thechangelab.com

About thechangelab

“If it’s not in the lab, you don’t need it.”

So said my friend when he first proposed this site to me.

So where’s the lab? Well, most people think of the “lab” as being in the dark, secret rooms of the mega-corps like Win/Tel, IBM, Apple or AMD. Fact of the matter is, for those of you reading this, the lab is right here at home.

Development doesn’t take millions of dollars. Development takes passion and interest. Same goes for injenuity. Plus a lot of patience along the way…

My own lab is in a corner of my living room. Here, I have an old Dell desktop running XP Home – ha ha ha – sitting next to a much older box. Something I inherited from my previous employer, back when Win NT was king. However, Like a Frankenstein that evolved, I moved the guts from it to an even older Packard-Bell, then back again. That old Packard-Bell now sleeps quietly in a storage locker with a working install of Slackware. The install itself sleeps quietly on a 1 GB HDD ripped from an old family PC.

That’s not interesting though. The interesting part is when my friends see what joy I take in playing the role of Dr. Frankenstein: breathing life into the dead.

But this is just my story. Other sites like Dusty Computing tell the stories of others. This one, is meant to show how other people have brought “the lab” home. And that is what thechangelab is about.

Now, we’re not really interested in how you installed ten different Linux distros on your machine and got them all to boot. Nor is this a platform for how you hacked your installation of XP Home to XP Pro. Nor how you got your old Mac running Windows apps. While interesting, they only hold interest as facts in and of themselves. But what practical or meaningful value do they have for the person who did them? For this reason, we don’t care what OS you use, nor if you even use one at all.

We want to know how you did something really interesting with your stuff. Even if your the NCSA at the University of Illinois running a cluster built from PS2s. (Incidentally, these people also gave us the first gui web browser.)

This isn’t to say we wouldn’t discuss topics like AMD and Intel’s race for X number of cores on their next CPU. But only so much of this can hold any real meaning. 4 cores? 8 cores? Do I really care? especially if my box still feels like it’s dragging its feet. What irritates me is how too many software companies JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND that better does NOT mean you must buy a new computer to run it. Of course, if you’re a gamer it’s a whole different scene. But a lot of us just don’t have that kind of money to drop. On the other hand, such information is still valuable for those of us building, upgrading or replacing their own systems now or in the near future.

So what story do you have to tell?

From the editor,
toshiya.