Many devices are probed at boot time in Linux. Come to think of it, the kernel is about the only thing that is not automatically selected in a simple setup. It would be possible to boot a generic kernel, scan the cpu/motheboard, selecte a kernel, change the bootloader and reboot to the closer configuration, and so manage to distribute an OS on a hard drive. KNOPPIX does pretty well from a CD.
"The day linux takes 15% of the desktop market, you'll see microsoft scrambling to actually turn windows into a good OS."
At the rate things are going, that will be in two or three years. Since it take MSFT six years to upgrade their OS, Linux market share should be pretty good in five years.
There were about 30 million Linux machines in the world last year. With a continued 30% growth rate per year, I see
2006 39 million
2007 51 million
2008 65 million
2009 85 million which is near the 15% number
This rate of growth of Linux could increase rapidly if present changes in businesses, school systems and governments influence use in the home.
If MSFT produced stuff just as good as FLOSS, they would deserve a share of the market. If they produced better stuff, they still only deserve a share of the market, because there is always a customer who wants cheaper, not necessarily better. Even if they turned to a FLOSS model, they still only deserve a share of the market. Look at GNU/Linux distros. Clearly, they are not all equally good, but they share the market.
The problems I have with MSFT is that they do not produce as good a product and they are unwilling to share the market.
http://koha.org/ has a PHP script you can install to give complete library capabilities including searching for bibliographic info. It takes 5 minutes to install but configuration is a dog because there are so many options. You will safely be able to loan books to friends as long as they do not leave the country. Koha sets up two server ports that can be accessed by browsing, one for general search and one for administration. You can number your books sequentially and barcode them. This thing is complete.
http://www.emilda.org/ is a similar setup with a smoother user interface. It is not as easy as Koha to install because you have to find perl scripts and install them. Koha has a script to do that.
They spec a 1000W supply. The board does not use all that, but they need so many amps at 12V and so on so it takes 1000W supply to handle the load reliably. A typical PC has a 350W supply but only uses 200W fully loaded. 4 drives X 20W =80W 4 CPUs X 100W= 400W 16!!! sticks of RAM X 10W =160W mobo itself X 20W = 20W Comes to 660W but the power supply and fans use some so I would say 800W would be enough. The extra is just to be safe and to meet peak current loads on every line.
Reminds me of a hot air soldering gun we used in the old days, like a hair dryer on steroids. The layout is interesting. I wonder if heat pipes or water cooling would be a more sane approach. This would make a beautiful X terminal server. Probably it could handle 300 clients easily. Fully tricked out the cost might be: 4 dual core CPUs X $1000=$4000 mobo=$1000 RAM=$3000 4 250 gB drives $500 power supply $500 Total $9000, about $30/client! A bargain!
The amusing part about this is that the resulting racks might look a lot like Big Iron servers with pluggable motherboards.:-)
Shucks! I thought I invented this idea first!
What I was thinking about was computer labs or control rooms where you have a ton of client machines close together. To minimize heat and noise, I was going to use a single 12V supply to feed a bunch of VIA Epia cards (fanless, low-power units). Too bad the mini-ATX has multiple input voltages. I need to add a converter card for about $50. The result, with LCD displays would be a computer lab with one power supply running 25 clients using about 20 watts each. On top of that, I could hang a 12 V battery in there to coast. The LCD screens could use a regular UPS solution.
Would it not be great to hear one's thoughts in the lab? It would be cheap, too. I figure I could set up a whole lab for (25 X 330) + $100 and cabling. I was going to use long video cables if I put the mobos in crates in several locations.
Abhorence of Microsoft's burdens is a valid business case for everything:
crashing
malware
non-compliance with standards
unethical business practices (billions in fines/settlements) such as restraint of trade
downtime
limited choices
high licence fees (50% of capital cost of equipment. In the old days was 15%)
Microsoft tax even on naked PCs
insecurity
poor networking performance (9x stuff, for sure)
licence audits and accounting
Get the FUD campaign
support to SCOG
generic trademarking (Windows, remember Lindows?)
lack of innovation (e.g. no PDF, blocking ODF,destroying startups with fresh ideas)
embrace/extend strategy to lock out competition
vendor lock-in
unconscionable contract terms with oems
There are many reasons to leave Microsoft behind and only a few to stay with them. The brief effort required to switch to GNU/Linux will pay off handsomely over time. For schools on tight budgets, the payoff reaches break-even in a month or two. Most businesses reach break-even in a year. After that, the savings are gravy and funds can be used to expand IT or for other purposes.
I have seen many school divisions spend $30000 or more on a computer lab that could have had a ripping Linux application server and low-power thin clients for half the money. If old equipment is available for free, a school can have a first rate lab for a couple of thousand dollars for a single application server with tons of resources and no licence fees.
The average kid in question has a few years before they graduate. GNU/Linux is growing about 30% per year in installations. GNU/Linux is being adopted in key areas in large numbers: business, education and government. Dell sells a system pre-loaded with Linux. Linux has arrived on the desktop for millions. Many IT job descriptions require Linux skills. When these kids graduate, businesses will be switching in large numbers and kids with Linux skills will be in great demand. We should be preparing students for the future, not the past.
Yes! Edubuntu has a really easy to install LTSP system, but you will need one PC with some guts. The beauty is that you have one good PC in the system and every user of every client PC gets the benefit. If you have a choice between spending $1000 or more on useless software licences and spending $700 on a hottish new PC to use as a server with Edubuntu, there is no question. The software will be new, the hardware it runs on will be new, and the students get the full experience. The system is easier to maintain because there is only one file system. You could also maintain the system remotely and with apt-get scripts. I would put 2 gB RAM on the new machine and install firewall, webserver and the usual apps.
I propose this setup even for big city schools. I wrote a report on using LTSP in schools here.
I agree that running a Linux distro marginally on an old machine is sad, but thanks to the client/server display, X-windows, a better use of the old hardware is to let them just do the display and what little work needs to be done to make an X connection to a newer machine with much more power. Then the apps can run modern software at modern speed and the user accesses them through an old computer. This is even useful for a single client because you can put the noisey, heat belching machine in a remote location. The big advantage is you can have thirty clients (or more) run from one application server. That reduces your cost of ownership by a factor of the number of clients. This technology that is easy to set up with LTSP or just X command extends the life of the old equipment until the fans/powersupply quit. A little maintenance can keep them going for ten years or more. You can do that with Windows, too, but would you really want thirty clients at once running in that environment (and don't forget the CALs)?
Granted, the thing can do what the patent says, but there is no invention. Even high school students have done experiments with permanent magnets and observed that there are vector fields involved. Combined with saturation and hysteresis, what is there to learn from the patent? There is no innovation and no particular advantage to the method. If you want a high torque motor, you can use DC and a commutator, for pity's sake, or polyphase.
it has the maximum 1GB RAM and runs Linux, which in my experience handles multitasking way better than Windows
Amen! I use Linux on an AMD64 terminal server with 2gB RAM and I can have a room full of people all running several apps and everyone feels alone. It was frightening the first time I saw the RAM slurped up, but I expect Linux to just keep humming now.
Linux has had most of these features for years. I configure my desktop with a squid/DansGuardian filter and force using it with iptables firewall so I have had configurable filtering for years. The time of day login has been around active directory for years. It would be easy to setup in Linux with cron scripts. I do not need eye-candy to use a PC. I wonder how they get modern speed of installation? I have been able to install Linux in abut 12 min per CD for years on all but the oldest machines. I do up to 4 CD installations. Is Longhorn going to fit on one CD still?
The SRB use ammonium nitrate, aluminium and some rubber binder. The bulk of the exhaust will be nitrogen oxides, nitrogen, water, and alumina, nothing very toxic. The main engine gives similar stuff from liquid fuels. If it were highly toxic, where are the deaths of wildlife and people upon each launch?
I do believe restraining population is a more urgent priority, but it is in our nature to explore everything no matter how dangerous or expensive. We can temporarily afford space because of the benificence of our planet and industrial agriculture. I believe disease or war will take care of the population problem if we do not, so why not explore space?
I think thin clients will move up the middle here. An LCD screen with a cigar-box case or even a thin client integrated with the display gives back the top of your desk, uses almost nothing for power and you get to use those N-way servers that AMD chips fit so well as application servers. AMD make a decent thin client chip, the GEODE, and I think it is very practical to take a multicore CPU and cut voltage and frequency to make a very low power device. VIA has done it successfully with single cores to power lots of thin clients. The dual core helps, too. Currently, thin clients lack some multimedia capability. Going dual core will get them back in the game and still permit fanless operation.
I usually teach high school students maths/science/computers. One year, I had a class of grade seven students who came in and looked very serious. I asked them what they thought of maths and the unanimous opinion was that maths was hard to learn and they often obtained the wrong answers. I promised them that my classes would be fun and to prove it I promised they would be able to multiply phone numbers in their heads and write down only the final product within the hour. They refused to believe it, but when showed the algorithm, three quarters succeeded and went home to tell their mommies what a great maths teacher they had.
I think there is an environmental inheritance of maths anxiety. Given a teacher who loves maths and understands and explains clearly, I believe maths anxiety would disappear. I did not enjoy maths as a student but I have always enjoyed solving problems. Later in life, I realized many problems are not soluble by maths but many are and knowing the difference has given me confidence to develop algorithms in minutes that used to take me hours to do. Computers can reveal the solution in microseconds. It is a great time to be numerate and logical.
I am teaching lately and I tell all my students that mathematics is the one subject where it is possible to get 100% even if the teacher is a cruel, ugly, old bastard. By this, I mean mathematics is one of the most objectively evaluated subjects. If a problem is completely described, the solution set is often unique. On the other hand there is Language Arts where the teacher is always thinking wierd thoughts and downgrades students who do not toe some imaginary line. I remember being marked down because my English teacher thought my work was too good to have been done by me. Another classmate killed himself because the same teacher gave him too low a mark to enter university. That student's favourite subject was English.
The trailing edge of the bell curve can be accommodated by the small operations that are so small, staff cannot be cut further, the night shift, the undesirable post, and the dole/welfare/prison/social assistance.
Wait until the boss learns about the carpenter's square or the theodolite... One or two people could do the job. With a prism that deflects a laser beam 90 degrees, one person could do the job. Using the strings as a compass, one person could "construct" 90 degree corners and do the job. With centre A on baseline PQ and radius R, draw an arc intersecting baseline PQ at x and y. With centre x and suitable radius draw an arc encompassing A. With centre y and same radius, draw an arc encompassing A and intersecting the arc centred on x at t and u. TU will contain A and will be perpendicular to the original baseline. Repeat as necessary.
I have a great application for this: a bunch of thin clients on a LAN. Use a 12V battery charger and battery as UPS, route to 30 or so of these little guys mounted on Via's Epia mobo (15 W or so). I could have a fanless computer lab! The Epia BIOS can boot via PXE from a terminal server in a remote, noisy place. We might have to rediscover 12V wiring for the lab. Electricians mostly do not run DC in a public building.
This has been my experience of late. I find fewer systems that have any difficulty installing Linux. I find Linux infinitely simpler to do anything out of the box, too. Yesterday, I installed EdUbuntu and K12LTSP for a story I will write about setting up a Linux Terminal Server. The only skill-testing question for EdUbuntu was "What is the IP address of your server?". K12 asked a few simple ones like "What language do you want?". For both, I had to add a single line in a text file for DHCPD to start, but that was because I had a second NIC. Most home PCs have only one. With K12, I got unexpected support for booting Apple power PCs, too. How great is that?
I work in schools. Last month, I saw a couple of expert techs fail to upgrade a lab to XP SP2 after spending most of a day at it. With K12LTSP or EdUbuntu, they could have done the job from scratch in under an hour. For three months, my Linux network worked flawlessly while users of that other OS often could not log in or print. Such systems are a little more complex than most home use, but even a home with a new PC and an old one could benefit from this technology by using the old machine as a client of the new machine. With Linux, this is trivial. With that other OS, impossible without another licence, and likely beyond the ease of use Windows users hold so dear.
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At the rate things are going, that will be in two or three years. Since it take MSFT six years to upgrade their OS, Linux market share should be pretty good in five years.
There were about 30 million Linux machines in the world last year. With a continued 30% growth rate per year, I see
This rate of growth of Linux could increase rapidly if present changes in businesses, school systems and governments influence use in the home.
If MSFT produced stuff just as good as FLOSS, they would deserve a share of the market. If they produced better stuff, they still only deserve a share of the market, because there is always a customer who wants cheaper, not necessarily better. Even if they turned to a FLOSS model, they still only deserve a share of the market. Look at GNU/Linux distros. Clearly, they are not all equally good, but they share the market. The problems I have with MSFT is that they do not produce as good a product and they are unwilling to share the market.
http://www.emilda.org/ is a similar setup with a smoother user interface. It is not as easy as Koha to install because you have to find perl scripts and install them. Koha has a script to do that.
They spec a 1000W supply. The board does not use all that, but they need so many amps at 12V and so on so it takes 1000W supply to handle the load reliably. A typical PC has a 350W supply but only uses 200W fully loaded.
4 drives X 20W =80W
4 CPUs X 100W= 400W
16!!! sticks of RAM X 10W =160W
mobo itself X 20W = 20W
Comes to 660W but the power supply and fans use some so I would say 800W would be enough. The extra is just to be safe and to meet peak current loads on every line.
Reminds me of a hot air soldering gun we used in the old days, like a hair dryer on steroids. The layout is interesting. I wonder if heat pipes or water cooling would be a more sane approach. This would make a beautiful X terminal server. Probably it could handle 300 clients easily. Fully tricked out the cost might be:
4 dual core CPUs X $1000=$4000
mobo=$1000
RAM=$3000
4 250 gB drives $500
power supply $500
Total $9000, about $30/client! A bargain!
Shucks! I thought I invented this idea first!
What I was thinking about was computer labs or control rooms where you have a ton of client machines close together. To minimize heat and noise, I was going to use a single 12V supply to feed a bunch of VIA Epia cards (fanless, low-power units). Too bad the mini-ATX has multiple input voltages. I need to add a converter card for about $50. The result, with LCD displays would be a computer lab with one power supply running 25 clients using about 20 watts each. On top of that, I could hang a 12 V battery in there to coast. The LCD screens could use a regular UPS solution.
Would it not be great to hear one's thoughts in the lab? It would be cheap, too. I figure I could set up a whole lab for (25 X 330) + $100 and cabling. I was going to use long video cables if I put the mobos in crates in several locations.
There are many reasons to leave Microsoft behind and only a few to stay with them. The brief effort required to switch to GNU/Linux will pay off handsomely over time. For schools on tight budgets, the payoff reaches break-even in a month or two. Most businesses reach break-even in a year. After that, the savings are gravy and funds can be used to expand IT or for other purposes.
I have seen many school divisions spend $30000 or more on a computer lab that could have had a ripping Linux application server and low-power thin clients for half the money. If old equipment is available for free, a school can have a first rate lab for a couple of thousand dollars for a single application server with tons of resources and no licence fees.
I have been able to meet the entire high school curriculum for IT using 1500 Debian packages and the distro contains 17000 packages...
The average kid in question has a few years before they graduate. GNU/Linux is growing about 30% per year in installations. GNU/Linux is being adopted in key areas in large numbers: business, education and government. Dell sells a system pre-loaded with Linux. Linux has arrived on the desktop for millions. Many IT job descriptions require Linux skills. When these kids graduate, businesses will be switching in large numbers and kids with Linux skills will be in great demand. We should be preparing students for the future, not the past.
I propose this setup even for big city schools. I wrote a report on using LTSP in schools here.
I agree that running a Linux distro marginally on an old machine is sad, but thanks to the client/server display, X-windows, a better use of the old hardware is to let them just do the display and what little work needs to be done to make an X connection to a newer machine with much more power. Then the apps can run modern software at modern speed and the user accesses them through an old computer. This is even useful for a single client because you can put the noisey, heat belching machine in a remote location. The big advantage is you can have thirty clients (or more) run from one application server. That reduces your cost of ownership by a factor of the number of clients. This technology that is easy to set up with LTSP or just X command extends the life of the old equipment until the fans/powersupply quit. A little maintenance can keep them going for ten years or more. You can do that with Windows, too, but would you really want thirty clients at once running in that environment (and don't forget the CALs)?
Granted, the thing can do what the patent says, but there is no invention. Even high school students have done experiments with permanent magnets and observed that there are vector fields involved. Combined with saturation and hysteresis, what is there to learn from the patent? There is no innovation and no particular advantage to the method. If you want a high torque motor, you can use DC and a commutator, for pity's sake, or polyphase.
Amen! I use Linux on an AMD64 terminal server with 2gB RAM and I can have a room full of people all running several apps and everyone feels alone. It was frightening the first time I saw the RAM slurped up, but I expect Linux to just keep humming now.
Linux has had most of these features for years. I configure my desktop with a squid/DansGuardian filter and force using it with iptables firewall so I have had configurable filtering for years. The time of day login has been around active directory for years. It would be easy to setup in Linux with cron scripts. I do not need eye-candy to use a PC. I wonder how they get modern speed of installation? I have been able to install Linux in abut 12 min per CD for years on all but the oldest machines. I do up to 4 CD installations. Is Longhorn going to fit on one CD still?
The SRB use ammonium nitrate, aluminium and some rubber binder. The bulk of the exhaust will be nitrogen oxides, nitrogen, water, and alumina, nothing very toxic. The main engine gives similar stuff from liquid fuels. If it were highly toxic, where are the deaths of wildlife and people upon each launch?
I do believe restraining population is a more urgent priority, but it is in our nature to explore everything no matter how dangerous or expensive. We can temporarily afford space because of the benificence of our planet and industrial agriculture. I believe disease or war will take care of the population problem if we do not, so why not explore space?
I think thin clients will move up the middle here. An LCD screen with a cigar-box case or even a thin client integrated with the display gives back the top of your desk, uses almost nothing for power and you get to use those N-way servers that AMD chips fit so well as application servers. AMD make a decent thin client chip, the GEODE, and I think it is very practical to take a multicore CPU and cut voltage and frequency to make a very low power device. VIA has done it successfully with single cores to power lots of thin clients. The dual core helps, too. Currently, thin clients lack some multimedia capability. Going dual core will get them back in the game and still permit fanless operation.
Obviously, the eye-candy in Windows is coded by salesmen not software engineers/programmers/analysts.
I think there is an environmental inheritance of maths anxiety. Given a teacher who loves maths and understands and explains clearly, I believe maths anxiety would disappear. I did not enjoy maths as a student but I have always enjoyed solving problems. Later in life, I realized many problems are not soluble by maths but many are and knowing the difference has given me confidence to develop algorithms in minutes that used to take me hours to do. Computers can reveal the solution in microseconds. It is a great time to be numerate and logical.
I am teaching lately and I tell all my students that mathematics is the one subject where it is possible to get 100% even if the teacher is a cruel, ugly, old bastard. By this, I mean mathematics is one of the most objectively evaluated subjects. If a problem is completely described, the solution set is often unique. On the other hand there is Language Arts where the teacher is always thinking wierd thoughts and downgrades students who do not toe some imaginary line. I remember being marked down because my English teacher thought my work was too good to have been done by me. Another classmate killed himself because the same teacher gave him too low a mark to enter university. That student's favourite subject was English.
The trailing edge of the bell curve can be accommodated by the small operations that are so small, staff cannot be cut further, the night shift, the undesirable post, and the dole/welfare/prison/social assistance.
Wait until the boss learns about the carpenter's square or the theodolite... One or two people could do the job. With a prism that deflects a laser beam 90 degrees, one person could do the job. Using the strings as a compass, one person could "construct" 90 degree corners and do the job. With centre A on baseline PQ and radius R, draw an arc intersecting baseline PQ at x and y. With centre x and suitable radius draw an arc encompassing A. With centre y and same radius, draw an arc encompassing A and intersecting the arc centred on x at t and u. TU will contain A and will be perpendicular to the original baseline. Repeat as necessary.
I have a great application for this: a bunch of thin clients on a LAN. Use a 12V battery charger and battery as UPS, route to 30 or so of these little guys mounted on Via's Epia mobo (15 W or so). I could have a fanless computer lab! The Epia BIOS can boot via PXE from a terminal server in a remote, noisy place. We might have to rediscover 12V wiring for the lab. Electricians mostly do not run DC in a public building.
How is NY making it difficult to buy a diesel vehicle?
I work in schools. Last month, I saw a couple of expert techs fail to upgrade a lab to XP SP2 after spending most of a day at it. With K12LTSP or EdUbuntu, they could have done the job from scratch in under an hour. For three months, my Linux network worked flawlessly while users of that other OS often could not log in or print. Such systems are a little more complex than most home use, but even a home with a new PC and an old one could benefit from this technology by using the old machine as a client of the new machine. With Linux, this is trivial. With that other OS, impossible without another licence, and likely beyond the ease of use Windows users hold so dear.