As a well known chef, people must assume you have a refined palate and discerning tastes... but do you ever get a crazy cravin' for a Big Mac? Do you have a secret lust for a particular type of junk food?
I've been out of high school for a long time and I still do that on my lunch breaks. And after work. On my coffee breaks. Before lectures. After lectures. While watching TV. Riding the bus. Walking down the street.
But not in bed. The girlfriend put the kibosh on that one early on.
Hey, this is great stuff. A couple years ago, people were saying that Linux didn't stand a chance in business computing unless a good office productivity suite was available... and now we have several in the pipeline, a couple of which are actually quite reasonable. Give 'em another year or two, and I think we'll have some solid cross platform products.
So, I'm curious: Releasing GP under an open source license is certainly The Right Thing To Do, but what specific benefits might we get from it? Are office suites as layered as operating systems, with code on higher levels fairly portable, or are the only standards at the file format level?
Also, is it a "from scratch" rewrite of ClarisWorks, or might there be some sticky licensing issues with Apple popping up in the near future.. ?
Regardless, having different ways of doing the same things, so long as there's open and stable file formats, is always a good thing...
For me, at least. I helped start a dot.com for Fun and Profit, and it turned out to be a bad choice. The company's still around, which makes me feel pretty good about the whole deal, but I burnt out on software production for a living.
On the other hand, hobbies are a completely different story. I'm currently running a non-profit web server, writing collaboration/discussion/sharing software, and I'm getting into embedded r/c flight control software. Can't get the geek out of my system, and I don't particularly want to, either!
Regardless, after I quit my job at the dot.com, I pursued my other big interest: photography. I worked both as a photographer, and as a professional assistant. Being an assistant was great, because I was making money hanging out with models, and it's an intense way to meet people and learn about the business. When I did my own shoots, there was a very tangible result which was almost completely the product of my blood, sweat, and tears.
I speak in the past tense, because I've decided to go back to school, and I no longer have the space or time to do much photography on top of my school work and geek interests. Regardless, I expect I'll get back into it after I've completed my formal education.
So, sometimes the grass really is greener on the other side of the fence. There's only one way to find out, though.
hah. well, that's what I get for reading your post too quickly. i've been using 808nm diodes to pump Nd:LSB, and for some reason I assumed you were pumping Nd:LSB/YVO. duh, me.
See if you can get your hands on Nd:LSB. It's a bit more expensive than YVO, but it's got a *much* higher saturation intensity, and more efficient absorption of 808nm as well... not that you really have to worry about that sort of thing when you're playing around with a 3W laser. Most of the applications I've seen with LSB are for compact, low powered situations...
Sounds like you've got an Nd:LSB laser. If you want to see something cool, track down a suitably sized potassium titanyl phosphate (KPT) crystal. It doubles the frequency, turning that faint red to a brilliant green. I'm not sure what the efficiency loss is, but it's a neat trick.
It would be really cool if a competitor combined all the nifty DARPA technologies discussed in the article.
Imagine: a robotic vehicle powered by a scramjet, with an internal guidance guidance system in the form of a rat being remotely controlled by the brain power of a monkey, and a quantum computer capable of basic arithmetic.
600 acres is roughly one square mile, or about a half-square mile per site. That's not an enormous amount of land for a robotics testing facility, especially for groups such as CMU and NREC. If you want a good amount of varied terrain, you're asking for a lot of space, particularly when dealing with larger/faster robots. Considering they're looking for "junk" land, I think it's a great use of otherwise abandoned space...
In high school, a few of my friends and I salvaged PDP's and gigantic 5MB drives from dumpsters outside of a telecommunications building. Those beasts weighed a hell of a lot, made of solid steel, with belt driven spindles and massive motors with heatsinks on 'em.
Interesting to think that something that's about 1/10th of a percent of the size of those monsters contains almost 41,000 times more data.
Technology. Great stuff.:)
Another story to bore your socks off:
When I was working at an animation/film editing studio five years ago, we dropped a serious amount of money on a 200GB fibre channel array to feed three Avid workstations. It was a beast of a box, easily weighing over a hundred pounds.. and it was really cool to run long lengths of those skinny little wires to the editing stations. After dealing with FC, I'm seriously looking forward to working with Serial ATA and Serial SCSI -- those complex multi-pin connections just gotta go.
I'm looking forward to the Rendezvous with Rama movie.. but I sure hope the bit about "revenge against aliens who blow up Italy" was a misprint. Talk about plot butchering.
The trick isn't how hot your CPU currently is, it's the rate at which it generates heat (the wattage), verses the thermal conductivity of the coolant, and how much coolant circulates past the chip (forced, or otherwise). Fluorinert has a pretty low viscosity, so it'll circulate fairly well on it's own in a reasonably sized vessel. I suspect it wouldn't have any problems cooling a modern CPU with a small heat sink.
Fluorinert is actually a fairly diverse group of coolants. The lowest has a boiling point at 30C, but others scale upwards of 210C. It's neat stuff. And contrary to some of the posts out there, 3M has phased out the ozone depleting (CFC based) Fluorinert chems with ozone safe and somewhat less toxic chems.
But it's still not cheap, unless you buy it used. Heh.
I would actually recommend this book to anyone who has more than a passing interest in wireless networks -- sure, there's a lot of nitty gritty details, but that's better than being short on information, right?
Anyhow, for those of you who are interested in setting up a public node, I definitely recommend you check out the NoCat project. It's an authentication/monitoring system for admins interested in having a little control over who accesses their wireless networks.
Another fun resource is the Personal Telco Project. There's lots of smart folks involved who can tell you everything you need to know about setting up wireless nodes with old abandoned computers and home built antennas. Yes. Wireless can be done cheaply.
.. two full sized screens. Not two half sized, odd aspect screens, divided by a really irritating bar.
What's the point of it? I suppose they could be trying to make use of two high resolution screens in order to be cheaper than using a singular high resolution screen... but that bar is hideous, and it's still farking expensive.
I agree with you completely, that government surveyance of it's constituents should have a lot more transparency and visibility to those being surveyed. Unfortunately, I don't believe the government in the United States is actually looking out for the best interests of all of it's citizens -- it's attempting to preserve its current status by reinforcing it's power. That's one of the basic goals of any purposeful organization in existence, not just government.
Of course, referring to the government as "it" is pretty lame, as "it" sounds like some I'm talking about sort of weird conspiracy. The government is an extraordinarily diverse group of humans, most of whom are average Joe and Jane Civilians. I won't write a dissertation on the power structures of government here, but my general point is that paranoia within a government maintained (but not directed) by civilians is self destructive.
Paranoia is the only explanation for the existence of the NSA, and the creation of this Homeland Security department and subsequent reorganization of the government's intelligence community is a huge red flag for a growing sense of instability. The only reason the Powers That Be would create such a broad and powerful organization is if there was a perceived threat not only from a handful of illegal immigrants, but also a substantial number of proper citizens who expressed dissatisfaction with the way things are currently being managed.
Mutter mutter. I'm sure this post will make my folder that much thicker. Heh.;)
The first rule of spying is that you get away with everything you possibly can, and the second rule of spying is that you get away with everything you possibly can. Admitting that you're spying is one thing, as everyone has spies, but saying how you're doing it, or even acknowledging that you're using certain methods, is a Bad Idea from the government's standpoint. They won't admit to unlawfully tapping people's phone lines, why the heck would they want to admit that they help run a global communications monitoring system?
Besides, the "leaky information" approach is much more effective at keeping people guessing. Any high tech security agency would use high tech methods (like packet sniffing) to increase it's knowledge base. The fact that Echelon exists should not be surprising or amazing. However, by not telling the masses about it, the population who know and care about the technology is left only to speculate, and the rumor mill probably works in the favor of the government on this issue. It's like guerrilla marketing.
The article doesn't go into much detail about the discussions, and leaves a lot of questionable assertions dangling. For example, the claim that "Going too far one way would restrict freedom of choice, while the opposite could foster organized crime." The more you restrict freedom of choice, the more actions become criminal. And doesn't organize crime really take a foothold when undue restrictions are imposed upon the masses? The Prohibition in the United States is/was a pretty stark example.
That aside, check out the conference website for a full list of the subjects they're covering. You might also be interested in reading an interesting report from the US National Research Council and Eric Schmidt (the CEO of Google) about how the Internet is growing up, so to speak.
I'm not sure how much you've looked up, so some of this information may be redundant, but here's what I've been able to dig up:
The Power4 chip has two processor cores and a shared 1.44MB on-chip L2 cache.. which in turn appears to be implemented as three separate cache controllers. The cache lines are hashed across the controllers, which is a pretty neat trick IMHO.
It weighs in at about 170 million transistors
This PDF mentions that there are over 5500 total I/Os (including > 2200 signal I/Os) that give the chip a raw bandwidth of over 1 Tb/s.
According to this page, the chip simulations show the core temperature peaking around 82C (~180F) in certain regions of the chip, and consuming 115 - 140 watts.
That's a beast of a chip! The packaging looks pretty substantial as well. I don't doubt the cooling systems are fairly remarkable, although I can't find any specific information about 'em.
When I said "The idea that you have any sort of control or privacy in the first place is already out of the question," I meant it to be in context with a service contract. I really didn't make that clear at all... my bad.
If you sign a contract with a service provider that has the questionable technologies we're discussing, chances are you are giving them the right to take over your device to some extent.
Yes, the bottom line is the law, but generally speaking, if you sign away your rights to privacy, you no longer have those rights.
My beef is with the contracts. They keep getting longer, and longer... eventually it will get to the point (if it hasn't already) that the average person will not be able to legally enter into contracts, because they won't be able to understand what the contract actually means. To make matters worse, contracts only become longer if they are specifying new regulations -- you can look at it in the sense that the longer the contract, the fewer rights you'll have when you sign it.
I think I'll end this post before I lapse into a crazed rant about business ethics.;)
With the exception of "taking control" they can already tell where you are and who you are (otherwise these sorts of things wouldn't work). And when it comes to "taking control".. well, you are technically renting the privilege to use the service in the first place. The idea that you have any sort of control or privacy in the first place is already out of the question.
I'm not sure if this is entirely applicable to your situation, but here's what I do, and it works reasonably well.
I have a server on a public IP address that runs SAMBA, but only accepts connections from 'localhost'. From my Windows box and iBook (running OS X), I just do a bit of SSH tunneling, and I'm able to mount the machine from anywhere I happen to be.
As far as I can tell, it's reasonably secure, and it works just fine for general files.
I also have a CVS repository on the server for my development projects, but that doesn't work so well for binary files like images and Word documents.:P
One of my friends keeps his files synchronized via an htaccess protected website which allows him to download and upload files. If you're interested, I'll see what I can do to track down his PHP script...
By "pipeline" I meant instruction size. It can't be said for sure if it's a 256-bit wide datapath, but it seems that anything less would make the chip even harder to build.
Later when I referred to shoving "two down the pipeline", it was in consideration of size of the previous 128-bit VLIW instructions, not that they were attempting to parallelize the execution of the previous VLIW instruction set.
.. just trying to clarify what I meant. Heaven forbid it be misinterpreted..;-)
This is not memory addressing, it's just the width of the instruction pipeline -- I'm inclined to think this chip will probably have 32-bit addressing to be IA32 friendly, but of course, I don't know for sure.
There's nothing too spectacular about 256-bit instruction paths in VLIW processors, but I'm not sure this will offer the caliber of benefits they claim it will: VLIW instructions (which are usually bundles of smaller, discrete instructions) are by nature very complex beasts, and trying to shove two down the pipeline without the instructions stepping on each other's toes is a difficult process.
But, of course, I'm not working at Transmeta, so I really can't say what wonders they're working over there.
I think the smartest choice I've ever made was to spend a few years in the "real world" between high school and college. Everyone I know who's taken a few years off has said the same thing: It's an excellent way to test the waters of working full time, and a great way to figure out what you really enjoy doing.
I took five years off, and while some have said my experience is somewhat extraordinary, I think it demonstrates my point well enough. In those five years, I worked at an animation studio, started a software company, traveled in Asia and Europe, and worked as a photographer and assistant up and down the West Coast of the United States. I discovered my love of travel, grew to love philosophy, met amazing people, and did some really cool things that would have been impossible to do if 1) I had been in school, or 2) had to pay off student loans.
There's no better time than now to try something interesting and take risks. Later on you'll have some pretty big responsibilities, like kids, student loans, and a mortgage. Now, even if your best laid plans fall apart, the worst that can happen is that you'll end up living with your parents and heading back to school.
If you can get a job as a sysadmin, go for it. If you end up not liking it, go do something else. Travel as much as you can afford. Try things that your normally wouldn't try.
Then go back to school. I'm currently pursuing a double degree in philosophy and photography at a great university in New Zealand, and in my spare time I administer a community server and do tricky things with PHP. I'm incredibly keen on my education now that I've had a look around in the "real world," and there's no way in hell I would have ended up on the other side of the planet, studying the things I'm studying, if I had headed straight off to uni after graduating from high school.
Don't go straight to school if you don't want to. It may be the safest thing to do in the long run, but you're at an ideal time in life to take a few risks. Trust me, you'll be better off for it.
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As a well known chef, people must assume you have a refined palate and discerning tastes ... but do you ever get a crazy cravin' for a Big Mac? Do you have a secret lust for a particular type of junk food?
I've been out of high school for a long time and I still do that on my lunch breaks. And after work. On my coffee breaks. Before lectures. After lectures. While watching TV. Riding the bus. Walking down the street.
But not in bed. The girlfriend put the kibosh on that one early on.
Hey, this is great stuff. A couple years ago, people were saying that Linux didn't stand a chance in business computing unless a good office productivity suite was available ... and now we have several in the pipeline, a couple of which are actually quite reasonable. Give 'em another year or two, and I think we'll have some solid cross platform products.
.. ?
...
So, I'm curious: Releasing GP under an open source license is certainly The Right Thing To Do, but what specific benefits might we get from it? Are office suites as layered as operating systems, with code on higher levels fairly portable, or are the only standards at the file format level?
Also, is it a "from scratch" rewrite of ClarisWorks, or might there be some sticky licensing issues with Apple popping up in the near future
Regardless, having different ways of doing the same things, so long as there's open and stable file formats, is always a good thing
For me, at least. I helped start a dot.com for Fun and Profit, and it turned out to be a bad choice. The company's still around, which makes me feel pretty good about the whole deal, but I burnt out on software production for a living.
On the other hand, hobbies are a completely different story. I'm currently running a non-profit web server, writing collaboration/discussion/sharing software, and I'm getting into embedded r/c flight control software. Can't get the geek out of my system, and I don't particularly want to, either!
Regardless, after I quit my job at the dot.com, I pursued my other big interest: photography. I worked both as a photographer, and as a professional assistant. Being an assistant was great, because I was making money hanging out with models, and it's an intense way to meet people and learn about the business. When I did my own shoots, there was a very tangible result which was almost completely the product of my blood, sweat, and tears.
I speak in the past tense, because I've decided to go back to school, and I no longer have the space or time to do much photography on top of my school work and geek interests. Regardless, I expect I'll get back into it after I've completed my formal education.
So, sometimes the grass really is greener on the other side of the fence. There's only one way to find out, though.
hah. well, that's what I get for reading your post too quickly. i've been using 808nm diodes to pump Nd:LSB, and for some reason I assumed you were pumping Nd:LSB/YVO. duh, me.
... not that you really have to worry about that sort of thing when you're playing around with a 3W laser. Most of the applications I've seen with LSB are for compact, low powered situations ...
See if you can get your hands on Nd:LSB. It's a bit more expensive than YVO, but it's got a *much* higher saturation intensity, and more efficient absorption of 808nm as well
Sounds like you've got an Nd:LSB laser. If you want to see something cool, track down a suitably sized potassium titanyl phosphate (KPT) crystal. It doubles the frequency, turning that faint red to a brilliant green. I'm not sure what the efficiency loss is, but it's a neat trick.
It would be really cool if a competitor combined all the nifty DARPA technologies discussed in the article.
Imagine: a robotic vehicle powered by a scramjet, with an internal guidance guidance system in the form of a rat being remotely controlled by the brain power of a monkey, and a quantum computer capable of basic arithmetic.
Hmm ...
600 acres is roughly one square mile, or about a half-square mile per site. That's not an enormous amount of land for a robotics testing facility, especially for groups such as CMU and NREC. If you want a good amount of varied terrain, you're asking for a lot of space, particularly when dealing with larger/faster robots. Considering they're looking for "junk" land, I think it's a great use of otherwise abandoned space ...
In high school, a few of my friends and I salvaged PDP's and gigantic 5MB drives from dumpsters outside of a telecommunications building. Those beasts weighed a hell of a lot, made of solid steel, with belt driven spindles and massive motors with heatsinks on 'em.
:)
.. and it was really cool to run long lengths of those skinny little wires to the editing stations. After dealing with FC, I'm seriously looking forward to working with Serial ATA and Serial SCSI -- those complex multi-pin connections just gotta go.
:)
Interesting to think that something that's about 1/10th of a percent of the size of those monsters contains almost 41,000 times more data.
Technology. Great stuff.
Another story to bore your socks off:
When I was working at an animation/film editing studio five years ago, we dropped a serious amount of money on a 200GB fibre channel array to feed three Avid workstations. It was a beast of a box, easily weighing over a hundred pounds
Anyhow. Enough of my drivel.
I'm looking forward to the Rendezvous with Rama movie .. but I sure hope the bit about "revenge against aliens who blow up Italy" was a misprint. Talk about plot butchering.
The trick isn't how hot your CPU currently is, it's the rate at which it generates heat (the wattage), verses the thermal conductivity of the coolant, and how much coolant circulates past the chip (forced, or otherwise). Fluorinert has a pretty low viscosity, so it'll circulate fairly well on it's own in a reasonably sized vessel. I suspect it wouldn't have any problems cooling a modern CPU with a small heat sink.
Fluorinert is actually a fairly diverse group of coolants. The lowest has a boiling point at 30C, but others scale upwards of 210C. It's neat stuff. And contrary to some of the posts out there, 3M has phased out the ozone depleting (CFC based) Fluorinert chems with ozone safe and somewhat less toxic chems.
But it's still not cheap, unless you buy it used. Heh.
Horton Hears a Who has a sequel?
Maybe Entwistle isn't really dead?
Oh, wait. You meant The Two Towers.
Hmm. You know, I'm sure a bad Ent Whistle joke is lurking in there somewhere.
I would actually recommend this book to anyone who has more than a passing interest in wireless networks -- sure, there's a lot of nitty gritty details, but that's better than being short on information, right?
Anyhow, for those of you who are interested in setting up a public node, I definitely recommend you check out the NoCat project. It's an authentication/monitoring system for admins interested in having a little control over who accesses their wireless networks.
Another fun resource is the Personal Telco Project. There's lots of smart folks involved who can tell you everything you need to know about setting up wireless nodes with old abandoned computers and home built antennas. Yes. Wireless can be done cheaply.
Enjoy!
What's the point of it? I suppose they could be trying to make use of two high resolution screens in order to be cheaper than using a singular high resolution screen ... but that bar is hideous, and it's still farking expensive.
My prediction is a crash n' burn on this one.
I agree with you completely, that government surveyance of it's constituents should have a lot more transparency and visibility to those being surveyed. Unfortunately, I don't believe the government in the United States is actually looking out for the best interests of all of it's citizens -- it's attempting to preserve its current status by reinforcing it's power. That's one of the basic goals of any purposeful organization in existence, not just government.
Of course, referring to the government as "it" is pretty lame, as "it" sounds like some I'm talking about sort of weird conspiracy. The government is an extraordinarily diverse group of humans, most of whom are average Joe and Jane Civilians. I won't write a dissertation on the power structures of government here, but my general point is that paranoia within a government maintained (but not directed) by civilians is self destructive.
Paranoia is the only explanation for the existence of the NSA, and the creation of this Homeland Security department and subsequent reorganization of the government's intelligence community is a huge red flag for a growing sense of instability. The only reason the Powers That Be would create such a broad and powerful organization is if there was a perceived threat not only from a handful of illegal immigrants, but also a substantial number of proper citizens who expressed dissatisfaction with the way things are currently being managed.
Mutter mutter. I'm sure this post will make my folder that much thicker. Heh. ;)
The first rule of spying is that you get away with everything you possibly can, and the second rule of spying is that you get away with everything you possibly can. Admitting that you're spying is one thing, as everyone has spies, but saying how you're doing it, or even acknowledging that you're using certain methods, is a Bad Idea from the government's standpoint. They won't admit to unlawfully tapping people's phone lines, why the heck would they want to admit that they help run a global communications monitoring system?
Besides, the "leaky information" approach is much more effective at keeping people guessing. Any high tech security agency would use high tech methods (like packet sniffing) to increase it's knowledge base. The fact that Echelon exists should not be surprising or amazing. However, by not telling the masses about it, the population who know and care about the technology is left only to speculate, and the rumor mill probably works in the favor of the government on this issue. It's like guerrilla marketing.
The article doesn't go into much detail about the discussions, and leaves a lot of questionable assertions dangling. For example, the claim that "Going too far one way would restrict freedom of choice, while the opposite could foster organized crime." The more you restrict freedom of choice, the more actions become criminal. And doesn't organize crime really take a foothold when undue restrictions are imposed upon the masses? The Prohibition in the United States is/was a pretty stark example.
That aside, check out the conference website for a full list of the subjects they're covering. You might also be interested in reading an interesting report from the US National Research Council and Eric Schmidt (the CEO of Google) about how the Internet is growing up, so to speak.
Yeah, the MCM is a real beast -- It's about the size of a grilled cheese sandwich, which seems like a more-than-convenient coincidence. ;)
I'm not sure how much you've looked up, so some of this information may be redundant, but here's what I've been able to dig up:
That's a beast of a chip! The packaging looks pretty substantial as well. I don't doubt the cooling systems are fairly remarkable, although I can't find any specific information about 'em.
cheers!
When I said "The idea that you have any sort of control or privacy in the first place is already out of the question," I meant it to be in context with a service contract. I really didn't make that clear at all ... my bad.
... eventually it will get to the point (if it hasn't already) that the average person will not be able to legally enter into contracts, because they won't be able to understand what the contract actually means. To make matters worse, contracts only become longer if they are specifying new regulations -- you can look at it in the sense that the longer the contract, the fewer rights you'll have when you sign it.
;)
If you sign a contract with a service provider that has the questionable technologies we're discussing, chances are you are giving them the right to take over your device to some extent.
Yes, the bottom line is the law, but generally speaking, if you sign away your rights to privacy, you no longer have those rights.
My beef is with the contracts. They keep getting longer, and longer
I think I'll end this post before I lapse into a crazed rant about business ethics.
With the exception of "taking control" they can already tell where you are and who you are (otherwise these sorts of things wouldn't work). And when it comes to "taking control" .. well, you are technically renting the privilege to use the service in the first place. The idea that you have any sort of control or privacy in the first place is already out of the question.
I'm not sure if this is entirely applicable to your situation, but here's what I do, and it works reasonably well.
:P
...
I have a server on a public IP address that runs SAMBA, but only accepts connections from 'localhost'. From my Windows box and iBook (running OS X), I just do a bit of SSH tunneling, and I'm able to mount the machine from anywhere I happen to be.
As far as I can tell, it's reasonably secure, and it works just fine for general files.
I also have a CVS repository on the server for my development projects, but that doesn't work so well for binary files like images and Word documents.
One of my friends keeps his files synchronized via an htaccess protected website which allows him to download and upload files. If you're interested, I'll see what I can do to track down his PHP script
(clicked the submit button on accident .. argh)
.. ;-)
By "pipeline" I meant instruction size. It can't be said for sure if it's a 256-bit wide datapath, but it seems that anything less would make the chip even harder to build.
Later when I referred to shoving "two down the pipeline", it was in consideration of size of the previous 128-bit VLIW instructions, not that they were attempting to parallelize the execution of the previous VLIW instruction set.
.. just trying to clarify what I meant. Heaven forbid it be misinterpreted
This is not memory addressing, it's just the width of the instruction pipeline -- I'm inclined to think this chip will probably have 32-bit addressing to be IA32 friendly, but of course, I don't know for sure.
There's nothing too spectacular about 256-bit instruction paths in VLIW processors, but I'm not sure this will offer the caliber of benefits they claim it will: VLIW instructions (which are usually bundles of smaller, discrete instructions) are by nature very complex beasts, and trying to shove two down the pipeline without the instructions stepping on each other's toes is a difficult process.
But, of course, I'm not working at Transmeta, so I really can't say what wonders they're working over there.
... eventually.
I think the smartest choice I've ever made was to spend a few years in the "real world" between high school and college. Everyone I know who's taken a few years off has said the same thing: It's an excellent way to test the waters of working full time, and a great way to figure out what you really enjoy doing.
I took five years off, and while some have said my experience is somewhat extraordinary, I think it demonstrates my point well enough. In those five years, I worked at an animation studio, started a software company, traveled in Asia and Europe, and worked as a photographer and assistant up and down the West Coast of the United States. I discovered my love of travel, grew to love philosophy, met amazing people, and did some really cool things that would have been impossible to do if 1) I had been in school, or 2) had to pay off student loans.
There's no better time than now to try something interesting and take risks. Later on you'll have some pretty big responsibilities, like kids, student loans, and a mortgage. Now, even if your best laid plans fall apart, the worst that can happen is that you'll end up living with your parents and heading back to school.
If you can get a job as a sysadmin, go for it. If you end up not liking it, go do something else. Travel as much as you can afford. Try things that your normally wouldn't try.
Then go back to school. I'm currently pursuing a double degree in philosophy and photography at a great university in New Zealand, and in my spare time I administer a community server and do tricky things with PHP. I'm incredibly keen on my education now that I've had a look around in the "real world," and there's no way in hell I would have ended up on the other side of the planet, studying the things I'm studying, if I had headed straight off to uni after graduating from high school.
Don't go straight to school if you don't want to. It may be the safest thing to do in the long run, but you're at an ideal time in life to take a few risks. Trust me, you'll be better off for it.