>> There actually already is [a cure for cancer/prostate cancer].
> There isn't.
There is.
It just isn't an easy-to-implement cure. All you have to do is kill every cancer cell. Given the sheer number of cells to check, it's a challenge.
Surgery for reattaching limbs has been done. Intense surgery for dealing with the body on a cell-by-cell basis may be feasible too. Indeed, start with a bloodstream filter to scan for spreading cancer. Acupuncture may not have real results, but scale it down to allow deep and extractable probing into the body and it could be a solution to cancer.
A problem is cost - if a person earns a paltry 2 or 3 million over a lifetime, but it costs at least a million in labor and time on special machines to deal with every cell in the body, how can a cure be afforded?
Sometime soon, if some holes were drilled to relieve the pressure, maybe we'd all feel more comforted. Suppose it was a different disaster being predicted like a comet. We'd be talking about taking action.
What can be done? Maybe vent holes, maybe cut a large slice away, maybe build shelters, maybe just move away while the going's easy...
There is a lot of crap, I agree, because many profs save time by having students write papers, and when you talk about riding coattails, the profs just put their name along with the student's name on the sometimes quite long list of authors. On the surface, there is a "structured" way of writing a paper so that it passes muster. After that, deep thoughts are typically not described in detail. The reader is "supposed to" have enough IQ or education to follow along.
Is it an old boys network? Perhaps, but I don't really think so. The system works, as in it is maintainable rather than functional, rather than perfect, because there is enough money to keep below average students. After all, if you have only above average students, you will end up with below average students, below a larger average, but then you need above average profs and above average budgets. Just as subprime was aided by mandates to provide poor people with access to housing, universities have to admit bad performance.
The problem is a lot of writers tend to gravitate to lower standards, partly to save time on writing, and partly because the system makes papers suck so badly that it becomes easy to become published - it's an artificial way of paving the road to academic recognition. Reviewers are inundated with garbage. They can't reject as many as they want because they have a "quota". Also, some people need an incentive to become researchers, trying to achieve something risky, and they aren't going to stay in the field if their papers keep getting rejected.
There has to be a happy ending - if you want to figure out something, don't just search the literature. The exact answer isn't there. You have to solve the problems yourself and skim the papers for little insights into techniques or results.
The masterminds are devious? The ignorance is enforced in the entire system?
Maybe, but could it just be the sheer sustained growth of knowledge and the lack of ability to handle the knowledge? I see people grasping at straws and stepping on each other to acquire not knowledge but wealth. The successes of the few trigger the enthusiasm of the masses. That is exactly what happened until the slippery slope became the avalanche. The funny thing is, what is in this simple analysis that could not find its way into a computer model?
For years, I have heard the occasional debate in the media about how unsustainable the increase in housing has to be. I wasn't even listening to financial gurus. The words of wisdom were coming from typical journalists who were sort of in tune with the common man.
Clearly the missing factor in the computer models, the X factor, is the belief that world progress itself was going to sustain the affordability of the high cost of living. Higher housing costs and education costs were to some people an unavoidable way of life, and a benchmark of progress, and somehow everyone else is able to get into the game no matter how high the stakes are. The message was simple: if you bother yourself in the age of fun-on-the-internet and really-cool-lifestyles to drill down into this mindset, you will see that the whole economy is sound and proper because the wealth is easily sustainable via production on the backs of the third world. Then immigrants will come, cluster, and afford the million dollar 2-bedroom bungalows with no garage, a bizarre effect that will exist in only a few years if housing prices were to maintain their collision course. This mathematics somehow did not appear in a computer model because our ability to control computers has not advanced to the level of simple linear projection.
So what is the data telling us now? The stock market is down because businesses have just focused on raking in as much money as they can from the economic situation of Christmas past. Now it is Christmas present, and there is no real plan for Christmas future. As a result, people are scared shitless to invest anything. The fear can only be allayed with real results. Trust has to be won. These are sweeping concepts that are not that easy perhaps to quantify and observe, not that easy to run on a computer model...
If you can move faster than light, surely you can reassemble reality into the reality you want instead of being forced to take the reality you're given.
I've always felt there was something odd about the recent trend of Super Computers using common hardware. components. They have really loss their way in super computing by just making a beefed up PC and running a version of a common OS which could handle it. Or Clustering a bunch of PC's togeter. Multi-Core technology is good for desktop systems as it is meant to run a lot of relatively small apps Rarely taking advantage of more then 1 or 2 cores. per app.In other-words it allows Multi-Tasking without a penalty. We don't use super computers that way. We use them to to perform 1 app that takes huge resources that would take hours or years on your PC and spit out results in seconds or days. Back in the early-mid 90's we had different processors for Desktop and Super Computers. Yes it was more expensive for the super computers but if you were going to pay millions of dollars for a super computer what the difference if you need to pay an additional $80,000 for more custom processors.
Your mind must still be stuck in the 90's.
Let's see what happened since then.
I've always felt there was something odd about the recent trend of Super Computers using common hardware components -- the components are not so common if you compare them to what was available even just months ago. High end computer parts evolve so fast that if you custom design a supercomputer, you can turn around and find that an off-the-shelf machine is breathing down your neck. The custom computer is hard to replicate because the next customer is always asking you for an even better procssor. With ordinary components you can get a lot more customers because they don't bother you for custom everything.
Or Clustering a bunch of PC's togeter -- This is an insensitive statement. People who want supercomputers but can't afford them make clusters. The clusters turn out to be quite scalable so we have really advanced cluster technology, which poorer people can afford to scale down from.
We use them to to perform 1 app that takes huge resources that would take hours or years on your PC and spit out results in seconds or days. -- What can one say? There are so many problems that require powerful compute power that if a supercomputer can be multitasked so much the better! PCs are designed to deliver multitasking, at some cost to straight ahead speed
Now replace th doctor with a machine that passes the Turing test...
Ergo all cell phones shold have epert sstems built in, at least as a source of knowledge on all things related to the common person: survival, first aid, cooking, dating, etc.
Thieves are clever and will only take 2-3 loads to small junkyards per month across 10 counties and work out in the country where nobody can hear them working. They're only dropping off a few hundred bucks at a time and half of them are illegals/felons using fake licenses anyway even if you did write it down.
How has the world come to this in the 21st century? Surely these people can get honest work with equal health risks and monetary reward?
I would imagine perfect is another word for optimal. There are many things in your life that can be affected by a phone call. Take that impact on average, considering all the phone calls that you are typically making, and the perfect phone call becomes the objective phone call, the kind of call that you want to make every time, the Holy Grail of phone calls.
Old Zeno saw this coming a mile away. Every time you make a 50% advancement, you get closer to your goal, but no matter how many times you do that, you never make it.
A vacuous truth is a statement of the form if false-statement, then P where P is any statement. This statement is true because any falsehood has no power to falsify anything. It really doesn't matter what P is. P can be true or false, but the statement false-statement implies P is still true.
We're dealing with the statement "if your work computer is booting Vista, you don't deserve to be paid." This is a vacuous statement for the very simple reason that work computers don't run Vista. Sure, industry and big business are trying to send Microsoft a message that society will turn on its head due to the onerous hardships that people have to suffer while using Vista at work, one hardship being not getting paid while Vista does something slow-ass. But people don't use Vista at work unless they're really suckers for punishment, in which case they deserve to be not paid while Vista slows things down.
But with all that out of way, Windows has had a sleep function for more than 10 years, so just what the debate is about, I don't know.
Cray seem determined to take #1 spot, but combining the XT4 and XT5 clusters for a better overall measurement has the disadvantage of making the XT5 look less efficient
As the saying goes, it isn't whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game.
But to come oh so close and yet so far. It just makes me want to spout cliches all day long.
In the not too distant future, we shall see a new Top 500 list. It just seems like yesterday that RoadRunner cracked the Petaflops barrier, and the whole world seems to have fallen on its ass in the interim. Banking failures, government bailouts, people losing their retirement portfolios. The irony is too much. Even as the computers get better, the answers that people need don't come fast enough.
Then the light turned on for me. People in general, the people you see on the street going on their busy way to whatever, are mostly relying on "someone else" to come up with the answers. Most people have little confidence in their own ability to answer hard questions.
Well, maybe things will turn around because of the power of supercomputers. It would be about time, wouldn't it? Here's how it may play out. Supercomputers so far, good as they are, serve up expensive results, so they are applied to difficult problems that are useful but far removed from everyday life.
As supercomputer clock cycles become more abundant, researchers can apply them to do more mundane things that the unwashed can relate to. The result could be revolutionary. People who have always aspired to some inconsequential achievement that requires some expertise or training may suddenly have access to highly instructive supercomputer-generated procedures that explain both how and why. Not only will people become more expert do-it-yourselfers, but robots will become far versatile, with amazing repertoires.
Crossing the petaflops barrier may be sufficient psychological incentive for people to request that governments begin to make supercomputing infrastructure available for public consumption, like roads and other services. Certainly, exciting times are comiing.
I know there are other problems facing the USA but space exploration is not something we should ever stop.
Space may be one of the best solutions, actually. It nis goals that drive people to get up and do things.
How much better can we make cars? Much, but if people don't want to spend so much on cars, and it's better to tell car-making personnel to go find something else to do for a while, such as, GM shuts down, that would be a signal of how it may be better to reallocate a large number of people into a different direction. Add the masses of unemployed clamoring for something to do, a lofty collective ambition could shift some people into new jobs and open other jobs for people who need work.
Almost as big as my little 14" CRT at 6400 x 4800 running on the old 386. With the tendency for screens to get wider, an aspect ratio of 6400 x 4200 scales nicely from 1600 x 1050 so we can see this picture nicely on an 8 ft monitor. About the same size as the screen in the USS Enterprise?
If you look closely, there's a little banner in the galaxy 342-HITHR that says "Happy 2000000000th! In 9000000000 years, there will be intelligence that will know what this amount of time means."
Is there anyone else out there who is getting tired of the current greed-based international world order?
Sure. Let's leave the riches unexploited. I don't want to freeze my ass drilling in the north anyways.
Witn the increasing usage of robots to do the work of man, I wonder what the fairest distribution of wealth would be. Clearly, the most productive entity, be it machine or man, would be allocated the most resources. So will super-smart robots become the greatest controllers of wealth?
This question has seemed to rear its ugly head in many ways. Detroit automakers are going under. Why? People don't want to buy cars so much? Why? They're poor. Why? They don't deserve to be paid. Why? They do stupid crap that machines or underpaid people in the third world can do.
So robots are taking control of the riches, and people who want to earn a buck will have to go up north and freeze their tushes.
So much for machines making life easier for people, right?
Perhaps the key is for huge portions of the populace to stop doing just stupid crap that machines can do, with the emphasis on stupid. People need to get damned smart and try to do smart things. Otherwise, there's little left other than to seek out the low hanging fruit in international territory. And when that's gone, the slightly higher hanging fruit, and then the really high hanging fruit, but what's after that?
People are repeatedly told in school that they have brains, that they are better than animals. But schools do little to prepare people to be really ambitious. So we whine about the rich getting richer and CEO pay being 400 times average pay, but willingly get on a deep sea drilling platform for some rich-ass boss who has the guts to get greedy. That could be a result of the education system not presenting how people can realize difficult goals. Students learn the fundamentals of thinking, and then it's sink or swim time.
If productive machines merit resource allocation, people need to learn how to be equally meritorious. So let's see what these robots can do up north and they will motivate a few people to become ambitious and then things will happen...
.. when things DON'T work. If the email server is down, how much does it decrease efficiency of communications. If the web server is down, how much revenue is lost? Or how many existing customers do you lose or prospective customers that go away? How much extra work does customer service get when the web site is broken?? If my desktop doesn't work, how much is the company spending for me to sit around doing nothing. That is the value if IT infrastructure
That is so sad. It justifies Google or Microsoft putting the necessary apps on the Internet. The value of IT becomes in the long run, asymptotically, the cost of buying modern computers and network plus an Internet connection.
IT people should be improving things to help the business scale up or take on new work. There are many business cases for machinery over labor: computers help people doing better work, people solve problems, keep track of things, etc.
We're at the pleasant age when a nifty gadget is always coming around the corner so the IT department keeps adding and subtracting from the infrastructure, and it gets so easy that someone with a little technical talent can get it done and keep it running for an office without much work. I know some offices where there is no IT department, but there are 50 people handling massive volumes of information. All they have to do is cooperate about where the stuff is stored on the network.
Even if an IT person isn't inventing anything, s/he should line up the next round of upgrades or look for ways of replacing people or learn about new business angles that need equipment. There's a lot to do, but IT people have a chance to make work interesting and productive
But if it has to be scrapped, what then? Chop it up and bring it back down? Let the cookie crumble and let the chips fall where they may? Boost it into the sun?
Every large space object needs to be designed with parachutes or whatever aerodynamics it takes to bring them home with enough predictability for us to get out of the way.
Slashdot Mirror
>> There actually already is [a cure for cancer/prostate cancer].
> There isn't.
There is.
It just isn't an easy-to-implement cure. All you have to do is kill every cancer cell. Given the sheer number of cells to check, it's a challenge.
Surgery for reattaching limbs has been done. Intense surgery for dealing with the body on a cell-by-cell basis may be feasible too. Indeed, start with a bloodstream filter to scan for spreading cancer. Acupuncture may not have real results, but scale it down to allow deep and extractable probing into the body and it could be a solution to cancer.
A problem is cost - if a person earns a paltry 2 or 3 million over a lifetime, but it costs at least a million in labor and time on special machines to deal with every cell in the body, how can a cure be afforded?
> *All* Microsoft product EULA's ban posting benchmarks
Not that I read EULAs to that granularity. The EULA is in English? Good enough to click on Accept. But Vista produces its own benchmarks. The irony.
Sometime soon, if some holes were drilled to relieve the pressure, maybe we'd all feel more comforted. Suppose it was a different disaster being predicted like a comet. We'd be talking about taking action.
What can be done? Maybe vent holes, maybe cut a large slice away, maybe build shelters, maybe just move away while the going's easy...
There is a lot of crap, I agree, because many profs save time by having students write papers, and when you talk about riding coattails, the profs just put their name along with the student's name on the sometimes quite long list of authors. On the surface, there is a "structured" way of writing a paper so that it passes muster. After that, deep thoughts are typically not described in detail. The reader is "supposed to" have enough IQ or education to follow along.
Is it an old boys network? Perhaps, but I don't really think so. The system works, as in it is maintainable rather than functional, rather than perfect, because there is enough money to keep below average students. After all, if you have only above average students, you will end up with below average students, below a larger average, but then you need above average profs and above average budgets. Just as subprime was aided by mandates to provide poor people with access to housing, universities have to admit bad performance.
The problem is a lot of writers tend to gravitate to lower standards, partly to save time on writing, and partly because the system makes papers suck so badly that it becomes easy to become published - it's an artificial way of paving the road to academic recognition. Reviewers are inundated with garbage. They can't reject as many as they want because they have a "quota". Also, some people need an incentive to become researchers, trying to achieve something risky, and they aren't going to stay in the field if their papers keep getting rejected.
There has to be a happy ending - if you want to figure out something, don't just search the literature. The exact answer isn't there. You have to solve the problems yourself and skim the papers for little insights into techniques or results.
These are military submarines. They have to be able to communicate. I don't think water is as much an impediment to radio waves as rocks.
How red is the herring?
The masterminds are devious? The ignorance is enforced in the entire system?
Maybe, but could it just be the sheer sustained growth of knowledge and the lack of ability to handle the knowledge? I see people grasping at straws and stepping on each other to acquire not knowledge but wealth. The successes of the few trigger the enthusiasm of the masses. That is exactly what happened until the slippery slope became the avalanche. The funny thing is, what is in this simple analysis that could not find its way into a computer model?
For years, I have heard the occasional debate in the media about how unsustainable the increase in housing has to be. I wasn't even listening to financial gurus. The words of wisdom were coming from typical journalists who were sort of in tune with the common man.
Clearly the missing factor in the computer models, the X factor, is the belief that world progress itself was going to sustain the affordability of the high cost of living. Higher housing costs and education costs were to some people an unavoidable way of life, and a benchmark of progress, and somehow everyone else is able to get into the game no matter how high the stakes are. The message was simple: if you bother yourself in the age of fun-on-the-internet and really-cool-lifestyles to drill down into this mindset, you will see that the whole economy is sound and proper because the wealth is easily sustainable via production on the backs of the third world. Then immigrants will come, cluster, and afford the million dollar 2-bedroom bungalows with no garage, a bizarre effect that will exist in only a few years if housing prices were to maintain their collision course. This mathematics somehow did not appear in a computer model because our ability to control computers has not advanced to the level of simple linear projection.
So what is the data telling us now? The stock market is down because businesses have just focused on raking in as much money as they can from the economic situation of Christmas past. Now it is Christmas present, and there is no real plan for Christmas future. As a result, people are scared shitless to invest anything. The fear can only be allayed with real results. Trust has to be won. These are sweeping concepts that are not that easy perhaps to quantify and observe, not that easy to run on a computer model...
If you can move faster than light, surely you can reassemble reality into the reality you want instead of being forced to take the reality you're given.
I've always felt there was something odd about the recent trend of Super Computers using common hardware. components. They have really loss their way in super computing by just making a beefed up PC and running a version of a common OS which could handle it. Or Clustering a bunch of PC's togeter. Multi-Core technology is good for desktop systems as it is meant to run a lot of relatively small apps Rarely taking advantage of more then 1 or 2 cores. per app.In other-words it allows Multi-Tasking without a penalty. We don't use super computers that way. We use them to to perform 1 app that takes huge resources that would take hours or years on your PC and spit out results in seconds or days. Back in the early-mid 90's we had different processors for Desktop and Super Computers. Yes it was more expensive for the super computers but if you were going to pay millions of dollars for a super computer what the difference if you need to pay an additional $80,000 for more custom processors.
Your mind must still be stuck in the 90's.
Let's see what happened since then.
I've always felt there was something odd about the recent trend of Super Computers using common hardware components -- the components are not so common if you compare them to what was available even just months ago. High end computer parts evolve so fast that if you custom design a supercomputer, you can turn around and find that an off-the-shelf machine is breathing down your neck. The custom computer is hard to replicate because the next customer is always asking you for an even better procssor. With ordinary components you can get a lot more customers because they don't bother you for custom everything.
Or Clustering a bunch of PC's togeter -- This is an insensitive statement. People who want supercomputers but can't afford them make clusters. The clusters turn out to be quite scalable so we have really advanced cluster technology, which poorer people can afford to scale down from.
We use them to to perform 1 app that takes huge resources that would take hours or years on your PC and spit out results in seconds or days. -- What can one say? There are so many problems that require powerful compute power that if a supercomputer can be multitasked so much the better! PCs are designed to deliver multitasking, at some cost to straight ahead speed
Now replace th doctor with a machine that passes the Turing test...
Ergo all cell phones shold have epert sstems built in, at least as a source of knowledge on all things related to the common person: survival, first aid, cooking, dating, etc.
Thieves are clever and will only take 2-3 loads to small junkyards per month across 10 counties and work out in the country where nobody can hear them working. They're only dropping off a few hundred bucks at a time and half of them are illegals/felons using fake licenses anyway even if you did write it down.
How has the world come to this in the 21st century? Surely these people can get honest work with equal health risks and monetary reward?
Prosthetic limbs that are actually rifles, swords in canes.
Just hope the asthmatic doesn't mistake the gun and the inhaler.
M. Poirot keeps hammering the point home: "Order and method, mon ami."
C'est ca.
And she lost her purse in space
Your pre-interview biases can only hurt your company and the industry
You lie. My bias for beautiful sex godesses is all the company and the industry needs.
I would imagine perfect is another word for optimal. There are many things in your life that can be affected by a phone call. Take that impact on average, considering all the phone calls that you are typically making, and the perfect phone call becomes the objective phone call, the kind of call that you want to make every time, the Holy Grail of phone calls.
Old Zeno saw this coming a mile away. Every time you make a 50% advancement, you get closer to your goal, but no matter how many times you do that, you never make it.
Ergo, we should look askance at 50% improvements.
A vacuous truth is a statement of the form if false-statement, then P where P is any statement. This statement is true because any falsehood has no power to falsify anything. It really doesn't matter what P is. P can be true or false, but the statement false-statement implies P is still true.
We're dealing with the statement "if your work computer is booting Vista, you don't deserve to be paid." This is a vacuous statement for the very simple reason that work computers don't run Vista. Sure, industry and big business are trying to send Microsoft a message that society will turn on its head due to the onerous hardships that people have to suffer while using Vista at work, one hardship being not getting paid while Vista does something slow-ass. But people don't use Vista at work unless they're really suckers for punishment, in which case they deserve to be not paid while Vista slows things down.
But with all that out of way, Windows has had a sleep function for more than 10 years, so just what the debate is about, I don't know.
Cray seem determined to take #1 spot, but combining the XT4 and XT5 clusters for a better overall measurement has the disadvantage of making the XT5 look less efficient
As the saying goes, it isn't whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game.
But to come oh so close and yet so far. It just makes me want to spout cliches all day long.
In the not too distant future, we shall see a new Top 500 list. It just seems like yesterday that RoadRunner cracked the Petaflops barrier, and the whole world seems to have fallen on its ass in the interim. Banking failures, government bailouts, people losing their retirement portfolios. The irony is too much. Even as the computers get better, the answers that people need don't come fast enough.
Then the light turned on for me. People in general, the people you see on the street going on their busy way to whatever, are mostly relying on "someone else" to come up with the answers. Most people have little confidence in their own ability to answer hard questions.
Well, maybe things will turn around because of the power of supercomputers. It would be about time, wouldn't it? Here's how it may play out. Supercomputers so far, good as they are, serve up expensive results, so they are applied to difficult problems that are useful but far removed from everyday life.
As supercomputer clock cycles become more abundant, researchers can apply them to do more mundane things that the unwashed can relate to. The result could be revolutionary. People who have always aspired to some inconsequential achievement that requires some expertise or training may suddenly have access to highly instructive supercomputer-generated procedures that explain both how and why. Not only will people become more expert do-it-yourselfers, but robots will become far versatile, with amazing repertoires.
Crossing the petaflops barrier may be sufficient psychological incentive for people to request that governments begin to make supercomputing infrastructure available for public consumption, like roads and other services. Certainly, exciting times are comiing.
I know there are other problems facing the USA but space exploration is not something we should ever stop.
Space may be one of the best solutions, actually. It nis goals that drive people to get up and do things.
How much better can we make cars? Much, but if people don't want to spend so much on cars, and it's better to tell car-making personnel to go find something else to do for a while, such as, GM shuts down, that would be a signal of how it may be better to reallocate a large number of people into a different direction. Add the masses of unemployed clamoring for something to do, a lofty collective ambition could shift some people into new jobs and open other jobs for people who need work.
6480 x 4236
Almost as big as my little 14" CRT at 6400 x 4800 running on the old 386. With the tendency for screens to get wider, an aspect ratio of 6400 x 4200 scales nicely from 1600 x 1050 so we can see this picture nicely on an 8 ft monitor. About the same size as the screen in the USS Enterprise?
If you look closely, there's a little banner in the galaxy 342-HITHR that says "Happy 2000000000th! In 9000000000 years, there will be intelligence that will know what this amount of time means."
Is there anyone else out there who is getting tired of the current greed-based international world order?
Sure. Let's leave the riches unexploited. I don't want to freeze my ass drilling in the north anyways.
Witn the increasing usage of robots to do the work of man, I wonder what the fairest distribution of wealth would be. Clearly, the most productive entity, be it machine or man, would be allocated the most resources. So will super-smart robots become the greatest controllers of wealth?
This question has seemed to rear its ugly head in many ways. Detroit automakers are going under. Why? People don't want to buy cars so much? Why? They're poor. Why? They don't deserve to be paid. Why? They do stupid crap that machines or underpaid people in the third world can do.
So robots are taking control of the riches, and people who want to earn a buck will have to go up north and freeze their tushes.
So much for machines making life easier for people, right?
Perhaps the key is for huge portions of the populace to stop doing just stupid crap that machines can do, with the emphasis on stupid. People need to get damned smart and try to do smart things. Otherwise, there's little left other than to seek out the low hanging fruit in international territory. And when that's gone, the slightly higher hanging fruit, and then the really high hanging fruit, but what's after that?
People are repeatedly told in school that they have brains, that they are better than animals. But schools do little to prepare people to be really ambitious. So we whine about the rich getting richer and CEO pay being 400 times average pay, but willingly get on a deep sea drilling platform for some rich-ass boss who has the guts to get greedy. That could be a result of the education system not presenting how people can realize difficult goals. Students learn the fundamentals of thinking, and then it's sink or swim time.
If productive machines merit resource allocation, people need to learn how to be equally meritorious. So let's see what these robots can do up north and they will motivate a few people to become ambitious and then things will happen...
... by being constipated after a long day of drinking.
.. when things DON'T work. If the email server is down, how much does it decrease efficiency of communications. If the web server is down, how much revenue is lost? Or how many existing customers do you lose or prospective customers that go away? How much extra work does customer service get when the web site is broken?? If my desktop doesn't work, how much is the company spending for me to sit around doing nothing. That is the value if IT infrastructure
That is so sad. It justifies Google or Microsoft putting the necessary apps on the Internet. The value of IT becomes in the long run, asymptotically, the cost of buying modern computers and network plus an Internet connection.
IT people should be improving things to help the business scale up or take on new work. There are many business cases for machinery over labor: computers help people doing better work, people solve problems, keep track of things, etc.
We're at the pleasant age when a nifty gadget is always coming around the corner so the IT department keeps adding and subtracting from the infrastructure, and it gets so easy that someone with a little technical talent can get it done and keep it running for an office without much work. I know some offices where there is no IT department, but there are 50 people handling massive volumes of information. All they have to do is cooperate about where the stuff is stored on the network.
Even if an IT person isn't inventing anything, s/he should line up the next round of upgrades or look for ways of replacing people or learn about new business angles that need equipment. There's a lot to do, but IT people have a chance to make work interesting and productive
don't ever want to see that happen
But if it has to be scrapped, what then? Chop it up and bring it back down? Let the cookie crumble and let the chips fall where they may? Boost it into the sun?
Every large space object needs to be designed with parachutes or whatever aerodynamics it takes to bring them home with enough predictability for us to get out of the way.