Winning is Everything at Robert Pogson

I feel like a winner these days. In spite of all kinds of bumps in the road of life, a lot of good has happened this year. Today, for instance, I needed my spool of cable to connect a computer in a convenient place to an outlet in an inconvenient place. To my horror, I could not find it anywhere. The last place I remembered using it was the classroom across the hall from mine. I had forgotten that I strung that cable in anticipation of the copier guys visiting when I made a cable for them in the supply room. Lo, a teacher found it in her way in the supply room. Fortunately, it had my name on it as I brought it up in luggage. Other good things have been:

Winning the school-built toboggan race with my improved classroom desk…
Winning third place a few times when there were only three entries…
Finding an employer and staff really willing to accept GNU/Linux for the performance

Seriously, apart from some awards as a student, the last time I competed and won something was 1958 in a Field Day at a one-room school in the bush. I had forgotten how good it is to win.

I was surprised to find in my in-box, an invitation to enter a contest by AMD for some neat processors and a motherboard to go with it. We are talking serious multicore CPUs and a quad-socket motherboard with 32 memory slots. Unfortunately, it is only open to residents of the USA. Too bad, I could envisage this thing being the heart of the ultimate GNU/Linux terminal server:

everything in one box: terminal servers, web servers, file servers, authentication, …
about one core for every two client machines
enough RAM to cache everything in ECC
a bunch of gigabit/s NICs

Compare that with one core for thirty or so clients and you can see a machine that rarely lets anyone wait and you would have adequate power for the occasional big job like compiling the Linux kernel or some 3D graphics in Blender or editing AV stuff. I doubt my non-budget would be enough to populate the RAM slots but it is good to have challenges. I might be willing to host a few BINGO nights to pay for it.

My Mission

My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.

My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.

I have shown GNU/Linux to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers over the years and will continue in some way doing that until I die in spite of the opposition.

1 Response to “Winning is Everything”

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1 Richard Chapman Mar 15th, 2010 at 8:57 pm

Gathering knowledge can be painful. I must have enough junk to fill a hardware store. If I’ve learned anything from my years of acquisition experience it’s that if you can’t find it, you don’t own it.