About 10 years ago my nephew played in a group at the local library. Now, my son in 9th grade, has been playing at his school for 2-3 years as part of a weekly activity block.
He also attended an event by the local college to get college students playing. They had > 100 players. The college was trying to jumpstart a student run D&D club.
You just need groups new people can join. That's why Magic:The Gathering got popular: the places that sold the cards would often organize playing events.
Why aren't you steering them to chromebooks so they don't need support from you?
I'm a heavy user of multiple xterms on a linux laptop at home. I have android tablets and phones and a chromebook with android apps. If I could get X11 (not VNC) on my chromebook, I'd get a new laptop to replace the Linux laptop.
Microsoft came out with a revived XP for netbooks. In doing so, MS specified the maximum spec, limiting screen resolution (below 1024x768), RAM and CPU.
The problem for MS was that people found they didn't *need* Office and other MS software. They could do the the things they wanted with out it.
Later on, AJAX came out. More powerful computing devices that were not x86 (ARM smartphones) couldn't run Windows. MS couldn't do anything to affect those developments.
College students started having smart phones to do their photos, social networking and sometimes school work in a way that Palm, WinCE, Blackberry could not do. They found they did not need "a real computer" and that's the start of the decline of Windows.
Regardless of the approach, don't forget that 25+ years ago, networking was quite primitive - most home users were using telephone line modems and businesses had closed networks (if they had them at all). Lynx was the web browser of choice (Mosaic was still a year or two away). Network/computer security was in its infancy (Sandra Bullock's "The Net" was a few years away). Email barely existed (I was working at IBM at the time and was able to get "myke@ibm.com" without anybody questioning it or there even being standards applied to email accounts).
When Linus was using Minix to create Linux and for a short time after, web and HTML didn't exist, let alone browsers such as lynx. If home users were using modems, it was to connect to BBSen or commercial systems like AOL and CompuServ. AOL didn't do internet email and it was hard for any home user to get email. Just about everyone with email got it through work or college.
I worked at one of those rare businesses with email & a shared 56k internet connection in '92. I remember when Mosaic came out. It didn't run on the Windows 3.1 that was out and just got ported to Mac System 7. System 7 had TCP/IP from Apple. Windows had a number of non-Microsoft TCP/IP stacks and no clear leader. Windows 3.11 included a standard TCP/IP that apps like Mosaic could adopt instead of one or several different ones with different APIs.
At that time, there were no firewalls. Maybe you had a router that blocked ingress of specific ports.
I got my degree in Mechanical Engineering. My whole class had PCs with DOS, Basic, Fortran and 8088 cpus. And access to Vax/VMS sometimes.
In heat transfer, we coded a Chebyshev differential equation to figure out the optimal thickness and spacing for cooling fins. It would take 30+ minutes to run at a minimum. Or 8 hours if you were way off. You learned a bit about better algorithms and speed when things took so long.
It's not the kind of thing I'd expect a programmer to be working on. And the engineer isn't going to be able to solve it w/o programming because of the thousands of number calculations that are needed.
I've done sysadmin on unix like systems for a long time. One of my early jobs had 500 workstations and servers running many different Unixen. You needed scripting to manage that.
I found that when you get to 30-40 systems, you must program (scripts, batch, perl, python, puppet, whatever) to manage it. Once you get into the scripting mode, it feels foolish to not use it, even with 10-20 systems.
All this naturally leads to cloud, network, using source control to keep history, monitoring, etc.
To me, the essence of DevOps is that I will get the call at 3am when things break and I can change the code/infrastructure so that call does not happen. If you're not getting the call from the customer (could be operations, real customers, users of your pipeline, etc) you're doing development. If you are not able to change development/code/process/infrastructure, you're operations.
As someone who suffers from mild chronic depression, I can tell you that anti-depressants work for me. They *do not* make me happy. They make it possible to be happy.
If you're having other effects from the ones you're taking, you need to work with your doctor to switch to one with fewer side effects. I had one that put me into raging anger when at the end of the day. Switching eliminated the daily anger.
I'd no sooner go off anti-depressants than someone should go off heart medication or insulin. Those without depression or an understanding of it that can go pound sand.
My intro to email was on DTSS back in '88. Later on I used pine in an xterm before moving to exmh. It was MH with a GUI wrapper written in Tcl/Tk. For both of them I used procmail to redirect my incoming email into folders.
exmh had lots of feature I miss. Someone wrote an addon I used in '99 that would learn how you moved mail between folders and would start doing it for you. Kinda what gmail's revamp is trying to do 18 years later.
I even ran a mail server at home and had squirrelmail as a front end. As ISPs started blocking SMTP in and out, I finally got a gmail invite for my home email and haven't looked back.
At work, it's mostly Outlook/Exchange after the days of Netscape.
We ran the current versions on our 486, pentium 90s, pentium 200s, pentium 2s and 3s.
For a server type system, they're ok except for power consumption and they can't keep up with gigabit speeds.
For a desktop, internet wasn't something you use extensively. In the pentium 2/3 days AJAX was just starting. Javascript was not used heavily and most people had dialup. Today's internet will be glacially slow if it will even run on older CPUs.
Most of the stuff I do personally and professionally uses web pages with heavy javascript. I think the baseline would be a RasPi or other ARM based system with ~ 1GB RAM, I've found that 4GB+ on x86 is vastly more responsive.
If you need photo quality and print often, an inkjet could be worth getting.
If you don't print photos that often, you can use an online service or bring a USB stick to many places that will print on demand. No issues with paying to clear up dried ink and the quality can be quite good.
If you're a photography geek, you can't manipulate the printing as much, but you're probably not letting the ink dry either.
I have a brother printer from ~2001 that is still working. I recently got another brother that does color and uses less electricity. The power savings will pay for the new printer and I got a color upgrade.
So which LOM on a server does *NOT* use some bastardization of VNC wrapped up in some god dam awful Java plugin, that if you are lucky and the vendor has update will run in a modern web browser with a modern version of Java.
iDrac in the Rx30 series (idrac 8?) has an HTML5 version in addition to the java applet. IIRC you can get to the vnc protocol with a standard vnc client too.
The first thing people do is go for the old Windows 7 desktop look and feel.
One size doesn't fit all. Even Apple has a different UI for desktop and phone/tablet.
I used to have fvwm2 on one screen with 4 workspaces and gnome on the other with 4 workspaces on Redhat 9 (pre fedora). You couldn't move apps from one screen to the other, but you could have your browser up on one side and go through the workspaces on the other side. I was able to have ~ 100 things open. Browser, email, editor, some xloads and mostly xterms. It was way better than the xinerama across the 2 screens.
When a large, ongoing corporation in tech has part of its infrastructure for customer support compromised in this way, it reinforces my conviction to never do any home automation that requires an external server to work.
Microsoft/Walmart had the music service based on "Plays for Sure" go dark. Nest disabled its hub. My kids used to play a game with a usb device (similar to Skylanders) that connected to a game server. Phillips stopped working with 3rd party equipment. When the company controlling the home it connected to, the devices and content you owned stop working.
I think we'll see more products that rely on a set of servers after the sale. It will be a long time until consumers force companies to design differently. I don't think government will ever regulate these things to the point where telco was: you buy the phone, they have to keep the service going.
My 1st layoff I was a SysAdmin. At the unemployment office they had me try to find the job title in a book. No System Administrator in that book.
I've done fine with that title in large & small companies running various Unixen and desktops over the years. I'm doing cloud and development nowadays. There is training for some of this, but it's always been at least as good to learn on your own.
Nowadays, with internet and inexpensive computer kit and virtualization it's so easy to learn at home. My 486 to learn Linux was $3-6k. I can get a 5 node cluster of Raspberry PIs for $300 to learn containers and the basics of cloud. Or a PC to learn OpenStack.
* The CEO and co-founder of an anonymous virtual private network service says "The rise of Azure and the Linux takeover has put most Windows admins out of work. Many of my old colleagues have had to retrain for Linux or go into something else entirely."
* In addition, "Thanks to the massive migration to the cloud, listings for jobs that involve maintaining IT infrastructure, like network engineer or system administrator, are trending downward, notes Terence Chiu, vice president of careers site Indeed Prime."
Everyone (and half the ones quoted in the OP) talk about programming, not IT like in the question.
The IT dept. worries about desktop, data management (NAS/backups), security, connectivity from the desktop to the rest of the company/world, remote access, email and other business apps (including database). I think that kind of IT will be around for awhile. The apps/email might move to outsourced. The desktop will probably be Windows in most cases for a long time unless MS really makes it unusable for most users.
We're already seeing some examples of traditional IT moving away from Windows. I look at my kid's school. All chromebooks & cloud. The school IT needs to do networking/WiFi and account management. I expect that the data management and software upgrades is minimized. There would be security in network configuration and policies for teachers/parents/students. Probably some internal applications (building management and phones?) that can't be outsourced to a web app. Everything else is outsourced to Google. They save lots on IT compared to Windows/iPads that I've seen at other schools.
My degree is Mechanical Engineering. I've been mostly Sysadmin in my career but did data analysis when I started and now do DevOps with more dev than sysadmin.
I couldn't do the development I do now w/o my sysadmin experience. Engineering made me learn to look at larger systems with an analytic eye. Programming was part of the degree; I had to write a FEM sing Chebychev differentiation to find the optimal spacing for fins on a plate for heat transfer. It was calculating values on a NxN grid with initial guesses of the initial values at the grid points. Each time through the N^2 calculations, you'd get converge. When the difference between n and n-1 values was close enough, that's be your approximate answer.
I wouldn't expect a CS programmer to be able to come up with the formula, though I would expect them to be able to code it once it was broken down.
Growing up near the college, they had free accounts. My High School had a teletype & modem. Later, my school got Commodore CBM/PET systems.
We also had a SuperPet. It had APL, Interpreted Pascal which I tried. It had Fortran, Cobol and 6809 Basic which I didn't try. I had an Apple ][+ and did lots of Basic, some assembly and Apple Pascal with the built in Bugger. Simply recompiling would sometimes clear up errors.
In college, I learned Fortran (MS and Vax) and dabbled with Turbo Pascal. After college, C, shell scripting, perl, Lex, DOS Batch.
Most recently, Python. As a sysadmin/devops, it's all shell and python nowadays.
My father had a TI Silent 700 teletype terminal. It had an acoustic coupler modem and used thermal paper. The paper was hard to find, before FAXes were common.
I lived near Dartmouth College and at school we had a teletype + modem to dial in. We also had accounts at Timeshare corp. I figured out how to use the Silent 700 to connect to Dartmouth's DCTS (or DTSS) and their chat room (conference).
Later, we got an Apple ][+ (never a modem though). In college I had a Z100 DOS system (not PC compatible), a Z248 80286 and after college I put Minix on it. That lead to a Gateway DX486 with Linux SLS and 0.98pl5.
Did I write this? Same system, my parents bought visicalc. Wizardry was awesome. I went to Clarkson University, where I later learned the authors met and one was a professor.
I was working for a project that had a large device that cost millions, driven by software & electronics. After data was gathered by the device, it was transferred to a datacenter system for analytics which was also part of the project. It was severely parallelized. Without the analytics, the hardware was just a sensor.
The head of the project was a mechanical engineer. The project meetings were about 10 minutes on the analytics, 40 on the hardware (not electronics!) and 10 on the embedded software & electronics.
The two people doing the analytics found a bug and brought it up during the meeting. The head berated them for "creating a bug" in the same manner as yo'd berate someone for machining a hole in the hardware that's off the blueprint's spec by inches when it's supposed to be within hundredths.
Later, they moved their lab into another building and wanted to physically move the rack of computers from the data center across the parking lot to the lab. They were older (6+ years) and not on a support contract. They were servers and they never needed to even plug cables in. We told them things would probably not work after that and they'd probably lose drives. They forced my coworkers to move it anyways.
So it didn't work after rolling across the lot. The drives were fine, but cpu boards didn't work. Naturally, it was our fault and they wanted heads to roll. A support contract was purchased (by IT, not the project) that was probably more $$ than the original cost and it was fixed. The whole process took their systems (including development) down for 2 months.
I was happy when, during an all-hands meeting (300+ people), it was announced the head was removed to another project to be a staff engineer (vs principal). IMO he should have been fired like he tried to do to my coworkers.
You haven't priced ebooks lately. Most of them are considerably more expensive than having a physical copy shipped to you. Take for instance the classic 1984. A paperback copy can be bought brand new including shipping for $6.51. On Kindle, it is 50% more, at $9.99. I love my Kindle, but I refuse to pay the premium price that publishers are charging for the books. On books that are priced this way, I'll either borrow a copy from the library or pirate it.
And 1984 is out of copyright in many non-US countries. It's on Project Gutenberg.
Given that, and its subject matter, I was amused by Amazon's remote removal of it. That's the strongest case for DRM removal I can think of.
Slashdot Mirror
About 10 years ago my nephew played in a group at the local library.
Now, my son in 9th grade, has been playing at his school for 2-3 years as part of a weekly activity block.
He also attended an event by the local college to get college students playing. They had > 100 players. The college was trying to jumpstart a student run D&D club.
You just need groups new people can join. That's why Magic:The Gathering got popular: the places that sold the cards would often organize playing events.
Why aren't you steering them to chromebooks so they don't need support from you?
I'm a heavy user of multiple xterms on a linux laptop at home. I have android tablets and phones and a chromebook with android apps.
If I could get X11 (not VNC) on my chromebook, I'd get a new laptop to replace the Linux laptop.
Microsoft came out with a revived XP for netbooks. In doing so, MS specified the maximum spec, limiting screen resolution (below 1024x768), RAM and CPU.
The problem for MS was that people found they didn't *need* Office and other MS software. They could do the the things they wanted with out it.
Later on, AJAX came out. More powerful computing devices that were not x86 (ARM smartphones) couldn't run Windows. MS couldn't do anything to affect those developments.
College students started having smart phones to do their photos, social networking and sometimes school work in a way that Palm, WinCE, Blackberry could not do. They found they did not need "a real computer" and that's the start of the decline of Windows.
>
Regardless of the approach, don't forget that 25+ years ago, networking was quite primitive - most home users were using telephone line modems and businesses had closed networks (if they had them at all). Lynx was the web browser of choice (Mosaic was still a year or two away). Network/computer security was in its infancy (Sandra Bullock's "The Net" was a few years away). Email barely existed (I was working at IBM at the time and was able to get "myke@ibm.com" without anybody questioning it or there even being standards applied to email accounts).
When Linus was using Minix to create Linux and for a short time after, web and HTML didn't exist, let alone browsers such as lynx. If home users were using modems, it was to connect to BBSen or commercial systems like AOL and CompuServ. AOL didn't do internet email and it was hard for any home user to get email. Just about everyone with email got it through work or college.
I worked at one of those rare businesses with email & a shared 56k internet connection in '92. I remember when Mosaic came out. It didn't run on the Windows 3.1 that was out and just got ported to Mac System 7. System 7 had TCP/IP from Apple. Windows had a number of non-Microsoft TCP/IP stacks and no clear leader. Windows 3.11 included a standard TCP/IP that apps like Mosaic could adopt instead of one or several different ones with different APIs.
At that time, there were no firewalls. Maybe you had a router that blocked ingress of specific ports.
a programmer how to do engineering.
I got my degree in Mechanical Engineering. My whole class had PCs with DOS, Basic, Fortran and 8088 cpus. And access to Vax/VMS sometimes.
In heat transfer, we coded a Chebyshev differential equation to figure out the optimal thickness and spacing for cooling fins. It would take 30+ minutes to run at a minimum. Or 8 hours if you were way off. You learned a bit about better algorithms and speed when things took so long.
It's not the kind of thing I'd expect a programmer to be working on. And the engineer isn't going to be able to solve it w/o programming because of the thousands of number calculations that are needed.
I've done sysadmin on unix like systems for a long time. One of my early jobs had 500 workstations and servers running many different Unixen. You needed scripting to manage that.
I found that when you get to 30-40 systems, you must program (scripts, batch, perl, python, puppet, whatever) to manage it. Once you get into the scripting mode, it feels foolish to not use it, even with 10-20 systems.
All this naturally leads to cloud, network, using source control to keep history, monitoring, etc.
To me, the essence of DevOps is that I will get the call at 3am when things break and I can change the code/infrastructure so that call does not happen. If you're not getting the call from the customer (could be operations, real customers, users of your pipeline, etc) you're doing development. If you are not able to change development/code/process/infrastructure, you're operations.
It's all about breaking the silos.
As someone who suffers from mild chronic depression, I can tell you that anti-depressants work for me. They *do not* make me happy. They make it possible to be happy.
If you're having other effects from the ones you're taking, you need to work with your doctor to switch to one with fewer side effects. I had one that put me into raging anger when at the end of the day. Switching eliminated the daily anger.
I'd no sooner go off anti-depressants than someone should go off heart medication or insulin. Those without depression or an understanding of it that can go pound sand.
My intro to email was on DTSS back in '88.
Later on I used pine in an xterm before moving to exmh. It was MH with a GUI wrapper written in Tcl/Tk. For both of them I used procmail to redirect my incoming email into folders.
exmh had lots of feature I miss. Someone wrote an addon I used in '99 that would learn how you moved mail between folders and would start doing it for you. Kinda what gmail's revamp is trying to do 18 years later.
I even ran a mail server at home and had squirrelmail as a front end. As ISPs started blocking SMTP in and out, I finally got a gmail invite for my home email and haven't looked back.
At work, it's mostly Outlook/Exchange after the days of Netscape.
I've run KVM and OpenStack (using KVM) on Atom based systems it definitly works.
We ran the current versions on our 486, pentium 90s, pentium 200s, pentium 2s and 3s.
For a server type system, they're ok except for power consumption and they can't keep up with gigabit speeds.
For a desktop, internet wasn't something you use extensively. In the pentium 2/3 days AJAX was just starting. Javascript was not used heavily and most people had dialup. Today's internet will be glacially slow if it will even run on older CPUs.
Most of the stuff I do personally and professionally uses web pages with heavy javascript. I think the baseline would be a RasPi or other ARM based system with ~ 1GB RAM, I've found that 4GB+ on x86 is vastly more responsive.
If you need photo quality and print often, an inkjet could be worth getting.
If you don't print photos that often, you can use an online service or bring a USB stick to many places that will print on demand. No issues with paying to clear up dried ink and the quality can be quite good.
If you're a photography geek, you can't manipulate the printing as much, but you're probably not letting the ink dry either.
I have a brother printer from ~2001 that is still working. I recently got another brother that does color and uses less electricity. The power savings will pay for the new printer and I got a color upgrade.
So which LOM on a server does *NOT* use some bastardization of VNC wrapped up in some god dam awful Java plugin, that if you are lucky and the vendor has update will run in a modern web browser with a modern version of Java.
iDrac in the Rx30 series (idrac 8?) has an HTML5 version in addition to the java applet. IIRC you can get to the vnc protocol with a standard vnc client too.
The first thing people do is go for the old Windows 7 desktop look and feel.
One size doesn't fit all. Even Apple has a different UI for desktop and phone/tablet.
I used to have fvwm2 on one screen with 4 workspaces and gnome on the other with 4 workspaces on Redhat 9 (pre fedora). You couldn't move apps from one screen to the other, but you could have your browser up on one side and go through the workspaces on the other side. I was able to have ~ 100 things open. Browser, email, editor, some xloads and mostly xterms. It was way better than the xinerama across the 2 screens.
When a large, ongoing corporation in tech has part of its infrastructure for customer support compromised in this way, it reinforces my conviction to never do any home automation that requires an external server to work.
Microsoft/Walmart had the music service based on "Plays for Sure" go dark. Nest disabled its hub. My kids used to play a game with a usb device (similar to Skylanders) that connected to a game server. Phillips stopped working with 3rd party equipment. When the company controlling the home it connected to, the devices and content you owned stop working.
I think we'll see more products that rely on a set of servers after the sale. It will be a long time until consumers force companies to design differently. I don't think government will ever regulate these things to the point where telco was: you buy the phone, they have to keep the service going.
WendinDos. I had a demo floppy for it. Multitasking DOS done well.
When MS bought them, they buried it. :-(
I wonder if it could run https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...?
I was a sysop for DTSS on a DPS-8 for awhile. DTSS had pipes which inspired them in Unix.
My 1st layoff I was a SysAdmin. At the unemployment office they had me try to find the job title in a book. No System Administrator in that book.
I've done fine with that title in large & small companies running various Unixen and desktops over the years. I'm doing cloud and development nowadays. There is training for some of this, but it's always been at least as good to learn on your own.
Nowadays, with internet and inexpensive computer kit and virtualization it's so easy to learn at home. My 486 to learn Linux was $3-6k. I can get a 5 node cluster of Raspberry PIs for $300 to learn containers and the basics of cloud. Or a PC to learn OpenStack.
* The CEO and co-founder of an anonymous virtual private network service says "The rise of Azure and the Linux takeover has put most Windows admins out of work. Many of my old colleagues have had to retrain for Linux or go into something else entirely."
* In addition, "Thanks to the massive migration to the cloud, listings for jobs that involve maintaining IT infrastructure, like network engineer or system administrator, are trending downward, notes Terence Chiu, vice president of careers site Indeed Prime."
Everyone (and half the ones quoted in the OP) talk about programming, not IT like in the question.
The IT dept. worries about desktop, data management (NAS/backups), security, connectivity from the desktop to the rest of the company/world, remote access, email and other business apps (including database). I think that kind of IT will be around for awhile. The apps/email might move to outsourced. The desktop will probably be Windows in most cases for a long time unless MS really makes it unusable for most users.
We're already seeing some examples of traditional IT moving away from Windows. I look at my kid's school. All chromebooks & cloud. The school IT needs to do networking/WiFi and account management. I expect that the data management and software upgrades is minimized. There would be security in network configuration and policies for teachers/parents/students. Probably some internal applications (building management and phones?) that can't be outsourced to a web app. Everything else is outsourced to Google. They save lots on IT compared to Windows/iPads that I've seen at other schools.
... than a programmer engineering.
My degree is Mechanical Engineering. I've been mostly Sysadmin in my career but did data analysis when I started and now do DevOps with more dev than sysadmin.
I couldn't do the development I do now w/o my sysadmin experience. Engineering made me learn to look at larger systems with an analytic eye. Programming was part of the degree; I had to write a FEM sing Chebychev differentiation to find the optimal spacing for fins on a plate for heat transfer. It was calculating values on a NxN grid with initial guesses of the initial values at the grid points. Each time through the N^2 calculations, you'd get converge. When the difference between n and n-1 values was close enough, that's be your approximate answer.
I wouldn't expect a CS programmer to be able to come up with the formula, though I would expect them to be able to code it once it was broken down.
Growing up near the college, they had free accounts. My High School had a teletype & modem.
Later, my school got Commodore CBM/PET systems.
We also had a SuperPet. It had APL, Interpreted Pascal which I tried. It had Fortran, Cobol and 6809 Basic which I didn't try.
I had an Apple ][+ and did lots of Basic, some assembly and Apple Pascal with the built in Bugger. Simply recompiling would sometimes clear up errors.
In college, I learned Fortran (MS and Vax) and dabbled with Turbo Pascal. After college, C, shell scripting, perl, Lex, DOS Batch.
Most recently, Python. As a sysadmin/devops, it's all shell and python nowadays.
My father had a TI Silent 700 teletype terminal. It had an acoustic coupler modem and used thermal paper. The paper was hard to find, before FAXes were common.
I lived near Dartmouth College and at school we had a teletype + modem to dial in. We also had accounts at Timeshare corp. I figured out how to use the Silent 700 to connect to Dartmouth's DCTS (or DTSS) and their chat room (conference).
Later, we got an Apple ][+ (never a modem though). In college I had a Z100 DOS system (not PC compatible), a Z248 80286 and after college I put Minix on it.
That lead to a Gateway DX486 with Linux SLS and 0.98pl5.
Did I write this?
Same system, my parents bought visicalc.
Wizardry was awesome.
I went to Clarkson University, where I later learned the authors met and one was a professor.
I was working for a project that had a large device that cost millions, driven by software & electronics. After data was gathered by the device, it was transferred to a datacenter system for analytics which was also part of the project. It was severely parallelized. Without the analytics, the hardware was just a sensor.
The head of the project was a mechanical engineer. The project meetings were about 10 minutes on the analytics, 40 on the hardware (not electronics!) and 10 on the embedded software & electronics.
The two people doing the analytics found a bug and brought it up during the meeting. The head berated them for "creating a bug" in the same manner as yo'd berate someone for machining a hole in the hardware that's off the blueprint's spec by inches when it's supposed to be within hundredths.
Later, they moved their lab into another building and wanted to physically move the rack of computers from the data center across the parking lot to the lab. They were older (6+ years) and not on a support contract. They were servers and they never needed to even plug cables in. We told them things would probably not work after that and they'd probably lose drives. They forced my coworkers to move it anyways.
So it didn't work after rolling across the lot. The drives were fine, but cpu boards didn't work. Naturally, it was our fault and they wanted heads to roll. A support contract was purchased (by IT, not the project) that was probably more $$ than the original cost and it was fixed. The whole process took their systems (including development) down for 2 months.
I was happy when, during an all-hands meeting (300+ people), it was announced the head was removed to another project to be a staff engineer (vs principal). IMO he should have been fired like he tried to do to my coworkers.
You haven't priced ebooks lately. Most of them are considerably more expensive than having a physical copy shipped to you. Take for instance the classic 1984. A paperback copy can be bought brand new including shipping for $6.51. On Kindle, it is 50% more, at $9.99. I love my Kindle, but I refuse to pay the premium price that publishers are charging for the books. On books that are priced this way, I'll either borrow a copy from the library or pirate it.
And 1984 is out of copyright in many non-US countries. It's on Project Gutenberg.
Given that, and its subject matter, I was amused by Amazon's remote removal of it. That's the strongest case for DRM removal I can think of.