Two hours later, an evacuation order comes out and you must leave the county NOW, but your EV only has enough charge to get you to the other side of town. Solution?
1. Go with a neighbor/relative - fewer vehicles on the road during an evacuation is beneficial anyways 2. If you have 2 vehicles, which many families will have for the foreseeable future, you will probably have 1 gas and 1 EV. You take the gas one. 3. Toss a generator into the trunk or attach a trailer that has a generator and the appropriate hookups, basically converting your hybrid into an EV 4. Catch a bus.
As for access to the super-charger points, logically as more Tesla vehicles get on the road they'll install more charge points. You should be fine unless you're trying to travel to some event where the road has vastly more traffic on it than normal. Ideally I see lots of charge points at restaurants. They always have enough parking, at least unless the restaurant is full itself. Charge points might be expensive now, but they have the potential to be a lot cheaper and at least they don't present a serious chemical/fire hazard.
Because of Tesla's stated business plan? Start in the ultra-high end sports car market, move down to the luxury car market, using the larger profit margins that allows to eventually move down into the economy car market?
They see Tesla being competition eventually, and they want to protect their business model - which would be to force Tesla to hire them, at least some of them, to act as dealers, allowing them to continue their business as usual.
There's a number of different ways to 'toughen' drunk driving laws, and lowering the BAC level is only one of them.
1. Lower the BAC level - problem: Even.08 is low enough that a cop driving behind you can't tell whether you're inebriated or just tired, on allergy medication, old, new to driving or just a bad driver. 2. Impose confinement: Something like 30 days in jail for the first offense. Problem: High impact; you're normally putting an employed person in jail, which means they might lose their job, at which point you have to provide for the care of them and their family(or they're not paying taxes). 3. Impose fines: Already done; to the point that poor people can't afford them yet the really rich often don't care 4. Force them to have an interlock device: The difficulty in fooling the thing is limited to the expense of simply evading it by getting a different vehicle. 5. Expand the definition of 'DUI' - I've heard of people busted for DUI while sleeping in the backseat of their car in the bar parking lot. Their own driveway I can sort of understand, and parked on the side of the road nowhere near where alcohol is served is downright suspicious, but if the engine isn't hot... I've also heard of people getting DUIs on riding lawnmowers, though most of those are justified in my opinion. Once you get on a motorway with your John Deere you're subject to the rules of the road... The funniest, I think, are the ones where somebody got a DUI while riding a horse or bicycle.
Especially for #5, you start to have to question whether the law in question is actually 'for the common good'. If the law is intended to protect the drunk against his own actions, what sense does it make to force him to suffer more serious losses than he realistically would even in an accident?
Eliminating drunk driving is a complex affair, and I think we need to do more to reduce the heavy drinkers from driving drunk - not expand the definition again.
We can't even successfully prevent all idiots from driving at.08
I'm not a professional researcher, but I question their results. I read a different article which said that.05 BAC levels would save 200-300 lives a year. Some figures: Annual traffic deaths: ~33k Portion that are 'alcohol related': 1/3rd, about 10k total Number of lives estimated to be saved: 500-800 per year, 5-8% of current alcohol deaths. Extra risk:.05 is 38% over sober.08 169%
Already there's all sorts of activities that will raise the risk of you having an accident more than 38%. The vast majority of the fatal DUI accidents I've read about are for people with BACs north of.24, or triple the current limit.
Meanwhile, I predict that prosecuting people for.05 DUIs is going to be expensive. Most will try to fight it; you're getting into the range where a breath test might not be accurate enough. I question whether the the cost to society for enforcing the rule might not exceed the cost of implementing it.
Realistically you'd be better off somehow stopping the 'should be dead with a BAC that high' people from driving. A bit tough given how creative some of them get - permanently 'borrowing' a friend or relative's vehicle, secretly buying a used car without the mandated interlock, etc...
I'm a registered user on facebook. I use it for a few applications that demand facebook credentials, but other than that it's locked down as tight as I can get it - no friends, no sharing, etc...
I'm sure there's lots like me. Heck, many of my coworkers have TWO facebook accounts -one for friends/family, one for work. I know it violates the TOS, but they don't care.
This hybrid does not work that way. It caches and then writes to the mechanical drive within times of the order of seconds or fractions of seconds and not hours as with your example above. It reduces seeking and not spinning. Since failure ties in to running time and not the amount of arm movement (unless somebody can find somehting that indicates otherwise) that's not likely to do anything with expected life, but then again it's not designed with that as an objective anyway.
You misunderstand me. I was talking more about reads in the first place, where 100% of the hits could come from the flash, and even then because flash is non-volatile there's no reason to be in any hurry to write the information to the hard drive even if you do have a write.
My point was that, assuming I'm 'in the zone' of my average usage, I'm capable of doing tasks for hours that never hit my HD at all. Knowing my usage patterns, this would remain true of a well optimized 24GB flash cache, resulting in the drive never needing to power up to fetch data from the platters. For minor writes, put them in the flash, then wait for when it really needs to spin up the drive to flush them down.
The reduction in failure chance of the mechanical drive is not likely to offset the increased chance of failure you've got by having two items with similar chance of failure, each of which results in the hybrid drive being unusable.
Do you have a citation that the flash is as likely to fail as the HD? Not to mention whether it is completely unable to function, even in a degraded state, without the flash?
Heck, do you have any evidence that 'battery backed RAM' is more reliable than an SSD? Batteries do go bad, remember. With a flash based cache system you only need a capacitor to finish flushing the writes to the flash, no need to have enough power to keep the RAM going while you spin up the drive and write the information.
Plus, 24GB of RAM still runs substantially more than the complete system we're looking at. Personally I don't see putting these hybrids in servers where reliability is paramount, it's more for laptops and desktops where price is an important consideration while people still want enough storage for all their music, videos, etc...
The poster above is completely correct. If the second component has a non-zero chance of failure then the expected life has decreased.
I think Dahamma's point isn't that the expected life hasn't decreased, and I've seen no indication that he thinks that the other component has a zero chance of failure, indeed, the statement ' If the MTBF of one is significantly longer than the other' indicates that both have MTBFs, which explicitly says both has failures.
Dahamma's point is that if one has a MTBF sufficiently higher than the other, the more reliable part doesn't *SIGNIFICANTLY* affect reliability. IE the more reliable component might drop a day of expected usage off the combined device vs the most common failure which limits it to 3-5 years. So now it's 2.99-4.98 years, on average. That's not 'significant'.
Now combine two drives that both have a MTBF of 5 years and your combined device might only have a MTBF of 2.5 years.
I've seen some numbers on main bearings, which are directly related to running time, numbers on platter problems, but nothing on the seek arm.
This, on the other hand, is a good point. Countering it, what if the drive is smart enough to spin down and not spin up as long as it's cache is working? I'm running a split system, I can actually work on my computer for hours without hitting the platter drive. Now, I'm rocking a 250GB SSD, not a 24GB one, but I'm running it as two drives - there's lots of files on the SSD that don't need to be there(such as OS files not routinely used by my install), and the drive isn't full. 24GB, smartly used, could be as effective at avoiding spinning up the platters as my one that's 10X the size.
Not spinning up = less wear on the bearings, less heat to kill things.
That sounds like the Drake Equation used to estimate the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations. You have the first three steps...
1. How many people will download it? (solved) 2. How many people will print it? 3. How many will assemble it? 4. How many will fire it? 5. How many will actually use it to further a crime? 6. How many will cause injury with it in the commission of a violent crime? 7. How many will kill somebody with it?
I'm guessing it's going to round to zero by about step 5.
Agreed, but it seems like the people who have the power to buy this equipment often resent the idea of having to get input from IT/etc on their selections.
Fortunately, they've given my office power to veto any IT related purchases - and if they don't come through us, we can actually confiscate the equipment, which they are not reimbursed for. Some other office might get the neat item they bought, but the important point is that there's no gain to bypassing us. The higher ups have determined that the extra up front expense of buying approved products is worth it in the long run.
For example, take printers. The ones that most offices would go out and buy on their own costs 75% of ours, but have a lifespan of less than 3 years vs the 8 ours will last, the toner costs twice as much(per page), etc...
As another example - one of our offices used software X for various tasks. The vendor for the software ended up going out of business and dropping all support for the program, then it was determined that there were a number of security risks. It took a bit, but I got them to pay the money to switch over to software Y, which has active support, some neat new features, and perhaps most importantly - had the ability to import the data from the defunct software.
How I sold it? 1. Disallowed from network due to vulnerabilities 2. Pointed out that it was only going to get more and more expensive to shift over while reliability slowly degraded.
It's nice that people can still believe fairytales, but not so nice when they involve the "peaceful" nature of communism. There is a little history you left out, such as:
I think your sarcasm detector is broken. Peragrin's post pegged mine.
Employees are a lot easier to dispose of due to low barrier to entry.
On the other hand, when an old timer has 10X the production at 2X the cost, they're worth keeping. It's sheer short-sightedness otherwise.
Oh, and 'over 10' wasn't in seconds, it was in minutes. You'd spend a minute just waiting for the page to load. When I was programming webpages, workflow and optimization was high on my list. I wanted a page to load in under a second.
Computers *are* just equipment to the end users in say a warehousing operation. Why are we not designing systems with this in mind?
Agreed.
In the warehousing example much used above if you avoid the latest gee whiz features and give them exactly what is needed there is no reason why the VAX of yesteryear cannot keep doing it's job other than it can't be maintained anymore.
Technically speaking, even a VAX system could technically run the robotic warehouses of today where they lock the building closed and machines move all the items to and from the shelving, with no human stockers at all. You might need a bigger room to store all the machines, but it can be done. A single server rack of modern machines can do the same for much less cost, and the only real reason a single machine couldn't do it is that I want more redundancy for safety.
That's a failing on IT's part though, why was the machine not designed with a 20 year lifecycle?
That's actually part of the failing - at least with the VAX systems they WERE designed with a 20 year lifecycle, but unlike with company vehicles, for some reason many companies stopped planning to replace the system after 20. In some cases they're still running computer systems from the '70s. Meanwhile the very approach to IT has changed drastically, from centralized mainframes to microcomputers. The control lines of 20 years ago need to be replaced. It's not an insurmountable expense, but especially when you're looking at industrial systems often you have to specially shield stuff, which just isn't standard in the minimum-cost solutions of today.
so why aren't we doing this?
I think that many places are, it's just that the short sighted ones manage to be lower cost in the short term, so if somebody isn't paying attention they can end up in an expensive situation if they aren't running a separate closed network for the stuff that's forced to be legacy.
With a decent bus service you could do the same, except you might have to walk a few hundred yards to a bus stop.
Even when I lived somewhere with half decent bus service(house was within half a block of the bus stop, and one came by every 1/2 hour most of the day), it was normally faster to bicycle where I wanted to go. It was like 10 miles to downtown, and on average I couldn't quite beat the bus. Note: I lived pretty much at the turn-around point for the route.
The bus service where I live now is much, much worse. Problem is, I don't see how there's any economical fix for it. The density just isn't there. Start running enough buses to get me taking it again and you'd be burning more fuel moving buses around than having the passengers just drive.
I've seen this as well. I'm IT, not medical, but I was talking with some medical people and they brought up the same problem as PlusFiveTroll - except in my case it was a eye scanning device of some kind. They bought it with a 3.5" floppy drive system, etc...
Spending millions of dollars to upgrade equipment just because the OS was obsolete was a VERY hard sell.
In the case of durable goods that possess computerized processes there should be some sort of support contract in place that states the vender will maintain upwards compatibility for X amount of time at reasonable costs. 3 years is too short to cut off support.
Businesses only replace vehicles regularly because they break down, need maintenance etc.
True of software as well. Though the maintenance is often to fix bugs and/or patch security holes.
Software will work perfectly right up until it chokes and crashes never to recover.
*snerk* This isn't always true of business software. I've seen plenty that just gradually slows down until you need to reboot and recover the system, running some sort of error recovery/optimization tool. In other cases I've seen monitors with a set of stickies next to them with things NOT to do in order to avoid breaking the system.
Also funding the IT dept with X amount doesn't work.
It's a good thing I didn't suggest that then - "and Y every Z years to do a major overhaul". If y = 10x, so be it. But you can't set x to 0 either, because you still need to do maintenance on the system. Bug fixes, security patches, hardware replacement, etc...
So, if you want to reel things in, everyone needs to come to an agreement... to compromise.
This is one of the reasons that at least some businesses are more than happy to work with unions - that way everybody gets the same package and paying people is simple. It's only when the union gets too big for it's britches and becomes obstructive that you have problems. Note: I see a difference between 'standing up for your union members' and being obstructive. It can be a fine balancing act.
But note that the GP didn't mention vacation or company cars. He mentioned shift skills and certifications. Which means that their payroll system isn't just paying people, it's handling scheduling as well, which complicates things greatly. We have some of that at my work. It's easy for us - we're salary and a fairly small shop, but you have things like Person X can't take leave the same time as Person Y. We need at least 3 people working at all times, etc...
The UI is the only major thing that keeps changing.
Worse, once you got the worker over the hump of learning all the hot keys, the old dos versions of various software packages actually worked BETTER than the modern 'web based' implementations of what the old green screens did.
I remember seeing somebody using a terminal program to log some part maintenance. It's a maintenance tracking system for aircraft - it tracks all work done not only on the aircraft, but on sub components, and will do things like spit out a report on how many flight hours part X has left before it needs to be rebuilt, and on Y before it needs to be replaced, etc... It can also handle you pulling X from plane 1 to put into plane 2 in order to get 2 in flying shape because there's two other problems with 1 at the moment keeping it from flying because we don't have any spare X's and we really need to get 2 into the air *NOW*.
It took seconds in the old system, but over 10 in the web based version. Obviously all the old hands were resisting going to the 'new improved' system. I believe they eventually got the system fixed, but it ended up being a lot more complicated than the project leads anticipated.
The trick, I think, is to treat IT more like a leased resource than a purchased tool. Or should I say 'a depreciating asset'?
A hammer is a hammer, whether it was bought yesterday or a decade ago. You're going to want to regularly inspect both for defects that might render it unsuitable, but you're unlikely to have to replace it 'just because'.
On the other hand, most businesses understand that you need to regularly replace your vehicles in addition to having regular maintenance. When you do so might vary, but there's normally a schedule. Dad's work replaces them every 4 years, for example. There are businesses that don't do this, but they tend to be smaller and run tighter on the wire - sort of like businesses that put off IT upgrades.
Fund the IT department with the idea in mind that you'll be spending X every year in 'routine maintenance' along the lines of oil & filter changes, and Y every Z years to do a major overhaul, and it becomes a lot more tolerable. It's generally cheaper as well, since you never quite get into that 'legacy' category where you're having to hire people back from retirement to explain the system to a middleman so he can explain it to the new programmers so they can build an interface.
But the question also asked what happened to all the money saved on eliminating staff?
1. Owners of the company in increased profit 2. Customers of the company in lowered costs prices due to competition that's also upgraded forcing the price of goods down. 3. Staff in the form of higher pay at least partially due to higher skillsets required. 4. More services are provided.
So tell me, exactly how will upgrading that newfangled "typewriter" help clients?
'Typewriter' is the least of the replacement concerns. We're looking at stuff like: 1. Payroll. My Grandmother used to do payroll by hand. If I remember right, her maximum as an individual was less than a hundred people, at which point it would be her full time job. Why only a hundred? Well, consider that she had to gather up the timecards, figure out how much each worker worked, figure out their overtime(if any), look up the appropriate amounts of tax withholding, FICA, and such, deduct set amounts for things like healthcare, debts and such. Double check the amounts, and log it all up for the business, then cut and distribute the checks. Mom uses electronic systems and can do the same for thousands of employees. 2. Inventory management. It used to be that you'd need a small army of stockers to transfer items to and from the warehouse, not to mention more clerks to constantly monitor the flow in and out of the warehouse(and inventorying what's inside of it) in order to anticipate the need for ordering more parts. Today? The computer can track all that, automatically generate order requests, and makes analysis of parts need much simpler. Did we go through 6 of part y29840, or only 1, meaning that we only need to keep 2 on the shelf, not 12? Are we going through so much of it that we need to order more, do we need to investigate why the part is breaking more often than anticipated, etc...?
It gets much more complicated from there, and one thing to remember is that IBM, "International Business Machines" predates computers was already producing whole lines of complicated machines that saved labor. Computers were just the next step.
The problem, I think, is that when many of these businesses deployed the new computerized systems they were still in the IBM mindset - the machines were durable equipment, so they were willing to pay the industrial price tag to get a *good* system that was expected to work decades(and they mostly have), and have subsequently evolved to work even better with that system. Then they got complacent, out of the mindset that software is a tool/machine as well, and you need to upgrade it occasionally. Then you get into that it's become critical and changing at this point will cost lots even though it would ultimately save them more money there's also a lot of risk. So it's very much a 'bite the bullet' time for such companies.
I don't mind taking the bus except for 2 factors: 1. Comfort. The city buses I've been on have been far less comfortable than any of my car seats. I know there have to be car seats out there that are less comfortable, but I haven't found them. 2. Time. I can decide to go somewhere, jump in my truck and be at my destination in about 10 minutes most of the time. With the bus I have to pay attention to the time, wait for the bus out in the weather, take an extra hour of time getting to within a couple blocks of my destination, normally arrive there an hour early, etc...
I don't count my time riding the bus as expensive as driving, but it's not an OOM's difference, thus making the bus more expensive in my metric.
One of the things I would have done is had at least 2 cameras. Preferably 4 or even 6. Still, it doesn't look like he mailed it far, so it's possible that he simply mailed it a few times until he got sufficient footage.
Yes, it's a well known fact (*) that all the senior posts in large Western companies are held by disabled black lesbians, isn't it?
It's also a well known fact that 99% of posts in large Western companies are senior ones.
All that means is that IF you manage to get a job in a 'large western company' when you're a white male you're golden. In reality it's a bit more complicated in that most of those senior posts are held by people who got into the industry when it was a lot friendlier to white males. TODAY it can be very difficult. Not impossible, but difficult.
Heh, this reminds me of the various difficulty levels in many games going up to things like "Insanity", might actually make some gamers deliberately play the unregistered/pirated version.
"You've only beaten it on 'hardcore'? Hah! I've made it to level 7 on unregistered!'
That would only work if it really does result in more filing fees being assessed. From a quick search(not a patent lawyer), there is a fee for appealing final rejections, but apparently there is no added fee before that. There are other things that might trigger a fee, such as if you make new claims.
For th GP - from what I've heard, the patent office is deluged with patent requests, so not having enough applications to meet quota seems a bit strange - they could get more points in that case by rubber-stamping 'approved'. Which, by some reports, is also happening.
Slashdot Mirror
Two hours later, an evacuation order comes out and you must leave the county NOW, but your EV only has enough charge to get you to the other side of town. Solution?
1. Go with a neighbor/relative - fewer vehicles on the road during an evacuation is beneficial anyways
2. If you have 2 vehicles, which many families will have for the foreseeable future, you will probably have 1 gas and 1 EV. You take the gas one.
3. Toss a generator into the trunk or attach a trailer that has a generator and the appropriate hookups, basically converting your hybrid into an EV
4. Catch a bus.
As for access to the super-charger points, logically as more Tesla vehicles get on the road they'll install more charge points. You should be fine unless you're trying to travel to some event where the road has vastly more traffic on it than normal. Ideally I see lots of charge points at restaurants. They always have enough parking, at least unless the restaurant is full itself. Charge points might be expensive now, but they have the potential to be a lot cheaper and at least they don't present a serious chemical/fire hazard.
And yeah, to each his own.
Not even sure why they are worried about Tesla.
Because of Tesla's stated business plan? Start in the ultra-high end sports car market, move down to the luxury car market, using the larger profit margins that allows to eventually move down into the economy car market?
They see Tesla being competition eventually, and they want to protect their business model - which would be to force Tesla to hire them, at least some of them, to act as dealers, allowing them to continue their business as usual.
There's a number of different ways to 'toughen' drunk driving laws, and lowering the BAC level is only one of them.
1. Lower the BAC level - problem: Even .08 is low enough that a cop driving behind you can't tell whether you're inebriated or just tired, on allergy medication, old, new to driving or just a bad driver.
2. Impose confinement: Something like 30 days in jail for the first offense. Problem: High impact; you're normally putting an employed person in jail, which means they might lose their job, at which point you have to provide for the care of them and their family(or they're not paying taxes).
3. Impose fines: Already done; to the point that poor people can't afford them yet the really rich often don't care
4. Force them to have an interlock device: The difficulty in fooling the thing is limited to the expense of simply evading it by getting a different vehicle.
5. Expand the definition of 'DUI' - I've heard of people busted for DUI while sleeping in the backseat of their car in the bar parking lot. Their own driveway I can sort of understand, and parked on the side of the road nowhere near where alcohol is served is downright suspicious, but if the engine isn't hot... I've also heard of people getting DUIs on riding lawnmowers, though most of those are justified in my opinion. Once you get on a motorway with your John Deere you're subject to the rules of the road... The funniest, I think, are the ones where somebody got a DUI while riding a horse or bicycle.
Especially for #5, you start to have to question whether the law in question is actually 'for the common good'. If the law is intended to protect the drunk against his own actions, what sense does it make to force him to suffer more serious losses than he realistically would even in an accident?
Eliminating drunk driving is a complex affair, and I think we need to do more to reduce the heavy drinkers from driving drunk - not expand the definition again.
We can't even successfully prevent all idiots from driving at .08
I'm not a professional researcher, but I question their results. I read a different article which said that .05 BAC levels would save 200-300 lives a year. .05 is 38% over sober .08 169%
Some figures:
Annual traffic deaths: ~33k
Portion that are 'alcohol related': 1/3rd, about 10k total
Number of lives estimated to be saved: 500-800 per year, 5-8% of current alcohol deaths.
Extra risk:
Already there's all sorts of activities that will raise the risk of you having an accident more than 38%. The vast majority of the fatal DUI accidents I've read about are for people with BACs north of .24, or triple the current limit.
Meanwhile, I predict that prosecuting people for .05 DUIs is going to be expensive. Most will try to fight it; you're getting into the range where a breath test might not be accurate enough. I question whether the the cost to society for enforcing the rule might not exceed the cost of implementing it.
Realistically you'd be better off somehow stopping the 'should be dead with a BAC that high' people from driving. A bit tough given how creative some of them get - permanently 'borrowing' a friend or relative's vehicle, secretly buying a used car without the mandated interlock, etc...
I'm a registered user on facebook. I use it for a few applications that demand facebook credentials, but other than that it's locked down as tight as I can get it - no friends, no sharing, etc...
I'm sure there's lots like me. Heck, many of my coworkers have TWO facebook accounts -one for friends/family, one for work. I know it violates the TOS, but they don't care.
This hybrid does not work that way. It caches and then writes to the mechanical drive within times of the order of seconds or fractions of seconds and not hours as with your example above. It reduces seeking and not spinning. Since failure ties in to running time and not the amount of arm movement (unless somebody can find somehting that indicates otherwise) that's not likely to do anything with expected life, but then again it's not designed with that as an objective anyway.
You misunderstand me. I was talking more about reads in the first place, where 100% of the hits could come from the flash, and even then because flash is non-volatile there's no reason to be in any hurry to write the information to the hard drive even if you do have a write.
My point was that, assuming I'm 'in the zone' of my average usage, I'm capable of doing tasks for hours that never hit my HD at all. Knowing my usage patterns, this would remain true of a well optimized 24GB flash cache, resulting in the drive never needing to power up to fetch data from the platters. For minor writes, put them in the flash, then wait for when it really needs to spin up the drive to flush them down.
The reduction in failure chance of the mechanical drive is not likely to offset the increased chance of failure you've got by having two items with similar chance of failure, each of which results in the hybrid drive being unusable.
Do you have a citation that the flash is as likely to fail as the HD? Not to mention whether it is completely unable to function, even in a degraded state, without the flash?
Heck, do you have any evidence that 'battery backed RAM' is more reliable than an SSD? Batteries do go bad, remember. With a flash based cache system you only need a capacitor to finish flushing the writes to the flash, no need to have enough power to keep the RAM going while you spin up the drive and write the information.
Plus, 24GB of RAM still runs substantially more than the complete system we're looking at. Personally I don't see putting these hybrids in servers where reliability is paramount, it's more for laptops and desktops where price is an important consideration while people still want enough storage for all their music, videos, etc...
The poster above is completely correct. If the second component has a non-zero chance of failure then the expected life has decreased.
I think Dahamma's point isn't that the expected life hasn't decreased, and I've seen no indication that he thinks that the other component has a zero chance of failure, indeed, the statement ' If the MTBF of one is significantly longer than the other' indicates that both have MTBFs, which explicitly says both has failures.
Dahamma's point is that if one has a MTBF sufficiently higher than the other, the more reliable part doesn't *SIGNIFICANTLY* affect reliability. IE the more reliable component might drop a day of expected usage off the combined device vs the most common failure which limits it to 3-5 years. So now it's 2.99-4.98 years, on average. That's not 'significant'.
Now combine two drives that both have a MTBF of 5 years and your combined device might only have a MTBF of 2.5 years.
I've seen some numbers on main bearings, which are directly related to running time, numbers on platter problems, but nothing on the seek arm.
This, on the other hand, is a good point. Countering it, what if the drive is smart enough to spin down and not spin up as long as it's cache is working? I'm running a split system, I can actually work on my computer for hours without hitting the platter drive. Now, I'm rocking a 250GB SSD, not a 24GB one, but I'm running it as two drives - there's lots of files on the SSD that don't need to be there(such as OS files not routinely used by my install), and the drive isn't full. 24GB, smartly used, could be as effective at avoiding spinning up the platters as my one that's 10X the size.
Not spinning up = less wear on the bearings, less heat to kill things.
That sounds like the Drake Equation used to estimate the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations. You have the first three steps...
1. How many people will download it? (solved)
2. How many people will print it?
3. How many will assemble it?
4. How many will fire it?
5. How many will actually use it to further a crime?
6. How many will cause injury with it in the commission of a violent crime?
7. How many will kill somebody with it?
I'm guessing it's going to round to zero by about step 5.
Agreed, but it seems like the people who have the power to buy this equipment often resent the idea of having to get input from IT/etc on their selections.
Fortunately, they've given my office power to veto any IT related purchases - and if they don't come through us, we can actually confiscate the equipment, which they are not reimbursed for. Some other office might get the neat item they bought, but the important point is that there's no gain to bypassing us. The higher ups have determined that the extra up front expense of buying approved products is worth it in the long run.
For example, take printers. The ones that most offices would go out and buy on their own costs 75% of ours, but have a lifespan of less than 3 years vs the 8 ours will last, the toner costs twice as much(per page), etc...
As another example - one of our offices used software X for various tasks. The vendor for the software ended up going out of business and dropping all support for the program, then it was determined that there were a number of security risks. It took a bit, but I got them to pay the money to switch over to software Y, which has active support, some neat new features, and perhaps most importantly - had the ability to import the data from the defunct software.
How I sold it?
1. Disallowed from network due to vulnerabilities
2. Pointed out that it was only going to get more and more expensive to shift over while reliability slowly degraded.
It's nice that people can still believe fairytales, but not so nice when they involve the "peaceful" nature of communism. There is a little history you left out, such as:
I think your sarcasm detector is broken. Peragrin's post pegged mine.
Employees are a lot easier to dispose of due to low barrier to entry.
On the other hand, when an old timer has 10X the production at 2X the cost, they're worth keeping. It's sheer short-sightedness otherwise.
Oh, and 'over 10' wasn't in seconds, it was in minutes. You'd spend a minute just waiting for the page to load. When I was programming webpages, workflow and optimization was high on my list. I wanted a page to load in under a second.
Computers *are* just equipment to the end users in say a warehousing operation. Why are we not designing systems with this in mind?
Agreed.
In the warehousing example much used above if you avoid the latest gee whiz features and give them exactly what is needed there is no reason why the VAX of yesteryear cannot keep doing it's job other than it can't be maintained anymore.
Technically speaking, even a VAX system could technically run the robotic warehouses of today where they lock the building closed and machines move all the items to and from the shelving, with no human stockers at all. You might need a bigger room to store all the machines, but it can be done. A single server rack of modern machines can do the same for much less cost, and the only real reason a single machine couldn't do it is that I want more redundancy for safety.
That's a failing on IT's part though, why was the machine not designed with a 20 year lifecycle?
That's actually part of the failing - at least with the VAX systems they WERE designed with a 20 year lifecycle, but unlike with company vehicles, for some reason many companies stopped planning to replace the system after 20. In some cases they're still running computer systems from the '70s. Meanwhile the very approach to IT has changed drastically, from centralized mainframes to microcomputers. The control lines of 20 years ago need to be replaced. It's not an insurmountable expense, but especially when you're looking at industrial systems often you have to specially shield stuff, which just isn't standard in the minimum-cost solutions of today.
so why aren't we doing this?
I think that many places are, it's just that the short sighted ones manage to be lower cost in the short term, so if somebody isn't paying attention they can end up in an expensive situation if they aren't running a separate closed network for the stuff that's forced to be legacy.
With a decent bus service you could do the same, except you might have to walk a few hundred yards to a bus stop.
Even when I lived somewhere with half decent bus service(house was within half a block of the bus stop, and one came by every 1/2 hour most of the day), it was normally faster to bicycle where I wanted to go. It was like 10 miles to downtown, and on average I couldn't quite beat the bus. Note: I lived pretty much at the turn-around point for the route.
The bus service where I live now is much, much worse. Problem is, I don't see how there's any economical fix for it. The density just isn't there. Start running enough buses to get me taking it again and you'd be burning more fuel moving buses around than having the passengers just drive.
I've seen this as well. I'm IT, not medical, but I was talking with some medical people and they brought up the same problem as PlusFiveTroll - except in my case it was a eye scanning device of some kind. They bought it with a 3.5" floppy drive system, etc...
Spending millions of dollars to upgrade equipment just because the OS was obsolete was a VERY hard sell.
In the case of durable goods that possess computerized processes there should be some sort of support contract in place that states the vender will maintain upwards compatibility for X amount of time at reasonable costs. 3 years is too short to cut off support.
Businesses only replace vehicles regularly because they break down, need maintenance etc.
True of software as well. Though the maintenance is often to fix bugs and/or patch security holes.
Software will work perfectly right up until it chokes and crashes never to recover.
*snerk* This isn't always true of business software. I've seen plenty that just gradually slows down until you need to reboot and recover the system, running some sort of error recovery/optimization tool. In other cases I've seen monitors with a set of stickies next to them with things NOT to do in order to avoid breaking the system.
Also funding the IT dept with X amount doesn't work.
It's a good thing I didn't suggest that then - "and Y every Z years to do a major overhaul". If y = 10x, so be it. But you can't set x to 0 either, because you still need to do maintenance on the system. Bug fixes, security patches, hardware replacement, etc...
So, if you want to reel things in, everyone needs to come to an agreement... to compromise.
This is one of the reasons that at least some businesses are more than happy to work with unions - that way everybody gets the same package and paying people is simple. It's only when the union gets too big for it's britches and becomes obstructive that you have problems. Note: I see a difference between 'standing up for your union members' and being obstructive. It can be a fine balancing act.
But note that the GP didn't mention vacation or company cars. He mentioned shift skills and certifications. Which means that their payroll system isn't just paying people, it's handling scheduling as well, which complicates things greatly. We have some of that at my work. It's easy for us - we're salary and a fairly small shop, but you have things like Person X can't take leave the same time as Person Y. We need at least 3 people working at all times, etc...
The UI is the only major thing that keeps changing.
Worse, once you got the worker over the hump of learning all the hot keys, the old dos versions of various software packages actually worked BETTER than the modern 'web based' implementations of what the old green screens did.
I remember seeing somebody using a terminal program to log some part maintenance. It's a maintenance tracking system for aircraft - it tracks all work done not only on the aircraft, but on sub components, and will do things like spit out a report on how many flight hours part X has left before it needs to be rebuilt, and on Y before it needs to be replaced, etc... It can also handle you pulling X from plane 1 to put into plane 2 in order to get 2 in flying shape because there's two other problems with 1 at the moment keeping it from flying because we don't have any spare X's and we really need to get 2 into the air *NOW*.
It took seconds in the old system, but over 10 in the web based version. Obviously all the old hands were resisting going to the 'new improved' system. I believe they eventually got the system fixed, but it ended up being a lot more complicated than the project leads anticipated.
The trick, I think, is to treat IT more like a leased resource than a purchased tool. Or should I say 'a depreciating asset'?
A hammer is a hammer, whether it was bought yesterday or a decade ago. You're going to want to regularly inspect both for defects that might render it unsuitable, but you're unlikely to have to replace it 'just because'.
On the other hand, most businesses understand that you need to regularly replace your vehicles in addition to having regular maintenance. When you do so might vary, but there's normally a schedule. Dad's work replaces them every 4 years, for example. There are businesses that don't do this, but they tend to be smaller and run tighter on the wire - sort of like businesses that put off IT upgrades.
Fund the IT department with the idea in mind that you'll be spending X every year in 'routine maintenance' along the lines of oil & filter changes, and Y every Z years to do a major overhaul, and it becomes a lot more tolerable. It's generally cheaper as well, since you never quite get into that 'legacy' category where you're having to hire people back from retirement to explain the system to a middleman so he can explain it to the new programmers so they can build an interface.
But the question also asked what happened to all the money saved on eliminating staff?
1. Owners of the company in increased profit
2. Customers of the company in lowered costs prices due to competition that's also upgraded forcing the price of goods down.
3. Staff in the form of higher pay at least partially due to higher skillsets required.
4. More services are provided.
So tell me, exactly how will upgrading that newfangled "typewriter" help clients?
'Typewriter' is the least of the replacement concerns. We're looking at stuff like:
1. Payroll. My Grandmother used to do payroll by hand. If I remember right, her maximum as an individual was less than a hundred people, at which point it would be her full time job. Why only a hundred? Well, consider that she had to gather up the timecards, figure out how much each worker worked, figure out their overtime(if any), look up the appropriate amounts of tax withholding, FICA, and such, deduct set amounts for things like healthcare, debts and such. Double check the amounts, and log it all up for the business, then cut and distribute the checks. Mom uses electronic systems and can do the same for thousands of employees.
2. Inventory management. It used to be that you'd need a small army of stockers to transfer items to and from the warehouse, not to mention more clerks to constantly monitor the flow in and out of the warehouse(and inventorying what's inside of it) in order to anticipate the need for ordering more parts. Today? The computer can track all that, automatically generate order requests, and makes analysis of parts need much simpler. Did we go through 6 of part y29840, or only 1, meaning that we only need to keep 2 on the shelf, not 12? Are we going through so much of it that we need to order more, do we need to investigate why the part is breaking more often than anticipated, etc...?
It gets much more complicated from there, and one thing to remember is that IBM, "International Business Machines" predates computers was already producing whole lines of complicated machines that saved labor. Computers were just the next step.
The problem, I think, is that when many of these businesses deployed the new computerized systems they were still in the IBM mindset - the machines were durable equipment, so they were willing to pay the industrial price tag to get a *good* system that was expected to work decades(and they mostly have), and have subsequently evolved to work even better with that system. Then they got complacent, out of the mindset that software is a tool/machine as well, and you need to upgrade it occasionally. Then you get into that it's become critical and changing at this point will cost lots even though it would ultimately save them more money there's also a lot of risk. So it's very much a 'bite the bullet' time for such companies.
I don't mind taking the bus except for 2 factors:
1. Comfort. The city buses I've been on have been far less comfortable than any of my car seats. I know there have to be car seats out there that are less comfortable, but I haven't found them.
2. Time. I can decide to go somewhere, jump in my truck and be at my destination in about 10 minutes most of the time. With the bus I have to pay attention to the time, wait for the bus out in the weather, take an extra hour of time getting to within a couple blocks of my destination, normally arrive there an hour early, etc...
I don't count my time riding the bus as expensive as driving, but it's not an OOM's difference, thus making the bus more expensive in my metric.
One of the things I would have done is had at least 2 cameras. Preferably 4 or even 6. Still, it doesn't look like he mailed it far, so it's possible that he simply mailed it a few times until he got sufficient footage.
Yes, it's a well known fact (*) that all the senior posts in large Western companies are held by disabled black lesbians, isn't it?
It's also a well known fact that 99% of posts in large Western companies are senior ones.
All that means is that IF you manage to get a job in a 'large western company' when you're a white male you're golden. In reality it's a bit more complicated in that most of those senior posts are held by people who got into the industry when it was a lot friendlier to white males. TODAY it can be very difficult. Not impossible, but difficult.
Heh, this reminds me of the various difficulty levels in many games going up to things like "Insanity", might actually make some gamers deliberately play the unregistered/pirated version.
"You've only beaten it on 'hardcore'? Hah! I've made it to level 7 on unregistered!'
That would only work if it really does result in more filing fees being assessed. From a quick search(not a patent lawyer), there is a fee for appealing final rejections, but apparently there is no added fee before that. There are other things that might trigger a fee, such as if you make new claims.
For th GP - from what I've heard, the patent office is deluged with patent requests, so not having enough applications to meet quota seems a bit strange - they could get more points in that case by rubber-stamping 'approved'. Which, by some reports, is also happening.
There's an old, probably ancient stress relief technique where you write a nasty letter but never send it.
Abraham Lincoln practiced it - they found scathing nasty letters after his death addressed to various generals during the war that were never sent.
Occasionally, one gets sent out by mistake...