Month: December 2002

That was nice.

Dave Farquhar General

Last Updated on September 30, 2010 by Dave Farquhar

Early this afternoon, my DSL connection fell over. I power-cycled my modem when I got home and everything was fine.
This won’t be good for my monthly stats… But there’s nothing I can do about that now.

Onward…

Laptop or desktop?

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , ,

Last Updated on April 18, 2017 by Dave Farquhar

All this talk today about cheap notebooks like the Sotec 3120x begs another question: Who should buy one?
Nearly six years ago, I published a column in the Columbia Missourian newspaper. My working title was 101 Reasons NOT to Buy a Laptop but a cooler-headed editor toned it down. I pointed out that you can buy twice the computer for the same amount of money, and laptops are hard to upgrade and they break a lot and you shouldn’t buy one without an extended warranty. (I was shocked to read that I’d said that way back then.)

All of that’s still true today. Except for the twice as much computer for the same amount of money bit. Thank goodness that’s changed.

Now you can buy twice as much computer for half the money.

Back then my job was to set up and fix laptops. I didn’t actually use one very much. I’ve been using one nearly every day for the past year and I’ve found some things to like about laptops now.

Portability. Duh. But this means not only can you take it with you, but you can stash it easily when company’s coming over.

Small size. A desktop computer’s going to take up most of the desk. My current computer desk has more usable space on it than my kitchen counter, which is nice because that gives me some room to work. Or put more computers on it. Guess which I do? But anyway, I can set up a laptop on a small desk and still have space to work.

Quiet. A lot of desktop PCs have three, even four fans in them. They make a lot of noise. Laptops have one fan and it doesn’t always even go all the time. Go back to a desktop and you’ll discover you’ve forgotten how much you like quiet. (Apologies to Charlie for stealing one of his lines.)

Gorgeous display. Another coworker came in today to work on my laptop (more on that in a bit) and to complain about another coworker. He was griping about how his laptop display looked when he hooked it up to an external monitor. I asked why anyone would hook up a laptop to a CRT. I guess it makes you look important.

Flat-panel LCD displays are gorgeous. No flicker, great color saturation, perfect focus, really easy on the eyes. They don’t update fast enough to be good for 120-fps 3D gaming, but for everything else, they’re fabulous. Staring at a CRT for 8 hours wears me out. Staring at an LCD for 8 hours has no effect on me. I’ve got a nice 19-inch CRT–an NEC, and it’s one of the professional line, not the consumer line–and it’s great. But I’ll take my laptop’s 13″ LCD.

You can get a similar effect by connecting an LCD to a desktop, but you’ll get digital converted to analog and back on an inexpensive one, which will affect display quality ever so slightly. A laptop is all digital, from video chip to screen.

The downside. After living with one, I’ve changed my tune a little. It used to be when someone said they were getting a laptop, I’d cringe the same way I would if they told me they were getting a sex change. I don’t do that anymore.

But there are still issues. I’ve broken my laptop twice in the past four months. And I treat mine well. The first was a hard drive. The second was the power connector–a piece of plastic snapped off. You’re looking at a motherboard swap to fix that one, in this age of people not knowing how to solder.

Laptop keyboards and mice take getting used to. Every time my girlfriend comes over and needs to use a computer, she sits down at the laptop and asks me for a “real mouse.”

And I miss my IBM clackety keyboards when I’m using a laptop. (I suspect Charlie would get really annoyed if I used one of those at work though, since he’s in the cube next to me, and the way I type, those keyboards can overpower fan noise. Or phone conversations. Or earthquakes.)

Upgrades remain a problem. I’ve got an IBM Thinkpad 600. Great display, great keyboard, and it’s small and light. But it’s slow. The memory tops out at some weird amount–I don’t think I can put 256 megs in it. CPU upgrades are all but out of the question. I can put a faster hard drive in it, but desktops give a lot more options. Even in my old original IBM AT case I can shoehorn a newer motherboard with an 800 MHz VIA C3 processor, and I can put in a 15K SCSI hard drive if I really want to. And that’s a 17-year-old case. I’ve got better upgrade options with a 17-year-old IBM PC/AT than I do with a four-year-old IBM Thinkpad!

So should anyone buy this new generation of cheap laptops? Well, remember, “cheap” is relative. Even when you can finagle into buying one for $800 through creative use of coupons, that’s still a pretty serious chunk of change.

And because they break as much as ever, I have trouble recommending a laptop as an only computer. If you’ve already got a desktop and plan to keep it and can afford a cheap snazzy laptop, then by all means go for it. You’ll love the freedom to move around. If you can’t afford $800 plus the extended warranty, wait a month or six. They’ll come down. I believe you’ll be able to buy a budget laptop for $599 by this time next year. Possibly even $499.

But if you’re buying your first computer, I think you’re better off with a low-end desktop and a nice flat-panel LCD display. The LCD will outlive the desktop PC, and the desktop PC will give you a lot more upgrade options. And as someone who’s been playing with these things for 20 years, trust me: You’ll want upgrade options.

Straight talk on cheap laptops

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , , , , , ,

Last Updated on September 30, 2010 by Dave Farquhar

I’ve been getting lots of traffic ever since we started talking about the Sotec 3120x laptop here last week. It looks like an era of inexpensive laptops is about to arrive, because the Sotec isn’t your only choice.
Sam’s Club sells a variant of the 3120x for about the same price as Wal-Mart, but it comes with a 30GB drive in place of the 20.

Steve DeLassus tells me a number of places have been hawking Toshiba Satellite 1115-S103 laptops in the sub-$1000 price range after coupons and rebates and other marketing gyrations. Suggested retail price on it is $1099. Street price should be $1049 or lower, as that’s Toshiba’s price if you buy direct. Toshiba’s offering a $200 mail-in rebate. So at the very worst, you can get a Satellite 1115-S103 for $849 if you buy it direct from Toshiba.

And then I did some checking on a hunch. Dell’s offering its Inspiron 2650C for $899 ($849 through 12/11). HP is offering its Compaq Presario 905us notebook with an Athlon XP 1400, 256 MB RAM, DVD, 14.1″ LCD for $999 with a $100 rebate. The HP Pavilion ze4101 has a faster processor but less memory, for the same price. There are some variants on the HPs and Compaqs out there–you might not find in stores exactly what HP’s selling direct, but you’ll find something awfully close.

The Toshiba and Dell offer a bigger screen (14.1 inches), DVD drives, 256 MB RAM (the Dell has 128), and the other expected gizmos like modem and networking, along with a seemingly faster 1.5 GHz Celeron processor.

Which brings up a point.

The 1.5 GHz Celeron is based on the P4 architecture. Remember, at 1.5 GHz, the P4 is a dog. The Celeron is a castrated P4. The P4-based Celeron doesn’t start to give decent speeds until it hits 2 GHz. Even though the Celeron 1.5 has a 300 MHz advantage over the older P3-based Celeron 1.2, the “slower” Celeron will actually be faster. And less expensive.

The HP/Compaq models offer truly faster AMD Athlon XP CPUs and ATI Radeon mobility video chipsets.

I know people are going to ask me which one to buy. So let’s agonize together.

Durability: Toshiba, Dell, HP and Compaq all had decent service records in the past and there are lots of places that will work on them. Sotec is more of an unknown in the United States at this point.

Dell has traditionally had the best reputation, but their laptops didn’t fare well this year in PC World’s service and reliability roundup. HP and Toshiba were the best of this bunch. Now that HP and Compaq are the same company, the Compaq should fare well too.

Frankly, I’d buy an extended warranty with any of them, and count on it breaking at least once. That’s par for the course with a laptop, especially if you use it for what it’s intended, which is carrying it around a lot.

Performance: The 1.5 GHz Celeron in the Toshiba and Dell models is a notoriously bad performer. The 1.2 GHz Celeron in the Sotec is a good performer but the integrated video will hurt. The HPQ models use AMD Athlon XP CPUs and ATI Radeon Mobility video chipsets. Performance on the latest 3D games will disappoint (but LCD screens in general are bad for 3D gaming). But for light gaming and everything else someone might want to do, the HP and Compaq models will be great.

Input: The Sotec offers a slightly reduced keyboard with an at-times quirky layout. The others offer full-sized keyboards. All use touchpads; they’ll be decent but you’ll probably want to pick up a USB mouse with any of them to use at least part of the time. Touch-typists will prefer anyone but Sotec. Hunt-and-peck types probably won’t care much one way or the other.

Portability: The Sotec weighs 4.4 pounds. The others weigh in at 6.5 or 6.9 pounds. None are hogs, but some people will really like the svelte Sotec. The Sotec has a longer battery life. Advantage: Sotec.

Expandability/extras: The Toshiba, HP and Compaq models offer TV-out, which isn’t something everybody needs, but when you want it, you want it. It allows you to use a big-screen TV for presentations in a pinch. You can connect up a TV to the laptop and do digital slideshows for a bigger audience than can crowd around a laptop screen, which is nice if you’re into that kind of thing. And when hooked up to a TV, it can serve as an emergency DVD player.

The Toshiba offers two PCMCIA slots. Everyone else offers one. HP and Compaq memory maxes out at 1024 MB, while memory on the Toshiba and Dell max out at 512 MB to the Sotec’s 384 MB. HP, Compaq, and Sotec are all using shared video memory, so they’ll steal a little system memory to give to the video chip. Toshiba and Dell aren’t doing this. All have built-in USB 1.1 and networking; none offer built-in Firewire.

HP offers the fastest CPU of the bunch, and CPU upgrades in laptops are always questionable.

Advantage: HP.

Serviceability: The Sotec’s DVD/CD-RW drive and hard drive are bolted in, rather than being plug-in modules. It’ll be a lot harder to fix yourself if need be. On most other companys’ models (I don’t know about any of these for certain), the drives slide out easily for replacement. Replacement CD/DVD drives are a pain to track down after the fact for any laptop more than a year or two old, but the big name brands will almost certainly be easier. If you buy an extended warranty, fixing it is someone else’s problem, at least for a couple of years. Advantage: Everyone but Sotec.

Overall winner: Hard to say. The Sotec is designed to be a subnotebook; the others are entry-level full notebooks. If portability and versatility are important to you, get the Sotec. It’s the only one of the bunch that’ll burn CDs for you at this price point. Keep in mind that the Sotec’s combo DVD/CD-RW drive will wear out quickly if you use it to watch a lot of movies, and that replacing it won’t be terribly easy, as it’s not a slide-in module like costlier notebooks use. If you intend to watch a lot of movies on the Sotec, make sure you buy an extended warranty on it.

The Sotec has a couple of question marks, but it also has an awful lot going for it.

The HP and Compaq models have the best combination of serviceability, expandability, speed, and reliability. I don’t think I’d mess with the Toshiba or Dell unless their prices dropped considerably. Between Compaq and HP, HP gives you the faster CPU, while Compaq gives you the bigger hard drive and more memory. It’s easier to add memory and replace the hard drive than it is to upgrade a laptop CPU; I’d get the HP and add memory to it pretty quickly and plan on replacing its hard drive with a large 5400 RPM model in a couple of years. With its best-of-class CPU and video and upgraded someday with a faster hard drive, the HP ought to be a good performer for many years. If the Sotec’s question marks scare you, the HP offers a compelling alternative.

Future outlook: When a system reaches a magical price point (notables were the $899 all-in-one Compaq Presarios in 1996, the $399 eMachine in 1998, the $199 Microtel Linux PCs from Wal-Mart this year, and this year’s sub-$900 laptops) it’s extremely tempting to run out and buy one. Especially the Sotec, which offers not only a great price, but almost every possible extra.

But remember what happened in the past. Compaq invaded Packard Bell’s territory in 1996 and released an underpowered but reliable and capable PC for $899, complete. Almost immediately, everybody was selling PCs for under $1,000. Then along came eMachines, deciding that even $499 wasn’t cheap enough and offering a unit, again underpowered, for $399. Few matched eMachines’ price point, but most companies were soon offering something for $499.

Laptops aren’t going to bottom out at $849. There’s no point in putting a smaller screen or hard drive in that Sotec. But if Wal-Mart decides it wants a bottom-feeder laptop, it could have Sotec substitute a VIA C3 chip for the Celeron (the Celeron’s being phased out anyway, and Wal-Mart already sells C3-based machines and their sales have proven you don’t have to have Intel Inside in order for people to buy them), and replace the combo DVD/CD-RW drive for a straight DVD drive or even a straight CD-ROM drive. A Sotec 3120x variant with an 800 MHz C3 and a plain old CD-ROM drive could probably sell for $749 or even $699. If Wal-Mart decides to thumb its nose at Microsoft and offer a Linux-based variant, it could chop another $100 off the price. (The big question there is whether it’s possible to support the Sotec’s modem under Linux.)

How soon will it happen? Hard to say. But think about it. Wal-Mart undercut everybody. Everybody reacted quickly. Dell wants to own the laptop market, because it’s part of the PC market. Wal-Mart wants to own every market. They’ll both strike back. HP and Toshiba won’t throw in the towel right away either, because they’re both big in retail laptops.

Right now the Sotecs are selling like crazy. Wal-Mart and Office Depot can’t keep them in stock. They won’t lower prices any further unless Dell and HPQ and Toshiba react again and seriously cut into sales. That’ll depend on whether they’re satisfied with their current sales figures. With 14 shopping days until Christmas (and realistically, the clock running out on shipping something to arrive before Christmas), I don’t expect pricing or inventory conditions to change much in the next two weeks.

But remember, this is Christmas boom time. People always cut prices after Christmas to spur sales. Chipmakers cut their prices too, meaning these laptops will be cheaper to make a month from now.

So if you’ve been wanting a laptop for a while and the sudden appearance of $849 laptops got you thinking but you’re willing to wait a while longer, this is a good time to wait.

Dumping a list of installed packages on a Debian system

Dave Farquhar Linux

Last Updated on September 30, 2010 by Dave Farquhar

Yes, Todd, I’m posting an update from work. This’ll save me from wasting time on Google later in life.
Use the command dpkg --get-selections to generate a list of all the installed packages. If you want to replicate a system quickly (say, for disaster recovery or system deployment), redirect the package list to a file (dpkg --get-selections >packagelist). Then, as long as you have a copy of the file, you can install a minimal Debian system and turn it into a replica of the other system with nothing more than an Internet connection and a few commands:



dpkg --get-selections |sed 's/\(de\)*install/purge/' | > dpkg --set-selections

dpkg --set-selections 
dselect install

And they say Windows’ TCO is lower than Linux…

Another day, another gray

Dave Farquhar General

Last Updated on September 30, 2010 by Dave Farquhar

Today’s my birthday. I turn 28 today. I’ve got some old content I haven’t posted yet; I may post some of that later.

The Compaq DL320 and Ghost

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , ,

Last Updated on April 18, 2017 by Dave Farquhar

We got another Compaq Proliant DL320 in at work. This one’s a Windows 2000 print server (grumble grumble–we’ve been playing with HP’s Linux-based print appliances and so far I really like them).

But anyway, since rebuilding a Windows server is a much bigger deal than rebuilding a Linux server (all our other DL320s run Debian Linux), we tried building a recovery image with Ghost.

Only one problem: Ghost 7.5 doesn’t see the DL320’s IDE drives. DOS sees them just fine. But Ghost 7.5 doesn’t see them, and neither did MBRWork, a freeware partition-recovery tool that’s saved my bacon a few times. There’s something odd going on here.

In desperation, I dug out an old copy of Ghost 5.1c I found on our network. It’s from mid-1999. Oddly enough, 5.1c sees the Proliant’s CMD 649-based UDMA controller just fine. The only problem is, Ghost 5.1c doesn’t handle the changes Windows 2000 made to NTFS. It’ll make the image just fine, but when I went to try to restore it, Ghost crashed.

So I pulled out an unused copy of PowerQuest Drive Image. Drive Image worked fine. Mostly. It made the image at least. One thing I noticed was that Drive Image’s compression was a whole lot less effective than Ghost’s. The other thing I noticed was that Drive Image’s partition resizing didn’t work right. I’d re-size the partitions so they’d fit on another drive I had (I wanted to test the backup to make sure it worked, but not on the live, production drive) but no matter what I did, it reported there wasn’t enough room on the drive.

“Ghost would be so much better in every way, if it worked,” I said in frustration.

“Isn’t that true of everything?” Charlie asked. I guess he didn’t think that was the most brilliant observation I ever made. Not that I did either.

We’ve got support with both Symantec and HP, so we really ought to call them and see if they have a resolution. HP talks out of both sides of its mouth; on the one hand, I found statements on its Web site that Ghost is unsupported on Proliant hardware, and on the other I found some tools that claim to help with system deployment using Ghost.

But since this DL320 is being used to drive a printer that costs about as much as any of us make in a year, and it’s being set up by a guy who’s being flown in early this week at $2,000 a day, I’m not positive that we’re going to get a good resolution to this. I suspect we’ll just end up using Drive Image and keeping an identical drive on hand in case Windows 2000 gets suicidal on us. The price of an IDE drive is pocket change on top of all this.

But when you’re running Linux and GNU tar is a legitimate option as a backup and recovery tool, I love the DL320. It’s small, fast, and cheap. It’s funny when tools allegedly written by college students as a hobby work better and more consistently than commercial tools you have to pay for.

Well, I guess I should say it’s funny when that happens and it’s someone else who has to deal with it.

Cheap laptops from Sotec

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , ,

Last Updated on December 5, 2015 by Dave Farquhar

David Huff e-mailed me this morning about a Sotec 3120X laptop that sells at Office Depot, Wal-Mart, Sam’s, Bestbuy.com, and possibly other places, for around $900 and asked if I knew anything about it.
It would appear not many people do. I found a handful of discussions on Usenet, including a couple of people who claim to have bought one. They described it as quiet, cool-running, and fast. One user said it was faster than his Dell 1.4 GHz P4 at work. (Which I don’t doubt, because the P4 is a horribly inefficient chip–the Tualatin-based Celeron is the better processor, and with its 100 MHz FSB and 256K onboard cache, it’s very nearly a P3. Its specs aren’t far off from the last P3s, the chip Intel didn’t want to sell because it made the P4 look so bad.)

One user complained about the keyboard. The itty-bitty spacebar would drive me nuts. But the only laptop keyboards I’ve ever used and halfway liked were Thinkpads. You definitely pay for the privelige–the keyboards had better be good, considering the price.

Back to the Sotec. One user reported it’s less than an inch and a half thick. It has a mobile Celeron 1.2 GHz, a SiS 630T chipset (with integrated video), a 20 GB HD, 256 MB of SDRAM, 12.1″ LCD screen, LAN and modem built in, a combo DVD/CD-RW drive, and a PCMCIA slot for expansion. It weighs 4.4 pounds, and its lithium ion battery specifies a life expectancy of about 2.5 hours. It runs Windows XP Home.

What it doesn’t have: serial or parallel ports, floppy drive, or PS/2 ports. Definitely legacy-free here. Depending on your intentions, that may or may not matter to you. (I find myself dealing with floppies a lot more often than I’d like, but part of that is because of my job.) No Firewire either, so this isn’t an instant portable video-editing machine. One user reports its memory maxes out at 384 megs. Apparently there’s 128 megs non-replaceable, and another 128-meg stick you can replace with a 256 to get to 384.

So what about Sotec? A Usenet suggests they’re not a newcomer. A post from 1995 asked for parts for a 386sx notebook manufactured by the company. There are suggestions that Sotec has made notebooks for Gateway, Dell, and Winbook in the past.

The price is definitely right, and the feature set is definitely right. It’s not a performance laptop, but most people don’t need performance laptops. It’ll read e-mail and run a word processor and presentation graphics and browse the Web just fine.

Is it a risk? Absolutely. Any laptop is. But having all the stuff integrated minimizes compatibility concerns. One of my biggest gripes about laptops has always been getting them onto networks. Usually it’s easy. When it’s not, you can just about forget it. Or you can count on networking breaking something else.

That leaves reliability. The part that most often fails is the hard drive. That’s luck of the draw. I’ve seen a lot more dead Hitachi laptop drives than IBMs. Some of my readers agree with me. At least one tells me he sees lots of dead IBMs and never sees a dead Hitachi. But I know you can’t count on getting an IBM laptop drive even in an IBM Thinkpad–occasionally those ship with Hitachi drives.

All I can say is, keep a backup of any important data you’ll keep on this or any laptop. And be ready to buy a replacement hard drive in a year or two. At least they’re not terribly expensive.

Can I recommend it? Not without seeing it and spending some time with it. From looking at the picture, I think they tried to cram way too many keys into too small of a space and they’d have been much better off without some of them.

But the price is definitely right. It’s powerful enough to be useful until it dies. With 1.2 GHz of CPU muscle and 256 megs of RAM, it’ll always run Windows XP well, and if some future version of Windows manages to outgrow it, there’ll always be a Linux that’ll run very nicely on it. It’ll give much better battery life than a P4, and it’ll outrun any low-end P4 as well. (P4-based laptops aren’t a good buy right now.)

And it’s small and light, which I know matters a lot to some people. (I’m old enough to have serviced one of the old Compaq luggables. I never had to carry one with me, but since I know and remember those, I have a hard time listening to anyone complain about the size and weight of any modern laptop.) Don’t buy one sight unseen. But don’t write it off sight unseen either.

A tip for amateur moviemakers: Record everything!

Dave Farquhar Video ,

Last Updated on September 30, 2010 by Dave Farquhar

Today was our first snow of the year. It started at 6 this morning and was supposed to be flurries with accumulation of a fraction of an inch. It’s still snowing right now and I suspect there’s a good two inches on the ground. But the long commute isn’t bothering me. Scraping snow isn’t bothering me.
I got called in to work early and didn’t have a chance to record any of the snowfall. That’s what’s bothering me.

You see, I’ve got this idea festering in my head. It’s a story that’ll make a great three-minute video, and it involves snowfall. A few snippets filmed today would have worked just fine.

I’m home now and I’ve got time to set up the camera, but the daylight is long gone. My opportunity passed me by. But it reminded me of a principle: Record everything. EVERYTHING. You never know when you’ll need it.

So the next time there’s a beautiful sunny day without a cloud in the sky, get out the camera and record a couple of minutes of it. Capture the birds singing and the full trees swaying in the wind. When autumn comes and the trees are changing their colors, film a couple of minutes of it. Record a couple of minutes of a thunderstorm. And record a snowfall.

If you’re going on a trip, take the camera. Record something distinctive about the place you’re going. Record anything you come across that’s safe and legal and halfway interesting. Define “interesting” as something your next-door neighbor doesn’t see every day.

Example: While driving around in downtown Kansas City last week, while stopped at a stoplight, there was an obvious drug deal going on in a gas station parking lot to the right. That’s something my next-door neighbor doesn’t see every day. Legally I was entitled to record it too–I was observing from public property. Now was it safe for me to be recording it? Good question.

Another example: We were walking around in Crown Center, an indoor shopping mall known for exotic stuff. Lots of interesting things to see there. Also something my neighbor doesn’t see every day. Perfectly safe. But illegal to record–Crown Center is private property. There were news cameras set up outside. They could record what was going on outside the building, from the public street.

Sometimes you can’t take a video camera where you’re going. So take a still camera. Digital is better for video purposes, of course, but take what you have. A ’70s-style Polaroid is better than nothing. A still shot (or series of still shots) of that drug deal going on might have been safer to shoot than a minute of video, and just as dramatic, if not more. And a still shot of something that doesn’t move is just as good as video of something that moves. You can pan and zoom on a still shot to make it move, or take a series of still shots from different angles.

One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that Gatermann’s just as likely to have a camera with him as he is shoes. And he gets a lot of really good stuff in the most unlikely of places. One of the pictures of me at the top of this page was taken in a restaurant, and the other was taken onboard Metrolink, which is St. Louis’ mass-transit train.

Also remember that mixing media works. It doesn’t really matter too much if some of your material is digital video, some of it’s analog video, some of it’s single stills, and some of it’s a series of stills. Nor does it matter if some of it is color and some of it black and white. Contrast can have a dramatic effect too. If all your stuff’s the same, figure out how to make it work. If all of it’s different, figure out how to make that work. Just remember that differences will naturally call attention to themselves, so figure out how to take advantage of that when it’s a good thing and to downplay it when it’s not.

Record things even if you don’t have an immediate use in mind for them. Sometimes creativity is having an idea in mind and then going and getting the parts for what you want to make. And sometimes creativity is looking at the parts you have and figuring out what you can make out of it. But usually it’s a little bit of both.

News flash: Windows is cheaper than Linux!

Dave Farquhar Windows , , ,

Last Updated on September 30, 2010 by Dave Farquhar

Lots of people asked me today what I thought about the IDC study that says Windows is cheaper than Linux. I yawned.
Consider the source. Microsoft paid for the thing. You think IDC was going to come back and say Linux is cheaper all around if Microsoft was paying the bill?

Yes, sometimes it’s cheaper. If all your sysadmins know NT and don’t know Unix well, then yes, Windows is going to be cheaper.

But I can think of some times when it’s not. Like if downtime means anything to you at all. My clients scream when I have to reboot an NT server. But I can count on having to reboot a busy NT server once a year due to a lockup or general server stupidity. And virtually every security update is going to require a reboot. I can slipstream a Linux security update almost every time without a reboot–unless it’s a patch to the kernel, which is rare. With the right distribution, I can even upgrade distributions without a reboot. Try that when going from Windows NT or 2000 to something else.

I saw a story on DebianPlanet today about someone bragging he’d done a server migration in 3 hours. You’ll never do that with Windows. But you can do a migration even faster than that–copy everything over somehow to the new server, either through a tape backup or disk cloning, then adjust /etc/fstab as necessary, plop down a generic kernel straight from a distribution, configure the NIC if it’s not a close relative of the old one, and reboot. If you want to get fancy, compile a custom kernel tuned to the new server’s hardware. You can do it all in an hour. We dread the day any of our Windows servers is destroyed by some kind of accident and we can’t find an identical replacement. It’ll take us a minimum of 5 hours to install and update the OS and re-install whatever apps are on it and re-create whatever shares are on it, because that’s how long it takes us to set up a new one out of the box.

And maybe you’ve got picky clients like some of mine. One of them decided out of the blue that they didn’t like how their network shares were named. Never mind that everyone just calls it “the O drive.” Yes, they’re anal-retentive morons, but the client is always right. So one of my coworkers spent a thrilling Saturday un-sharing folders and re-sharing them with new names. On a Samba server, you can just load a text file, change some names, and restart the daemon. Done. The job that took 6 hours and was full of potential for human error is reduced to a few minutes. There’s still potential for human error, but it’s much less because the job isn’t as tedious and boring. And it’s much quicker to fix.

And don’t even get me started on tracking server licenses and CALs. Many organizations, when faced with a Microsoft audit, find it cheaper to just re-buy all of them than to spend the time tracking down the documentation that proves they’re honest. With Linux and open source, there’s no danger of having to pay for something twice, not counting the upgrades. (Those are free too, if you want them.)

Phillies’ signing of Thome is about confidence, not wins

Dave Farquhar Baseball , , , ,

The Phillies just signed the most popular slugger in Cleveland Indians’ history, inking a 6-year, $87 million deal.
Analysts note that with Thome in the lineup instead of Travis Lee, the Phillies would have scored about 70 more runs last season. They still would have been fourth in the league, even with those extra 70 runs. That’s not enough to guarantee you’ll be the fourth team in the playoffs.

Analysts also noted that for the past few years, Thome has spent a good deal of time as the DH rather than playing in the field, and they doubt Thome will be capable of playing first base for the last year or even two years of his contract.

Also, last week, Philadelphia signed David Bell to play third base, replacing Placido Polanco. Bell’s a better hitter than Polanco, but not by much. Bell’s a better fielder than Polanco (at least at third), but not by very much.

But this trend isn’t about fielding. It’s not so much even about scoring runs. I’m not even convinced it’s about winning ball games. This is about confidence.

You see, a year ago, the Phillies had the best third baseman in baseball and the second-best third baseman in their team’s history (second only to Mike Schmidt, who is one of the three best third basemen who ever lived). The Phillies offered Scott Rolen a pile of money to sign a long-term contract. But Scott Rolen wasn’t convinced the Phillies wanted to win badly enough. He refused a couple of offers, slumped, got into some arguments with manager Larry Bowa, and eventually was traded to the Cardinals for whatever they could manage to get for him, preferring that to losing him to free agency.

It wasn’t that long ago that Philadelphia lost Curt Schilling, one of the best pitchers in the game today, pretty much the same way.

Rolen rediscovered his swing, and helped the Cardinals get to the postseason. Schilling dueled Randy Johnson for the Cy Young Award two years straight, and along with Johnson was the hero of the 2001 World Series, and was practically unbeatable up until the 2002 postseason.

Meanwhile, the Phillies looked like they’d given up and entered a rebuilding phase as they got ready to open an expensive new ballpark. And Philadelphia fans are notoriously unforgiving. We’re talking fans who’ll boo Santa Claus.

And the Phillies have lots of young, exciting players whose contracts are running out.

Signing David Bell and Jim Thome proves the Phillies are willing to spend some money. This will make unhappy players play better (witness Scott Rolen’s performance after coming to St. Louis versus his so-so performance in Philadelphia last year). Bell has become one of those players who always seems to find himself playing for a winner. Young players need that influence. Bell, at least theoretically, brings value beyond the numbers he puts up. If it were about numbers, the Phillies would have acquired Joe Randa, who makes much less money, and the Phillies could have had Joe Randa for a bag of baseballs and a vial of dirt scraped off one of Mike Schmidt’s spikes. But Joe Randa’s never played for a winner.

And Jim Thome’s a big, burly, buff guy who hits monsterous home runs by the truckload and excites fans. The Phillies haven’t had a truly great power hitter since Mike Schmidt. In his best year, Schmidt hit 48 home runs and batted .286. Jim Thome hit 52 home runs and batted .304 last year.

In 1997, the St. Louis Cardinals were missing something. They had the opportunity to trade for Mark McGwire. McGwire hit a bunch of towering home runs and captured the fans’ imagination and helped the Cardinals lure some other great players, most notably center fielder Jim Edmonds, to St. Louis.

The Phillies want Jim Thome to come in and be Mark McGwire.

The Phillies covet former Braves pitcher Tom Glavine. Glavine’s been one of the best left-handed pitchers in the National League for the past decade. The Braves and Mets are also interested in Glavine. But the Braves made him a half-hearted offer and seem to be more interested in unloading salary than in making another playoff run. The Mets are coming off a last-place finish and they’re trying to find someone willing to take Jeromy Burnitz and Mo Vaughn’s contracts. Meanwhile, the Phillies have just signed two of the most coveted players in the free agent market. The Phillies’ offer is comparable to the Mets’ offer. Glavine wants money, of course, but he also wants to win another World Series before he retires. Who do you think he’s most interested in pitching for now?

David Bell alone doesn’t make the Phillies a better team. Jim Thome alone makes the Phillies a marginally better team. David Bell plus Jim Thome plus Tom Glavine signal a commitment to win, at least for the next few years, which will draw out the best in the players they have and make other players interested, as well as draw fans, which creates revenue, which can be used to pursue other quality players.

Those are the ingredients of a dynasty.

Now the Phillies just have to figure out how to mix them properly.