On Fri, 2004-11-19 at 12:51, Danny Sauer wrote:
george wrote regarding 'Re: [SLE] SuSE 9.2 and future packaging' on Fri, Nov 19 at 10:54:
On 11/19/04 11:13 AM, "Danny Sauer"
wrote: My time's somewhat valuable, whereas DVD readers are cheap. Personally, I'd prefer to just get a modern DVD drive and stick it in my old, outdated computer that can't play most current DVD movies or read the current format of DVD media, rather than waste all night downloading a bunch of packages...
Get a faster internet service :)
I've got a full T1's worth of bandwidth to my house. It's fast (and a bit of an involved story), but it's still not nearly as fast as a DVD drive. At typical sysadmin salaries, $10 buys about 15 minutes of my time. I'll bet I can swap out an optical drive and copy a few packages off of the DVD more than 15 minutes faster than someone on even a "fast" network connection could download any significant number of packages. So in one session (perhaps "at install time") the new drive pays for itself.
I would propose that SuSE provide a link to froogle.com, which lists a new ATAPI DVD drive (which reads double-layer media) for as low as $19. Yes, $19. Sell your old crappy drive on eBay for $5-$10, since there's a new sucker online ever minute, and you've made back 1/2 of the cost to move to a faster drive. Put the DVD drive in a networked machine, NFS export it, and install everywhere from that one, $10 drive. You'll save more than $10 worth of time.
If your time is _that_ valuable, you would not do all this.
Really? What's a faster method that would conserve my time better? My time's indeed valuable, so I'd much appreciate tips. It takes maybe 5 minutes to create an ad for an old DVD drive, and it's not much work to order a drive + install it. It's not "all this" much work, considering the signifcant time savings. If money's tight, well, someone who can't swing a $20 drive might want to reconsider spending >$50 on software that's available for free in a few weeks, esp when said person can't even use the paid-for media to begin with.
--Danny, who actually mirrors the ftp site locally and installs from that machine, which trades a bit of initial time investment for an overall time savings
Only thing I get out of George's reply was he likes to be rude and -not- offer anything productive to the list. George, If all you have in a reply is being rude take it elsewhere. It is not appreciated here! -- Ken Schneider UNIX since 1989 SuSE since 1998 * Only reply to the list please*