I admit that this might seem silly but I have never really wanted to get myself an Athlon based computer. I know too many people that have funny crases and wierd stuff happening, probably the fault of the chipset more that the processor (VIA, ewww) but still. My P3 has been great.
So earlier today I went to look for what I would need to upgrade my system. I need CPU, RAM and a motherboard. AMD is supposed to be the price / performance king right? Comparing an Athlon 1600+ vs a P4 1.6 with roughly compareable (feature wise) MSI motherboards and 256 MB RAM I will save 55 Canadian dollars, about 30 US, with the AMD system. Before this price cut.
So, WTF? For fifty bucks I'll buy the Intel thank you. I'll probably have that in the first 3 month's power bills anyway.
Point two is that Lucas doesn't seem to demand much from his actors. Everyone in the film was a decent actor, but they were just coasting in this one. Easy work, for a nice fat check. That flew just fine with the original Star Wars, but now it's just stupid looking and awkward feeling.
The guy who played Ankikan (I can't get to imdb right now) was horrible. Every scene he had was painful to watch, "ooh I'm mad, ooh I'm sad". THey would have been better off doing him CGI.
Was this as big as they think it was?
on
Tracking Mafiaboy
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
As the technology bubble neared its bursting point in 2000, a 14-year-old Montrealer calling himself Mafiaboy disabled much of the Internet economy, alarming the White House and the financial markets.
Okay, obviously this was big news but honestly not many people were exactly surprised where they? The tools that allowd this kid to pull this off had been identified already, the theory was pretty well established. Was knocking out Yahoo for 12 hours really a disruption of the "Internet Economy"?
The article was interesting, a good read. There was really any surpising information in there, punk toublemaker kid out to cause shit, surprise. THe fact that the author went to great length trying to paint this as some super mega massive disruption or something was very anoying. Yes this was an important event because of the new level of media attention but it was not an especially shocking event in a technical sense. Nobody was surprised it happened.
Not just wor,s really. If they are going to charge $x per Kb downstream I would want a rather detailed account of what I am playing for. When I check my email and get 3 MB worth of virus mail and then have to pay for the bandwidth to get it I will be pissed.
Also interesting is the fact that I've never seen the activity light on my DSL modem off. It flickers constantly, probably pings, scans, etc. No friggin way I am going to pay for that.
So you're gonna stop a DOS attack with a firewall? If they're "Masters of the Obvious" I guess that makes you "Masters of the Impossible". A firewall is not going to save you from a saturated link, aka DOS attack.
It's time to rewrite the netcode. DOS attacks aren't really any different to memory leaks in programs. They can be controlled and confined and cleaned up, if the code is good.
uh huh. Don't do much of this "netcode" stuff do you. Why do I think I just fed a troll?
Add to this whether A to D conversion passes the Radio Shack test. . How hard can it be to simply build a decent converter from scratch? Or, is this an unusually difficult task?
IIRC, this was my seventh grade science project. Maybe grade 8...
Unfortunately... one problem with microsoft products... most updates require a reboot... something no sane admin will allow automated on a critical server.
Oh yeah, the reboot is the real problem with this. God knows there is no chance that an update or patch (from MS, Redhat, whoever) will have it's own list of bugs. Or won't work with "Product x". Or will just plain fuckup.
Testing and rollback plans are for pansies and pinkos.
1) The paper means something. I was out of work for 8 months last year, half the interviews I went on were companies looking for paper. Looking back I am glad I didn't land those jobs but at the time it would have been nice. A single guy with little debt can be unemployed for 8 months, if I had a family....
2) Any degree will help you move up. You DO NOT want to be a sysadmin for the rest of your life. The hours suck, you are constantly fighting with some dumbass little thing, you have to bust your ass to keep your skills current. I know it looks like the bomb now but one day when you are 25 or so you'll be sitting at your desk sucking down some Subway and posting on Slashdot when you realize that Wednesday's work day just hit 30 consecutive hours. "Oh look", you'll say, "It's Thursday at lunchtime, I've been here for 30 hours! I want to go fucking home! Shove this pager up your ass boss man!"
I'm having a lovely couple of days btw.
I want out, I want to be a manager, maybe in marketing. I have no education, I'm gonna get it. My boss wants me to get it, he's helping. It's cool. I wish I had done it when I was 20 though.
Don't plan on being a sysadmin for the rest of your life. Most guys I know don't make it past 30 in this job, you get out or you burn out. It is fun while it lasts but it will cost you your health, your social life and your perspective.
I can't figure out why everyone gets upset about levies on blank media.
I am Canadain, I pay $.21 per CD I buy to this levy. Every Linux distro, backup or whatever I burn gives $.21 to recording artists, composers and record labels. I don't mind.
Why? Am I some kind of idiot? No, the law that establishes the levy has given me certain rights. It is perfectly legal for me to make a copy of a music CD for my personal use. I can't sell it, I can't give it away but I can listen to it. It is perfectly legal for me to borrow a CD from you and copy it. It is perfectly legal for me to hand you a music CD and a blank, sit you down in front of my computer and show you how to copy it. That is now your CD and nobody can say shit about it.
It does piss me off sometimes, I have probably a couple hundred CDs that have never had music recorded on them. On the other hand you should see my copied (not pirated) music collection!
Interesting antecdote that I can't really attribute to anyone in particular:
When the Airmailes company in Canada decided to go public they almost pulled out of the deal at the last minute. Why? They were afraid that when the public was able to see how many "Miles" they wrote off after expiration and how much money it made them there would be a huge backlash.
Airmiles sin't just good marketing, it's a freakin goldmine.
It's really not about sales, it's about making it easy for you to find what they want you to find and hard to find what they don't want you to find. The last thing the recording industry wants is you being able to find and then buy ANY kind of music.
Does the word "control" rings a bell ?
That's the big thing people miss! I'm not convinced it's not about sales though.
It used to be that I would hear a song on the radio or see a video that was kind of neat and go buy the CD. It was about a 60/40 chance that it was complete crap, utter garbage I wouldn't listen to again. Now I can go download a few tracks and find out if I'm gonna hate the CD or not first. The record industry knows this happens, they see this as a bunch of lost sales but it's not. It got to the point for a while there that I wouldn't buy a CD unless I had listened to it first at a friends or a party. I also had a "I like three or more songs" rule, if I only liked one song, no sale. Everyone has experience with this.
The thing is, when I could easily download a whole bunch of stuff, I bough more, not less. I was always finding cool new stuff. I don't buy as many CDs anymore, I'm not sure why, I was out of work for a while and got out of the habit I guess. I also have a harder time finding cool new stuff, my tastes have changed some, it seems to be harder to find stuff that I like now. I've grown out of the Napster demographic or something.
I am the IT Department for a small company, I run our own email servers and I have done everything I can think of to protect us from viri.
All in all it works pretty good, we don't have Klez, we get a ton of it but it is all filtered at the server. Personally I think that someone who ends up sending everyone in thier contact list is going to suffer a bit of a hit to thier proffesional reputation. Over the past week or so serveral people in the company have been getting "you sent me a virus" messages. No we didn't! I've been over the whole company with a fine toothed comb, we don't have this thing.
The fake email headers are really this virus' claim to fame. What a freaking disaster.
Then come marketing and promotion costs -- perhaps the most expensive part of the music business today. They include increasingly expensive video clips, public relations, tour support, marketing campaigns, and promotion to get the songs played on the radio. For example, when you hear a song played on the radio -- that didn't just happen!
And thank god for all that effort! Can you imagine what an absolte disaster it would be if this stuff didn't happen? If I didn't have Britteny's silly ass music drilled into my head over and over by my local radio station I might actually spend $20 on the CD out of curiosity or something. Oh the horror.
Thanks to the effort of the RIAA, MTV and radio I know exactly what kinf of stuff to aviod. I haven't purchased a CD on a radio station's playlist in years.
Ahh you bastards! Okay so Celine Dion is not much of a loss to me but you guys just tripped over your own feet in a large way.
I have one of these Mini Disc Walkmans. Along with it came this handy little kit to connect my walkman to my PC and record a cd to it.
Now with this CD from Sony Music I am unable to use my Sony PC Link to enjoy this music I have (hypothetically) purchased using my Sony MD Walkman. Hmmmm. Certainly calls into question my plans to purchase a new MD Walkman, the much more expensive MZ-900DPC sometime this month. Or maybe I just won't purchase Sony Music titles any more.
Nice of you guys to put me in a position where I have to choose between your hardware and music titles. I would have figured you would prefer me to purchase both, that's probably why you're the high paid media exective and I'm just the consumer with a love of music and a large disposable income though.
So long and thanks for all the laughs, if you need me I'll be in the Panasonic section at Circut City.
Re:go to see someone doing a full out review....
on
Mass Motherboard Review
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
You will one day get a bad board, trust me when i say this, what happens after you figure out the board is flawed and needs RMAed means alot. Some companys will tell you that your SOL and need to send it back to the maker for replacment which is all fine and dandy but can take some time. (around 6-8 weeks)where as the supplier can get you a ned board in a week. Someone now needs to do a comprehesive write up about the suppliers and we'll be all set.
This is really a key issue that people miss most of the time. My Dell system is now 2 years old and I want to replace it. I've been happy with the system and all I really need is a new MB, CPU and RAM so I was just going to put it all in the Dell case and call it a day. I've walked out of 2 retail stores in the past couple days because thier RMA policies pissed me off. If I have a MB fail I need it fixed asap not replaced as soon as it can be delivered from Tiwan via sailboat and bike courier. All the places I've been to only offer a 60 or 90 day quick replacement after that you have to deal with the manufacturer directly.
The only other option I can think of is to go buy a whole new system, even barebones that'll be twice what I would need to spend otherwise.
Mna this sucks. I've become really used to that next day courier replacement parts service Dell has.
I always got a kick out of places that would try and collect you name adn address for no good reason. I guess some marketing dweeb actually looked at thier DB and decided that this wasn't valuable
I know I'm not the only person that does this. When I had to sign up on Sun's site to d/l the JDK I actually entered "Scott McNealy" with Sun's Headquaters address and Phone #. The amount of work involved in weeding all the garbage in the DB makes it worthless.
Unless someone needs my address for billing or shipping they are not going to get it.
I use it to access my home machine from work with the MS Terminal client (fits on a floppy) without any trouble at all. It's not great and if it's not a VPN you are open to being sniffed but it is very simple to use. It also helps that I have a static IP on my DSL line
The one drawback is that it only allows one session at a time, if you are logged in at the console then you must end that session to log in remotely. Kind of a PITA.
Research Katz, Research
on
Review: Showtime
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Okay guys this is my very first bash Katz post so forgive me if I'm not quite as polished as I could be.
In fact, DeNiro seems to have made a career (Analyze This, and most recently Meet the Parents), out of laughing at his own tough-guy persona, which is really a shame. He hasn't had a serious role in a few years, and this spoofing of spoofs of spoofs is getting old.
Katz you Jackass. You do realize that after Meet the Parents De Niro made two not funny films, 15 Minutes (not so good) and The Score (excellent). Just before Analyze This he was in Ronin, Great Expectations and Jackie Brown.
Every time he was playing a variant of the tough guy he's famous for. He hasn't had a serious role in a while? Go rent The Score you idiot. Yeah the spoofing is a little silly and predictable, but it isn't all the man is doing with his career.
I like most of your articles, I think you contribute to this site in many ways and are an important part of it. Your tendency to make sweeping asinine statements with no factual basis is starting to annoying. It is devaluing your contribution by undermining your credibility. Try researching things occasionally.
Sounds to me like you guys have your config all nasty.
On a p2-3xx with 64mb ram and win95, the interface is visibly slow.
This has to be a result of server load or network bandwith. I have the ICA client running on a P166 with 100Mb switch ethernet and I can't tell the difference between it and the console.
the server is supposed to map your printers, but we find that PCs with more than one available printer either won't print, or print to random destinations.
Printer mapping is a nightmare. I am frankly more surprised that it works at all than that it works poorly. I'm transitioning all my printers to sahred printer with netork connections rather than client connected ones. Setup like that it works great.
You won't save a lot of $ on hardware and no $ on licences but the TCO is lower. A citrix farm is cheaper to admin than 200 desktops, no question.
I run a Citrix environment for a small company (~100 ppl). I've been doing it for about 8 months and I love it. It took me a while to get my head wrapped around the concepts but once you get the hang of it it's nice.
Citrix is expensive, you need Citrix server licences, Citrix Connection Licences, Win2k server licences, Win2k CALs and Win2k Terminal Services CALs. Not cheap, I firgure I've spent about $600 CD per user on these alone. In the end this will save you money on admin time and headaches. The upfront costs are scary but the TCO is lower.
Thin clients are cool. I use NCD ThinStars and I'm pretty happy with them. They run WinCE, have all the client software built in for Citrix and MS RDP, they remind me so much of the HP X term I used way back when I can't belive it sometimes. Keep in mind you won't have any removable media though.
The thing you have to do before even considering this is audit your software requirements. If you want to setup general use labs with Office and IE, you'll be fine. For a CS lab or an Eng lab where you have stuff like compilers and Matlab installed it just isn't gonna work.
Don't go cheap on the servers, when they go down you are hooped. Of the current bunch out there I like the Compaqs the best, figure on dual proc P3s (Xeons are overkill for this) with 1 to 2 GB RAM and RAID 1 or 5. The boost you get from having a RAID adapter with a big cache is huge when compared to a SCSI system. This server will handle out 25 or 30 people depending on thier usage.
If your software requirements are compatable with the concept I think you should really take a look at it. TCO is much lower, if Office breaks you have to fix it on a few servers, IE uber patches installed a few times, much easier than 100 desktops, belive me. I have two friends that started out with me in the same company 8 years ago and now we are all Citrix admins in different places. All of us have the same opinion, if you have to run a Windows network, this is the way to do it. One of them is the admin for a Citrix reference client.
The only warning I have for you is to be damn careful about the software you deploy. When you have a shared sytem anything can drop the whole boat for you. Be damn careful of HP printer drivers some of the LaserJet drivers will crash you, all of the Deskjet drivers will cause you problems.
Slashdot Mirror
So earlier today I went to look for what I would need to upgrade my system. I need CPU, RAM and a motherboard. AMD is supposed to be the price / performance king right? Comparing an Athlon 1600+ vs a P4 1.6 with roughly compareable (feature wise) MSI motherboards and 256 MB RAM I will save 55 Canadian dollars, about 30 US, with the AMD system. Before this price cut.
So, WTF? For fifty bucks I'll buy the Intel thank you. I'll probably have that in the first 3 month's power bills anyway.
The guy who played Ankikan (I can't get to imdb right now) was horrible. Every scene he had was painful to watch, "ooh I'm mad, ooh I'm sad". THey would have been better off doing him CGI.
Okay, obviously this was big news but honestly not many people were exactly surprised where they? The tools that allowd this kid to pull this off had been identified already, the theory was pretty well established. Was knocking out Yahoo for 12 hours really a disruption of the "Internet Economy"?
The article was interesting, a good read. There was really any surpising information in there, punk toublemaker kid out to cause shit, surprise. THe fact that the author went to great length trying to paint this as some super mega massive disruption or something was very anoying. Yes this was an important event because of the new level of media attention but it was not an especially shocking event in a technical sense. Nobody was surprised it happened.
Also interesting is the fact that I've never seen the activity light on my DSL modem off. It flickers constantly, probably pings, scans, etc. No friggin way I am going to pay for that.
So you're gonna stop a DOS attack with a firewall? If they're "Masters of the Obvious" I guess that makes you "Masters of the Impossible". A firewall is not going to save you from a saturated link, aka DOS attack.
It's time to rewrite the netcode. DOS attacks aren't really any different to memory leaks in programs. They can be controlled and confined and cleaned up, if the code is good.
uh huh. Don't do much of this "netcode" stuff do you. Why do I think I just fed a troll?
IIRC, this was my seventh grade science project. Maybe grade 8...
Oh yeah, the reboot is the real problem with this. God knows there is no chance that an update or patch (from MS, Redhat, whoever) will have it's own list of bugs. Or won't work with "Product x". Or will just plain fuckup.
Testing and rollback plans are for pansies and pinkos.
There's 2 things school has going for it.
1) The paper means something. I was out of work for 8 months last year, half the interviews I went on were companies looking for paper. Looking back I am glad I didn't land those jobs but at the time it would have been nice. A single guy with little debt can be unemployed for 8 months, if I had a family....
2) Any degree will help you move up. You DO NOT want to be a sysadmin for the rest of your life. The hours suck, you are constantly fighting with some dumbass little thing, you have to bust your ass to keep your skills current. I know it looks like the bomb now but one day when you are 25 or so you'll be sitting at your desk sucking down some Subway and posting on Slashdot when you realize that Wednesday's work day just hit 30 consecutive hours. "Oh look", you'll say, "It's Thursday at lunchtime, I've been here for 30 hours! I want to go fucking home! Shove this pager up your ass boss man!"
I'm having a lovely couple of days btw.
I want out, I want to be a manager, maybe in marketing. I have no education, I'm gonna get it. My boss wants me to get it, he's helping. It's cool. I wish I had done it when I was 20 though.
Don't plan on being a sysadmin for the rest of your life. Most guys I know don't make it past 30 in this job, you get out or you burn out. It is fun while it lasts but it will cost you your health, your social life and your perspective.
I am Canadain, I pay $ .21 per CD I buy to this levy. Every Linux distro, backup or whatever I burn gives $ .21 to recording artists, composers and record labels. I don't mind.
Why? Am I some kind of idiot? No, the law that establishes the levy has given me certain rights. It is perfectly legal for me to make a copy of a music CD for my personal use. I can't sell it, I can't give it away but I can listen to it. It is perfectly legal for me to borrow a CD from you and copy it. It is perfectly legal for me to hand you a music CD and a blank, sit you down in front of my computer and show you how to copy it. That is now your CD and nobody can say shit about it.
It does piss me off sometimes, I have probably a couple hundred CDs that have never had music recorded on them. On the other hand you should see my copied (not pirated) music collection!
I do this too. I pity the poor bastard who has fuck@yougys.com
:)
Interesting antecdote that I can't really attribute to anyone in particular:
When the Airmailes company in Canada decided to go public they almost pulled out of the deal at the last minute. Why? They were afraid that when the public was able to see how many "Miles" they wrote off after expiration and how much money it made them there would be a huge backlash.
Airmiles sin't just good marketing, it's a freakin goldmine.
Does the word "control" rings a bell ?
That's the big thing people miss! I'm not convinced it's not about sales though.
It used to be that I would hear a song on the radio or see a video that was kind of neat and go buy the CD. It was about a 60/40 chance that it was complete crap, utter garbage I wouldn't listen to again. Now I can go download a few tracks and find out if I'm gonna hate the CD or not first. The record industry knows this happens, they see this as a bunch of lost sales but it's not. It got to the point for a while there that I wouldn't buy a CD unless I had listened to it first at a friends or a party. I also had a "I like three or more songs" rule, if I only liked one song, no sale. Everyone has experience with this.
The thing is, when I could easily download a whole bunch of stuff, I bough more, not less. I was always finding cool new stuff. I don't buy as many CDs anymore, I'm not sure why, I was out of work for a while and got out of the habit I guess. I also have a harder time finding cool new stuff, my tastes have changed some, it seems to be harder to find stuff that I like now. I've grown out of the Napster demographic or something.
All in all it works pretty good, we don't have Klez, we get a ton of it but it is all filtered at the server. Personally I think that someone who ends up sending everyone in thier contact list is going to suffer a bit of a hit to thier proffesional reputation. Over the past week or so serveral people in the company have been getting "you sent me a virus" messages. No we didn't! I've been over the whole company with a fine toothed comb, we don't have this thing.
The fake email headers are really this virus' claim to fame. What a freaking disaster.
And thank god for all that effort! Can you imagine what an absolte disaster it would be if this stuff didn't happen? If I didn't have Britteny's silly ass music drilled into my head over and over by my local radio station I might actually spend $20 on the CD out of curiosity or something. Oh the horror.
Thanks to the effort of the RIAA, MTV and radio I know exactly what kinf of stuff to aviod. I haven't purchased a CD on a radio station's playlist in years.
Damnit, I was gonna say that!
Dear Mr. Regular,
I send you this file to ask your advice....
I have one of these Mini Disc Walkmans. Along with it came this handy little kit to connect my walkman to my PC and record a cd to it.
Now with this CD from Sony Music I am unable to use my Sony PC Link to enjoy this music I have (hypothetically) purchased using my Sony MD Walkman. Hmmmm. Certainly calls into question my plans to purchase a new MD Walkman, the much more expensive MZ-900DPC sometime this month. Or maybe I just won't purchase Sony Music titles any more.
Nice of you guys to put me in a position where I have to choose between your hardware and music titles. I would have figured you would prefer me to purchase both, that's probably why you're the high paid media exective and I'm just the consumer with a love of music and a large disposable income though.
So long and thanks for all the laughs, if you need me I'll be in the Panasonic section at Circut City.
This is really a key issue that people miss most of the time. My Dell system is now 2 years old and I want to replace it. I've been happy with the system and all I really need is a new MB, CPU and RAM so I was just going to put it all in the Dell case and call it a day. I've walked out of 2 retail stores in the past couple days because thier RMA policies pissed me off. If I have a MB fail I need it fixed asap not replaced as soon as it can be delivered from Tiwan via sailboat and bike courier. All the places I've been to only offer a 60 or 90 day quick replacement after that you have to deal with the manufacturer directly.
The only other option I can think of is to go buy a whole new system, even barebones that'll be twice what I would need to spend otherwise.
Mna this sucks. I've become really used to that next day courier replacement parts service Dell has.
Name: Freddy Fukerfaster
Address: l1234 Rodeo Drive
City: Beverly Hills
State: CA
Zip: 90210
Sex: Female
Age: 142
Phone: (111)222-3333
I know I'm not the only person that does this. When I had to sign up on Sun's site to d/l the JDK I actually entered "Scott McNealy" with Sun's Headquaters address and Phone #. The amount of work involved in weeding all the garbage in the DB makes it worthless.
Unless someone needs my address for billing or shipping they are not going to get it.
this is www.slashdot.org not www.truth.org or www.rocktheboat.org
We don't want none of that "factual" shit around here.
I use it to access my home machine from work with the MS Terminal client (fits on a floppy) without any trouble at all. It's not great and if it's not a VPN you are open to being sniffed but it is very simple to use. It also helps that I have a static IP on my DSL line
The one drawback is that it only allows one session at a time, if you are logged in at the console then you must end that session to log in remotely. Kind of a PITA.
In fact, DeNiro seems to have made a career (Analyze This, and most recently Meet the Parents), out of laughing at his own tough-guy persona, which is really a shame. He hasn't had a serious role in a few years, and this spoofing of spoofs of spoofs is getting old.
Katz you Jackass. You do realize that after Meet the Parents De Niro made two not funny films, 15 Minutes (not so good) and The Score (excellent). Just before Analyze This he was in Ronin, Great Expectations and Jackie Brown.
Every time he was playing a variant of the tough guy he's famous for. He hasn't had a serious role in a while? Go rent The Score you idiot. Yeah the spoofing is a little silly and predictable, but it isn't all the man is doing with his career.
I like most of your articles, I think you contribute to this site in many ways and are an important part of it. Your tendency to make sweeping asinine statements with no factual basis is starting to annoying. It is devaluing your contribution by undermining your credibility. Try researching things occasionally.
I'never tried, I would be amazed to find one that works at all. That's what I said in my coment....
On a p2-3xx with 64mb ram and win95, the interface is visibly slow.
This has to be a result of server load or network bandwith. I have the ICA client running on a P166 with 100Mb switch ethernet and I can't tell the difference between it and the console.
the server is supposed to map your printers, but we find that PCs with more than one available printer either won't print, or print to random destinations.
Printer mapping is a nightmare. I am frankly more surprised that it works at all than that it works poorly. I'm transitioning all my printers to sahred printer with netork connections rather than client connected ones. Setup like that it works great.
You won't save a lot of $ on hardware and no $ on licences but the TCO is lower. A citrix farm is cheaper to admin than 200 desktops, no question.
Either train or fire your Citrix admin! All of the stuff you mentioned is preventable. It's not even hard.
Every book I've ever read on Citrix tell you how to fix those problems.
Citrix is expensive, you need Citrix server licences, Citrix Connection Licences, Win2k server licences, Win2k CALs and Win2k Terminal Services CALs. Not cheap, I firgure I've spent about $600 CD per user on these alone. In the end this will save you money on admin time and headaches. The upfront costs are scary but the TCO is lower.
Thin clients are cool. I use NCD ThinStars and I'm pretty happy with them. They run WinCE, have all the client software built in for Citrix and MS RDP, they remind me so much of the HP X term I used way back when I can't belive it sometimes. Keep in mind you won't have any removable media though.
The thing you have to do before even considering this is audit your software requirements. If you want to setup general use labs with Office and IE, you'll be fine. For a CS lab or an Eng lab where you have stuff like compilers and Matlab installed it just isn't gonna work.
Don't go cheap on the servers, when they go down you are hooped. Of the current bunch out there I like the Compaqs the best, figure on dual proc P3s (Xeons are overkill for this) with 1 to 2 GB RAM and RAID 1 or 5. The boost you get from having a RAID adapter with a big cache is huge when compared to a SCSI system. This server will handle out 25 or 30 people depending on thier usage.
If your software requirements are compatable with the concept I think you should really take a look at it. TCO is much lower, if Office breaks you have to fix it on a few servers, IE uber patches installed a few times, much easier than 100 desktops, belive me. I have two friends that started out with me in the same company 8 years ago and now we are all Citrix admins in different places. All of us have the same opinion, if you have to run a Windows network, this is the way to do it. One of them is the admin for a Citrix reference client.
The only warning I have for you is to be damn careful about the software you deploy. When you have a shared sytem anything can drop the whole boat for you. Be damn careful of HP printer drivers some of the LaserJet drivers will crash you, all of the Deskjet drivers will cause you problems.
Check out these sites for info:
www.thethin.net
www.thinplanet.com
And read these books:
Windows NT/2000 Thin Client Solutions
Citrix: MetaFrame for Windows Terminal Services: The Official Guide
If you have any other questions feel free to email me : electric-monk(at)cadvision.com