Attacking the 35$ (not) computah

I can't do that any more. It take overnight at best to copy a terabyte.

?-/

You'd better already have it ready!

People in some countries are born stupid. I've been in mid sized buildings with 3,000A three phase service at 480V. Your jumper cables would vaporize and the flash would kill you. Another building had a

500A 7200V main disconnect. How long would you live, if you screwed around with that? It had multiple mechanical interlocks and security hardware to keep idiots with jumper cables out of it. Also, what makes you think there would even be enough room to get the clips on the terminals? This is the 300 foot CATV drop thread, all over again.

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You can't have a sense of humor, if you have no sense.

He can't help it. He's painted himself into yet another corner, and his only hope is to bore everyone to death.

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You can't have a sense of humor, if you have no sense.

Wouldn't that be considered a high end mini?

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You can't have a sense of humor, if you have no sense.

On a sunny day (Tue, 13 Mar 2012 13:06:02 -0700) it happened Joerg wrote in :

No no, it is a matter of cost. Especially for industrial espionage if the reward is considered big enough, then all resources available will be allotted to decrypting or otherwise acquiring your secrets, And when it was thought it could be relevant to national security, or your invention it could have an effect on the competitiveness of the US. So it remains very dangerous for companies to rely on 'cloud'. Problem is that for industrial espionage there is so much to be found from so little, what components you bought where, where you PCBs were made, if in a country they control they will have the gerbers... The tentacles of the octopus that is US 'security' are every where, Remember how they made Siemens PLCs kill the ultra-centrifuges in Iran? Or at least they will have believe that.... So, for a member of 'spectre' there would be some risks. OTOH those guys are blind on the other eye sometimes. In the current electronic world it is very difficult to keep anything secret, Money streams tell stories.

*Sigh*

Intel® C606 Chipset

Frankly, you are as useless as a eunuch's cum rag and bereft of any justification for your continued processing of oxygen into carbon dioxide.

Let that be a clue for what your next move should be. Have someone take pictures of the mess and post it to Facebook or something so we can all have a good laugh.

[blather]

software they used

THAT reliable.

So I have to explain it again: Take the example in my link. A bank used a mainframe and it croaked. These things are a tad more complicated than PCs and you cannot buy a new XYZ board at the PC shop downtown. You need intimate know-how in the form of at least one person from the manufacturer and access to their spare parts ordering system. Do you honestly believe they'll give you that without a maintenance contract in place? Ask your former employer about it.

Ergo, without maintenance agreement you data will be "hostage" for a looong time and your customers miffed.

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Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

[...]

I did. Several.

You seem to hold your former colleagues in rather low regard. Do you honestly believe it would have taken IBM experts hours and hours to figure that out? In particular because such a mainframe failure often makes the evening news, and did in this case.

IBM makes good quality stuff. But any technical thing can croak. Centralized systems are obviously much more vulnerable because they take down a large chunk of the corporation with them.

Lets take your jello then: You said they may not even work with one drive. So obviously that means that if they do have a 2nd drive the thing will still come to a grinding halt when only one of them fails. And that's my point, and the reason why several companies I intimately know have decided not to go the mainframe route anymore.

spy

Last time I personally used tapes was in the late 70's, on the IBM-5100 which uses tape cartridges. I believe it's still in the family, in an attic somewhere.

Later in the 80's I used tape but not mine, that was on an oil rig.

well

hire

Did the thought ever cross your mind that a mainframe is expensive and consequently shared? That was _the_ model in Germany until the PC had its breakthrough. It was later still used by companies that didn't want to fuss with programming, for example large tax preparing accountancies. The company that ran these "Rechenzentren" (Computation Centers) is DATEV. And no, as a client you had zero influence whom they hired.

Lax handling of engineering stuff happens even in really big organizations. Classic example: A MOSFET came out in n-channel and in p-channel, same number. That caused quite a few phssst ... *BAM* episodes.

Personally I have a pretty rigid method here, most things go strictly by checklist. Luckily much of my work happens in medical and aerospace electronics and there it's the same. Has to be, or the government would shut the plaece down.

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Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

Where have I said that I'd even consider doing that? If you want to know what people actually do you can ask Wolfgang on the German NG (speaks English), he lives in Paraguay.

Which are state of the art these days, whether you believe it or not. And I showed proof, in the form of customer service documents. We are in the 21st century :-)

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Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

No, but neither will they pull out all the stops if your machine takes a dive. Even with a full service contract it was a standing joke at my university that after IBM's "preventative maintenance" the odds were only about 60% that the thing would come back up working on time.

That was for a 370/165 and later a 3081. IBM looked really hurt when the one after that was an Amdahl. We had a weird configuration with custom hardware and PDP11s serving as 2703 terminal concentrators. IBMs original TCAM offering didn't scale well enough.

Best fault we ever had was a direct lightning strike to the lead coated building housing it. The result was that it ended up in a zombie state where the standard procedures for controlled shutdown did not work.

They will eventually. The smaller boxes did have third party support sometimes with parts from IBM. Our guy used to arrive in a red Ferrari and the parts that he wanted by motorbike or van courier.

Big iron was always a pretty tricky proposition. But ISTR that it would be total madness to try and run it without a service contract even in academia unless you could live with several days outage for a failure.

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Regards,
Martin Brown

Yikes. You seem to need lots of bloated SW then, or tons of data :-)

I keep everything XP here, and I stay away from things such as large footprint CAD software. The more recent data files I normally need are maybe 1GB, that copies over in a jiffy. Of course that's different for someone in the video biz.

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Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

[...]

Yes, just like it would be madness to fly a fleet of 777's without a maintenance deal with Boeing or an affiliate. Nobody in their right mind would do that.

But the mainframe era is fading. Even NASA and the folks on the hill flipped the big switch on their last mainframes one final time, to the "off" position:

I wonder what IBM will do with all those slick cabinets. They would be really cool for a retro-style office or maybe a lab.

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Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

There are idiots everywhere. A friend who still does AM radio engineering recently told me about a mexican owned station in the area where the transmitter's safety switch burn up. Instead of replacing it, they made a new set of contacts out of an old shovel.

I posted the Federal Law, which I quoted from CFR47. You didn't bother to reply to. 300 feet only applies to fiber optics.

BS. there are lots of third party repair companies. There is even a trade journal for the industry. I used to get it, and there were over

100 service companies advertising at the time. What kind of bank do you use that is that criminally stupid?

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You can't have a sense of humor, if you have no sense.

The 'Honor Card' ATM network replaced a three year old Amdahl in 1990 with a new system when they outgrew the existing hardware. The hard drives weren't replaced, so the total downtime was under a half hour, late one night. They not only had multiple drives, they had a hot spares.

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You can't have a sense of humor, if you have no sense.

Since you've worked in the cable biz you'll probably get a kick out of this photo:

I posted state regs that clearly mandate 300ft for cable TV. Folks who can't live up to that won't get the franchise, respectively lose it rather soon.

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Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

AFAIK one must have IBM-authorization to work on their gear. If you stray you risk that the warranty becomes toast. In my case (Compaq) that was clearly spelled out in the paperwork.

The link I posted was regarding a major bank, headquartered in London. Their "modest" Shanghai building can be seen here:

They had a proper maintenance agreement in place. The croaked mainframe still caused a serious ATM and online banking outage.

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Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

software they used

THAT reliable.

Maybe you should read instead of being a write-only bowl of Jello.

You find it impossible to fathom that something (no telling what) failed. Simply amazing.

No shit?! Much of that complication is in redundancy.

Nor would you want the moron who buys components at the PC shop downtown, anywhere near the system.

You're 100% wrong! IBM hasn't required a service contract since '56. At one time DEC required a service contract (and refused to sell one to IBM) but you're wrong about IBM. Now if you want guaranteed service times, of course a contract is required. Any such terms would be meaningless without being spelled out in a contract.

You're being an idiot. I hope Joerg comes back next week.