Linux And Other Rants: The Perfect Setup In One Day

The inaugural post from "Linux and Other Rants," a blogspot-based blog, talks about someone explaining his experiences with using Linux in the workplace, and in stark contrast with Jim Sampson having problems with it over ten years, the anonymous blogger was able to do so in a single day.

It took me one day to get Linux installed and the above requirements met. It did involve a little effort on my part, like Googling on how to set up Kontact properly and I won't pretend everything is perfect. Printer setup in Dapper can be a pain sometimes. However, I'm extremely happy with my current setup and probably won't upgrade again until KDE 4 is released.

Though I can't speak for Jim, I think the point of his article was not that Linux wasn't ready for all workplace environments, but that it wasn't ready for his, and that it can be hard to deal with the tantalizing idea of running a Linux system only to find one little thing keeps you from fully converting over. In this case, it seemed to be a success.

Wired News (via A.P.) 911 Images Could Mean Info Overload

New York City wants to broaden 911 to accept digital photos and video clips - information which could come in handy for diagnosing medical emergencies and for capturing information about a crime scene. But there's concern about capacity on the 911 network.

"Your message will not go through until the bandwidth is there," said Ken Lowden, executive director of the Indiana Wireless Enhanced 911 Board. "If the bandwidth is really tight your picture's gonna sit there."

Still, the idea is feasible, assuming we can get all the cellphone companies to play ball and work with some open standards for transmission of video and pictures - which may be more difficult than making sure the 911 network, which already processes 11 million calls a year in NYC alone, can handle the data.

Coding Horror: The Economics of Bandwidth

Though the latency sucks, late researcher Jim Gray is remembered for an ACM interview about a product called TeraScale SneakerNet - essentially showing that, when the amount of data you need to transfer gets large enough, putting it into a box and shipping it is often cheaper, faster, or both.

JG UPS takes 24 hours, and 9 hours at each end to do the copy. DP Wouldn't it be a lot less hassle to use the Internet? JG It's cheaper to send the machine. The phone bill, at the rate Microsoft pays, is about $1 per gigabyte sent and about $1 per gigabyte received-about $2,000 per terabyte. It's the same hassle for me whether I send it via the Internet or an overnight package with a computer. I have to copy the files to a server in any case. The extra step is putting the SneakerNet in a cardboard box and slapping a UPS label on it. I have gotten fairly good at that. Tape media is about $3,000 a terabyte. This media, in packaged SneakerNet form, is about $1,500 a terabyte.

When you keep in mind that your network pipe usually is doing many other things while you want to send data, transferring large amounts of data via cargo truck starts to make a whole lot more sense.

CIO: The Colts, Super Bowl Ads and K-Fed: How Is Your Network Right Now?

Our CEO spoke with CIO Magazine about the glut of traffic that occurs semi-regularly on the network when events such as the Super Bowl, March Madness, the World Cup or other events come out, as employees rush to get the latest info via the Internet.

Throughout each year, he says, NetQoS typically sees three or four big web-related events -- some that are expected, some that are not -- that can have a "significant impact" on NetQoS's customers infrastructure during the workday. Sometimes "you don't know how big it's going to be," Trammell says. He cites Victoria Secret's website-server meltdown in 1999 as one example (see our Best and Worst IT-Related Super Bowl commercials for more on that.) Another one happens during March Madness, the NCAA men's basketball tournament, which takes place during the week.

His advice to handle events like the Super Bowl shouldn't surprise anyone - keep an eye on application performance beyond "up or down" status, make sure that you know how much of your traffic is business related, and most importantly, no flag football games in the data center.

Slashdot: Linux Kernel 2.6.20 Released

The most notable things about this kernel for IT are that it has support for virtualization and UDP-lite.