Ask HN: is anyone solving pg's #4 (Outsource IT) for laptops? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: is anyone solving pg's #4 (Outsource IT) for laptops?

4 pointslifeisstillgood13 comments

Everyone likes FreeBSD on the server. I also like it for my laptop. I thought for a while I was the only one.

My laptop just dies on startx now...

As a student, there used to be no opportunity cost to re-configuring my workstation. It was kind of the job. Then the opportunity cost slowly crept up over the years, until, well, I cannot take two billable days to play and rebuild. It really will be cheaper to buy an new laptop.

Now, I could do what everyone else seems to be doing, and buy a Macbook Air.

But then I would not be running FreeBSD anymore. At least not the FreeBSD I know and love.

So, I thought of two comments from pg

  1. if you are going to build the next google, 
  you want to build the search engine that the  
  top 10,000 hackers use.

  2. Solve idea #4 - outsource IT

  You can take practically anything users still 
  depend on IT departments for and base a startup 
  on it, and you will have the enormous force of 
  their present dissatisfaction pushing you  
  forward.

What I am asking is - is there anyone building (or just certifying) laptops for the top 10,000 hackers, such that buying a laptop from them is almost a guarantee that I will suffer no more hardware issues than I would with a mac.

I will pay a premium not to sit in front of a black screen with client deadlines approaching. Really a big premium.

Can I outsource my hardware support to them? If they succeed I can see them being well placed to build the development machines for the next 100,000 (and me somewhere below that). And then build the next iPad.

I am not claiming to be a top 10,000 hacker, nor any use to the BSD community, but if these people exist and are certifying laptops / fixing up the drivers they find are spotty, please let me know.

http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html

The efficient way to do this is probably to setup multiple machines in parallel.

My line of thinking is that you go out and buy three identical machines.

Spend the two days messing with everything and get a laptop just the way to like it.

Make a disk image of the first machine and write it to the other two.

When something in the machine breaks, open one of the spares and restore work files from backup. For me this would take less than an hour.

When you get to the last laptop buy three new ones.

If it takes you two days to do this initial setup you should have to do that fewer than once every three years or so.

Scary. I like it.

>When you get to the last laptop buy three new ones

You'd have to do this on the second laptop. If you do it on the last one, then you don't have a spare machine and have downtime while setting up your new machine(s).

As an "IT Guy" this deeply interests me. I outsource some things, and many others I run in-house. Typically I'll outsource something when I don't have the time to do it myself, and the cost to have someone else do it is reasonable (or, if I can take the time saved and work on something more important).

The thing with outsourcing IT stuff is that when something goes wrong, it can go disastrously wrong. Think about it - you could find a freebsd guy and pay him a retainer to keep him 'on call' whenever you need him. But, what happens if you need him desperately right now, and his car won't start (or he gets hit by a bus, or misses your call)?

To answer your question specifically, take a look at NASA. They have to build hardware that doesn't fail. They use old, tested technology, and they build multiple redundancies. Are you willing to pay double (at least) for old technology? Would you be happy with a 486, if you knew it was never going to crash?

I suspect that this is why many of us pay the "Apple tax".

This is a _hard_ problem to solve. That's why it's on PG's list

I'll just be blunt. I think you're SOL. People were providing these types of services for FreeBSD* and Linux back in the 90s into the early, early 2000s but almost all of them dropped off the face of the Earth.

Your best bet seems to buy last year's or (preferably) older model of a well-supported ThinkPad. Something with mature "support".

* BSDi/Telenet/Name-Du-Jour being one example for FreeBSD systems, before their divisions died and they were bought by Wind River.

Shit out of luck?

It seems an odd ecosystem - companies selling pc components must see the writing on the wall. Windows no longer fits all sizes, it's out ofthe mobile / tablet race, it's nearly out of the corporate desktop space (headless Linux running a web browser, people complain give em an ipad) and so which os is going to provide growth? Apple won't let the oems into it's patch, especially with their super tight manufacturing.

Never mind - two laptops, github and tarsnap and regular tests of the backup process.

Sounds nice, but it's been demonstrated there isn't a profitable business reason to do so. I'm still bitter about the FreeBSD/BSDi/Telenet thing.

if your a hacker why would you need that?

Because I am a hacker with a per hour cost.

I love messing around with BSD, and then blogging about it (itmanagerscookbook.com / ciocookbook.com) but, I simply cannot afford downtime like this for things that are totally avoidable, by leveraging the intelligence of others.

Apple collates that intelligence and "curates" it for me.

But they are not "open" - and if there was someone even similarly testing hardware and polishing drivers then for me it is worth paying a premium, following their hardware instructions, and having a BSD machine that does what I want without the fear of sitting in front of the blank screen and spending a long time getting everything back to where I want it.

:-(

What about using a virtual machine? That way when you have a hardware failure you just switch computers, even on an old one temporarily and are still able to work properly?

That's what I'm doing to ease when I'm working from my parents' home for example where they have multiple computers and I use one available.

That's quite a good idea to combine with the whole backup routine.

In theory I could carry the whole thing on a USB stick.

Now I'm curious - what kind of premium would you pay for this? 10%? 25% 100%? (keeping in mind the premium people pay for apple hardware ~%100%)

Ok, I paid 300 for this laptop (I know - but I booted and ran bsd on it before purchase)

anyway, I just lost nearly twice that in day rates

so frankly you could sting me for 2000 pa depending on your guarantees - which is something like a MacBook pro every six months

dunno - I am going to go for the n+1 laptop idea. I looked like an idiot this weekend and that's not helping

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