You know what always gets me is the money better spent argument.
Subtract Sputnik Subtract Yuri G Subtract a Man on the Moon Subtract Hubble Subtract the Voyager Probes Subtract the Mir and the ISS Subtract the Mars Rovers
First, you would have tiny science section at Barns&Noble, no neat documentaries on television and little or no satellite communications networks. You would have reduced meteorological warnings, reduced understanding of agriculture, global warming and the ozone layer, a reduced understanding of the Universe, it's meaning and what makes things work, reduced understanding of fission, fusion and the Sun, and no beautiful awe-inspiring photographs to look at on the Internet. In fact, the Internet might not work as well even, because of those satellite things above. And maybe the Vatican and Catholics still think we are the center of the Universe.
And secondly, we'd be stuck on this rock, with no hope of escaping. No doubt, we are all going to die here, eventually. What good will any human accomplishments ever be? If not for the above things, that would be the inevitable mindset, hopelessness. Have you ever really looked at the picture of Earth from the Moon? Have you ever read the Carl Sagan essay, Pale Blue Dot? I can think of no single picture, words and idea that brings humans together. It is everyones home, the only one we've ever had, after all.
A fraction, FRACTION of the federal US budget is spent on NASA. I, for one, see science and space exploration as beneficial to all humans. For me, every dollar that goes into a new probe, or improved human presence in space, whatever the "motivation" for doing so, is a dollar better spent.
Really, besides the laugh we had the other day, Excel does not suck. It's does a lot of things very very well. Just don't try to use it beyond what it's designed for.
I used to work in the finance department for a very large company, and I was inundated with Excel. People used it for everything and loved it. The only hurdles come when someone tries to do something that's grossly inappropriate. That notion comes from finance people who love it and try to do everything with it. Sometimes they succede, sometimes it was ridicules. I don't fault Excel for that.
I Just think about basic command line stuff I use everyday. With bash you have sort, awk, grep, sed etc.. You can do very much the same things with Excel, only sometimes much more easily and with instant visual results.
Cripes I'm a Unix admin and I pine for Excel on Linux. OOCalc is missing ohh.. I don't know decent graphing, pivot functions etc.. I still find myself doing complex sorts, replaces, etc.. with excel ^H^H^H^H^H(ehh. OOCalc) because it's just easier.
That and the data is in a portable compatible format (not just a static text file) that anyone can pick up and continue to use, look at my formulas etc.. without much trouble.
My first question about this HASTOL was how are you going to anchor the orbiter laying out the rope? Wouldn't it get pulled right back down towards Earth?
Then I googled for the documents and read this tidbit,
Next is the grapple system that will grip the payload from the airplane and hand it over to the tether system. The tether system will rely on Earth's gravity or its electromagnetic energy to slingshot the payload at orbital speeds. This momentum-exchange tether will allow the energy and momentum to be transferred between objects in space, allowing the system to toss a spacecraft from one orbit to another.it seems that this is a system for transfering payloads between objects in established orbit.
Rely on it's gravity or electromagnetic energy? I'll need to read more to get some clarification on this..
http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp We never paid a dime for the damn space pen. Fisher, the pen company, paid all the money, and made a lot more back, since it still sells space pens today.
Oh, and Russia decided pencils were a bad idea and uses the Fisher pens also.
Yes, I agree with you, except for the bureaucracy.
I'd argue that NASA had a pretty clear mission statement in those days. Private industry these days.. What board of directors is gonna be 110% about going to the moon?
And the contractors? I think when someone gives you 100 million dollars to build something that will help the first human set foot on the moon, because the president said so, there's no confusion about business decisions.
James Webb led the Apollo project like a persuasive and smart tyrant. Singular focus got us there, not bureaucracy.
If there's any X-factor, it's technology. One big breakthrough, or several small ones, could change the world.
Private space enterprise has not even matched Yuri yet. Not even close. The Russians poured money into the space race just to determine that a manned moon landing was not even realistic.
We tried very hard. It took 10 years (starting with Mercury / Gemini etc..) with the involvement of 400,000 people in Apollo on what was basically an initiative mandated by the president. Dozens of the best and most advanced private aerospace companies were funded by lucrative government contracts to the tune of about 19 billion dollars (in the 1960's & just for Apollo, not Mercury or Gemini). If you add Mercury and Gemini and the remainder of NASA's programs it's about $150B. (in 1996 dollars)
I fail to see how a private company could commit comparable resources and not vanish from lack of profit immediately after the first orbital test flights. Or even do it in 10-15 years with a fraction of that. There are companies with the money, perhaps, but few with the talent and the infrastructure. I don't think Boeing has a spare $150B laying around. I think you'd need lots of big powerful companies working together, or some as yet unforeseen commercial space gold mine.
We do have the knowledge, but really, I don't think that would be a huge advantage and I'm not so certain we'd aim for a straight repeat of Apollo anyhow.
Let me add another reason why it's not good. Overhead. I work for a medium sized cable company, we have a dozen or so CSRs. Most of them are very bright. Yet, even the smartest ones have trouble keeping accounts and packages perfect, as it is now. We audit regularly to correct any billing mistakes.
Now, let's add 150 more customer choices and billing scenarios. Imagine you talk to 70 customers a day. Imagine they can have ohh.. 30,000 different channel combinations. Imagine that you have to keep track of everything in a billing system (database, printed bills, cable box authorizations etc..) and imagine customers that have billing complaints. The system would have to be absolutely freaking fool proof and automated, to prevent the nightmare that would be customer not sure what they have, customer not happy with their bill, CSR not sure which package to add, CSR confused because customer says this channel is out and customer paying for it, they think. CSR customer disagreement.. We'd all have to speak the same language when naming channels. We'd all have to try and describe 150 channels and their content to customers. How long would it take for each customer to decide exactly what they want? What if you suddenly want one channel at 1AM half way through your billing cycle? There are a lot of not so bright indecisive penny pinchers out there. I'm sure the system for adding/removing channels could be automated, but that still leaves the opportunity for billing disputes to the nth degree. Heck, we have issues with kids that order PPV now, and parents that won't pay.
Maybe I'm envisioning the worst, but from my experience, giving the customers so many choices only leads to grief, on both sides of the deal.
Perhaps a time of use billing system would be appropriate? Or, maybe people should start to adopt the paradigm that it's kind of like the Internet (Ya, I might get flamed for that crazy idea.) All the content is there, you just pay for access to the network.
There has been research into nuclear rockets (NERVA), and nuclear power sources.
Project Prometheus shows promise. Already, most of the long range probes that NASA has use radioactive decay as a power source, which is pretty safe and reliable.
I'll be sad when Spector finally leaves the Senate. He seems to actually think about an issue objectively, rather then rationalize his decision so that it aligns with team little R in parenthesis.
Now, his stance on online gambling annoys me, but hey, better than most still.
I read the Wikipedia article a few weeks ago. I like where they describe the Jams, which is basically a technology to enable massive online discussions, and a subsequent technology that analyzes all the text for themes. The got everything down to a few phrases:
"Dedication to every client's success" "Innovation that matters - for our company and for the world" "Trust and personal responsibility in all relationships"
Not to sound campy, but that's a pretty awesome mission statement.
I do know that gamers become very relevant to the rest of the world when they grow up.
As a teenager I spent many, many hours in front of a computer playing games.
Since then, I have never been afraid of computer technology. I am not despaired when challenged by a technical problem, I embrace it. I have always been drawn to learning and becoming better. I am better at problem solving, deciphering UI's and reacting quickly when a crisis arises. These days, as a hobby, I program computer games, which keeps my mind sharp and the logic ticking. Yes, I attribute a great deal of my professional skills, and in fact, my computer mentality, to video games.
You know, I might just say that playing computer games was a better learning experience than playing high school sports.
I think my biggest beef in this business, morality wise, is those that pretend. The whole cocky, know it all, Nick Burns malarkey. I vowed about 6 years ago, that If I didn't know something, I'd admit to it. If I'm not sure what the consequence will be regarding a technical decision, I lay that out for management. It's impossible to know everything.
BS in the IT field is easily perpetrated. Most of what I know is specialty knowledge. It would be easy to make believable stuff up for management. To give them half truths and speculation in order to make myself look better.
I think it's a defense mechanism of sorts, trying to make yourself look smarter than you really are. It's fear of appearing incompetent, desire to wave your big brain around, to compensate for some kind of low self esteem.
Then there is the act of being nothing but contrary and competitive with peers, which is kind of the same psychology. If someone has a good idea, accept it and tell them it's a good idea. Don't be so one-upmanship about everything. If you work with someone smarter or more experienced then you, be grateful and seek their advice.
Pretending might work for a little while, but in the end, you'll be outed as doing a poor job.
- The world will never need more than 4 or 5 computers. - Nobody will ever need more than 640K of memory. - We can close all patents offices now, everything is invented (ca 1890)
I was not foolish enough to say never ever, like your examples. I thought I made that clear.
but I don't get the application for a 30GB burner. Not any time soon anyway..... I don't know, I just can't think of anything reasonable, right now or even soon.....
as a 30GB nex-gen DVD thingy for which no one has a reader (yet)........ increasingly large flash drives are the preferred and established technology.
Ok, I see you have a use.
I do HD video with my very inexpensive HD camcorder.
You care about HD video. Does the parent? No. I was replying to the parent, not you.
These LTO tapes are useless for the porno. Good: no one thinks to look there. Bad: searching for that just right jerk off material is maddening, being linear media and all.
I've seen this every time HD-DVD/Blueray comes up on slashdot and perhaps I have no imagination, but I don't get the application for a 30GB burner. Not any time soon anyway. Hard drive backups? I can't see that being a big application for Desktop systems. If you're backing up many systems, a centralized server with this might be nice, but then again, the gist I get is you all want this for personal applications. LT0-1 and 2 drives are not that much more expensive, hold more and are faster anyway.
MP3's? I have about 12GB, which = 350CD's. I backed up the whole thing once on 3 DVD's. I sort my folders by date and back up changes on a single CDR about once every 4 months.
Video, perhaps, but I can't see the appeal in archiving video (with youtube etc..) unless it's pirated movies. Software? Maybe your putting 6 linux distros on one of these things, instead of 4 DVD's etc.. But how often do you need 6 Linux distributions? I guess you could carry your whole software library around on a few disks, you silly pirates, but I've never needed more then a DVD full of utility applications. Besides, a single flipper holding my original stuff can travel just as easily as a 30GB nex-gen DVD thingy for which no one has a reader (yet)
I don't know, I just can't think of anything reasonable, right now or even soon, that would make a 30GB burner desirable. I don't think giant space in disc media is the future. I think ever increasingly large flash drives are the preferred and established technology.
To me, Planet Earth and NIN live in 1080i on a 42" LCD is a much more fun. I claimed I didn't want HD video either, until I saw it done well on a big enough screen.
Looking beyond 2057 is futile. Perhaps even looking as far as 2057 is futile. I forget who it was that said this but perhaps it is apt: "The future is not only different from what we imagine, but different from what we CAN imagine."
Perhaps you did not read that last part? He qualified his predictions with a nice dose of modesty. To call the GP ludicrously arrogant, is... ehh.. ludicrously arrogant?
Predicting and dreaming of the future is at worst, just for fun. There is no harm in it. And, if we don't do it, what's to guide our aspirations?
Is your network working well? Are the system backups clicking away in the crontab? Is he friendly and willing to help with user problems? Most importantly, when there is a problem, does he fix it fast and put in any extra hours needed?
If yes, that's a good admin. If the network stinks, he should get fired.
They pay admins so stuff does not break. Believe me, I've spent many an 60-80 hour week, getting things so that I can act a bit like your co-worker here.
That doesn't make much sense. If the NIC goes down or starts misbehaving, the chances of your NIC's SNMP traps arriving at their destination is effectively zero. You probably mean setting up traps on your switches with threshold traps on all the interfaces, the switch's CPU, CAM table size, etc. Which would be more useful. You could also use a syslog server, which is going to be considerably easier if you don't have a dedicated monitoring solution.
I'm talking about scripted snmpget commands, looking at a dhcp leases file to determine active clients periodically polling them, and manging historical data in some kind of database.
If the device is misbehaving and not responding, flag it as non responsive.
You're not thinking of traps if you're talking about polling. Traps are initiated by the switch (or other device) and sent to your log monster. You can use SNMP polling of the sort that e.g. MRTG and OpenNMS do which, with appropriate thresholds, can get you most of the same benefits. But don't use it on Cisco hardware, not if you want your network to function, anyway. Their CPUs can't handle SNMP polling, not at the level you're talking about.
Yes, I'm definitely confused about the whole trap thing. Not traps. I looked it up for clarification.
When did I say Cisco routers? Thanks for the advice though.
We have a very modest sun fire that monitors close to ten thousand cable modems using a system similar to what (I think) I'm describing.
And the best part is that because SNMP traps are UDP, they are the first thing to get thrown away when the shit hits the fan. So when a failing NIC starts jabbering and the poor switch's CPU goes to 100%, you'll never see a trap.
You're right about that, and the UDP traffic below. But again, my idea of checking up on the clients, not the switch, might lead you to the root of the problem more easily. I would not use it as my only tool however. With very large networks like this, more then one type of monitoring is a good thing. A few sflow/netflow collectors, like ntop etc.. could also be useful. Add an snmp graphing server for your routers and more centered equipment, like MRTG or PRTG, and some custom stuff such as these scripts I like, and you have tools to find out who's crashing your network. Cisco equipment seems to not have a problem forwarding data to a netflow collector BTW. I've also used dnstop, which is great for finding bad clients / DoS, but that won't find a wonky Ethernet card I imagine.
And the best part is that because SNMP traps are UDP, they are the first thing to get thrown away when the shit hits the fan. So when a failing NIC starts jabbering and the poor switch's CPU goes to 100%, you'll never see a trap. All you'll see are a bunch of boxes on the same vlan going up and down for no apparent reason. You might get a fps threshold trap from some gear on your distribution or core layers, assuming it's sufficiently beefy to handle a panicked switch screaming ARPs at a gig a second and have some brains left over, but that's about it. More likely you won't have a clue that anything is wrong until the switch kicks and 40 boxes go down for five minutes.
Monitoring a network with tens of thousands of switch ports sucks hardcore, there's no way around it.
Once in a college dorm I followed the most active orange lights down the tree of 10Mb Cisco switches all the way to a very senile old ISA Ethernet card in a 386. It was bringing about 200 clients down. We kindly upgraded the kids computer. Network latency quite suddenly started happening in very set intervals for about a day, strangely correlating to in class / out of class times, so we kind of knew it was an Ethernet card.
Managing a cable plant is not "thousands of ports" though. A CMTS will discriminate amongst hundreds of modems on one port thanks to the quite amazing upstream scheduling algorithms built into a few ASICs and modems don't fail into a crash the network state. Crappy Ethernet cards fail into a crash the modem state though. Often.
One not to unreasonable strategy is to set up SNMP traps on all your NICs. This is not unlike the cable modem watching software at most Cable ISPs.
At first, I can envision it being a PITA if you have a variety of NIC hardware especially finding all those MIBs. But they are all pretty standard these days, and your polling interval could be fairly long, like every 2 minutes. You could script the results, sorting all the naughties and periodic non-responders to the top of the list. That would narrow things down a heck of a lot in a circumstance like this.
No alarms, but at least a quick heartbeat of your (conceivably very large) network. A similar system can be used to watch 30,000+ cable modems, without to much load on the snmp trap server.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right. I apologize.
You know what always gets me is the money better spent argument.
Subtract Sputnik
Subtract Yuri G
Subtract a Man on the Moon
Subtract Hubble
Subtract the Voyager Probes
Subtract the Mir and the ISS
Subtract the Mars Rovers
First, you would have tiny science section at Barns&Noble, no neat documentaries on television and little or no satellite communications networks. You would have reduced meteorological warnings, reduced understanding of agriculture, global warming and the ozone layer, a reduced understanding of the Universe, it's meaning and what makes things work, reduced understanding of fission, fusion and the Sun, and no beautiful awe-inspiring photographs to look at on the Internet. In fact, the Internet might not work as well even, because of those satellite things above. And maybe the Vatican and Catholics still think we are the center of the Universe.
And secondly, we'd be stuck on this rock, with no hope of escaping. No doubt, we are all going to die here, eventually. What good will any human accomplishments ever be? If not for the above things, that would be the inevitable mindset, hopelessness. Have you ever really looked at the picture of Earth from the Moon? Have you ever read the Carl Sagan essay, Pale Blue Dot? I can think of no single picture, words and idea that brings humans together. It is everyones home, the only one we've ever had, after all.
A fraction, FRACTION of the federal US budget is spent on NASA. I, for one, see science and space exploration as beneficial to all humans. For me, every dollar that goes into a new probe, or improved human presence in space, whatever the "motivation" for doing so, is a dollar better spent.
Really, besides the laugh we had the other day, Excel does not suck. It's does a lot of things very very well. Just don't try to use it beyond what it's designed for.
I used to work in the finance department for a very large company, and I was inundated with Excel. People used it for everything and loved it.
The only hurdles come when someone tries to do something that's grossly inappropriate. That notion comes from finance people who love it and try to do everything with it. Sometimes they succede, sometimes it was ridicules. I don't fault Excel for that.
I Just think about basic command line stuff I use everyday. With bash you have sort, awk, grep, sed etc.. You can do very much the same things with Excel, only sometimes much more easily and with instant visual results.
Cripes I'm a Unix admin and I pine for Excel on Linux. OOCalc is missing ohh.. I don't know decent graphing, pivot functions etc..
I still find myself doing complex sorts, replaces, etc.. with excel ^H^H^H^H^H(ehh. OOCalc) because it's just easier.
That and the data is in a portable compatible format (not just a static text file) that anyone can pick up and continue to use, look at my formulas etc.. without much trouble.
Oh, that's not true. You can always run AmigaOS 4.0 on it.
http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp
We never paid a dime for the damn space pen. Fisher, the pen company, paid all the money, and made a lot more back, since it still sells space pens today.
Oh, and Russia decided pencils were a bad idea and uses the Fisher pens also.
Yes, I agree with you, except for the bureaucracy. I'd argue that NASA had a pretty clear mission statement in those days. Private industry these days.. What board of directors is gonna be 110% about going to the moon? And the contractors? I think when someone gives you 100 million dollars to build something that will help the first human set foot on the moon, because the president said so, there's no confusion about business decisions. James Webb led the Apollo project like a persuasive and smart tyrant. Singular focus got us there, not bureaucracy. If there's any X-factor, it's technology. One big breakthrough, or several small ones, could change the world.
Private space enterprise has not even matched Yuri yet. Not even close. The Russians poured money into the space race just to determine that a manned moon landing was not even realistic.
We tried very hard. It took 10 years (starting with Mercury / Gemini etc..) with the involvement of 400,000 people in Apollo on what was basically an initiative mandated by the president. Dozens of the best and most advanced private aerospace companies were funded by lucrative government contracts to the tune of about 19 billion dollars (in the 1960's & just for Apollo, not Mercury or Gemini). If you add Mercury and Gemini and the remainder of NASA's programs it's about $150B. (in 1996 dollars)
I fail to see how a private company could commit comparable resources and not vanish from lack of profit immediately after the first orbital test flights. Or even do it in 10-15 years with a fraction of that. There are companies with the money, perhaps, but few with the talent and the infrastructure. I don't think Boeing has a spare $150B laying around. I think you'd need lots of big powerful companies working together, or some as yet unforeseen commercial space gold mine.
We do have the knowledge, but really, I don't think that would be a huge advantage and I'm not so certain we'd aim for a straight repeat of Apollo anyhow.
Let me add another reason why it's not good. Overhead. I work for a medium sized cable company, we have a dozen or so CSRs. Most of them are very bright. Yet, even the smartest ones have trouble keeping accounts and packages perfect, as it is now. We audit regularly to correct any billing mistakes.
Now, let's add 150 more customer choices and billing scenarios. Imagine you talk to 70 customers a day. Imagine they can have ohh.. 30,000 different channel combinations. Imagine that you have to keep track of everything in a billing system (database, printed bills, cable box authorizations etc..) and imagine customers that have billing complaints. The system would have to be absolutely freaking fool proof and automated, to prevent the nightmare that would be customer not sure what they have, customer not happy with their bill, CSR not sure which package to add, CSR confused because customer says this channel is out and customer paying for it, they think. CSR customer disagreement.. We'd all have to speak the same language when naming channels. We'd all have to try and describe 150 channels and their content to customers. How long would it take for each customer to decide exactly what they want? What if you suddenly want one channel at 1AM half way through your billing cycle? There are a lot of not so bright indecisive penny pinchers out there. I'm sure the system for adding/removing channels could be automated, but that still leaves the opportunity for billing disputes to the nth degree. Heck, we have issues with kids that order PPV now, and parents that won't pay.
Maybe I'm envisioning the worst, but from my experience, giving the customers so many choices only leads to grief, on both sides of the deal.
Perhaps a time of use billing system would be appropriate? Or, maybe people should start to adopt the paradigm that it's kind of like the Internet (Ya, I might get flamed for that crazy idea.) All the content is there, you just pay for access to the network.
The use of nuclear weapons is banned, yes.
There has been research into nuclear rockets (NERVA), and nuclear power sources.
Project Prometheus shows promise. Already, most of the long range probes that NASA has use radioactive decay as a power source, which is pretty safe and reliable.
I'll be sad when Spector finally leaves the Senate. He seems to actually think about an issue objectively, rather then rationalize his decision so that it aligns with team little R in parenthesis.
Now, his stance on online gambling annoys me, but hey, better than most still.
Yes, I've gained respect for IBM in recent years.
I read the Wikipedia article a few weeks ago. I like where they describe the Jams, which is basically a technology to enable massive online discussions, and a subsequent technology that analyzes all the text for themes. The got everything down to a few phrases:
"Dedication to every client's success"
"Innovation that matters - for our company and for the world"
"Trust and personal responsibility in all relationships"
Not to sound campy, but that's a pretty awesome mission statement.
I do know that gamers become very relevant to the rest of the world when they grow up.
As a teenager I spent many, many hours in front of a computer playing games.
Since then, I have never been afraid of computer technology. I am not despaired when challenged by a technical problem, I embrace it. I have always been drawn to learning and becoming better. I am better at problem solving, deciphering UI's and reacting quickly when a crisis arises. These days, as a hobby, I program computer games, which keeps my mind sharp and the logic ticking. Yes, I attribute a great deal of my professional skills, and in fact, my computer mentality, to video games.
You know, I might just say that playing computer games was a better learning experience than playing high school sports.
Thanks for that. It's very helpful.
I think my biggest beef in this business, morality wise, is those that pretend. The whole cocky, know it all, Nick Burns malarkey. I vowed about 6 years ago, that If I didn't know something, I'd admit to it. If I'm not sure what the consequence will be regarding a technical decision, I lay that out for management. It's impossible to know everything.
BS in the IT field is easily perpetrated. Most of what I know is specialty knowledge. It would be easy to make believable stuff up for management. To give them half truths and speculation in order to make myself look better.
I think it's a defense mechanism of sorts, trying to make yourself look smarter than you really are. It's fear of appearing incompetent, desire to wave your big brain around, to compensate for some kind of low self esteem.
Then there is the act of being nothing but contrary and competitive with peers, which is kind of the same psychology. If someone has a good idea, accept it and tell them it's a good idea. Don't be so one-upmanship about everything. If you work with someone smarter or more experienced then you, be grateful and seek their advice.
Pretending might work for a little while, but in the end, you'll be outed as doing a poor job.
I was not foolish enough to say never ever, like your examples. I thought I made that clear.
Ok, I see you have a use.
You care about HD video. Does the parent? No. I was replying to the parent, not you.
Oh yea, forgot about that..
These LTO tapes are useless for the porno.
Good: no one thinks to look there.
Bad: searching for that just right jerk off material is maddening, being linear media and all.
I've seen this every time HD-DVD/Blueray comes up on slashdot and perhaps I have no imagination, but I don't get the application for a 30GB burner. Not any time soon anyway. Hard drive backups? I can't see that being a big application for Desktop systems. If you're backing up many systems, a centralized server with this might be nice, but then again, the gist I get is you all want this for personal applications. LT0-1 and 2 drives are not that much more expensive, hold more and are faster anyway.
MP3's? I have about 12GB, which = 350CD's. I backed up the whole thing once on 3 DVD's. I sort my folders by date and back up changes on a single CDR about once every 4 months.
Video, perhaps, but I can't see the appeal in archiving video (with youtube etc..) unless it's pirated movies.
Software? Maybe your putting 6 linux distros on one of these things, instead of 4 DVD's etc.. But how often do you need 6 Linux distributions? I guess you could carry your whole software library around on a few disks, you silly pirates, but I've never needed more then a DVD full of utility applications. Besides, a single flipper holding my original stuff can travel just as easily as a 30GB nex-gen DVD thingy for which no one has a reader (yet)
I don't know, I just can't think of anything reasonable, right now or even soon, that would make a 30GB burner desirable. I don't think giant space in disc media is the future. I think ever increasingly large flash drives are the preferred and established technology.
To me, Planet Earth and NIN live in 1080i on a 42" LCD is a much more fun. I claimed I didn't want HD video either, until I saw it done well on a big enough screen.
Seriously, the armchair NASA engineering here is stupidendious.
Perhaps you did not read that last part? He qualified his predictions with a nice dose of modesty. To call the GP ludicrously arrogant, is... ehh.. ludicrously arrogant?
Predicting and dreaming of the future is at worst, just for fun. There is no harm in it. And, if we don't do it, what's to guide our aspirations?
So, that's when Spore's coming out!?
Is your network working well? Are the system backups clicking away in the crontab?
Is he friendly and willing to help with user problems? Most importantly, when there is a problem, does he fix it fast and put in any extra hours needed?
If yes, that's a good admin. If the network stinks, he should get fired.
They pay admins so stuff does not break. Believe me, I've spent many an 60-80 hour week, getting things so that I can act a bit like your co-worker here.
Approximately as fast as an A500 with the 1MB ram expansion.
When did I say Cisco routers? Thanks for the advice though. We have a very modest sun fire that monitors close to ten thousand cable modems using a system similar to what (I think) I'm describing. You're right about that, and the UDP traffic below. But again, my idea of checking up on the clients, not the switch, might lead you to the root of the problem more easily. I would not use it as my only tool however. With very large networks like this, more then one type of monitoring is a good thing. A few sflow/netflow collectors, like ntop etc.. could also be useful. Add an snmp graphing server for your routers and more centered equipment, like MRTG or PRTG, and some custom stuff such as these scripts I like, and you have tools to find out who's crashing your network. Cisco equipment seems to not have a problem forwarding data to a netflow collector BTW. I've also used dnstop, which is great for finding bad clients / DoS, but that won't find a wonky Ethernet card I imagine. Once in a college dorm I followed the most active orange lights down the tree of 10Mb Cisco switches all the way to a very senile old ISA Ethernet card in a 386. It was bringing about 200 clients down. We kindly upgraded the kids computer. Network latency quite suddenly started happening in very set intervals for about a day, strangely correlating to in class / out of class times, so we kind of knew it was an Ethernet card. Managing a cable plant is not "thousands of ports" though. A CMTS will discriminate amongst hundreds of modems on one port thanks to the quite amazing upstream scheduling algorithms built into a few ASICs and modems don't fail into a crash the network state. Crappy Ethernet cards fail into a crash the modem state though. Often.
One not to unreasonable strategy is to set up SNMP traps on all your NICs. This is not unlike the cable modem watching software at most Cable ISPs.
At first, I can envision it being a PITA if you have a variety of NIC hardware especially finding all those MIBs. But they are all pretty standard these days, and your polling interval could be fairly long, like every 2 minutes. You could script the results, sorting all the naughties and periodic non-responders to the top of the list. That would narrow things down a heck of a lot in a circumstance like this.
No alarms, but at least a quick heartbeat of your (conceivably very large) network. A similar system can be used to watch 30,000+ cable modems, without to much load on the snmp trap server.
Funny you should say that, I immediately thought of this: http://www.ipv6porn.com/