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They Don't Make Them Like They Used To
`Sean writes: "Sosik-Hamor Projects has posted an article entitled 'They Don't Make Them Like They Used To' that, with the help of some semiautomatic weapons, documents the durability of old school hardware versus the flimsy cases being used in newer peripherals. The Sun 3/50 came out victorious and was stolen from the trash the next day, probably to be turned into body armor!"
When I was a little brat, I dropped my trusty, 40 pound IBM XT down the stairs by accident. Amazingly, everything was ok, even the 10MB, 4 inch high hard disk.
It's been sitting in my parents garage for over 10 years. We fired it up this weekend and played commander keen and starflight.
They dont make em like they used to.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
In the 'good old days', you could buy a TV and it'll still be working 15 years later - now you are lucky if it lasts 7 before something major goes wrong. My old BBC (circa 1983) micro still works - it was in daily constant use for over 10 years with 5 1/4" floppy drive. I have trouble firing up a 1995 PC with harddrive - sometimes it just won't even get past the BIOS boot.
All in the name of economy... *sigh*
On the same vein, the egyptians had the hierographic writings which have lasted over 3,000 years - any 'modern days' records going to last that long? Nope..
Discuss: Have we really progressed?
Richy C.
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Although I guess it could be that a company that is shoddy on general physical construction may not care too much about other aspects of design. It could be, but it hardly logically follows.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
You do realize that his ISP is going to probably choke or shoot him with his own gun over the slashdotting their server is about to recieve. Especially as it is in norway. (And given the probably very high per-megabyte bandwidth charge.)
May I suggest a mirror? Quickly
That gives a whole new sense to wearable PC's. The PC that can save your life when being shot.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
I'm getting getting all misty-eyed and patriotic just thinking about it...in fact, I think I'll sing!
(Tue the tune of "America the Beautiful")
Oh beautiful for shotgun sights,
For butts in pure wood grain!
For purple mountains majesty
Where we go hunt our game!
America! America! God shed His grace on thee...
Where we can shoot
What won't reboot
And ev'ry dead P.C.!
Thank you, thank you, groupies always welcome...
(P.S. Yes, .nu is in the USA -- I have a shell account here in town, and the last letters of its extension are .nu...)
are you aware of the governm,ent conspiracy relating to tinfoil hats you see they supposedly cover the mind conrtol rays from the secret death satalites but they actually amplify the secret telsa death ray so that the government can kill those that know the truth while leaving their servants like katz and taco to rule the world without the tinfoil hats because the government is actually conspiring to create an anti-conspiracy conspiracy advocating the tinfoil hats as a means of mind control because instead of takeing wawy the mind contorl rays the tinfoil hats actually amplify them so that thje government can peer into your mind and make you work in line with them and control all that they hold sacred so that you will simply become a mindless drone of the worldwide government conspiracy yes that's what the UN is a worldwide governemnt conspiracy designed by monica lewinsky who is actually a secret cia officer designed to steal missile launch codes from bill clinton so that the cia will be able to have control over the us nuclear missile aresonal so that the un and the new world order headed by the us nsa and cia will be able to hold control over the world via a long range interncontrinental ballistic missile range specifically designed to oppress the peoples into creating a workforce so that the rich shall prosper and the poor shall be forced into nazi-style deathcamps for trying to expose the truth and you will be send to the end of the world and back to expose the truth and nobody will listen because of the tinfoil hat conspiracy and the amplified government mind control rays from the secret nasa death satalites.
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Oh man, that was some bad $3 crack.
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Join the cult. Now. Destroy the new economy.
The time is now. Rise up from our trenches, our bunkers, and fight the great war against the mortal enemy.You. Now. Fight!
What what I understand, engineers aim for a minimum operational life of 10,000 hours which equate to just over one year of continuous use. When the price points become fixed, then all you can alter are the invisible quality aspects (e.g. smaller hamburgers, larger packaging, higher risk failure). Like any good industrialist and profit seeking capitalist, it is in their interest to have everything fail at the right time (planned obsolescence) just in time for their new upgrades and "bigger/better/faster" range to come out. Henry Ford used to send his engineers scrounging through dumps to find out what parts survived ... and when he discovered cottler pins holding wheels together he reduced the quality of the metal. Remember that in a manufacturing mindset, you only make a profit on the "First Sale" (see previous /. articles on why Microsoft is discouraging resale through EBay). Once hooked and addicted, they calculate the potential lifetime value of each customer and software price yields (ie how much they can screw them and have them coming back for more).
... custom software is still expensive (think 100K/year x #team of hackers) and mass produced software (<$500) creates their own scale of economy (training, pool of experts, etc). You can see how after a while one company dominates a particular ecological niche, Cisco (TCP/IP routing), SGI (OpenGL), AutoCAD (design), Adobe (publishing), high-end databases (Oracle) thus rewarding specialisation and persistance. Without lure of supernormal profits, would you have these companies existing to bribe their option hungry programmers? Let's have a rough look at the economics, it takes say 3 years and a team of 20-30 engineers at $100K/year plus 33% operational overhead, ie a minimum cost of $10M you need to recover from software sales. At an average sale price of $50, you need minimum 2 million copies just to break even and steady state revenue of $3-4M/year. Assuming you are only targetting 1st world countries (starving peasants don't exactly put software at top of their Xmas list) you've got an uphill battle to convince others you're worthwhile keeping for the long-term, not to mention on-going support and hand-holding. Maybe those Indian programmers are not such a bad idea after all.
Unfortunately there's not much you can do
We might whinge at the formula movies and crappy software but we only get what we pay for. The demand for high quality high reliability software (e.g. FAA flight control) is only a select market and if the average purchaser is not interested in paying extra for a higher mean-time-between failure (given today's disposable society) then you are just wasting scarce programmer resources. Perhaps OpenSource software could set a new standard but documenting and independently validating a set of 3 software metrics
- mean time between failure (reliability)
- total cost to repair/replace (quality)
- acceleration of learning curve (difficulty)
This should sort out the sheep from the goats.
LL
Some years back at a company I once worked at, someone went postal in our US office after being sacked. He may have been sacked unfairly, I don't know, but his response was what I'd call disproportionate: he returned to the server room with a large-ish shotgun, and started blasting away from the doorway at machinery. Everyone dived for cover, including my friend Martin, who wisely chose to hide behind an IBM DASD array the size of a coke machine. The shots went through the first wall of the casing, but didn't even make it through the disks, so Martin was safe. No one was seriously hurt, and the guy got hauled away to the Laughter Academy when his ammo ran out.
From what I gathered reading the article, the Sun and the Xterm were still alive when shot.
Sacrilege!
Putting down broken hardware is one thing, but killing still working Unix hardware boarders on blasphemey!
May their weapons jam and their clip's springs weaken!
www.eFax.com are spammers
Reminds me of a story from the Vietnam War protests in the late 1960s. A bunch of student radicals took over the computer center at a large university. If their demands were not met, they would Destroy the Computer, symbol of opression. Admin ignored them. So they tried.
This was a big IBM mainframe. The radicals discovered a number of interesting facts:
However, they did a real job on the console keyboard.
Welcome to the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy.
One of my collegues had to attend the clean-up operation of one such attack at a large financial institution, roughly 7-8 years ago. This company used Banyan CNS servers, which were huge 386 or 486 ISA machines with integrated UPS. The case consisted of an aluminimum frame with removable side panels and top. Due to the integrated UPS, they had to be strong.
This site had suffered severe structural damage during the attack, so much so that at least 2 of these servers were acting as supports for the rest of the building. What's more, they still worked after the event, although a bit dusty.
Can anyone beat that..
While you're pondering your problem with Americans' propensity for shooting things, fella, just remember where y'all got those Mk-37 torpedoes that HMS Conqueror fired at the General Belgrano back in '82 during the Falklands War.
You're welcome, by the way.
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
I don't know how many of you are actually old enough to remember when: A) Hayes Microcomputer was still in business, and; B) manufactured a device called a Transet 1000.
/Diversion
.125 aluminum cases. This makes for fairly effective PCB armor. We unloaded .30 cal from an M1 carbine, .45 ACP from a stainless Colt M1911A (with Pachmyre grips, Millet sites, ported and polished, and a 2.2lb trigger job), 9mm (from god-knows-what), and last but not least, a few 12 gauge shotgun slugs. The slugs ripped it out of the carrier, but never penetrated the case. The .45 and 9mm went deep, but not all the way through. The .30 cal did the most damage, actually punching through far enough to smash the 68008 CPU (it being ceramic made it particularly brittle).
This was one of Dennis' brilliant brain-childs that was basically a marketing flop. It was supposed to be a print buffer (which it did an OK job at), a mailbox (before real internet-type e-mail), and a couple of other things we never were really clear on.
After the product was launched, all the developers were issued a personal Transet. There were those who worked in the project that thought it was a dumb idea to begin with, and decided to make a point about it.
The actual Hayes employee, whom I'll call Chuck, another Hayes employee (not involved in the project, but working there at the time), and myself (not a Hayes employee until many years later), took said Transet 1000 out the ol' shooting range in Marietta, named aptly enough "The Bullet Stop".
Diversion
The Bullet Stop was owned by Paul LaVista, an arms dealer and active mercenary. You may remember him being in the news about 6-7 years ago for shooting himself, them claiming to find a bomb in his Mercedes. All part of an attempt to divert attention of the ever-viligant IRS for not paying his taxes. (Doesn't everyone pay cash for their Stinger missles?). The first time we walked in there was with two 25lb (that's about 46 kilos) blocks of ice. Paul looked at us and said "You're sick puppies! I'd like to pop a couple of those!" That netted us two free magazines for the H&K MP5-A. We preceded to spend about $600, renting every dang weapon that was semi or full-auto in the place. The rule from then on was "Anything that's already dead, fits through the front door, and isn't in a Sherwin-Williams can"
After removing the EPROM from the Transet (those were expensive then, 128K x 8, and as hardware hackers, we coveted any such useful hardware) we clipped the Transet into the target clamp, ran it out about 30 feet, and proceeded to try to kill it.
In those days, Hayes modems, Transets and Chronographs (a collectors item, fetching as much as $300 in the right market, these days. I have 15 of them!) came in very nice
All in all, it was an enjoyable afternoon spent killing a Transet, bowling pins, and few other odds-and-ends. But it didn't quite end there...
Chuck decided that rather than just kill a Transet, we (he) should make a point with it. It was placed on Dennis' desk, before Dennis arrived. Upon find a representative of his beloved project mercilessly slaughtered, he became a tad irate. Word is he never found out who dunnit, but many references were made, and comments such as "A project like that might wind up like a Transet" were occasionally heard. I wish we still had that ol' Transet. It's a bit of Hayes history now...
Other things we shot up: A running Nova 1200 (with 48K of core memory), a self-propelled vacuum cleaner (fun), platters from disc-packs (they spark when a high speed round goes through them), vinyl records (boring), and numerous other bits of obsolete technology.
One word of warning: Next to the Bullet Stop was a bar called the Pew-n-Brew. It's very important to get the order correct: Go shooting, *then* go drinking. One of establishments gets a little annoyed if you get these reversed.
A year ago, the sysadmin in our department wound up with a couple of HP LJ III-somethings that somebody was actually trying to surplus. He offered them to the department via a mailing list, and they were gone in about a minute.
We may never know if they really could survive gunfire, but I know I feel more comfortable in a room that has a LaserJet around so I can duck and cover. :-)
Babar
But don't ponder where the General Belgrano came from in the first place.
LTUASE.
Learn to use a search engine.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Ahhhh, you're referring to the USS Phoenix (CL-46), which survived the Pearl Harbor raid on 7 Dec '41 and served in the PacFlt through the duration, then was mothballed and sold to the Argies in '58?
So much for a Phoenix rising from its own ashes...
Geez, this place is starting to sound like sci.military.naval....
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
The Sun 3/50 they showed is not the sturdiest built Sun box either. My Sun 670MP is much bigger and has more boards. (It is also on wheels. The thing is like an end-table on steroids.) You could probably put a couple of clips into it before getting anything to go through. (If at all.)
I was given the machine from work. I live in an old house with very high ceilings. The first thing I used it for was to change a light bulb. (I now have Redhat 6.2 on it, but I needed a sturdy platform at the time and it was there...)
Reminds me that I have a bunch of old PC equiptment that needs to be taken out and shot.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
A friend once pointed out to me that in 3000BCE or so, we had storage media that was hardened and made even more durable by fire (read:clay tablets), and no such medium since then has regained that ability.Progress?
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
Are people nuts? They are actually pissed that their hardware doesn't stand up to being shot? Call this a flame (which means automatic karma on slashdot for some reason), but I think you're all nuts.
I seem to recall a time when hard drives cost a few hundred bucks for 20 megs. Nice, big-ass hard drive. It could probably stop a train. Or, we could spend that few hundred bucks on a current device, one that costs less to manufacture, and get a lot more for our buck.
Granted, huge advances have allowed us to get that much space. But if giving up the iron solar-flare paneling is going to save me 50 bucks on my next hard drive purchase, get rid of it. I don't take my machines in to areas where they are going to get shot.
-Frijoles-