You want to find a company that's concerned about how you're going to use and maintain the system. If they're developing use cases and trying to assess the technical knowledge of people who will use the system, they're on the right track. If they're worrying about whether to use Windows or Unix or something else, worry. If they're pushing a specific technology or product, worry.
When they present their proposals, ask why each piece is needed, and take the offensive. Ask why they didn't use something smaller or simpler. "Upgradeability" and "future growth" are, more often than not, excuses to sell you crap that you'll never use UNLESS you specifically told them that those things mattered to you. It amazes me how many people end up with a database-backed CMS for a relatively static site with a miniscule archive.
Ask about things like standards compliance and handicapped accessibility. A good company will either do that by default or jot down that it matters to you. It won't be a big deal to them. A bad company will try to convince you that IE on Windows (or whatever their technology of choice supports) is the only browser that matters.
You also want to be a little bit of a pest early on. Cold-call them a day or two after you meet to see how things are going. If they have -any- progress, you're in good shape. If the answer is "Oh, uh, we're still looking into that" or something equally evasive, well, it's not going to get better.
My only decorations are some reference docs that I refer to often enough that I stuck 'em to the walls and craploads of light. In addition to the pitiful office lighting, I have three 100 watt-equivalent "full-spectrum" (I hate that terminology. The blue-ish ones.) bulbs. Two compact fluorescents (different brands) and one incandescent.
A few people have commented on how spartan my office looks. The thing is, I don't look up often. I don't -care- what's on the walls around me. What I -do- care about is light. Our whole building is Too Damned Dark®, so I often end up with other light-junkies on my office because they "like how bright and happy" my bare-walled office is.
I've tried to convince people that ergonomics extends beyond "chairs that don't suck" and "goofy keyboards", but it's a hard sell, particularly when your managers include a lot of the "We had VT-52s and we liked it!" crowd.
The fact is, if you know linux well, then you don't need to bother asking Slashdot.
If you -don't- know linux well, then the price that you pay will be your free time. Setting up your first stable (and properly backed-up) LVM system can be quite time-consuming. For some people, it's not fun, so spending an extra thousand dollars is a better deal than losing a few weekends.
You want good quality, but you don't want to pay for it. Ummm, right.
Quality comes at a price. Everybody learns this eventually. With a DIY solution, the price is your time. You can make something really great if you're willing to burn a weekend or two on it.
If you're buying something, you can have "moderately expensive, stable, and really limited", "really cheap, but likely to fall apart or catch fire", or "really expensive and really flexible".
The other thing that you run into with a sommercial system is the difference between home and business requirements. For a business with a machine room, dust, humidity, and temperature are easy to control. A noisy unit is fine. Under your desk, temperature and dust build-up will be a problem, and the thing'll sound like a jet engine.
...that eventually, all of the US telecom companies will merge back into one. That single, surviving company will be known as "The Bell System" or, colloquially as "Ma Bell".
I knew that some pedant was going to call me on that.
I put "driverless" in quotes for a reason. Yeah, a 1394 camera will require some kernel modules, but it's an open standard. I meant that it doesn't require any proprietary device-specific drivers. Anything that can do 1394 can handle a 1394 video camera.
My experience has been that the cheap cameras can vary wildly, even when the model number stays the same. So, if you look online and discover that somebody managed to get their VizoPro 5000QX-5 (or whatever) working with Linux, even if you go to the store and pick up your own, it may not work because the other guy had a different revision (that's probably not listed either on the box or the camera).
The way I see it, there are two ways to handle this:
Budget: go to a store with a liberal return policy and buy a cheap webcam. Take it home and try it. If it doesn't work, return it and get another one. Repeat until successful or out of cameras.
Lazy: buy an iSight or some other firewire camera. They cost a bit more, but firewire video is basically "driverless", so it's pretty much guaranteed to work.
If the feed provides full article text, I think ads are reasonable. With full articles, I have absolutely no reason to visit the site, so I'm eating bandwidth and giving nothing in return.
If, on the other hand, the RSS feed just has headlines, I think that ads are too much. With a headline-only feed, EVERY message is ALREADY an ad for the full article on the web site, so putting even more ads in is just excessive.
-Get the best-value processor that you can find. You won't need the fastest thing out there, but it's better to have a little more "oomph" than you need. If you end up using an encrypted filesystem at some point, you'll want enough power to decript and keep the network "fed"
-Have a plan for adding a second network interface. Maybe you don't need it now, but once the DIY bug bites, you may find yourself wanting to use the machine as your NAT box or as a wireless access point or something like that.
-Think about noise and power use. Yeah, those WD Raptors are fast, but they're really loud, too, particularly if you buy a pile of them. You might want to think about acoustic material for the inside of the case -- your local car customizing shop can hook you up. You'll also want an "overkill" power supply for the case so that you don't have problems when you add more drives later.
-Think about heat and airflow. At this time of the year, it's easy to ignore (Dear Australia: yes, I know it's summer there now), but during the summer, stuffing the fileserver into the closet might not be such a good idea.
-Consider underclocking. If you do buy a better processor than you need, bump the speed down for now. Less power, less heat, less noise.
-Get a BIOS or hardware-level RAID mirror for your "root" disk. You can use software RAID for the data disks, but you want to be absolutely certain that you can recover the disk with information about the software RAID. The RAID does no good if you don't know how to access it.
-If you use Linux, LVM will become your new best friend.
-Consider buying hard drives that are carried by your nearest Best Buy/CompUSA/other computer store. You don't actually have to buy the initial batch from there, but if a drive in the RAID set goes bad, you'll want to replace it ASAP. It's nice if you can do that tonight rather than "in a few days".
Your sig mentions worrying about moderators who mark things "overrated". I have to admit that I've done it sometimes because there's no "just plain wrong" or "clearly living on another planet" tag.
I'm not talking about "I disagree", I'm talking about posts that claim things that plainly aren't true, like "Apple is -already- making G5 laptops." That stuff tends to percolate up because moderators look at it and say "Wow. I didn't know that." without realizing that they didn't know it because the poster is either misinformed or making it up.
(Mods: Yeah, I know. Off to "Offtopic" land for me.)
First paragraph: FreeBSD is waaaay better with SMP than NetBSD.
Second paragraph: FreeBSD doesn't work well on hyperthreaded P4s, so using one as a benchmark is unfair.
Hyperthreading is, more or less, SMP (Intel has a fluffy introduction to it here). Sure, there are differences, but you're making exceptions for your exceptions. There's a point where fanboy-ness becomes obvious.
A bit of advise, though: there are people through this article claiming that patents cost $20k or more in legal fees.
Bullshit!
Sure, you can spend that if you want to. Just visit a patent lawyer with a nothing more than a vague idea about something that you'd like to patent. At several hundred dollars an hour, the bill adds up quickly.
The alternative is to go to the patent database, read a few patents to get a feel for the format, buy a few books, and write up your own patent. Then, search for prior art yourself and flag anything that's even remotely close. After you've done this work, visit a patent attorney with your patent and research notes and ask him to review it. If you've done your homework and have a reasonably well-written patent, the attorney won't have to do much more than read it. The total cost will probably end up at $2000-$3000 after filing fees.
A bit of warning: good technical artists are -expensive-, so think about ways to minimize the number of diagrams.
My father has several patents, and this is the method that he used.
This is a problem that has been solved by every hardware platform out there -except- the PC.
Buy decent hardware. Use a serial console (perhaps hooked up to something like a Cyclades box). Move on.
If you absolutely MUST use a PC, there are workarounds like watchdog cards or those dell boxes that basically have a second monitoring computer in them. Fundamentally, though, they are workarounds for an inadequate design.
(In fairness, the PC design's adequate for its intended use: desktops. Using a PC in the server room is a bit like trying to attach a giant U-Haul trailer to a family car: It doesn't work as well as a truck, but you can't blame the car for that.)
1) Fire up NetStumbler (or your OS's equivalent) and see which channels are in use. Remeber that 802.11b/g "bleeds" both up and down at least one channel. Pick the "least-busy" channel. Failing that, pick the one with the weakest (i.e. "easiest to clobber") signal.
2) Depending on your school's policies, see if you can turn on bridging or otherwise share the connection (some schools are okay with it so long as you bridge and don't use NAT). If your connection works, others might use it and shut off their own connections. This probably involves talking to neighbors with their own APs.
3) Talk to a neighbor with an open AP and see if you can use that one rather than your own. Most people are cool about that sort of thing.
4) If you can't share, think about -reducing- the power of your AP, and see if your neighbors are willing to do the same. This is the airspace equivalent to "quiet hours".:-)
5) Almost every new AP supports some sort of "interference robustness" or "microwave-safe mode" or something like that. All it does is reduce your MTU so that -some- of the packets make it through. Either turn this on, or manually reduce your MTU.
6) Think about Bluetooth, 802.11a, or other "alternative" wireless technology. Bluetooth shares the same frequencies, but is often able to get an across-the-room connection even when the wi-fi space is totally screwed up.
Send email to a few supercomputing centers. These places have tons of clusters, with lots of vendors throwing hardware at them. They're also often associated with schools, so they're not competitors and they actually -want- people to learn from what they've done.
To get you started: http://www.ncne.org http://www.psc.edu http://www.sdsc.edu http://www.ncsa.edu
Yeah, it's Pittsburgh-centric. Guess where I'm posting from. There's probably somewhere closer to you.
The things you want to figure out before calling:
-What's your budget? (Nice stuff tends to be more expensive)
-How much does latency matter? (Usually, lots. Sometimes, not so much. Put numbers here.)
-What's your architecture (at several levels of technical detail)? Can you use 64-bit PCI? Do you have to work with a proprietary bus? Can you use full-height, full-length cards? What OS -exactly- are you using? (Hint: "Linux" ain't close enough.) What version and vendor of PVM/MPI/whatever are you using, and can you switch?
I was talking about two different things. I probably shouldn't have mentioned the beer-by-the-case law, but I thought that it was another entertaining weird-booze-law story.
Other places (and actually a few places in PA) have no-cold-beer laws.
Greetings from Pennsylvania, where beer is only sold by the case to prevent casual drinking. You can only get smaller quantities from bars. Yes, really.
The idea with those weird no-cold-beer laws is to prevent "impulse drinking". Since nobody likes Warm Ones (except the English), they assume that not allowing the sale of Cold Ones will force a (literal!) cooling-off period before you crack open a can.
Most places get around this by also selling styrofoam coolers and bags of ice. That way, the beer's cold by the time you're done filling up the gas tank.:)
Re:Why no mention on the major sites?
on
Knoppix 3.6 released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It must've been a timing issue. It's now listed on the official Knoppix site.
Slashdot Mirror
You want to find a company that's concerned about how you're going to use and maintain the system. If they're developing use cases and trying to assess the technical knowledge of people who will use the system, they're on the right track. If they're worrying about whether to use Windows or Unix or something else, worry. If they're pushing a specific technology or product, worry.
When they present their proposals, ask why each piece is needed, and take the offensive. Ask why they didn't use something smaller or simpler. "Upgradeability" and "future growth" are, more often than not, excuses to sell you crap that you'll never use UNLESS you specifically told them that those things mattered to you. It amazes me how many people end up with a database-backed CMS for a relatively static site with a miniscule archive.
Ask about things like standards compliance and handicapped accessibility. A good company will either do that by default or jot down that it matters to you. It won't be a big deal to them. A bad company will try to convince you that IE on Windows (or whatever their technology of choice supports) is the only browser that matters.
You also want to be a little bit of a pest early on. Cold-call them a day or two after you meet to see how things are going. If they have -any- progress, you're in good shape. If the answer is "Oh, uh, we're still looking into that" or something equally evasive, well, it's not going to get better.
A few people have commented on how spartan my office looks. The thing is, I don't look up often. I don't -care- what's on the walls around me. What I -do- care about is light. Our whole building is Too Damned Dark®, so I often end up with other light-junkies on my office because they "like how bright and happy" my bare-walled office is.
I've tried to convince people that ergonomics extends beyond "chairs that don't suck" and "goofy keyboards", but it's a hard sell, particularly when your managers include a lot of the "We had VT-52s and we liked it!" crowd.
The fact is, if you know Linux well
The fact is, if you know linux well, then you don't need to bother asking Slashdot.
If you -don't- know linux well, then the price that you pay will be your free time. Setting up your first stable (and properly backed-up) LVM system can be quite time-consuming. For some people, it's not fun, so spending an extra thousand dollars is a better deal than losing a few weekends.
You want good quality, but you don't want to pay for it. Ummm, right.
Quality comes at a price. Everybody learns this eventually. With a DIY solution, the price is your time. You can make something really great if you're willing to burn a weekend or two on it.
If you're buying something, you can have "moderately expensive, stable, and really limited", "really cheap, but likely to fall apart or catch fire", or "really expensive and really flexible".
The other thing that you run into with a sommercial system is the difference between home and business requirements. For a business with a machine room, dust, humidity, and temperature are easy to control. A noisy unit is fine. Under your desk, temperature and dust build-up will be a problem, and the thing'll sound like a jet engine.
NewEgg is the second-worst retailer that I've ever used (Tiger Direct is the worst).
Quite literally -everything- that I've ever ordered from NewEgg has been broken, less than spec, not as advertised, or otherwise problematic.
...that eventually, all of the US telecom companies will merge back into one. That single, surviving company will be known as "The Bell System" or, colloquially as "Ma Bell".
You heard it here first.
I knew that some pedant was going to call me on that.
I put "driverless" in quotes for a reason. Yeah, a 1394 camera will require some kernel modules, but it's an open standard. I meant that it doesn't require any proprietary device-specific drivers. Anything that can do 1394 can handle a 1394 video camera.
My experience has been that the cheap cameras can vary wildly, even when the model number stays the same. So, if you look online and discover that somebody managed to get their VizoPro 5000QX-5 (or whatever) working with Linux, even if you go to the store and pick up your own, it may not work because the other guy had a different revision (that's probably not listed either on the box or the camera).
The way I see it, there are two ways to handle this:
Budget: go to a store with a liberal return policy and buy a cheap webcam. Take it home and try it. If it doesn't work, return it and get another one. Repeat until successful or out of cameras.
Lazy: buy an iSight or some other firewire camera. They cost a bit more, but firewire video is basically "driverless", so it's pretty much guaranteed to work.
How long before Netscape offers a "preferred partner program" where they promise not to blacklist the spyware produced by any of their partners?
I think it depends on the RSS feed.
If the feed provides full article text, I think ads are reasonable. With full articles, I have absolutely no reason to visit the site, so I'm eating bandwidth and giving nothing in return.
If, on the other hand, the RSS feed just has headlines, I think that ads are too much. With a headline-only feed, EVERY message is ALREADY an ad for the full article on the web site, so putting even more ads in is just excessive.
A few comments about this
-Get the best-value processor that you can find. You won't need the fastest thing out there, but it's better to have a little more "oomph" than you need. If you end up using an encrypted filesystem at some point, you'll want enough power to decript and keep the network "fed"
-Have a plan for adding a second network interface. Maybe you don't need it now, but once the DIY bug bites, you may find yourself wanting to use the machine as your NAT box or as a wireless access point or something like that.
-Think about noise and power use. Yeah, those WD Raptors are fast, but they're really loud, too, particularly if you buy a pile of them. You might want to think about acoustic material for the inside of the case -- your local car customizing shop can hook you up. You'll also want an "overkill" power supply for the case so that you don't have problems when you add more drives later.
-Think about heat and airflow. At this time of the year, it's easy to ignore (Dear Australia: yes, I know it's summer there now), but during the summer, stuffing the fileserver into the closet might not be such a good idea.
-Consider underclocking. If you do buy a better processor than you need, bump the speed down for now. Less power, less heat, less noise.
-Get a BIOS or hardware-level RAID mirror for your "root" disk. You can use software RAID for the data disks, but you want to be absolutely certain that you can recover the disk with information about the software RAID. The RAID does no good if you don't know how to access it.
-If you use Linux, LVM will become your new best friend.
-Consider buying hard drives that are carried by your nearest Best Buy/CompUSA/other computer store. You don't actually have to buy the initial batch from there, but if a drive in the RAID set goes bad, you'll want to replace it ASAP. It's nice if you can do that tonight rather than "in a few days".
Niiice. There's a point where trolling, sarcasm, and insightful commentary meet, and you nailed it.
Your sig mentions worrying about moderators who mark things "overrated". I have to admit that I've done it sometimes because there's no "just plain wrong" or "clearly living on another planet" tag.
I'm not talking about "I disagree", I'm talking about posts that claim things that plainly aren't true, like "Apple is -already- making G5 laptops." That stuff tends to percolate up because moderators look at it and say "Wow. I didn't know that." without realizing that they didn't know it because the poster is either misinformed or making it up.
(Mods: Yeah, I know. Off to "Offtopic" land for me.)
Second paragraph: FreeBSD doesn't work well on hyperthreaded P4s, so using one as a benchmark is unfair.
Hyperthreading is, more or less, SMP (Intel has a fluffy introduction to it here). Sure, there are differences, but you're making exceptions for your exceptions. There's a point where fanboy-ness becomes obvious.
I'll be attending a remote broadcast of the event, and our Apple sales rep. will be buying lunch (so it's not exactly unsanctioned).
They -are- doing a live, remote broadcast. The only question is "how public will that broadcast be?"
Maybe their bandwidth bills were too high after the last one, so they decided to record, encode, and blast to Akamai after the event.
I realized where I've seen the design before: those crappy radio coolers that are on a lot of department store endcaps at this time of year.
The parent post has the right idea: get a patent.
A bit of advise, though: there are people through this article claiming that patents cost $20k or more in legal fees.
Bullshit!
Sure, you can spend that if you want to. Just visit a patent lawyer with a nothing more than a vague idea about something that you'd like to patent. At several hundred dollars an hour, the bill adds up quickly.
The alternative is to go to the patent database, read a few patents to get a feel for the format, buy a few books, and write up your own patent. Then, search for prior art yourself and flag anything that's even remotely close. After you've done this work, visit a patent attorney with your patent and research notes and ask him to review it. If you've done your homework and have a reasonably well-written patent, the attorney won't have to do much more than read it. The total cost will probably end up at $2000-$3000 after filing fees.
A bit of warning: good technical artists are -expensive-, so think about ways to minimize the number of diagrams.
My father has several patents, and this is the method that he used.
This is a problem that has been solved by every hardware platform out there -except- the PC.
Buy decent hardware. Use a serial console (perhaps hooked up to something like a Cyclades box). Move on.
If you absolutely MUST use a PC, there are workarounds like watchdog cards or those dell boxes that basically have a second monitoring computer in them. Fundamentally, though, they are workarounds for an inadequate design.
(In fairness, the PC design's adequate for its intended use: desktops. Using a PC in the server room is a bit like trying to attach a giant U-Haul trailer to a family car: It doesn't work as well as a truck, but you can't blame the car for that.)
1) Fire up NetStumbler (or your OS's equivalent) and see which channels are in use. Remeber that 802.11b/g "bleeds" both up and down at least one channel. Pick the "least-busy" channel. Failing that, pick the one with the weakest (i.e. "easiest to clobber") signal.
:-)
2) Depending on your school's policies, see if you can turn on bridging or otherwise share the connection (some schools are okay with it so long as you bridge and don't use NAT). If your connection works, others might use it and shut off their own connections. This probably involves talking to neighbors with their own APs.
3) Talk to a neighbor with an open AP and see if you can use that one rather than your own. Most people are cool about that sort of thing.
4) If you can't share, think about -reducing- the power of your AP, and see if your neighbors are willing to do the same. This is the airspace equivalent to "quiet hours".
5) Almost every new AP supports some sort of "interference robustness" or "microwave-safe mode" or something like that. All it does is reduce your MTU so that -some- of the packets make it through. Either turn this on, or manually reduce your MTU.
6) Think about Bluetooth, 802.11a, or other "alternative" wireless technology. Bluetooth shares the same frequencies, but is often able to get an across-the-room connection even when the wi-fi space is totally screwed up.
People who use Macs from multiple locations can use iSync and Apple's .mac service to synchronize bookmarks across all of the macs.
Send email to a few supercomputing centers. These places have tons of clusters, with lots of vendors throwing hardware at them. They're also often associated with schools, so they're not competitors and they actually -want- people to learn from what they've done.
To get you started:
http://www.ncne.org
http://www.psc.edu
http://www.sdsc.edu
http://www.ncsa.edu
Yeah, it's Pittsburgh-centric. Guess where I'm posting from. There's probably somewhere closer to you.
The things you want to figure out before calling:
-What's your budget? (Nice stuff tends to be more expensive)
-How much does latency matter? (Usually, lots. Sometimes, not so much. Put numbers here.)
-What's your architecture (at several levels of technical detail)? Can you use 64-bit PCI? Do you have to work with a proprietary bus? Can you use full-height, full-length cards? What OS -exactly- are you using? (Hint: "Linux" ain't close enough.) What version and vendor of PVM/MPI/whatever are you using, and can you switch?
There is such a thing as a firewire TV tuner.
Yeah. I know.
I was talking about two different things. I probably shouldn't have mentioned the beer-by-the-case law, but I thought that it was another entertaining weird-booze-law story.
Other places (and actually a few places in PA) have no-cold-beer laws.
Greetings from Pennsylvania, where beer is only sold by the case to prevent casual drinking. You can only get smaller quantities from bars. Yes, really.
:)
The idea with those weird no-cold-beer laws is to prevent "impulse drinking". Since nobody likes Warm Ones (except the English), they assume that not allowing the sale of Cold Ones will force a (literal!) cooling-off period before you crack open a can.
Most places get around this by also selling styrofoam coolers and bags of ice. That way, the beer's cold by the time you're done filling up the gas tank.
It must've been a timing issue. It's now listed on the official Knoppix site.