Linux just gives them a justifiable destination other than Microsoft.
Time to invent a new word: "linussend", as in "You mean we don't have to shift onto MS-Windows when our hardware becomes obsolete? Hurrah! What a linussend!"
I also replace the default IE homepage with http://news.google.com.au/ (guess which country I live in) on any new MS-Windows install. The bandwidth is lower, the news more useful and there are more tools one click away.
Does Yahoo translate? I use Google links on my corporate pages to do that. Do they offer a calculator or conversions? All of the stuff in the "missing Google manual"? As a search engine, Yahoo isn't in the same class.
As to Yahoo's photo galleries, they have some fairly severe limits. On the other hand, a Google search for a stock ticker will take you to Yahoo's finance pages. Each has something to offer, so I'm glad they both exist.
Get real! Linux works best for non-technical people, because they can no longer break all of the stuff that they're accustomed to breaking under MS-Windows, if not directly then by reading the wrong piece of spam in MS-Outlook or clicking the "Yes, I want my computer to be anally raped" link/button on some bizarre website.
...is a plug that specified the voltage it wanted from a wall socket. A double powerpoint is about $AUD20, the cost of fitting one is several times that, and the cost of a bunch of switching electronics to provide an arbitrary voltage at up to a few amps is about half that.
The vast majority of things I plug in draw up to a few amps at somewhere between 6 and 20 volts, some of them through a plugpack and some through internal PSUs, many of them inefficient.
Integrating a separate small socket on the same fitting into which these things could plug (a three-pin plug with one pin being a zener diode, no zener diode equals no volts) would be cheap, eliminate plug-packs altogether, and could be mimicked by a "universal plugpack" in sockets which followed only the old standard. All of the nasty lethal volts stay in the wall, all of your down-converters are relatively efficient, a universal converter for automotive use is simple, and you don't need wide-spaced sockets to cope with adjacent plugpacks.
Someone in the USA had a PDP-11 and a Fujitsu Eagle disk drive sink under muddy water during a flood (the water eventually covered the rack and came to just below the ceiling). The machine continued to operate until the power failed, after the flood peaked. Underwater. Under muddy water.
When the flood subsided, they needed the computer back up in a hurry so they hosed it out, dried it off, replaced the air filter in the hard disk and tried powering it up again. It worked. The tape drive (Cipher F880, I think) didn't survive, the rest did.
Customer calls to tell me that their app server is kicking clients off occasionally. I drop into the office about ninety minutes later and ask where the machine is. They don't know. It turns out to be mounted vertically in a box under the front counter. The case has about 8mm clearance on top and about a mm each side, and when I go to haul it out (still running), I burn my fingers. The back of the box is closed.
Taking two notepads, I use one under and one over to wiggle the case (yes, still running) out far enough to get a screwdriver onto the case bolts, rest it on a stool, and unscrew the lid - letting the screws drop to the floor because they're too much too hot to touch.
When the lid comes off, assisted by the notepads, I get a blast of heat which literally frizzles my fringe and eyebrows. The machine stops kicking off users, and to my amazement nothing inside has actually melted. The PSU fan is dead, and the CPU fan is simply circulating the heat evenly throughout the box. This is a Pentium (last of the 486-style fans) running approximately 200Mhz.
I take a fan heater, set it to blow-not-heat and aim it into the case. Four hours later, at close of trade, I come back, shut the beastie down and replace the PSU. The machine then continues to operate for some months until they replace it.
Another customer running Linux called me out when their machine went all wonky midsummer. Both the PSU and CPU fans had been dead for some time, judging by the coatings. They'd added a new staff member, and the new desk had diverted the air from the airconditioner away from the box, else it'd probably still be working.
...which puts both 120V and 240V firmly in the lethal current range. Good choice.
If we ran our mains at a couple of kilohertz and I think about 700V (and UHT DC for long distances), not only would transformers and such be lots smaller but the risk of death from electric shock would be minimal. 700V is high enough to take it out of the danger zone for muscular control, and a little short of burn damage; the couple of kilohertz is too high to easily induce fibrillation.
100KHz would be even better, because the current would prefer to travel outside your skin - and even if it chose to go through you the fibrillation risk is essentially nil - but you don't want to know what line losses are like at 100KHz. (-:
...three-phase plug you'll need to install before powering the damn thing up, and that - what with the cooling fans and all - not even a Canadian owning one of these would ever see snow in his yard.
...to hook those babies together in multiprocessor clumps that can exchange data amongst themselves really, really quickly.
If Opterons don't win on raw FP performance (which in itself is debatable), they'd absolutely hammer (ha!) the Intel chips once IO and the cost of support chips was factored in.
I'm betting Intel chips were chosen for (supplier-)political reasons.
...and left the terminal showing a/. article on whatever Microsoft's faux pas of the month was. In Mozilla (this was a couple of years back else it would've been FireFox).
It's all "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.2; Linux) (KHTML, like Gecko)" here but I could be "Mozilla 1.8a2 Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8a2) Gecko/20040709" if you liked. (-:
Unfortunately, they're not very good diodes, with the reverse (blocking) voltage typically not being much more than the forward voltage. What this means in practical terms is that unless you also have a real diode in series with the LEDs (or a varistor/series-pair of zeners across the LEDs), the first power surge along will kill them.
Your 120VAC (our 240VAC) is not constant. It goes from zero to root-2 of the voltage. This causes immense problems with movement, particularly machinery running at an exact multiple of the mains frequency (as some kinds of motors do). Running your LED strings three-phase would help to mitigate that, but it'd be much simpler to put the little suckers behind a small but robust bridge rectifier and a pair of resistors teed across a modest but high-voltage capacitor. And of course, modern electronics being what they are, there is probably a "one-chip" (generally requires at least a coil and capacitor as well) AC-DC converter around that costs peanuts and would do the job.
Ignorant people run whatever's in front of them. And it works. I've had people spend an entire day using a Linux machine (KDE, nothing special) and react with shocked surprise when they're told as they walk out that it wasn't MS-Windows or MS-Office they were using.
...and at the time (4 years ago?) with equivalent-speed SCSI and IDE drives and controllers, dd if=/dev/hdc | dd of=/dev/sda and vice versa chewed about 3x as much CPU horsepower to work on the IDE drive (same ration in either direction).
Very few of my Outlook-using clients stay wistful for long after being introduced to Thunderbird. If you use FireFox and Thunderbird in place of Mozilla, you can be a little more selective about who gets what.
Also, I recommend throwing OOo into the mix, set to default to MS file formats. That way when the Revolution comes, changing will be less painful. All of this, you can put on a CD (including Mac versions) and send home with students, admonishing them "Go forth, and install as many of these as you like!"
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Linux just gives them a justifiable destination other than Microsoft.
Time to invent a new word: "linussend", as in "You mean we don't have to shift onto MS-Windows when our hardware becomes obsolete? Hurrah! What a linussend!"
...to Linus, as a thank-you for the huge discounts from Microsoft. And encourage them to try for AUD$250 a seat or less next time.
I also replace the default IE homepage with http://news.google.com.au/ (guess which country I live in) on any new MS-Windows install. The bandwidth is lower, the news more useful and there are more tools one click away.
Does Yahoo translate? I use Google links on my corporate pages to do that. Do they offer a calculator or conversions? All of the stuff in the "missing Google manual"? As a search engine, Yahoo isn't in the same class.
As to Yahoo's photo galleries, they have some fairly severe limits. On the other hand, a Google search for a stock ticker will take you to Yahoo's finance pages. Each has something to offer, so I'm glad they both exist.
Get real! Linux works best for non-technical people, because they can no longer break all of the stuff that they're accustomed to breaking under MS-Windows, if not directly then by reading the wrong piece of spam in MS-Outlook or clicking the "Yes, I want my computer to be anally raped" link/button on some bizarre website.
...is a plug that specified the voltage it wanted from a wall socket. A double powerpoint is about $AUD20, the cost of fitting one is several times that, and the cost of a bunch of switching electronics to provide an arbitrary voltage at up to a few amps is about half that.
The vast majority of things I plug in draw up to a few amps at somewhere between 6 and 20 volts, some of them through a plugpack and some through internal PSUs, many of them inefficient.
Integrating a separate small socket on the same fitting into which these things could plug (a three-pin plug with one pin being a zener diode, no zener diode equals no volts) would be cheap, eliminate plug-packs altogether, and could be mimicked by a "universal plugpack" in sockets which followed only the old standard. All of the nasty lethal volts stay in the wall, all of your down-converters are relatively efficient, a universal converter for automotive use is simple, and you don't need wide-spaced sockets to cope with adjacent plugpacks.
...burying a blue "e" and wearing a disdainful look?
Someone in the USA had a PDP-11 and a Fujitsu Eagle disk drive sink under muddy water during a flood (the water eventually covered the rack and came to just below the ceiling). The machine continued to operate until the power failed, after the flood peaked. Underwater. Under muddy water.
When the flood subsided, they needed the computer back up in a hurry so they hosed it out, dried it off, replaced the air filter in the hard disk and tried powering it up again. It worked. The tape drive (Cipher F880, I think) didn't survive, the rest did.
And I didn't use anything as robust as wire. (-:
Links to two sets of pictures within.
oldSCO, this is.
Customer calls to tell me that their app server is kicking clients off occasionally. I drop into the office about ninety minutes later and ask where the machine is. They don't know. It turns out to be mounted vertically in a box under the front counter. The case has about 8mm clearance on top and about a mm each side, and when I go to haul it out (still running), I burn my fingers. The back of the box is closed.
Taking two notepads, I use one under and one over to wiggle the case (yes, still running) out far enough to get a screwdriver onto the case bolts, rest it on a stool, and unscrew the lid - letting the screws drop to the floor because they're too much too hot to touch.
When the lid comes off, assisted by the notepads, I get a blast of heat which literally frizzles my fringe and eyebrows. The machine stops kicking off users, and to my amazement nothing inside has actually melted. The PSU fan is dead, and the CPU fan is simply circulating the heat evenly throughout the box. This is a Pentium (last of the 486-style fans) running approximately 200Mhz.
I take a fan heater, set it to blow-not-heat and aim it into the case. Four hours later, at close of trade, I come back, shut the beastie down and replace the PSU. The machine then continues to operate for some months until they replace it.
Another customer running Linux called me out when their machine went all wonky midsummer. Both the PSU and CPU fans had been dead for some time, judging by the coatings. They'd added a new staff member, and the new desk had diverted the air from the airconditioner away from the box, else it'd probably still be working.
...which puts both 120V and 240V firmly in the lethal current range. Good choice.
If we ran our mains at a couple of kilohertz and I think about 700V (and UHT DC for long distances), not only would transformers and such be lots smaller but the risk of death from electric shock would be minimal. 700V is high enough to take it out of the danger zone for muscular control, and a little short of burn damage; the couple of kilohertz is too high to easily induce fibrillation.
100KHz would be even better, because the current would prefer to travel outside your skin - and even if it chose to go through you the fibrillation risk is essentially nil - but you don't want to know what line losses are like at 100KHz. (-:
...three-phase plug you'll need to install before powering the damn thing up, and that - what with the cooling fans and all - not even a Canadian owning one of these would ever see snow in his yard.
If Opterons don't win on raw FP performance (which in itself is debatable), they'd absolutely hammer (ha!) the Intel chips once IO and the cost of support chips was factored in.
I'm betting Intel chips were chosen for (supplier-)political reasons.
...and left the terminal showing a /. article on whatever Microsoft's faux pas of the month was. In Mozilla (this was a couple of years back else it would've been FireFox).
Yes, it does get colder there.
...this. Currently pitch black, 9AM, -13degC and 90km/h winds. Brrrrrrrrr.
It's all "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.2; Linux) (KHTML, like Gecko)" here but I could be "Mozilla 1.8a2 Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8a2) Gecko/20040709" if you liked. (-:
Your 120VAC (our 240VAC) is not constant. It goes from zero to root-2 of the voltage. This causes immense problems with movement, particularly machinery running at an exact multiple of the mains frequency (as some kinds of motors do). Running your LED strings three-phase would help to mitigate that, but it'd be much simpler to put the little suckers behind a small but robust bridge rectifier and a pair of resistors teed across a modest but high-voltage capacitor. And of course, modern electronics being what they are, there is probably a "one-chip" (generally requires at least a coil and capacitor as well) AC-DC converter around that costs peanuts and would do the job.
Ignorant people run whatever's in front of them. And it works. I've had people spend an entire day using a Linux machine (KDE, nothing special) and react with shocked surprise when they're told as they walk out that it wasn't MS-Windows or MS-Office they were using.
...and at the time (4 years ago?) with equivalent-speed SCSI and IDE drives and controllers, dd if=/dev/hdc | dd of=/dev/sda and vice versa chewed about 3x as much CPU horsepower to work on the IDE drive (same ration in either direction).
103 reviews on Amazon. Impressive.
here. (-:
Want a second guess? (-:
BTW, I very rarely mod down. There are usually more than enough whiners around to do that job for me. (-:
Very few of my Outlook-using clients stay wistful for long after being introduced to Thunderbird. If you use FireFox and Thunderbird in place of Mozilla, you can be a little more selective about who gets what.
Also, I recommend throwing OOo into the mix, set to default to MS file formats. That way when the Revolution comes, changing will be less painful. All of this, you can put on a CD (including Mac versions) and send home with students, admonishing them "Go forth, and install as many of these as you like!"