In the colo that I frequent, there are probably a dozen cordless phones. All of the ones I have looked at are 2.4Ghz. There are also no less than 3 802.11b/g access points, and everyone carries a cell phone. It's a location that absolutely *should* have too much 2.4Ghz interference.
The only problem I have with phones in the colo is the noise from the fans and air conditioners. It makes it hard to hear.:)
Cell phones don't work very well in the colo, but it seems to be a fringe area, probably because of the nearby skyscrapers (downtown LA), local broadcast equipment, and the colo is about 30 feet underground. Cells don't work very well at ground level either.
Both harmonics, and how clean the signal is. Microwave ovens don't run at 2.4Ghz (it's 2.6Ghz, I believe), but if they're not "tuned" right, they can jam 802.11b/g equipment.
Where I grew up, our local police and hospital used a trunked radio system. It would frequently override local broadcast TV stations (Channel 49 specifically). It wasn't anything you could listen to, it was noise, but still... They weren't at that frequency, but I believe it was that they were broadcasting a very strong signal, and not a particularly clean signal. This was probably intentional, so slightly out of tune equipment wouldn't find itself out of contact.
It always pissed me off, because it always happened during important parts of the shows I was watching. (I was a kid, TV was important then)
Try talking on a Nextel phone anywhere near a monitor or speaker..:)
You'll hear an audible clicking out of anything with a powered speaker. That includes TV's, home stereo's, boom boxes, and even PC speakers. The speakers don't even have to be attached to a PC, they just need power. While you're talking (or 2-waying), you can hear the digital noise the whole time.
TV's and monitors freak out too. It looks something like the degausse feature, except it continutes in the same way the sound does.
To stay on topic, I've used a variety of 802.11b and 802.11g equipment with a whole bunch of different 2.4Ghz phones, and never had a problem. We do have one location that has problems, but it's from someone elses microwave equipment (like communications, not cooking). I had my laptop monitoring, and I'd see the noise jump up to 20+ dB in a sweeping pattern. I don't know who it is, but it's not 802.11?, I didn't get any data, just a jump in noise. It's enough to jam the 2.4 Ghz cordless phones, but it doesn't bother my directional 802.11b antennas.
And no, I know my equipment wasn't interfering with the phones, I unplugged all my networking equipment one day, just to prove to the office staff that it wasn't the problem.
In the computer store, CPU and PS fans would die from dirt clogging them. Usually the bearings ended up shot, so removing the dust just left a pretty much worthless rattly fan. In the servers, the 1u's with fans mounted right on the heatsink don't last very long. A typical service life is 1 to 2 years. The better designs, like the Asus 1u rackmounts with blower fans and ducts, seem to last forever. I haven't had a single failure in those.
Hard drives are always great victims. I see one or two failures per month. All things considered, that isn't a lot, since we have at least 400 drives in operation, on machines that are up to about 6 years old. The 400 drives is a rough number, it's probably much higher. I see a higher rate of SCSI failures, even in well cooled machines. Obviously, cases with poor cooling lose their drives faster.
Customers are sometimes less than entertained when they ask me to work on a server that I didn't build or install (contract work). I open up the box, find the dead SCSI drive, and find it has almost no cooling, and tell them, "Your drives died due to lack of cooling because of a poor case design." It's fairly obvious when the drives are too hot to touch after shutting them down and opening the case.:) I like the servers with IDE drives, that last forever and nothing inside gets hot.
The most IDE failures I ever had at once were when we "retired" 1/2 dozen machines, and shipped the parts back by FedEx (abandoning the old 4u cases at the site). They were all working when the parts were packed, but only a few drives survived shipping, and they were all well packed. Luckly I only wanted them for spare parts.
A lot of these servers need to be kept functional, even if they're slow. If they satisfy the needs of the client, it's hard to tell them to upgrade, so we fix what's broken and put them back into service. I may mention that the hardware is ancient, but they'll rarely want to buy newer hardware. "I paid $6k for that 5 years ago, why should I upgrade?"
I find power supply fans to be a bit lower on the list. #1 is hard drives, #2 is CPU fans. #3 is power supply fans. But hey, they're all those damned moving parts. Can't trust those things.:)
I've opened up plenty of monitors to fix various things myself, but I wouldn't consider myself a TV repair man.
My favorite was a monitor that was being thrown away because it wouldn't stay on. It wouldn't stay on because the switch was broken. A sheet metal screw in the front took care of that. It worked for years after that.
I've replaced many power supply fans. They fail rather regularly in smokers houses. I usually get new ones from Radio Shack, rather than salvaging them from other power supplies.
In a computer store I used to work at, we had a guy who was an ex-navy electronics repair tech. He would rip apart monitors and fix the boards, to get them going again. I was in his area a lot, so he was careful to point out which parts were rather hazardous. Ya, the flyback was the one thing he said "never touch this."
He was really interesting. He'd occasionally blow up parts. I'm guessing they must have been ready to go, right? He once filled the store with the stink from a failed capacitor. They were fun to watch. Sometimes they'd shoot sparks, sometimes they'd just smoke.
BTW, if Scott is reading this, HI!.:)
But, to stay on topic, I agree with some of the other posts, this is wrong. If they want to license it, they should make a seperate license, not try to group PC techs in with TV/Radio repair techs. Not only is it wrong, but it's insulting to the real TV/Radio techs. Most of us computer guys wouldn't have a clue how to repair a TV or radio. Personally, I'll fix almost anything in a computer, but I wouldn't dare touch the guts of a TV.
I don't have any machines with quite that uptime. We have a few with over 400 days, but those will be going down soon. At least with Linux, downtime is because we make changes, not because the machine arbitrarly dies.:)
I lost a bunch of my good uptimes when we moved servers a few months ago. Our New York servers have over 400 days, but we'll be moving those soon also.:(
I have a machine in Tampa that's been running for a few years now, but it seems no one remembers what the password was.:) Since it's still doing it's job (a small web site, and some mail forwarding), I haven't been willing to reboot it to get back into it.
My home machines never maintain a high uptime. I'm always changing stuff, just because I can. I'm always changing kernel options, adding hardware, etc, etc.
Haha, I can just imagine the post office being like "Sir, you have a lot of packages at the post office. Please bring a truck to pick them up."
Maybe someone local to him can arrange the first annual "Slashdot - Getting Linus Drunk" party.:) I'd be in not only for funding some of the beer, but I'd make the drive up there to attend. What a great way for a bunch of Slashdot geeks to meet.:) Maybe we'll all find out only like 50% of the folks here are "geeks", and the rest are normal folks.
I listed RedHat and Debian from the little experience I have with them. I've been a Slackware user for years, and build just about everything from sources, but that's the way I like doing things. I only just started using Gentoo, for the AMD64 support, which works beautifully BTW.
Slackware may not be the standard commercial distro, but it's one of the oldest and longest living. The first Linux book I bought may years ago (Linux Unleased, 1st edition) had a Slackware disk in it, and that's what I've used ever since. I've tried many distributions, but never stayed with them very long to really get into their uniqueness.
I've worked on customers machines with other distros, which is why I know anything about the others.:) I wasn't very pleased with Debian, because the install they did was very bare, and I had to add a bunch of packages to even compile a kernel.
It would be nice if there was a "standard" installer for all of them, but I don't see a real reason for it. Most people get their distro from a friend, who can show them the in's and out's of whatever they're using. In my close group of friends that use Linux, we use Slackware, RedHat (and Fedora), Debian, Mandrake, SuSE, and Gentoo. Most of us use Slackware most of the time on workstations, and Slackware almost all the time on servers (except the AMD64 machines).
And that leaves me wondering, what's the easiest way to get something to Linus?:) I believe he's up in San Jose now, it should fairly cheap to FedEx a case of beer and a thank-you card from LA.:)
OOhh, I found This Page that says he drinks Guinness. What a coincidence, that's what I've been drinking since an Irish friend of mine introduced me to it years ago (at an Irish pub, of course). I'm planning on going to the Guinness brewery in Ireland sometime this year, maybe I'll get him a gift.:)
For slackware, you can download just about anything from here, and just type "installpkg [filename]"
Gentoo, you'd emerge it, without downloading it first "emerge [package]"
RedHat, you'd get the package, and use RPM to install it.
Debian, you'd apt-get it "apt-get [package]"
Updates are even easy in Slackware. We have one server on our network which updates it's packages nightly, and then 100+ other servers collect their updates from a cron running "slackupdate.sh -nc -l 2". For us, it's much more polite to have our own repository, than to have 100+ machines beat up the publically available ones.:)
You can do something similiar with Gentoo or Debian. I'm not sure how RedHat handles these.
But, for the stuff that doesn't come in packages, ya, three commands are pretty easy. All things considered, it's faster to type those, than to unzip, and click the annoying click-throughs to get a Windows program to install.
People are afraid of the kernel, but hell, all you have to do is download the kernel, and use the pretty menu driven configuration to pick what drivers you need, and just a couple commands later, you have a kernel optimized for your machine. With Windows, good luck getting out all the drivers that you don't need.
Most Windows users that I've talked to simply won't get away from Windows because they're too lazy to learn something new. Hell, they won't stop using MSIE, even after getting the spyware or virus of the day because of it. One guy I know got a virus from a site because of an MSIE exploit, and continues to use MSIE. He was fighting with it for two days to get rid of the virus. He simply won't consider Mozilla/FireFox or Opera. Why? Because he's been using MSIE for years.
It's very similiar to the people who held out on advancing from Windows 3.1 for so long. Why change, when it does things they like? It won't be until the "killer app" shows up for Linux that doesn't work anywhere else. Unfortunately for this process, most people are porting their applications over to Windows, to let everyone enjoy, so the "killer app" probably won't ever be a Linux-only application.
Several large banks still run OS/2. Why? Because it works for them. You'll still find lots of people running Win98. Likewise, you'll find people running very old versions of RedHat, because they're afraid of upgrading.
We've only recently started a campaign to upgrade our old Slack 7.0 to Slack 8.1 servers to Slack 10.0. I made a bootable CD to make this easy. It takes 1/2 dozen commands (including mounting the cd and destination partitions), and takes 5 to 10 minutes. Users rarely notice the downtime, and appreciate than things are faster now. How much pain would I be in upgrading from say WinNT to WinXP?
I found an old catalog a while back that showed the Model III to be just over USD $3000.
You could have probably sold that. That would have been a great game back in the day. That's way beyond what I could have written then. But again, I was only about 8 years old.
But in either case, it's not a game of "my wallet is bigger". If he makes more than me, he doesn't need someone to pay for drinks, so it's just a "thank you".
I appreciate someone taking me out for drinks, if I've done work for them. Sure, I may have spent a week programming something for a friend, and sure a night of drinking doesn't even approach the time invested, but it seems to make everything right.:)
Actually, I just made some more changes to it yesterday, and wiped out just about everything to do it.
I was having a bastard of a time trying to get the OS to boot from one of those 3Tb arrays, and I had been previously booting from an old 6Gb IDE hard drive from the RMA pile, so I transfered everything from the 6Gb to a pair of 20Gb drives (RAID 1), and wiped all the partition information from/dev/sda and started over.
Today, we start populating it. Wheeee.:) I have 400Gb to go onto it immediately, and plenty more to follow.
He's probably heard all the computer stories he can tolerate.
I'd have to assume it's kind of like walking into my office saying "I have a problem with...." Like, I don't want to hear it, go away. Tell me about the hot girl you met the other night, or the new stuff you put on your car, and I'll listen.:)
Unfortunately, for Linus, most of the "Hey Linus, this doesn't work" questions usually turn out to be user failure. I field plenty of those right now for our Linux workstations and servers. Very very rarely does anything come back to something in the kernel.
I seem to recall seeing a picture of a slightly drunk Linus with a beer bottle in front of him. Damned if I can remember what brand it was off-hand.
I know me and some of my friends have done amazing programming when we're drunk, I wonder if we could put some really whack stuff in the kernel on a good drunken weekend. Of course, it would need it's own category in the 'make menuconfig', something like "Drunken Ideas".
The 2.6.7 kernel does have something about including graphics into it. I didn't read too much into it, I was busy getting it ready for a new server.:)
The way I see it, the initial cost is $0. If you find it worth while, it's worth paying a few bucks for. That reminds me, it's about time to pay my tribute to a few of the groups I use their stuff frequently. Time to buy a round of CD's and T-shirts to give away to friends.:)
My Slackware hat is starting to look kind of ratty, I guess I should get one for myself too.
If I ever bump into Linus in real life, I'm going to take him out drinking.:)
We have a 6u Dell Quad Xeon 500 box that we're retiring in the next few weeks, that we're trying to figure out what to do with. I suggested it would make a very nice boat anchor. Aparently we're still paying the financing to Dell on it. Maybe they'll take it back.:)
You wouldn't really want it as a workstation, it sounds like a freakin' turboprop airplane taking off when it's running.
The first computer I used was a TRS 80 Model III. It was at my school. There were no floppy drives, just a single cassette deck, but we didn't have anything to actually put in there.:) I think the most productive thing it ever ran were the basic programs I'd type in from a learning basic book.
Wheeeee, I can make text scroll on the screen.:)
Oh, the good ol' days. Now if I were to write the same thing, it'd scroll by faster than you could see.
[insert obligatory "walking to school in the snow uphill both ways every day" here]
Funny, I was just working on one of our multi-terabyte multi-cpu multi-ghz machines today. My first "modern" machine was a 486/33 with a 20Mb hard drive.
This one isn't our fastest, it just has the largest storage. I'm sure in 10 years, it'll be nothing that I'd even want to work with, because it'll be so slow.
$ uname -a Linux server 2.6.7 #1 SMP Tue Jun 29 03:51:47 EDT 2004 i686 unknown unknown GNU/Linux
$ cat/proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 15 model : 2 model name : Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 2.40GHz stepping : 5 cpu MHz : 2400.080 cache size : 512 KB [SNIP] processor : 3 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 15 model : 2 model name : Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 2.40GHz stepping : 5 cpu MHz : 2400.080 cache size : 512 KB
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Staplers don't bother my TV much, but my coworkers duck frequently.
That's odd, but expectable.
In the colo that I frequent, there are probably a dozen cordless phones. All of the ones I have looked at are 2.4Ghz. There are also no less than 3 802.11b/g access points, and everyone carries a cell phone. It's a location that absolutely *should* have too much 2.4Ghz interference.
The only problem I have with phones in the colo is the noise from the fans and air conditioners. It makes it hard to hear.
Cell phones don't work very well in the colo, but it seems to be a fringe area, probably because of the nearby skyscrapers (downtown LA), local broadcast equipment, and the colo is about 30 feet underground. Cells don't work very well at ground level either.
Both harmonics, and how clean the signal is. Microwave ovens don't run at 2.4Ghz (it's 2.6Ghz, I believe), but if they're not "tuned" right, they can jam 802.11b/g equipment.
Where I grew up, our local police and hospital used a trunked radio system. It would frequently override local broadcast TV stations (Channel 49 specifically). It wasn't anything you could listen to, it was noise, but still... They weren't at that frequency, but I believe it was that they were broadcasting a very strong signal, and not a particularly clean signal. This was probably intentional, so slightly out of tune equipment wouldn't find itself out of contact.
It always pissed me off, because it always happened during important parts of the shows I was watching. (I was a kid, TV was important then)
Try talking on a Nextel phone anywhere near a monitor or speaker..
You'll hear an audible clicking out of anything with a powered speaker. That includes TV's, home stereo's, boom boxes, and even PC speakers. The speakers don't even have to be attached to a PC, they just need power. While you're talking (or 2-waying), you can hear the digital noise the whole time.
TV's and monitors freak out too. It looks something like the degausse feature, except it continutes in the same way the sound does.
To stay on topic, I've used a variety of 802.11b and 802.11g equipment with a whole bunch of different 2.4Ghz phones, and never had a problem. We do have one location that has problems, but it's from someone elses microwave equipment (like communications, not cooking). I had my laptop monitoring, and I'd see the noise jump up to 20+ dB in a sweeping pattern. I don't know who it is, but it's not 802.11?, I didn't get any data, just a jump in noise. It's enough to jam the 2.4 Ghz cordless phones, but it doesn't bother my directional 802.11b antennas.
And no, I know my equipment wasn't interfering with the phones, I unplugged all my networking equipment one day, just to prove to the office staff that it wasn't the problem.
It may be the environments I've worked in.
:) I like the servers with IDE drives, that last forever and nothing inside gets hot.
In the computer store, CPU and PS fans would die from dirt clogging them. Usually the bearings ended up shot, so removing the dust just left a pretty much worthless rattly fan. In the servers, the 1u's with fans mounted right on the heatsink don't last very long. A typical service life is 1 to 2 years. The better designs, like the Asus 1u rackmounts with blower fans and ducts, seem to last forever. I haven't had a single failure in those.
Hard drives are always great victims. I see one or two failures per month. All things considered, that isn't a lot, since we have at least 400 drives in operation, on machines that are up to about 6 years old. The 400 drives is a rough number, it's probably much higher. I see a higher rate of SCSI failures, even in well cooled machines. Obviously, cases with poor cooling lose their drives faster.
Customers are sometimes less than entertained when they ask me to work on a server that I didn't build or install (contract work). I open up the box, find the dead SCSI drive, and find it has almost no cooling, and tell them, "Your drives died due to lack of cooling because of a poor case design." It's fairly obvious when the drives are too hot to touch after shutting them down and opening the case.
The most IDE failures I ever had at once were when we "retired" 1/2 dozen machines, and shipped the parts back by FedEx (abandoning the old 4u cases at the site). They were all working when the parts were packed, but only a few drives survived shipping, and they were all well packed. Luckly I only wanted them for spare parts.
A lot of these servers need to be kept functional, even if they're slow. If they satisfy the needs of the client, it's hard to tell them to upgrade, so we fix what's broken and put them back into service. I may mention that the hardware is ancient, but they'll rarely want to buy newer hardware. "I paid $6k for that 5 years ago, why should I upgrade?"
I find power supply fans to be a bit lower on the list. #1 is hard drives, #2 is CPU fans. #3 is power supply fans. But hey, they're all those damned moving parts. Can't trust those things. :)
I've opened up plenty of monitors to fix various things myself, but I wouldn't consider myself a TV repair man.
My favorite was a monitor that was being thrown away because it wouldn't stay on. It wouldn't stay on because the switch was broken. A sheet metal screw in the front took care of that. It worked for years after that.
I've replaced many power supply fans. They fail rather regularly in smokers houses. I usually get new ones from Radio Shack, rather than salvaging them from other power supplies.
In a computer store I used to work at, we had a guy who was an ex-navy electronics repair tech. He would rip apart monitors and fix the boards, to get them going again. I was in his area a lot, so he was careful to point out which parts were rather hazardous. Ya, the flyback was the one thing he said "never touch this."
:)
He was really interesting. He'd occasionally blow up parts. I'm guessing they must have been ready to go, right? He once filled the store with the stink from a failed capacitor. They were fun to watch. Sometimes they'd shoot sparks, sometimes they'd just smoke.
BTW, if Scott is reading this, HI!.
But, to stay on topic, I agree with some of the other posts, this is wrong. If they want to license it, they should make a seperate license, not try to group PC techs in with TV/Radio repair techs. Not only is it wrong, but it's insulting to the real TV/Radio techs. Most of us computer guys wouldn't have a clue how to repair a TV or radio. Personally, I'll fix almost anything in a computer, but I wouldn't dare touch the guts of a TV.
I don't have any machines with quite that uptime. We have a few with over 400 days, but those will be going down soon. At least with Linux, downtime is because we make changes, not because the machine arbitrarly dies. :)
:(
:) Since it's still doing it's job (a small web site, and some mail forwarding), I haven't been willing to reboot it to get back into it.
I lost a bunch of my good uptimes when we moved servers a few months ago. Our New York servers have over 400 days, but we'll be moving those soon also.
I have a machine in Tampa that's been running for a few years now, but it seems no one remembers what the password was.
My home machines never maintain a high uptime. I'm always changing stuff, just because I can. I'm always changing kernel options, adding hardware, etc, etc.
Haha, I can just imagine the post office being like "Sir, you have a lot of packages at the post office. Please bring a truck to pick them up."
:) I'd be in not only for funding some of the beer, but I'd make the drive up there to attend. What a great way for a bunch of Slashdot geeks to meet. :) Maybe we'll all find out only like 50% of the folks here are "geeks", and the rest are normal folks.
Maybe someone local to him can arrange the first annual "Slashdot - Getting Linus Drunk" party.
I listed RedHat and Debian from the little experience I have with them. I've been a Slackware user for years, and build just about everything from sources, but that's the way I like doing things. I only just started using Gentoo, for the AMD64 support, which works beautifully BTW.
:) I wasn't very pleased with Debian, because the install they did was very bare, and I had to add a bunch of packages to even compile a kernel.
Slackware may not be the standard commercial distro, but it's one of the oldest and longest living. The first Linux book I bought may years ago (Linux Unleased, 1st edition) had a Slackware disk in it, and that's what I've used ever since. I've tried many distributions, but never stayed with them very long to really get into their uniqueness.
I've worked on customers machines with other distros, which is why I know anything about the others.
It would be nice if there was a "standard" installer for all of them, but I don't see a real reason for it. Most people get their distro from a friend, who can show them the in's and out's of whatever they're using. In my close group of friends that use Linux, we use Slackware, RedHat (and Fedora), Debian, Mandrake, SuSE, and Gentoo. Most of us use Slackware most of the time on workstations, and Slackware almost all the time on servers (except the AMD64 machines).
And that leaves me wondering, what's the easiest way to get something to Linus? :) I believe he's up in San Jose now, it should fairly cheap to FedEx a case of beer and a thank-you card from LA. :)
:)
OOhh, I found This Page that says he drinks Guinness. What a coincidence, that's what I've been drinking since an Irish friend of mine introduced me to it years ago (at an Irish pub, of course). I'm planning on going to the Guinness brewery in Ireland sometime this year, maybe I'll get him a gift.
For most distros, it's easier than that.
:)
For slackware, you can download just about anything from here, and just type "installpkg [filename]"
Gentoo, you'd emerge it, without downloading it first "emerge [package]"
RedHat, you'd get the package, and use RPM to install it.
Debian, you'd apt-get it "apt-get [package]"
Updates are even easy in Slackware. We have one server on our network which updates it's packages nightly, and then 100+ other servers collect their updates from a cron running "slackupdate.sh -nc -l 2". For us, it's much more polite to have our own repository, than to have 100+ machines beat up the publically available ones.
You can do something similiar with Gentoo or Debian. I'm not sure how RedHat handles these.
But, for the stuff that doesn't come in packages, ya, three commands are pretty easy. All things considered, it's faster to type those, than to unzip, and click the annoying click-throughs to get a Windows program to install.
People are afraid of the kernel, but hell, all you have to do is download the kernel, and use the pretty menu driven configuration to pick what drivers you need, and just a couple commands later, you have a kernel optimized for your machine. With Windows, good luck getting out all the drivers that you don't need.
Most Windows users that I've talked to simply won't get away from Windows because they're too lazy to learn something new. Hell, they won't stop using MSIE, even after getting the spyware or virus of the day because of it. One guy I know got a virus from a site because of an MSIE exploit, and continues to use MSIE. He was fighting with it for two days to get rid of the virus. He simply won't consider Mozilla/FireFox or Opera. Why? Because he's been using MSIE for years.
It's very similiar to the people who held out on advancing from Windows 3.1 for so long. Why change, when it does things they like? It won't be until the "killer app" shows up for Linux that doesn't work anywhere else. Unfortunately for this process, most people are porting their applications over to Windows, to let everyone enjoy, so the "killer app" probably won't ever be a Linux-only application.
Several large banks still run OS/2. Why? Because it works for them. You'll still find lots of people running Win98. Likewise, you'll find people running very old versions of RedHat, because they're afraid of upgrading.
We've only recently started a campaign to upgrade our old Slack 7.0 to Slack 8.1 servers to Slack 10.0. I made a bootable CD to make this easy. It takes 1/2 dozen commands (including mounting the cd and destination partitions), and takes 5 to 10 minutes. Users rarely notice the downtime, and appreciate than things are faster now. How much pain would I be in upgrading from say WinNT to WinXP?
I'll be more than happy to leave it unplugged laying just outside of the cabinet. I'll even put a big sign on it saying "Take this one!" :)
I don't think my boss would appreciate getting the bad marks on his credit though.
It'll still make a mighty fine boat anchor.
I found an old catalog a while back that showed the Model III to be just over USD $3000.
You could have probably sold that. That would have been a great game back in the day. That's way beyond what I could have written then. But again, I was only about 8 years old.
You don't know how much I make.
But in either case, it's not a game of "my wallet is bigger". If he makes more than me, he doesn't need someone to pay for drinks, so it's just a "thank you".
I appreciate someone taking me out for drinks, if I've done work for them. Sure, I may have spent a week programming something for a friend, and sure a night of drinking doesn't even approach the time invested, but it seems to make everything right.
Actually, I just made some more changes to it yesterday, and wiped out just about everything to do it.
I was having a bastard of a time trying to get the OS to boot from one of those 3Tb arrays, and I had been previously booting from an old 6Gb IDE hard drive from the RMA pile, so I transfered everything from the 6Gb to a pair of 20Gb drives (RAID 1), and wiped all the partition information from
Today, we start populating it. Wheeee.
He's probably heard all the computer stories he can tolerate.
I'd have to assume it's kind of like walking into my office saying "I have a problem with...." Like, I don't want to hear it, go away. Tell me about the hot girl you met the other night, or the new stuff you put on your car, and I'll listen.
Unfortunately, for Linus, most of the "Hey Linus, this doesn't work" questions usually turn out to be user failure. I field plenty of those right now for our Linux workstations and servers. Very very rarely does anything come back to something in the kernel.
I seem to recall seeing a picture of a slightly drunk Linus with a beer bottle in front of him. Damned if I can remember what brand it was off-hand.
I know me and some of my friends have done amazing programming when we're drunk, I wonder if we could put some really whack stuff in the kernel on a good drunken weekend. Of course, it would need it's own category in the 'make menuconfig', something like "Drunken Ideas".
The 2.6.7 kernel does have something about including graphics into it. I didn't read too much into it, I was busy getting it ready for a new server.
The way I see it, the initial cost is $0. If you find it worth while, it's worth paying a few bucks for. That reminds me, it's about time to pay my tribute to a few of the groups I use their stuff frequently. Time to buy a round of CD's and T-shirts to give away to friends. :)
:)
My Slackware hat is starting to look kind of ratty, I guess I should get one for myself too.
If I ever bump into Linus in real life, I'm going to take him out drinking.
I'll mention it to my bosses. :)
:)
We have a 6u Dell Quad Xeon 500 box that we're retiring in the next few weeks, that we're trying to figure out what to do with. I suggested it would make a very nice boat anchor. Aparently we're still paying the financing to Dell on it. Maybe they'll take it back.
You wouldn't really want it as a workstation, it sounds like a freakin' turboprop airplane taking off when it's running.
Most users can be replaced by a simple shell script anyways, so that wasn't hard to prove.
The first computer I used was a TRS 80 Model III. It was at my school. There were no floppy drives, just a single cassette deck, but we didn't have anything to actually put in there. :) I think the most productive thing it ever ran were the basic programs I'd type in from a learning basic book.
:)
Wheeeee, I can make text scroll on the screen.
Oh, the good ol' days. Now if I were to write the same thing, it'd scroll by faster than you could see.
[insert obligatory "walking to school in the snow uphill both ways every day" here]
Ahhh, the days of the text based video games.. I miss "Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy"
Funny, I was just working on one of our multi-terabyte multi-cpu multi-ghz machines today. My first "modern" machine was a 486/33 with a 20Mb hard drive.
/ /array1 /array2
/proc/cpuinfo
This one isn't our fastest, it just has the largest storage. I'm sure in 10 years, it'll be nothing that I'd even want to work with, because it'll be so slow.
$ uname -a
Linux server 2.6.7 #1 SMP Tue Jun 29 03:51:47 EDT 2004 i686 unknown unknown GNU/Linux
$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/md0 19G 2.7G 15G 16%
/dev/sda 3.2T 407M 3.2T 1%
/dev/sdb 3.2T 407M 3.2T 1%
$ cat
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 15
model : 2
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 2.40GHz
stepping : 5
cpu MHz : 2400.080
cache size : 512 KB
[SNIP]
processor : 3
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 15
model : 2
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 2.40GHz
stepping : 5
cpu MHz : 2400.080
cache size : 512 KB