Oracle required Sun VAR's to enroll in their own, more-rigorous VAR program in order to sell the newer products. Many Sun VAR's didn't bother, which has caused us no end of grief given a requirement that we have to come up with three quotes to buy stuff. They added restrictions to the the quoting process and the automatic 20% (or whatever) discount that one would get through just about any VAR on systems is no longer the case. That's effectively a price increase. They've also substantially increased the price of support contracts.
That said, Soracle x64 systems continue to rock. They work well, have thoughtful physical design, and they have real, working, useful serial consoles. No "attach a keyboard and monitor" crap, no need to pull a DHCP server out of your ass. I have yet to identify a single other x64 vendor with a fully-useful serial console. Maybe those of you with two 'servers' sitting on a desk don't see the value in this, but when you routinely have to bring up systems purchased and racked in an unstaffed facility on another continent where the by-the-hour local hands have even fewer English skills than tech savvy, having a working serial console to get in to configure the rest is a frickin' GODSEND.
When I flew to NZ in 2007, the systems were much like you describe. If yours didn't happen to work, you were SOL.
AA's streaming is likely to be absurdly expensive. I suggest that they put their resources into getting passengers' meals right instead.
RAID only protects against hardware failure
If it's a type that provides redundancy, sure. and even then only if the failure is actually detected instead of just silently munging data
Repeat after me: Z F S. I had a disk do this on me last week. However the actual problem was worse: I had a Seagate hard drive.
Seagate drives have been okay for us. We've had a bunch of failures, but those have been out of a whole bunch of disks. The *incidence* for us with Seagate drives hasn't been any better or worse than with Hitachi/IBM or Fuji or Toshiba drives.
Now, the Quantum Q105S, now there was a shitty-ass disk.
Perhaps someone alerted them to the fact that nobody under 60 cares about newspapers. Given how Googlers are sent to Carousel when they turn 30, I'm surprised they didn't understand that up front.
In a previous life I worked with many ex-TI people who described the company much as you do above. It came across as a place to get a job right out of college, maybe sticking in long enough to take advantage of their generous tuition reimbursement to get an MS, then move on to somewhere more palatable.
I suspect that TI's execs are willing to take the risk that alienating *both* members of the basement-dwelling-calculator-hacker community will not lead to their bankruptcy.
I long ago tired of TI kkkeey bbounce on my TI-55, then one day during a dynamics & equilibria test one segment died on the display of my TI-55 II, and I had to multiply many of my answers by 10 to see if the exponent changed (10^-5 vs 10^-6). After that I tossed the thing and my sister chipped in so I could get an HP 15C. Twenty-eight years later, the HP looks and works like new, and is on it's lifetime *second* set of batteries.
I never understood the appeal of a graphing calculator.
On the rare occasions when I don't have a postbellum editor, I prefer ed to vi -- ed doesn't pretend to be something it's not and at least makes some amount of sense.
Remember Turbo Pascal? When it hit a compilation editor it would dump you into it's own editor at the problem spot, which had a certain charm I guess, except that the editor used @#$#@#@#!! Word Perfect dain-bramaged key sequences.
At CMU I knew exactly *one* person who used vi, and he was a weenie. When entering the corporate workplace I was (and still am) perplexed at those who subject themselves to vi.
I walked in there and I said "Droids, I want to lose. I mean, I want
to lose. I want to see line editors on CRTs and nulls in my files.
I'm a Solaris (and other) admin just getting into Linux, and can't for the life of me figure out a point to LVM. Reads from mirrored volumes aren't spread across the mirrors, eg., and who really gives a flip about the soft partitions?
There's work on ZFS for Linuxes. I don't know that it has many resources behind it, but it'd sure be nice to have in a usable state. I don't give a rat's ass if it comes bundled into the kernel or not --- I just want it to work properly.
The damage to the US economy was largely self-inflicted. Our economic system is way, way too vulnerable to drama queens -- the stock market is a perfect example of how millions of people are adversely affected by a few guys in suits acting like 13-year-old drama queens.
o TV service != Internet connectivity.
o I'm skeptical that your DSL speed is truly comparable
o Go price out a frac DS3 and tell me if you still think Comcast's prices are outrageous for the speed you get.
o I've had my share of bad experiences with *residential* Comcast service. A handful of years ago as I was escaping my first marriage, I had to stay with a buddy for a while. At that time, my employer wouldn't go for a DS1, so Comcast was what I had. Some days service would be down for fully half of the time, in increments of.5 to several hours. It was especially bad when it rained. Comcast claimed they would escalate if it wasn't resolved in three visits, but it took five and a lot of screaming. Until then, I'd call and they'd try to blame my switch, tell me to unplug the modem, etc. They'd send out two or three first-tier techs to the 10-unit building on a single day, without seeing the big picture. This went on for months, which as a telecommuter was majorly frustrating. When I did get them to send out an actual engineer, they found both that a neighbor had faulty equipment that was sending nasty reflections upstream, or something like that, but also that their pole-mounted box was leaking, which accounted for the correlation with rain. Once they fixed that, it worked as expected.
o When I moved here, a DS1 to our POP was an option, but 1.5 MBit/s these days can be frustrating. The telco touts advanced DSL, but the CO is 11,000 feet or so from me, so I couldn't get jack from them. Comcast again appealed from the bang / buck ratio, but I'd since read that signing up for *business class* service makes all the difference, so I did. $89/mo for nominal 20/5 speed. The install was done by a contractor, I think, but two guys showed up who were clueful. They didn't blame my Apple desktop, didn't claim that I needed MS Windows to install crapware, and didn't have a problem with me having my own switch. They hooked it up, ensured that the modem could configure and set up the connection, and gave me the customer u/p for the router. Since then it's mostly worked fine. Not as many 9's as if I had a DS1 into our POP, but acceptable. Occasionally there's an outage and I have to call them, but just as often I'll get a recorded call from them telling me status. There are occasional routing weirdnesses, and I had DNS issues until I switched from our own resolvers to theirs.
Were you using ES drives that are meant to more actively handle the vibrations inherent in a disk array, or were you using slightly cheaper desktop drives that aren't? If the latter, you have little to complain about.
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Oracle required Sun VAR's to enroll in their own, more-rigorous VAR program in order to sell the newer products. Many Sun VAR's didn't bother, which has caused us no end of grief given a requirement that we have to come up with three quotes to buy stuff. They added restrictions to the the quoting process and the automatic 20% (or whatever) discount that one would get through just about any VAR on systems is no longer the case. That's effectively a price increase. They've also substantially increased the price of support contracts. That said, Soracle x64 systems continue to rock. They work well, have thoughtful physical design, and they have real, working, useful serial consoles. No "attach a keyboard and monitor" crap, no need to pull a DHCP server out of your ass. I have yet to identify a single other x64 vendor with a fully-useful serial console. Maybe those of you with two 'servers' sitting on a desk don't see the value in this, but when you routinely have to bring up systems purchased and racked in an unstaffed facility on another continent where the by-the-hour local hands have even fewer English skills than tech savvy, having a working serial console to get in to configure the rest is a frickin' GODSEND.
My understanding is that the practice started due to MUA's wrapping lines.
When I flew to NZ in 2007, the systems were much like you describe. If yours didn't happen to work, you were SOL. AA's streaming is likely to be absurdly expensive. I suggest that they put their resources into getting passengers' meals right instead.
Maybe because not everyone can attend a rich high school that offers worthwhile computing classes -- or afford a computer at home with a compiler.
RAID only protects against hardware failure
If it's a type that provides redundancy, sure.
and even then only if the failure is actually detected instead of just silently munging data
Repeat after me: Z F S. I had a disk do this on me last week.
However the actual problem was worse: I had a Seagate hard drive.
Seagate drives have been okay for us. We've had a bunch of failures, but those have been out of a whole bunch of disks. The *incidence* for us with Seagate drives hasn't been any better or worse than with Hitachi/IBM or Fuji or Toshiba drives. Now, the Quantum Q105S, now there was a shitty-ass disk.
Perhaps someone alerted them to the fact that nobody under 60 cares about newspapers. Given how Googlers are sent to Carousel when they turn 30, I'm surprised they didn't understand that up front.
In a previous life I worked with many ex-TI people who described the company much as you do above. It came across as a place to get a job right out of college, maybe sticking in long enough to take advantage of their generous tuition reimbursement to get an MS, then move on to somewhere more palatable.
I suspect that TI's execs are willing to take the risk that alienating *both* members of the basement-dwelling-calculator-hacker community will not lead to their bankruptcy.
I long ago tired of TI kkkeey bbounce on my TI-55, then one day during a dynamics & equilibria test one segment died on the display of my TI-55 II, and I had to multiply many of my answers by 10 to see if the exponent changed (10^-5 vs 10^-6). After that I tossed the thing and my sister chipped in so I could get an HP 15C. Twenty-eight years later, the HP looks and works like new, and is on it's lifetime *second* set of batteries. I never understood the appeal of a graphing calculator.
On the rare occasions when I don't have a postbellum editor, I prefer ed to vi -- ed doesn't pretend to be something it's not and at least makes some amount of sense.
Remember Turbo Pascal? When it hit a compilation editor it would dump you into it's own editor at the problem spot, which had a certain charm I guess, except that the editor used @#$#@#@#!! Word Perfect dain-bramaged key sequences.
At CMU I knew exactly *one* person who used vi, and he was a weenie. When entering the corporate workplace I was (and still am) perplexed at those who subject themselves to vi. I walked in there and I said "Droids, I want to lose. I mean, I want to lose. I want to see line editors on CRTs and nulls in my files.
I'm a Solaris (and other) admin just getting into Linux, and can't for the life of me figure out a point to LVM. Reads from mirrored volumes aren't spread across the mirrors, eg., and who really gives a flip about the soft partitions? There's work on ZFS for Linuxes. I don't know that it has many resources behind it, but it'd sure be nice to have in a usable state. I don't give a rat's ass if it comes bundled into the kernel or not --- I just want it to work properly.
There is plenty of music that is free and legally free. Too bad it mostly sucks so badly.
The damage to the US economy was largely self-inflicted. Our economic system is way, way too vulnerable to drama queens -- the stock market is a perfect example of how millions of people are adversely affected by a few guys in suits acting like 13-year-old drama queens.
o TV service != Internet connectivity. o I'm skeptical that your DSL speed is truly comparable o Go price out a frac DS3 and tell me if you still think Comcast's prices are outrageous for the speed you get. o I've had my share of bad experiences with *residential* Comcast service. A handful of years ago as I was escaping my first marriage, I had to stay with a buddy for a while. At that time, my employer wouldn't go for a DS1, so Comcast was what I had. Some days service would be down for fully half of the time, in increments of .5 to several hours. It was especially bad when it rained. Comcast claimed they would escalate if it wasn't resolved in three visits, but it took five and a lot of screaming. Until then, I'd call and they'd try to blame my switch, tell me to unplug the modem, etc. They'd send out two or three first-tier techs to the 10-unit building on a single day, without seeing the big picture. This went on for months, which as a telecommuter was majorly frustrating. When I did get them to send out an actual engineer, they found both that a neighbor had faulty equipment that was sending nasty reflections upstream, or something like that, but also that their pole-mounted box was leaking, which accounted for the correlation with rain. Once they fixed that, it worked as expected.
o When I moved here, a DS1 to our POP was an option, but 1.5 MBit/s these days can be frustrating. The telco touts advanced DSL, but the CO is 11,000 feet or so from me, so I couldn't get jack from them. Comcast again appealed from the bang / buck ratio, but I'd since read that signing up for *business class* service makes all the difference, so I did. $89/mo for nominal 20/5 speed. The install was done by a contractor, I think, but two guys showed up who were clueful. They didn't blame my Apple desktop, didn't claim that I needed MS Windows to install crapware, and didn't have a problem with me having my own switch. They hooked it up, ensured that the modem could configure and set up the connection, and gave me the customer u/p for the router. Since then it's mostly worked fine. Not as many 9's as if I had a DS1 into our POP, but acceptable. Occasionally there's an outage and I have to call them, but just as often I'll get a recorded call from them telling me status. There are occasional routing weirdnesses, and I had DNS issues until I switched from our own resolvers to theirs.
Actually, it's a file transfer protocol. Some implementations happen to also have terminal functionality.
Making something that will routinely get broken and discarded out of fscking *cadmium* is progress???
.. so long as you don't horque the high-gain antenna by shipping it back and forth across the country for no good reason
Not very far. My fridge doesn't smell. I would however go somewhat farther to get free pop.
Actually in this pic he looks like an FTM.
Were you using ES drives that are meant to more actively handle the vibrations inherent in a disk array, or were you using slightly cheaper desktop drives that aren't? If the latter, you have little to complain about.
It takes an act of God to get a proper camera into my company's DC's - I suspect it's like that other places too.
That's great if you happen to live in Verizon territory, moreover one that Verizon hasn't abandoned.
Been to the Pitnick funeral, have you?