On Hardware Failures. One of the computer industry's dirty little secrets is hardware failure. The few of us who work in, near, or otherwise around large computer installations take this for granted. Companies like Yahoo have people on staff that spend a lot of their time dealing with failing memory, buggy motherboards, smoked power supplies, bad disks, and overheating CPUs. Google, from what I read, doesn't even bother anymore. But the larger world probably doesn't see this very often. Many are likely just blissfully ignorant of how fragile their precious data is until the first time disaster (or mistake) strikes. I know I was. I still remember the two hours I spent at the Commodore 64, typing in that BASIC program listing from the back of a computer magazine. It might have been “Compute” or “Byte.”
Anyway…
Over the last two weeks I've been reminded of this fact. … [Jeremy Zawodny's blog]