My first job: The Mystery of The Powered-Down Server

I paid my way through college by working every-other-semester in the Cooperative-Education Program my school provided. My first job was with a small company (now defunct) which made some of the very first optical-storage robotic storage systems. I honestly forgot what I was "officially" hired for at first, but I quickly moved up into the kernel device-driver team and was quite happy there.

It was primarily a Solaris shop, with a smattering of IBM AIX RS/6000. It was one of these ill-fated RS/6000 machines which (by no fault of its own) plays a major role in this story.

One day, I came to work to find my team-leader in quite a tizzy -- cursing and ranting about our VAR selling us bad equipment; about how IBM just doesn't make good hardware like they did in the good old days; about how back when _he_ was in charge of buying equipment this wouldn't happen, and on and on and on.

Our primary AIX dev server was powered off when he arrived. He booted it up, checked logs and was running self-diagnostics, but absolutely nothing so far indicated why the machine had shut down. We blew a couple of hours trying to figure out what happened, to no avail. Eventually, with other deadlines looming, we just chalked it up be something we'll look into more later.

Several days went by, with the usual day-to-day comings and goings; no surprises.

Then, next week, it happened again.

My team-leader was LIVID. The same server was hard-down again when he came in; no explanation. He opened a ticket with IBM and put in a call to our VAR rep, demanding answers -- how could they sell us bad equipment -- why isn't there any indication of what's failing -- someone must come out here and fix this NOW, and on and on and on.

(As a quick aside, in case it's not clearly coming through between-the-lines, our team leader was always a little bit "over to top" for me. He was the kind of person who "got things done," and as long as you stayed on his good side, you could just watch the fireworks most days - but it became pretty exhausting sometimes).

Back our story -
An IBM CE comes out and does a full on-site hardware diagnostic -- tears the whole server down, runs through everything one part a time. Absolutely. Nothing. Wrong.

I recall, at some point of all this, making the comment "It's almost like someone just pulls the plug on it -- like the power just, poof, goes away."

My team-leader demands the CE replace the power supply, even though it appeared to be operating normally. He does, at our cost, of course.

Another weeks goes by and all is forgotten in the swamp of work we have to do.

Until one day, the next week... Yes, you guessed it... It happens again. The server is down. Heads are exploding (will at least one head we all know by now). With all the screaming going on, the entire office staff should have comped some Advil.

My team-leader demands the facilities team do a full diagnostic on the UPS system and assure we aren't getting drop-outs on the power system. They do the diagnostic. They also review the logs for the power/load distribution to the entire lab and office spaces. Nothing is amiss.

This would also be a good time draw the picture of where this server is -- this particular server is not in the actual server room, it's out in the office area. That's on purpose, since it is connected to a demo robotics cabinet we use for testing and POC work. And customer demos. This will date me, but these were the days when robotic storage was new and VERY exciting to watch...

So, this is basically a couple of big boxes out on the office floor, with power cables running into a special power-drop near the middle of the room. That information might seem superfluous now, but will come into play shortly in our story.

So, we still have no answer to what's causing the server problems, but we all have work to do, so we keep plugging away, hoping for the best.

The team leader is insisting the VAR swap in a new server.

One night, we (the device-driver team) are working late, burning the midnight oil, right there in the office, and we bear witness to something I will never forget.

The cleaning staff came in.

Anxious for a brief distraction from our marathon of debugging, we stopped to watch them set up and start cleaning the office for a bit.

Then, friends, I Am Not Making This Up(tm)... I watched one of the cleaning staff walk right over to that beautiful RS/6000 dev server, dwarfed in shadow beside that huge robotic disc enclosure... and yank the server power cable right out of the dedicated power drop. And plug in their vacuum cleaner. And vacuum the floor.

We each looked at one-another, slowly, in bewilderment... and then went home, after a brief discussion on the way out the door.

You see, our team-leader wasn't with us that night; so before we left, we all agreed to come in late the next day. Very late indeed.

Who the fuck had the idea to deliver the driver for an external optical drive on a DVD?!

Hell no!

Probably it will sound strange or slow to you but my ISP upgraded to optical fiber and now I got 50Mbps from 20Mbps that I had before. I downloaded 1GB file in 3min. I'm so fucking happy.

I put a sticker under the optical mouse on one of my team mates then he started to rage when his mouse is not working. Then he started calling technical support and they, too, didnt know what cause the mouse to not working. I wanted to laugh so hard, but I must resist. Ahaaha xD

When I was like 8 years old or so, I had Nero installed on my older sister’s PC. Nero is a software for burning CDs.

Nero had a button called “Create CD” and 8yo me thought “what if I create CDs and sell them” 😂 I thought a fucking disc will materialize inside the drive 😂 big brain time

Interestingly enough I’d already built one PC from scratch at that age, but optical drives that can write discs were so rare to me that I didn’t even understand them. And physics. And common sense.

Old story, and yeah, it's all true, I shit you not!

So here I am at about age 11 (more or less). At the time, I had an almost brand new 333MHz beast, with 8 MB RAM, 2 (!!!) MB video card and (I think) about 300 MB of storage (yeah, I'm old :)) ).

Connected to this monster was sitting a 14" CRT monitor, mechanical keyboard and a 2 button, ball "powered" mouse.

There was no optical tracking tech at the time.

One evening, I notice my mouse starts lagging. Test it to see if Win95 is stuck. Nope, just mouse problems...

Fiddle with it a little, and at some point it stops working at all.

My room was dark now, so I got up to turn on the lights, sat down in front of the PC, and moved the mouse by instinct.

Surprise! It's working again!

My brother comes in and turnes off the lights. Mouse non responsive.

I tell him to turn them on again, mouse works again.

At this point, we were both scratching our heads at this mystery...

I decided to confirm it again using a desc light.

Conclusion: my 2 button, ball tracking, non light sensitive mouse was working only if light was shining directly oh it AND on my 14" crt monitor at the same time!!!

To this day I have no ideea why.

I kept them both for posterity, and they are still there in my parent's attic.

Fin.

Here in Saint Petersburg, Russia, our local governmental utility company that is responsible for providing tap water for the entire city, uses crayfish to monitor the water composition.

There are some crayfishes living at the plant and there are some scientists that constantly monitor the crayfish via optical fiber to measure how they feel. If crayfish feels bad, the water is cut out and the inspection begins. There are operators that are paid to watch for crayfish mood throughout the day.

This system works flawlessly since 2005 and helped prevent several accidents when toxic stuff that can’t be monitored on a large scale ended up in our local river.

I mean coal miners was using canaries and rats for years to detect what detectors just can’t detect good enough.

Our entire tap water system depends on some crayfish and it’s amazing.

I hate it when you are enrolled in a college for a cse degree but they decide to teach you quantum mechanics and environmental sciences cause you never know, may need them someday. However in the name of cse they teach you what was magnetic optical drive and about mice and printers cause as a cse student you should know how the mouse, the keyboard, printers work. How is electricity that powers your tools is generated? How much energy is generated or required to display the colour on you monitor? And programming, well thats what the company train you in after recruitment!!

FUCKING GREAT! SOME GIPSY WORKERS JUST CUT THE OPTICAL WIRE UNDER MY HOUSE. FAGGOTS, GJ!

What you are expected to learn in 3 years:

power electronics,
analogue signal,
digital signal processing,
VDHL development,
VLSI debelopment,
antenna design,
optical communication,
networking,
digital storage,
electromagnetic,
ARM ISA,
x86 ISA,
signal and control system,
robotics,
computer vision,
NLP, data algorithm,
Java, C++, Python,
javascript frameworks,
ASP.NET web development,
cloud computing,
computer security ,
Information coding,
ethical hacking,
statistics,
machine learning,
data mining,
data analysis,
cloud computing,
Matlab,
Android app development,
IOS app development,
Computer architecture,
Computer network,
discrete structure,
3D game development,
operating system,
introduction to DevOps,
how-to -fix- computer,
system administration,
Project of being entrepreneur,

and 24 random unrelated subjects of your choices

This is a major called "computer engineering"

My arguments about Apple:
- "iPhone 12 camera can be better than anything else because it's more advanced, it has LiDAR and 10-bit codecs"
- "I can copy on my iPhone and paste on my MacBook and vice versa out of the box"
- "My Beats can seamlessly switch from playing from my MacBook to my iPhone to my Apple Watch. I can be exercising with only my Apple Watch and my Beats, no need for iPhone"
- "2K screen with nice colors in a 900g laptop is rare if you consider the price. Apple one is the cheapest one with that characteristics"
- "Apple Pay is convenient"
- "Fingerprint scanners fail with wet fingers no matter if it's ultrasonic or optical, LiDAR Face ID is objectively more secure than any camera-based unlock mechanism"
- "Stainless steel frame feels better than aluminum one"

I'm not saying Apple is the best. I'm not saying that Google Pay doesn't exist or that Apple Pay is better. I'm not saying that Apple has no downsides.

However, these are responses I get:
"But Apple IS crapple, immutably"
"Why are you even looking at apple crap if you want something good"

If you want to bash Apple, bash it for something real like that butterfly keyboard fails, unconventional AirPods shape that makes most people's ears hurt, screen coating fails on MacBooks, App Store commissions.

!personal

So, I was diagnosed with congenital nystagmus at an early fucking age. This is complicated for people who've never heard of it before to comprehend, until they notice the eyes of the person in question. Think of it this way: I lack the biological form of optical image stabilization. Because of nystagmus, I can't fucking drive.

Now, let me tell you, it really fucking sucks. I've never had a girlfriend, never been able to get a job, basically never been able to do the type of shit most of you can already fucking do. Pile that on with college, where I don't really fucking know anybody, and it's really fucking easy to see why I've had depression and nearly fucked my GPA over last semester (2.08, yeah it's embarrassing but fuck it).

That out of the way, nystagmus is rare. So rare that any surgeries to fix it aren't guaranteed to fix the problem, and are only marginally better. I have strong skepticism for any optometrist who acts like they perform this surgery every day, because the numbers simply don't back them up. If there's so few who have this issue, then the amount of operations and opportunities to do them are fucking slim.

Today, my mom came over to Indiana from Ohio, and took me to the local Cheddar's (do other countries have those??). We sit down, and she wanted to re-hash this surgery idea. I have made the statement before that these are the only two eyes that I will ever have, and there's no guaranteed ROI on any procedures, and is probably going to fuck me over if shit hits the fan.

Then she tells me there's this doctor in Maryland. I might be geographically challenged (lol), but I'm pretty sure that's over on the east coast. It's forever from here, we'd probably have to take an airliner.

This doctor made some pretty bold fucking claims. Not only was it possible he could fix the nystagmus, but he could help me use a special form of glasses that would enable me to learn to drive. Knowing that R&D on nystagmus was sketchy because of the aforementioned conditions, I had to tell her that I still don't know how I feel about it. Also, if this doctor moves from Maryland to any of the other states, would he still be allowed to do these things?

I told her I don't know how I feel about it. I'm not sure it's worth the money if we follow through and come to find out it's not enough, and I still can't drive. She acts like this stuff is dead simple. I don't think it is. You have perceived benefits, but there have to be caveats. This would be a major change, and I don't know how I feel about following through with it.

So, brand new laptop. Running an i5-7200U, 8gb of RAM, just put a 1tb SSD in there. Even has an optical drive my dudes! Also got a nice lineup of new mechanical pencils cause my mom is a fucking boss. Today's been a good day.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Coming back home to find out that my parents switched to optical fiber and can download with 50MB/s WiFi speeds makes me feel sad to go back to my 15MB/s campus speed. Even more when I go to Germany.

Just imagine sicknesses spreading through internet.

I mean real human sicknesses. Of course your laptop can’t generate aids, but hey, did you ever have a song stuck in your head, repeated infinitely? Memes, viral videos, modern pop music, it looks just like perfect delivery mechanisms.

Human brain is flawed and buggy, vulnerable to countless things like optical illusions, uncanny valley, nlp and others. It’s obvious that there is some audiovisual input sequence that may have arbitrary side effects.

We are towards invention of some precisely formed pieces of information that’ll damage your brain forever, maybe drive you insane so there’ll be no way back. Delivered via viral media straight to your brain, destroying it irreversibly.

Be ready to face the future.

I made an optical character recognition engine once. Seeing it actually work was a really cool experience.

I feel like writing or telling people about the time I jumped from Windows 7 Ultimate and jumping to Windows 10. (I'm not against 10, but I'm never updating after what had happened to me)
It all starts when none of my games will play due to a possible issue with my graphics card. I look up "3D source game bug" and not many results pop up. I go on Microsoft's Qna areas and ask this question but to my surprise nothing they say would make sense. "Clean the pins of your graphics card, make sure you verify the games on Steam". I verified the games and they checked out as perfectly fine. I don't have access to my graphics card because this is a laptop, sadly not a tower.
Two months pass and my computer is already showing signs of stress, like it didn't want to live in a sense. It was three times slower than when I was on Windows 7 and it was unallocating areas of my main hard drive where I could make virtual hard drives.
Instantly I start looking up Linux distros and find Linux Mint. 17.3 was the current version at the time. I downloaded it and burned it onto a DVD-rom and rebooted my computer. I loaded into the disc and to my surprise it seemed almost like Windows 7 apart from the Linux part. I grab my external hard drive and partition it to hold the Linux distro and leave it plugged in incase Windows 10 does actually fail.
On December 19, a few months after Windows 10 had released. I start my laptop to try and continue my studies in video game development. But to my surprise, Windows 10 had finally crashed permanently. The screen flickered blue and black, and an error box saying Loginui.exe failed to start. I look at it for a solid minute as my computer had just committed suicide in a sense.
I reboot thinking it would fix the error but it didn't. I couldn't log in anymore.
I force shutdown the laptop and turn it back on putting it into safe mode.
To my surprise loginui.exe works and I sign in. I look at my desktop, the space wallpaper I always admired, the sound files, screen shots I had saved.
I go into file explorer and grab everything out of my default hard drive Windows was installed on. Nothing but 400gb got left behind and that was mainly garbage prototypes I had made and Windows itself. I formatted my external hard drive and placed everything on it. Escaping Windows 10 with around 100GB of useful data I looked at the final shutdown button I would look at.
I click it and try to boot into normal Windows 10. But it doesn't work. It flickers and the error pops up once more.
I force it to shutdown and insert the previous Linux Mint disc I made and format the default hard drive through Linux. I was done. 10 gave me a lot of shit. Java wouldn't work, my games has a functional UI but no screen popped up except a black abyss and it wouldn't even let me try to update my graphics card, apparently my AMD Radeon 5450 was up to date at the AMD Radeon 5000's.
I installed Linux Mint and thinking the games would actually play I open steam and Launch Half-Life 2 to check if Linux would be nicer to me than Windows 10 had been.
To my surprise the game ran. The scene from Highway 17 popped on screen and the UI was fully functional. But it was playing at 10-15fps rather than the usual 60-70fps. Keep look at my drivers and see my graphics card isn't in use. I do some research and it turns out I have a Hybrid Laptop.
Intel HD Graphics and an AMD Radeon 5450 and it was using the Intel and not the AMD. Months of testing and attempts of getting the games to work at high frame rates pass and the Damn thing still functions at a low terrible fps. Finally I give up. I ask my mom for a Windows 7 disc and she says we can't afford it. A few months pass and I finally get a Windows 7 installation disc through money I've saved up. Proudly I put it into my optical disc drive and install it to my main hard drive deleting Linux completely. I announced to all my friends my computer was back in working order and I install everything I needed, Steam, Skype, Blender, and Unity as well as all my games. I test Half-Life 2 and it's running exceptionally smoothly, I test Minecraft at max settings and it's working beautifully. The computer was functioning properly once again and my life as a developer started as I modeled things and blender, learned beginners C# and learned a lot of Batch. Today the computer still runs at a great speed and I warn others of what happened to me after I installed Windows 10 to my machine if they are thinking of switching from 7 or 8 on an older machine.
Truly the damage to my data cannot be undone. But the memory of the maintenance, work, tests, all are a memory of how Windows 10 ruined me and every night before the one year anniversary of Windows 10's release, I took out the battery of my laptop and unplugged it from the a.c. power, just so Windows 10 doesn't show it's DLLs, batch scripts, vbs scripts, anything on my computer. But now, after this has happened and I have recovered, I now only have a story to tell

Is told to make a cool football themed board for a planning expo.

Thinks football is stupid, but makes an awesome board with a built in football game made with a Raspberry Pi and optical sensors to detect when you throw a ball through the hole.

Boss tells me that my board doesn’t match the theme and doesn’t even mention the fact that what I made was cool as fuck.

Have to trash the board and make something lame with construction paper footballs instead.

My soul is dead. Business people are such fucking children who punish creativity and reward mediocrity. I need to find a company run by developers.

Both the FAT32 and ISO9660 file systems have a 4 GB file size limitation due to storing file sizes as a 32-bit integer. However, the developers of ISO9660 had an idea that the geniusheads at Microsoft failed to think of.

ISO 9660, the first widely used file system on optical discs, bypasses its own 4 GB file size limit by supporting multiple entries for the same file! So a 12 GB file can be represented as three entries for the same file name.

This is what future-proofing looks like.
If only Microsoft had had (sic.) this idea for FAT32 (and FAT16).

so today was my physics exam(optics and optical devices) and this weird thing happened..

and before i get to tell you what happened , 2 months ago another set of examinations were going on and there is this attendance sheet that we have to fill up with a code provided on the answer sheet and signature. It has 2 columns(code and signature) and 5 rows(5 exams) and every student has his 5 rows unseparated by any space. So i filled the code and realized that i have filled it in the wrong area(last row of the guy before me). As it was first exam , i just cut it and thought its no big deal. In last exam ,this guy asks me "what have you done?" so i said its no big deal just write the code on the side. He said ok that was it(i thought)

now getting to what happened today, again it was our last exam , i got the attendance sheet and what do i see, this guy ahead of me filled up the code in my area and cut it. At first i thought ok maybe he was mistaken but then i realised that this is our last exam and we already have 4 signatures so how could he not see the difference between the signatures.
So he did that on purpose?
what kind of moron does that?
well maybe he felt delighted by doing this. idk too much weird for one day.

Okay i need help
I am about to buy an mid 2012 MacBook pro with an ssd. I wish to place the ssd in the main bay and the stock hdd in the optical. All i want to know is that will it work, has anyone done it??

I swear it's been over a year since I've used a optical drive on a computer.

Hell my personal rig has no optical drive.

Disc is dead!!!!

Hay folks,

if you have a subnotebook, do you have/need optical drive in it?

You have to work, but you notice a fiber in your web cam. Clean the lens, but its still there. Open the web cam to the last bit and clean the optical chip.. There you fixed the web cam, but what about the work..

why can't we zoom in on the side when taking a picture? i know some phones use optical zoom but those that use digital don't have to zoom in on the center, right?

So, total hardware noobie here. My laptop is giving me shit long Android studio build times and i am thinking of adding a ssd in it .thoughts?My current laptop specs are win10/8gb ram/1 tb hdd/ i5 7th gen

Recently i had a battery repair where that guy confirmed that i don't have some kind of ssd slot (idk the name) but ssd could be placed in the area of hdd, and hdd could be attached in the place of optical disk using "caddy" something.

On hearing this, my friend is advising me not to get caddy attached as it would still somehow provide slower speeds than just the ssd. is it true?

I was thinking of going for a 240gb ssd but if my 1tb hard disk is removed, i would have a to rethink about the softwares i use, since my C:drive is usually taking around 500 gb itself