This guy looks promising and was a computer guys before computers were cool.
No it isn't me and I don't personally know him / can't vouch for him, I just found it real quick on Craigs.
Sounds like you are looking the kind of guy I assume we all are - kind of old school hacker that has been doing it forever, does it because that's what he loves doing. Where are you going to find those kinds of guys? Go to Fry's on a Friday night. Go to Barnes and Noble's on a Saturday night and browse the programming language book section. If a guy's idea of a fun Saturday night is looking for reference material for a new computer language, just hire him. Doesn't matter - if he doesn't work out you can fire him later but that is the kind of guy you should be looking for... other ideas would be LAN partys (heck, have your company sponsor one, mingle, you can spot the ones you are looking for a mile away), the computer room on a college campus on nights that the football team is playing at home - if you were a computer nerd where would you be found?
It is called fiction, and your first resume is going to be one of the most glorious works of fiction you have ever written in your life. Welcome to the club, kid:-)
Am I allowed to use the phrase 'dumb mother fscker' on slashdot? I'm gonna assume no. No offense intended to you, more intended at the entire hiring process in general.
-Just 1 example: I spent more than 1 year (2002-2003) trying to find a solid Java programmer with some J2EE that actually could "really" program
A year? Over a year? Holy fucking shit - that pretty much sums up most of the disconnect between hiring managers and good employees today. Here is a clue [1] : there are thousands of hardcore software engineers / programmers out there with a dozen years of experience writing client server apps, database driven business systems, real time systems to do the stuff during the day and batch processing engines to do more stuff each night - dying for a chance to do good work for you. Plenty can read a hex dump of a 64k chunk of memory and understand why the system is doing wrong what it should be doing right. They have learned and forgotten more operating systems, programming languages, development methodologies and data modeling practices than Abu has even heard of - and most of their resumes can't make it past HR because they don't have 9 years of J2EE. They may not even know Java YET - but here's another clue : it is just another language, and I pretty much guarantee you that a good developer (BS/CompSci) will pick it up just like he picked up all the other languages, and probably a LOT faster than the year and a half you have just spent 'looking' for a J2EE developer.
-So if you are a student and you love programming, don't listen to those idiots sitting around you in class lamenting about how you won't have a job when you graduate. You will have a job.
No - if you are a student and you love programming, listen anyways. HR and hiring managers will reject your resume because you only have Oracle 7 and they 'need' someone with Oracle 8i. You won't make it past the screening process with 9 years of C++ development because they need someone with J2EE. You won't be hired because the 7 years of Oracle and MS/SQL don't 'count' because they 'need' someone with Sybase.
I will agree with the parent on 'don't worry' the minute he comes back here and says 'hey guys - I couldn't find J2EE developers so I hired a bunch of experienced C++ guys, sent them to a two week Java boot camp. They came back a tight knit team of developers that are kicking butt on my projects and my company is really reaping the rewards of having all these hardcore coders.' Until then - worry big time because there is no way you (a recent grad) are going to have three years experience in every single technology listed on every job req out there today.
[1] Most HR reps couldn't get a clue during the clue mating season in a field full of horny clues if they smeared their bodies with clue musk and did the clue mating dance.
I agree, inasmuch as you will agree that the user seemed to adopt a three-year-old's approach to the shared resources in the first place (cue the 'squeal voice' : Mine - gimme - mine - me no share.) Either he knows he is eating ALL the bandwidth and doesn't care or he has no clue that he is flooding the pipe - one of those is true and both is equally childish.
But yes, I agree that the association needs to immediately draft a TOS (terms of service) letter with regards to the shared dataline. Unless he is on the association as a director it isn't a democracy - it is more like a monolithic theocracy or a democratic republic like the USA - the people get one vote per person to pick representation but at that point the representatives get to make the rules (and get voted out if they make unpopular rules.) Having owned condos in the past I can say that the rules can be fairly draconian and are not flexible - in fact many of the rules have 'fines' attached on a per-day basis (altering the exterior of your unit, for example, or parking where you are not supposed to park.)
Write up guidelines, be specific, have a dollar amount associated with not staying within the guidelines and everything pretty much sorts itself out.
Yea or just talk to the user first. I hate when stuff gets blown out of proportion - no need to start an act of Congress over an eDonkey - unless he wants to be an eAss.
I was gonna mod you up but you were already pegged - so I will simply agree with you.
Unplug his ass. Unplug his wire from your switch and plug it into a cheapo Linksys cablemodem router (that isn't connected to anything else) so he gets a DHCP address - but no connectivity (that part is just for fun, makes it a real bitch for him to self-diagnose an outage when he can ping the router, get a DHCP address, and his neighbor still has Internet connectivity.) When he comes up wondering why he can't get out to the net show him the logs and explain that one guy using 95% of the bandwidth is not acceptable and he can either cut it out or go get his own dedicated pipe to the 'net.
Controller limitations on IDE drive subsystems mean one read/write process at a time - thus putting half your swapfile on one drive and half on the other really don't gain you anything on an IDE system.
If you had one drive on one controller, the other drive on a different controller (or if you were using SCSI) and you will see gains.
That said, if your system seems swap limited watch the memory utilization - if your system has 512M and it is using all 512M of it, add more RAM for better performance (disclaimer - I have no clue whether or not your OS will use more than 512M but if it does, go for it.)
I buy Dell laptops, desktops, and servers. I concur - 3 weeks is about right to go through the kitting, building, testing, burn-in, boxing, set up for delivery, pickup, ship and deliver. You can probably shave a day or two off of that by spending another $50-$100 on the 'overnight' shipping but it really doesn't buy you anything.
In my experience over the past few years (four laptops, two servers, a desktop or two) this has consistently been the case. I guess you could get lucky and have one go out the next day but I wouldn't bet on it.
Ok for the record I love Knoppix (check my journal) and I love Dell (again, check my journal) but I will recommend you mix the two with care. Seems that during shutdown Knoppix issues some fairly heavy handed low-level shutdown commands and more than one person has found themselves unable to turn their laptop back on by pushing the power button.
Remedy for those too lazy to Google it up : pull out the battery, unplug it, let it sit for a few minutes, plug it back in without the battery (or is it put the battery back in without plugging it back in.. I forget) and push the power button - it comes back on.
Personally I highly recommend creating a virtual machine on your laptop (in Windows) using VMware (www.vmware.com - free 30 day trial, then come back here and whine about how expensive it is with the rest of us) and configure the virtual machine to use the.iso file as a virtual CD - it makes Knoppix run FAST because it is coming in at hard drive speeds (not waiting for the CD to spin up) and when you power it down it simply powers down the VM and not the real laptop.
VMware is a good place to play with other distros also because the hardware is always the same and it does the translation to the real hardware (ie, some strange wifi card nobody has written a driver for yet.) Only downside is that I haven't gotten OpenGL to work with my RH9 install on it.
-My last DRC run was 9+ hours. Though I am running on a smaller box.
Get a faster box. No, really. Get a faster box. Right now at Dell you can get the dual capable PowerEdge 1600sc with the Xeon 2.8GHz cpu (free upgrade from 2.4GHz), 1G ECC/Registered RAM (1G for the price of 512M), 18G 15Krpm SCSI drive, Gigahertz network adapter for $825. Buy two identical machines, port over the CPU, RAM, and drive from the second one and for under $1,700 you have a dual Xeon 2.8GHz box with 2G ECC/Reg memory and two 18G 15k RPM SCSI drives.
$1,700 is short money when you consider what it costs per day to run your shop - I'm not sure how much faster it would run (you didn't spec out your existing rig) but if you can get in two runs a day (4 hours per run down from 9) you have doubled the amount of work you can do each day.
Setup : Nursing home, two old geezers in their nightgowns in medical beds talking to each other.
OG1 : Ya 'member right after we won WWII? OG2 : Yea Bob, that was great. OG1 : Teehee - you remember right after that when we were in France at that bar? OG2 : You mean when those three hot French nurses invited us back to there place? OG1 : That's what I'm talking about!!! OG2 : Yea Bob, I remember that. OG1 : (sadly) We shoulda went. OG2 : (sadly) Yea Bob, we shoulda went.
How about just assuming that regardless of size drives are inherently unreliable and adopt a backup strategy that protects you?
RAID-5 isn't safe. It is fairly safe from the perspective of a single drive failure isn't going to cost you any data, but it doesn't protect you from a virus, a bad drive controller, a hosed FAT / MFT, or a bone-head user. Tape drives are not safe - tapes stretch, get old, are a hassle, and nobody ever does a verify after store to tape to even get the lowest level of data checking. CD-R and DVD-R are pretty safe for the 5 year plan if you store them in protective binders and don't let them get scratched - assuming you do a binary check on the data after you burn it to insure it was a good burn. Takes a bunch of CD-R's to backup your 80G drive though so nobody does it enough to be useful.
The nearline storage comment pretty much described a real good use for this 400G drive, something you should consider : stick it in a completely separate machine, throw a share on it and use it as a place to copy your files and store backup data on. Put it on your network somewhere away from your other machines (on a UPS) and leave it running 24x7 (or as close to that as you can get, reboot when necessary depending on the OS you use.) Don't give your users direct access, you be the only one that moves data in and out.
Throw two of them in the same machine as individual drives (not RAID) with two similar shares, and manually mirror the data from time to time. Voila! Redundant data - probably more reliable than any external storage method, and highly likely more reliable than whatever method you are currently using.
It wouldn't take a new machine, you could recycle an old PII/400 or whatever with 256M of SDRAM - as long as the BIOS could handle a 400G drive (might take an aftermarket IDE card.)
Anybody know what price these are going to hit the market at... maybe $600 apiece? A dollar and fifty cents a Gig, maybe $2 a Gig?
Jesus, I have personally paid $5 per Meg for used hard drives (a Seagate ST251-1 for the record) back when new drives were running about $10 a Meg (and that was MFM, with MTBF of about 20,000 hours - not the expensive good stuff.)
These will shake out eventually (after the new wears off) to about $400 = $1 per Gig. That's 10,000x cheaper than drive space a little over a decade ago. Come to think of it, that drive is also exactly 10,000x larger than the 40M drives of that era.
We are on the cusp of the TeraByte Desktop era - four 250G IDE or SATA drives in one box and we are already there - at pretty close to $1,000 for a TB of storage. These new 400G drives make it possible for 2TB Desktops with RAID (protected data) for somewhere in the $2,500 - $3,500 range (6 drives, $400-$500 apiece, plus a nice RAID card.) Ya - these still fit pretty nicely with the 'inexpensive' term.
I think that when RAID came out the term 'inexpensive' was used to indicate 'regular off the shelf' drives as opposed to the wickedly expensive mission critical super-great mainframe hard drives that your vendor (IBM or HP) used in your mini-computer or mainframe and charged insane prices for - like $10,000 per gigabyte (back then.)
Shit I thought I was the only person that did that. One of the biggest things I love about my 560SEL is the '3 body trunk' - although I actually measure the space in live (not dead) bodies... I figure a live body is a little larger than a dead body because you can't fold a live body in half to accomodate a strange space, and he needs air to breathe, and needs to be semi-comfortable if the body happens to be one of your friends.
If I promised to learn the metric system and not be an arrogant asshole, you think you could hook me up with a job and help me immigrate from the US to Australia?
It's a genuine (if completely off-topic) question...
How's the shareware business paying off? Going to be able to quit the day job anytime in the near future? Edit : I just reread it and the caffeine is just now hitting my system. Perhaps compare / contrast the shareware market vs. your regular business instead.
Just curious. The reason I ask is because from my viewpoint the shareware business is very similar (in an abstract, conceptual way) to the OSS model - except the OSS guys give away their source and don't get upset when nobody sends them money. Take the shareware model, subtract any revenue that the users that register send in, post the source code up for download and Voila! F/OSS.
That's what the F/OSS movement is all about? How the fsck does that pay the rent, grocery bills, car lease and buy new computer toys? Particularly when the software is the end product (games, user apps, etc.)
From each person what he can contribute. For each person what he needs.
That sounds great, in concept, but those of us that have been to the Kremlin in Moscow, that great Mecca of Communism, have seen that it doesn't work.
I don't have all the answers, but anybody that honestly believes that software / information wants to be free (as in beer) needs to spend a month living with the natives in Russia to get a strong lesson in Communism from those that lived it. Anybody there over the age of 30 can give you a first person account, they lived exactly the business environment the F/OSS fantasy dreams of - and they will be happy to explain the rise and fall of the Russian empire that was built on those exact beliefs.
Oh yea bwy this wasn't directed at you directly, but it seemed as good a place as any to interject.
Once again I had a great idea. Not an original idea, but a great idea nonetheless. Maybe I should have specified 'affordably priced'.
Ask me sometime about my other ideas / inventions : unmanned flying things (both heavier than air and lighter than air), electricity, the wheel, and the two stroke internal implosion engine (I don't think this one is being done yet, probably with good reason.)
Jesus you are right, it is exactly what I wanted! And - get this - for only A THOUSAND DOLLARS?
Actually what I am considering doing is taking the Dell Latitude CPiA (PII/366, 192M, 13.1" TFT) laptop, pulling out the CDROM and filling it with two new batteries, pulling out the hard drive and popping in a compact flash drive with an adapter (install the OS onto that, set aside a bit of the system memory as a ramdrive for temp files), installing Win98se or a stripped down version of Win2000Pro on it with term-server client and having exactly what I wanted in the first place, cost about $300 to make all the upgrades to my old laptop to make that happen.
Agree with you about Viewsonic's cool toy with a dumb price.
I do almost the same : I have a 4 year old HP Jornada 680 (6" diag 640x240 touch screen, 133MHz cpu, 16M RAM, keyboard, wifi card) running WinCE 3.0 - I use the term-server client for WinCE to connect to my server and just run a terminal server session full speed on one of those machines. The only thing moving over the wifi connection is screen deltas and it is incredibly smooth, fast. If the screen was 640x480 or even 800x600 - it would be the perfect solution.
Battery lasts about 20 hours (I have the larger battery) and it is instant on / instant off. Doesn't run DOOM III but for regular computing it is almost perfect.
Maybe if Sharp wanted a 'killer' solution, come out with something like that, a PDA with a keyboard, wifi, term-server client already installed, a 1024x768 screen, a real slow CPU that sucks lightly on the electricity, and a fat battery to run for 20 hours. The entire thing could weigh less than 2 lbs and would simply scream when connected to a decent machine running terminal server.
I thought a lot about that, but remember two things about houses : a) the house probably already has LOTS of PVC pipe already in it, and b) if my house is on fire I don't plan on sticking around to smell the PVC fumes. I plan on grabbing my case of backup CDs and my laptop and watching that bad boy burn from a nice spot on the street.
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This guy looks promising and was a computer guys before computers were cool.
... other ideas would be LAN partys (heck, have your company sponsor one, mingle, you can spot the ones you are looking for a mile away), the computer room on a college campus on nights that the football team is playing at home - if you were a computer nerd where would you be found?
No it isn't me and I don't personally know him / can't vouch for him, I just found it real quick on Craigs.
Sounds like you are looking the kind of guy I assume we all are - kind of old school hacker that has been doing it forever, does it because that's what he loves doing. Where are you going to find those kinds of guys? Go to Fry's on a Friday night. Go to Barnes and Noble's on a Saturday night and browse the programming language book section. If a guy's idea of a fun Saturday night is looking for reference material for a new computer language, just hire him. Doesn't matter - if he doesn't work out you can fire him later but that is the kind of guy you should be looking for
It is called fiction, and your first resume is going to be one of the most glorious works of fiction you have ever written in your life. :-)
Welcome to the club, kid
Am I allowed to use the phrase 'dumb mother fscker' on slashdot? I'm gonna assume no. No offense intended to you, more intended at the entire hiring process in general.
-Just 1 example: I spent more than 1 year (2002-2003) trying to find a solid Java programmer with some J2EE that actually could "really" program
A year? Over a year? Holy fucking shit - that pretty much sums up most of the disconnect between hiring managers and good employees today. Here is a clue [1] : there are thousands of hardcore software engineers / programmers out there with a dozen years of experience writing client server apps, database driven business systems, real time systems to do the stuff during the day and batch processing engines to do more stuff each night - dying for a chance to do good work for you. Plenty can read a hex dump of a 64k chunk of memory and understand why the system is doing wrong what it should be doing right. They have learned and forgotten more operating systems, programming languages, development methodologies and data modeling practices than Abu has even heard of - and most of their resumes can't make it past HR because they don't have 9 years of J2EE. They may not even know Java YET - but here's another clue : it is just another language, and I pretty much guarantee you that a good developer (BS/CompSci) will pick it up just like he picked up all the other languages, and probably a LOT faster than the year and a half you have just spent 'looking' for a J2EE developer.
-So if you are a student and you love programming, don't listen to those idiots sitting around you in class lamenting about how you won't have a job when you graduate. You will have a job.
No - if you are a student and you love programming, listen anyways. HR and hiring managers will reject your resume because you only have Oracle 7 and they 'need' someone with Oracle 8i. You won't make it past the screening process with 9 years of C++ development because they need someone with J2EE. You won't be hired because the 7 years of Oracle and MS/SQL don't 'count' because they 'need' someone with Sybase.
I will agree with the parent on 'don't worry' the minute he comes back here and says 'hey guys - I couldn't find J2EE developers so I hired a bunch of experienced C++ guys, sent them to a two week Java boot camp. They came back a tight knit team of developers that are kicking butt on my projects and my company is really reaping the rewards of having all these hardcore coders.' Until then - worry big time because there is no way you (a recent grad) are going to have three years experience in every single technology listed on every job req out there today.
[1] Most HR reps couldn't get a clue during the clue mating season in a field full of horny clues if they smeared their bodies with clue musk and did the clue mating dance.
I agree, inasmuch as you will agree that the user seemed to adopt a three-year-old's approach to the shared resources in the first place (cue the 'squeal voice' : Mine - gimme - mine - me no share.) Either he knows he is eating ALL the bandwidth and doesn't care or he has no clue that he is flooding the pipe - one of those is true and both is equally childish.
But yes, I agree that the association needs to immediately draft a TOS (terms of service) letter with regards to the shared dataline. Unless he is on the association as a director it isn't a democracy - it is more like a monolithic theocracy or a democratic republic like the USA - the people get one vote per person to pick representation but at that point the representatives get to make the rules (and get voted out if they make unpopular rules.) Having owned condos in the past I can say that the rules can be fairly draconian and are not flexible - in fact many of the rules have 'fines' attached on a per-day basis (altering the exterior of your unit, for example, or parking where you are not supposed to park.)
Write up guidelines, be specific, have a dollar amount associated with not staying within the guidelines and everything pretty much sorts itself out.
Yea or just talk to the user first. I hate when stuff gets blown out of proportion - no need to start an act of Congress over an eDonkey - unless he wants to be an eAss.
I was gonna mod you up but you were already pegged - so I will simply agree with you.
Unplug his ass. Unplug his wire from your switch and plug it into a cheapo Linksys cablemodem router (that isn't connected to anything else) so he gets a DHCP address - but no connectivity (that part is just for fun, makes it a real bitch for him to self-diagnose an outage when he can ping the router, get a DHCP address, and his neighbor still has Internet connectivity.) When he comes up wondering why he can't get out to the net show him the logs and explain that one guy using 95% of the bandwidth is not acceptable and he can either cut it out or go get his own dedicated pipe to the 'net.
Controller limitations on IDE drive subsystems mean one read/write process at a time - thus putting half your swapfile on one drive and half on the other really don't gain you anything on an IDE system.
If you had one drive on one controller, the other drive on a different controller (or if you were using SCSI) and you will see gains.
That said, if your system seems swap limited watch the memory utilization - if your system has 512M and it is using all 512M of it, add more RAM for better performance (disclaimer - I have no clue whether or not your OS will use more than 512M but if it does, go for it.)
Good news in you are looking at going to Windows - starting with Windows 2003 they are 'seeing crazy uptime numbers now, like three months'.
Five years ago I would have agreed with you, but as evil as Dell is they are fluffy bunnies compared to Carly Fiorina's recent antics.
I would rather be seen in public hugging GWBush than buy anything from HP.
That's sad because I used to be a big HP fanboy (sys/admin on an HP Spectrum class mini for one thing - still love their printers.)
I buy Dell laptops, desktops, and servers.
I concur - 3 weeks is about right to go through the kitting, building, testing, burn-in, boxing, set up for delivery, pickup, ship and deliver. You can probably shave a day or two off of that by spending another $50-$100 on the 'overnight' shipping but it really doesn't buy you anything.
In my experience over the past few years (four laptops, two servers, a desktop or two) this has consistently been the case. I guess you could get lucky and have one go out the next day but I wouldn't bet on it.
Ok for the record I love Knoppix (check my journal) and I love Dell (again, check my journal) but I will recommend you mix the two with care. Seems that during shutdown Knoppix issues some fairly heavy handed low-level shutdown commands and more than one person has found themselves unable to turn their laptop back on by pushing the power button.
.. I forget) and push the power button - it comes back on.
.iso file as a virtual CD - it makes Knoppix run FAST because it is coming in at hard drive speeds (not waiting for the CD to spin up) and when you power it down it simply powers down the VM and not the real laptop.
Remedy for those too lazy to Google it up : pull out the battery, unplug it, let it sit for a few minutes, plug it back in without the battery (or is it put the battery back in without plugging it back in
Personally I highly recommend creating a virtual machine on your laptop (in Windows) using VMware (www.vmware.com - free 30 day trial, then come back here and whine about how expensive it is with the rest of us) and configure the virtual machine to use the
VMware is a good place to play with other distros also because the hardware is always the same and it does the translation to the real hardware (ie, some strange wifi card nobody has written a driver for yet.) Only downside is that I haven't gotten OpenGL to work with my RH9 install on it.
-My last DRC run was 9+ hours. Though I am running on a smaller box.
Get a faster box.
No, really. Get a faster box. Right now at Dell you can get the dual capable PowerEdge 1600sc with the Xeon 2.8GHz cpu (free upgrade from 2.4GHz), 1G ECC/Registered RAM (1G for the price of 512M), 18G 15Krpm SCSI drive, Gigahertz network adapter for $825. Buy two identical machines, port over the CPU, RAM, and drive from the second one and for under $1,700 you have a dual Xeon 2.8GHz box with 2G ECC/Reg memory and two 18G 15k RPM SCSI drives.
$1,700 is short money when you consider what it costs per day to run your shop - I'm not sure how much faster it would run (you didn't spec out your existing rig) but if you can get in two runs a day (4 hours per run down from 9) you have doubled the amount of work you can do each day.
Well these must have been the rare and highly valued PRE-NERF French women.
(As a rule of thumb, any time more than one woman wants to have sex with you at the same time - you pretty much have to go for it.)
Reminds me of a commercial I saw a while back.
Setup : Nursing home, two old geezers in their nightgowns in medical beds talking to each other.
OG1 : Ya 'member right after we won WWII?
OG2 : Yea Bob, that was great.
OG1 : Teehee - you remember right after that when we were in France at that bar?
OG2 : You mean when those three hot French nurses invited us back to there place?
OG1 : That's what I'm talking about!!!
OG2 : Yea Bob, I remember that.
OG1 : (sadly) We shoulda went.
OG2 : (sadly) Yea Bob, we shoulda went.
How about just assuming that regardless of size drives are inherently unreliable and adopt a backup strategy that protects you?
RAID-5 isn't safe. It is fairly safe from the perspective of a single drive failure isn't going to cost you any data, but it doesn't protect you from a virus, a bad drive controller, a hosed FAT / MFT, or a bone-head user.
Tape drives are not safe - tapes stretch, get old, are a hassle, and nobody ever does a verify after store to tape to even get the lowest level of data checking.
CD-R and DVD-R are pretty safe for the 5 year plan if you store them in protective binders and don't let them get scratched - assuming you do a binary check on the data after you burn it to insure it was a good burn. Takes a bunch of CD-R's to backup your 80G drive though so nobody does it enough to be useful.
The nearline storage comment pretty much described a real good use for this 400G drive, something you should consider : stick it in a completely separate machine, throw a share on it and use it as a place to copy your files and store backup data on. Put it on your network somewhere away from your other machines (on a UPS) and leave it running 24x7 (or as close to that as you can get, reboot when necessary depending on the OS you use.) Don't give your users direct access, you be the only one that moves data in and out.
Throw two of them in the same machine as individual drives (not RAID) with two similar shares, and manually mirror the data from time to time. Voila! Redundant data - probably more reliable than any external storage method, and highly likely more reliable than whatever method you are currently using.
It wouldn't take a new machine, you could recycle an old PII/400 or whatever with 256M of SDRAM - as long as the BIOS could handle a 400G drive (might take an aftermarket IDE card.)
Perfect use for this drive.
RAID-5 with four 100G SCSI drives vs. one 400G IDE drive ... difference in cost = SCSI RAID array being about $1,000 more.
Which would you trust your data and your business to, if your data was worth a million dollars and downtime cost your business $10,000 an hour?
Anybody know what price these are going to hit the market at ... maybe $600 apiece? A dollar and fifty cents a Gig, maybe $2 a Gig?
Jesus, I have personally paid $5 per Meg for used hard drives (a Seagate ST251-1 for the record) back when new drives were running about $10 a Meg (and that was MFM, with MTBF of about 20,000 hours - not the expensive good stuff.)
These will shake out eventually (after the new wears off) to about $400 = $1 per Gig. That's 10,000x cheaper than drive space a little over a decade ago. Come to think of it, that drive is also exactly 10,000x larger than the 40M drives of that era.
We are on the cusp of the TeraByte Desktop era - four 250G IDE or SATA drives in one box and we are already there - at pretty close to $1,000 for a TB of storage. These new 400G drives make it possible for 2TB Desktops with RAID (protected data) for somewhere in the $2,500 - $3,500 range (6 drives, $400-$500 apiece, plus a nice RAID card.) Ya - these still fit pretty nicely with the 'inexpensive' term.
I think that when RAID came out the term 'inexpensive' was used to indicate 'regular off the shelf' drives as opposed to the wickedly expensive mission critical super-great mainframe hard drives that your vendor (IBM or HP) used in your mini-computer or mainframe and charged insane prices for - like $10,000 per gigabyte (back then.)
Shit I thought I was the only person that did that. One of the biggest things I love about my 560SEL is the '3 body trunk' - although I actually measure the space in live (not dead) bodies ... I figure a live body is a little larger than a dead body because you can't fold a live body in half to accomodate a strange space, and he needs air to breathe, and needs to be semi-comfortable if the body happens to be one of your friends.
If I promised to learn the metric system and not be an arrogant asshole, you think you could hook me up with a job and help me immigrate from the US to Australia?
It's a genuine (if completely off-topic) question...
As a newbie to Linux may I inquire as to which distro that was? If I am going to run it, I want to run a good one.
How's the shareware business paying off? Going to be able to quit the day job anytime in the near future? Edit : I just reread it and the caffeine is just now hitting my system. Perhaps compare / contrast the shareware market vs. your regular business instead.
Just curious. The reason I ask is because from my viewpoint the shareware business is very similar (in an abstract, conceptual way) to the OSS model - except the OSS guys give away their source and don't get upset when nobody sends them money. Take the shareware model, subtract any revenue that the users that register send in, post the source code up for download and Voila! F/OSS.
That's what the F/OSS movement is all about? How the fsck does that pay the rent, grocery bills, car lease and buy new computer toys? Particularly when the software is the end product (games, user apps, etc.)
From each person what he can contribute.
For each person what he needs.
That sounds great, in concept, but those of us that have been to the Kremlin in Moscow, that great Mecca of Communism, have seen that it doesn't work.
I don't have all the answers, but anybody that honestly believes that software / information wants to be free (as in beer) needs to spend a month living with the natives in Russia to get a strong lesson in Communism from those that lived it. Anybody there over the age of 30 can give you a first person account, they lived exactly the business environment the F/OSS fantasy dreams of - and they will be happy to explain the rise and fall of the Russian empire that was built on those exact beliefs.
Oh yea bwy this wasn't directed at you directly, but it seemed as good a place as any to interject.
Once again I had a great idea. Not an original idea, but a great idea nonetheless. Maybe I should have specified 'affordably priced'.
Ask me sometime about my other ideas / inventions : unmanned flying things (both heavier than air and lighter than air), electricity, the wheel, and the two stroke internal implosion engine (I don't think this one is being done yet, probably with good reason.)
Jesus you are right, it is exactly what I wanted! And - get this - for only A THOUSAND DOLLARS?
Actually what I am considering doing is taking the Dell Latitude CPiA (PII/366, 192M, 13.1" TFT) laptop, pulling out the CDROM and filling it with two new batteries, pulling out the hard drive and popping in a compact flash drive with an adapter (install the OS onto that, set aside a bit of the system memory as a ramdrive for temp files), installing Win98se or a stripped down version of Win2000Pro on it with term-server client and having exactly what I wanted in the first place, cost about $300 to make all the upgrades to my old laptop to make that happen.
Agree with you about Viewsonic's cool toy with a dumb price.
Jesus the top one in that article got my attention ... that's real, real nice.
http://www.oqo.com/hardware/specs/
I do almost the same : I have a 4 year old HP Jornada 680 (6" diag 640x240 touch screen, 133MHz cpu, 16M RAM, keyboard, wifi card) running WinCE 3.0 - I use the term-server client for WinCE to connect to my server and just run a terminal server session full speed on one of those machines. The only thing moving over the wifi connection is screen deltas and it is incredibly smooth, fast. If the screen was 640x480 or even 800x600 - it would be the perfect solution.
Battery lasts about 20 hours (I have the larger battery) and it is instant on / instant off. Doesn't run DOOM III but for regular computing it is almost perfect.
Maybe if Sharp wanted a 'killer' solution, come out with something like that, a PDA with a keyboard, wifi, term-server client already installed, a 1024x768 screen, a real slow CPU that sucks lightly on the electricity, and a fat battery to run for 20 hours. The entire thing could weigh less than 2 lbs and would simply scream when connected to a decent machine running terminal server.
I thought a lot about that, but remember two things about houses : a) the house probably already has LOTS of PVC pipe already in it, and b) if my house is on fire I don't plan on sticking around to smell the PVC fumes. I plan on grabbing my case of backup CDs and my laptop and watching that bad boy burn from a nice spot on the street.
I bet you are right on the target. Perhaps go into the BIOS and throttle the CPU back by hand, if possible.