Comment Re:Can it diagnose for Ebola? (Score 1) 51
Can it diagnose for Ebola? If everybody wears wearable gadgets, can we force-quarantine people based on the data from their devices?
don't give anybody any ideas
Can it diagnose for Ebola? If everybody wears wearable gadgets, can we force-quarantine people based on the data from their devices?
don't give anybody any ideas
Actually, as a former short time IBMer, I think you're both right. IBM core has lifers that have been sucked in and have worked there for years, most without skulls that ate actually marketable outside of IBM (yes, really). This self feeds where the vast majority internally still are riding on skills from 20yrs ago, and so the company competes over the past several years by bleeding out acquisitions it makes as it tries to buy its way into new markets without a real coherent strategy (see everything from storage platforms to their analytics acquisitions over past several years). Its a sales company where they try and compete on their long, slow, stodgy, established contracts, every once in awhile buying a new company and then rolling the capabilities under existing software contracts and agreements, adjusting the margin charge yearly to justify.
This hasn't been working for several years at this point, anyone who understands basic financials can see the company has been playing financial games for about the last 4yrs (Money Mag gets credit for being one of the first mainstream places to call this out about a yr ago, even questuoning Buffets inVestment).
So yes, they are tech in the sense they invest quite a bit into r&d to establish a patent hold, if someone else comes up with a remotely competent product that sells, IBM goes through this portfolio to attain a royalty stake while divesting itself of the risk.
Does that sound like a tech company?
That sounds a lot like Novell in the early 2000s.
128,908 + 14,337j feet....
...just when I thought I was over the PTSD from my electrical networks class, the fetal position your joke induced demonstrates otherwise.
I don't use a smart phone you insensitive clod.
And actually I don't
I'm jealous. My original RAZR died years ago. Best phone I ever had though.
I'll accept the idea that somewhere somebody has so many servers and so little space that a blade center was the only way they could achieve the density they needed.
Except I've never seen it -- all the blade centers I've ever seen have been partially full and the equivilent 1U and 2U servers probably would have fit in the same or less space than the blade chasis was occupying.
And almost always there's a mongolian clusterfuck when they decide to add blades to the chasis -- which they inevitably do, because they have so much money sunk into the blades that there's no way out from under it.
The mongolian clusterfuck is the result of the byzantine cofiguration rules each vendor has for determining a blade's NIC or FC mapping with the blade center's (overpriced) internal switch bays. Half or full height? LoM or mezzanine slot? Which mez slot? Which blade slot? Oh, you want an extra NIC on that blade? Sorry, the mapping requires an additional switching module which will cost you more than any decent L3 48 port gig switch.
Whatever the savings from the blade center (and maybe in some metered situation there is power savings of couple hundred watts) is easily lost in hours of troubleshooting when trying to do something different.
Blade centers always look like some kind of pre-virtualization version of server consolidation that became obsolete once 24U of servers could easily be run on 8U or less of VM host and SAN. They would be a lot more interesting if their mapping regeimes weren't hard wired -- blade advocates give me blahblah "point of failure" about a switchable/configurable backplane.
The HP c-class isn't that bad. It's been pretty set it and forget it. The ESX runs off of an SD card (or maybe it's just a boot image, there's a VM team that deals with that stuff), then all the datastores are hosted on a SAN. The blades themselves are just compute and memory.
Of course your original argument still stands, I've never seen a case where real estate is at such a premium that blades are the only way to go. Usually I see racks and racks of storage taking up room instead of servers, but for me they make adding/configuring physical servers easy. No storage and networking teams to send tickets for configuring zoning and vlans. I just go into the bladecenter and connect one to the other.
I will present exhibit 1:
Billy Ray Cyrus's Achy Breaky Heart.
Shouldn't this be over to the side with the rest of the advertisements?
Nooit, lekker! Ja, on my way in my bakkie right now, stuck by a robot. Will set up a braai by the bokkie machine as soon as I get there and enjoy the wifi without paying a buck for the kif. Let's hope the reception isn't all kak.
What's your pluck?
Coke doesnt cause obesity any more than chocolate cake does. Consuming a lot of those certainly might cause obesity, however.
people don't usually eat 3 slices of chocolate cake every day though, or casually eat chocolate cake while sitting at their desk, then going and getting another slice when the first one is gone.
As a former Cold Warrior (both launch officer side and staff analytical mathematician side), I now appreciate the bitterness I saw in former WW2 warriors when they would see a Japanese car.
Grumbling at a Japanese car because "We beat the Japs, now you won't buy American cars!" isn't quite the same as "I manned a US nuclear silo during the Cold War, and now the USA is refreshing the nuclear weapons stockpile". Maybe "we beat the Ruskies, and now you order brides via mail from Russia!" or "I manned a US Flying Fortress during WWII and now the USA is refreshing the Air Force with new bombers" might be closer to the two expressed sentiments. One is "I've been trained to hate a particular enemy", the other is "War. War never changes."
I read the whole summary trying to find why the author appreciates the bitterness of the former WW2 warriors. I kept expecting to see that the US was contracting with Russians or buying all Russian gear to maintain/refresh the stockpile, but nothing. I am still wondering why that is. It's not like he was *fighting* the nuclear weapons or that the Cold Warriors were working day and night to get rid of the US stockpile. This is going to keep me up at night.
Historically, governments justified the "certification" requirements imposed on people wishing to pursue various professions by the consumers' inability to share the information required to make an informed choice of a service provider.
For example, arriving to a new city, you don't know, what taxi company is decent and which hires serial rapists — the city hall should issue "medallions" to the good drivers and fight attempts by the non-vetted to provide the same services without paying the authorities their due.
Uber is showing, how the consumer feedback, that's easy to provide and is immediately available to anyone with a smart phone, obviates the need for such certifications — along with the associated costs and the abuse-potential.
Unfortunately, somebody will have to be the first person to write the "Woke up in the morning upside down in a ditch with my pants missing. Would not use again." review.
Looks like Uber is becoming the next Amazon by pursuing every possible angle to maintain growth while in search of nonexistent profits. Looking forward to the Uber Phone rollout.
The new singing telegram...
Honest question - in the 21st century, why do we still have trained and licensed pharmacists? Why can't a monkey with basic training operate a computer that has access to up-to-date pharmacy database containing information on interactions and etc. dispense pills?
An obsolete profession if I ever saw one.
If it's an honest question, I'll give you an honest answer. The pharmacist is not just dispensing pills. They know more about drugs and medication than the doctors prescribing them in the first place, and are kind of the last check in the healthcare industry to make sure that you don't end up with a drug combination that will kill you. A lot of pharmacists have doctoral degrees, so they've spent 8 years studying chemistry and drugs compared to the semester or two required for an MD. You can also talk to a pharmacist and they'll recommend a course of treatment for you or steer you in the right direction. Pharmacists can give immunizations (you've noticed all of the flu shot, etc signs outside of Walgreens this time of year, haven't you?). It's also within a pharmacist's right to not give you drugs if, say, you're all whacked out and show up with a prescription for 100 vicodin, or you give them another reason to suspect that you are abusing or about to sell whatever you just showed up to purchase. There's a lot more judgement and critical thinking involved in the job than filling bottles with pills, and also a shit-ton of paperwork that monkeys are not very good at. That critical thinking part is where a database of drug interactions comes short.
And you trust the cashier making $3 an hour after taxes not to be stealing your controlled substances?
So long as the bags are sealed in the pharmacy and the contents are not noted on the outside, it should be fine.
You obviously have no idea how much a pharmacist makes.
Just about everything that is bad for you today is being negated a few years later. Can't find the link today, but at one point "research" showed that jeans were responsible for higher risk of cancer. So I will just continue to live my life and enjoy it to the fullest. If something kills me, at least I had a good time.
I remember that one...I was in middle school at the time. In response, I refused to wear denim for a couple years until I realized that it really didn't make any sense sometime in high school.
A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable. -- Thomas Jefferson
