Re:Good for linux(?), probably not good for Sun
on
Sun To Sell Linux PCs
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· Score: 2
Thanks. I don't mean to insult them. The people I have in mind are all highly-intelligent engineers. They aren't sysadmins, just like I'm not an engineer. However, they know read enough to know that they can dramatically improve their productivity with linux. However, since there is no corporate solution provided, with a standard platform (OS+hardware). So, they're going out and trying to do it themselves, and find themselves in the same situation I would be in if i decided to design an ASIC. If there was a good standard system I could recommend to everybody BEFORE they start trying to put something of their own together, they'd have something which I can fully know what it is, what can go wrong with it, how to configure it, etc., and I could get them going and they could get back to designing chips. As it is, so far, we the experimentation has mostly been done by people with some previous unix admin experience (their own linux boxen, mostly), so I just give small bits of help - how to make a kernel here, now to set up automount there.... However, as this goes on, and these guys are breaking the rules (IT management would prefer the engineers use drawing tables and abacuses (abaci?)) and getting full round of synthesis, place&route, and extraction done in one day when it takes 3 days for everybody else, everybody's wanting in on it. The correct answer in my job is to tell them that it's not supported and that they're on their own. Unfortunately for my career and workload, I still have a soul and a minimally functional brain, so more and more of my time is eaten up, mostly now by people outside my division, who are trying to do their jobs better. Maybe, if Sun comes out with a good platform and a good implementation of the OS, without jacking themselves up into Dell-level pricing, I can get IT to accept it as a standard, and get these people proper support.
Sure, If I were still delivering pizza for a living and hacking on my pc in my spare time, I'd be pissing and moaning about a big company trying to take over my private geek hobby. I no longer have that luxury. My one misgiving about this, though is the cost issue mentioned above. The systems we're using in this site cost about USD 2100, with dual Athlons and 4GB of ECC ram, ordered from Monarch, I believe. We acquired them with the connivance of a clueful higher manager, who let us expense them, like office supplies. Our company has a close business relationship with Dell, and any formal PC hardware purchase must be made from them. The Dell equivalent to our systems costs around USD 8000. I'd hate to think what Sun may want for these systems.
Re:Good for linux(?), probably not good for Sun
on
Sun To Sell Linux PCs
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I'll give you a compelling reason. Sun will do a standard set of hardware, optimize the OS install for that exact platform, with sensible defaults and and easy configuration. Corporations will be able to just buy a box and have a good working system, no problems with the video card of the day the vendor sent not being supported by the current distribution, compile a custom kernel for it, then keep track of it in case of a future reinstall. If Sun changes the hardware, it'll also support it. I love Linux. I started using it 9 years ago, almost to the day. Yet, one of my major headaches in my job is answering questions from people who are trying to take advantage of the superiour OS, but don't have the background to make it work.
Ok, so you can't run calibre. Are you on a Sun, or an HP?
Linux OK, What kernel version? I don't know type "uname -a" and tell me what it says It says "youname: command not found" Really? what's your $PATH set to? I don't know ok, type "echo $PATH" It just comes back to a prompt Ok, what's the system name, I'll telnet in, and see what I can see. linux ok, what domain is it in? what do you mean? Is it linux.company.com, or what? I suppose Ok, what is the IP address - just type/sbin/ifconfig -a".... what user are you logged in as? root so none of your user setup scripts are being run for you anyway. Let's try logging in as yourself - you can just "su - username" su: user username does not exist Ok, have you set up NIS? What's that?
After digging down through all this stuff, teaching enough unix to make it so I can get into the system. I go to the website for their particular distribution (I'm a slackware man, myself), and start learning the management interface
If it were a defined platform, the user would have set the box on his desk, followed the instructions, and been up and running, and I could go right in and tweak things like NIS and automount, instead of starting from scratch on each box.
can't afford regular backups
I'm not sure how to respond to that comment, only that I must. Cursing seems most appropriate... What do you fucking mean can't afford regular backups? Do you have shit for brains? Ok, that's all the profanity I can stand for the moment. If you can't afford to back up your data, then either you are in the final steps of liquidating your business AND you can't even sell the data, and/or your data is meaningless, and shouldn't be collected in the first place. In these cases, you should save the money on both backing it up and creating it. Sell your computers to somebody who knows what they're for, and keep your reciepts in a paper ledger, and give that to your accountant at the end of the year, if your business survives that long. Back to the original phrase that set me off - "can't afford regular backups" sounds like an intentional distortion of the standard and valid wisdom stating that a business with data "can't afford to not do regular backups". I saw an entire hospital's accounting department lose two complete weeks of work re-entering an entire months work from the paper printouts. If they hadn't had those printouts, they would have also lost an entire months worth of income, plus been fined by various federal agencies for having incomplete records, all because they didn't follow our directions for backup (rather than rotating tapes, they just kept backing up over the previous tape). Every business that is run by data newbies needs one catastrophic failure, preferably saved by the geek who rides to the rescue with the backups he insisted on creating. For most, until that happens, they actually believe that they "can't afford regular backups". If they survive it, they never make that mistake again. You want to be a hero? Offer to take over the boring, non-glamorous job of backup. Do the job well, keep a low profile, bide your time, save somebody's ass. You'd be amazed how happy people are when you just show them how to find things in a Netapp snapshot.
I have to ammend my comment a bit... You say you're at week 5, trying to get paid for week 1, and you have the agreed-upon milestones finished for week 1. What about weeks 2 through 4? While you may have the employer contracturally, if you're only 20-25% as far along as you should be, he's got to be getting nervous and regretting hiring you. If, in fact, you've completed up to maybe week 3 (or especially 4), that's not far behind, and he's purely a scumbag, probably short on VC because of poor management, and trying to stretch to his own milestones to get more VC.
A: You are right to warn the investor, but B:You will give yourself a difficult reputation to carry through a career.
Now, if you have a personal contact within the investor company, you can slip it in that way, but it still probably won't gain you much. Perhaps you can use your knowledge for.... oh, how can I say this, blackmail? No, that's such an ugly word... How about extortion?
detonate nuclear warheads inside the star
This reminds me of my favorite Franklin Delano Roosevelt quotation, given on being informed that Romania had declared war on the US a few days after Pearl Harbor -
My kingdom for some mod points for the man who brings "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel" into this discussion. I think that may have been my first Heinlein. Whenever I read about cryogenic effects on life, I still think of the frozen "Mother Thing".
Depending on your application, it can be an enormous help. Building the apps fully static lets you work on your application in perl, edit, run, modify, debug, enhance, run, etc. on your development machine, then slap out a binary that can be run on any other windoze machine by simply getting that machine access to the executable. You're not messing with the registry, sticking DLLs all over the place, and taking up disk space with a development system when all you need is to run the program you wrote with your development system. Sure, the individual binary is enormous, for what it does, at least, at small amounts of code (as the app grows, the overhead shrinks into insignificance). I had to write and run an application on a bunch of windoze boxen for a client a couple of years ago. I was not permitted to install anything. I got it working in perl, used an eval copy(it wasn't a long-term application) of perl2exe, got the job done, and everybody was happy. Sounds like your app is similar. One caveat: the big static binaries tend to load kind of slow, but as you know, everything has tradeoffs.
I hope your homeowner's association is more reasonable than mine. At least 80% of our ground must be covered with Kentucky Bluegrass, here, in front-range Colorado, where some municipalities are discussing condemning farmers water rights because there isn't enough water to keep pretending this isn't an arid climate. I've even heard that some of the neighbors have discussed lodging a complaint with the assocation against me, because I do a partial hands-off mow of my back yard, using two stakes, some parachute cord, and a self-propelled mower to do the part of my back yard that can be done as an uninterrupted circle. This allows me to set it up at the end of the day, let it take one lap, manually mow what's outside the circle, and do the bulk of the mowing in the cool and dark(well, ok, it never gets DARK around here, with all the light pollution... don't get me started on that), cutting down dramatically on the pollution produced, and letting me save my sun exposure time for hiking.
A coworker has gotten that service (I presume you mean verizon wireless expressnet), as he is about to lose his dedicated ISDN connection to our intranet. The speeds are rarely above 30kbps, and the latency makes it very difficult to do things like editing files. I haven't seen it, but the latency sounds about like my Sprint Broadband Direct (though I commonly get downstream 1Mbps and upstream 256mbps). You can use it pretty well for email, streaming audio (low rate), IM, and other such latency-insensitive apps. However, when it's the only game in town....
The test assumes the clueless luser broke the tray with the weight of the cup+contents. say it's open, and he's reaching for something behind the system, presses down with his stomach, either just leaning, or with slipped footing. *Crack!* Of course they're overengineered, and can handle lots more weight than a cd. If they couldn't, my kids would have broken off the trays on all of mine by now, instead of just wearing out the open/close racks&pinions.
I can't imagine what the freaking problem is. They say the car can't take the stress on the track going that fast. I'd be quite impressed if they ran their distance at 30 mph. Surely, if it's capable of pushing itself along at >100, they can pick a lower speed and take a groove that doesn't stress the bearings. I think he's shooting for credibility amongst idiots. He'll come around after the failure, looking for "investors", claiming he was sabotaged by "big oil" or whatever. Here, you want perpetual motion - use the casimir effect, and lcds efficient enough to open and close one of the mirrors, and let that drive a piston, slowly. It's not really perpetual motion, but should be free energy, though at a low output.
Furthermore, what about the Indians, Turks, Asians, Ethiopians, Saxons, Celts,
That's one of my points, which sometimes sets me at odds with others in my rather fundamentalist church - For the life of me, I just can't picture Gandhi roasting in hell.
Now, for my silly comment, since I don't see it in anyone else's comments: I though Larry was God.
it feels like one No, it looks like it feels like one.
I found this article very comforting. I've been trying for a long time now to wrap my brain around the idea of an especially big gas giant, orbiting a star down around 0.001AU, with the only observable effect being just a bit of apparent redshifting? No violent flashes as the star snarfs up the red giant until it's just a rock (or diamond? )core? I suspect that all the giant, ultrashort period planets so far discovered, are false positives, attributable to this effect.
I'd be surprised if they make it that far. My experience with Maxtors MaxAttach NAS product destroyed my confidence in them. Unfortunately, the best peformance/feature/value combo I'm finding out there to replace them is the new Quantum guardian. I know that Maxtor owns Quantum's hard drive business, but I'm hoping they can't get their grubby hands on the NAS.
My family has been in the auction business since 1908. In our auctions, we do both the standard Dutch auction AND reverse auction, with most items. We start at the expected price, work down until somebody jumps in, and go back up until there's only one left. Ocassionally, someone will respond at the first offer, thus avoiding the reverse auction. Often, the first person to respond in the reverse part is not answered, thus avoiding the Dutch auction. At the end of every auction, Dad gives a brief preview of upcoming auctions, if any are booked, thus a search of multiple auctions. Of Woolston's three patents, the only one that's anything more than "standard task, but now done with a computer" is the one fully automating the auction, and that's pretty obvious. I'll bet the reason he couldn't get funding and start his own internet auction site is that the moron couldn't actually DO the stuff he was talking about. Maybe I should patent "A method of transportation using a device to dissemble an object, convert the matter to energy, transmit that energy, and convert it back to matter in its original form", then hope somebody invents the Star Trek Transporter, which I can then claim.
significant noise issues Actually, that's the best reason I can see to put a radio telescope down there. Having all the array cold will decrease the thermal noise generated by the array itself. Even though it's an rf instrument, and nominally doesn't care about light, I'd expect it to do its best work in July.
see ISS slightly after sunset, which is much more convienent. But much less dramatic. Anybody can catch a time to see it, which is no big deal. The big deal is to see it suddenly flash into view, like I did this morning. I'm not optimally placed for it, but I used the data for Phoenix, adjusted by rough guess, and watched the southwest. I'd forgotten to sync my watch to GPS, so I was just giving up, when suddenly, there it was. It would have been cooler to have been directly below it without light pollution, and track it while dim and see the brightening, but it was still dramatic. Watching it at sunset, you'll only see it dim, instead of brighten, unless they spend a LOT of fuel on delta-vee.
Do you perchance mean tartaric acid? This correction brought to you by a literate American who has always spelled and pronounced "arctic" and its derivative correctly, educated in a rural Indiana school.
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Man, can you imagine a beowulf cluster of those?
Thanks. I don't mean to insult them. The people I have in mind are all highly-intelligent engineers. They aren't sysadmins, just like I'm not an engineer. However, they know read enough to know that they can dramatically improve their productivity with linux. However, since there is no corporate solution provided, with a standard platform (OS+hardware). So, they're going out and trying to do it themselves, and find themselves in the same situation I would be in if i decided to design an ASIC.
If there was a good standard system I could recommend to everybody BEFORE they start trying to put something of their own together, they'd have something which I can fully know what it is, what can go wrong with it, how to configure it, etc., and I could get them going and they could get back to designing chips.
As it is, so far, we the experimentation has mostly been done by people with some previous unix admin experience (their own linux boxen, mostly), so I just give small bits of help - how to make a kernel here, now to set up automount there.... However, as this goes on, and these guys are breaking the rules (IT management would prefer the engineers use drawing tables and abacuses (abaci?)) and getting full round of synthesis, place&route, and extraction done in one day when it takes 3 days for everybody else, everybody's wanting in on it. The correct answer in my job is to tell them that it's not supported and that they're on their own. Unfortunately for my career and workload, I still have a soul and a minimally functional brain, so more and more of my time is eaten up, mostly now by people outside my division, who are trying to do their jobs better. Maybe, if Sun comes out with a good platform and a good implementation of the OS, without jacking themselves up into Dell-level pricing, I can get IT to accept it as a standard, and get these people proper support.
Sure, If I were still delivering pizza for a living and hacking on my pc in my spare time, I'd be pissing and moaning about a big company trying to take over my private geek hobby. I no longer have that luxury. My one misgiving about this, though is the cost issue mentioned above. The systems we're using in this site cost about USD 2100, with dual Athlons and 4GB of ECC ram, ordered from Monarch, I believe. We acquired them with the connivance of a clueful higher manager, who let us expense them, like office supplies. Our company has a close business relationship with Dell, and any formal PC hardware purchase must be made from them. The Dell equivalent to our systems costs around USD 8000. I'd hate to think what Sun may want for these systems.
I love Linux. I started using it 9 years ago, almost to the day. Yet, one of my major headaches in my job is answering questions from people who are trying to take advantage of the superiour OS, but don't have the background to make it work.If it were a defined platform, the user would have set the box on his desk, followed the instructions, and been up and running, and I could go right in and tweak things like NIS and automount, instead of starting from scratch on each box.
can't afford regular backups
I'm not sure how to respond to that comment, only that I must. Cursing seems most appropriate... What do you fucking mean can't afford regular backups? Do you have shit for brains? Ok, that's all the profanity I can stand for the moment. If you can't afford to back up your data, then either you are in the final steps of liquidating your business AND you can't even sell the data, and/or your data is meaningless, and shouldn't be collected in the first place. In these cases, you should save the money on both backing it up and creating it. Sell your computers to somebody who knows what they're for, and keep your reciepts in a paper ledger, and give that to your accountant at the end of the year, if your business survives that long.
Back to the original phrase that set me off - "can't afford regular backups" sounds like an intentional distortion of the standard and valid wisdom stating that a business with data "can't afford to not do regular backups".
I saw an entire hospital's accounting department lose two complete weeks of work re-entering an entire months work from the paper printouts. If they hadn't had those printouts, they would have also lost an entire months worth of income, plus been fined by various federal agencies for having incomplete records, all because they didn't follow our directions for backup (rather than rotating tapes, they just kept backing up over the previous tape).
Every business that is run by data newbies needs one catastrophic failure, preferably saved by the geek who rides to the rescue with the backups he insisted on creating. For most, until that happens, they actually believe that they "can't afford regular backups". If they survive it, they never make that mistake again.
You want to be a hero? Offer to take over the boring, non-glamorous job of backup. Do the job well, keep a low profile, bide your time, save somebody's ass. You'd be amazed how happy people are when you just show them how to find things in a Netapp snapshot.
I have to ammend my comment a bit...
You say you're at week 5, trying to get paid for week 1, and you have the agreed-upon milestones finished for week 1. What about weeks 2 through 4?
While you may have the employer contracturally, if you're only 20-25% as far along as you should be, he's got to be getting nervous and regretting hiring you.
If, in fact, you've completed up to maybe week 3 (or especially 4), that's not far behind, and he's purely a scumbag, probably short on VC because of poor management, and trying to stretch to his own milestones to get more VC.
Baby got baaack.
Perhaps you're not familiar with the wisdom-in-verse - "The bigger the cushion, the sweeter the pushin'"
A: You are right to warn the investor, but
.... oh, how can I say this, blackmail? No, that's such an ugly word... How about extortion?
B:You will give yourself a difficult reputation to carry through a career.
Now, if you have a personal contact within the investor company, you can slip it in that way, but it still probably won't gain you much.
Perhaps you can use your knowledge for
This reminds me of my favorite Franklin Delano Roosevelt quotation, given on being informed that Romania had declared war on the US a few days after Pearl Harbor -
My kingdom for some mod points for the man who brings "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel" into this discussion. I think that may have been my first Heinlein. Whenever I read about cryogenic effects on life, I still think of the frozen "Mother Thing".
Depending on your application, it can be an enormous help. Building the apps fully static lets you work on your application in perl, edit, run, modify, debug, enhance, run, etc. on your development machine, then slap out a binary that can be run on any other windoze machine by simply getting that machine access to the executable. You're not messing with the registry, sticking DLLs all over the place, and taking up disk space with a development system when all you need is to run the program you wrote with your development system. Sure, the individual binary is enormous, for what it does, at least, at small amounts of code (as the app grows, the overhead shrinks into insignificance).
I had to write and run an application on a bunch of windoze boxen for a client a couple of years ago. I was not permitted to install anything. I got it working in perl, used an eval copy(it wasn't a long-term application) of perl2exe, got the job done, and everybody was happy. Sounds like your app is similar.
One caveat: the big static binaries tend to load kind of slow, but as you know, everything has tradeoffs.
I hope your homeowner's association is more reasonable than mine. At least 80% of our ground must be covered with Kentucky Bluegrass, here, in front-range Colorado, where some municipalities are discussing condemning farmers water rights because there isn't enough water to keep pretending this isn't an arid climate.
I've even heard that some of the neighbors have discussed lodging a complaint with the assocation against me, because I do a partial hands-off mow of my back yard, using two stakes, some parachute cord, and a self-propelled mower to do the part of my back yard that can be done as an uninterrupted circle. This allows me to set it up at the end of the day, let it take one lap, manually mow what's outside the circle, and do the bulk of the mowing in the cool and dark(well, ok, it never gets DARK around here, with all the light pollution... don't get me started on that), cutting down dramatically on the pollution produced, and letting me save my sun exposure time for hiking.
A coworker has gotten that service (I presume you mean verizon wireless expressnet), as he is about to lose his dedicated ISDN connection to our intranet. The speeds are rarely above 30kbps, and the latency makes it very difficult to do things like editing files. I haven't seen it, but the latency sounds about like my Sprint Broadband Direct (though I commonly get downstream 1Mbps and upstream 256mbps). You can use it pretty well for email, streaming audio (low rate), IM, and other such latency-insensitive apps.
However, when it's the only game in town....
The test assumes the clueless luser broke the tray with the weight of the cup+contents. say it's open, and he's reaching for something behind the system, presses down with his stomach, either just leaning, or with slipped footing. *Crack!* Of course they're overengineered, and can handle lots more weight than a cd. If they couldn't, my kids would have broken off the trays on all of mine by now, instead of just wearing out the open/close racks&pinions.
Maybe something based on this force could help out with this.
I can't imagine what the freaking problem is. They say the car can't take the stress on the track going that fast. I'd be quite impressed if they ran their distance at 30 mph. Surely, if it's capable of pushing itself along at >100, they can pick a lower speed and take a groove that doesn't stress the bearings.
I think he's shooting for credibility amongst idiots. He'll come around after the failure, looking for "investors", claiming he was sabotaged by "big oil" or whatever.
Here, you want perpetual motion - use the casimir effect, and lcds efficient enough to open and close one of the mirrors, and let that drive a piston, slowly. It's not really perpetual motion, but should be free energy, though at a low output.
Furthermore, what about the Indians, Turks, Asians, Ethiopians, Saxons, Celts,
That's one of my points, which sometimes sets me at odds with others in my rather fundamentalist church - For the life of me, I just can't picture Gandhi roasting in hell.
Now, for my silly comment, since I don't see it in anyone else's comments: I though Larry was God.
I guess the news is that they just realized it.
it feels like one
No, it looks like it feels like one.
I found this article very comforting. I've been trying for a long time now to wrap my brain around the idea of an especially big gas giant, orbiting a star down around 0.001AU, with the only observable effect being just a bit of apparent redshifting? No violent flashes as the star snarfs up the red giant until it's just a rock (or diamond? )core? I suspect that all the giant, ultrashort period planets so far discovered, are false positives, attributable to this effect.
I'd be surprised if they make it that far. My experience with Maxtors MaxAttach NAS product destroyed my confidence in them.
Unfortunately, the best peformance/feature/value combo I'm finding out there to replace them is the new Quantum guardian. I know that Maxtor owns Quantum's hard drive business, but I'm hoping they can't get their grubby hands on the NAS.
I plainly didn't RTFP, or I'd have known that a bolometer is a heat detector. Those wavelengths are a bit too short to be called RF.
/me hangs head
My family has been in the auction business since 1908. In our auctions, we do both the standard Dutch auction AND reverse auction, with most items. We start at the expected price, work down until somebody jumps in, and go back up until there's only one left. Ocassionally, someone will respond at the first offer, thus avoiding the reverse auction. Often, the first person to respond in the reverse part is not answered, thus avoiding the Dutch auction. At the end of every auction, Dad gives a brief preview of upcoming auctions, if any are booked, thus a search of multiple auctions.
Of Woolston's three patents, the only one that's anything more than "standard task, but now done with a computer" is the one fully automating the auction, and that's pretty obvious.
I'll bet the reason he couldn't get funding and start his own internet auction site is that the moron couldn't actually DO the stuff he was talking about.
Maybe I should patent "A method of transportation using a device to dissemble an object, convert the matter to energy, transmit that energy, and convert it back to matter in its original form", then hope somebody invents the Star Trek Transporter, which I can then claim.
significant noise issues
Actually, that's the best reason I can see to put a radio telescope down there. Having all the array cold will decrease the thermal noise generated by the array itself. Even though it's an rf instrument, and nominally doesn't care about light, I'd expect it to do its best work in July.
see ISS slightly after sunset, which is much more convienent.
But much less dramatic. Anybody can catch a time to see it, which is no big deal. The big deal is to see it suddenly flash into view, like I did this morning. I'm not optimally placed for it, but I used the data for Phoenix, adjusted by rough guess, and watched the southwest. I'd forgotten to sync my watch to GPS, so I was just giving up, when suddenly, there it was. It would have been cooler to have been directly below it without light pollution, and track it while dim and see the brightening, but it was still dramatic.
Watching it at sunset, you'll only see it dim, instead of brighten, unless they spend a LOT of fuel on delta-vee.
Do you perchance mean tartaric acid?
This correction brought to you by a literate American who has always spelled and pronounced "arctic" and its derivative correctly, educated in a rural Indiana school.