One quick option: Check out Knoppix. It's an ISO image, bootable Linux version that's a great demonstrator. It never touches the hard drive, so you can demo it on any X86 workstation that can CD boot (well, any might be going too far). Take out the CD and reboot, and voila, you're back to Windows.
gasps of shock and surprise. the same company replaced 40 windows web servers with 4 running linux/apache. I'll take one competent linux admin over 10 drooling idiots any day.
Isn't it more accurate to say, "I'll take one competent administrator for four boxes any day over a bunch of untrained pseudo-admins on 40 boxes?" I think the author (and the interviewed) used a poor example here. Consolodation of resources, no matter the underlying OS, makes for better manageability.
Net, etc., which is really just a programming paradigm, can and has been solved in user space, a la Java.
Not to be argumentative, but I believe.NET is a framework, which would put it more in the realm of J2EE (JBoss, WebLogic, etc.) than that of a language like Java. Sorry if I've misstated something here.
Also, since I've got the soapbox, who's to say that OSS has to exclude Windows? I keep trying to tell my management (and our CIO) that, just because Linux is open source doesn't mean that "open source" means Linux.
The thing that puts managers off about the whole idea of OSS is that they don't like the idea of switching their entire infrastructure to something else. Someone else pointed out that those changes are very costly. Try telling them that, when they go looking for a new piece of software, they should check out SourceForge first to see what's there. And, no, I'm not trying to say that SourceForge is the only repository for OSS, but it sure is a simple litmus test for a CIO who gets most of his direction from Meta/Gartner.
I work for a small electric utility. Our infrastructure is all Windows and Sun. Most of our applications run on Windows, most of our databases run on Sun. Our developers, with the exception of the mainframers that are transitioning legacy systems, are all Microsoft coders, with a lot of stuff done in VB. Say what you will about our architecture, but realize that it's a prevalent one.
Now, imagine me going to our CIO and trying to convince him that OSS is a good thing. It's easy for me to imagine, because I've been doing it for a while. His first thought is, "This guy wants to replace everything with Linux? He's crazy."
I want nothing of the sort. Sure, I'd like to see some Linux-based solutions around, but that's not my first point of assault. The operating system part of the infrastructure, even the framework (.NET, J2EE, whatever), isn't my concern. In an enterprise, the real savings, and the place that OSS can really shine, is in the application space. In our business, when the NERC (National Electric Reliability Council) comes along and says, "Here's a software specification, all utilities must use the methodology described here to communicate with one another," the vendors come out of the woodwork with multi-million dollar solutions smothered in consulting costs that would boggle your mind. And it's not like there's any competitive advantage to be had. No one company's energy scheduling software is going to win them market advantage because it's better than their neighbor's. It's the perfect place for an open source solution.
In short, you have to rack up a bunch of savings on sever OS licenses to make up for the savings on one vendor app. And by vendor, I don't mean Microsoft. They're the low-cost provider in a lot of realms. I mean real userland app vendors like SAP, PeopleSoft, and all the industry-specific, silo-oriented applicatons that drain organizations of their cash.
Oh, yeah, and before anyone asks what I'm doing about it, check here. It's not much, and it's slow going, but it's a start.
On a slightly related note. I would hope that all companies that saves a bundle on free software could set aside a part of their profit and donate it to the projects behind their software.
Here's an interetsting thought: What if contributions to OSS projects were tax deductible, so long as the project was not-for-profit (Apache, et al)? Would that encourage corporations to donate?
We don't use it because it won't sync with our blackberries.
I suspect that's a load of spin, if you're referring to "it" as OSS, put out by a manager that is getting pressures from all fronts and wants an answer that will get people off his back. It likely wouldn't stand up to inspection.
I don't know what your company's capabilities are, but I would say that, if you WANT to use OSS and the only thing holding you back is compatibility with your custom app on the Blackberry platform, then get your programmers to re-write the app. The Blackberry OS is Java-based, you know. If it's a vendor based app, then which part doesn't work with OSS? Does the app server not run on Linux/BSD/whatever, or is there some sort of magic protocol that only communicates with Windows or Solaris?
Oh, yeah, and, while you're at it, put any code you develop up on SourceForge and contribute to the OSS movement.
Agreed. The CIO (Chief Information Officer) shouldn't be confused with the CTO (Chief Technology Officer). Now, having said that, I realize that most executive staffs (staves?) include only a CIO who's job it is to do everything related to information and information technology. The jobs, though, are mostly dissimilar.
I believe Robert Zubrin summed it up in his book The Case For Mars, "Mars is cold because, well, Mars is cold." This, of course, followed a lengthy explanation of why, some of which is discussed here.
I live in Portland, where there (used to be) a lot of other high-tech jobs. Intel has five campuses here. The career path for a game tester around here is Game Tester --> [pissed off at low wages] --> Entry Level QA Engineer Contractor At A Real High-Tech Firm (double your wage) --> [pissed off becuase other QA Engineers are doing the same job you're doing for 50% more] --> QA Engineer Contractor At Some Other Real High-Tech Firm (add 50% to your wages) --> Laid off for three months --> Yet Another Contract Position --> Laid off for more months...
Seriously, though, in the booming days of IT around here, anyone who knew how to file a bug report could make bucks as a QA Tester (they put Engineer in the title to make it sound important, pissing off real engineers). The game test company that I started my run with was famous as a place for contract headhunters (pimps) to get trained-up talent for cheap. They thought $17 an hour and no overtime was the gravy train.
What really gets me is that it's not true. These days, you have to make a ridiculous amount of money to just get by.
If you did sth stupid, and croak from it, you regret.
Yes, but you only regret for the short period of time between realizing that you've just killed yourself and actually dying. A short, sharp shock, so to speak.
I used to have an Apple ][gs, which ran a perfectly usable GUI on a 2.6 Mhz processor and 256K of RAM.
Also, when Win95 was in beta, I had it running just fine on a 386SX16 with 16M of RAM and a VGA card. It came with Write, a perfectly usable word processor without any noticable bloat.
If I didn't miss the point, the poster seemed to be looking for some sort of low-end distro that he could SEND HOME with the new owners and let them go through the install themselves. That sort of lets out the net-boot install method.
Would it work to put an ISO on the HD and give them a boot floppy? They could work through the install themselves that way, and always have the ISO (on its own partition) as a sort of restore disk.
It almost seems that this patent could be applied to meetings. The company I work for is going to be in trouble.
Jeff Bezos: ...the discussion system may be used in conjunction with a non-commercial environment and with a network other than the WWW or even with a system that is not based on a network.
Luckily, we're protected [in the U.S.] by some fine prior art.
The U.S. Constitution (First Ammendment): Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
For players, PCGen isn't as useful as a character generator as it is a character maintenance program. Leveling up in 3E can be a daunting task, unlike 2E, which I remember to be quite a bit easier.
For DMs, it can be useful as a character generator for NPCs that you want fully fleshed out, with more data than just a stat-block would include.
Check out ENWorld. Lots of downloads, links, discussion and news for the RPG community, centered around D20 (the open gaming version of TSR's [now Wizards of the Coast] Dungeons and Dragons).
Interesting. Have you tried it? I've been reading about openMosix lately, and the FAQ says that it will host VMWare. Specifically, it says:
If you intend to run VMWare under openMosix so that openMosix would load-balance several instances of that (yes, that works). But, if you want to run openMosix in several VMWare instances and let these instances load balance (that fails).
The first case works. The latter case does not work because VMware has a bug in its Pentium emulation that makes VMware crash (not openMosix, but the VMware binary) on the first migration.
Since I read that, I've been itching to try an openMosix cluster with VMWare running on it. I'd love to prove that out to our Win-centric server guys here at work.
Oh, they'll probably allow other OSes to RUN, just "not as efficiently as Windows-on-Windows." The ad will go something like, "In independently-run* tests, researchers found that exponentially greater performance can be achieved when running virtual servers by staying with Windows."
* Independant test lab is owned by a shell corporation operated by MSN, but it's still independant.
I want to say first that a) I understand your skepticism, and b) I'm normally adamant about having references at hand when talking about something [thank God for Google].
Having said that, I can't find the article that laid out the particulars. I'll keep looking, and post something if I find it.
The basics behind the statement are twofold: first, the shuttle ET has between 5 and 20 tons of fuel left when it gets ejected from the orbiter. Second, the shuttle has to make a specialized maneuver right before it ejects the ET that ensures that the ET is headed down the correct insertion path for its death descent into the atmosphere. If it continued along a ballistic launch trajectory, not ejecting the residual fuel, extra cargo capacity could be achieved.
While you're waiting for me to get back to you, check out Chris Fitch's excellent ET page at this link.
I suspect that [his] point was that, more than anything, we need useful mass in orbit. It costs around US$5,000 per pound (US$11,000 per kg) to put stuff into orbit. Why bring [however much the space shuttle weighs] back down again? The only thing we ought to be bringing back is enough mass to return the people safely. Everything else should be left in orbit to be used.
"SSTO" stands for Single Stage To Orbit. We don't have an HLLV (Heavy Lift Launch Vehicle) capable of that yet, not even the shuttle in its current configuration. Every piece of spacecraft that either burns up in the atmosphere during launch or gets thrown in the ocean as it is discarded is a waste of precious material that we need in orbit if we're ever going to have a long-term presence there.
Do you know that the shuttle could carry an extra thousand pounds of cargo if it kept its external tank with it until it reached orbit instead of discarding it to fall into the Indian Ocean, blown apart by built-in explosives? That doesn't even include the useful mass that is the ET itself. I'd like to see them, just once to prove it can work, carrying an ET all the way to orbit and attaching it to the space station. Even if they ejected it later because it didn't go with their new drapes, at least they've shown it can be done.
It's good of you, citizen, to take your governmental direction so well. They tell us not to speculate, so we must not.
*Bother!*
For one, Mr. Benford's speculation was obviously just that, and an educated reader can digest the whole article knowing that an early statement is based in an assumption. That doesn't by any means invalidate the rest of the article.
Secondly, given Mr. Benford's background, I would SPECULATE that he is somewhere close to the truth, and trust his guesses as much as any NASA-employed rhetoric spreader.
But that's just me. I'm an American, but more importantly a thoughtful member of humanity [we have no corner on ideas of freedom], and I support your right to continue to wallow in your ignorance.
AFAIK, putting a launch facility on the back side of the moon only has one benefit: Centrepital force helps the launch (barely).
The downsides include more asteroid hits, lack of radio contact with Earth (without a lunar polar relay or something), lack of visibliity from Earth, etc.
Some would question why you'd want to put a launch facility on the moon, anyway. It's just another gravity well, albeit a more shallow one. Personally, I think that the availability of resources, such oxygen, which is bound up in oxides in the soil, iron, aluminum, and possibly some water are reasons to put a facilty there. Even the gravity can be an advantage, because we terrestrial creatures really seem to prefer having a "down" to work with, something you don't get in space.
I'm sure it's neat working in space when you can let go of a wrench and have it float nearby until you need it. What happens when it floats out of reach, or floats into what you're working on? Furthermore, when I go to the can, I want to know that whatever I'm getting rid of is actually accelerating away from my body at some useful rate. Gravity helps with all problems like this.
From a strictly resource-economic point of view, launching from orbit (L-5, for instance) is way better than launching from a gravity well of any sort.
There's a couple of good explanatory posts here already, and if you're still interested, check out PERMANENT, a web site dedicated to Projects to Employ the Resources of the Moon and Asteroids Near Earth in the Near Term. |phew!| It's riddled with good ideas and tutorials on the basics of how to do a lot of stuff as far as we know.
I, for one, think Earth's gravity well is too deep to make space elevators feasable. If I'm wrong, great, but I'm pretty sure the near term is going to be all about SSTO HLLVs.
Slashdot Mirror
One quick option: Check out Knoppix. It's an ISO image, bootable Linux version that's a great demonstrator. It never touches the hard drive, so you can demo it on any X86 workstation that can CD boot (well, any might be going too far). Take out the CD and reboot, and voila, you're back to Windows.
Isn't it more accurate to say, "I'll take one competent administrator for four boxes any day over a bunch of untrained pseudo-admins on 40 boxes?" I think the author (and the interviewed) used a poor example here. Consolodation of resources, no matter the underlying OS, makes for better manageability.
Not to be argumentative, but I believe .NET is a framework, which would put it more in the realm of J2EE (JBoss, WebLogic, etc.) than that of a language like Java. Sorry if I've misstated something here.
Also, since I've got the soapbox, who's to say that OSS has to exclude Windows? I keep trying to tell my management (and our CIO) that, just because Linux is open source doesn't mean that "open source" means Linux.
The thing that puts managers off about the whole idea of OSS is that they don't like the idea of switching their entire infrastructure to something else. Someone else pointed out that those changes are very costly. Try telling them that, when they go looking for a new piece of software, they should check out SourceForge first to see what's there. And, no, I'm not trying to say that SourceForge is the only repository for OSS, but it sure is a simple litmus test for a CIO who gets most of his direction from Meta/Gartner.
I work for a small electric utility. Our infrastructure is all Windows and Sun. Most of our applications run on Windows, most of our databases run on Sun. Our developers, with the exception of the mainframers that are transitioning legacy systems, are all Microsoft coders, with a lot of stuff done in VB. Say what you will about our architecture, but realize that it's a prevalent one.
Now, imagine me going to our CIO and trying to convince him that OSS is a good thing. It's easy for me to imagine, because I've been doing it for a while. His first thought is, "This guy wants to replace everything with Linux? He's crazy."
I want nothing of the sort. Sure, I'd like to see some Linux-based solutions around, but that's not my first point of assault. The operating system part of the infrastructure, even the framework (.NET, J2EE, whatever), isn't my concern. In an enterprise, the real savings, and the place that OSS can really shine, is in the application space. In our business, when the NERC (National Electric Reliability Council) comes along and says, "Here's a software specification, all utilities must use the methodology described here to communicate with one another," the vendors come out of the woodwork with multi-million dollar solutions smothered in consulting costs that would boggle your mind. And it's not like there's any competitive advantage to be had. No one company's energy scheduling software is going to win them market advantage because it's better than their neighbor's. It's the perfect place for an open source solution.
In short, you have to rack up a bunch of savings on sever OS licenses to make up for the savings on one vendor app. And by vendor, I don't mean Microsoft. They're the low-cost provider in a lot of realms. I mean real userland app vendors like SAP, PeopleSoft, and all the industry-specific, silo-oriented applicatons that drain organizations of their cash.
Oh, yeah, and before anyone asks what I'm doing about it, check here. It's not much, and it's slow going, but it's a start.
Here's an interetsting thought: What if contributions to OSS projects were tax deductible, so long as the project was not-for-profit (Apache, et al)? Would that encourage corporations to donate?
I suspect that's a load of spin, if you're referring to "it" as OSS, put out by a manager that is getting pressures from all fronts and wants an answer that will get people off his back. It likely wouldn't stand up to inspection.
I don't know what your company's capabilities are, but I would say that, if you WANT to use OSS and the only thing holding you back is compatibility with your custom app on the Blackberry platform, then get your programmers to re-write the app. The Blackberry OS is Java-based, you know. If it's a vendor based app, then which part doesn't work with OSS? Does the app server not run on Linux/BSD/whatever, or is there some sort of magic protocol that only communicates with Windows or Solaris?
Oh, yeah, and, while you're at it, put any code you develop up on SourceForge and contribute to the OSS movement.
Agreed. The CIO (Chief Information Officer) shouldn't be confused with the CTO (Chief Technology Officer). Now, having said that, I realize that most executive staffs (staves?) include only a CIO who's job it is to do everything related to information and information technology. The jobs, though, are mostly dissimilar.
I believe Robert Zubrin summed it up in his book The Case For Mars , "Mars is cold because, well, Mars is cold." This, of course, followed a lengthy explanation of why, some of which is discussed here.
I live in Portland, where there (used to be) a lot of other high-tech jobs. Intel has five campuses here. The career path for a game tester around here is Game Tester --> [pissed off at low wages] --> Entry Level QA Engineer Contractor At A Real High-Tech Firm (double your wage) --> [pissed off becuase other QA Engineers are doing the same job you're doing for 50% more] --> QA Engineer Contractor At Some Other Real High-Tech Firm (add 50% to your wages) --> Laid off for three months --> Yet Another Contract Position --> Laid off for more months...
Seriously, though, in the booming days of IT around here, anyone who knew how to file a bug report could make bucks as a QA Tester (they put Engineer in the title to make it sound important, pissing off real engineers). The game test company that I started my run with was famous as a place for contract headhunters (pimps) to get trained-up talent for cheap. They thought $17 an hour and no overtime was the gravy train.
What really gets me is that it's not true. These days, you have to make a ridiculous amount of money to just get by.
They're working on it. It'll be out any day.
Yes, but you only regret for the short period of time between realizing that you've just killed yourself and actually dying. A short, sharp shock, so to speak.
I used to have an Apple ][gs, which ran a perfectly usable GUI on a 2.6 Mhz processor and 256K of RAM.
Also, when Win95 was in beta, I had it running just fine on a 386SX16 with 16M of RAM and a VGA card. It came with Write, a perfectly usable word processor without any noticable bloat.
If I didn't miss the point, the poster seemed to be looking for some sort of low-end distro that he could SEND HOME with the new owners and let them go through the install themselves. That sort of lets out the net-boot install method.
Would it work to put an ISO on the HD and give them a boot floppy? They could work through the install themselves that way, and always have the ISO (on its own partition) as a sort of restore disk.
I thought it was more like:
:^)
"My name's Summer. My father thought of it while sitting in a meadow in June, watching the sunlight play on the wildflowers..."
"Yeah? My name's Nick. My father thought of it one day while shaving..."
Jeff Bezos:
...the discussion system may be used in conjunction with a non-commercial environment and with a network other than the WWW or even with a system that is not based on a network.
Luckily, we're protected [in the U.S.] by some fine prior art.
The U.S. Constitution (First Ammendment):
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Yeah, the're really amped.
Don't forget Visual Source Safe... |grin|
For players, PCGen isn't as useful as a character generator as it is a character maintenance program. Leveling up in 3E can be a daunting task, unlike 2E, which I remember to be quite a bit easier.
For DMs, it can be useful as a character generator for NPCs that you want fully fleshed out, with more data than just a stat-block would include.
Check out ENWorld. Lots of downloads, links, discussion and news for the RPG community, centered around D20 (the open gaming version of TSR's [now Wizards of the Coast] Dungeons and Dragons).
Interesting. Have you tried it? I've been reading about openMosix lately, and the FAQ says that it will host VMWare. Specifically, it says:
If you intend to run VMWare under openMosix so that openMosix would load-balance several instances of that (yes, that works). But, if you want to run openMosix in several VMWare instances and let these instances load balance (that fails).
The first case works. The latter case does not work because VMware has a bug in its Pentium emulation that makes VMware crash (not openMosix, but the VMware binary) on the first migration.
Since I read that, I've been itching to try an openMosix cluster with VMWare running on it. I'd love to prove that out to our Win-centric server guys here at work.
Oh, they'll probably allow other OSes to RUN, just "not as efficiently as Windows-on-Windows." The ad will go something like, "In independently-run* tests, researchers found that exponentially greater performance can be achieved when running virtual servers by staying with Windows."
* Independant test lab is owned by a shell corporation operated by MSN, but it's still independant.
Dunno. I suppose for much the same reason that you have gas left in your tank when you go to the gas station. Better to have too much than not enough.
Having said that, I can't find the article that laid out the particulars. I'll keep looking, and post something if I find it.
The basics behind the statement are twofold: first, the shuttle ET has between 5 and 20 tons of fuel left when it gets ejected from the orbiter. Second, the shuttle has to make a specialized maneuver right before it ejects the ET that ensures that the ET is headed down the correct insertion path for its death descent into the atmosphere. If it continued along a ballistic launch trajectory, not ejecting the residual fuel, extra cargo capacity could be achieved.
While you're waiting for me to get back to you, check out Chris Fitch's excellent ET page at this link.
Regards,
JD
I suspect that [his] point was that, more than anything, we need useful mass in orbit. It costs around US$5,000 per pound (US$11,000 per kg) to put stuff into orbit. Why bring [however much the space shuttle weighs] back down again? The only thing we ought to be bringing back is enough mass to return the people safely. Everything else should be left in orbit to be used.
"SSTO" stands for Single Stage To Orbit. We don't have an HLLV (Heavy Lift Launch Vehicle) capable of that yet, not even the shuttle in its current configuration. Every piece of spacecraft that either burns up in the atmosphere during launch or gets thrown in the ocean as it is discarded is a waste of precious material that we need in orbit if we're ever going to have a long-term presence there.
Do you know that the shuttle could carry an extra thousand pounds of cargo if it kept its external tank with it until it reached orbit instead of discarding it to fall into the Indian Ocean, blown apart by built-in explosives? That doesn't even include the useful mass that is the ET itself. I'd like to see them, just once to prove it can work, carrying an ET all the way to orbit and attaching it to the space station. Even if they ejected it later because it didn't go with their new drapes, at least they've shown it can be done.
Sorry. I'll get off my soapbox now.
JD
It's good of you, citizen, to take your governmental direction so well. They tell us not to speculate, so we must not.
*Bother!*
For one, Mr. Benford's speculation was obviously just that, and an educated reader can digest the whole article knowing that an early statement is based in an assumption. That doesn't by any means invalidate the rest of the article.
Secondly, given Mr. Benford's background, I would SPECULATE that he is somewhere close to the truth, and trust his guesses as much as any NASA-employed rhetoric spreader.
But that's just me. I'm an American, but more importantly a thoughtful member of humanity [we have no corner on ideas of freedom], and I support your right to continue to wallow in your ignorance.
AFAIK, putting a launch facility on the back side of the moon only has one benefit: Centrepital force helps the launch (barely).
The downsides include more asteroid hits, lack of radio contact with Earth (without a lunar polar relay or something), lack of visibliity from Earth, etc.
Some would question why you'd want to put a launch facility on the moon, anyway. It's just another gravity well, albeit a more shallow one. Personally, I think that the availability of resources, such oxygen, which is bound up in oxides in the soil, iron, aluminum, and possibly some water are reasons to put a facilty there. Even the gravity can be an advantage, because we terrestrial creatures really seem to prefer having a "down" to work with, something you don't get in space.
I'm sure it's neat working in space when you can let go of a wrench and have it float nearby until you need it. What happens when it floats out of reach, or floats into what you're working on? Furthermore, when I go to the can, I want to know that whatever I'm getting rid of is actually accelerating away from my body at some useful rate. Gravity helps with all problems like this.
From a strictly resource-economic point of view, launching from orbit (L-5, for instance) is way better than launching from a gravity well of any sort.
I, for one, think Earth's gravity well is too deep to make space elevators feasable. If I'm wrong, great, but I'm pretty sure the near term is going to be all about SSTO HLLVs.