kraigus shmeggus ([info]kraig) wrote,
@ 2005-12-07 08:09:00
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geek time!
I'm a sysadmin, although you wouldn't know it from the content of most of my posts.

Here's my first reaction to Tim Bray talking about the new Sun CPUs.

I was reading his quickie, all stuff I'd seen before, til I saw the part where he points out that stopped cores don't produce heat, and heat is what kills CPUs. I thought of our machine room, the back of which is filled with researcher equipment, Enterprise 450s and a v880 or two thrown in for good measure, along with some icky Ultra 10's and even a Blade. None of this stuff is newer than 3 years old; some of it is pushing a decade, I think. Two or three of the machines are still running Solaris 6, "because it still works" and the researchers refuse to consider an upgrade. Ever. Not that I want them to always be running the latest & greatest, but there's a limit to how long we can really support stuff, and "because it still works" isn't the best reason for keeping something around, y'know? Eventually it will stop working, and then of course it will be an emergency.

Which leads me to ponder the following: considering what would happen if the Niagaras really do last significantly longer, I pictured a machine room at my retirement, full of equipment bought in 2006 and 2007. "Because it still works." Running Solaris 10 or RedHat Enterprise 4 or SuSE 10 or some other equally creaky OS. I'm old, but I still don't retire for 30+ years. And us pulling our hair out trying to convince the researcher to Just Get New Stuff Before This Crap Dies Suddenly And Horribly, because as we all know, that's what happens: it works fine, until one day, it doesn't any more. And that will be the day before a major journal's deadline or something, with everybody in the group hopping to finish up their results.

Yes, students, professors do everything at the deadline too. It's a fucking lie when they tell you life is better when you don't; not because life isn't better, but because they speak from a single personal experience they had back in the days they were doing their Masters degree. Everything else has been the day before or the day of. Trust me, my mother has been a grad student or faculty member literally my entire life, and now I work in a school.

So, yeah. I know I ought to be going "COOL! LOOK! ME WANT!" and grunting incoherently and pointing, but... while I would like to see one of these things and see what it can do, I'm also somewhat depressed.

Time to turn in my geek badge?

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[info]dawn_guy
2005-12-07 01:31 pm UTC (link)
I'm old
Kids these days, yeesh. Get over here so I can beat you with my cane.

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[info]kraig
2005-12-07 03:29 pm UTC (link)
I wouldn't want you to put your back out or fall down and break your hip. I know you ancients are fragile. Lend me your cane and I'll beat myself, that way there'd be less guilt for me.

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(Anonymous)
2005-12-10 02:51 am UTC (link)
"Professors do everything at the deadline too"

I don't.

I know the "researchers" you mean. Just spill a Coke on the backplane.

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[info]kraig
2005-12-10 02:23 pm UTC (link)
OK, that's an unfair generalization, just as it's unfair to say "students do everything at the deadline". But many do frequently (nobody does it all the time). That's just life.

Why put researchers in quotation marks?

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(Anonymous)
2005-12-11 06:11 pm UTC (link)
The behaviour you describe is not typical of researchers -- in other words, you are using the word to describe a set of people insisting on particular behaviour and it happens to be a convenient label, but not the most accurate one in the circumstances.

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[info]kraig
2005-12-11 10:05 pm UTC (link)
Which behaviour? Last-minute scrambles or an insistence on holding on to old hardware? I assume you mean the former, since if you mean the latter you would disqualify about 3/4 of the faculty in SCS at the University of Waterloo and, I think, four fifths of the faculty members on campus. (And really, almost all the ones I know are quite reasonable when given a good explanation as to just why "because it still works" isn't necessarily a good reason to keep something around.)

Addressing last-minute stuff, I refuse to believe that out there is a single academic who has *always* had *everything* done well beforehand. I'll grant that there may exist a person or three who, everything else being equal, always has things in hand, but it sometimes happens that one is placed in an impossible circumstance: you're parachuted in to rescue a project before it's too late, for instance. It's still a last minute scramble for you, even though it's not your fault. If that has never happened to you, all I can say is you would appear to me to be an unusually well-organized person working in a perfect department, and I would like to inquire about the colour of the big ceiling in your world, with an eye towards moving to whatever plane of existence it's on.

The wording of your initial comment is somewhat confusing though; it implies that you *do* mean those who hold onto stuff too long, and disqualifying them as researchers based on those grounds strikes me as being needlessly critical, to stretch a diplomatic phrase almost to the breaking point.

At any rate, I think we're making a bit of a mountain out of a molehill: my initial post was intended to be mostly tongue in cheek.

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[info]kraig
2005-12-11 10:09 pm UTC (link)
Incidentally, do you care to associate yourself with your statements, or shall you remain Anonymous?

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(Anonymous)
2005-12-13 06:29 pm UTC (link)
I meant their holding on to old hardware past its best-by date, and not thinking about how that affects your job. That has nothing to do with them being researchers, except that you happen to provide support for research computing. You could call them Ruritanians, which comes almost as close to explaining why they do it. Minor point, and I realize you were writing casually and somewhat facetiously in the original post.

You're right about last-minute scrambles; some are better than others, but no one's perfect.

As for anonymity, surely you're not suggesting that having an LJ userid somehow avoids that? (It does for you; you have enough clues in your user profile. But many do not.)

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[info]kraig
2005-12-13 07:52 pm UTC (link)
Oh. Well, in point of fact, most of them are pretty reasonable if you point out that they're making your life more difficult. And the ones that don't, well, that's ok - we bill out our time now, so they pay for it one way or another and *their* lives become more difficult. It can be frustrating, but ultimately, it comes out of the research dollar pools the faculty can come up with, and given that we track our time we also have the ability to add staff capacity as required. The system isn't perfect, but it seems to be working reasonably well so far.

re anonymity: I allow anonymous comments, but that doesn't mean I think it's fair for somebody who could be anybody in the world to take potshots at our faculty. Sort of a "nobody beats up my sister but ME" kind of thing. (And if you *are* a CS type at Waterloo, I don't think I would have needed to include half the above paragraph.)

... all that, and, as you say, what I wrote wasn't really meant to be taken seriously anyway, although like most... hrm, parody I guess... there's likely a grain of truth buried there.

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(Anonymous)
2005-12-13 09:35 pm UTC (link)
Would you let one of your sisters kertwang another? Think about which of your "sisters" might enjoy this...

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[info]kraig
2005-12-13 09:44 pm UTC (link)
They can do whatever they like to one another, just so's they leave me out of it. I've been told to stay out of those, and I'm quite pleased to, I don't get paid enough. ;)

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