RDU might be better than it was a year or two ago but it is still pretty bad. I had to leave Raleigh/Durham for Philadelphia because of the lousy job market. Keep in mind I'm a more senior level geek with 10 years in the market (10 years working with MS technologies, 7 years with Linux & Solaris).
I remember going to a TriBUG meeting where every single person there was laid off. These were senior level UNIX geeks, and not one of them could find work. The other UG I was involved in, TriLUG, was doing better probably because of the Linux boom combined with a larger contingent of sysadmins & programmers entrenched in academia where they were a bit safer. Still, enough members of that organization were out of work that some time was set aside at the beginning of every meeting for people to stand up and give a short pitch on who they are and what kind of work they were looking for.
Unless you were a guru sysadmin and programmer and DBA, you had almost no chance of finding work in RDU. And even then you had to be prepared to fight hard, accept entry level pay and still likely face rejection.
The older/larger cities seem to be fairing better than small specialty towns like RDU or Silicon Valley. New York City, Philadelphia, etc. are large and diversified and seem to be weathering the storm better. I'm not as plugged into RDU today as I was a year ago today, but a year ago today it was a wasteland in RDU and only a fool would relocate there without already having a job established.
I think wget is the way to go, perhaps with the "-m -k" flags, and then check the whole directory tree into CVS using `date +%Y%m%d` as your version number.
I don't use commercial wireless internet and I wouldn't I don't want to be bombarded with ads, either.
Bandwidth is pretty cheap, especially if you aren't reselling it. Dump $100 into hardware up front, another $50 a month for the bandwidth, and leave it be. Don't go putting all kinds of crap in front of me to slow me down. Just let me sit down, drink my coffee/tea/beer and surf in peace.
I have a "unabomber" shack out in the middle of nowhere, with no utilities to speak of. What you speak of is *very* doable with Solar power.
A few reflections on what I've learned.
* A PC, as you've learned, will usually consume in excess of 100W of power with the monitor on. Using aggressive settings on your power management software, a VIA EPIA motherboard, and a small LCD monitor you could probably get it around 50 watts. Such a machine is likely to feel slow.
* My Apple Powerbook is very solar-friendly. ~15W during heavy use.
* Try to get everything you need built-in. Things like PC Card devices or external storage really suck down power. The built in devices tend to be engineered for better power management profiles.
* If you find yourself needing to network, wire it. Wired networks suck less juice (at all points) than wireless. And it goes a lot faster.
* If you want to listen to music, budget that into your battery system. A laptop playing a huge MP3 playlist is never going to idle the processor down. Luckily batteries are relatively cheap, so adding just one more battery will add several hours to your runtime.
* If your situation is like mine and you will have a lot of little construction projects on your cabin while you're out there, my power use went WAAAY down when I switched from corded power tools to 18V Ryobi cordless tools. Charging the batteries did not appreciably diminish my reserves, the tools were almost as powerful as those they replaced, and they were much quieter and a joy to work with.
* Don't mess with car batteries. They are no good for this application. At the very least, look at RV/Marine Deep Cycle batteries (12V). Better yet, look at 6V Golf Cart batteries (which you pair up in series for 12V). The Golf Cart batteries will be the ones you want during those overcast weeks.
* Look into lighting, appliances, etc. that run directly off of 12VDC. There are many web sites out there that cater to hunting cabins, homesteaders, RV's, etc. You'll pay more for these appliances up front, but it is much more efficient to run most of your day to day stuff off 12VDC as you lose a lot in the inverter going up to 110VAC. The computer, however, should probably run off 110VAC if for no other reason to ensure that you're getting a steady clean feed from the inverter rather than from your PV panels & batteries, which may surge if the clouds suddenly part or what have you (the inverter will buffer this).
This article smacks of the typical chaos that corporate developers often bring to the table. The author bitches that IT won't give him admin rights to his PC, yet he neglects to mention when he did have them the sysadmin was having to call him frequently to explain the high amounts of bandwidth being devoured by his system after he installed Kazaa. Or how about the help desk ticket asking if there is some way to block all the pop up ads when it turns out Mr. Developer installed Gator or some other [spy|ad]ware.
Yes, I'm a corporate bastard sysadmin. If I weren't a bastard the company would need four more of me to clean up the constant messes the developers create due to their complete lack of consideration for company resources. I'm not talking about the legitimate development work, either, but rather the pure crap that these guys do with their systems that end up introducing all sorts of malware into the internal LAN.
Just stop your bitching, and remember you're not at home. This isn't your network. It isn't your computer. It's the company's. Try to respect that a bit more, m'kay?
Of course this should also be sent to the big auto manufacturers and parts vendors who provide master and slave cylinders (part of the automotive brake and clutch systems, respectively).
The way forward...
on
Does IT Matter?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
...is sometimes the way back.
X Terminals were a great idea but in a time where machines and network infrastructure were too slow to support them. They have pretty much gone away.
Today your average desktop class machine is really enough to support several dozen regular business users.
Add openMOSIX into the mix, and one virtual machine made up of a small handful of real machines can suddenly support hundreds of users' desktops. New machines can easily be rotated into the cluster (live) while old machines are rotated out when they become obsolete.
On the actual desk itself, something like a VNC terminal appliance is all one needs. Lifespan of one of these units is several times what a PC would last.
A sysadmin with 300 users is now really supporting only one workstation (whose processes are being migrated to maybe a dozen or two other workstations who have direct access to the master node's file system).
This isn't pie in the sky. It's based on very old ideas re-applied using new technologies that weren't available when the ideas were first tried. It actually works very well using the hardware and software available to us today.
I have to laugh when my users think that what I'm doing is bleeding edge. This is old school UNIX administration.
Ummm no. Those servers are definitely not the good guys. There might be an organization called "Spamhaus" but that's not it. What you're looking at are most definitely the bad guys.
I'm certain of this because I took the pictures. I briefly worked for this company (yes, I needed a job that bad to feed my family). Big surprise, I'm no longer there due to a conflict of ethics.
Just take a look at the technology that drives some of the lower end spamhauses and then you try telling me that hitting a web site is going to hurt them.
Since I posted that message I was contacted by the cAos folks. Seems like a better project to pool resources with. Sort of like RHEL with a Debian-esque social contract.
If your offer still stands, please drop me a note and I'd love to talk to you about setting up a mirror.
IMHO, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is closer to being a suitable foundation for a community-driven enterprise-class Linux distribution. There is very little at all to trim from it (mostly removing Red Hat's trademarks). Say what you want about Red Hat, but they have until lately been the most unambiguously Open Source friendly Linux vendor out there. I say "until lately" because their service agreements stifle traditional GPL rights granted to the end user.
That said, a number of us are working on liberating RHEL through the cAos project. First public beta should be available this month. We have a very Debian-like social contract, but the tech is all based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
For those of you who prefer RPM-based distros, wouldn't it be nice to install all system packages with yum? The new install floppy image we're testing now is working towards this goal. What this means is all of your packages are installed with the latest stable version from the getgo.
My manager emailed me in a panic today over an email that RHN sent out to subscribers talking about this very issue. Fedora was never mentioned. This seems like a scare tactic to bully people into buying RHEL.
But I figured out how I'm going to deal with it. I'm taking the source RPM's for RHEL 3 and building my own distro for internal company use. If it works well, I expect that I'll be permitted to release my work to the public and have a broader pool of collaborators to work with. We'll use yum instead of up2date/rhn for patching systems. So you'll basically be able to get RHEL (without the name) for free and optimized for i686 and athlon processors.
Mandrake is another great alternative. If your shop depends heavily on kickstart & rpm's, Mandrake is close enough to Red Hat to make the switch pretty easy.
Computers don't get slower with age. Our expectations on them just increase.
My web server was made in 1996. It's a Dell PowerEdge 4200. My desktop machine is a screaming Duron 750MHz. But those are the faster machines.
Some of my other museum pieces include a Sun Ultra 5, half a dozen Sun Ultra 1's, various SPARCstations from the 1 up to the 20 (and most models in between), a number of old PARISC boxen, couple of old DEC AlphaStations, and a small swarm of Pentium 100-133's.
I operate them all with just one keyboard. An IBM type "M" that was manufactured on Aug 20, 1987 and still going strong after many years of abuse. I keep a spare one around just in case (but haven't needed it yet).
A Pentium 100 with 32M of RAM and a recent installation of OpenBSD is a very useful machine. In fact I've powered down most of mine because I had inflated expectations of how many I'd need to run all the services that I wanted.
The machines that are starting to find their way into dumpsters today are actually Pentium II and Pentium III class, which are more than enough PC for most people. Most need a boost in RAM but the processor is more than fast enough to run a modern Linux distro, KDE with the eye candy levels cranked down, some web surfing, email and KOffice.
Even at the office I'm reclaiming old servers that are about to be put out to pasture, reconstitute them with Linux and some extra RAM, and put them back into service.
It *is* actually doing something. At any given time there are a few dozen people logged in running CLI tools. CLI tools do not tend to suck up machine resources like Gnome or KDE.
There were ~36 ssh connections going at that time, plus a couple of dozen irssi sessions. The same machine also handles all email and web traffic for a number of Triangle-area tech groups.
Also, it's not like the hardware is a Sparc 5 or anything. It's a pretty nice piece of server class iron, and it is pretty well tuned.
Welcome, young Patawan learner, to the true beauty of UNIX/Linux in its classic form.
I'm the sysadmin for a mid-sized company in the telecommunications sector. We have lots and lots of windows, a growing amount of Linux, and very little in the way of Macs.
The Macs will never take over here. You need a Mac to do administration on a Mac. However, with one PC I can do administration of all the Windows and Linux boxes.
The thing that is making Linux orders of magnitude easier to maintain now is Yum, maintained primarily by Seth Vidal at Duke University. I kickstart install my new machines, with a home-rolled Yum RPM as part of the installation process. Every night clients download patches from an internal server, and also install any packages that MIS directs them to (via yum's as yet undocumented groupinstall feature). One man can maintain hundreds of machines pretty easily. I anticipate that it could scale much higher than that without difficulty.
There are new features coming out in Yum shortly that will make it easier to have centralized MIS control while still empowering department or division level sysadmins to augment the base configuration delivered by a central IT organization.
Some of my other favorite sysadmin tools that make Linux easy to maintain include Xvnc, Perl, OpenSSH, PostgreSQL and PHP. For you Windows or Mac guys that are curious about Linux, you can check out the aforementioned tools at http://freshmeat.net
...at $WORK I have a Linux box that handles ~25 full screen X sessions all day long, and hovers around.10 load average. The box is an old dual PIII 500MHz with 2GB RAM, 36GB RAID 0+1 volume. All of the client machines are Windows XP desktops using VNC viewer locally to attach to Xvnc sessions on the Linux box (which is kicked off in xinetd on-demand).
The server itself was considered too slow to run Windows. It had been retired from the Windows domain, and the bean counters have written it off the books. Yet there it is, serving a vital business function to my users that is about to scale up to another ~30 users in the next couple of weeks.
Every bit of software involved in making this happen was free. The hardware was, effectively, free. And I'm already handling more users than the newfangled expensive Windows 2000 Terminal Server that is parked in the same rack.
This move was made to stave off the sudden onslaught of requests for a second machine (linux) at every desk. The corporate standard desktop has been and will be Windows for some time to come. But setting up a Linux box with lots of RAM, fast disk and Xvnc has already saved us over $45,000 that would have otherwise been spent on dedicated Linux machines at every desk.
"You could replace a 100-watt light bulb with a 60-watt LED, and get the same brightness,"
Better yet, you could replace a 100 watt light bulb with a 27 watt CF and get the same brightness. For about $5 at your local Target megastore. And it will last for at least five years based on my experience.
I went through my mother's house and replaced several kilowatts worth of standard bulbs with CF's (not all the bulbs in the house, but about 25% of them) and her electricity bill has gone down on average by about $50 per month (keep in mind here in Philadelphia the electricity rate is very high).
I'm running it on my Ultra 5 now. It's like having RH 7.3 running on your sparc. There is a lot of work being done to get it sync'd up with the current Red Hat work.
It's been shameful that RHEL customers have had to do without official LVM support while the retail users have had it for some time.
I'm using it presently on RH 9 and found that Red Hat's implementation of LVM prevents snapshots from working properly. That is, you can create a logical snapshot, but you can't mount it. I downloaded the latest kernel source from kernel.org, copied the.config file over from the RH kernel, but didn't apply the Red Hat patches. Not only does the system work precisely as expected, but LVM snapshotting actually works just fine. I'm now able to properly back up my desktop machine.
That Red Hat has known about this problem for ages and neglected to fix it is shameful. LVM should have been a priority all along for RHEL.
It is telling that the system was developed at the behest of one of the worst brewers on the planet. The system is tuned to deliver beer at 2 degrees celcius (that's 36 degrees to my fellow Americans).
As any good beer advocate knows, a temperature of 36 degrees will numb the tongue and effectively kill any sense of taste you might experience while drinking your ale. The system needs to be warmed up by a good ten degrees (farenheit) so we can taste out beer.
Oh, and please leave the frosty mugs behind as well. They are just a gimick and only serve to water my beer down and further numb the taste buds.
Slashdot Mirror
RDU might be better than it was a year or two ago but it is still pretty bad. I had to leave Raleigh/Durham for Philadelphia because of the lousy job market. Keep in mind I'm a more senior level geek with 10 years in the market (10 years working with MS technologies, 7 years with Linux & Solaris).
I remember going to a TriBUG meeting where every single person there was laid off. These were senior level UNIX geeks, and not one of them could find work. The other UG I was involved in, TriLUG, was doing better probably because of the Linux boom combined with a larger contingent of sysadmins & programmers entrenched in academia where they were a bit safer. Still, enough members of that organization were out of work that some time was set aside at the beginning of every meeting for people to stand up and give a short pitch on who they are and what kind of work they were looking for.
Unless you were a guru sysadmin and programmer and DBA, you had almost no chance of finding work in RDU. And even then you had to be prepared to fight hard, accept entry level pay and still likely face rejection.
The older/larger cities seem to be fairing better than small specialty towns like RDU or Silicon Valley. New York City, Philadelphia, etc. are large and diversified and seem to be weathering the storm better. I'm not as plugged into RDU today as I was a year ago today, but a year ago today it was a wasteland in RDU and only a fool would relocate there without already having a job established.
$31.49 (and free shipping).
I think wget is the way to go, perhaps with the "-m -k" flags, and then check the whole directory tree into CVS using `date +%Y%m%d` as your version number.
I don't use commercial wireless internet and I wouldn't I don't want to be bombarded with ads, either.
Bandwidth is pretty cheap, especially if you aren't reselling it. Dump $100 into hardware up front, another $50 a month for the bandwidth, and leave it be. Don't go putting all kinds of crap in front of me to slow me down. Just let me sit down, drink my coffee/tea/beer and surf in peace.
I have a "unabomber" shack out in the middle of nowhere, with no utilities to speak of. What you speak of is *very* doable with Solar power.
A few reflections on what I've learned.
* A PC, as you've learned, will usually consume in excess of 100W of power with the monitor on. Using aggressive settings on your power management software, a VIA EPIA motherboard, and a small LCD monitor you could probably get it around 50 watts. Such a machine is likely to feel slow.
* My Apple Powerbook is very solar-friendly. ~15W during heavy use.
* Try to get everything you need built-in. Things like PC Card devices or external storage really suck down power. The built in devices tend to be engineered for better power management profiles.
* If you find yourself needing to network, wire it. Wired networks suck less juice (at all points) than wireless. And it goes a lot faster.
* If you want to listen to music, budget that into your battery system. A laptop playing a huge MP3 playlist is never going to idle the processor down. Luckily batteries are relatively cheap, so adding just one more battery will add several hours to your runtime.
* If your situation is like mine and you will have a lot of little construction projects on your cabin while you're out there, my power use went WAAAY down when I switched from corded power tools to 18V Ryobi cordless tools. Charging the batteries did not appreciably diminish my reserves, the tools were almost as powerful as those they replaced, and they were much quieter and a joy to work with.
* Don't mess with car batteries. They are no good for this application. At the very least, look at RV/Marine Deep Cycle batteries (12V). Better yet, look at 6V Golf Cart batteries (which you pair up in series for 12V). The Golf Cart batteries will be the ones you want during those overcast weeks.
* Look into lighting, appliances, etc. that run directly off of 12VDC. There are many web sites out there that cater to hunting cabins, homesteaders, RV's, etc. You'll pay more for these appliances up front, but it is much more efficient to run most of your day to day stuff off 12VDC as you lose a lot in the inverter going up to 110VAC. The computer, however, should probably run off 110VAC if for no other reason to ensure that you're getting a steady clean feed from the inverter rather than from your PV panels & batteries, which may surge if the clouds suddenly part or what have you (the inverter will buffer this).
This article smacks of the typical chaos that corporate developers often bring to the table. The author bitches that IT won't give him admin rights to his PC, yet he neglects to mention when he did have them the sysadmin was having to call him frequently to explain the high amounts of bandwidth being devoured by his system after he installed Kazaa. Or how about the help desk ticket asking if there is some way to block all the pop up ads when it turns out Mr. Developer installed Gator or some other [spy|ad]ware.
Yes, I'm a corporate bastard sysadmin. If I weren't a bastard the company would need four more of me to clean up the constant messes the developers create due to their complete lack of consideration for company resources. I'm not talking about the legitimate development work, either, but rather the pure crap that these guys do with their systems that end up introducing all sorts of malware into the internal LAN.
Just stop your bitching, and remember you're not at home. This isn't your network. It isn't your computer. It's the company's. Try to respect that a bit more, m'kay?
This is nothing new. TruePosition is the market leader in the US for this.
Of course this should also be sent to the big auto manufacturers and parts vendors who provide master and slave cylinders (part of the automotive brake and clutch systems, respectively).
...is sometimes the way back.
X Terminals were a great idea but in a time where machines and network infrastructure were too slow to support them. They have pretty much gone away.
Today your average desktop class machine is really enough to support several dozen regular business users.
Add openMOSIX into the mix, and one virtual machine made up of a small handful of real machines can suddenly support hundreds of users' desktops. New machines can easily be rotated into the cluster (live) while old machines are rotated out when they become obsolete.
On the actual desk itself, something like a VNC terminal appliance is all one needs. Lifespan of one of these units is several times what a PC would last.
A sysadmin with 300 users is now really supporting only one workstation (whose processes are being migrated to maybe a dozen or two other workstations who have direct access to the master node's file system).
This isn't pie in the sky. It's based on very old ideas re-applied using new technologies that weren't available when the ideas were first tried. It actually works very well using the hardware and software available to us today.
I have to laugh when my users think that what I'm doing is bleeding edge. This is old school UNIX administration.
Ummm no. Those servers are definitely not the good guys. There might be an organization called "Spamhaus" but that's not it. What you're looking at are most definitely the bad guys.
I'm certain of this because I took the pictures. I briefly worked for this company (yes, I needed a job that bad to feed my family). Big surprise, I'm no longer there due to a conflict of ethics.
Just take a look at the technology that drives some of the lower end spamhauses and then you try telling me that hitting a web site is going to hurt them.
Since I posted that message I was contacted by the cAos folks. Seems like a better project to pool resources with. Sort of like RHEL with a Debian-esque social contract.
If your offer still stands, please drop me a note and I'd love to talk to you about setting up a mirror.
IMHO, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is closer to being a suitable foundation for a community-driven enterprise-class Linux distribution. There is very little at all to trim from it (mostly removing Red Hat's trademarks). Say what you want about Red Hat, but they have until lately been the most unambiguously Open Source friendly Linux vendor out there. I say "until lately" because their service agreements stifle traditional GPL rights granted to the end user.
That said, a number of us are working on liberating RHEL through the cAos project. First public beta should be available this month. We have a very Debian-like social contract, but the tech is all based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
For those of you who prefer RPM-based distros, wouldn't it be nice to install all system packages with yum? The new install floppy image we're testing now is working towards this goal. What this means is all of your packages are installed with the latest stable version from the getgo.
My manager emailed me in a panic today over an email that RHN sent out to subscribers talking about this very issue. Fedora was never mentioned. This seems like a scare tactic to bully people into buying RHEL.
But I figured out how I'm going to deal with it. I'm taking the source RPM's for RHEL 3 and building my own distro for internal company use. If it works well, I expect that I'll be permitted to release my work to the public and have a broader pool of collaborators to work with. We'll use yum instead of up2date/rhn for patching systems. So you'll basically be able to get RHEL (without the name) for free and optimized for i686 and athlon processors.
Mandrake is another great alternative. If your shop depends heavily on kickstart & rpm's, Mandrake is close enough to Red Hat to make the switch pretty easy.
Computers don't get slower with age. Our expectations on them just increase.
My web server was made in 1996. It's a Dell PowerEdge 4200. My desktop machine is a screaming Duron 750MHz. But those are the faster machines.
Some of my other museum pieces include a Sun Ultra 5, half a dozen Sun Ultra 1's, various SPARCstations from the 1 up to the 20 (and most models in between), a number of old PARISC boxen, couple of old DEC AlphaStations, and a small swarm of Pentium 100-133's.
I operate them all with just one keyboard. An IBM type "M" that was manufactured on Aug 20, 1987 and still going strong after many years of abuse. I keep a spare one around just in case (but haven't needed it yet).
A Pentium 100 with 32M of RAM and a recent installation of OpenBSD is a very useful machine. In fact I've powered down most of mine because I had inflated expectations of how many I'd need to run all the services that I wanted.
The machines that are starting to find their way into dumpsters today are actually Pentium II and Pentium III class, which are more than enough PC for most people. Most need a boost in RAM but the processor is more than fast enough to run a modern Linux distro, KDE with the eye candy levels cranked down, some web surfing, email and KOffice.
Even at the office I'm reclaiming old servers that are about to be put out to pasture, reconstitute them with Linux and some extra RAM, and put them back into service.
It *is* actually doing something. At any given time there are a few dozen people logged in running CLI tools. CLI tools do not tend to suck up machine resources like Gnome or KDE.
There were ~36 ssh connections going at that time, plus a couple of dozen irssi sessions. The same machine also handles all email and web traffic for a number of Triangle-area tech groups.
Also, it's not like the hardware is a Sparc 5 or anything. It's a pretty nice piece of server class iron, and it is pretty well tuned.
Welcome, young Patawan learner, to the true beauty of UNIX/Linux in its classic form.
Here is a shell server that is pretty well used by the members of TriLUG that will show you 101 days is easy.
[chrish@moya chrish]$ uptime
12:55am up 113 days, 5:57, 36 users, load average: 0.02, 0.30, 0.32
I've seen plenty of Linux systems approaching and a few exceeding 1 yr of uptime but by then it's time for a distro upgrade.
I'm the sysadmin for a mid-sized company in the telecommunications sector. We have lots and lots of windows, a growing amount of Linux, and very little in the way of Macs.
The Macs will never take over here. You need a Mac to do administration on a Mac. However, with one PC I can do administration of all the Windows and Linux boxes.
The thing that is making Linux orders of magnitude easier to maintain now is Yum, maintained primarily by Seth Vidal at Duke University. I kickstart install my new machines, with a home-rolled Yum RPM as part of the installation process. Every night clients download patches from an internal server, and also install any packages that MIS directs them to (via yum's as yet undocumented groupinstall feature). One man can maintain hundreds of machines pretty easily. I anticipate that it could scale much higher than that without difficulty.
There are new features coming out in Yum shortly that will make it easier to have centralized MIS control while still empowering department or division level sysadmins to augment the base configuration delivered by a central IT organization.
Some of my other favorite sysadmin tools that make Linux easy to maintain include Xvnc, Perl, OpenSSH, PostgreSQL and PHP. For you Windows or Mac guys that are curious about Linux, you can check out the aforementioned tools at http://freshmeat.net
One of the links in this headline has been pulled, and replaced with a simple link to the goatse man.
Folks at work, watch what you click in this story!
Either someone at freedesktop.org is dicking around, or someone hacked freedesktop.org.
...at $WORK I have a Linux box that handles ~25 full screen X sessions all day long, and hovers around .10 load average. The box is an old dual PIII 500MHz with 2GB RAM, 36GB RAID 0+1 volume. All of the client machines are Windows XP desktops using VNC viewer locally to attach to Xvnc sessions on the Linux box (which is kicked off in xinetd on-demand).
The server itself was considered too slow to run Windows. It had been retired from the Windows domain, and the bean counters have written it off the books. Yet there it is, serving a vital business function to my users that is about to scale up to another ~30 users in the next couple of weeks.
Every bit of software involved in making this happen was free. The hardware was, effectively, free. And I'm already handling more users than the newfangled expensive Windows 2000 Terminal Server that is parked in the same rack.
This move was made to stave off the sudden onslaught of requests for a second machine (linux) at every desk. The corporate standard desktop has been and will be Windows for some time to come. But setting up a Linux box with lots of RAM, fast disk and Xvnc has already saved us over $45,000 that would have otherwise been spent on dedicated Linux machines at every desk.
"You could replace a 100-watt light bulb with a 60-watt LED, and get the same brightness,"
Better yet, you could replace a 100 watt light bulb with a 27 watt CF and get the same brightness. For about $5 at your local Target megastore. And it will last for at least five years based on my experience.
I went through my mother's house and replaced several kilowatts worth of standard bulbs with CF's (not all the bulbs in the house, but about 25% of them) and her electricity bill has gone down on average by about $50 per month (keep in mind here in Philadelphia the electricity rate is very high).
Tron wasn't even mentioned in the headline, but when it came out it was pretty much bleeding edge.
The VR sequences in Lawnmower Man were really out there as well.
I know this old school stuff might look hokey today but back then they were revolutionary.
As much as I'd hate to admit it, George Lucas has really raised the bar with episodes 1 & 2.
Also don't forget music videos. Dire Straits "Money for Nothing" comes immediately to mind.
Haven't you heard of Aurora Linux?
I'm running it on my Ultra 5 now. It's like having RH 7.3 running on your sparc. There is a lot of work being done to get it sync'd up with the current Red Hat work.
It's been shameful that RHEL customers have had to do without official LVM support while the retail users have had it for some time.
.config file over from the RH kernel, but didn't apply the Red Hat patches. Not only does the system work precisely as expected, but LVM snapshotting actually works just fine. I'm now able to properly back up my desktop machine.
I'm using it presently on RH 9 and found that Red Hat's implementation of LVM prevents snapshots from working properly. That is, you can create a logical snapshot, but you can't mount it. I downloaded the latest kernel source from kernel.org, copied the
That Red Hat has known about this problem for ages and neglected to fix it is shameful. LVM should have been a priority all along for RHEL.
It is telling that the system was developed at the behest of one of the worst brewers on the planet. The system is tuned to deliver beer at 2 degrees celcius (that's 36 degrees to my fellow Americans).
As any good beer advocate knows, a temperature of 36 degrees will numb the tongue and effectively kill any sense of taste you might experience while drinking your ale. The system needs to be warmed up by a good ten degrees (farenheit) so we can taste out beer.
Oh, and please leave the frosty mugs behind as well. They are just a gimick and only serve to water my beer down and further numb the taste buds.