None of those is an honest review. The rest are trolls and jokes in poor taste.

(Take it from an alt.tasteless award winner.)

In this case, the autopilot appears to have worked for an Alpine landing.

(For certain values of landing.)

My numbers are similar. My home desktop computers especially seemed to go thru power supplies every couple of years. After having to replace a motor in my refrigerator for the second time (under warranty) the repair tech said it was a symptom of the crappy quality of the AC power mains: brownouts, voltage spikes, etc.

Once I put every computer on a UPS I stopped having to replace power supplies so often. When I upgraded my home AV system, I put everything there on a UPS also.

I highly recommend that you use a UPS between the wall socket and any high value equipment you operate.

(I still had a power supply fail on a UPS, but it was inside a RAID array, and the power supply inside was a cheap 3rd party Chinese wonder. When I replaced it, I bought an additional spare.)

The only hard drives I've had fail have been very old external drives (>8 years) and one inside a laptop that was dropped while operating.

For those of use who haven't coded since their introductory C classes decades ago, and maybe some Matlab or Labview tinkering since, here's a brief and illustrative overview of WTFTPIA.

LOL! Congratulations on coming up with a hair analogy where I failed!

So the Milky Way is more like Donald Trump than Ru Paul.

The important part, which you seem to have missed with your hair analogy, is that recent analysis of its behavior characterizes it as part of the Milky Way, rather than just a tidally-ripped passing galaxy.

It's definitely not "hey look I can make myself 50% taller by styling my hair in a Marge Simpson bouffant."

Really? Pirate Bay? That's like people still using Altavista or Napster.

Kickass kicks ass. Although they're not immune from the copyright cosa nostra thugs either.

If people are that close to the edge then leaving for work an hour earlier / losing an hour's sleep is only a proximate cause to their death.

The root cause is that they were leading a fucked-up life and were susceptible to a final straw. Now, whether any given individual's life is fucked up due to their own choices or not probably runs the gamut from 0 to 1 on probability distribution.

It also sounds good for a video server. I have one attached to my PC-based DVR, with playback clients in other rooms. For 99.9% or more of the data, it's very large files (100s of MB to multiple GB) that are written once and read many times until deleted.

However, since this server is also a backup server, its a RAID array. I wonder if this Shingled format has any effect on RAID performance. A lot of "green" drives do not work well in this RAID setup, causing stuttering video playback when they continually try to go into energy saving modes.

WTF are you talking about? We develop VOIP systems and use VLC to both host and client streaming video all the time, both over LAN and WAN, and it works just fine under both UDP and RTP.

So GOML and HAND.

:,-(

Oh, I agree, I could have prevented a metric fuckton of shit landing in my lap. I know that now. That's just how i learned it the hard way.

Now, any estimate I give includes plenty of margin. Like the top post says, poor managers get worst-case estimates, plus a healthy margin for the inevitable negotiation that will take place.

The same applies for cost estimates. I learned the hard way the first time I was asked to present an estimated cost to complete forced by an unexpected 16-week delay in critical long lead part from an overseas supplier. I made a diligent effort to present an accurate ETC to the customer. No margin, no padding, just my honest, well-documented estimate of the cost to complete the project.

I was expecting to be dealing with the engineers and project managers I'd been working with all along, who were competent technically and I got along with well. But instead, the customer (major aerospace prime contractor) sent in their best hard-ass negotiator who was an MBA with no understanding of the technical side.

Mr. Hard Ass refused to accept that I wasn't bullshitting him. And the engineers I got along with so well didn't do a thing to back me up. They just sat there looking uncomfortable. After two days of going over the schedule and estimate line by line, and me refusing to cut anything other than the slightest costs, Mr. Hard Ass went over my head to the CEO, who agreed to a 25% percent reduction in the estimate across the board. He just ate the cost.

I got dressed down hard for not padding my numbers, but he was decent enough to understand that the ultimate blame lied with the suppliers who waited until 4 weeks before their agreed delivery date to notify us they'd be 16 weeks late. And it was a lesson I will never forget.

No, it's a very common problem in engineering in general, and not unique to software. But the reaction "let's eliminate estimates" appears to be.

As an engineering manager, I learned the hard way many times how estimates turn into deadlines. Your estimate is reported to the manager's manager and so on up the line, and someone uses it in planning their shit.

Your estimate, in which you did not build any schedule margin, then becomes an item in the critical path of someone else's plan, someone who didn't build in any margin either, or —worse— who was pressured to make a completely fictional "plan" which is really just a backwards-calculated paper justification to "prove" that a job could be completed in an impossibly short period of time by assuming nine women can make a baby in one month and things like shipping, reproduction, and quality assurance take place in zero time. This "plan" makes upper management happy. Temporarily.

You, leader of a small team that is working merrily away, accomplishing real work and solving the occasional unexpected problem (OEM pinouts were wrong, widget zeta delayed in shipping, amplifier stage behaving like oscillator, etc.), are asked for a status update. Because of your unexpected problems, your estimated completion date is now two weeks later than your previous estimate.

Now the middle manager, who knew he wasn't going to meet the "plan" he was forced to develop, now has someone to place the blame on. He knows he's going to be in the path of a metric fuckton of shit, but he's placed himself uphill of you.

It's clear even in TFS that the real problem isn't estimation, it's poor program management, lack of requirements management, and often also marketing-driven decision-making.

In other words, the same old shit.

For space-hardened laptops, that is high-resolution.

Then don't forget that many HDMI cables now include Ethernet along with video and audio, so unless you also want to quarantine your video players, stay away from cables labeled HDMI 1.4 (or later).

Personally, I'd rather avoid installing things needing quarantine.