Umm... you just described the Jump To Lightspeed expansion for Star Wars Galaxies.
And yes, it is amazing when there are enough people online, which hasn't happened in a while since they royally fucked up the ground game with their 'combat upgrade' or something like that.
Silly question, but isn't the Pentium M just a tweaked P-III with some power management thrown in there, plus three years worth of 'make a damn P3 run faster' engineering?
In a way I think that that's pretty cool, if it is the case - Cycle for cycle I always respected the P3 (compared to the P4 running at the same speed, which only happened very briefly as they were phasing out the 1.4GHz P4's, and the P3's were just hitting that mark.)
This is the first I've heard of it so I assume either it's fairly new, or I have been spending WAY too much time in EverQuest lately (probably the latter) - but when you say rdesktop works fine... does that mean it is a solution I can adopt for a production (commerical) environment without fear that it will hose something up and get me fired, or does that mean it is good enough (with a few quirks that I will have to overlook) for me to sneak in and use in an academic or play environment?
No offense intended - I'm just on a pretty short leash at work and can't afford any new 'publicity'.
Ok, I thought about it a while and I have your perfect solution. Get in on it now, before someone else does.
Step 1: Pick the company you want to intern for - presumedly some high-tech programming company. Step 2: Go buy a red T-Shirt and a red baseball cap with no logo (unless you can find / steal a Domino's outfit.) Step 3: Go buy a pizza from Dominos and take it to the tech company. Figure out where the hacker team is and just walk in and hand over the pizza. Step 4: Tell them, over pizza, that you want to do the most fucked up work known to man : document their code, and write their end user / technical specification documentation for them, for free, for one month.
They will put you to work that very day writing technical documentation (which every 'real programmer' feels is beneath him, and would give anything in order to avoid doing it.) If you can be God's Gift to Documentation for one month you have secured your position as a paid intern starting the next month - and you will get a chance to display your leet haxor skills once you are on the inside.
You want in, there's your in. Enjoy. Heck, I would put you to work tomorrow if you agree to those terms, if I was in Austin.
In fact if you agree to those terms I will find someone in Austin to put you to work, pretty much guaranteed.
I worked at a grocery store (part time, as a cashier) while getting my college degree - and here's what you didn't mention : I scored more ass working the register then anywhere else in my LIFE.
Envision 5 six hour shifts a week, five minutes per customer - thats 300 women lined up one after another to give you a chance at scoring with them. Even the most socially inept leet haxor scores 0.33% of the time, so statistically that's 1 new sexual encounter per week. Want to increase that ratio, buy a motorcycle and park it where they can see it on the way in and casually mention it when one seems to be on the fence about giving you her number.
Interning for IBM may be cool, but having 15,000 different women a year line up for you to pick and choose from is well worth the pay cut.
If this is a class for 'Human Computer Interface' students, particularly students at the graduate level that have never programmed... perhaps give a little thought to how they came to be graduate students in HCI that have never programmed.
Maybe it is because there is a world of difference between programming and human-computer interface design, just as there is a world of difference between chemical engineering and industrial structure painting. Paint is made of chemicals, but chemical engineers suck at painting houses - and although a light understanding of chemistry helps the painter, it doesn't take a chemical engineer to paint a wall.
Want to know what your focus should be, for developing a curriculum to describe to HCI students good complex web-site design? Crayons. And maybe a web browser to go look at web sites that suck and look at some good web sites in order to start the discussion about why some suck and why some are good. Have them map out the individual page interfaces in crayon and then have them draw the relationships between their pages and the environment (user, firewall, Internet in general, server farm, load balancer, database back end, other systems, etc.) in crayon. If they can't express and design human-computer interface concepts using a crayon, it isn't going to get expressed.
Even the best SQL mastery isn't going to help create a complex web site that feels 'natural' / isn't 'painful' to use, nor is PHP or Ruby or any other language. Those are implementation details, and if you wait until implementation to work through your complex user interface design decisions I can assure you : your web site will suck.
Graduate level studies are about theory, concepts, and developing an understanding for the underlying driving factors at the core behind the technology. If you have them coding in any language, hooking little web pages they hacked together with their new-found programming skills to a MySQL database then you have effectively robbed them of the very education you intended to provide.
An additional database option: Sybase (powerful, free if run on Linux on a single CPU machine with 2G or less RAM and total database size of 5G or less.)
Many teams of people that have never coded before, all working on different parts of an application, waiting until it is almost done to do any intra-team coordination.
Sounds just like the application we just got back from India.
The SuSE 9.x live CD/DVDs are insanely great, assuming he isn't using an LCD. You can use them with an LCD if you are hardcore, but they are no-brainer easy if you have a regular CRT.
Boots right into the GUI, I highly recommend you give it a look.
The review in my sig is from a while back, and I wasn't particularly motivated at the time (maybe drunk.) It's better than I said in here, and my review has the instructions to make it work on a machine with an LCD monitor:
Insiders know that the Death Star you see getting started in Episode III is the one they outsourced. Sixteen years later it was still basically a clusterfuq, way over budget and late as hell but management decided to go live with it, against the protests of the totally skilled local Imperial Base Makers (who claim that the outsource companies don't know a damn thing about building Death Stars.)
Wait until Episode IV to see how well it holds up. Everybody (ie, the local Imperial Base Makers with experience and professional training) knows to put in defenses against snub fighters, so that shouldn't be a problem.
Quite honestly I doubt that $900 is their intended price point. They are like two guys building these in their garage by hand one at a time (anybody remember the Apple I?) and it's a totally new (relatively speaking) approach - doesn't use any of the heavy hitter OS'es or hardware.
The word for this is 'prototype'. Prototypes and first generations are expensive because... well because they are (ask me when I get more caffeine in me if you need more details.)
Heck I applaud these guys. Couple of guys set up shop in their garage like old school Woz and Jobs - and they are coming up with something both new and possibly viable. More importantly - they are doing something they want to do and you never know... maybe succeeding. I wish them luck.
Actually the 'real' price to jump from a 2.8 to a 3.0 is $100 - they are just having a promotion where you can get the upgrade from the baseline chip (a Celeron) to the 2.8 for free - Intel is blowing out the 2.8GHz P4's so they are taking advantage of price breaks to clear the channel of remaining stock.
Getting the 3.0 is an option, but it's a dumb option - perhaps intended to influence the purchase decisions towards the 2.8, again to clear the remaining stock. I was comparing a specific box and configuration to the GP's post with a white box 1U barebones that had no CPU, memory, or drives and cost 50% more.
Getting Tier I hardware at better than commodity pricing - sure Dell tech support sucks (compared to what it used to be like) but I buy the hardware from the perspective of someone that builds his own - buy the hardware like white-box and assume you will need to support it yourself. If you can get it as cheap (or cheaper, as we saw) than white-box, that's your justification.
Looking back at my history, let me clarify my statement : I'm a fanboy of Dell hardware - not the company. I agree with you, I don't like their business ethics, morals, vision or leaders, nor would I trust them with my business - I trust me with my business though, and I trust the hardware they build (mainly because of my experiences with their hardware.) As a company they suck, but not as bad as Carly's new HP (yea, I know she's gone, but you know what I mean.)
That's a cool looking rig, but it lists at about $850 (Australian, like $700 US) with no CPU, RAM, or drives.
Here is a Dell PowerEdge 750 1U server with a P4 2.8GHz HyperThreaded, 256M and an 80G SATA (with room to add another drive and up to 4G of memory) for $499 shipped to your door. Yea, I'm a Dell fanboy, but even if I wasn't I would still see a pretty good price point in that box.
Note that this specific box is pretty low end and could use some upgrades, but it is a complete machine ready to run, esp if you want to go on the cheap.
Hell on a particularly memorable college project we had four people - me (hardcore tech), a junior tech that was pretty good, and two others : one who had an inside connection to get me a full time slice* on the mainframe any time day or night, and the other who only had to show up and bring food and caffeinated drinks - and quite honestly everybody was quite happy with their respective jobs. I hacked together the hardcore code, spec'ed out some subroutines to the other coder, got full speed access to run my code whenever I wanted and never had to leave the keyboard to find something to eat.
We aced that project and I am perfectly happy sharing 100% of that success with the other team members, giving each of them full credit for being just as important as 'the lead programmer.' If there had been four 'alpha' haxors on that team we probably never would have finished it.
* Yea I'm that old, and the student accounts all ran through a single time slice, whereas the prof's got their own time slice. If there were 35 students on at the same time, a prof's account was, in effect, 35x faster than a student's account. Add in after hours access and this inside connection was worth her weight in gold.
I have the opposite problem: my productivity declines as my tasks get simpler.
That's funny, because it's the same for me. I'd be most relaxed at a gun-fight, particularly if automatic weapons are being used on either side. At least I could stay focused and I'd have a well defined, single goal.
The simple crap, like paying bills... that's the real evil side of my life. I mean - I have enough money in the bank, I have the bills, I have enough checks - where's the challenge in that. Actually writing that check and getting it in the mail is a trivial exercise left to the reader. Much to simple an answer for me to actually complete the exercise. Visa wasn't impressed.
I use Linux at home, I use it at work, and it would probably have a much better time permeating my workplace if I wasn't afraid to be associated with the insane clown posse, aka those dumb ass 'software has to be FREE' or 'Micro$oft is evil!!' motherfuckers.
Every time I walk into a meeting ready to propose a way to be even more effective doing development for applications running in production on AIX machines, wanting to propose Linux on Intel as the development platform... one of the FOSS fucks has to beat me to the punch with some of the 'M$ is evil!!!11' or 'Linux is perfectly poised to fill this gaping vacuum created by potential greed' bullshit.
Holy fucking mother of God. Guess what - I work for an insurance company and we make a boatload of money. They honestly could give a damn about the $100 per seat (corporate licensing agreements) for Windows, nor could I... all I care about is working in the most appropriate environment given what I need to do - and that's all my corporate sponsors care about also - and all the super-zealots striking fear into the evil BillG from their parent's basements are fucking things up for me.
Here's the real score:
Linux is free. Windows 2000 is free too, because all you leet haxors pirate it.
Linux runs OO as an office suite and Evolution 2.0 via Ximian to connect to corporate email. Come to think of it, OWA works pretty good on Firefox also. In all reality, OO and Evolution are pretty cool as a proof of concept but still... nigga please. Windows has Outlook, in fact it has the entire Office suite. Free, too, cause admit it or not, all you fuckers are pirating Office too.
Linux as installed out of the box doesn't play Everquest I or II, HalfLife I or II or CounterStrike. I have heard that it may or may not play Doom III or UT2004, dunno how well that works. Installing Windows emulators to get this shit to work doesn't count. Windows - plays everything except maybe TuxRacer.
Linux - great for developing and testing shell scripts for my AIX boxes. Windows - not.
Linux - WSAD 5.1.2, works nice. Windows - me too.
Linux zealots : for fucks sake, shut the hell up. Windows zealots : MSCE army with organized education plans....
Lets get real : assume that everybody else pirated Windows just like you so it is free too. Want to compete, want to be taken seriously - drop the 'software wants to be FREE' shit and focus on the actual parts that are better : stability, licensing and registration hassles (because that re-registration in XP is a serious hassle), whatever.
My company could care less about the actual dollar figure of a given copy of the OS, but if you calmly point out that Linux can be installed on a new machine without bothersome licensing restrictions or documenting and tracking that each and every machine has a legitimate license - that's a double whammy win for both parties. A hundred dollars is NOTHING compared to the corporate costs associated with actually tracking the license of the OS from installation to retirement.
Saying something (software) is 'free' in the corporate world is like saying a woman 'has a nice personality.' Saying something (software) can be installed on corporate hardware without being burdened by licensing restrictions is like saying a woman 'is bi-curious and wants to have you participate in the experience.'
You can get the 9.2 Pro install disks, the 9.3 Live CD/DVDs - heck I have the Enterprise Server 9.0 disks here on my desk on CD-R so I must have found them out there somewhere too...
With SuSE the cost is for support, not for the actual OS (although they may charge a nominal fee for the retail release in the pretty box with included media.)
And yes, if it weren't for the damn internally used web apps using ActiveX (or IE only features) I would be totally converted over at work.
You could pick up a Dell PowerEdge 1800 dual 3GHz (64 bit?) Xeon (2M cache free upgrade) right now with their quad memory upgrade promotion cranking it up to 2G for somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,700 ($500 of that being the second Xeon CPU)- leaving four slots for more memory. Add in four 2G sticks of the stuff Crucial has for that machine (the 1800 has six slots for memory) and you are looking at 10G of physical memory on a dual 3GHz Xeon machine for just shy of $6k.
That said, as I understand it AMD got their memory bus figured out quite a bit better than Intel, particularly in multi-CPU machines - if it was going to serve as a memory based SMP database engine, I might look into the Opteron platform.
Damn, I just re-read that first sentence. $1,700 for a dual 64-bit 3.0GHz Xeon machine with 2G of RAM, upgradable to 10G for a complete system cost of under $6k. Gonna be a good Christmas this year, I'm guessing.
You will find that my imagination and abilities are only limited by my budget. Well that and, as I am finding, the Sarbanes / Oxley mandates that recently came down from the Productivity Prevention Team, quite effective in keeping me from actually getting any work done.
I don't really care what it pays if it has anything to do with real-time systems (guidance or delivery systems a plus), if the R&D budget has enough wiggle room for better hardware (toys) than I have at home, if you promise that I will be able to participate in the production roll-out and be allowed to make the production environment succeed, and esp if there are a few challenges that are categorized "can't be done."
Apollo 13 didn't get home because a bunch of mediocre guys sat around filling out paperwork requesting permission and setting up a committee to discuss business impact - Apollo 13 got home because a bunch of crack-junkie hardcore engineers decided that failure wasn't an option.
Actually, I think you hit the nail on the head. What separates the true geeks from the rest of the pack is not the current, operational and productive hardware on his subnet - it's the quality of the dead / obsolete hardware he has. Any clown can have a P4 1.6GHz chip laying around as a toy, but a true geek has something out of an IBM Model 32 or something from a Cray XMP class supercomputer (I had the CPU board from one of these for quite some time, lost it during one of the last three moves across country. Damn I miss that thing.)
As for your GigE - I doubt it is the switch throttling your throughput, more likely the hard drives. I have a cheapo Netgear 5 port GigE switch (cost like $75 last year) and it took an obscene amount of work to get my computers to serve up more throughput than it could handle. I managed to get pretty close to wire speed (like 120 MBytes/sec) but I had to go from ramdisk to ramdisk on either side of the wire.
what do 'typical geeks' have on their home networks?
Porn! I don't know if all of our girlfriends are related, but they all have the same last name (Jpeg).
But honestly - a true geek's home environment is one of experimentation, with a sub-set of it set aside for getting real work done (playing games, coding, multimedia, etc.)
My network consists of a four box cluster of Dell 400sc boxes (single 2.8GHz HyperThreaded CPU, 2G RAM, GigE NIC in each, on a GigE backbone) all coming through a 4-way KVM to a nice keyboard, mouse, and 18" LCD, two laptops and an iPaq coming in via Wifi, and two more desktops. The cluster is my primary environment and is used for everything - one machine is for playing with different distros of Linux (SuSE 9.2 Pro right now), one is my 'file server', one is for gaming and one is for 'other' meaning where I run all my VMware virtual machines for playing with different things like client server application development, MQseries, WebSphere environments, playing with database environments, burning CD's / DVD's etc.
The most important thing about a geek's home system is that he has some hardware that he can experiment with, and some hardware that is stable - generally not something you can maintain all on a single machine.
Slashdot Mirror
A stolen bible?
Man, someone is going to Hell for that one.
Umm ... you just described the Jump To Lightspeed expansion for Star Wars Galaxies.
And yes, it is amazing when there are enough people online, which hasn't happened in a while since they royally fucked up the ground game with their 'combat upgrade' or something like that.
Silly question, but isn't the Pentium M just a tweaked P-III with some power management thrown in there, plus three years worth of 'make a damn P3 run faster' engineering?
In a way I think that that's pretty cool, if it is the case - Cycle for cycle I always respected the P3 (compared to the P4 running at the same speed, which only happened very briefly as they were phasing out the 1.4GHz P4's, and the P3's were just hitting that mark.)
Rdesktop works fine.
... does that mean it is a solution I can adopt for a production (commerical) environment without fear that it will hose something up and get me fired, or does that mean it is good enough (with a few quirks that I will have to overlook) for me to sneak in and use in an academic or play environment?
This is the first I've heard of it so I assume either it's fairly new, or I have been spending WAY too much time in EverQuest lately (probably the latter) - but when you say rdesktop works fine
No offense intended - I'm just on a pretty short leash at work and can't afford any new 'publicity'.
Ok, I thought about it a while and I have your perfect solution. Get in on it now, before someone else does.
Step 1: Pick the company you want to intern for - presumedly some high-tech programming company.
Step 2: Go buy a red T-Shirt and a red baseball cap with no logo (unless you can find / steal a Domino's outfit.)
Step 3: Go buy a pizza from Dominos and take it to the tech company. Figure out where the hacker team is and just walk in and hand over the pizza.
Step 4: Tell them, over pizza, that you want to do the most fucked up work known to man : document their code, and write their end user / technical specification documentation for them, for free, for one month.
They will put you to work that very day writing technical documentation (which every 'real programmer' feels is beneath him, and would give anything in order to avoid doing it.) If you can be God's Gift to Documentation for one month you have secured your position as a paid intern starting the next month - and you will get a chance to display your leet haxor skills once you are on the inside.
You want in, there's your in. Enjoy. Heck, I would put you to work tomorrow if you agree to those terms, if I was in Austin.
In fact if you agree to those terms I will find someone in Austin to put you to work, pretty much guaranteed.
I worked at a grocery store (part time, as a cashier) while getting my college degree - and here's what you didn't mention : I scored more ass working the register then anywhere else in my LIFE.
Envision 5 six hour shifts a week, five minutes per customer - thats 300 women lined up one after another to give you a chance at scoring with them. Even the most socially inept leet haxor scores 0.33% of the time, so statistically that's 1 new sexual encounter per week. Want to increase that ratio, buy a motorcycle and park it where they can see it on the way in and casually mention it when one seems to be on the fence about giving you her number.
Interning for IBM may be cool, but having 15,000 different women a year line up for you to pick and choose from is well worth the pay cut.
If this is a class for 'Human Computer Interface' students, particularly students at the graduate level that have never programmed ... perhaps give a little thought to how they came to be graduate students in HCI that have never programmed.
Maybe it is because there is a world of difference between programming and human-computer interface design, just as there is a world of difference between chemical engineering and industrial structure painting. Paint is made of chemicals, but chemical engineers suck at painting houses - and although a light understanding of chemistry helps the painter, it doesn't take a chemical engineer to paint a wall.
Want to know what your focus should be, for developing a curriculum to describe to HCI students good complex web-site design? Crayons. And maybe a web browser to go look at web sites that suck and look at some good web sites in order to start the discussion about why some suck and why some are good. Have them map out the individual page interfaces in crayon and then have them draw the relationships between their pages and the environment (user, firewall, Internet in general, server farm, load balancer, database back end, other systems, etc.) in crayon. If they can't express and design human-computer interface concepts using a crayon, it isn't going to get expressed.
Even the best SQL mastery isn't going to help create a complex web site that feels 'natural' / isn't 'painful' to use, nor is PHP or Ruby or any other language. Those are implementation details, and if you wait until implementation to work through your complex user interface design decisions I can assure you : your web site will suck.
Graduate level studies are about theory, concepts, and developing an understanding for the underlying driving factors at the core behind the technology. If you have them coding in any language, hooking little web pages they hacked together with their new-found programming skills to a MySQL database then you have effectively robbed them of the very education you intended to provide.
An additional database option :
Sybase (powerful, free if run on Linux on a single CPU machine with 2G or less RAM and total database size of 5G or less.)
Many teams of people that have never coded before, all working on different parts of an application, waiting until it is almost done to do any intra-team coordination.
Sounds just like the application we just got back from India.
You can burn a CD-R from the original once, but you can't re-burn from that first copy.
Wanna bet?
The SuSE 9.x live CD/DVDs are insanely great, assuming he isn't using an LCD. You can use them with an LCD if you are hardcore, but they are no-brainer easy if you have a regular CRT.
.iso files from Novell
Boots right into the GUI, I highly recommend you give it a look.
Download
The review in my sig is from a while back, and I wasn't particularly motivated at the time (maybe drunk.) It's better than I said in here, and my review has the instructions to make it work on a machine with an LCD monitor:
Insiders know that the Death Star you see getting started in Episode III is the one they outsourced. Sixteen years later it was still basically a clusterfuq, way over budget and late as hell but management decided to go live with it, against the protests of the totally skilled local Imperial Base Makers (who claim that the outsource companies don't know a damn thing about building Death Stars.)
Wait until Episode IV to see how well it holds up. Everybody (ie, the local Imperial Base Makers with experience and professional training) knows to put in defenses against snub fighters, so that shouldn't be a problem.
Lucas has totally redeemed himself for the aberrations known as Episode I & Episode II.
Go see it on the big screen.
Trust me on this one.
Quite honestly I doubt that $900 is their intended price point. They are like two guys building these in their garage by hand one at a time (anybody remember the Apple I?) and it's a totally new (relatively speaking) approach - doesn't use any of the heavy hitter OS'es or hardware.
... well because they are (ask me when I get more caffeine in me if you need more details.)
... maybe succeeding. I wish them luck.
The word for this is 'prototype'. Prototypes and first generations are expensive because
Heck I applaud these guys. Couple of guys set up shop in their garage like old school Woz and Jobs - and they are coming up with something both new and possibly viable. More importantly - they are doing something they want to do and you never know
Actually the 'real' price to jump from a 2.8 to a 3.0 is $100 - they are just having a promotion where you can get the upgrade from the baseline chip (a Celeron) to the 2.8 for free - Intel is blowing out the 2.8GHz P4's so they are taking advantage of price breaks to clear the channel of remaining stock.
Getting the 3.0 is an option, but it's a dumb option - perhaps intended to influence the purchase decisions towards the 2.8, again to clear the remaining stock. I was comparing a specific box and configuration to the GP's post with a white box 1U barebones that had no CPU, memory, or drives and cost 50% more.
Getting Tier I hardware at better than commodity pricing - sure Dell tech support sucks (compared to what it used to be like) but I buy the hardware from the perspective of someone that builds his own - buy the hardware like white-box and assume you will need to support it yourself. If you can get it as cheap (or cheaper, as we saw) than white-box, that's your justification.
Looking back at my history, let me clarify my statement : I'm a fanboy of Dell hardware - not the company. I agree with you, I don't like their business ethics, morals, vision or leaders, nor would I trust them with my business - I trust me with my business though, and I trust the hardware they build (mainly because of my experiences with their hardware.) As a company they suck, but not as bad as Carly's new HP (yea, I know she's gone, but you know what I mean.)
That's a cool looking rig, but it lists at about $850 (Australian, like $700 US) with no CPU, RAM, or drives.
Here is a Dell PowerEdge 750 1U server with a P4 2.8GHz HyperThreaded, 256M and an 80G SATA (with room to add another drive and up to 4G of memory) for $499 shipped to your door. Yea, I'm a Dell fanboy, but even if I wasn't I would still see a pretty good price point in that box.
Note that this specific box is pretty low end and could use some upgrades, but it is a complete machine ready to run, esp if you want to go on the cheap.
It's funny, because it is true.
Hell on a particularly memorable college project we had four people - me (hardcore tech), a junior tech that was pretty good, and two others : one who had an inside connection to get me a full time slice* on the mainframe any time day or night, and the other who only had to show up and bring food and caffeinated drinks - and quite honestly everybody was quite happy with their respective jobs. I hacked together the hardcore code, spec'ed out some subroutines to the other coder, got full speed access to run my code whenever I wanted and never had to leave the keyboard to find something to eat.
We aced that project and I am perfectly happy sharing 100% of that success with the other team members, giving each of them full credit for being just as important as 'the lead programmer.' If there had been four 'alpha' haxors on that team we probably never would have finished it.
* Yea I'm that old, and the student accounts all ran through a single time slice, whereas the prof's got their own time slice. If there were 35 students on at the same time, a prof's account was, in effect, 35x faster than a student's account. Add in after hours access and this inside connection was worth her weight in gold.
I have the opposite problem: my productivity declines as my tasks get simpler.
... that's the real evil side of my life. I mean - I have enough money in the bank, I have the bills, I have enough checks - where's the challenge in that. Actually writing that check and getting it in the mail is a trivial exercise left to the reader. Much to simple an answer for me to actually complete the exercise. Visa wasn't impressed.
That's funny, because it's the same for me. I'd be most relaxed at a gun-fight, particularly if automatic weapons are being used on either side. At least I could stay focused and I'd have a well defined, single goal.
The simple crap, like paying bills
Dang, you almost got it right.
... one of the FOSS fucks has to beat me to the punch with some of the 'M$ is evil!!!11' or 'Linux is perfectly poised to fill this gaping vacuum created by potential greed' bullshit.
... all I care about is working in the most appropriate environment given what I need to do - and that's all my corporate sponsors care about also - and all the super-zealots striking fear into the evil BillG from their parent's basements are fucking things up for me.
... nigga please.
...
I use Linux at home, I use it at work, and it would probably have a much better time permeating my workplace if I wasn't afraid to be associated with the insane clown posse, aka those dumb ass 'software has to be FREE' or 'Micro$oft is evil!!' motherfuckers.
Every time I walk into a meeting ready to propose a way to be even more effective doing development for applications running in production on AIX machines, wanting to propose Linux on Intel as the development platform
Holy fucking mother of God. Guess what - I work for an insurance company and we make a boatload of money. They honestly could give a damn about the $100 per seat (corporate licensing agreements) for Windows, nor could I
Here's the real score:
Linux is free.
Windows 2000 is free too, because all you leet haxors pirate it.
Linux runs OO as an office suite and Evolution 2.0 via Ximian to connect to corporate email. Come to think of it, OWA works pretty good on Firefox also. In all reality, OO and Evolution are pretty cool as a proof of concept but still
Windows has Outlook, in fact it has the entire Office suite. Free, too, cause admit it or not, all you fuckers are pirating Office too.
Linux as installed out of the box doesn't play Everquest I or II, HalfLife I or II or CounterStrike. I have heard that it may or may not play Doom III or UT2004, dunno how well that works. Installing Windows emulators to get this shit to work doesn't count.
Windows - plays everything except maybe TuxRacer.
Linux - great for developing and testing shell scripts for my AIX boxes.
Windows - not.
Linux - WSAD 5.1.2, works nice.
Windows - me too.
Linux zealots : for fucks sake, shut the hell up.
Windows zealots : MSCE army with organized education plans.
Lets get real : assume that everybody else pirated Windows just like you so it is free too. Want to compete, want to be taken seriously - drop the 'software wants to be FREE' shit and focus on the actual parts that are better : stability, licensing and registration hassles (because that re-registration in XP is a serious hassle), whatever.
My company could care less about the actual dollar figure of a given copy of the OS, but if you calmly point out that Linux can be installed on a new machine without bothersome licensing restrictions or documenting and tracking that each and every machine has a legitimate license - that's a double whammy win for both parties. A hundred dollars is NOTHING compared to the corporate costs associated with actually tracking the license of the OS from installation to retirement.
Saying something (software) is 'free' in the corporate world is like saying a woman 'has a nice personality.'
Saying something (software) can be installed on corporate hardware without being burdened by licensing restrictions is like saying a woman 'is bi-curious and wants to have you participate in the experience.'
Guess which one is more appealing.
Here's SuSE for free:
...
ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/
You can get the 9.2 Pro install disks, the 9.3 Live CD/DVDs - heck I have the Enterprise Server 9.0 disks here on my desk on CD-R so I must have found them out there somewhere too
With SuSE the cost is for support, not for the actual OS (although they may charge a nominal fee for the retail release in the pretty box with included media.)
And yes, if it weren't for the damn internally used web apps using ActiveX (or IE only features) I would be totally converted over at work.
What more do all you people need
Well I'm not going to claim to have a 'real life' but I do a pretty good job simulating one in Virtual Reality.
Can't do that on a PII/333.
You could pick up a Dell PowerEdge 1800 dual 3GHz (64 bit?) Xeon (2M cache free upgrade) right now with their quad memory upgrade promotion cranking it up to 2G for somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,700 ($500 of that being the second Xeon CPU)- leaving four slots for more memory. Add in four 2G sticks of the stuff Crucial has for that machine (the 1800 has six slots for memory) and you are looking at 10G of physical memory on a dual 3GHz Xeon machine for just shy of $6k.
That said, as I understand it AMD got their memory bus figured out quite a bit better than Intel, particularly in multi-CPU machines - if it was going to serve as a memory based SMP database engine, I might look into the Opteron platform.
Damn, I just re-read that first sentence.
$1,700 for a dual 64-bit 3.0GHz Xeon machine with 2G of RAM, upgradable to 10G for a complete system cost of under $6k. Gonna be a good Christmas this year, I'm guessing.
You will find that my imagination and abilities are only limited by my budget. Well that and, as I am finding, the Sarbanes / Oxley mandates that recently came down from the Productivity Prevention Team, quite effective in keeping me from actually getting any work done.
:)
I don't really care what it pays if it has anything to do with real-time systems (guidance or delivery systems a plus), if the R&D budget has enough wiggle room for better hardware (toys) than I have at home, if you promise that I will be able to participate in the production roll-out and be allowed to make the production environment succeed, and esp if there are a few challenges that are categorized "can't be done."
Apollo 13 didn't get home because a bunch of mediocre guys sat around filling out paperwork requesting permission and setting up a committee to discuss business impact - Apollo 13 got home because a bunch of crack-junkie hardcore engineers decided that failure wasn't an option.
So the stuff you do at work - is it hard?
Dead/Inactive
Actually, I think you hit the nail on the head.
What separates the true geeks from the rest of the pack is not the current, operational and productive hardware on his subnet - it's the quality of the dead / obsolete hardware he has. Any clown can have a P4 1.6GHz chip laying around as a toy, but a true geek has something out of an IBM Model 32 or something from a Cray XMP class supercomputer (I had the CPU board from one of these for quite some time, lost it during one of the last three moves across country. Damn I miss that thing.)
As for your GigE - I doubt it is the switch throttling your throughput, more likely the hard drives. I have a cheapo Netgear 5 port GigE switch (cost like $75 last year) and it took an obscene amount of work to get my computers to serve up more throughput than it could handle. I managed to get pretty close to wire speed (like 120 MBytes/sec) but I had to go from ramdisk to ramdisk on either side of the wire.
what do 'typical geeks' have on their home networks?
Porn! I don't know if all of our girlfriends are related, but they all have the same last name (Jpeg).
But honestly - a true geek's home environment is one of experimentation, with a sub-set of it set aside for getting real work done (playing games, coding, multimedia, etc.)
My network consists of a four box cluster of Dell 400sc boxes (single 2.8GHz HyperThreaded CPU, 2G RAM, GigE NIC in each, on a GigE backbone) all coming through a 4-way KVM to a nice keyboard, mouse, and 18" LCD, two laptops and an iPaq coming in via Wifi, and two more desktops. The cluster is my primary environment and is used for everything - one machine is for playing with different distros of Linux (SuSE 9.2 Pro right now), one is my 'file server', one is for gaming and one is for 'other' meaning where I run all my VMware virtual machines for playing with different things like client server application development, MQseries, WebSphere environments, playing with database environments, burning CD's / DVD's etc.
The most important thing about a geek's home system is that he has some hardware that he can experiment with, and some hardware that is stable - generally not something you can maintain all on a single machine.