The same person that has the skills to flash a operating system kernel onto a CF card, boot from it in single user mode, reset the password, reboot and the get the system to load a new kernal from an NFS mount point is worth at least $60 per hour.
You're forgetting that in this economy, selling yourself has become more important than ever. 90% of the people who can do the above probably don't have the sales skill necessary to land a $60/hr consulting (or otherwise) gig right now.
This was probably mentioned before but according to Wil's weblog (down at the moment so I can't provide a proper link), he was talking with Burton on the set and Burton got him hooked up with a role in Star Trek X.
From the FAQ you linked to:
A SHN file made from a WAV is quite a bit larger than the corresponding MP3, with a size perhaps ~50-60% of the orginal WAV.
This != "at least double the amount of stuff you can archive". From my experience, 50-60% is an "optimistic fudge" as far as estimates go if you're dealing with ripping CDs. It's closer to 60-80%.
Overall though, I agree that buying a lot of cheap IDE drives and setting up RAID5 and doing lossless compression is much saner than dropping $20k on something. Especially if you have a decent sound card to use.
Why trust some anonymous person's benchmarks that may or may not reflect your usage patterns? PC hardware is cheap and all three of the filesystems are ridiculously easy to set up. Find a box you aren't using and hammer the living shit out of it in the manner that you are accustomed to having the living shit hammered out of your webservers. Rinse. Repeat.
My company uses Dell's Poweredge hardware in our data center. Since we'd spent a lot of money on server stuff, we were able to get a discount on things like laptops and desktops. We were using Toshiba laptops and a mix of desktops before.
Within a year of using Dell's laptops, we were back to being mostly Toshiba. I was one of the few who got stuck with an Inspiron 3800 that's on a long term lease. I'm constantly having functional problems with it (serial port is unusable, external floppy corrupts data, etc) as well as general hardware issues (fan is making a horrible dying noise, battery life is roughly an hour, case is generally shoddy). I guess I can't complain too much though.. at least it doesn't power cycle if I pick it up wrong (like the first TiBooks).
The desktops were better, but not by much. We got those way in advance of the laptops, and I ran Mandrake on mine for a long time. The only problem was with the IDE implementation.. if I went to rip a CD, it would hang my system. Still pretty lame.
I don't use Ogg or mp3 for my stuff.. I use shn (from etree.org) instead, which is a lossless audio compression method that cuts the ripped wav file roughly in half. I listen with Sennheiser 495 headphones plugged into a headphone amp. Ogg and mp3 simply aren't good enough.
Qwest is a good example of being well set up to take the load? Maybe you're thinking of a different "Qwest" than I am, but a company I do consulting for has several racks worth of hardware colo'd at the New Jersey facility and the IP service absolutely sucks.
I worked for two years at a software company in Texas doing most of the network and system design/setup/troubleshooting, as well as some management. During this time I did probably 1/3 of my work at home. I had 1.5M ADSL, so my connectivity was better than the office T1 shared by 200+ people. My work machine was a terrible Dell Optiplex which only sort of played nice with Linux, versus my much better PC and SGI Octane at home. So at the beginning I'd work maybe 6 hours and go home and do another 4 or 5. This was fine because I love sysadmining and hate Texas. My boss got to the point where he only required that I be at work between noon and 4pm because I was far more productive at home, and I never took sick days because I'd just do stuff from home with a puke bucket by my side (which was better than laying in bed doing nothing). Did I have to work so much?
Eventually my wife got pregnant and we decided to move back to the midwest to be closer to our families, so I went into my boss's office one day and said "I'm quitting, this is your two month notice." We chatted for a bit and then I walked back to my cube. Waiting for me was an email saying "I'd like you to be a consultant and work from home". Well of course I said yes. Working from home is the Holy Grail after all.
Now that I've been doing it for 8 months, I'm not so sure that's true. I miss the annoying and cool people at the office. Politics are definitely more of a factor now. Where I used to be able to do things quickly and decisively, I now have to spend a lot of time explaining myself. I get paged a lot more. Essentially I've ceased being a human being and am now just a tool that can be brought to bear at any time. Unfortunately, I haven't found anything more interesting jobwise here in Kansas City so I'm stuck for the time being.
Right now, Slashdot is slow-loading (from a 1.5mbps, multi-backboned connection), produces half of a webpage (everything down to the sections bar), and only responds to about half of my HTTP GET requests.
Looks fine to me from any multi-backboned T1 connection I have access to, as well as my cable modem. I've almost never had problems hitting Slashdot, even with wildly varying connections in the four cities I've lived in since I started reading it.
Don't call it a comeback
I been here for years
Rockin my peers and puttin suckas in fear
Makin the tears rain down like a MON-soon
Listen to the bass go BOOM
Explosion, overpowerin
Over the competition, I'm towerin
Wreckin shop, when I drop these lyrics that'll make you call the cops
Don't you dare stare, you betta move
Don't ever compare
Me to the rest that'll all get sliced and diced
Competition's payin the price
I'm gonna knock you out [HUUUH!!!]
Mama said knock you out [HUUUH!!!]
(REPEAT 4X)
Don't u call this a regular jam
I'm gonna rock this land
I'm gonna take this itty bitty world by storm
And I'm just gettin warm
Just like Muhummad Ali they called him Cassius
Watch me bash this beat like a skull
Cuz u know I had beef wit
Why do u riff with me, the maniac psycho
And when I pull out my jammy get ready cuz it might go
BLAAAAW, how ya like me now?
The river will not allow
U to get with, Mr. Smith, dont riff
Listen to my gear shift
I'm blastin, outlastin
Kinda like Shaft, so u could say I'm shaftin
Old English filled my mind
And I came up with a funky rhyme
I'm gonna knock you out [HUUUH!!!]
Mama said knock you out [HUUUH!!!]
(REPEAT 4X)
Breakdown!!!
Shadow boxin when I heard you on the radio [HUUUH!!!]
I just don't know
What made you forget that I was raw?
But now I got a new tour
I'm goin insane, startin the hurricane, releasin pain
Lettin you know that you can't gain, I maintain
Unless ya say my name
Rippin, killin
Diggin and drillin a hole
Pass the Ol' Gold
I'm gonna knock you out [HUUUH!!!]
Mama said knock you out [HUUUH!!!]
(REPEAT 4X)
Shotgun blasts are heard
When I rip and kill, at WILL
The man of the hour, tower of power, I'll devour
I'm gonna tie you up and let you understand
that I'm not your average man
when I got a jammy in my hand
DAAAAAM!!!!! Oooooohh!!
Listen to the way I slaaaaay, your crew
Damage [UHH] damage [UHH] damage [UHH] damage
Destruction, terror, and mayhem
Pass me a sissy so suckas I'll slay him
Farmers [What!!!] Farmers [What!!!]
I'm ready [we're ready!!!]
I think I'm gonna bomb a town [get down!!]
Don't u neva, eva, pull my lever
Cuz I explode
And my nine is easy to load
I gotta thank God
Cuz he gave me the strength to rock
HARD!! knock you out, mama said knock you out
That article was great except for the stupid "how to pronounce Linux" tripe at the end. Who cares? Stuff like that is one of the many reasons I try to not associate with anyone else running Linux.
I use an SKB 16U shock-mount rack. I spent $180 on ebay for it, and the guy who sold it to me just slapped a label on the front and shipped it. I've had it for probably 3 years now and it's awesome for computer gear. It has about 1" of space around the rack rails (which are mounted on coils) that is good for cleanly cabling the rack and for the necessary airflow for sparc hardware. You can even get casters for it.
The only problem I've had has been finding inexpensive cases for my PCs and shelves for my nonrackable stuff.
On the plus side, Americans are rich and pay is good, at least if you've got a degree and work hard and are a bit lucky. But, it means you have to watch over promoted
shit from Hollywood, watch TV that is utterly crap, watch professional sports that are little more than long ads and, if you're silly enough to listen to the radio, listen
to virtually uninterupted crap.
So don't listen to the radio. Don't watch TV.
I'm from Nebraska, where the radio choices are worse than just about anywhere else I've ever visited or lived. As soon as I was able, I put a CD changer in my car and never looked back. When I moved out of my parents' house, I didn't buy myself a TV. Am I depriving myself of "American culture"? Maybe. When people talk about Survivor or Friends, I just smile and nod politely. When someone says "Did you hear that song by Limp Bizkit where they blah blah blah?" it's the same deal. You tell me how much I'm missing.
Instead I've taken my "riches" and squandered them on media that I chose to partake in, and it would seem that I have the best of both worlds.
As a geek I should be consulted and compensated. I will also sue major hollywood studios for the portrayal of geeks in film, because it infringes on my intellectual property rights to geek language and culture.
Make sure that you also get an apology for The Net and Hackers, and for the technical abomination known as Mission Impossible. 686 RISC chip powered Apple laptop my ass.
I am on the computer an average of 12 to 16 hours per day (depending on the day), and for a long time I was always hunched over so I would have good access to the keyboard. At least that's what I thought. About a month ago I decided to take advantage of my wife's excellent vision plan (I'm a consultant and have no insurance) and take care of some checkups that I'd not had for a while, the most notable being a vision checkup. I hadn't had one since probably 6 years ago in high school so I was curious. Now this wasn't because my eyesight looked bad or anything, I was just wanting to make sure things were going along like they should.
After a few minutes in the chair, I found out that I had astigmatism, which if you are in your early 20s will make farther away stuff look blurry and closer stuff look clear due to your lens growing too fast (or so they told me). The doctor said that people often will lean forward or generally bring the viewed object closer without even realizing it. This sounded like a familiar song and dance (since I was acutely aware of my bad posture and the problems it causes), so I shelled out the money for some glasses.
Ever since doing so, I don't ever lean forward and things are noticably clearer. I was surprised, I hadn't even noticed that my vision was getting out of whack. My back hasn't hurt since.
Yeah, right. SGI still makes the best Unix servers and workstations.
You'll get no argument from me on that point (I'm posting from an Octane, my home workstation). In fact, if you think that I'm talking shit about SGI, you're sorely mistaken. I'm merely one of the people who thinks it's not going to last, and is disappointed about it.
it sounds like SGI CEO Bob Bishop wants SGI to reemphasize the IRIX/MIPS solutions because -- surprise! -- they actually generate revenue, unlike the Linux/Intel space
I think you're overly optimistic in your assumption that Bishop wants to reemphasize Irix/MIPS. If Linux/Intel doesn't generate revenue, then why is XFS and its tools being ported to Linux? Why are they devoting resources to Linux kernel scalability, NUMA, I/O enhancements, large memory support, etc? How do you explain dmSDK? state-threads? The standard answer would be "because SGI is a good OSS citizen" or whatever, but when I look at things like the "innovation" of Octane2 and the prohibitive cost of damn near anything with SGI badging, I have to wonder what is up their sleeve. It seems to me like it is going to be -- surprise! -- throwing out Irix totally.
Sure, the propaganda points toward an Irix/MIPS path, but it seems like the actions and the words aren't matching up very well. I don't think that SGI is going to be hawking Irix much longer. MIPS, maybe. If SGI proves me wrong, I'll be happier than you can imagine.
Alias/Wavefront, an animation software unit of SGI, in March adapted its flagship Maya program to run on Linux.
Yet more proof that SGI is selling out. Pretty soon they'll be nothing more than another VA Linux that happens to have a couple extra products. Yes, they've done some cool stuff with software and with PCs. No, that doesn't make it okay to stop making high-end Unix workstations and servers.
You can't buy a Linux box at Best Buy or Circuit City because those places sell nothing but crap. Buying a computer there is like buying shoes at K-Mart. You think that just because you can't get Nikes at K-Mart that they aren't successfully mass-marketed?
A lot of people are saying that Crystal is the goods. I would like to add that in addition to having decent tech support, the hold music system is without a doubt the best I've ever experienced. You dial in, pick your favorite music genre out of four or five, and listen to some pretty decent examples of those genres while waiting.
Slashdot Mirror
The same person that has the skills to flash a operating system kernel onto a CF card, boot from it in single user mode, reset the password, reboot and the get the system to load a new kernal from an NFS mount point is worth at least $60 per hour.
You're forgetting that in this economy, selling yourself has become more important than ever. 90% of the people who can do the above probably don't have the sales skill necessary to land a $60/hr consulting (or otherwise) gig right now.
This was probably mentioned before but according to Wil's weblog (down at the moment so I can't provide a proper link), he was talking with Burton on the set and Burton got him hooked up with a role in Star Trek X.
From the FAQ you linked to:
A SHN file made from a WAV is quite a bit larger than the corresponding MP3, with a size perhaps ~50-60% of the orginal WAV.
This != "at least double the amount of stuff you can archive". From my experience, 50-60% is an "optimistic fudge" as far as estimates go if you're dealing with ripping CDs. It's closer to 60-80%.
Overall though, I agree that buying a lot of cheap IDE drives and setting up RAID5 and doing lossless compression is much saner than dropping $20k on something. Especially if you have a decent sound card to use.
Why trust some anonymous person's benchmarks that may or may not reflect your usage patterns? PC hardware is cheap and all three of the filesystems are ridiculously easy to set up. Find a box you aren't using and hammer the living shit out of it in the manner that you are accustomed to having the living shit hammered out of your webservers. Rinse. Repeat.
My company uses Dell's Poweredge hardware in our data center. Since we'd spent a lot of money on server stuff, we were able to get a discount on things like laptops and desktops. We were using Toshiba laptops and a mix of desktops before.
Within a year of using Dell's laptops, we were back to being mostly Toshiba. I was one of the few who got stuck with an Inspiron 3800 that's on a long term lease. I'm constantly having functional problems with it (serial port is unusable, external floppy corrupts data, etc) as well as general hardware issues (fan is making a horrible dying noise, battery life is roughly an hour, case is generally shoddy). I guess I can't complain too much though.. at least it doesn't power cycle if I pick it up wrong (like the first TiBooks).
The desktops were better, but not by much. We got those way in advance of the laptops, and I ran Mandrake on mine for a long time. The only problem was with the IDE implementation.. if I went to rip a CD, it would hang my system. Still pretty lame.
I don't use Ogg or mp3 for my stuff.. I use shn (from etree.org) instead, which is a lossless audio compression method that cuts the ripped wav file roughly in half. I listen with Sennheiser 495 headphones plugged into a headphone amp. Ogg and mp3 simply aren't good enough.
Qwest is a good example of being well set up to take the load? Maybe you're thinking of a different "Qwest" than I am, but a company I do consulting for has several racks worth of hardware colo'd at the New Jersey facility and the IP service absolutely sucks.
I worked for two years at a software company in Texas doing most of the network and system design/setup/troubleshooting, as well as some management. During this time I did probably 1/3 of my work at home. I had 1.5M ADSL, so my connectivity was better than the office T1 shared by 200+ people. My work machine was a terrible Dell Optiplex which only sort of played nice with Linux, versus my much better PC and SGI Octane at home. So at the beginning I'd work maybe 6 hours and go home and do another 4 or 5. This was fine because I love sysadmining and hate Texas. My boss got to the point where he only required that I be at work between noon and 4pm because I was far more productive at home, and I never took sick days because I'd just do stuff from home with a puke bucket by my side (which was better than laying in bed doing nothing). Did I have to work so much?
Eventually my wife got pregnant and we decided to move back to the midwest to be closer to our families, so I went into my boss's office one day and said "I'm quitting, this is your two month notice." We chatted for a bit and then I walked back to my cube. Waiting for me was an email saying "I'd like you to be a consultant and work from home". Well of course I said yes. Working from home is the Holy Grail after all.
Now that I've been doing it for 8 months, I'm not so sure that's true. I miss the annoying and cool people at the office. Politics are definitely more of a factor now. Where I used to be able to do things quickly and decisively, I now have to spend a lot of time explaining myself. I get paged a lot more. Essentially I've ceased being a human being and am now just a tool that can be brought to bear at any time. Unfortunately, I haven't found anything more interesting jobwise here in Kansas City so I'm stuck for the time being.
"Gallium Arsenide Valley". I'm just not seeing it.
As if "new Onion Wednesday" doesn't DDoS theonion.com and theonionavclub.com enough, you had to announce the story today too. Thanks.
Right now, Slashdot is slow-loading (from a 1.5mbps, multi-backboned connection), produces half of a webpage (everything down to the sections bar), and only responds to about half of my HTTP GET requests.
Looks fine to me from any multi-backboned T1 connection I have access to, as well as my cable modem. I've almost never had problems hitting Slashdot, even with wildly varying connections in the four cities I've lived in since I started reading it.
Don't call it a comeback
I been here for years
Rockin my peers and puttin suckas in fear
Makin the tears rain down like a MON-soon
Listen to the bass go BOOM
Explosion, overpowerin
Over the competition, I'm towerin
Wreckin shop, when I drop these lyrics that'll
make you call the cops
Don't you dare stare, you betta move
Don't ever compare
Me to the rest that'll all get sliced and diced
Competition's payin the price
I'm gonna knock you out [HUUUH!!!]
Mama said knock you out [HUUUH!!!]
(REPEAT 4X)
Don't u call this a regular jam
I'm gonna rock this land
I'm gonna take this itty bitty world by storm
And I'm just gettin warm
Just like Muhummad Ali they called him Cassius
Watch me bash this beat like a skull
Cuz u know I had beef wit
Why do u riff with me, the maniac psycho
And when I pull out my jammy get ready cuz it might go BLAAAAW, how ya like me now?
The river will not allow
U to get with, Mr. Smith, dont riff
Listen to my gear shift
I'm blastin, outlastin
Kinda like Shaft, so u could say I'm shaftin
Old English filled my mind
And I came up with a funky rhyme
I'm gonna knock you out [HUUUH!!!]
Mama said knock you out [HUUUH!!!]
(REPEAT 4X)
Breakdown!!!
Shadow boxin when I heard you on the radio
[HUUUH!!!]
I just don't know
What made you forget that I was raw?
But now I got a new tour
I'm goin insane, startin the hurricane, releasin pain
Lettin you know that you can't gain, I maintain
Unless ya say my name
Rippin, killin
Diggin and drillin a hole
Pass the Ol' Gold
I'm gonna knock you out [HUUUH!!!]
Mama said knock you out [HUUUH!!!]
(REPEAT 4X)
Shotgun blasts are heard
When I rip and kill, at WILL
The man of the hour, tower of power, I'll devour
I'm gonna tie you up and let you understand
that I'm not your average man
when I got a jammy in my hand
DAAAAAM!!!!! Oooooohh!!
Listen to the way I slaaaaay, your crew
Damage [UHH] damage [UHH] damage [UHH] damage
Destruction, terror, and mayhem
Pass me a sissy so suckas I'll slay him
Farmers [What!!!] Farmers [What!!!]
I'm ready [we're ready!!!]
I think I'm gonna bomb a town [get down!!]
Don't u neva, eva, pull my lever
Cuz I explode
And my nine is easy to load
I gotta thank God
Cuz he gave me the strength to rock
HARD!! knock you out, mama said knock you out
That article was great except for the stupid "how to pronounce Linux" tripe at the end. Who cares? Stuff like that is one of the many reasons I try to not associate with anyone else running Linux.
I always wondered how the Libyan Nationalists were able to get their hands on all that plutonium for Doc Brown.
I just did it.
101 oso:~ > du -sk reality.sgi.com/
463191 reality.sgi.com
102 oso:~ > ls -l reality.sgi.com |wc -l
775
105 oso:~ > ls -l reality.sgi.com.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 matt users 281182058 Jul 8 03:52 reality.sgi.com.tar.gz
I wonder if it'll change at all between now and aug 15.
I use an SKB 16U shock-mount rack. I spent $180 on ebay for it, and the guy who sold it to me just slapped a label on the front and shipped it. I've had it for probably 3 years now and it's awesome for computer gear. It has about 1" of space around the rack rails (which are mounted on coils) that is good for cleanly cabling the rack and for the necessary airflow for sparc hardware. You can even get casters for it.
The only problem I've had has been finding inexpensive cases for my PCs and shelves for my nonrackable stuff.
On the plus side, Americans are rich and pay is good, at least if you've got a degree and work hard and are a bit lucky. But, it means you have to watch over promoted shit from Hollywood, watch TV that is utterly crap, watch professional sports that are little more than long ads and, if you're silly enough to listen to the radio, listen to virtually uninterupted crap.
So don't listen to the radio. Don't watch TV.
I'm from Nebraska, where the radio choices are worse than just about anywhere else I've ever visited or lived. As soon as I was able, I put a CD changer in my car and never looked back. When I moved out of my parents' house, I didn't buy myself a TV. Am I depriving myself of "American culture"? Maybe. When people talk about Survivor or Friends, I just smile and nod politely. When someone says "Did you hear that song by Limp Bizkit where they blah blah blah?" it's the same deal. You tell me how much I'm missing.
Instead I've taken my "riches" and squandered them on media that I chose to partake in, and it would seem that I have the best of both worlds.
Sue for defamation? Microsoft? This should be marked as "Funny", not "Interesting".
As a geek I should be consulted and compensated. I will also sue major hollywood studios for the portrayal of geeks in film, because it infringes on my intellectual property rights to geek language and culture.
Make sure that you also get an apology for The Net and Hackers, and for the technical abomination known as Mission Impossible. 686 RISC chip powered Apple laptop my ass.
I am on the computer an average of 12 to 16 hours per day (depending on the day), and for a long time I was always hunched over so I would have good access to the keyboard. At least that's what I thought. About a month ago I decided to take advantage of my wife's excellent vision plan (I'm a consultant and have no insurance) and take care of some checkups that I'd not had for a while, the most notable being a vision checkup. I hadn't had one since probably 6 years ago in high school so I was curious. Now this wasn't because my eyesight looked bad or anything, I was just wanting to make sure things were going along like they should.
After a few minutes in the chair, I found out that I had astigmatism, which if you are in your early 20s will make farther away stuff look blurry and closer stuff look clear due to your lens growing too fast (or so they told me). The doctor said that people often will lean forward or generally bring the viewed object closer without even realizing it. This sounded like a familiar song and dance (since I was acutely aware of my bad posture and the problems it causes), so I shelled out the money for some glasses.
Ever since doing so, I don't ever lean forward and things are noticably clearer. I was surprised, I hadn't even noticed that my vision was getting out of whack. My back hasn't hurt since.
Topics like this make me wonder if the intellect of the Slashdot editors and readers is really anything greater than grammer school children.
Please, if you're going to toss insults around, at least spell "grammar" correctly.
Yeah, right. SGI still makes the best Unix servers and workstations.
You'll get no argument from me on that point (I'm posting from an Octane, my home workstation). In fact, if you think that I'm talking shit about SGI, you're sorely mistaken. I'm merely one of the people who thinks it's not going to last, and is disappointed about it.
it sounds like SGI CEO Bob Bishop wants SGI to reemphasize the IRIX/MIPS solutions because -- surprise! -- they actually generate revenue, unlike the Linux/Intel space
I think you're overly optimistic in your assumption that Bishop wants to reemphasize Irix/MIPS. If Linux/Intel doesn't generate revenue, then why is XFS and its tools being ported to Linux? Why are they devoting resources to Linux kernel scalability, NUMA, I/O enhancements, large memory support, etc? How do you explain dmSDK? state-threads? The standard answer would be "because SGI is a good OSS citizen" or whatever, but when I look at things like the "innovation" of Octane2 and the prohibitive cost of damn near anything with SGI badging, I have to wonder what is up their sleeve. It seems to me like it is going to be -- surprise! -- throwing out Irix totally.
Sure, the propaganda points toward an Irix/MIPS path, but it seems like the actions and the words aren't matching up very well. I don't think that SGI is going to be hawking Irix much longer. MIPS, maybe. If SGI proves me wrong, I'll be happier than you can imagine.
Alias/Wavefront, an animation software unit of SGI, in March adapted its flagship Maya program to run on Linux.
Yet more proof that SGI is selling out. Pretty soon they'll be nothing more than another VA Linux that happens to have a couple extra products. Yes, they've done some cool stuff with software and with PCs. No, that doesn't make it okay to stop making high-end Unix workstations and servers.
You can't buy a Linux box at Best Buy or Circuit City because those places sell nothing but crap. Buying a computer there is like buying shoes at K-Mart. You think that just because you can't get Nikes at K-Mart that they aren't successfully mass-marketed?
A lot of people are saying that Crystal is the goods. I would like to add that in addition to having decent tech support, the hold music system is without a doubt the best I've ever experienced. You dial in, pick your favorite music genre out of four or five, and listen to some pretty decent examples of those genres while waiting.