Remarkable timing for this story, as my Sheevaplug suddenly died last week after just over 330 days of flawless uptime. Turns out, there is a known issue with the original power supplies that were shipped, and they die pretty frequently after 8-10 months of use.
This is so common that Globalscale now sells the PSUs separately for ~$10 USD (plus another $15 for shipping, of course).
>LTSP is probably more work than it's worth if you have less than five work stations
Sorry, but I absolutely have to disagree with that statement. I have been using LTSP for the past four+ years to provide access to my family's 3 workstations. Even if it were only two machines, I would count my time well-spent, given the great reduction in maintenance and support time per user. Having everything centralized for updates and management pays off very quickly (in my experience), even for just a small user base.
p.s. - HUGE props to this team, they have done an incredible job. I had no idea it was such a small group of contributors. Many thanks from a very grateful user!!!
The older (~2001-2004) P-1000 series Fujitsu Lifebooks are fantastic - small, rugged, touchscreen, built-in wifi, and reasonably decent processors (e.g. 800MHz and up).
I worked extensively with the P-1000 model back in '03 or so, and found them to be an outstanding piece of hardware. And, at least at the time, they were quite friendly with the Linux distros that I tried on them.
The older ones are kind of hard to find, because again, they are great machines, but every now and then you can find a good deal on eBay.
Go out and get a Dectop for less than half the price. Slightly weaker specs, and doesn't come pre-loaded, but does come with a keyboard and mouse. My Dectop is now functioning very nicely as a low-volume, silent (replaced the hd with a CF card & adapter), 5-watt LAMP web server.
More than 48 hours since being posted, an item titled " The Increasing Importance of Community" on Slashdot has a grand total of 68 comments - less than a quarter that of the following article about some arcane Sun filesystem maybe being ported to Apple. Holy shit.
Pretty much says it all, doesn't it? Community decay at it's very finest.
While I agree that your comment is insightful, I fear that your logic is deeply flawed when you suggest that nationalism is a divisive force, or that unity always comes from thoughtful compromise. I wish it were so, but the available evidence indicates otherwise. Look at nazi Germany for a perfect example; insanely nationalistic, and almost completely united.
And FWIW, I just spent a week in Belgium last month, and all I heard from the locals was how conflicted the country is right now; it was all "us" (northern/Belgian) and "them" (southern/French). I was visiting the Antwerp/Brussels area, and everywhere I went I heard the same thing.
That having been said, I was still incredibly impressed by how educated, articulate, and civilized the whole population was. Belgium really is an amazing place, full of amazing people. We could learn a great deal back in the states from your example.
Linux didn't really advance computing, linux is yet another reimplementation of Unix.
Simply because Linux is a *nix derivative does not negate it's contributions to modern computing, and the ways in which people utilize computers.
If you want to argue that the advent of linux has not increased participation in (and "advanced") software development, well, good luck with that. I'll be over here with a cold beer, ignoring you. If you're just arguing that AT&T and Berkeley's contributions have been greater than hobbyists, I don't think I disagree. But I definitely disagree that linux "does not offer original ideas."
Several years back, my best friend came to visit me at college - when we woke up after a monstrous night of partying, he shuffled in to the kitchen to forage for food. This was college, so there really wasn't any food to be had.
He found a bottle of Everclear grain alcohol in the cupboard, and after finding no cereal to pour it on, located the unexpired carton of milk in the refrigerator. He then sat down at the kitchen table, and had himself a bowl (yes, a bowl, people) of Everclear and milk for breakfast.
As my stunned roommates and I stared on in hungover disbelief, he looked up from his breakfast, smiled broadly, and said "Ahhhh!! All the vitamins and minerals of fresh milk, along with the wholegrain goodness of Everclear: an important part of your well-balanced diet!"
While your focus on "net outcome" is commendable, your logic is deeply flawed. Most workers (in the U.S., anyway) have much less choice in the distance of their commute than in the transportation they use to cover that distance.
Trying to insist that everyone could/should live equidistant from their employer is fine, as long as you're ok with McDonald's and Starbucks being the only options for employment.
Your premise is that people should be punished in direct proportion to the distance they are forced to commute, which ignores the reality that most people live as close to their work as they can afford. There is no way that Joe Sixpack's 50 mile roundtrip commute in a Honda Civic is going to use less fuel than Joe CEO's 6 miles in his Lincoln Navigator (real world example, BTW). By your logic, Joe S., driving his 30mpg civic, is a bigger Part Of The Problem than Joe C., strictly by virtue of the fact that Joe C. can afford to live 10 minutes from work.
Your "judging" of people's fuel consumption in that respect will logically and inevitably reward the wealthy and punish the poor -- hopefully not the result you were looking for.
I've got a USB stick with Damn Small Linux installed, both bootable and through QEMU, and it's screamin' fast when booted direct, but barely manageable on an Athlon 2500+ under QEMU. If you do most of your work from a terminal, it's fine, but the GUI, not so much.
So, answer = not really, but it's still damn cool.
Surprised more people aren't aware of the PC Weasel for remote server control. Those things can do stuff that mere mortals like myself would have thought impossible.
They're not exactly cheap, but they're worth every penny IMHO. No, I'm not affiliated with PC Weasel or a vendor or anything other than an incredibly satisfied customer.
Seriously, the compressed air is a must, but your work area will quickly become unbearably disgusting unless you have a small vacuum (dustbuster) for getting rid of the larger wads of hair and crap that are usually nested in machines 3+ years old.
A smallish "parts organizer" cabinet w/ removable drawers comes in handy, both for keeping track of small screws and such for the current project, as well as having a good assortment of extra odds-and-ends available. Get something with about twice as many drawers as you think you'll need - the empty ones fill up fast.
In 6 years of freelance PC repair, all I've ever needed for tools are the pretty obvious ones:
Screwdriver set, complete w/ torx bits, etc. Soldering iron KVM switch Desk lamp Large tweezers and/or small needle-nose pliers Knoppix CD A decent (~1.2GHz) mid-range test box with removable HD trays and CD/DVD burner
Damn Small Linux embedded + QEMU + A tiny (64/128MB) USB memory stick
= A functional linux distro that's bootable instead of or even inside of windows.
Sure, most of us here realize that running linux on top of 'doze basically negates 90% of the value of running a linux distro in the first place, but it does make for one Hell of a parlor trick to impress the coworkers
Took me most of a weekend to get mine fully operational, and I not only learned a whole lot in the process, but now I have a gadget that impresses the suits in IT at work almost as much as teh 1447 h4xx0r k1ddiez down the block. And, oh yah, it's damn useful as well.
(probably -1 Redundant by now, but I don't have time to browse the whole goddamn thread)
MOD PARENT UP!!!!! (ok, it was either mod or reply, so now I'm officially a hypocrite)
I never say that, but good fucking god, that nearly made me piss my pants!!!
Thank you, JustOK, for salvaging what had otherwise been a hideously shitty day. I'll still be chuckling like an idiot about that post for at least a week.
Slashdot Mirror
Love the post/sig irony!
You have truly contributed an important piece of geek/nerd culture. Thanks again, and best wishes!
Remarkable timing for this story, as my Sheevaplug suddenly died last week after just over 330 days of flawless uptime. Turns out, there is a known issue with the original power supplies that were shipped, and they die pretty frequently after 8-10 months of use. This is so common that Globalscale now sells the PSUs separately for ~$10 USD (plus another $15 for shipping, of course).
That's nice. If you run ANY version of Windows.
>LTSP is probably more work than it's worth if you have less than five work stations
Sorry, but I absolutely have to disagree with that statement. I have been using LTSP for the past four+ years to provide access to my family's 3 workstations. Even if it were only two machines, I would count my time well-spent, given the great reduction in maintenance and support time per user. Having everything centralized for updates and management pays off very quickly (in my experience), even for just a small user base.
p.s. - HUGE props to this team, they have done an incredible job. I had no idea it was such a small group of contributors. Many thanks from a very grateful user!!!
The older (~2001-2004) P-1000 series Fujitsu Lifebooks are fantastic - small, rugged, touchscreen, built-in wifi, and reasonably decent processors (e.g. 800MHz and up).
I worked extensively with the P-1000 model back in '03 or so, and found them to be an outstanding piece of hardware. And, at least at the time, they were quite friendly with the Linux distros that I tried on them.
The older ones are kind of hard to find, because again, they are great machines, but every now and then you can find a good deal on eBay.
Tt
This is a joke.
Go out and get a Dectop for less than half the price. Slightly weaker specs, and doesn't come pre-loaded, but does come with a keyboard and mouse. My Dectop is now functioning very nicely as a low-volume, silent (replaced the hd with a CF card & adapter), 5-watt LAMP web server.
And the Dectop looks better, too, IMHO.
As much as I have always despised the "me too!" posts on /. as being pointless and annoying, here I am.
Thank you, friend, for beautifully articulating what so many of us do not have the skill (or courage) to express.
holy shit did it bring out the MS astroturfers. Educational if for no other reason than to see who's who.
Ack.
Homeless + Calgary + not frozen to death yet = very impressive.
Hang in there, Craig. And get your profile up on that site!
Damn. No "+1 Disturbing" mod available.
ooops! Sorry dude, my bad. Seriously.
Now, back to drinking heavily....
2 months? You're kidding, right? Or are you really that out of touch with the "news"?
Or maybe... oh wait, I'm sorry. You're just trolling.
Never mind.
More than 48 hours since being posted, an item titled " The Increasing Importance of Community" on Slashdot has a grand total of 68 comments - less than a quarter that of the following article about some arcane Sun filesystem maybe being ported to Apple. Holy shit.
Pretty much says it all, doesn't it? Community decay at it's very finest.
While I agree that your comment is insightful, I fear that your logic is deeply flawed when you suggest that nationalism is a divisive force, or that unity always comes from thoughtful compromise. I wish it were so, but the available evidence indicates otherwise. Look at nazi Germany for a perfect example; insanely nationalistic, and almost completely united.
And FWIW, I just spent a week in Belgium last month, and all I heard from the locals was how conflicted the country is right now; it was all "us" (northern/Belgian) and "them" (southern/French). I was visiting the Antwerp/Brussels area, and everywhere I went I heard the same thing.
That having been said, I was still incredibly impressed by how educated, articulate, and civilized the whole population was. Belgium really is an amazing place, full of amazing people. We could learn a great deal back in the states from your example.
Ok Trip, let me get this straight: your parachute ensured egg survival from a drop of, ohhh, say 18 inches? 10 inches?
That must've been one Hell of a 'chute!
(Sorry, just woke up in a bad mood this morning. I'm sure your parachute was lovely.)
Linux didn't really advance computing, linux is yet another reimplementation of Unix.
Simply because Linux is a *nix derivative does not negate it's contributions to modern computing, and the ways in which people utilize computers.
If you want to argue that the advent of linux has not increased participation in (and "advanced") software development, well, good luck with that. I'll be over here with a cold beer, ignoring you. If you're just arguing that AT&T and Berkeley's contributions have been greater than hobbyists, I don't think I disagree. But I definitely disagree that linux "does not offer original ideas."
Now, back to that beer.
Swear to God, may FSM strike me down if I lie:
Several years back, my best friend came to visit me at college - when we woke up after a monstrous night of partying, he shuffled in to the kitchen to forage for food. This was college, so there really wasn't any food to be had.
He found a bottle of Everclear grain alcohol in the cupboard, and after finding no cereal to pour it on, located the unexpired carton of milk in the refrigerator. He then sat down at the kitchen table, and had himself a bowl (yes, a bowl, people) of Everclear and milk for breakfast.
As my stunned roommates and I stared on in hungover disbelief, he looked up from his breakfast, smiled broadly, and said "Ahhhh!! All the vitamins and minerals of fresh milk, along with the wholegrain goodness of Everclear: an important part of your well-balanced diet!"
And to everyone's amazement, he didn't even die.
While your focus on "net outcome" is commendable, your logic is deeply flawed. Most workers (in the U.S., anyway) have much less choice in the distance of their commute than in the transportation they use to cover that distance.
Trying to insist that everyone could/should live equidistant from their employer is fine, as long as you're ok with McDonald's and Starbucks being the only options for employment.
Your premise is that people should be punished in direct proportion to the distance they are forced to commute, which ignores the reality that most people live as close to their work as they can afford. There is no way that Joe Sixpack's 50 mile roundtrip commute in a Honda Civic is going to use less fuel than Joe CEO's 6 miles in his Lincoln Navigator (real world example, BTW). By your logic, Joe S., driving his 30mpg civic, is a bigger Part Of The Problem than Joe C., strictly by virtue of the fact that Joe C. can afford to live 10 minutes from work.
Your "judging" of people's fuel consumption in that respect will logically and inevitably reward the wealthy and punish the poor -- hopefully not the result you were looking for.
Is QEMU usably fast?
Depends on your definition of "usably."
I've got a USB stick with Damn Small Linux installed, both bootable and through QEMU, and it's screamin' fast when booted direct, but barely manageable on an Athlon 2500+ under QEMU. If you do most of your work from a terminal, it's fine, but the GUI, not so much.
So, answer = not really, but it's still damn cool.
Surprised more people aren't aware of the PC Weasel for remote server control. Those things can do stuff that mere mortals like myself would have thought impossible.
They're not exactly cheap, but they're worth every penny IMHO. No, I'm not affiliated with PC Weasel or a vendor or anything other than an incredibly satisfied customer.
Seriously, the compressed air is a must, but your work area will quickly become unbearably disgusting unless you have a small vacuum (dustbuster) for getting rid of the larger wads of hair and crap that are usually nested in machines 3+ years old.
A smallish "parts organizer" cabinet w/ removable drawers comes in handy, both for keeping track of small screws and such for the current project, as well as having a good assortment of extra odds-and-ends available. Get something with about twice as many drawers as you think you'll need - the empty ones fill up fast.
In 6 years of freelance PC repair, all I've ever needed for tools are the pretty obvious ones:
Screwdriver set, complete w/ torx bits, etc.
Soldering iron
KVM switch
Desk lamp
Large tweezers and/or small needle-nose pliers
Knoppix CD
A decent (~1.2GHz) mid-range test box with removable HD trays and CD/DVD burner
And yes , "irony" actually used correctly in a /. post!!! VICTORY!!!!
Damn Small Linux embedded
+
QEMU
+
A tiny (64/128MB) USB memory stick
= A functional linux distro that's bootable instead of or even inside of windows.
Sure, most of us here realize that running linux on top of 'doze basically negates 90% of the value of running a linux distro in the first place, but it does make for one Hell of a parlor trick to impress the coworkers
Took me most of a weekend to get mine fully operational, and I not only learned a whole lot in the process, but now I have a gadget that impresses the suits in IT at work almost as much as teh 1447 h4xx0r k1ddiez down the block. And, oh yah, it's damn useful as well.
(probably -1 Redundant by now, but I don't have time to browse the whole goddamn thread)
MOD PARENT UP!!!!! (ok, it was either mod or reply, so now I'm officially a hypocrite)
I never say that, but good fucking god, that nearly made me piss my pants!!!
Thank you, JustOK, for salvaging what had otherwise been a hideously shitty day. I'll still be chuckling like an idiot about that post for at least a week.