PEER 1 has created an online community for customers, staff, and friends to get together and share their opinions, knowledge, and ideas around online business and technology. We’ve got quite a few members in the short amount of time this community has been active and I’m hoping to see a lot more.

I believe that when a company, especially as large and well known such as PEER 1, comes into the communities for reasons other than marketing and selling…it’s always a great thing. When it comes to business, technology, or just about anything in life, the learning never ends. I really hope to see the community grow and I’m looking forward to meeting new people from around the world sharing ideas and opinions and interacting with them all.

So for those of you who just happen to stumble across this blog post, come join me, PEER 1 staff, family, and friends, at the new PEER 1 Community.

Does anyone remember the dot-com days, the rivalry between Sun and Microsoft?

Sun’s famous motto “The Network is the Computer” threatened to make Microsoft’s desktop monopoly obsolete, and visions of a world of thin clients running Java backed up by expensive Sun servers were dancing in then-CEO Scott McNealy’s head.

According to an article titled Microsoft and Sun Expand Strategic Alliance, it seems that Sun and Microsoft are getting along better than ever. An announcement was made at a press conference that Sun has signed up to become a Windows Server Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM), selling Sun x64-based servers that come bundled with Microsoft Windows Server 2003.
A flow chart that they’ve included, shows the compatibility for Windows on Sun Systems.

This is actually a little saddening for me to see, but this new direction is sure to be a winner for all involved.

Quoted:

The deal covers four main areas of collaboration for Microsoft and Sun: selling OEM Windows Server hardware, ensuring that Solaris is supported as a guest operating system on Microsoft’s virtualization products including Virtual PC, expanding the partnership in Microsoft’s Mediaroom TV-over-Internet (IPTV) project, and the construction of a Sun hardware and software interoperability lab on the Microsoft campus.

Will this be a win for Sun? I’m not so sure….

We’ve all been in this situation at one time or another (or several times), I know I have. I came across a neat little article from FOSSwire that will help out in these situations. Installing a bad driver can cause utter frustration when your system freezes up and ctrl+alt+backspace isn’t working. You want to hit the power button as a first reaction but you know that could possibly cause more damage than what’s already been caused (especially if your hard drive is still being written to).

I wasn’t aware that the Linux kernel had a secret little key command that let’s me reboot my system easily:

• Hold down the Alt and SysRq (Print Screen) keys.
• While holding those down, type the following in order. Note that nothing will appear to happen until the last letter is pressed: REISUB
• Watch your computer reboot magically.

What the individual keys do in that sequence are not as important as what it does as a whole: stops all programs, unmounts all drives, and reboots. Certainly a lot safer than just hitting the power button.

So keep in mind, when configuring a system and something gets buggered, REISUB will help save the day. This isn’t something that you should try just to reboot your computer. Anytime you can reboot your computer normally, you should.

Dedication and determination. Many young people now a day set their goals early on in life. What used to be goals of becoming doctors and fire fighters is now a goal of becoming the next Bill Gates, the lead network engineer of a large corporation, a video game developer, or anything that has to do with technology.

Today, it doesn’t require a college degree for these young aspiring people to reach their goals in the technical field. Ask Henry Pugsley if he would agree. Henry, while still in high school started taking math, literature, and computer classes at community college at the age of 15 to get a head start. In his spare time, Henry taught himself scripting, programming, networking, and anything else he could absorb. After graduation, he started going to the University of Central Florida for Computer Engineering and then Computer Science. After 4 semesters of what was essentially high school review, he decided college wasn’t the way to go. Before he left UCF, he began working for a local ISP as a support tech and within 2 years was doing everything from T1 installations to router upgrades and Linux server administration.

At the age of 21, Henry took a big step in his life and moved away from Florida, leaving his friends and family to move to San Antonio, Texas to work for one of the largest managed hosting providers around, Rackspace Managed Hosting. At this point life confirmed that leaving college was a good idea, since the dot com bubble had just burst and experience counted more than a degree. Again, Henry began as a support technician and after working there for only 10 months the founder of Rackspace called upon him to help begin a new company – ServerBeach. Henry then went from a 2nd shift support technician to a developer and systems integrator in the blink of an eye, faced with helping to design and develop a new business in the dedicated hosting market.

After several years working with ServerBeach, being a developer, a network administrator, a support technician, and other various roles within the 5-person company, Henry decided it was time to move on to something more challenging.

Today, Henry is now working for a fast growing privately held company in Dallas, Texas putting together his own Research and Development department, earning a 6-figure income. He has worked for successful startup companies and helped more mature companies determine their path in the world of technology.

I chose to write about Henry because his choices in life showed dedication and determination at such a young age. Today while still under the age of 30, he’s a very successful man in the tech field and is steadily moving up. There are several young people in the world today building their own start-ups, working towards their goals, being creative, being visionaries. I applaud young people such as Henry as they’re proof that you don’t always need that college degree to be successful. I am in no way, shape, or form discouraging anyone from going to college. There are definitely reasons to go and I also applaud those who make it through college and become successful.

Visionaries, creative minds, the dedicated and determined are our leaders of today and create the path for our leaders of the future. We need to encourage our younger generations to be creative, to expand their visions and put it to work, teach them how to apply their ‘Action Habit’ (which you can read more in an earlier post).

AMD to open up graphics specs! All I can say is…it’s about time! AMD’s representative announced at the kernel summit that the company has made a decision to enable the development of open source drivers for all of its (ATI) graphics processors from the R500 going forward. Specifications will soon be available and a skeleton driver as well. It’s speculated that a free 2D driver is anticipated by the end of the year.

Now they no longer have to wait for ATI to write drivers and other people can improve the drivers without ATI. Things are looking good!