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As you walk by them, pushing everything you own in a shopping cart, since you haven't been able to get a job in forever, due to the "invisible hand" of the "free market" making it much cheaper to have a robot do your job, and you didn't have $50,000,000 to invest....
mark
I'm so old, I remember that when cable first came in, the selling point was that you would never have to watch commercials again.
Really.
And you didn't, in the eighties, into the nineties on some channels.
Fact: back in the sixties, the hard limit from the FCC was something like five minutes of commercials PER HOUR. Last time I recorded an allegedly hour long show off cable, it was 22 min of commercials.
mark
This is.
From Cliff Stoll's Acme Klein Bottles
mark "wish it wasn't quite that expensive...."
So, are they considering putting up solar power satellites, and beaming really cheap power down?
mark
PS The environmental impact study on SPS was done in the US... in the late seventies. No one's willing to front the money....
There really is a difference. However... that difference is in the firmware, and that's where the manufacturers were scamming.
There is a thing called TLER - time to recover from errors. That is, if the drive is trying to write or read from a block, and it finds a problem, it goes to write to another block, or uses error recovery to read. For servers, they really want the time that the drive keeps trying to be under seven seconds. The consumer drives could be adjusted using software like hdparm.
Then around '09, and apparently starting with WD, they made a change to the firmware, and you could no longer change that variable. Servers scream and gag and give up, and tell you the drive's dying, when instead of spending under seven seconds, the drive keeps trying for ->over two minutes-. Everything you read says do *NOT* use those for RAID, either.
The server grade drives are very much *not* into spinning down, and they have that short TLER.
This is why, around here, we're ecstatic at the new WD Red drives, that are "targeted towards NAS"; the reality is that they've got TLER set to seven seconds. And, where the server grade drives are two to three times the price of consumer grade drives, or higher (some sources are a *lot* higher), the Reds are 1.33% of consumer grade drives.
Reliability: we have some of everything, and have not noticed a real difference in reliability. And our drives get used a *lot*.
mark
As others have said, save all copies of email between you and your boss informing them of the flaws. Make sure all future emails are return receipt requested. Print them out. Take copies home... and then buy a safety vault in a bank, nothing less, and store them there. That way, they can't be made to disappear so easily.
Yes, I knew someone who lost their federal job, and the documentation at home disappeared.
mark
I mean, there's one of the eight copies of that manuscript by Abdul Alhazrad there....
mark
Spend a week, and convince the others to follow suit: Document, down to quarter hours, how much time you spend doing your job, and how much is spent on help desk work. Then suggest what management is paying for a sysadmin or programmer to do help desk work.
The costs alone will push them, esp. if any or all of you are doing overtime frequently.
Add one more argument: what happens if one of you gets hit by a car, or the flu, or finds another job - how's the slack going to be picked up? Long time ago - I was working in a mainframe shop back then - the systems programmer went on vacation for a week. Tuesday of that week, they found him on the beach, and had him come back to fix a problem. A month later, one of the operators got promoted to assistant, and started training. Being irreplacable means never having a life of your own.
mark
Last time I heard the mainframe "declared dead" was the late nineties... and at the same time, IBM was shipping more mainframes than they'd ever delivered before.
The desktop dead? Let's see, why might that not be the case?
1. People upgrading their existing systems, including hardware, rather than buying a new computer.
2. People without 20/10 vision, who can't read email on that tiny screen.
2.a Websites (such as MySQL's documentation) that use fixed widths and locations, resulting in
overprinting if you don't have your browser fullscreened.
3. Gamers.
4. Anyone who actually wants to watch a video. (I "watched" Thor on a 12" screen on an airplace a couple
of years ago, with daylight in the cabin. Tell me what you're watching on your expensive phone
gives a better view.)
5. Anyone who is actually doing work, including writing something longer than a twit, spreadsheets (the
original killer app), Power Point (no, no, I don't, but managers *adore* them), or graphics, or....
6. Anyone who does more on it than a couch potato.
7. See 3. (Who do you think drove video?)
8. Um, most of the stuff that you look up on those phones and tablets? What do you think *THAT* is running on, if not
servers or mainframes?
mark
I mean, I occasionally read stuff from the other side,,, but a fair bit of it ranges from Michelle Bachman (R-wacko)'s la-la land pronouncements, to a guy on a mailing list I'm on, who's sure that with the Fed printing money, it's devaluating as we type, and oh, yes, we live in a soclaist America....
How does this "bubble-bursting filter" screen out the total crazies, to get *reasonable* contrasting information?
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...a target. As in, paintball, anyone?
Or, for that matter, oops, I stumbled and spilled my coffee/soup/fries with ketchup all *over* that 'droid....
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That the usual slashdot turkeys don't even seem to be noticing: how did US DHS get copies of those records?
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That a fall or two from my shirt pocket to the floor didn't screw up the on/off switch.
Oh, and yes: several years ago, I heard a report on the latest cell phones. For 10 - 12 minutes, they went on about the features. Then, at the end of the report, "and what about the voice quality?" was finally asked. The response was that one was ok, one was mediocre, and the rest terrible.
Now, I realize all of you young'uns are *TERRIFIED* of actually talking to another person, but let me point out that they're "cellular telephones", and "telephone" means "to speak at a distance", and the rest of us actually want (horrors!) to *TALK TO SOMEONE*, and surely the companies could spend 5 cents instead of 1 cent - that's *such* a huge cut to their profits - to have speakers and mikes that give you something better that fgdghjrhjylrhjmtt hgdxphoiyr nblkx; you!
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Drop the first 10 years, or stuff unrelated to what you're doing now. You can always say, at the bottom, "Additional information upon request". I did that, and never got asked.
Oh, and nearly 10 years ago, I started dying my hair. And got a job where, in the time I was there, my manager turned 30.
A friend who was having trouble getting a job (also a programmer) - she's in her mid-forties - had started getting a few gray hairs... dyed them, and got a job fairly soon after.
There is an extreme agist bias in the industry, and the way the laws in the US are written, unless you've got seven witnesses and a video of them saying, "nyah, nyah, you're to old for me to hire", there's no way to prove it.
mark
God is real, unless declared integer.