Didn't you know? Stars are the ancient enemy of Al-Ilah the Moon Deity, the forces of the Djinn, who fight against the Holy Angels and seek to corrupt humans.
Not just that, but every NASA invention has actually ADDED to the economy, creating jobs in the US.
Medical research? Check. Everything from osteoporosis treatments to ceramic "invisible" braces. Oh, and don't forget scratch-resistant lenses for your grandmother's glasses. That memory foam bed you sleep on? Check. The ear thermometer. The insoles you put into your shoes. The modern ionization smoke detector. The safety "zip strips" on the highway that warn you if you are hitting the shoulder. Cordless power tools. The paint used to keep the Statue of Liberty (along with a hell of a long list of other sites) from corroding. Hell, even the clear-coat on your car is probably NASA-descended. Advanced water filtration - your BRITA filter uses NASA technology.
Not to mention the "budget plan" proposed by their latest Howdy Doody robber-barons puppet was a mockery of anything sane, relying on "projections" that insisted unemployment would go down lower than its lowest point from the last century, stay there indefinitely, that medical costs would magically drop to 1/4 their current level by putting the poor and the disabled on a "voucher program" for their health care, and that the US would not get into even the most minor armed conflict for 50 years or longer...
Let me sum up the Paul Ryan plan. It really only needs three bullet points.
1 - Tax cuts for billionaires because they bought the Retardican Party off. 2 - Grandma eats Alpo. But the Retardicans don't care. "They should just die, and decrease the surplus population." 3 - Retardicans are fucking insane.
Welcome to how the legal system works - justice is not a part of it any more.
The sad part is that this kind of shit pervades even the "criminal justice" side.
Traffic tickets? Compare the cost of "just paying" (or in many states, "taking defensive driving") with the cost of defending yourself - lost hours of work on the days you have to go to court, lost time on paperwork or else lawyer fees to subpoena all the records you'll need, and oh yeah, the possibility that the case judge will be one of those corrupt motherfuckers who insist "the police are always right" because guess what, the judge's salary is paid out of ticket fines too.
I had one once where the police officer was obviously just using "pull someone over" as an excuse to hit on the new female recruit. Sat there and watched as he got everything about my car's info wrong on the ticket except for license plate - make, model, even the number of fucking DOORS - because he was too busy trying to "explain how we do this" while sneaking his hand onto her ass.
Didn't matter, of course. The Prosecutors are corrupt, the Judges are corrupt, the whole system is fucking corrupt and the fines and fees are set "just low enough" that most people will "just pay it" because it works out cheaper to do so.
Oh, and no, it's not just on the low side either. The American "justice" system has gotten the "plea bargain" down to a science - you can "plead guilty" to something you know you didn't do, get "lenience" from the court, OR they can tack on dozens of fucking extraneous charges and run you into the ground so that even if you do manage to convince the jury you're innocent on most of it, chances are they'll get one of the charges through, and you'll be fucking bankrupted by the cost of defending yourself anyways.
And in the world of internet service, "ISP overpromises and oversells without capacity to deliver what they promised" ought to be followed swiftly by "Feds sweep in and indict heads of ISP."
But that'll never happen, because the ISPs have already paid off the people who should be arresting them.
Crapptivision said the same thing about the other franchises they killed.
Tony Hawk. Guitar Hero. Crash Bandicoot Spyro the Dragon The repeated - and getting worse and worse - Spider-Man games The repeated - and getting worse and worse - X-Men games (ugh, X-men fighting series from developers who didn't know crap about fighting games instead of more MvC... sigh) Yet Another James Bond Ripoff
Someone needs to take all the Crapptivision execs, line them up, and fly down the line on rollerblades just slapping them all repeatedly till they grow some common sense.
Frankly, I'd rather use a yard because I can easily estimate it at three of my feet.
You three-footed mutant, you;)
Speaking to the weirdo above however: E.g. how do you divide a yard by tow? Basically you can't: you come up with 1.5 feet.
One and a half feet is a perfectly usable and functional 18 inches, which is divisible cleanly and easily by 2,3,4,6,and 9. In other words, you're an idiot.
Why is when ever Metric Vs Imperial comes up someone always converts directly?
Put simply: because you're going to have to convert a metric shit-ton (see I can do metric too!) of existing signage, land measurements, construction measurements, and equipment over.
Or do you plan to convert it all indirectly somehow?
The beauty of the metric system is that you have a consistent system
Which works wonderfully in a scientist's lab, and whose units never fucking show up in the real world.
I went through this above. The "Imperial" system was about using real-world, available items to measure in ways that made the most sense for cleanly splitting units evenly and fairly later.
Want to know why when you see a cookbook, the most commonly measurements are the "cup", "teaspoon" and "tablespoon"? Guess what - every kitchen could be expected to have those items on hand in a mostly standardized size.
Feet to inches - easily divisible by 2,3,4,6. Meters and Centimeters? Thirds are a bitch. Quarters quickly degenerate into deep decimals. Eighths? Pain in the ass. Most of the other "odd Imperial unit conversions" that don't operate in base10 (nail counts in base16, etc) have a reason they were measured that way.
To steal from someone up above a bit: Imperial units are "natural" measures - you will find that most (if not all) natural phenomena will work out to an exact integer number of some measure or other. This made them great when making exact measuring devices was extremely difficult. Far and away easier to use a measuring device that occurs all around you.
Now regarding the rest of your blather: The beauty of the metric system is that you have a consistent system. And that's why scientific calculations are usually done in metric and the result is then transfered back to imperial, so the US public won't get worried that the French took over, communists gained control of the class room, or that their politicians betrayed the greatest conceivable nation on earth.
Setting aside the fact that yes, there are a lot of dumbasses in the US (starting with the Retardican Party and their bucktoothed, inbred hick friends the Ree Tardiers), the reason scientific calculations are done in metric is that metric was designed to be used in a lab where the scientists didn't have to give a crap about the real world. Then the scientists convinced politicians to convert over to it for other things - and having spoken to people round the world, most people find the metric system a pain in the ass to use except for the fact that their governments mandated it.
Decimal measurement makes things really cute and easy for the scientists.
It also makes things a royal pain in the ass for humans, since the real world is analog. The watchface; separated into a 360 degree circle (ever noticed even the scientists can't bring themselves to decimalize the circle?), divides cleanly into 12 hours, that divide cleanly into 60 minutes, 60 seconds, etc. It all remains whole units. It's divisible easily and cleanly by 2,3,4,5,6,8... USEFUL.
What the hell, the decimal trolls already modded a post I had up to 5 down to -1 once, so I'll continue and if they don't like it they can go fuck themselves.
The basic problem with metric vs imperial is that they both spawn from two different environments.
Metric spawned from scientists in a lab. It works great in a lab. Everything is very precise, very orderly, and while they're in the lab they don't have to give a crap about the real world. They need to divide something in half and it comes out with a.5 in it, then they need to cut it in thirds afterward? What the hell, they don't care about a few repeating decimals here or there, they're scientists.
"Imperial" spawned from everyday people using the relatively standard things they had on hand to measure with. It even had the good sense to obsolete measurements when they became irrelevant (we don't measure by "rods" or the "hogshead" anymore).
Want to know why we use tablespoons/teaspoons for cooking? Because it could be assumed that just about every household had at least one "Table Spoon" and "Tea Spoon" on hand already. No need to go out buying special measuring devices (get a dinnerware set from IKEA and compare the table and tea spoons in it to standard, you'll find they are close enough to handle rounding error). Need a 1/2 teaspoon or 1/4 teaspoon? Measure a full one on the chopping board, slice it with the back of your kitchen knife. This is how most home cooking operated.
A standard cup? Guess what - a standard cup.
Everyday devices for everyday measurement. No need to go buying special, laboratory-grade equipment specially tailored to exacting specifications just to make your fucking breakfast. No need to try to measure out the quantity of applesauce you're putting into your latkes in a graduated cylinder.
I find it funny - every metric superiority troll running around here starts screaming "well we make it easy because then we just play with the units till they come out cleanly", making new "standards" that instantly obsolete old ones and make maintenance a royal pain in the ass and require new equipment or retooling of existing equipment. And the cost of buying/retooling everyone's equipment is not negligible.
What's even funnier is that these metric superiority trolls will do a quick 180 (see, gasp, a non-metric unit again!) when it comes time for them to argue over whether customers are getting full value when marketing uses a Metric Gigabyte (1GB=1,000,000,000 bytes) instead of a "Real Gigabyte" (1Gibibyte=1,073,741,824 bytes) when stating the capacity of storage media.
Because humans have 10 digits (unless they've had a machinery accident or birth defect or something) on their hands, making base-10 a useful arrangement for monetary transactions.
On the other hand, currency wasn't always metric. Ever heard of "pieces of eight"?
The "Imperial" system actually works better for "rule of thumb" style measurements.
In particular, the "Imperial" style of measurements are all easier to divide into equal portions by prime numbers. Feet and Inches make it so that "one foot" length is easily divided into halves, thirds, quarters, sixths, twelfths... the only number it doesn't easily divide by is five. By contrast, meters/centimeters make for a pain in the ass to divide by anything but multiples of 5 or 10, not to mention that common everyday occurrences that are approximately "one foot" long are then 30.5 centimeters, a measurement that divides cleanly by precisely Jack and Shit.
Miles make for easy measurement of rate-of-motion and gallons make for easy measurement of fuel usage when traveling. Going the average street-value 30mph? Two minutes per mile to destination. Going the average highway 60mph? One minute per mile to your destination off-ramp.
96 km/h? Ah fuck.The math isn't clean even by rough estimate.
Recordable discs use gold or silver with negligable oxidation of the reflector. You might get some level of degradation of the dye and call that "oxidation" but we're talking about the reflector, right?
Manufactured discs use aluminum which does oxidize somewhat. In extreme environments with lots and lots of humidity you can get the aluminum to oxidize but only a very few people have ever actually seen it. Mostly this is a myth started by the folks proclaming "DVD rot" which has only occurred in some really odd circumstances.
Actually, I've seen a couple discs with a pinhole flaw in the outer leaf, where oxidation set in (they were stamped, not writable/rewritable). Visually the effect was pretty impressive.
As for the rest... "oxidation" as a substitute for "degradation due to interaction with humidity in open air." I was referring mostly to aluminum stamped discs, but you'll also get plenty of degradation of the inks (they do NOT do well when exposed to high humidity and temperature outside of the sealed casing), plus plain physical damage from rubbing against other objects once the leaves separate.
And you're right about the alignment issues as well. Like I said, once you've knocked the thing into cross-cut pieces at 1/4" width or so, and the leaves have separated on most of the pieces, expecting to retrieve anything from it is ridiculous.
You might as well actually take each piece and scan it with an electron microscope, then try to make a visual image by assembling the piece images, do some form of error correction by algorithm to try to re-create the edge data, create a new master from the full result, re-press a CD from your new master, and then see if you get anything readable.
...Crap. I just gave some asshole with access to an SEM ideas, didn't I?
(a) the worst damage will be closest to the spindle, which is where the data write begins. (b) properly cross-cut into 1/4" or less width, the shattering rate should eliminate better than 90% of the data between strips. (c) shattered in such a fashion, oxidization will quickly take care of the remaining data. The leaves will separate, exposing the metal data layer to air, and oxidization will set in damn quick (can you, even with "patience", collect it all AND put it all back together correctly in less than three days?).
Ok, but why is this really any more secure than running the thing through an industrial-grade shredder? I mean the type that can generally chew on a stack of 5 or so credit cards at once.
Really, it looks cool but that's about it. "More Secure" doesn't mean a whole lot once you've separated the thing into reasonably small pieces and scattered them into a landfill.
You come of as a bit of an asshole (Indians are people not monkeys), but I'll answer your questions anyway.
I refer to the morons who get my order wrong consistently at the drive-thru as monkeys, too. As in, "trained monkeys could do this job and probably are."...
We've engaged several times with the BI team (the appropriate part of the IT organization for this kind of proposal... and yes the VP of IT is aware of the situation) to see how they can try to support our needs. Again, I'm not asking them to take over the application we've built, but instead come up with their own proposal based on approved systems and tools.
Each time, we provide a detailed list of requirements (must haves, really should haves, and like-to-haves) along with use cases, example reports, lists of source-systems for data, etc), with lots and lots of meetings to clarify what we're asking for. And then we ask them to propose an "approved" solution (approved meaning one they will support and manage). And that's where it hangs up.
If I am reading your previous statements correctly (and I am pretty sure I am), what actually happened is that BI responded to your request with a proposal of a certain scope - probably including the cost of hiring someone to maintain it and purchasing hardware on which it would run. Their quote may even have included a quote cost from OI for server purchases, personnel that OI wants, etc.
Then, you told them it would take too long and be too costly, and you opted to use your own salaried hours from your own department to create an alternate front-end (which you then tied into the existing database setup available from the other side of IT) that consists of a semi-rogue install. Is that somewhere near the neighborhood of an accurate guess? For that matter, what sort of cost comparison have you made between the server-maintenance costs from OI and hours used on maintenance by your own group for your own solution, as opposed to what you were quoted by BI?
But here's the challenge. From my end, regardless of the tools and methods available, I'm required to collect data from global systems and from 30 countries and then prepare decks of reports (up to 20 pages each) for each of those, usually by the 10th of the month. I can do that manually with linked excel sheets, vba macros, and checking files in and out of e-rooms (like sharepoint)... and if that was the only way to do it, I'd still be expected to do it (though I don't think it would be possible to do now - with all we have to do). On top of all that, we have to provide ad-hoc analysis based on our data, because management may want to explore specific details of potential problems.
(paste from earlier in same)So this application is essentially a "balanced scorecard" tool. In a nutshell, it's standalone (not attached to other databases) and allows for data to be keyed in or loaded via excel and produces PowerPoint decks and Excel reports. There are also some trivial administrative forms that allow for things like users checking boxes to indicate the data from their country is ready for reporting. The key requirement is that it has to be flexible. If the primary VP for this reporting wants to see a new report or changes to existing reports, we need to be able to turn that around in a week or two, not several months. The other key challenge is that it has to handle data that isn't provisioned through the certified data paths. Some data that needs to be reported simply does not exist in any current systems and is the result of offline analysis or it may be in systems that are otherwise not connected (not even all the "sanctioned" systems inter-operate). We have to report based on that data, so it gets loaded via a manual process of some kind. And there's no way to avoid that.
If your proposals are as accurate as you claim (and I'm getting a better idea of what you are looking at here), it sounds like the problem is still that you aren't talking to them in
Slashdot Mirror
In other words, you'd have to be:
- The MafiAA
- Microsoft
- Sony
- Righthaven
Need I go on?
The problem there, is that you can disbar their lawyers all you want... but the fucktards at Righthaven will just hire another shyster lawyer.
The fact that "Righthaven" are even allowed into court any more, in any jurisdiction, is proof positive that the justice system is broken.
Didn't you know? Stars are the ancient enemy of Al-Ilah the Moon Deity, the forces of the Djinn, who fight against the Holy Angels and seek to corrupt humans.
Hey Iran. I got a better virus for you.
STARS!!!!!
Really, sometimes these guys are too easy...
Not just that, but every NASA invention has actually ADDED to the economy, creating jobs in the US.
Medical research? Check. Everything from osteoporosis treatments to ceramic "invisible" braces.
Oh, and don't forget scratch-resistant lenses for your grandmother's glasses.
That memory foam bed you sleep on? Check.
The ear thermometer.
The insoles you put into your shoes.
The modern ionization smoke detector.
The safety "zip strips" on the highway that warn you if you are hitting the shoulder.
Cordless power tools.
The paint used to keep the Statue of Liberty (along with a hell of a long list of other sites) from corroding. Hell, even the clear-coat on your car is probably NASA-descended.
Advanced water filtration - your BRITA filter uses NASA technology.
Not to mention the "budget plan" proposed by their latest Howdy Doody robber-barons puppet was a mockery of anything sane, relying on "projections" that insisted unemployment would go down lower than its lowest point from the last century, stay there indefinitely, that medical costs would magically drop to 1/4 their current level by putting the poor and the disabled on a "voucher program" for their health care, and that the US would not get into even the most minor armed conflict for 50 years or longer...
Let me sum up the Paul Ryan plan. It really only needs three bullet points.
1 - Tax cuts for billionaires because they bought the Retardican Party off.
2 - Grandma eats Alpo. But the Retardicans don't care. "They should just die, and decrease the surplus population."
3 - Retardicans are fucking insane.
Welcome to how the legal system works - justice is not a part of it any more.
The sad part is that this kind of shit pervades even the "criminal justice" side.
Traffic tickets? Compare the cost of "just paying" (or in many states, "taking defensive driving") with the cost of defending yourself - lost hours of work on the days you have to go to court, lost time on paperwork or else lawyer fees to subpoena all the records you'll need, and oh yeah, the possibility that the case judge will be one of those corrupt motherfuckers who insist "the police are always right" because guess what, the judge's salary is paid out of ticket fines too.
I had one once where the police officer was obviously just using "pull someone over" as an excuse to hit on the new female recruit. Sat there and watched as he got everything about my car's info wrong on the ticket except for license plate - make, model, even the number of fucking DOORS - because he was too busy trying to "explain how we do this" while sneaking his hand onto her ass.
Didn't matter, of course. The Prosecutors are corrupt, the Judges are corrupt, the whole system is fucking corrupt and the fines and fees are set "just low enough" that most people will "just pay it" because it works out cheaper to do so.
Oh, and no, it's not just on the low side either. The American "justice" system has gotten the "plea bargain" down to a science - you can "plead guilty" to something you know you didn't do, get "lenience" from the court, OR they can tack on dozens of fucking extraneous charges and run you into the ground so that even if you do manage to convince the jury you're innocent on most of it, chances are they'll get one of the charges through, and you'll be fucking bankrupted by the cost of defending yourself anyways.
And in the world of internet service, "ISP overpromises and oversells without capacity to deliver what they promised" ought to be followed swiftly by "Feds sweep in and indict heads of ISP."
But that'll never happen, because the ISPs have already paid off the people who should be arresting them.
Crapptivision said the same thing about the other franchises they killed.
Tony Hawk.
Guitar Hero.
Crash Bandicoot
Spyro the Dragon
The repeated - and getting worse and worse - Spider-Man games
The repeated - and getting worse and worse - X-Men games (ugh, X-men fighting series from developers who didn't know crap about fighting games instead of more MvC... sigh)
Yet Another James Bond Ripoff
Someone needs to take all the Crapptivision execs, line them up, and fly down the line on rollerblades just slapping them all repeatedly till they grow some common sense.
I'm reminded, when the "everyone else is doing it" crowd pops up, of the old "eat shit, 10 billion flies can't be wrong."
From friends in Europe? All the time.
Twelve is not easily divided by 5 or 8
60 is. And I was referring to the 60 minutes in an hour.
Frankly, I'd rather use a yard because I can easily estimate it at three of my feet.
You three-footed mutant, you ;)
Speaking to the weirdo above however:
E.g. how do you divide a yard by tow? Basically you can't: you come up with 1.5 feet.
One and a half feet is a perfectly usable and functional 18 inches, which is divisible cleanly and easily by 2,3,4,6,and 9. In other words, you're an idiot.
Why is when ever Metric Vs Imperial comes up someone always converts directly?
Put simply: because you're going to have to convert a metric shit-ton (see I can do metric too!) of existing signage, land measurements, construction measurements, and equipment over.
Or do you plan to convert it all indirectly somehow?
Australia is almost exactly the same size as the lower 48 US States.
Yes but 98% of it is virtually unpopulated wasteland. That thing you call the "Outback."
The beauty of the metric system is that you have a consistent system
Which works wonderfully in a scientist's lab, and whose units never fucking show up in the real world.
I went through this above. The "Imperial" system was about using real-world, available items to measure in ways that made the most sense for cleanly splitting units evenly and fairly later.
Want to know why when you see a cookbook, the most commonly measurements are the "cup", "teaspoon" and "tablespoon"? Guess what - every kitchen could be expected to have those items on hand in a mostly standardized size.
Feet to inches - easily divisible by 2,3,4,6. Meters and Centimeters? Thirds are a bitch. Quarters quickly degenerate into deep decimals. Eighths? Pain in the ass. Most of the other "odd Imperial unit conversions" that don't operate in base10 (nail counts in base16, etc) have a reason they were measured that way.
To steal from someone up above a bit:
Imperial units are "natural" measures - you will find that most (if not all) natural phenomena will work out to an exact integer number of some measure or other. This made them great when making exact measuring devices was extremely difficult. Far and away easier to use a measuring device that occurs all around you.
Now regarding the rest of your blather:
The beauty of the metric system is that you have a consistent system. And that's why scientific calculations are usually done in metric and the result is then transfered back to imperial, so the US public won't get worried that the French took over, communists gained control of the class room, or that their politicians betrayed the greatest conceivable nation on earth.
Setting aside the fact that yes, there are a lot of dumbasses in the US (starting with the Retardican Party and their bucktoothed, inbred hick friends the Ree Tardiers), the reason scientific calculations are done in metric is that metric was designed to be used in a lab where the scientists didn't have to give a crap about the real world. Then the scientists convinced politicians to convert over to it for other things - and having spoken to people round the world, most people find the metric system a pain in the ass to use except for the fact that their governments mandated it.
I tried decimal time.
Decimal measurement makes things really cute and easy for the scientists.
It also makes things a royal pain in the ass for humans, since the real world is analog. The watchface; separated into a 360 degree circle (ever noticed even the scientists can't bring themselves to decimalize the circle?), divides cleanly into 12 hours, that divide cleanly into 60 minutes, 60 seconds, etc. It all remains whole units. It's divisible easily and cleanly by 2,3,4,5,6,8... USEFUL.
What the hell, the decimal trolls already modded a post I had up to 5 down to -1 once, so I'll continue and if they don't like it they can go fuck themselves.
The basic problem with metric vs imperial is that they both spawn from two different environments.
Metric spawned from scientists in a lab. It works great in a lab. Everything is very precise, very orderly, and while they're in the lab they don't have to give a crap about the real world. They need to divide something in half and it comes out with a .5 in it, then they need to cut it in thirds afterward? What the hell, they don't care about a few repeating decimals here or there, they're scientists.
"Imperial" spawned from everyday people using the relatively standard things they had on hand to measure with. It even had the good sense to obsolete measurements when they became irrelevant (we don't measure by "rods" or the "hogshead" anymore).
Want to know why we use tablespoons/teaspoons for cooking? Because it could be assumed that just about every household had at least one "Table Spoon" and "Tea Spoon" on hand already. No need to go out buying special measuring devices (get a dinnerware set from IKEA and compare the table and tea spoons in it to standard, you'll find they are close enough to handle rounding error). Need a 1/2 teaspoon or 1/4 teaspoon? Measure a full one on the chopping board, slice it with the back of your kitchen knife. This is how most home cooking operated.
A standard cup? Guess what - a standard cup.
Everyday devices for everyday measurement. No need to go buying special, laboratory-grade equipment specially tailored to exacting specifications just to make your fucking breakfast. No need to try to measure out the quantity of applesauce you're putting into your latkes in a graduated cylinder.
I find it funny - every metric superiority troll running around here starts screaming "well we make it easy because then we just play with the units till they come out cleanly", making new "standards" that instantly obsolete old ones and make maintenance a royal pain in the ass and require new equipment or retooling of existing equipment. And the cost of buying/retooling everyone's equipment is not negligible.
What's even funnier is that these metric superiority trolls will do a quick 180 (see, gasp, a non-metric unit again!) when it comes time for them to argue over whether customers are getting full value when marketing uses a Metric Gigabyte (1GB=1,000,000,000 bytes) instead of a "Real Gigabyte" (1Gibibyte=1,073,741,824 bytes) when stating the capacity of storage media.
Because slashdot's mod system is broken beyond belief, mostly.
Because humans have 10 digits (unless they've had a machinery accident or birth defect or something) on their hands, making base-10 a useful arrangement for monetary transactions.
On the other hand, currency wasn't always metric. Ever heard of "pieces of eight"?
The "Imperial" system actually works better for "rule of thumb" style measurements.
In particular, the "Imperial" style of measurements are all easier to divide into equal portions by prime numbers. Feet and Inches make it so that "one foot" length is easily divided into halves, thirds, quarters, sixths, twelfths... the only number it doesn't easily divide by is five. By contrast, meters/centimeters make for a pain in the ass to divide by anything but multiples of 5 or 10, not to mention that common everyday occurrences that are approximately "one foot" long are then 30.5 centimeters, a measurement that divides cleanly by precisely Jack and Shit.
Miles make for easy measurement of rate-of-motion and gallons make for easy measurement of fuel usage when traveling. Going the average street-value 30mph? Two minutes per mile to destination. Going the average highway 60mph? One minute per mile to your destination off-ramp.
96 km/h? Ah fuck.The math isn't clean even by rough estimate.
Recordable discs use gold or silver with negligable oxidation of the reflector. You might get some level of degradation of the dye and call that "oxidation" but we're talking about the reflector, right?
Manufactured discs use aluminum which does oxidize somewhat. In extreme environments with lots and lots of humidity you can get the aluminum to oxidize but only a very few people have ever actually seen it. Mostly this is a myth started by the folks proclaming "DVD rot" which has only occurred in some really odd circumstances.
Actually, I've seen a couple discs with a pinhole flaw in the outer leaf, where oxidation set in (they were stamped, not writable/rewritable). Visually the effect was pretty impressive.
As for the rest... "oxidation" as a substitute for "degradation due to interaction with humidity in open air." I was referring mostly to aluminum stamped discs, but you'll also get plenty of degradation of the inks (they do NOT do well when exposed to high humidity and temperature outside of the sealed casing), plus plain physical damage from rubbing against other objects once the leaves separate.
And you're right about the alignment issues as well. Like I said, once you've knocked the thing into cross-cut pieces at 1/4" width or so, and the leaves have separated on most of the pieces, expecting to retrieve anything from it is ridiculous.
You might as well actually take each piece and scan it with an electron microscope, then try to make a visual image by assembling the piece images, do some form of error correction by algorithm to try to re-create the edge data, create a new master from the full result, re-press a CD from your new master, and then see if you get anything readable.
...Crap. I just gave some asshole with access to an SEM ideas, didn't I?
Except that:
(a) the worst damage will be closest to the spindle, which is where the data write begins.
(b) properly cross-cut into 1/4" or less width, the shattering rate should eliminate better than 90% of the data between strips.
(c) shattered in such a fashion, oxidization will quickly take care of the remaining data. The leaves will separate, exposing the metal data layer to air, and oxidization will set in damn quick (can you, even with "patience", collect it all AND put it all back together correctly in less than three days?).
Ok, but why is this really any more secure than running the thing through an industrial-grade shredder? I mean the type that can generally chew on a stack of 5 or so credit cards at once.
Really, it looks cool but that's about it. "More Secure" doesn't mean a whole lot once you've separated the thing into reasonably small pieces and scattered them into a landfill.
You come of as a bit of an asshole (Indians are people not monkeys), but I'll answer your questions anyway.
I refer to the morons who get my order wrong consistently at the drive-thru as monkeys, too. As in, "trained monkeys could do this job and probably are." ...
We've engaged several times with the BI team (the appropriate part of the IT organization for this kind of proposal... and yes the VP of IT is aware of the situation) to see how they can try to support our needs. Again, I'm not asking them to take over the application we've built, but instead come up with their own proposal based on approved systems and tools.
Each time, we provide a detailed list of requirements (must haves, really should haves, and like-to-haves) along with use cases, example reports, lists of source-systems for data, etc), with lots and lots of meetings to clarify what we're asking for. And then we ask them to propose an "approved" solution (approved meaning one they will support and manage). And that's where it hangs up.
If I am reading your previous statements correctly (and I am pretty sure I am), what actually happened is that BI responded to your request with a proposal of a certain scope - probably including the cost of hiring someone to maintain it and purchasing hardware on which it would run. Their quote may even have included a quote cost from OI for server purchases, personnel that OI wants, etc.
Then, you told them it would take too long and be too costly, and you opted to use your own salaried hours from your own department to create an alternate front-end (which you then tied into the existing database setup available from the other side of IT) that consists of a semi-rogue install. Is that somewhere near the neighborhood of an accurate guess? For that matter, what sort of cost comparison have you made between the server-maintenance costs from OI and hours used on maintenance by your own group for your own solution, as opposed to what you were quoted by BI?
But here's the challenge. From my end, regardless of the tools and methods available, I'm required to collect data from global systems and from 30 countries and then prepare decks of reports (up to 20 pages each) for each of those, usually by the 10th of the month. I can do that manually with linked excel sheets, vba macros, and checking files in and out of e-rooms (like sharepoint)... and if that was the only way to do it, I'd still be expected to do it (though I don't think it would be possible to do now - with all we have to do). On top of all that, we have to provide ad-hoc analysis based on our data, because management may want to explore specific details of potential problems.
(paste from earlier in same)So this application is essentially a "balanced scorecard" tool. In a nutshell, it's standalone (not attached to other databases) and allows for data to be keyed in or loaded via excel and produces PowerPoint decks and Excel reports. There are also some trivial administrative forms that allow for things like users checking boxes to indicate the data from their country is ready for reporting. The key requirement is that it has to be flexible. If the primary VP for this reporting wants to see a new report or changes to existing reports, we need to be able to turn that around in a week or two, not several months. The other key challenge is that it has to handle data that isn't provisioned through the certified data paths. Some data that needs to be reported simply does not exist in any current systems and is the result of offline analysis or it may be in systems that are otherwise not connected (not even all the "sanctioned" systems inter-operate). We have to report based on that data, so it gets loaded via a manual process of some kind. And there's no way to avoid that.
If your proposals are as accurate as you claim (and I'm getting a better idea of what you are looking at here), it sounds like the problem is still that you aren't talking to them in