Yoyodyne, befouler of SDMB, purveyor of jackassery.

[glilly]

I, looking for enlightenment, ask a question in GQ. I’m trying to determine what level of redundancy in a computer system would be economically justified, but I don’t know where to find current statistical data on failure rates (MTBF), so I ask.

thread

In response, yoyodyne shits this nasty little nugget:

No offense, but if you don’t know the answer to your question somebody else should be designing the system.

He is then promptly and rightfully slapped down by other posters for not adding any useful information, being rude, and assuming that lack of memorized data means inability to design systems.

In sharp contrast, posters like engineer_comp_geek and Anthracite share useful information. Yoyodyne decides not to follow this trend.

Instead, he shat another stinky little nugget, but given the number of posts preceding it, it apparently stuck to his butt hairs for some time before falling off and befouling the SDMB.

My point was not that one should have MTBF rates memorized, but that using them to justify the design and cost of mission critical systems is a serious mistake. One that someone who is qualified to spec such systems would not make.

The “average” calculated failure rate of tens of thousands of drives has no bearing on the failure rate of those installed in your system.

Maybe he’s right. Maybe statistical analysis is not the right way to approach a statistical analysis problem. But instead of saying, “Your methodology does not jive with standard practices. Typically people approach this with X…” Instead he barfs that I am wrong and therefore I’m not qualified to do my job. He has proven himself to waist deep in jackassery and either unaware of it or proud of it.

Twice in the same thread, he insults me while providing no useful information.

But there’s more. He’s also wrong and/or lying. Let’s look at his excrement line-by-line:

My point was not that one should have MTBF rates memorized,…

Really? He said in his first post that someone who could not answer my question about failure rates wasn’t qualified to design the system, therefore implicitly saying that someone who could would be qualified (or at least wouldn’t be automatically disqualified). So, yes, that was his point.

…but that using them to justify the design and cost of mission critical systems is a serious mistake.

So why didn’t he say so in his first post? If this statement is correct, than his first post is wrong. If MTBFs are irrelevant, and a “qualified” designer knows this, than a qualified designer wouldn’t know MTBFs (since they’re meaningless) – but he says that someone who doesn’t know them isn’t qualified.

Is yoyo’s mental capacity too stunted to see his contradiction?

One that someone who is qualified to spec such systems would not make.

Apart from the poor grammar, he is gargling jackassery at this point. He is saying I’m not qualified to do my job. That may be fair criticism, but he’s purposely making it into a snide statement – worse yet, he’s doing it without giving even a hint as to why I’m wrong or why being wrong makes me unqualified.

I suspect it’s because he does not understand the principles well enough to explain his flawed and imbalanced reasoning.

The “average” calculated failure rate of tens of thousands of drives has no bearing on the failure rate of those installed in your system.

Yes and no. He fails to expain the “yes” part, probably because he can’t, so I will: If a disk drive is going to fail on a computer after one year because of a defect in the motor, it’s going to fail regardless of how long other disk drives have lasted. Trouble is, I don’t have a crystal ball to know that it will fail in a year, therefore I have to do what is done in countless industries across countless uses: weigh economic costs of implementation vs. average cost of damage weighted with statistical data. Not every preventative measure is economically justified.

If yoyo can’t accept this, he should put down the cheap booze he’s drinking. The same type of statistical analysis is done to create food and beverage safety rules and systems.

Yoyodyne has proudly demonstrated his lack of knowledge in statistics, analysis, business, economics, and grammar, and done so with a chip on his shoulder. It reminds me of 13 year old boys I knew, which, not coincidently, I suspect is the age of yoyodyne.

[Una_Persson]

Except for a vanity search and me posting now, it appears you would not have any posts here. That sucks.

I actually tried to find some good details on failure rates of components at my company for you. However, we had sweeping layoffs again this week, which resulted in the guards throwing out the two friends I had in the PC build room who had the info. Actually, it’s even more sad, as there are about $300,000 worth of computers there now which need to go to people but no one knows how to outfit them. The real cost of RIF’s…

But my job is safe. Yup. I’m just a dinosaur munching happily in the swamp. What? Nope, that comet’s not coming for me. Nope. I’m just a dinosaur…what? Comet’s getting closer, you say? Well, it’s not coming for me, nope, 'cause I’m just a dinosaur… :dubious:

[Alereon]

There are times to throw out a snarky, “if you have to ask…” reply. IMHO, this was not one of them. You asked what seemed, to me, to be a legitimate question, and yoyodyne acted like a jerk.

[norinew]

OK, to summarize, yoyodyne was being rude, nasty and not at all helpful. glilly, maybe you haven’t been around long enough to realize it, but folks like that tend to be around here for very short durations. So, you can comfort yourself with that.

[TVAA]

If yoyodyne hasn’t already left, he’ll be driven out by the negative reaction he’ll engender in everyone he speaks with.

I wouldn’t worry about it.

[glilly]

*Originally posted by norinew *
**OK, to summarize, yoyodyne was being rude, nasty and not at all helpful. glilly, maybe you haven’t been around long enough to realize it, but folks like that tend to be around here for very short durations. So, you can comfort yourself with that. **

I think these type of people tend to leave faster when given a push. This was my little push.

I was only mildly ticked off by his posts, but I had yet to scribe a solid rant and felt it was time.

*Originally posted by Anthracite *
I actually tried to find some good details on failure rates of components at my company for you. However, we had sweeping layoffs again this week, which resulted in the guards throwing out the two friends I had in the PC build room who had the info. Actually, it’s even more sad, as there are about $300,000 worth of computers there now which need to go to people but no one knows how to outfit them. The real cost of RIF’s…

Thanks for the extra legwork, Anth. I didn’t expect that level of help. I’m a little surprised that there aren’t more data (or at least rules-of-thumb). I come from an engineering background where failure rate analysis is more typical, probably because the cost of capital is typically higher. In the IS sphere, people tend to just look at the cost of downtime and the cost of redundancy without factoring statistical data. I think this is typically so because for an application a server is being installed. I’m looking at installing 80 with an average of 8 PCs connected to each, so even little costs start to add up – which it seems is less common.

By the way Anthracite, you seem to have experience in IS and engineering fields. Are you in the process contol biz? Your work also seems to involve coal-fired power plants. Have you done any work with the little power plant connected to the corn milling plant in Eddyville, IA?

You’ve also nailed on the head one of the problems of over-reliance on goal setting, especially in cutting budgets. People get away too easily with plans that that cut easy-to-measure costs while increasing hard-to-measure costs. At my company, they are doing away with the travel agency to cust costs by … I can’t remember how much. We have to use the company travel internet site, which is terribly slow. My last reservation took 20 minutes to complete (the next one will go faster since I won’t have to enter credit card numbers, etc, but it still won’t be as fast as the people at the reservation center). It was easy to demonstrate the savings of getting rid of the travel people, but hard to measure the cost of people spending extra time on reservations – at least on the P&L.

[Una_Persson]

*Originally posted by glilly *
Are you in the process contol biz? Your work also seems to involve coal-fired power plants. Have you done any work with the little power plant connected to the corn milling plant in Eddyville, IA?

I do detailed engineering, financial, and legal analysis which requires either customizing existing software tools, or creating new ones from scratch for the purpose of my study. Since I manage my projects, I essentially spec out the tools I need. And since there aren’t many people like me, I end up doing all the coding too.

I’ve not done process control, unless you mean programming logic controllers of processes. I’ve worked designing a couple of machines which, I recently discovered, are actually still in use and responsible for creating something that likely some moderate percentage of Dopers have in their house…but as part of that I had to teach myself SLC/PLC programming, and deal with a lot of process control, timing different functions and actions of the robotics on the assembly line so a plant worker didn’t get skewered like a prawn on an automated stacker…

One reason I’ve never been considered to be “obsolete” is that I’ve always been flexible and willing to learn. And I do learn. When I started my job, I saw managers then turn down work from paying clients, saying “We don’t have anything to do that with, sorry. Can we interest you in something you absolutely don’t need?”. I also saw experienced engineers say multiple times “I would like to work on that project, but I’d have to learn programming, and I’m an engineer, not a programmer…so I’ll just sit here at my desk on overhead until you find another pipe stress job for me.” Many of those people are laid off now. I really didn’t know any programming before I graduated. I picked it up because it was an opportunity. Otherwise, I would easily have been overlooked at my company, and stuck in a cubicle until retirement - instead of being a (once successful) manager. Not any more, though, I’m just trying to stay alive. However, 2 million+ lines of code later, I don’t know what I am any more. I still have both engineering degrees, and my PE…if I have to get a new career, it won’t be in engineering. I have about 3-4 open offers in programming, which I could do. Maybe I’ll go into extreme hardcore lesbian porn. Who knows?

Meanwhile, the less flexible engineers unfortunately are ending up being flexible in the fast food and shoe sales markets. Very sad, but very true in this market.

Una

[Ludovic]

I, looking for enlightenment, ask a question in GQ. I’m trying to determine what level of redundancy in a computer system would be economically justified, but I don’t know where to find current statistical data on failure rates (MTBF), so I ask.

thread

In response, yoyodyne shits this nasty little nugget:

quote:

No offense, but if you don’t know the answer to your question somebody else should be designing the system.

[/quote]

to be fair, does he not later say that

The “average” calculated failure rate of tens of thousands of drives has no bearing on the failure rate of those installed in your system.

so, in yoyodyne-world, the “answer” is “I dont even need to ask for information on this, as it has no bearing.” So, if you were capable of designing the system, you would not have posted here, not because you had memorized the answer but were “smart” enough to know it had no bearing.

Not that I would consider them irrelevant: indeed how else would you estimate costs? But it could explain the first answer.

[Cerowyn]

*Originally posted by Ludovic *
so, in yoyodyne-world, the “answer” is “I dont even need to ask for information on this, as it has no bearing.” So, if you were capable of designing the system, you would not have posted here, not because you had memorized the answer but were “smart” enough to know it had no bearing.

Cool! Bearing-less hard drives!

If someone presented me with an architecture plan that didn’t include MTBF numbers for critical components, I’d get out my big DENIED stamp, regardless of how the rest of it looked. There is no other way to back up your choices.

[glilly]

*Originally posted by Ludovic *
…so, in yoyodyne-world, the “answer” is “I dont even need to ask for information on this, as it has no bearing.” So, if you were capable of designing the system, you would not have posted here, not because you had memorized the answer but were “smart” enough to know it had no bearing.

Not that I would consider them irrelevant: indeed how else would you estimate costs? But it could explain the first answer.

It’s possible that he meant in his first post that my question was off-base, but you can’t write a proper rant without pointing out someone’s contradiction!

I give him better-than-even odds of actually meaning what he said. If he thought that my question was the wrong one to ask, he could have just as easily said so. Instead he focused on my not knowing the answer already. It certainly seemed much more so when the first was his only response, and the second seemed like backpeddling and counter-explaining after the other posters had spanked him.

He still hasn’t piped up to suggest what the alternative is…