Gotta love technology

[brisray]

"Ray, you got to go and look at the screens in the finance lab."
"Why? We've got an entire IT staff for looking after the computers."
"Yeah, but..."

So I spent the afternoon up a ladder, looking at why 2 Intel NUCs both failed at the same time. Probably just a brownout but both lost the disk drivers when they tried to reboot.

[Cobra!]

Reminds me of a Twitter account I've stumbled across called Internet of Shit, where things that are connected to the internet that don't need to be stop working because said internet connection couldn't be established, among other things.

I feel like maybe society is too reliant on the internet. It's a good escape, but every aspect of our lives is online now, and there's always a panic whenever it goes down anywhere. I remember one day while I was going to uni, they cancelled all of the classes because the internet was down. Apparently everyone was in panic, even lecturers in classes that have nothing to do with the internet!

[TheFrugalGamer]

Gah! That picture looks very, very familiar. We have a similar setup here and it has similarly caused many problems for me. I agree with Cobra! that there are way too many things connected to the internet that shouldn't be, but the stock-obsessed types do like their fancy screens. You'd be surprised at how much those fancy ticker feeds costs, and I have my doubts about how much they're even used...

[brisray]

My job description is "web developer" but over the years it turned out that anything to do with mass communication comes down to me. The tickers and info screens arund the place all came to me, as well as all our social media, mass emailing and even conference organization.

I have my doubts if anyone even looks at the screens and tickers, even a lot of the web pages I write. I certainly know all about it if anything goes wrong with them though.

We have another ticker that stopped working after 20 years of service, so I've been getting quotes to replace it. For our budget the cost isn't that bad but they are not exactly cheap. From the info I've gotten back, 46 feet of full color, two line LED ticker will cost around $35,000 plus another $1,000 per year for the data feeds.

Both Cobra and TheFrugalGamer have an interesting point, are we too reliant on the internet? Maybe, but I've been involved with data manipulation most of my working life. Right from the 90s when the company I worked for paid people to courier data tapes around the world because what they contained was valuable and no one wanted them to get lost anywhere before I got hold of them to process.

[brisray]

Some trivia. The company I worked for was supposed to be the largest data processor in the UK, and the 4th largest in Europe. I was head programmer of 14 programmers and even back then were capable of processing and creating VLDbs - Very Large Databases. We took a VLDb as anything that contained over a million records (rows of data) or over 1Tb in size. Anything smaller than that was just bread and butter.

Our work stations would be any other company's main server, even then it could take us 2 or 3 days to process what was on the tapes. We used anything we thought suitable, C, FoxPro for DOS, even QuickBasic. I've forgotten what computers we were using, but I remember taking the casing off mine sometimes and having a couple of room fans blowing over it to keep it cool enough to keep working.

We were very well paid but sometimes the work was hideous. One time I put in 32 hours of non-stop programming, A stupid thing to do and by the end of it I could hardly think straight, but the processed tapes had to be back in the US the next night or we'd end up with a large penalty.

If it was on magnetic media we could read it, even if the media was damaged. We didn't have a capability of rebuilding hard drives, but anything else we'd have a go at. Damaged disks we'd go through sector by sector and splice damaged tape and rewrite the headers to get anything still readable off of it. Time consuming and expensive for the client, but most of what we dealt with was commercially valuable and impossible to replace.

It turned out I was a little more than your average data monkey, but I very nearly got myself the sack the first day there. I dropped one of the tapes and the plastic shattered. The rest of the day was spent rewinding two and half thousand feet of tape by hand.