Armed Polite Society
Main Forums => The Roundtable => Topic started by: Don't care on October 11, 2008, 08:06:20 PM
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For the story:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7665206.stm
Any care to wager how long Kim Jong-il (a/k/a criminal ratbastard), or his handpicked successor, will abide by the (to include the spirit and intent) treaty?
Edit to Add: Japan has criticised as "extremely regrettable" Washington's decision to remove North Korea from its list of state sponsors of terrorism.
Japan opposed the move because it first wanted North Korea to provide more information about Japanese citizens it abducted in the 1970s and 1980s.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7665716.stm
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For the story:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7665206.stm
Any care to wager how long Kim Jong-il (a/k/a criminal ratbastard), or his handpicked successor, will abide by the (to include the spirit and intent) treaty?
Just as long as it takes for the UN to deliver another huge shipment of food.
Then he'll break the treaty again.
Then he'll be a good boy again to get more food.
Repeat. Again. Again. Again.
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Beneath contempt.
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Just as long as it takes for the UN to deliver another huge shipment of food.
Then he'll break the treaty again.
Then he'll be a good boy again to get more food.
Repeat. Again. Again. Again.
We had an ancient SGI 4 processor computer in a secure lab. It had been upgraded to its max potential years ago. Every time we would talk to our IT hardware acquisition folks come capital package time, we would mention it.
Thing was, we always worked with a new IT guy (really not IT, more MIS) who had never seen the SGI and was suitably impressed by its age and the looming cost of service, since it had no service contract. "Just imagine how much it would cost to fix if something broke on it. It is an SGI and you know how much they charge to work on THEM,," I would say.
Well, Mr./Miss MIS would heartily agree and we would get some other suitably impressive replacement equivalent to 4 processors. "The cost of the new machines is only a little more than an emergency repair" MIS-guy would say.
Some years it was 4 high-end PCs, sometimes a couple dual processor workstations, one year even a HPUX box. We would wait for them to ask for the old SGI box, but they never came for it. It had been fully depreciated years ago and nobody on the asset management side gave its existence a second glance. A year would pass and we'd work another capital package and see a new MIS guy who got stuck with the task of running the capital packages...
I can't recollect just how many times we parleyed that old rustbucket into spanking new hot hardware. I think we eventually refreshed our entire lab over time, just from that one SGI boat anchor.
The ploy ("scam" is so harsh a term) finally came to an end when the contract came to an end and we no longer needed the lab.
I was sad to see the old warhorse go. We removed and disassembled its hard drives, giving the platters to information security, and sanitized the rest of it. It took 4 engineers to get it on the pallet & a pallet jack to get it out of the lab. I walked down with it to the loading dock, near where (at that time) they placed all the old to-be-surplussed hardware. At least it had its own pallet, unlike the indifferently-stacked Gateways and Compaqs and 17" CRTs on other pallets.
For a moment I thought, "Hey, I wonder if I could expense some of the correct hard drives off ebay, borrow some OS media, get him going again, shoehorn him into the new lab/contract, and keep the scam ploy alive indefinitely?"
Nah, I would have to explain to too many people on the new, larger, contract just why we needed a 10+ year old SGI box...not to mention the facilities request I would have to generate to double the cooling capacity and electrical service for the lab, since the old SGI used more power than all the new labs PCs.
So, I walked away from the SGI box, grateful to it for years of faithful service...and grateful for turnover in IT/MIS positions.
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jfruser, your old SGI is probably in North Korea right now, earning its keep in a third life.
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Or in my garage with a couple Sun SPARC stations and an IBM e-Server or two to keep it company. =D
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jfruser, your old SGI is probably in North Korea right now, earning its keep in a third life.
If that is ithe case, they'll get years of trouble-free processing. And we'll never have to worry about them getting anywhere on their nuke program in the next decade, considering the sedate clockspeed of the processors.
G98:
It would make a fine heater for your garage in the winter.
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Funny you should mention that. I'm death on everybody in the house turning off their Quad-Xeon IBM workstations when they're not using them, because they heat the place up pretty darned well. (And they spin the wattmeter at a good clip, too...)
I'm considering putting a Koolance Exos water-cooling unit on my personal 3.0Ghz Quad-Xeon workstation, because of the heat it throws and the sound pressure level it produces. There are 2 each 120mm and 2 each 80mm thermostatically-controlled fans in that computer. They make my office sound like a Boeing product if I let the temps build up on a summer day without the A/C turned on in the house.
Then again, we may not need to use the furnace as much come this winter time. ;)
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G98:
Tell me about it. A few years back I ran two HPUX 725 boxes. For a month. Kept the room hot and doubled my electricity bill. Freecycle saved me from more self-injury by taking them off my hands.
Heck, my single processor Athlon 2200XP (1.8GHz) desktop sucks too much power and produces too much heat. I am looking for a low-power replacement. I really don't want to have to upgrade the 49 YO electrical service in the house.
It also sounds like a jet on startup, due to the many fans I stuffed into it to keep the drives, GPU, and CPU cool.
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Heh. My brother and I use our computers to heat our apartment. They don't do too bad, except on the coldest of days, when they just can't keep up.
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G98:
Tell me about it. A few years back I ran two HPUX 725 boxes. For a month. Kept the room hot and doubled my electricity bill. Freecycle saved me from more self-injury by taking them off my hands.
Heck, my single processor Athlon 2200XP (1.8GHz) desktop sucks too much power and produces too much heat. I am looking for a low-power replacement. I really don't want to have to upgrade the 49 YO electrical service in the house.
It also sounds like a jet on startup, due to the many fans I stuffed into it to keep the drives, GPU, and CPU cool.
Why not a laptop?
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Why not a laptop?
Ooh, ooh! I can answer that one.
Why would one want to go from this:
(https://armedpolitesociety.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.teamtriumphtexas.com%2FHerbertliner.jpg&hash=a1e7eee3303a45cd43bf5efeb17d4b602dfc3cf1)
to this?
(https://armedpolitesociety.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fiat500classics.co.uk%2Fcatalog%2Fimages%2Fdefault%2F500dsideview.jpg&hash=09ab5f689fad2700f83d0962fb7de260abec541a)
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Ooh, ooh! I can answer that one.
Why would one want to go from this:
(https://armedpolitesociety.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.teamtriumphtexas.com%2FHerbertliner.jpg&hash=a1e7eee3303a45cd43bf5efeb17d4b602dfc3cf1)
to this?
(https://armedpolitesociety.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fiat500classics.co.uk%2Fcatalog%2Fimages%2Fdefault%2F500dsideview.jpg&hash=09ab5f689fad2700f83d0962fb7de260abec541a)
:lol:
Pretty much why I have a desktop instead of a laptop. If I could afford to have both, I would, but I'm not giving up my desktop.
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Fuel economy? =D
:laugh: :laugh:
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Well, he said he had an Athlon 2200. Any Core 2 Duo laptop is way more powerful than that and uses a fraction of the power.
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Someone ought to rename APS to "Computer Geekroom", for how the topic has changed from North Korea being pulled from the terrorist watch list.
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Oh, I've got a couple laptops in the stable, but I'm under no impressions that they're as capable as my workstations. Not even close, and a Core 2 Duo stuffed into a notebook does not equal a serious number cruncher. You have to go to something like an AlienWare Area 51 m17x to start approaching a portable workstation capability. Even then, I'd take one of those and add an external monitor, keyboard, and trackball before I'd use it as a desktop substitute.