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Living on Internet Time... Like Thomas Edison Did
securitas writes: "If you think that dotcommers are the first people to live on Internet time, then take a trip to the 19th century (NYT Story, here's a Yahoo link). Thomas Edison had 10,000 researchers and scientists working at his Menlo Park labs, who slept on their desks, and had the same problems pleasing the investment community as today's tech companies. The result? Over 1000 patents and many inventions that we take for granted today."
I am a Computer Information Systems Professional at a major Fortune 500 corporation. Very recently the head of our IT department decided that we were going to switch every one of our networks over to Windows XP Professional. We had previously been running OpenBSD on all our quad processor Xeons. Some of them had had uptimes approaching a year! My personal favourite, Gerbil, had been running without a reboot for three years.
One day one of those Microsoft shills that you often read about on the Register came by for a visit. I grew very suspicious about what was going on when my boss and the Microsoft representative walked by my desk, and entered the server room. I could hear muffled voices through the closed door. The Microsoft representative was asking what we were running on our servers! My worst fears had come true. I sat at my desk for the rest of the day, silently awaiting the bad news. The news did not come until the next day. It was worse than I had feared. We were to be a Microsoft only shop from that day on! I could not believe it. The Microsoft representative had told my boss that the operating and support costs would actually go down. And my boss had fully bought into it, hook, line, and sinker.
Tough times hit our company in the last month, and we were forced to lay off a few of the less experienced IS/IT workers. One of them took this rather hard. As a last minute attempt at corporate sabotage, he decided to change all of the Computer Administrator passwords on a few of the XP Professional boxes sitting around in the server room. This caused absolute havoc, as Dell had failed to send along administrator passwords for the new boxes. Our company could not make use of these computers for three days. It took Dell that long to get us the administrator passwords. It is strictly because of Microsoft's poor implementation of a multi-user computing environment that our company lost three days of productivity.
Needless to say, I had our quad Xeons back running OpenBSD by the end of the week. Gerbil is back on its way to another glorious 3 years of uptime.
Did I skip over a paragraph or something in the article that said Edison was the only guy to ever invent stuff?
"Derp de derp."
Here's an excerpt of a supposedly true story about Tesla, now you know why I'm looking for objective data:
"After his death in 1943, his TeslaScope interplanetary communication device was turned on at the home of a friend in Canada, and the assembled group heard the Commander of an Alien vessel, explain the true hidden facts behind Tesla's fantastic 87 year life. Tesla apparently didn't discover until fairly late in his life, that he himself was an Alien, who had been left on Earth as a baby to help the people of the Earth evolve through the use of his inventive genius. From early childhood it was clear that he was quite different and odd compared to more "normal" Earth humans. The Commander mentioned that they had attended Tesla's funeral, and they had simply blurred all the photographs so that there would be no record of their attendance."
"Derp de derp."
Oh come ON! Is the point of what I said that obscure? In the parent post I was trying to find info about Tesla, and above is an excerpt from a web page that I found!! It's because of information like that that I wanted to find objective information.
I did NOT post that to wind anybody up or to ruin Tesla's name, I posted it to show people the type of info I was *not* hunting for.
Troll. *hrumph* "MS rules and Linux sux". -- there, now you can mod me down as a troll.
"Derp de derp."
And 10,000 broke-ass slobs whose names have long been forgotten.
Discoveries patented by that fucking Thomas Edison were in fact made by John Tesla (who was a _real_ hacker at that time) .
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