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?
December 7 2005, 13:31:43 UTC 6 years ago
December 7 2005, 15:29:30 UTC 6 years ago
Anonymous
December 10 2005, 02:51:24 UTC 6 years ago
I don't.
I know the "researchers" you mean. Just spill a Coke on the backplane.
December 10 2005, 14:23:53 UTC 6 years ago
Why put researchers in quotation marks?
Anonymous
December 11 2005, 18:11:57 UTC 6 years ago
December 11 2005, 22:05:34 UTC 6 years ago
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.
December 11 2005, 22:09:27 UTC 6 years ago
Anonymous
December 13 2005, 18:29:02 UTC 6 years ago
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.)
December 13 2005, 19:52:07 UTC 6 years ago
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.
Anonymous
December 13 2005, 21:35:37 UTC 6 years ago
December 13 2005, 21:44:09 UTC 6 years ago