Embed RFID tags in the floor. Put an RFID reader underneath the forklift. Have it report back over 802.11b with the RFID tag number(s) that it is closest to.
You could always start out with a Pizgauer 6x6 ambulance and outfit it with $15K worth of gadgetry.
For $15K that Pinz will be more capable off-road than any new SUV, including Jeeps and H2 Hummers. Has plenty of room inside for lots of hardware and a crew of geeks. And it's great for attention whoring, which you seem to already be good at ("hey I sold my kid for some gadgetry...")
I've been in the IT business full time for 11 years. I've worked for some really rotten startups and for some nice ones, too. It sounds like they've taken you for granted all this time and never really prepared for the fact that you would leave at some point.
You're not required in most states to give any notice at all. If you're in an at-will state, you could say "I quit" and walk out the door now. But that's not professional, nor courteous, and the damage this would do to your professional reputation would be devastating. Here I am, 11 years in, and in the last month my small department has hired one guy from a job I worked at 8 years ago and another from a job I worked at 10 years ago. It's a small world. Don't burn bridges.
But their "demands" on you are entirely unreasonable, not to mention they are in no position to make demands. Your two week notice is a courtesy, not an obligation. You owe them nothing more.
If you choose to do some side work for them, make absolutely sure it doesn't put your new employer out any. And charge a premium consulting rate. $100/hr would not be unreasonable at all, and it will be an incentive for them to get someone else hired quickly. Just make sure you get paid! I've been in this position and required prepayment for blocks of hours, and this worked out well for me even though the employer bitched and moaned and cried bloody murder about it before conceding to my conditions. Otherwise there is a good chance they'll milk you for all the time they can and make you fight them in court for the money.
Check out this old blog entry of mine. It details how to set up VNC in a way that does what I think you're trying to do. Clients for any popular OS are abundant.
You can run that on top of a regular Linux distro, or if you also need thin clients you can add this to an LTSP server.
From what I can tell it doesn't have the cool features like VMotion where you can move a VM to another physical host without shutting it down first. From what I can see the only real areas it is likely to be compelling are price, license, and performance.
Tim, I read that. It doesn't begin to answer my question. That's a hype piece. I manage a large ESX farm. I'm wondering what to expect based on that experience.
We don't get BBC over here and PBS hasn't had favorable deals to air Doctor Who in many years in my market, so there is almost no Doctor Who fix for me. It seems like when MythTV does catch it for me, it's an old William Hartnell episode. Bah.
* Replace all of your incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent. Use the lowest wattage that you are comfortable with, reserving higher wattage for task lighting where you need the most clear illumination. This alone can cut your energy costs for lighting anywhere from 66%-75%.
* Wrap your hot water pipes and heat vents with insulation.
* Spray expansive foam insulation into your exterior facing walls.
* Replace any appliances that heat with electricity. Natural gas is the most practical replacement.
* Consider a passive solar water pre-heater so that warm/hot water goes in to your main water heater.
* Switch your car. Skip the hypebrids... I mean hybrids... and go straight to a good turbodiesel. Volkswagen has done wonders with their TDI. Add a chip and you can get great performance and still do better than 40MPG. Volkswagen TDI is known to run well on 100% biodiesel, also, if you ever consider going that route.
* Hang heavy curtains over your windows. Keep the curtains closed at night.
* Consider putting a small awning over your windows to block the summer sun from coming in directly, but inviting the winter sun which sits lower in the sky.
* Don't let your dishwasher dry the dishes. Dry them by hand.
* Hang your clothes on a clothesline to dry them whenever possible.
* If you live in an arid region, consider using a swamp cooler to augment or replace your air conditioning.
* If you live on a nice chunk of land, consider augmenting your heat and hot water with a wood burning furnace. This is impractical if you have to buy wood. But a godsend if you live on a managed woodlot.
* Replace all CRT monitors and televisions in your home with LCD's.
* Get yourself a "killawatt" device which will allow you to measure the actual energy consumption of everything you have that plugs into a standard 110VAC outlet and determine what appliances you need to replace with more efficient ones.
* Subscribe to Home Power and Countryside magazines to stay plugged into what other people are doing.
Right but it doesn't work with RHN. That was the point I was trying to make. If you use RHN to distribute patches, you'll need to come up with another strategy (likely based on yum) when using CentOS.
CentOS is Red Hat Enterprise Linux without the bullying tactics.
I have run CentOS for about a year now on several hundred machines and it works great. The major caveat if you're used to Red Hat is you need to work out a different patch management system since RHN/up2date isn't there. But yum is built in, and works quite well.
I was the sole Linux guy at my last job and had no problem deploying and maintaining hundreds of CentOS boxes between Kickstart and yum.
And there is support. The free support is community based. But you can buy a real honest to goodness support contract with SLA's and everything.
It's quite true. I sent an email to Leatherman protesting the news of their contribution and support, and got an email back from Mr Tim Leatherman himself standing behind his actions.
There are now many gun owners and outdoorsmen in this country who refuse to buy leatherman products anymore (including me) and will recommend alternatives that are often superior anyway, such as Gerber's multitools.
If you are a supporter of the DNC it won't bother you. Leatherman contributed a lot of money to John Kerry and other Democrat politicians. I'd rather they just dropped the price of the tool, made no contribution to any politicians, and let me as an individual decide who to give it to.
Gerber makes some mean multitools, every bit as tough as the original Leatherman (maybe more so) and without the political contribution baggage that goes with buying a Leatherman.
He also thought that "Microsoft Bob" represented the future of computing, that 640KB of RAM should be enough for everyone, etc. The guy lucked into a fabulous opportunity and held onto it through lies, extortion, establishing a monopoly, and other non-competetive practices.
Yes, the public school system is broken. But I don't have any faith that Gates of all people will have the answer to repairing it.
Perhaps you're missing the point. The SX4000 is a scalable device that presents the four disks as one SCSI disk, and the whole thing can be scaled tremendously (especially if you have multiple SCSI controllers or multi-channel controllers). All of this can show on one PC.
What you're talking about saturates the resources of a single PC, and has to squeeze into the confines of one chassis. It is more or less only scalable to the 4x400GB mark and then falls flat.
Yes, it is possible to do hardware RAID across them. But RAID 1 is not striping; it's mirroring. I think what you're after is RAID 0. I think that you can accomplish the same effect with LVM, though.
I got a couple of Promise UltraTrak SX4000 4 Channel External RAID Enclosures at $WORK to evaluate and while they aren't fast enough for me to move a production Oracle server to, they are plenty fast for a home media server and are quite affordable.
Each enclosure presents itself as a SCSI drive. You can chain enclosures together and use LVM to make them available to one (or more) filesystem(s). Hardware RAID takes place within each enclosure, but not across them.
Mine were set up with four 300GB drives which, after RAID5 overhead, gave me 900GB of usable space per enclosure (I had two enclosures). You could easily use 400GB drives and have 1.2TB per enclosure if you wanted. I would think that total cost for the enclosure with 400GB disks would be around $2500 US.
Yeah I've talked to Greg before. Not recently, but remember I used to be a contributor to CentOS when my previous employer was actually paying me to help come up with a viable alternative to RHAT (who was terribly inflexible in their support arrangements, and didn't have a good pricing model for compute clusters).
I have a lot of RHAS 2.1 boxes now that could use an upgrade. I'm dragging my feet on that because of the consistently bad experiences I've had over the years as a Red Hat customer. I'd rather go to CentOS but SuSE is more likely to get validation just because the lawyers like to think that they have someone to sue if catastrophe strikes.
Ever hear of the Crimson Permanent Assurance?
Embed RFID tags in the floor. Put an RFID reader underneath the forklift. Have it report back over 802.11b with the RFID tag number(s) that it is closest to.
You could always start out with a Pizgauer 6x6 ambulance and outfit it with $15K worth of gadgetry.
For $15K that Pinz will be more capable off-road than any new SUV, including Jeeps and H2 Hummers. Has plenty of room inside for lots of hardware and a crew of geeks. And it's great for attention whoring, which you seem to already be good at ("hey I sold my kid for some gadgetry...")
In Soviet Russia, the technology controls you.
I've been in the IT business full time for 11 years. I've worked for some really rotten startups and for some nice ones, too. It sounds like they've taken you for granted all this time and never really prepared for the fact that you would leave at some point.
You're not required in most states to give any notice at all. If you're in an at-will state, you could say "I quit" and walk out the door now. But that's not professional, nor courteous, and the damage this would do to your professional reputation would be devastating. Here I am, 11 years in, and in the last month my small department has hired one guy from a job I worked at 8 years ago and another from a job I worked at 10 years ago. It's a small world. Don't burn bridges.
But their "demands" on you are entirely unreasonable, not to mention they are in no position to make demands. Your two week notice is a courtesy, not an obligation. You owe them nothing more.
If you choose to do some side work for them, make absolutely sure it doesn't put your new employer out any. And charge a premium consulting rate. $100/hr would not be unreasonable at all, and it will be an incentive for them to get someone else hired quickly. Just make sure you get paid! I've been in this position and required prepayment for blocks of hours, and this worked out well for me even though the employer bitched and moaned and cried bloody murder about it before conceding to my conditions. Otherwise there is a good chance they'll milk you for all the time they can and make you fight them in court for the money.
Check out this old blog entry of mine. It details how to set up VNC in a way that does what I think you're trying to do. Clients for any popular OS are abundant.
You can run that on top of a regular Linux distro, or if you also need thin clients you can add this to an LTSP server.
What thought process led to IA64 being favored over the various flavors of sparc?!? It probably involved a lot of vodka.
From what I can tell it doesn't have the cool features like VMotion where you can move a VM to another physical host without shutting it down first. From what I can see the only real areas it is likely to be compelling are price, license, and performance.
Tim, I read that. It doesn't begin to answer my question. That's a hype piece. I manage a large ESX farm. I'm wondering what to expect based on that experience.
...to running Linux in something like VMWare ESX (not GSX!)?
We don't get BBC over here and PBS hasn't had favorable deals to air Doctor Who in many years in my market, so there is almost no Doctor Who fix for me. It seems like when MythTV does catch it for me, it's an old William Hartnell episode. Bah.
Monolithic domes are great and all, and if you are building a new home it should definitely be considered.
But this advice was more along the lines of what you could do in a typical stick-built house without having to move out.
* Replace all of your incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent. Use the lowest wattage that you are comfortable with, reserving higher wattage for task lighting where you need the most clear illumination. This alone can cut your energy costs for lighting anywhere from 66%-75%.
* Wrap your hot water pipes and heat vents with insulation.
* Spray expansive foam insulation into your exterior facing walls.
* Replace any appliances that heat with electricity. Natural gas is the most practical replacement.
* Consider a passive solar water pre-heater so that warm/hot water goes in to your main water heater.
* Switch your car. Skip the hypebrids... I mean hybrids... and go straight to a good turbodiesel. Volkswagen has done wonders with their TDI. Add a chip and you can get great performance and still do better than 40MPG. Volkswagen TDI is known to run well on 100% biodiesel, also, if you ever consider going that route.
* Hang heavy curtains over your windows. Keep the curtains closed at night.
* Consider putting a small awning over your windows to block the summer sun from coming in directly, but inviting the winter sun which sits lower in the sky.
* Don't let your dishwasher dry the dishes. Dry them by hand.
* Hang your clothes on a clothesline to dry them whenever possible.
* If you live in an arid region, consider using a swamp cooler to augment or replace your air conditioning.
* If you live on a nice chunk of land, consider augmenting your heat and hot water with a wood burning furnace. This is impractical if you have to buy wood. But a godsend if you live on a managed woodlot.
* Replace all CRT monitors and televisions in your home with LCD's.
* Get yourself a "killawatt" device which will allow you to measure the actual energy consumption of everything you have that plugs into a standard 110VAC outlet and determine what appliances you need to replace with more efficient ones.
* Subscribe to Home Power and Countryside magazines to stay plugged into what other people are doing.
Right but it doesn't work with RHN. That was the point I was trying to make. If you use RHN to distribute patches, you'll need to come up with another strategy (likely based on yum) when using CentOS.
CentOS is Red Hat Enterprise Linux without the bullying tactics.
I have run CentOS for about a year now on several hundred machines and it works great. The major caveat if you're used to Red Hat is you need to work out a different patch management system since RHN/up2date isn't there. But yum is built in, and works quite well.
I was the sole Linux guy at my last job and had no problem deploying and maintaining hundreds of CentOS boxes between Kickstart and yum.
And there is support. The free support is community based. But you can buy a real honest to goodness support contract with SLA's and everything.
It's quite true. I sent an email to Leatherman protesting the news of their contribution and support, and got an email back from Mr Tim Leatherman himself standing behind his actions.
There are now many gun owners and outdoorsmen in this country who refuse to buy leatherman products anymore (including me) and will recommend alternatives that are often superior anyway, such as Gerber's multitools.
If you are a supporter of the DNC it won't bother you. Leatherman contributed a lot of money to John Kerry and other Democrat politicians. I'd rather they just dropped the price of the tool, made no contribution to any politicians, and let me as an individual decide who to give it to.
Gerber makes some mean multitools, every bit as tough as the original Leatherman (maybe more so) and without the political contribution baggage that goes with buying a Leatherman.
He also thought that "Microsoft Bob" represented the future of computing, that 640KB of RAM should be enough for everyone, etc. The guy lucked into a fabulous opportunity and held onto it through lies, extortion, establishing a monopoly, and other non-competetive practices.
Yes, the public school system is broken. But I don't have any faith that Gates of all people will have the answer to repairing it.
...should the world replace the UN? It's clearly not working.
Don't try reading any pro-gun blogs while you're at Panera.
Perhaps you're missing the point. The SX4000 is a scalable device that presents the four disks as one SCSI disk, and the whole thing can be scaled tremendously (especially if you have multiple SCSI controllers or multi-channel controllers). All of this can show on one PC.
What you're talking about saturates the resources of a single PC, and has to squeeze into the confines of one chassis. It is more or less only scalable to the 4x400GB mark and then falls flat.
Yes, it is possible to do hardware RAID across them. But RAID 1 is not striping; it's mirroring. I think what you're after is RAID 0. I think that you can accomplish the same effect with LVM, though.
I got a couple of Promise UltraTrak SX4000 4 Channel External RAID Enclosures at $WORK to evaluate and while they aren't fast enough for me to move a production Oracle server to, they are plenty fast for a home media server and are quite affordable.
Each enclosure presents itself as a SCSI drive. You can chain enclosures together and use LVM to make them available to one (or more) filesystem(s). Hardware RAID takes place within each enclosure, but not across them.
Mine were set up with four 300GB drives which, after RAID5 overhead, gave me 900GB of usable space per enclosure (I had two enclosures). You could easily use 400GB drives and have 1.2TB per enclosure if you wanted. I would think that total cost for the enclosure with 400GB disks would be around $2500 US.
Yeah I've talked to Greg before. Not recently, but remember I used to be a contributor to CentOS when my previous employer was actually paying me to help come up with a viable alternative to RHAT (who was terribly inflexible in their support arrangements, and didn't have a good pricing model for compute clusters).
I have a lot of RHAS 2.1 boxes now that could use an upgrade. I'm dragging my feet on that because of the consistently bad experiences I've had over the years as a Red Hat customer. I'd rather go to CentOS but SuSE is more likely to get validation just because the lawyers like to think that they have someone to sue if catastrophe strikes.