports game fan, I don't play FPSs on a console (I use my PC for that), and I like to play console games with friends. I don't usually bother with sequels: I have Soul Calibur for the Dreamcast, and I probably won't bother with Soul Calibur 2.
Playstation 2: GTA sequel, Tony sequel, Metal Gear sequel. Damned good games, but not too compelling if you own a PSOne. Also, only two controllers. Roughly a zillion crap games that I'd never buy, except by mistake.
Xbox: Halo, and, uh, Halo. Oh, wait. Steel Battalion (for what? $200?) and Buffy. Hardly any unique content. Plus, the damned thing is huge and Microsoft is evil.
Gamecube: Pikmin, Starfox, Zelda, Monkeyball, Super Smash Bros., Mario Sunshine, Metroid. All of these are really good games. Really good new games only come out every month or so, but that's perfect for my buying rate. I just picked up F Zero GX and have been wearing my thumbs raw with it.
Basically, quantity doesn't matter to me. I'm only going to buy a few games, so I want them to be good ones. The Gamecube wins that contest for me.
Obviously, everyone should use $MY_FAVORITE_WM. It has $OBSCURE_FEATURE, which is far less developed on $OTHER_WM. Sure, $OTHER_WM has $OTHER_MAJOR_FEATURE, but newbies don't need that.
Seriously, It really comes down to what your distro maker wants to support. The people at Redhat, SuSE, etc. are not stupid. They're worrying about the same things. Technical superiority doesn't matter. Ease of use and GOOD DOCUMENTATION counts for a lot. "Look at the source code" is not a valid response to a question from a non-developer. The desktop environment and window manager that focus on ease of SUPPORT are the ones that'll triumph.
I work at a university, and we offer our own Linux distribution. We wanted to upgrade our WM last year. We looked at KDE: it didn't compile properly in our environment. We looked at GNOME: the documentation was unusable. Our final choice: FVWM2 without either GNOME or KDE. Well documented, easily customizable (with TONS of examples), stable, and easily understood. It doesn't have the latest bling-bling like anti-aliased text, but it's a whole lot easier to support.
One of the blacklists (ORBS, maybe) used to scan for open relays. They hit the university where I work. We noticed the scan and sent a "Knock it off" letter to them.
You'd think they'd WANT people to aggressively pursue relay exploiters. Instead, for the crime of proactively noticing and refusing attempts to use us as a relays, we were permanently blacklisted by them and they didn't respond to any further attempts to contact them.
People complained when their mail to parents at podunk.net (or whatever other small-town ISP) bounced. Our response: tell your parents to use a different ISP with a smarter blacklist. Many did. Others convinced their ISPs to stop using that blacklist.
So, the economic sword can cut both ways. You're more likely to be hit by the backswing when you're too aggressive.
Oh, God. Can you imagine what'll happen when consumers demand a single plug with both a water connection and a high-voltage electrical connection? Joe Sixpack, a puddle of water, leaking oil and a bit of gas (from the mower can) on the garage floor, and enough juice to make it all go boom. It's a lawsuit waiting to happen.
My guess is that someone at Microsoft is waiting for people to forget about it so that they can re-introduce and patent the embraced, extended version for patch downloads.
:)
Now that you've brought it up, you've set their plans back by years, you bastard!
Seriously, I pulled out the FSP sources that I had a while ago, and they didn't even compile cleanly. (I think they worked on SunOS 3 or so). I decided that using rsync would work almost as well with a lot less work.
FSP has a future, but only for non-critical software transfers, and nobody's ever willing to admit that their transfer is non-critical. So, you really do need someone like an OS vendor to sneak it in behind-the-scenes. Maybe, uh, Redhat could use it for their patch transfer system.
Sick thought: BitTorrent over FSP. After you get over the nausea, it starts to sound like an okay idea.
They suspect that it's spammers (or other shady elements) covering their tracks.
That's "GNU/Linux PC", you capitalist running pig dog!
I have one of these machines, and went through the same thing myself recently. Assuming you really want to go through with this,
1) Get more RAM. As much as you can afford. At least 512MB before you start looking at anything else.
2) Get a cheap Radeon card. No point in buying a good one, but a cheap one will let the machine use Quartz Extreme graphics, which offloads a hell of a lot of work from the CPU. It's not faster for those complicated photoshop transforms, but it makes the machine feel much more responsive. If you can't do that (and maybe even if you can), turn off the graphics doodads that you can live without. Do you need anti-aliasing, transparancy, or drop shadows? Turn off the bouncing and the genie effect in the dock.
Things that aren't worth it:
-A CPU upgrade. If you go this far, just give up and buy a faster machine. CPU upgrades are expensive, the performance is usually underwhelming, and you can kiss any hope of support or resale goodbye.
-Paying full price for OS X. If you can get an academic discount ($50), a family pack, or a site license, great! Have fun. Paying $130 to upgrade hardware that's worth... about the same amount... is probably not worthwhile.
I like the work that the ACLU does. I can even appreciate their stance on some issues where I disagree with them. After Sept. 11, I knew that Bad Shit (tm) would soon be coming from Washington, and they looked like the group that was most likely to do something.
I gave them $50 or so. In return, I started receiving weekly "Oh no! Those wacky republicans are at it again! Give us more money!" letters.
The info wouldn't have been bad: it's good to be informed. What bothered me was the hysterical "Be afraid!" tone, the constant pleading for money (with that sleazy "but wait, there's more!" tone that comes with offers for time-shares), and the regular deulge of thick envelopes (with a pre-paid business reply envelope in each). I suspect that the entirety of my donation was spent on the weekly pleas for more money. I felt like I was supporting the post office and the envelope industry, not civil liberties.
Now, I drop more money to the EFF, and I make a point of writing my congressmen when I think I can argue the issue intelligently. It's not the broad-based defense of liberty that I'd prefer, but it's less annoying that donating to the ACLU.
You haven't really specified the problem. "She wants to do what all of us sighted people do." What, make calls? That's easy. Is there anything else? If she just wants to make phone calls, find out how she wants to do it.
If she wants to dial the numbers, just get her a cheap Nokia "candy bar"-style phone and ensure that one or two of the keys are textured (I recommend "5" as one of them) for easy location.
If she wants to "look up" numbers, see about one of the voice-activated phones. Sprint definitely offers them, and probably other companies. With these phones, you press a button and say "Call Bob", and it calls bob's number. Programming's a bit tricky, but that's what sons are for, right?
Pay attention, too, to "handsfree" models. There's pressure on the cell phone companies to make models that are usable by drivers. That means simple, and usable without looking at the keypad. Sounds kind of like what you want.
I want this feature, but I want it to vibrate, not beep. Then I can get my SMS messages in meetings, in the theater, etc. Add in a morse response button, and I could respond w/o pulling out the phone, too.
'course, all that fiddling in my pocket might look bad...
First of all, you should have thought about this BEFORE now. If you're a decent webhosting company, disaster planning and recovery is as essential to your business as spare hard drives.
That being said, there are often companies who can provide air conditioning and/or generators on a truck. They'll block off a doorway or the loading dock and pump the air in through there. If you have a little more time (and appropriate permits, etc.), they're often willing to run temporary connections into your forced air system.
Whenever they do HVAC work on our building, they have the trucks set up and waiting. We have a few too many computers to even survive with "just the essentials" if the AC goes out.