...and find that many patches are not available to people without a paid support contract with Sun.
I've got a rack full of Sun hardware in my master bedroom at home (yes, my wife is a saint) and reloaded them with Linux and OpenBSD primarily due to the way in which Sun handles their patches for hobbyists.
I've been pushing these things on everyone who will listen for almost ten years now.
It's amazing to think that in all that time, I've only lost three bulbs. Two of them burned out after 6+ years of regular use. One of them met an early demise thanks to a kinetic incident involving a toddler and a toy.
The initial investment may seem high (and when I started buying them, it was easy to spend around $20 on a single bulb) but over the years you more than get your money back.
The only real gotchas I've found is that they don't work at all with dimmer switches, and they may require a warm-up period if you use them outside and it is quite cold out. Indoors they are instant-on now. The old ones used to hum, flicker, warm-up to full brightness, etc. but those problems have pretty much been overcome years ago.
On the upshot, a relatively small desktop lamp can usually accommodate an incredibly bright CF bulb. To achieve similar brightness with a conventional bulb would no doubt destroy the lamp. If you like to read by a strong light source, you ought to try this.
Displaying an old Altair is pointless if you don't know how to demonstrate its capabilities.
If you're hanging out here, there is some good chance you know UNIX or Linux. That said, getting an old Sun E4000 server would make for a great display. Shipping usually costs more than the street value of the machine, but within your budget. Hosting shell accounts on a 12+ processor old school UNIX box would be great fun and no doubt offer opportunity for nostalgia from those who enjoyed the golden age of UNIX.
...TruePosition. I used to work there a few years ago. One of the managers in IT was a total dick (which is why I left) but the product of the company is pretty amazing stuff.
From TFA: "The titles will be protected by digital rights management software to prevent the programmes being traded illegally on the internet."
Overlooking the fact that they spelled "programs" incorrectly (this is, after all, for the US market), media outlets still don't "get it" that DRM is a non-starter with many consumers.
I work for a very large software company and we're going through this battle right now for an internal application.
The developers are fine at making improvements to the application interface and providing new features, but completely and utterly clueless when it comes to system architecture, security, using hardcoded hostnames, etc. etc. The more we close the developers out of the production deployment, the better this runs. We also have to increasingly review their work to make sure they aren't doing things like hardcoding hostnames, or writing data to local disk instead of the rdbms (writing data to the disk kills horizontal scalability, high availability, etc)
The relationship has turned quite sour and there is a big wall between both sides with a liaison sitting on top relaying messages back and forth. It's an entirely unhealthy working relationship but at least the developers aren't sneaking things into the production environment anymore that have no business being there.
I think the poor man's $250 ($249) is about the practical limit for what I would spend on one of these but at $200 I might actually be tempted to buy one for myself and one for a FOSS developer that would be likely to make a real dent in the challenges Linux will face porting over to this platform.
I am not an admin on Sourceforge, but I run IBM's Community Source and IIOSB environments (very similar in functionality to Sourceforge, and on a scale that is probably unprecedented outside of Sourceforge itself). Could I make more money somewhere else? Certainly. But I work with some of the top minds in the Linux community right now, so there really isn't a lot of incentive to look around.
Early on there was a bit of a free-for-all as money for Linux gurus was springing up all over the place. Now it's a little better understood who the big players are, where the job satisfaction is the highest, and where the best minds are drawn to, and so on.
These days it takes more creative thinking to lure the most qualified people. Many of us were burned badly when the bubble burst and will pick and choose our career paths more carefully today. The tables have turned. So what if your company is the hottest thing going today; where will it be five years from now? Ten? How will your company survive when the fad it is riding on ends?
Google will realize tax writeoffs for the whole thing, a one-time tax credit (or perhaps they will find a way to make the tax credit apply at a lower amount over multiple years), and above and beyond that they will see significantly reduced site power bills.
The next thing they need to be looking at is average power consumption per employee and find more efficient ways to work. Putting a PC on every desk is wasteful. One fat LTSP server per department (or for multiple departments!) and a thin client on every desk would be more than enough for most people. I did this at another shop a few years ago and it worked great. It's a real shame that most people are stuck in a rut and won't try a new way of doing things .
OK it's not a new way of doing things. The idea itself is really very old. But the technology has caught up with the idea, and it's now a very workable idea, unlike the old X terminal toasters of the early 1990's running on 10Mbps ethernet with lousy graphics chipsets and poor performance, with a couple of dozen people sharing a SPARCstation 5 (not enough machine for one person, let along 12).
"Isn't mythTV only useful if you have a TV Tuner. Without that, it's just a way to play videos that you get onto the harddrive/network. There's a lot cheaper and easier ways to get a box that will play movies."
Tunerless front-ends are actually quite useful in a MythTV environment. The matter of value is going to have a different answer for everyone. Is the PS3 only going to be used as a MythTV front end? That's probably wasteful, short of the value of the hack itself. But if it is going to be used for its original intent (playing games!) and then as a MythTV front end when not playing games, I would say that is a very efficient purchase (if it is indeed possibly to easily switch back and forth between both modes).
As a matter of fact, I would be very likely to buy a PS3 if it could be pressed into dual-use service like this. I am only a casual gamer and would otherwise be unlikely to buy a PS3 strictly for playing games. I figure I have at least 5 years worth of play left in my Xbox so why bother?
Computers are comfortable well within the comfortable ambient temperature range for humans. It's more important to make sure you don't impede air movement by stacking things on top of it, next to it, in front of it, or behind it if any of those things impede airflow.
Also, it is advisable you schedule maintenance, perhaps on a quarterly basis, to remove the cover and vaccuum out the accumilated dust as you're going to be in a much dustier environment than your average data center.
The other bit that is more important than excessive air conditioning is to put a UPS between your server and the mains. Fluctuations in the electrical lines are far more likely to take out your server than being a few degrees warmer than the average data center.
Use OpenBSD as your gateway OS and set up queues so that BitTorrent is allowed on its well known ports, but carve out dedicated bandwidth as well for other services like imap, smtp, http, https, etc. to make sure they always have priority over torrents. You can prioritize the queues so that interactive services like ssh and http/https will pre-empt bandwidth from bulk transfer services like BitTorrent and ftp. The amount of control you have with pf is any geek's dream. You can even go so far as to say that hosts running Windows get put in a lower priority queue than hosts running anything else.:)
"for as long as i can remember everytime I trip on shrooms I get bombarbed with homosexual thoughts. Do any of you guys get this as well? I'm straight (or at least I think I am), and for the first few times I was devastated and confused because I thought I was a closet homo somehow unknown to me. I think now I realize that I was either acting out an insecurity when I was tripping, or it was one of those modes where you just become some foreign entity. I've also "morphed" into a girl before, seen things thr"
That's what you get for leaving your screen unlocked.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a standard but nobody uses it these days. Even the search engines disavow it anymore.
...and find that many patches are not available to people without a paid support contract with Sun.
I've got a rack full of Sun hardware in my master bedroom at home (yes, my wife is a saint) and reloaded them with Linux and OpenBSD primarily due to the way in which Sun handles their patches for hobbyists.
Maybe so, but it's still available on google.
I think there are some dinosaurs who would disagree with that if they hadn't died a gazillion years ago.
I've been pushing these things on everyone who will listen for almost ten years now.
It's amazing to think that in all that time, I've only lost three bulbs. Two of them burned out after 6+ years of regular use. One of them met an early demise thanks to a kinetic incident involving a toddler and a toy.
The initial investment may seem high (and when I started buying them, it was easy to spend around $20 on a single bulb) but over the years you more than get your money back.
The only real gotchas I've found is that they don't work at all with dimmer switches, and they may require a warm-up period if you use them outside and it is quite cold out. Indoors they are instant-on now. The old ones used to hum, flicker, warm-up to full brightness, etc. but those problems have pretty much been overcome years ago.
On the upshot, a relatively small desktop lamp can usually accommodate an incredibly bright CF bulb. To achieve similar brightness with a conventional bulb would no doubt destroy the lamp. If you like to read by a strong light source, you ought to try this.
Displaying an old Altair is pointless if you don't know how to demonstrate its capabilities.
If you're hanging out here, there is some good chance you know UNIX or Linux. That said, getting an old Sun E4000 server would make for a great display. Shipping usually costs more than the street value of the machine, but within your budget. Hosting shell accounts on a 12+ processor old school UNIX box would be great fun and no doubt offer opportunity for nostalgia from those who enjoyed the golden age of UNIX.
...TruePosition. I used to work there a few years ago. One of the managers in IT was a total dick (which is why I left) but the product of the company is pretty amazing stuff.
From TFA: "The titles will be protected by digital rights management software to prevent the programmes being traded illegally on the internet."
Overlooking the fact that they spelled "programs" incorrectly (this is, after all, for the US market), media outlets still don't "get it" that DRM is a non-starter with many consumers.
I work for a very large software company and we're going through this battle right now for an internal application.
The developers are fine at making improvements to the application interface and providing new features, but completely and utterly clueless when it comes to system architecture, security, using hardcoded hostnames, etc. etc. The more we close the developers out of the production deployment, the better this runs. We also have to increasingly review their work to make sure they aren't doing things like hardcoding hostnames, or writing data to local disk instead of the rdbms (writing data to the disk kills horizontal scalability, high availability, etc)
The relationship has turned quite sour and there is a big wall between both sides with a liaison sitting on top relaying messages back and forth. It's an entirely unhealthy working relationship but at least the developers aren't sneaking things into the production environment anymore that have no business being there.
RTFQ. Original submitter asked about build environments, not the actual embedded device.
I'm shocked no one has said it yet.
This is potentially a *good* use of RFID. Face it, RFID is coming to paper money. It's not a matter of "if" but "when".
Then blind folks will be able to scan with a portable RFID scanner and have the denomations read off to them.
Because Debian and the FSF don't see eye to eye on things, such as shipping Linux kernels with binary blobs.
http://www.infrastructures.org/
Some of these essays are a bit dated especially with regards to the tools they are suggesting but the mindset is still quite sound.
I think the poor man's $250 ($249) is about the practical limit for what I would spend on one of these but at $200 I might actually be tempted to buy one for myself and one for a FOSS developer that would be likely to make a real dent in the challenges Linux will face porting over to this platform.
...and look out for the stampede.
I am not an admin on Sourceforge, but I run IBM's Community Source and IIOSB environments (very similar in functionality to Sourceforge, and on a scale that is probably unprecedented outside of Sourceforge itself). Could I make more money somewhere else? Certainly. But I work with some of the top minds in the Linux community right now, so there really isn't a lot of incentive to look around.
Early on there was a bit of a free-for-all as money for Linux gurus was springing up all over the place. Now it's a little better understood who the big players are, where the job satisfaction is the highest, and where the best minds are drawn to, and so on.
These days it takes more creative thinking to lure the most qualified people. Many of us were burned badly when the bubble burst and will pick and choose our career paths more carefully today. The tables have turned. So what if your company is the hottest thing going today; where will it be five years from now? Ten? How will your company survive when the fad it is riding on ends?
Kim du Toit explained this phenomenon some time ago in this essay. I think he hit it right on the head.
How far off the mark is Magnatune for you?
"The prices for the panels are just the beginning."
I never implied otherwise. But the panels will likely be the single largest expense in all this.
"Consider the costs of the massive power distribution",
They would have this with or without solar panels.
"storage" [snip] "Batteries are a very high maintenance item over the years, too."
Who said anything about storage?
Your prices are way off for PV panels. It didn't take me more than 60 seconds to find . Quantities of 12x panels that peak at 175W, $810 each. About $4.63 per watt (peak) Google will be purchasing in larger volumes than this and will no doubt get a much better price. But at this price point, the PV panels alone would be about $139M for a 30MW peak production array.
Google will realize tax writeoffs for the whole thing, a one-time tax credit (or perhaps they will find a way to make the tax credit apply at a lower amount over multiple years), and above and beyond that they will see significantly reduced site power bills.
The next thing they need to be looking at is average power consumption per employee and find more efficient ways to work. Putting a PC on every desk is wasteful. One fat LTSP server per department (or for multiple departments!) and a thin client on every desk would be more than enough for most people. I did this at another shop a few years ago and it worked great. It's a real shame that most people are stuck in a rut and won't try a new way of doing things .
OK it's not a new way of doing things. The idea itself is really very old. But the technology has caught up with the idea, and it's now a very workable idea, unlike the old X terminal toasters of the early 1990's running on 10Mbps ethernet with lousy graphics chipsets and poor performance, with a couple of dozen people sharing a SPARCstation 5 (not enough machine for one person, let along 12).
"Isn't mythTV only useful if you have a TV Tuner. Without that, it's just a way to play videos that you get onto the harddrive/network. There's a lot cheaper and easier ways to get a box that will play movies."
Tunerless front-ends are actually quite useful in a MythTV environment. The matter of value is going to have a different answer for everyone. Is the PS3 only going to be used as a MythTV front end? That's probably wasteful, short of the value of the hack itself. But if it is going to be used for its original intent (playing games!) and then as a MythTV front end when not playing games, I would say that is a very efficient purchase (if it is indeed possibly to easily switch back and forth between both modes).
As a matter of fact, I would be very likely to buy a PS3 if it could be pressed into dual-use service like this. I am only a casual gamer and would otherwise be unlikely to buy a PS3 strictly for playing games. I figure I have at least 5 years worth of play left in my Xbox so why bother?
Computers are comfortable well within the comfortable ambient temperature range for humans. It's more important to make sure you don't impede air movement by stacking things on top of it, next to it, in front of it, or behind it if any of those things impede airflow.
Also, it is advisable you schedule maintenance, perhaps on a quarterly basis, to remove the cover and vaccuum out the accumilated dust as you're going to be in a much dustier environment than your average data center.
The other bit that is more important than excessive air conditioning is to put a UPS between your server and the mains. Fluctuations in the electrical lines are far more likely to take out your server than being a few degrees warmer than the average data center.
Use OpenBSD as your gateway OS and set up queues so that BitTorrent is allowed on its well known ports, but carve out dedicated bandwidth as well for other services like imap, smtp, http, https, etc. to make sure they always have priority over torrents. You can prioritize the queues so that interactive services like ssh and http/https will pre-empt bandwidth from bulk transfer services like BitTorrent and ftp. The amount of control you have with pf is any geek's dream. You can even go so far as to say that hosts running Windows get put in a lower priority queue than hosts running anything else. :)
"for as long as i can remember everytime I trip on shrooms I get bombarbed with homosexual thoughts. Do any of you guys get this as well? I'm straight (or at least I think I am), and for the first few times I was devastated and confused because I thought I was a closet homo somehow unknown to me. I think now I realize that I was either acting out an insecurity when I was tripping, or it was one of those modes where you just become some foreign entity. I've also "morphed" into a girl before, seen things thr"
That's what you get for leaving your screen unlocked.
Hmmm I have a number of Linux servers here that would disagree with you.
I see my ftp server has served up 14TB so far this month without a hiccup, and it's using ext3.
I don't blame you for posting anonymously. It's hard to post something like that in a way that people can hold your name accountable.