Pops wrote:And I personally guarantees you'll catch no flack from the resident peanut gallery - a free pass.*
* Free Pass limited to first post only, lol.
Note to Peanut Gallery: I'm serious, back off, give 'em some room.
Ibon wrote:I fully embrace this message......I will even grant two free passes....I owe this for my bad behaviour with Runey who filled my quota of teasing for 2013....
KaiserJeep wrote:I'm a 61 year old Electrical Engineer working on computer hardware for the largest tech company on Earth.
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Then somebody bought that company, and a few years later, somebody bought the company that bought ours, and now I am one of over 300,000 employees.
Outcast_Searcher wrote:KaiserJeep wrote:I'm a 61 year old Electrical Engineer working on computer hardware for the largest tech company on Earth.
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Then somebody bought that company, and a few years later, somebody bought the company that bought ours, and now I am one of over 300,000 employees.
Hi KaiserJeep. From context, I assumed you were talking about IBM.
Looking at the 10 biggest tech companies on Wiki (as of 3/2012), IBM is third in employees, roughly tied for second in market cap, and Fifth in annual revenue. For consistency in being "big", I'd give either IBM or Samsung the nod. (DIsclosure: I spent my 26+ year I/T career at IBM). I'm NOT being pedantic here -- it is no longer obvious at all to me which is the largest tech company.
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Re your interest in fault tolerant computers, and the large chilled room (presumably mainframes) you cite, it prompts a question.
My expertise after my application programming days was system software programming, specifically DB2 on the IBM mainframe. (Fault tolerance was clearly a BIG deal to me before RAID made single point of failure mainframe hard drive head crashes a thing of the past). With the advent of networking and distributed computing, and robust applications like DB2 (parallel sysplex) that can operate on many mainframes simultaneously which (within distance limits) are on different sites -- I wonder about the relative NEED for serious fault tolerant computing (i.e. one single super-duper fault tolerant computer) any more.
Essentially, cheap redundancy and reliable communication seems to have largely filled the gap. The thing all the beasts need, which is the obvious linchpin over time, is plenty of reliable electric power.
Just wondered if I'm missing something obvious. (I'm a pure software guy -- I know a little physics and math and principles of electricity, but nothing close to formal degrees in EE, etc).
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For the home user, having a few cheap PC's and a group of memory sticks stored in several relatively secure locations (like safe deposit boxes -- which also serve as a Faraday cage) in a ubiquitous format like PDF seems to have the data redunancy issue covered without complexity or undue expense. (Just diligence in backing up and storing the data).
Cheers, and welcome to the discussion boards.
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