Kind of goes with the idea that the technology has become a victim of value engineering. I don't buy them from costco anymore, but you know a lot of people are going to.
But I didn't say all of the ones that burned out were from Costco. Just the last batch.
We've had this particular discussion on slashdot before. A lot of people, including me, had initially good results with CFLs, but it seems in the last couple of years the average lifespan has decreased significantly. Speculation is that, at least with some manufacturers, they've fallen victim of "value engineering".
My own experience: My first two CFLs, purchased in the mid-nineties, still work fine. Of the Costco eight-count blister-pack I purchased last November, only three are still working.
"Isolinear optical chip"? I'm trying to remember other ST:TNG technobabble, especially from the later seasons when it became the "babble of the week", but thankfully it's all faded from memory.
I was thinking about suggesting VMWare's free bare-metal virtualizer as the best way to go virtual on inexpensive equipment, but you need a PC to manage the virtual instances, which raises a chicken-and-egg problem.
Look at it this way -- what you're really providing is a resource, not a system. He has some application he wants to be able to run for the next 15 years. What it runs on is immaterial.
Firstly that his current machines have kept running for 15 years without major hardware failure is a miracle. I don't think you can count on that.
I'm assuming that there's no way for him to run the app "online". The advantage of this is that it makes the workstations absolutely generic -- they just need a browser and internet access. A failure occurs, you buy a generic replacement. It wouldn't hurt to check with the company that makes the application he's using, see if there's a web-based version he can buy as a service.
If there's no other solution but to provide the service on local machines, the thing to concentrate on is redundancy, easy replacement, and backups. Hardware just doesn't last forever. Buy a drive that's supposed to last 5 years and it might crap out tomorrow, or it might last 15 years. There's no way of knowing.
But since it's a service you're providing, you can design the systems so that hardware failure doesn't prevent him from doing business.
For instance, I was at Fry's the other weekend, and was surprised at how cheap hot-swappable drive trays have gotten. For about $40 you can put two hot-swappable trays in the 5 1/4 inch bays of a standard tower. Keep a spare on the shelf, and teach him how to pull a drive that's gone red and put in the spare drive. Then take the broken drive plus tray to someone who knows one end of a screwdriver from the other for replacement.
Get a case that can be opened without tools.
Case fans are easy to replace -- provide spares. Buy a gamer's case that takes extra case fans and put them all in, so after one or two failures he'll still have cooling. Buy high quality ball bearing fans.
Get him a small cheap canister vacuum cleaner and put "vacuum out computers" on his schedule twice a year. Include written directions on how to power down, open the case, and gently vacuum out the dust bunnies.
Put Windows on automatic update. (I hate to say it, but for non-computer people, it's probably best.)
Don't buy a subscription-based antivirus. He'll forget to renew it, or won't know how, and then he'll get infected. I use AVG Free because I don't have to worry about it expiring.
You need to do something about backups. These days I ghost to a third drive once a month and put it in a safe place. Your mileage may vary. If it's too complicated, he probably won't do it.
That's all I can think of at the moment. Good luck.
Assuming this is about the leak of some high profile action movie, does anyone else think the reaction is even a tad out of proportion to the importance of the crime? When I read about data center seizures, I hope to read that it was a child porn ring, or some botnet organization, or a terrorism conspiracy, even a spam ring... you know, something important. Not suspicion of leaking a popcorn flick. I know, there is the perception of a lot of money at stake. But it's kind of a bizarre set of values when a movie company's grievance can result in an operation of this magnitude when there's so much other stuff going on that's actually dangerous.
I think that's to some extent hyperbole. There are differences, and there is a tendency to need to do admin tasks "the osx way" or you're going to get confused and disappointed. But it's no stranger, as a Unix distrib, than is AIX.
It's hard to say what a "commercial Unix" is anymore. Someone familiar only with FreeBSD would be as confused on an RS6K as he would on a G5. Then, being a competent admin, he would learn about Smitty or read "OSX for Unix Geeks" (as appropriate for the platform) and he'd do fine.
From a practical, day-to-day standpoint, HP/UX, AIX, Solaris, Novell, are as much different from each other as each are different from OSX. OSX admins tend towards depending on GUI for admin, but so do AIX admins (smitty) and, for that matter, admins of recent versions of Red Hat. OSX isn't that special.
So, the original statement, that OSX is another commercial Unix, is spot on. The code base was forked from BSD a long time ago, and has had an interesting (in the Chinese sense) history since, but it's no less Unix than the other distros that are called Unix. It's a different word from Linux, which (despite appearances) has a lot more cohesive code base.
My daughter (14) recently grew out of her Asus EEE. Her other gadgets provide what she needs and the battery was starting to go. I'm thinking of getting another battery and seeing how I might repurpose it.
There's just one problem.
It's pink.
She chose the pink model. So far I haven't found a solution less intrusive than spray paint. As I obviously can't be seen using it in it's current form, I'm a-thinkin' Rattle-Can Black.
> it reportedly plans to lay off thousands of employees and has even started a program to have IBM workers transfer to other countries at local wages.
I suspect that as a business practice this can be made to look really good on a spreadsheet, but is going to monumentally suck in real life, and not just for the employees relocated to Parakou.
Without context, this is meaningless. 75 Mb/sec as a percentage of what? "As much as" -- translating to "less than, probably significantly less than". In context, this is probably not news. Which is usually why context is left out -- because in context, there would be nothing significant to report.
"Up to 1000 people had pianos dropped on their heads". Over what time period and geological area? If worldwide since 1698, it's a curiosity. If in my town since last Tuesday, it's cause for concern. But without context, I have no idea whether to get excited about the Piano Ban of 2009.
That's a great story. It sounds like that manager had more problems than an itchy "send" finger. I suspect he could benefit from some anger management training.
I remember several years ago a call in the middle of the night. A manager had stayed late to write a crushing, inflammatory performance review and had accidentally sent it to the whole company.
I mean that literally -- he sent it to every single person with an email account from the CEO to the janitors -- several thousand people. Bad naming choice for a key mail alias.
This was back in the days when email was a lot more primitive, so we really did have a chance in hell of scrubbing all the mail servers before start of business day, but it took us most of the night. And I did get one or two night-owls say the next day "I thought I saw a really interesting email, but then it suddenly vanished".
This particular manager got off easy -- I don't think we could have accomplished the scrub in this day and age. What I learned from this is to look my emails over once more before sending, including address fields and subject line. It takes only a few seconds and improves the quality of communication. Side note -- If only people would read what they just wrote before hitting "send"... If I'm writing something controversial, I finish the text and let it sit while I get a cup of coffee or perform some unrelated task. There's always time to press "send" later if I still feel that way.
I heard somewhere that you could collect a bounty for blowing the whistle. I'm thinking it'd be difficult to re-employ afterwards, though. Probably the best personal decision would be to get the heck out of there. That's a tough decision in a down economy, but it may be a decision between being unemployed for awhile, or getting into serious legal difficulty.
I run into this often to a much smaller extent. I do administration for individuals and small businesses, sometimes pro-bono or in exchange for other services (carpentry, automotive, housecleaning). I rely heavily on free tools because invariably these people can barely afford a legit copy of whatever OS they're running (if it has to be Winders).
I'm very alarmed at how many of these machines have illegal copies of Winders, various antivirus packages, small business applications. The owner usually has no media or license certificate and no idea where the software came from. In some cases I've traced this back to local system builders who are apparently decreasing their overhead by cloning applications. In one case, for a remote customer who's hard drive had blown out, I bought an OEM copy of Windows XP to replace the illegal copy she had been running, along with the replacement hard drive, and mailed it to her. I had intended to talk her through installing the drive and OS, but instead she took the computer and the media to the same local shop she had originally dealt with. They charged her about half the license cost to install it, and not only didn't install the copy I bought, (installing their "in-house" copy of Winders instead) but also kept the media I had sent her. And I could not convince her that this was a bad thing.
This isn't just one shop. I have customers in Oregon, California and Nevada, and all of them had unlicensed software installed at one time on their machine by a local shop. I had an (unsuccessful) argument just the other night with a customer in southern Oregon, that she should uninstall her "mystery" copy of Symantec antivirus and switch to a free antivirus that will at least not get her into trouble.
I'm hoping that keeping records, including emails, and choosing to disengage when I can't convince the customer to come clean, will keep me from becoming collateral damage.
The main problem seemed to be that the writers didn't start with a well-defined story arc with a definite ending, and somewhere in about the 3rd season they lost their way. New plot elements were introduced to keep the atmosphere going, whether or not they contributed to or conflicted with what had gone before. It's the kind of thing that happens when a series is renewed for more seasons than there is story. A friend calls this "The Lost Effect". I never got into "Lost", so don't know for certain what he's talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
Kind of goes with the idea that the technology has become a victim of value engineering. I don't buy them from costco anymore, but you know a lot of people are going to.
But I didn't say all of the ones that burned out were from Costco. Just the last batch.
The solution is obvious.
Power companies will have to introduce a CFL levy.
We've had this particular discussion on slashdot before. A lot of people, including me, had initially good results with CFLs, but it seems in the last couple of years the average lifespan has decreased significantly. Speculation is that, at least with some manufacturers, they've fallen victim of "value engineering".
My own experience: My first two CFLs, purchased in the mid-nineties, still work fine. Of the Costco eight-count blister-pack I purchased last November, only three are still working.
Finally, a decent Star Trek movie? Sorry, I meant, a decent movie based on Star Trek? The mind boggles.
> Next iteration they'll be selling units with Vista on them
But then they'd be laptops.
"Isolinear optical chip"? I'm trying to remember other ST:TNG technobabble, especially from the later seasons when it became the "babble of the week", but thankfully it's all faded from memory.
They found a virus on the CD and have to reprint.
I didn't know there was a bar for open source gaming.
I was thinking about suggesting VMWare's free bare-metal virtualizer as the best way to go virtual on inexpensive equipment, but you need a PC to manage the virtual instances, which raises a chicken-and-egg problem.
Look at it this way -- what you're really providing is a resource, not a system. He has some application he wants to be able to run for the next 15 years. What it runs on is immaterial.
Firstly that his current machines have kept running for 15 years without major hardware failure is a miracle. I don't think you can count on that.
I'm assuming that there's no way for him to run the app "online". The advantage of this is that it makes the workstations absolutely generic -- they just need a browser and internet access. A failure occurs, you buy a generic replacement. It wouldn't hurt to check with the company that makes the application he's using, see if there's a web-based version he can buy as a service.
If there's no other solution but to provide the service on local machines, the thing to concentrate on is redundancy, easy replacement, and backups. Hardware just doesn't last forever. Buy a drive that's supposed to last 5 years and it might crap out tomorrow, or it might last 15 years. There's no way of knowing.
But since it's a service you're providing, you can design the systems so that hardware failure doesn't prevent him from doing business.
For instance, I was at Fry's the other weekend, and was surprised at how cheap hot-swappable drive trays have gotten. For about $40 you can put two hot-swappable trays in the 5 1/4 inch bays of a standard tower. Keep a spare on the shelf, and teach him how to pull a drive that's gone red and put in the spare drive. Then take the broken drive plus tray to someone who knows one end of a screwdriver from the other for replacement.
Get a case that can be opened without tools.
Case fans are easy to replace -- provide spares. Buy a gamer's case that takes extra case fans and put them all in, so after one or two failures he'll still have cooling. Buy high quality ball bearing fans.
Get him a small cheap canister vacuum cleaner and put "vacuum out computers" on his schedule twice a year. Include written directions on how to power down, open the case, and gently vacuum out the dust bunnies.
Put Windows on automatic update. (I hate to say it, but for non-computer people, it's probably best.)
Don't buy a subscription-based antivirus. He'll forget to renew it, or won't know how, and then he'll get infected. I use AVG Free because I don't have to worry about it expiring.
You need to do something about backups. These days I ghost to a third drive once a month and put it in a safe place. Your mileage may vary. If it's too complicated, he probably won't do it.
That's all I can think of at the moment. Good luck.
Assuming this is about the leak of some high profile action movie, does anyone else think the reaction is even a tad out of proportion to the importance of the crime? When I read about data center seizures, I hope to read that it was a child porn ring, or some botnet organization, or a terrorism conspiracy, even a spam ring... you know, something important. Not suspicion of leaking a popcorn flick. I know, there is the perception of a lot of money at stake. But it's kind of a bizarre set of values when a movie company's grievance can result in an operation of this magnitude when there's so much other stuff going on that's actually dangerous.
I think that's to some extent hyperbole. There are differences, and there is a tendency to need to do admin tasks "the osx way" or you're going to get confused and disappointed. But it's no stranger, as a Unix distrib, than is AIX.
It's hard to say what a "commercial Unix" is anymore. Someone familiar only with FreeBSD would be as confused on an RS6K as he would on a G5. Then, being a competent admin, he would learn about Smitty or read "OSX for Unix Geeks" (as appropriate for the platform) and he'd do fine.
From a practical, day-to-day standpoint, HP/UX, AIX, Solaris, Novell, are as much different from each other as each are different from OSX. OSX admins tend towards depending on GUI for admin, but so do AIX admins (smitty) and, for that matter, admins of recent versions of Red Hat. OSX isn't that special.
So, the original statement, that OSX is another commercial Unix, is spot on. The code base was forked from BSD a long time ago, and has had an interesting (in the Chinese sense) history since, but it's no less Unix than the other distros that are called Unix. It's a different word from Linux, which (despite appearances) has a lot more cohesive code base.
Warner subsequently announced that The Pirate Bay would continue offering movie downloads from competitor Sony Picture Studios.
True. But there is also irony in that they couldn't understand it or figure out how to translate it.
> Sorry to see ignorant bastards modding you to hell, but it's nothing that I couldn't have predicted.
They probably couldn't understand it.
My daughter (14) recently grew out of her Asus EEE. Her other gadgets provide what she needs and the battery was starting to go. I'm thinking of getting another battery and seeing how I might repurpose it.
There's just one problem.
It's pink.
She chose the pink model. So far I haven't found a solution less intrusive than spray paint. As I obviously can't be seen using it in it's current form, I'm a-thinkin' Rattle-Can Black.
> it reportedly plans to lay off thousands of employees and has even started a program to have IBM workers transfer to other countries at local wages.
I suspect that as a business practice this can be made to look really good on a spreadsheet, but is going to monumentally suck in real life, and not just for the employees relocated to Parakou.
> I took one huge badly written page, stripped out the crap content (like, do you need a font tag on every word?),
Every string, more likely. No doubt created by Frontpage. I've had to clean up pages like that also. And the pages really did render in less time.
Without context, this is meaningless. 75 Mb/sec as a percentage of what? "As much as" -- translating to "less than, probably significantly less than". In context, this is probably not news. Which is usually why context is left out -- because in context, there would be nothing significant to report.
"Up to 1000 people had pianos dropped on their heads". Over what time period and geological area? If worldwide since 1698, it's a curiosity. If in my town since last Tuesday, it's cause for concern. But without context, I have no idea whether to get excited about the Piano Ban of 2009.
That's a great story. It sounds like that manager had more problems than an itchy "send" finger. I suspect he could benefit from some anger management training.
I remember several years ago a call in the middle of the night. A manager had stayed late to write a crushing, inflammatory performance review and had accidentally sent it to the whole company.
I mean that literally -- he sent it to every single person with an email account from the CEO to the janitors -- several thousand people. Bad naming choice for a key mail alias.
This was back in the days when email was a lot more primitive, so we really did have a chance in hell of scrubbing all the mail servers before start of business day, but it took us most of the night. And I did get one or two night-owls say the next day "I thought I saw a really interesting email, but then it suddenly vanished".
This particular manager got off easy -- I don't think we could have accomplished the scrub in this day and age. What I learned from this is to look my emails over once more before sending, including address fields and subject line. It takes only a few seconds and improves the quality of communication. Side note -- If only people would read what they just wrote before hitting "send"... If I'm writing something controversial, I finish the text and let it sit while I get a cup of coffee or perform some unrelated task. There's always time to press "send" later if I still feel that way.
Some interesting comments over on The Register:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/23/battlestar_galactica_finale/comments/
I heard somewhere that you could collect a bounty for blowing the whistle. I'm thinking it'd be difficult to re-employ afterwards, though. Probably the best personal decision would be to get the heck out of there. That's a tough decision in a down economy, but it may be a decision between being unemployed for awhile, or getting into serious legal difficulty.
I run into this often to a much smaller extent. I do administration for individuals and small businesses, sometimes pro-bono or in exchange for other services (carpentry, automotive, housecleaning). I rely heavily on free tools because invariably these people can barely afford a legit copy of whatever OS they're running (if it has to be Winders).
I'm very alarmed at how many of these machines have illegal copies of Winders, various antivirus packages, small business applications. The owner usually has no media or license certificate and no idea where the software came from. In some cases I've traced this back to local system builders who are apparently decreasing their overhead by cloning applications. In one case, for a remote customer who's hard drive had blown out, I bought an OEM copy of Windows XP to replace the illegal copy she had been running, along with the replacement hard drive, and mailed it to her. I had intended to talk her through installing the drive and OS, but instead she took the computer and the media to the same local shop she had originally dealt with. They charged her about half the license cost to install it, and not only didn't install the copy I bought, (installing their "in-house" copy of Winders instead) but also kept the media I had sent her. And I could not convince her that this was a bad thing.
This isn't just one shop. I have customers in Oregon, California and Nevada, and all of them had unlicensed software installed at one time on their machine by a local shop. I had an (unsuccessful) argument just the other night with a customer in southern Oregon, that she should uninstall her "mystery" copy of Symantec antivirus and switch to a free antivirus that will at least not get her into trouble.
I'm hoping that keeping records, including emails, and choosing to disengage when I can't convince the customer to come clean, will keep me from becoming collateral damage.
> In it Joss Whedon observed that the BSG writers and producers "got it" that "science fiction is a setting, not a story."
Yeah, they got that part. There's so many other things that they did not get.
It didn't get any better.
The main problem seemed to be that the writers didn't start with a well-defined story arc with a definite ending, and somewhere in about the 3rd season they lost their way. New plot elements were introduced to keep the atmosphere going, whether or not they contributed to or conflicted with what had gone before. It's the kind of thing that happens when a series is renewed for more seasons than there is story. A friend calls this "The Lost Effect". I never got into "Lost", so don't know for certain what he's talking about.