Bah - learn to make house calls to fix computers. It gets you laid (as in : having sex with a real woman.)
The trick is, pay attention to the computer for a while (ignoring the woman.) Then set it off doing something that's going to take a half hour or so (defragging the hard drive or backing up to an external) and explain - well, that's going to take an hour... what can we do that will keep me busy while that thing works? Then the clothes start flying off.
We used to have a similar 'BUS' rule (ie, what if so-and-so got hit by a bus) until someone we all knew got hit by a bus. That sucked, he was a good guy and we had just referenced that joke a week earlier. Now we have the 'LOTTO' rule (ie, what if so-and-so hit the lottery and left the company to be independently wealthy.) We all miss Dave. And most of us secretly wish he had documented his fucking code before getting hit by that bus.
One detail that often gets left out (because putting it in the wiki serves no purpose) : the URL to the wiki. I like your solution to that issue - +1 Bradley (except I'm out of points and wanted to respond).
If the next guy doesn't know where to find your documentation, you might as well have spent all that time grinding XP in your favorite MMORPG.
Honestly I wrote tons of documentation for a job I was on years ago, spent several days reverse engineering my entire solution with the new guy so in effect he had personally written every line of code on my primary project and hand walked him through the theory and evolution of the project. The one piece of paper he used most consistently : the post-it note with my cell number on it. The first call each month triggered a $1000 retainer good for 20 hours of consultation that month - so I looked forward to getting that call, generally so I could tell him where in the documentation to find the answer. I left on good terms with that employer (you should see the terms for the first call when I leave on not so good terms.)
Orange and white, Orange. Green and White, Blue. Blue and White, Green. Brown and White, Brown.
Use pieces (cable, plugs, jacks) certified for the speed you want to carry.
Once you get those two down, understand not to untwist more of the cable than absolutely necessary to get it into the connector, get it correctly into the cable, and get a good solid crimp on it - and TEST IT after you crimp both ends - odds are it's more than sufficient to carry as much GigE traffic as you care to move.
Once you have a stock of pieces on the shelf, it's WAY more cost effective from an employers perspective to make a single cable than to sit down, fill out a purchase order, have that purchase order pass through several hands during processing, follow up with the paper order, wait a week to have that single cable shipped to you. ESPECIALLY if that cable is a statistical anomaly and needs to be replaced.
If you're wiring a patch panel for the first time, however, order a hundred or so cables of various length and save yourself the hassle.
So, how do you describe people who 'do HTML' (and CSS and maybe a bit of JavaScript and graphics manipulation)? Some job titles I've seen include: Design Technologist, Web Developer, Front-end Developer, HTML/CSS Developer, Client-side Developer and UI Engineer. Do you have any favourite job titles for this role?"
Honestly, most of the real programmers I know refer to those that 'do HTML' as 'Loser' or 'Wannabe'. I'm not going to say I agree with them... but I understand.
As a rule of thumb, I've found two things to be true when dealing with requests of this kind -
1. The doctor probably said '15 years' off the top of his head, as the existing system is his only frame of reference. It was probably said in passing and casually, yet it's been escalated to the most important thing on the list - when in all honesty the most important thing is 'my practice stays in business so I can continue to make money.'
2. It's a good idea to see how much he can spend and adjust the system to that amount, rather than continually down-wrench the system trying to just get the cheapest system humanly possible. Ask the doctor - what did you pay for this system in 1993? Five thousand dollars? So that's my budget, right? If he says no, get a real budget number and make it work, explain the trade-offs for that particular price point.
Have you *ever* seen HDD surviving 80 years? Nope. (Ask any SAN admin for references.)
That's not how MTBF works. It's an aggregate across the entire enterprise. Let's say you populate your infrastructure with 1,000 2.4" SSD's with a MTBF of 1,000,000 hours. In theory, you can assume that you're going to have one drive fail every 1,000 hours (or roughly one failure every 6 weeks, or roughly 9 failed drives each year.)
Yea, you think I'd learn not to rant online before caffeine. ~~~ Bluto: Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no! Otter: [whispering] Germans? Boon: Forget it, he's rolling.
Because I have. They hire plenty of them at my company and they are invariably about as smart as a bag of hammers. They're fairly obedient and most have a pretty good work ethic though, and their long term loyalty to the company was killed long ago.
I'm 41 and I will take that Pepsi challenge any day of the week and twice on Saturday at 7am. We can start with a one page written (in English, using appropriate grammar, spelling, capitalization, and punctuation) paper correlating the business of IT for the IT associated with their business. Maybe follow that with filling in a circle with all the major degree arcs (0, 30, 45, 60, 90, etc) and then penciling in the tan(), sin(), cos() at those points. While we are banging out math without the calculators, we can swing by the Kwik-E-Mart and buy random amounts of goods, pay for it with a 20 and see who can calculate the change we're going to get back faster, or maybe speed fill in the boxes in a multiplication table that goes up to 12x12. Random memorization not a good test? Ok lets switch it up to something more business appropriate, such as generalizing the differences between event driven programming and object oriented programming, or perhaps why using binary implementations to represent money isn't the brightest idea, and why overnormalizing a database used for reporting is going to result in unreasonably long wait times during the batch cycle. Maybe top if off with simply Googling each other and finding just how many pictures of us doing stupid (or illegal) shit on the net we can find of each other - because if anything says sharp as a tack, it's posting pictures of myself taking hits from the bong with seven gold medals around my neck.
Age and wisdom vs. youth and treachery - I will put my money on the old guy for the win.
-x-
Here's the easiest way to see it : ever watch a three year old playing with a ball in the living room? When the ball goes under the coffee table, and the kid goes under to get it - you know exactly what is going to happen next. The kid is going to stand up, full speed, and bang the hell out of his head on the underside of the table. It is going to happen faster than you can do anything to stop it, you wish you could jump down there to prevent it but you can't, and sure enough - BAM! followed by half an hour of crying. You knew it was going to happen before it even happened, you knew the kid didn't have a clue and was in for a world of hurt, and all you could do was watch it happen. The kid doesn't even know what he doesn't know yet, and at three years old simply believes the world revolves around him. Fast forward 20 years and it's the same story - different tabletops, different headaches.
Yea, you kids and your fancy limitless random access memory and direct access storage devices.
When I was a kid my first PC had 5000 bytes of RAM, of which only 3500 were available for user applications (the remaining 1500 bytes reserved for the OS.) The screen showed 22 characters across and 23 characters down, each character as big as your thumb. It used 16 different colors, all 16 of which were ugly. If we wanted graphics we had to sacrifice a few characters from the alphabet and remap the 8x8 pixel character map into whatever graphic we wanted. And finally, after only having it a few months we got a tape drive to save our programs (so we didn't have to type them in each time we shut off the computer.) It took 15 minutes to load a single program from tape. And we were THANKFUL!
And no marking this funny. It would be hilarious, if it weren't true. But I'm serious as a heart attack. Made a helicopter game on that machine once, cost me half my alphabet!
When your professor made that observation back in 1991, memory was also about $50 per megabyte (plus or minus.) So 4096M (aka 4GB) would have cost you about 1/5th of a million dollars, not accounting for how bigger chips cost more (see the radical curve in price between 2GB chips, 4GB chips, and 8GB chips today.) More likely, a single machine with a dual core 3GHz CPU and 4GB of memory in it in 1991 would have sold for well over several million dollars and might possibly have been the single most powerful computer in the world.
He might have predicted that $500 dual core laptops with 4GB of memory would have been in your future, but he might have been just as correct predicting flying cars.
It is less about the temperature change and more about the difference between static and dynamic friction - on old hard drives you get the double whammy of motors that get weaker over the years, bearings that get sticky, and finally drive heads sticking to the landing zone on the platters. As long as the drive continues to spin, the coefficient of friction (dynamic) is low enough that the motor can keep spinning the drive. Shut it down overnight and the grease in the bearings gets sticky and the heads stick to the platter - just a little, but enough that the drive motor can't overcome the additional friction and the drive won't spin up. Give it a thump and it will sometimes get started again - at this point, I highly recommend a good backup.
I have seen the crumbling you refer to in old laser printers. I attributed it to the ozone but now that I think about it those old laser printers get pretty hot too (and cycle hot / cold overnight each night.)
For this list not to put DOOM on the #1 most influential spot - insane. Maybe the editors at Guinness are a little too young to remember life before first person shooters, but such a life existed (and you were likely to be eaten by a Grue!) Doom was the shot that started a revolution in gaming - in other words, the grandfather of most of the games we play today.
Mario Kart. It's too early in the morning to come up with a response to that. Bah.
I ran Netware servers for years. I have this sneaking suspicion that a Netware 4.11 server would probably have survived a two story fall without so much as a reboot, based on how well they weathered my years of abuse and neglect.
Ok - here's the scoop on donating hardware to education in a cost effective fashion :
Companies (not individuals) may benefit from the 21st Century Classrooms Act for Private Technology Investment. Under this legislation, corporations that donate computers can deduct the full purchase price if the equipment is no more than two years old. (Citation : http://www.ciwmb.ca.gov/CalMAX/EUpdate/2002/Winter.htm)
More insight : "The Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 states that companies that donate personal computers to schools qualify for an enhanced charitable deduction benefit. The law, introduced by Representative Randy Cunningham (R-California), expands tax incentives for private companies that donate computer technology, equipment, or software to K-12 classrooms. The act took effect January 1, 1998, and applies to computers less than two years old."
That tax benefit (being able to write off the entire purchase price of the hardware as a tax deduction, even if the hardware has already been depreciated for tax purposes) is big. Real big. If you can write off the entire purchase price of hardware TWICE, in the 25% tax bracket - well you can effectively double-dip on writing off the full purchase price of the hardware on your taxes, making the net cost about half. The trick is timing the hardware purchase cycle so you can depreciate the entire amount and then donating the hardware before it hits two years old.
Maybe if they hadn't nerfed Necromancers (et.al) in EQ1 they would still have a bunch of those customers. The game became a overwhelming exercise in extreme frustration in which many a Necro silently wished extremely bad things on the entire staff of Sony, those nerf'ing motherfuckers. Looks like those wishes came true.
I guess making lifetap a resistible spell wasn't such a great idea afterall, was it bitches?
Agreed. Newer SATA drives can sustain burst peak throughput of 120MB/sec for the first 10% of the drive, on a newly formatted drive in which all the data is laid down in a single massive contiguous linear string of sequential blocks. During the first few minutes the drive is being used for benchmarking under optimal conditions.
Newer SATA drives that have been used in real life for a few weeks, with a normal distribution of data and the file allocation table scattered all over the drive, using the entire spread of drive from the fastest first few cylinders through the very last and slowest cylinders, average about 60MB/s sustained.
My ramdrive reads somewhere between 1GB/s and 1.4GB/s sustained, but unfortunately I can't make it big enough to actually do anything with it, and every time I power cycle the machine (which is often) I lose all the data on it. I'd consider buying a single dedicated server and putting 64G or so in it so a) it would be big enough do practical work with, and b) I could share it with all the machines - if only my network was fast enough to take advantage of it. 125MB/s is peak throughput for GigE, which is just barely faster than the average throughput of hard drives - in order to take advantage of that approach I would need something that can move 1.25GB/s sustained (hence my hypothetical interest in TerE, or at least 10GigE.)
Sustained real world throughput for SATA drives is somewhere in the 500Mbps range - that's 60 Megabytes per second for single-threaded sustained reads or writes. Mix it up a little by having multiple applications access the drive at the same time and throughput can drop a full order of magnitude (in the range of 6 Megabytes per second.)
Given that, yes TerE is serious overkill for anything you are not already using (and continually saturating) GigE for. I'd say about the only situation where TerE would really help is for setting up a single dedicated machine with a MASSIVE shared ramdrive, and having other machines use that ramdrive as if it were local. Actually the more I consider it, that would be a damn fine use of TerE, and a good way to improve performance in computer clusters working on shared solution programming.
Slashdot Mirror
Backup is better than RAID.
Also - RAID 5 is great if you smoke a drive. What happens if you smoke your RAID controller? I've seen it happen.
I was using Spinright back in the 90's - it was awesome then, but I wasn't aware they are still around.
I endorse the package from the 90s and if it is the same guys I'm tempted to endorse them today.
Bah - learn to make house calls to fix computers. It gets you laid (as in : having sex with a real woman.)
The trick is, pay attention to the computer for a while (ignoring the woman.) Then set it off doing something that's going to take a half hour or so (defragging the hard drive or backing up to an external) and explain - well, that's going to take an hour ... what can we do that will keep me busy while that thing works? Then the clothes start flying off.
Hey, it could happen!
We used to have a similar 'BUS' rule (ie, what if so-and-so got hit by a bus) until someone we all knew got hit by a bus. That sucked, he was a good guy and we had just referenced that joke a week earlier.
Now we have the 'LOTTO' rule (ie, what if so-and-so hit the lottery and left the company to be independently wealthy.)
We all miss Dave. And most of us secretly wish he had documented his fucking code before getting hit by that bus.
One detail that often gets left out (because putting it in the wiki serves no purpose) : the URL to the wiki. I like your solution to that issue - +1 Bradley (except I'm out of points and wanted to respond).
If the next guy doesn't know where to find your documentation, you might as well have spent all that time grinding XP in your favorite MMORPG.
Honestly I wrote tons of documentation for a job I was on years ago, spent several days reverse engineering my entire solution with the new guy so in effect he had personally written every line of code on my primary project and hand walked him through the theory and evolution of the project. The one piece of paper he used most consistently : the post-it note with my cell number on it. The first call each month triggered a $1000 retainer good for 20 hours of consultation that month - so I looked forward to getting that call, generally so I could tell him where in the documentation to find the answer. I left on good terms with that employer (you should see the terms for the first call when I leave on not so good terms.)
Orange and white, Orange. Green and White, Blue. Blue and White, Green. Brown and White, Brown.
Use pieces (cable, plugs, jacks) certified for the speed you want to carry.
Once you get those two down, understand not to untwist more of the cable than absolutely necessary to get it into the connector, get it correctly into the cable, and get a good solid crimp on it - and TEST IT after you crimp both ends - odds are it's more than sufficient to carry as much GigE traffic as you care to move.
Once you have a stock of pieces on the shelf, it's WAY more cost effective from an employers perspective to make a single cable than to sit down, fill out a purchase order, have that purchase order pass through several hands during processing, follow up with the paper order, wait a week to have that single cable shipped to you. ESPECIALLY if that cable is a statistical anomaly and needs to be replaced.
If you're wiring a patch panel for the first time, however, order a hundred or so cables of various length and save yourself the hassle.
So, how do you describe people who 'do HTML' (and CSS and maybe a bit of JavaScript and graphics manipulation)?
Some job titles I've seen include: Design Technologist, Web Developer, Front-end Developer, HTML/CSS Developer, Client-side Developer and UI Engineer.
Do you have any favourite job titles for this role?"
Honestly, most of the real programmers I know refer to those that 'do HTML' as 'Loser' or 'Wannabe'. ... but I understand.
I'm not going to say I agree with them
As a rule of thumb, I've found two things to be true when dealing with requests of this kind -
1. The doctor probably said '15 years' off the top of his head, as the existing system is his only frame of reference. It was probably said in passing and casually, yet it's been escalated to the most important thing on the list - when in all honesty the most important thing is 'my practice stays in business so I can continue to make money.'
2. It's a good idea to see how much he can spend and adjust the system to that amount, rather than continually down-wrench the system trying to just get the cheapest system humanly possible. Ask the doctor - what did you pay for this system in 1993? Five thousand dollars? So that's my budget, right? If he says no, get a real budget number and make it work, explain the trade-offs for that particular price point.
Have you *ever* seen HDD surviving 80 years? Nope. (Ask any SAN admin for references.)
That's not how MTBF works. It's an aggregate across the entire enterprise. Let's say you populate your infrastructure with 1,000 2.4" SSD's with a MTBF of 1,000,000 hours. In theory, you can assume that you're going to have one drive fail every 1,000 hours (or roughly one failure every 6 weeks, or roughly 9 failed drives each year.)
Tell them you have a four digit Slashdot UID.
Chicks dig that kind of technical superiority and you will get mad amounts of ass.
Yea, you think I'd learn not to rant online before caffeine.
~~~
Bluto: Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!
Otter: [whispering] Germans?
Boon: Forget it, he's rolling.
Have you ever talked to a 21 year old?
Because I have. They hire plenty of them at my company and they are invariably about as smart as a bag of hammers. They're fairly obedient and most have a pretty good work ethic though, and their long term loyalty to the company was killed long ago.
I'm 41 and I will take that Pepsi challenge any day of the week and twice on Saturday at 7am. We can start with a one page written (in English, using appropriate grammar, spelling, capitalization, and punctuation) paper correlating the business of IT for the IT associated with their business. Maybe follow that with filling in a circle with all the major degree arcs (0, 30, 45, 60, 90, etc) and then penciling in the tan(), sin(), cos() at those points. While we are banging out math without the calculators, we can swing by the Kwik-E-Mart and buy random amounts of goods, pay for it with a 20 and see who can calculate the change we're going to get back faster, or maybe speed fill in the boxes in a multiplication table that goes up to 12x12. Random memorization not a good test? Ok lets switch it up to something more business appropriate, such as generalizing the differences between event driven programming and object oriented programming, or perhaps why using binary implementations to represent money isn't the brightest idea, and why overnormalizing a database used for reporting is going to result in unreasonably long wait times during the batch cycle. Maybe top if off with simply Googling each other and finding just how many pictures of us doing stupid (or illegal) shit on the net we can find of each other - because if anything says sharp as a tack, it's posting pictures of myself taking hits from the bong with seven gold medals around my neck.
Age and wisdom vs. youth and treachery - I will put my money on the old guy for the win.
-x-
Here's the easiest way to see it : ever watch a three year old playing with a ball in the living room? When the ball goes under the coffee table, and the kid goes under to get it - you know exactly what is going to happen next. The kid is going to stand up, full speed, and bang the hell out of his head on the underside of the table. It is going to happen faster than you can do anything to stop it, you wish you could jump down there to prevent it but you can't, and sure enough - BAM! followed by half an hour of crying. You knew it was going to happen before it even happened, you knew the kid didn't have a clue and was in for a world of hurt, and all you could do was watch it happen. The kid doesn't even know what he doesn't know yet, and at three years old simply believes the world revolves around him. Fast forward 20 years and it's the same story - different tabletops, different headaches.
Yea, you kids and your fancy limitless random access memory and direct access storage devices.
When I was a kid my first PC had 5000 bytes of RAM, of which only 3500 were available for user applications (the remaining 1500 bytes reserved for the OS.) The screen showed 22 characters across and 23 characters down, each character as big as your thumb. It used 16 different colors, all 16 of which were ugly. If we wanted graphics we had to sacrifice a few characters from the alphabet and remap the 8x8 pixel character map into whatever graphic we wanted. And finally, after only having it a few months we got a tape drive to save our programs (so we didn't have to type them in each time we shut off the computer.) It took 15 minutes to load a single program from tape.
And we were THANKFUL!
And no marking this funny. It would be hilarious, if it weren't true. But I'm serious as a heart attack. Made a helicopter game on that machine once, cost me half my alphabet!
When your professor made that observation back in 1991, memory was also about $50 per megabyte (plus or minus.) So 4096M (aka 4GB) would have cost you about 1/5th of a million dollars, not accounting for how bigger chips cost more (see the radical curve in price between 2GB chips, 4GB chips, and 8GB chips today.) More likely, a single machine with a dual core 3GHz CPU and 4GB of memory in it in 1991 would have sold for well over several million dollars and might possibly have been the single most powerful computer in the world.
He might have predicted that $500 dual core laptops with 4GB of memory would have been in your future, but he might have been just as correct predicting flying cars.
As I recall, the original Type M keyboard (aka the 1391401) had a list price of about $400. For just the keyboard.
And yes, I still have mine.
He just needs to look at her sternly and say 'I find your lack of faith ... disturbing.'
It is less about the temperature change and more about the difference between static and dynamic friction - on old hard drives you get the double whammy of motors that get weaker over the years, bearings that get sticky, and finally drive heads sticking to the landing zone on the platters. As long as the drive continues to spin, the coefficient of friction (dynamic) is low enough that the motor can keep spinning the drive. Shut it down overnight and the grease in the bearings gets sticky and the heads stick to the platter - just a little, but enough that the drive motor can't overcome the additional friction and the drive won't spin up. Give it a thump and it will sometimes get started again - at this point, I highly recommend a good backup.
I have seen the crumbling you refer to in old laser printers. I attributed it to the ozone but now that I think about it those old laser printers get pretty hot too (and cycle hot / cold overnight each night.)
Maybe he was making a point you missed.
Code :
[ ]pretty
[ ]cheap
[ ]correct
Pick two.
For this list not to put DOOM on the #1 most influential spot - insane. Maybe the editors at Guinness are a little too young to remember life before first person shooters, but such a life existed (and you were likely to be eaten by a Grue!) Doom was the shot that started a revolution in gaming - in other words, the grandfather of most of the games we play today.
Mario Kart. It's too early in the morning to come up with a response to that. Bah.
It's not the volts that kills you. It's the amps. (Obscure)
I ran Netware servers for years. I have this sneaking suspicion that a Netware 4.11 server would probably have survived a two story fall without so much as a reboot, based on how well they weathered my years of abuse and neglect.
Ok - here's the scoop on donating hardware to education in a cost effective fashion :
Companies (not individuals) may benefit from the 21st Century Classrooms Act for Private Technology Investment. Under this legislation, corporations that donate computers can deduct the full purchase price if the equipment is no more than two years old. (Citation : http://www.ciwmb.ca.gov/CalMAX/EUpdate/2002/Winter.htm)
More insight : "The Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 states that companies that donate personal computers to schools qualify for an enhanced charitable deduction benefit. The law, introduced by Representative Randy Cunningham (R-California), expands tax incentives for private companies that donate computer technology, equipment, or software to K-12 classrooms. The act took effect January 1, 1998, and applies to computers less than two years old."
That tax benefit (being able to write off the entire purchase price of the hardware as a tax deduction, even if the hardware has already been depreciated for tax purposes) is big. Real big. If you can write off the entire purchase price of hardware TWICE, in the 25% tax bracket - well you can effectively double-dip on writing off the full purchase price of the hardware on your taxes, making the net cost about half. The trick is timing the hardware purchase cycle so you can depreciate the entire amount and then donating the hardware before it hits two years old.
Maybe if they hadn't nerfed Necromancers (et.al) in EQ1 they would still have a bunch of those customers. The game became a overwhelming exercise in extreme frustration in which many a Necro silently wished extremely bad things on the entire staff of Sony, those nerf'ing motherfuckers. Looks like those wishes came true.
I guess making lifetap a resistible spell wasn't such a great idea afterall, was it bitches?
Agreed. Newer SATA drives can sustain burst peak throughput of 120MB/sec for the first 10% of the drive, on a newly formatted drive in which all the data is laid down in a single massive contiguous linear string of sequential blocks. During the first few minutes the drive is being used for benchmarking under optimal conditions.
Newer SATA drives that have been used in real life for a few weeks, with a normal distribution of data and the file allocation table scattered all over the drive, using the entire spread of drive from the fastest first few cylinders through the very last and slowest cylinders, average about 60MB/s sustained.
My ramdrive reads somewhere between 1GB/s and 1.4GB/s sustained, but unfortunately I can't make it big enough to actually do anything with it, and every time I power cycle the machine (which is often) I lose all the data on it. I'd consider buying a single dedicated server and putting 64G or so in it so a) it would be big enough do practical work with, and b) I could share it with all the machines - if only my network was fast enough to take advantage of it. 125MB/s is peak throughput for GigE, which is just barely faster than the average throughput of hard drives - in order to take advantage of that approach I would need something that can move 1.25GB/s sustained (hence my hypothetical interest in TerE, or at least 10GigE.)
Sustained real world throughput for SATA drives is somewhere in the 500Mbps range - that's 60 Megabytes per second for single-threaded sustained reads or writes. Mix it up a little by having multiple applications access the drive at the same time and throughput can drop a full order of magnitude (in the range of 6 Megabytes per second.)
Given that, yes TerE is serious overkill for anything you are not already using (and continually saturating) GigE for. I'd say about the only situation where TerE would really help is for setting up a single dedicated machine with a MASSIVE shared ramdrive, and having other machines use that ramdrive as if it were local. Actually the more I consider it, that would be a damn fine use of TerE, and a good way to improve performance in computer clusters working on shared solution programming.