I believe it is able to do that, with the help of ESD in Gnome. I've had it work before, but there's a crap load of network latency. Then again, this was also with the Windows client; I can't speak much for the Linux one that you'd need here.
As a student myself, I got through a lot of high school using mostly Linux. Now that I'm in college I don't even have a Windows machine with me, and I'm doing fine.
I started by putting RedHat on an old HP Vectra I had laying around while I was in middle school. I really didn't know much about it, I just wanted to try something new. I couldn't even get X to work at first, so I just played with the command shell.
First I got Apache working, and hosted some pictures for friends off of my cable modem. Then I played with some FTP servers, got Samba going, and finally X. I loved it, and decided I wanted to switch eventually, though I still had to use Windows a lot of the time for school and such. I bought another old box and left a server running, though, and ran my Website that way. I kept trying to learn what I could about it, and eventually built a dual AMD MP 2800 box, on which I ran various version of RedHate and SuSE, but which now runs Gentoo.
I can do everything I need to on Linux, now. I've discovered through experience that OpenOffice is compatible enough, and I'm learning LaTeX too. I can do audio recording in it with Ardour and Jack, as well as Graphics in the Gimp. Not the greatest apps, but I'm happy with them considering they work pretty well and are free. I can also run Maya pretty nicely.
I will confess, I do have VMware installed, and have a Windows VM that I use once in a while. But it's mostly just to play with; most of the time I can do without it. In Gentoo specifically, I love Portage.
By now I consider myself a power user. I don't like working with Windows, though I still use it at school and when working with the rest of my family and their boxes. I want to have some familiarity with both, but I much prefer Linux.
I know what you mean. My Gentoo workstation used to crash a lot, mainly due to heat and bad RAM. Now it's pretty stable. I have a Gentoo Server back home that I used for OpenVPN, and managed to freeze that by using the ifconfig parameter in the OpenVPN config file (turned out I didn't need it, but it did seem strange). Other than that, though, Linux has been very stable for me.
Depending on the circumstances, you might be able to get stuff down there for less than in the US. If you can't power your machine directly off of the battery, use a higher battery voltage (ie, 24 or 48 volts for example) so you can save on wiring, unless your setting up the grid intertie (where you use the grid as a battery and just get the panels and the inverter). Be sure to get an actual utility interactive inverter. Don't just connect any inverter to the grid or bad things will happen. If you're looking into just being independent of the grid but still want an inverter, get a sine wave inverter, as everything will run better. (I mean it, don't skimp on this! You can actually fry stuff with a square wave or "modified sine wave" inverter, despite what some people might tell you!) Yes, it is a bit more expensive, but everything works out better in the long run. For more info, check out Home Power Magazine. Good luck, I wish I had that much sun! Have fun, stay safe, and remember to fuse.
OK, I can comment a little bit on this. First of all, there is a hosting company that claims to run entirely on renewable energy (solar, wind, they don't get to specific on their site), SolarHost.com. I've never used them, only read about them.
As for running on solar power (or wind), what you want to consider to start with is how much power the box draws, and how long it will run. The best thing you can do is conserve what you can; it will save you on overall system cost. If it's a workstation, pick one just as big as you need, and don't go overboard. (I'm typing this on my dual AMD MP box, which yes is overkill. But in case anyone's interested, with both CPUs at 100 % doing some Maya rendering among other things, it draws about 250 watts.) A server is the same way, but you'll usually want to leave it on all the time. You can take many conservation measures, like making it a headless box and minimizing the hardware involved. My Gentoo Web/Mail/MySQL server at home is a 1 GHz Via board with 256 MB Ram, and the 12 volt car power supply. All I have connected to the board is a hard drive; I disconnected the CD-ROM when I was done installing. At 12 volts, it draws roughly 30-36 watts (~3 amps).
Going the 12 volt route is nice, because then you don't need an inverter to power the box. Assuming it draws 35 watts 24 hours/day, that comes out to 840 watt-hours a day (you get watt-hours by multiplying watts by hours). Obviously, we're going to want to use a battery so our server can run at night. So, we multiply by 1.2 to compensate for the power lost here, and get 1008 watt-hours (1.008 KWH). Now, assuming we want to do this entirely with solar, we need to figure out how much sun is available in the area. Go here to figure out how many hours of sun you get a day. Where I am, in New York State, we get an average of 2.5-3 sun hours a day throughout the year (keep in mind, this is "full sun" so the panels will be putting out power at different light levels, though well stick with this figure of the sun hours). Let's use 2.5 sun hours to be safe. To produce 1008 watt-hours, we divide 1008 by 2.5. The result is that I would need 403.2 watts of solar panels. Four of these will be about right, putting out 115 watts each or about 460 watts, leaving a bit of a buffer. The price of the panels alone would be $2,060. You'd need batteries next, with enough capacity for, let's say, 3 days without sun. That means they have to be able to hold 3.024 KWH at 12 volts, or 252 amp-hours (3,024 watt-hours divided by 12 volts). If we drain the battery (assuming a deep-cycle led-acid battery) down all the way, we'll damage it. The minimum should be 20 percent. To make sure they last long, however, we should go with something more along the lines of, say, 35 %. That means we should plan for a battery bank with a capacity of about 390 amp-hours. A pair of the L-16 HCs found here should work. Then you'd need a charge controller of about 50 or 60 amps. Not including wiring, labor, fusing, shipping, or the server itself, the cost comes to about $3,116. This is to run a 35 watt load 24 hours a day.
Believe it or not, small-scale renewable energy is in fact quite popular. A lot can be done with the power generated by that system; you could probably run a small apartment with it (assuming no heat with electricity, and that said apartment does not contain the server:-)). Most people don't run a server all the time, so something like this works out. Running an average-sized house, after some slight conservation (not using electricity for heat, using compact floursecent lights and LEDs, and just remembering to turn stuff off when not using it), the total is usually about $20,000 to $30,
Maybe a heat exchanger could be used, like this one. You could set it up to use outside air to cool air drawn from the inside. Of course, it was designed to allow homeowners to bring outside air into their homes without loosing/gaining much heat, but I would think it could be set up this way.
I used SuSE 9.0, and I have to agree with you: It is a very polished distro. I'd go so far as to say that the hardware support was better than on Windows... For some things; it was easier for me to get up and running with a Phillips Webcam in SuSE than under XP. The YaST package manager was nice too, but after trying Gentoo I think portage tops it, though not if you're new to Linux like I was when I was trying SuSE. It wasn't my first distro, but I tried it after RedHat.
Power in the future isn't going to be wind, geothermal, etc, because it doesn't produce enough power.
Not enough power? Current solar cell technologies (available to the average consumer) can achieve ~15% efficiency. This is at "full sun," which is rated at 1000 watts/square meter. There are even more efficient technologies used in satellites, etc. There is still a lot of room for improvement, but it is not too far off. Many people already supply all the power they need for their home with solar and other renewables. (Check out Home Power for more on that.)
The same goes for wind as well. We receive an incredible amount of energy in the form of sunshine each day. We have the technology to harness it, so why not? We could build some large scale wind and solar plants, and give tax incentives to people who set up their own systems and put their extra power back onto the grid. Extra energy could be stored on a large scale through hydrogen. I think some nuclear plants would be needed, as it would be a good idea to diversify. But we would lessen our dependence on a source of uranium ore, and keep the production of waste to a minimum. Not to mention that if we spread out our power generation more, the power quality would increase, not as much power would be lost in transmission, and the utility grid would be less vulnerable.
Of course there's no way this'll ever happen over night. But it is a good thing to work towards. Greater production of the renewable energy technologies would lead to more innovation, and new jobs. The US and other countries should work to phase in something like this over time, rather than just building a bunch of nuke plants.
You don't know how to code? Fine, don't try to then. The point the author is trying to make here is that the software is not totally dominated by proprietary standards, so it's possible for different modifications to be made to by people who do code. It's not like everyone who uses it needs to be a 1337 coder, but there are those out there who will modify it.
I use Ardour on my Gentoo machine. I haven't done anything big with it yet (need more HD space), but I like it for the most part. And no, I don't code fluently enough to make any serious modifications to the program.
Amen to that. Although it has had some interesting, more artistic applications, like in Sin City. They could have used real sets, but the CG environment created a great atmosphere. But for the most part I agree that it is a sign of the cheapness of Hollywood nowadays.
No, luckily, you're not entirely. When someone can do the models/stop motion right, I think it can look pretty good. The CG stuff is nice, but somehow it doesn't look entirely natural to me.
Not that it's an example of the greatest model work, I thought the cardboard castles in Bruce Campbell vs Army of Darkness were pretty good, even in some cases more believable than the towers in the LOTR movies.
Yes, I agree with you there. Last year I did an internship at my high school with the IT department. We had to switch a bunch of users from one Windows domain to another, and it involved having users change passwords in the proccess. So, as I went around setting the various workstations to talk to the new domain, I would instruct users to type a new password. As I did this with one secretary, I happened to glance down at what she was typing for her 5 digit password. It was 11111. I told her she had to use something more complicated, but I didn't see what she typed after that. God only knows what some of the people with whom I wasn't staring at their keyboards typed...
At home I run a Web/Mail server. It uses a 1 GHz mini-itx board which I got from a friend who planned on using it in his car. So, I got it along with the power supply that uses a 12 volt input. Rather than pick up a 120 volt PSU for it, I decided to try something new, rather than just plug it into my UPS with my router, cable modem, and other server. I looked around and found this (sorry, the data sheet's in PDF format). It's a small DC power supply that can also charge a 12 volt battery. It can act like a UPS as well, so in the event of a power failure, it will switch my server to battery power. It's not bad; the server typically takes about 3 amps at 12 volts. So far it's been very reliable.
As for powering other electronics and replacing the wall transformers, this would be a good idea and could be easily done. Most of them take a small amount of current at about 12 volts, so all you'd really need would be a decent power supply (Astrodyne's got a lot of them), some kind of regulator circuit to keep the battery from overcharging, and wiring to all the devices. It would be a lot more efficient than each device having its own separate transformer.
I would add that, if you are working with Windows machines that you suspect (or know) are infected, you might want to go so far as to set up a dedicated network for the tech bench with its own subnet. Grab a Linksys router (or another Linux box or whatever) to keep any crap from getting onto your main network. (If you decide to build your own router, it would probably not be a bad idea to make it a different box than the Linux box the parent mentioned;).)
Can he assign resource well? Does he understand how an increase or decrease in FTEs impacts the team? Can he assign priorities? does he tell his boss when the teams work load in too much?
I see what you're saying, but IMHO, if he is going to do all of that properly, he needs to have at least somewhat of an understanding of what the tasks are, how long they should take, etc. He doesn't have to be an expert, but he does have to have an understanding of the area he is supposed to be managing.
OK, fine. I really don't care; Linux happened to pop into my head, as that is what I would probably use in that situation. To me, it is the easy solution. Perhaps you should have suggested yourself that he do it on a Windows/VMX/whatever box if you really wanted to put that as an option, but instead you had complain about my choice of words.
And if you really want to separate Linux that much, be my guest. It's close enough for me, and it works.
What is the layout like for the network? How many floors do you have? The first solution that would come to my mind would be to set up multiple routers and have different subnets, thus making it harder for someone with their own DHCP server to screw with the entire network.
Another option would be to setup a Linux (or other UNIX) and then have a shell script run every 5 minutes or whatever and scan a range of hosts to find out which are listening on port 68, which I believe is what DHCP servers listen on. You could have the script make note of the IP, and then maybe block traffic too/from it, tell the guest to remove the DHCP server, etc. based on your situation.
As another on-topic example, I run Alias Maya on my Gentoo box. I didn't have any trouble getting it to work at all. I'd say it's a great example of how well open and closed source software can work together.
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I believe it is able to do that, with the help of ESD in Gnome. I've had it work before, but there's a crap load of network latency. Then again, this was also with the Windows client; I can't speak much for the Linux one that you'd need here.
As a student myself, I got through a lot of high school using mostly Linux. Now that I'm in college I don't even have a Windows machine with me, and I'm doing fine.
I started by putting RedHat on an old HP Vectra I had laying around while I was in middle school. I really didn't know much about it, I just wanted to try something new. I couldn't even get X to work at first, so I just played with the command shell.
First I got Apache working, and hosted some pictures for friends off of my cable modem. Then I played with some FTP servers, got Samba going, and finally X. I loved it, and decided I wanted to switch eventually, though I still had to use Windows a lot of the time for school and such. I bought another old box and left a server running, though, and ran my Website that way. I kept trying to learn what I could about it, and eventually built a dual AMD MP 2800 box, on which I ran various version of RedHate and SuSE, but which now runs Gentoo.
I can do everything I need to on Linux, now. I've discovered through experience that OpenOffice is compatible enough, and I'm learning LaTeX too. I can do audio recording in it with Ardour and Jack, as well as Graphics in the Gimp. Not the greatest apps, but I'm happy with them considering they work pretty well and are free. I can also run Maya pretty nicely.
I will confess, I do have VMware installed, and have a Windows VM that I use once in a while. But it's mostly just to play with; most of the time I can do without it. In Gentoo specifically, I love Portage.
By now I consider myself a power user. I don't like working with Windows, though I still use it at school and when working with the rest of my family and their boxes. I want to have some familiarity with both, but I much prefer Linux.
I know what you mean. My Gentoo workstation used to crash a lot, mainly due to heat and bad RAM. Now it's pretty stable. I have a Gentoo Server back home that I used for OpenVPN, and managed to freeze that by using the ifconfig parameter in the OpenVPN config file (turned out I didn't need it, but it did seem strange). Other than that, though, Linux has been very stable for me.
Depending on the circumstances, you might be able to get stuff down there for less than in the US. If you can't power your machine directly off of the battery, use a higher battery voltage (ie, 24 or 48 volts for example) so you can save on wiring, unless your setting up the grid intertie (where you use the grid as a battery and just get the panels and the inverter). Be sure to get an actual utility interactive inverter. Don't just connect any inverter to the grid or bad things will happen. If you're looking into just being independent of the grid but still want an inverter, get a sine wave inverter, as everything will run better. (I mean it, don't skimp on this! You can actually fry stuff with a square wave or "modified sine wave" inverter, despite what some people might tell you!) Yes, it is a bit more expensive, but everything works out better in the long run. For more info, check out Home Power Magazine. Good luck, I wish I had that much sun! Have fun, stay safe, and remember to fuse.
OK, I can comment a little bit on this. First of all, there is a hosting company that claims to run entirely on renewable energy (solar, wind, they don't get to specific on their site), SolarHost.com. I've never used them, only read about them.
As for running on solar power (or wind), what you want to consider to start with is how much power the box draws, and how long it will run. The best thing you can do is conserve what you can; it will save you on overall system cost. If it's a workstation, pick one just as big as you need, and don't go overboard. (I'm typing this on my dual AMD MP box, which yes is overkill. But in case anyone's interested, with both CPUs at 100 % doing some Maya rendering among other things, it draws about 250 watts.) A server is the same way, but you'll usually want to leave it on all the time. You can take many conservation measures, like making it a headless box and minimizing the hardware involved. My Gentoo Web/Mail/MySQL server at home is a 1 GHz Via board with 256 MB Ram, and the 12 volt car power supply. All I have connected to the board is a hard drive; I disconnected the CD-ROM when I was done installing. At 12 volts, it draws roughly 30-36 watts (~3 amps).
Going the 12 volt route is nice, because then you don't need an inverter to power the box. Assuming it draws 35 watts 24 hours/day, that comes out to 840 watt-hours a day (you get watt-hours by multiplying watts by hours). Obviously, we're going to want to use a battery so our server can run at night. So, we multiply by 1.2 to compensate for the power lost here, and get 1008 watt-hours (1.008 KWH). Now, assuming we want to do this entirely with solar, we need to figure out how much sun is available in the area. Go here to figure out how many hours of sun you get a day. Where I am, in New York State, we get an average of 2.5-3 sun hours a day throughout the year (keep in mind, this is "full sun" so the panels will be putting out power at different light levels, though well stick with this figure of the sun hours). Let's use 2.5 sun hours to be safe. To produce 1008 watt-hours, we divide 1008 by 2.5. The result is that I would need 403.2 watts of solar panels. Four of these will be about right, putting out 115 watts each or about 460 watts, leaving a bit of a buffer. The price of the panels alone would be $2,060. You'd need batteries next, with enough capacity for, let's say, 3 days without sun. That means they have to be able to hold 3.024 KWH at 12 volts, or 252 amp-hours (3,024 watt-hours divided by 12 volts). If we drain the battery (assuming a deep-cycle led-acid battery) down all the way, we'll damage it. The minimum should be 20 percent. To make sure they last long, however, we should go with something more along the lines of, say, 35 %. That means we should plan for a battery bank with a capacity of about 390 amp-hours. A pair of the L-16 HCs found here should work. Then you'd need a charge controller of about 50 or 60 amps. Not including wiring, labor, fusing, shipping, or the server itself, the cost comes to about $3,116. This is to run a 35 watt load 24 hours a day.
Believe it or not, small-scale renewable energy is in fact quite popular. A lot can be done with the power generated by that system; you could probably run a small apartment with it (assuming no heat with electricity, and that said apartment does not contain the server :-)). Most people don't run a server all the time, so something like this works out. Running an average-sized house, after some slight conservation (not using electricity for heat, using compact floursecent lights and LEDs, and just remembering to turn stuff off when not using it), the total is usually about $20,000 to $30,
Maybe a heat exchanger could be used, like this one. You could set it up to use outside air to cool air drawn from the inside. Of course, it was designed to allow homeowners to bring outside air into their homes without loosing/gaining much heat, but I would think it could be set up this way.
I used SuSE 9.0, and I have to agree with you: It is a very polished distro. I'd go so far as to say that the hardware support was better than on Windows... For some things; it was easier for me to get up and running with a Phillips Webcam in SuSE than under XP. The YaST package manager was nice too, but after trying Gentoo I think portage tops it, though not if you're new to Linux like I was when I was trying SuSE. It wasn't my first distro, but I tried it after RedHat.
Not enough power? Current solar cell technologies (available to the average consumer) can achieve ~15% efficiency. This is at "full sun," which is rated at 1000 watts/square meter. There are even more efficient technologies used in satellites, etc. There is still a lot of room for improvement, but it is not too far off. Many people already supply all the power they need for their home with solar and other renewables. (Check out Home Power for more on that.)
The same goes for wind as well. We receive an incredible amount of energy in the form of sunshine each day. We have the technology to harness it, so why not? We could build some large scale wind and solar plants, and give tax incentives to people who set up their own systems and put their extra power back onto the grid. Extra energy could be stored on a large scale through hydrogen. I think some nuclear plants would be needed, as it would be a good idea to diversify. But we would lessen our dependence on a source of uranium ore, and keep the production of waste to a minimum. Not to mention that if we spread out our power generation more, the power quality would increase, not as much power would be lost in transmission, and the utility grid would be less vulnerable.Of course there's no way this'll ever happen over night. But it is a good thing to work towards. Greater production of the renewable energy technologies would lead to more innovation, and new jobs. The US and other countries should work to phase in something like this over time, rather than just building a bunch of nuke plants.
You don't know how to code? Fine, don't try to then. The point the author is trying to make here is that the software is not totally dominated by proprietary standards, so it's possible for different modifications to be made to by people who do code. It's not like everyone who uses it needs to be a 1337 coder, but there are those out there who will modify it.
I use Ardour on my Gentoo machine. I haven't done anything big with it yet (need more HD space), but I like it for the most part. And no, I don't code fluently enough to make any serious modifications to the program.
Amen to that. Although it has had some interesting, more artistic applications, like in Sin City. They could have used real sets, but the CG environment created a great atmosphere. But for the most part I agree that it is a sign of the cheapness of Hollywood nowadays.
No, luckily, you're not entirely. When someone can do the models/stop motion right, I think it can look pretty good. The CG stuff is nice, but somehow it doesn't look entirely natural to me.
Not that it's an example of the greatest model work, I thought the cardboard castles in Bruce Campbell vs Army of Darkness were pretty good, even in some cases more believable than the towers in the LOTR movies.
Yes, I agree with you there. Last year I did an internship at my high school with the IT department. We had to switch a bunch of users from one Windows domain to another, and it involved having users change passwords in the proccess. So, as I went around setting the various workstations to talk to the new domain, I would instruct users to type a new password. As I did this with one secretary, I happened to glance down at what she was typing for her 5 digit password. It was 11111. I told her she had to use something more complicated, but I didn't see what she typed after that. God only knows what some of the people with whom I wasn't staring at their keyboards typed...
At home I run a Web/Mail server. It uses a 1 GHz mini-itx board which I got from a friend who planned on using it in his car. So, I got it along with the power supply that uses a 12 volt input. Rather than pick up a 120 volt PSU for it, I decided to try something new, rather than just plug it into my UPS with my router, cable modem, and other server. I looked around and found this (sorry, the data sheet's in PDF format). It's a small DC power supply that can also charge a 12 volt battery. It can act like a UPS as well, so in the event of a power failure, it will switch my server to battery power. It's not bad; the server typically takes about 3 amps at 12 volts. So far it's been very reliable.
As for powering other electronics and replacing the wall transformers, this would be a good idea and could be easily done. Most of them take a small amount of current at about 12 volts, so all you'd really need would be a decent power supply (Astrodyne's got a lot of them), some kind of regulator circuit to keep the battery from overcharging, and wiring to all the devices. It would be a lot more efficient than each device having its own separate transformer.
I agree, having a Linux box would be a good idea.
I would add that, if you are working with Windows machines that you suspect (or know) are infected, you might want to go so far as to set up a dedicated network for the tech bench with its own subnet. Grab a Linksys router (or another Linux box or whatever) to keep any crap from getting onto your main network. (If you decide to build your own router, it would probably not be a bad idea to make it a different box than the Linux box the parent mentioned ;).)
I see what you're saying, but IMHO, if he is going to do all of that properly, he needs to have at least somewhat of an understanding of what the tasks are, how long they should take, etc. He doesn't have to be an expert, but he does have to have an understanding of the area he is supposed to be managing.
I agree. A new OS X CD bedroom would go great on top of my AOL CD living room.
Just use this.
what would you have used?
OK, fine. I really don't care; Linux happened to pop into my head, as that is what I would probably use in that situation. To me, it is the easy solution. Perhaps you should have suggested yourself that he do it on a Windows/VMX/whatever box if you really wanted to put that as an option, but instead you had complain about my choice of words.
And if you really want to separate Linux that much, be my guest. It's close enough for me, and it works.
Geez, I'm sorry I wasn't being OS politically correct. Yeah, I'm sure you could use another OS, Windows included. Why don't you go do that then.
I access my VFAT formatted iPod on my Gentoo box. I've never had a problem transfering MP3s and other files too and from it.
What is the layout like for the network? How many floors do you have? The first solution that would come to my mind would be to set up multiple routers and have different subnets, thus making it harder for someone with their own DHCP server to screw with the entire network.
Another option would be to setup a Linux (or other UNIX) and then have a shell script run every 5 minutes or whatever and scan a range of hosts to find out which are listening on port 68, which I believe is what DHCP servers listen on. You could have the script make note of the IP, and then maybe block traffic too/from it, tell the guest to remove the DHCP server, etc. based on your situation.
As another on-topic example, I run Alias Maya on my Gentoo box. I didn't have any trouble getting it to work at all. I'd say it's a great example of how well open and closed source software can work together.
I second that.