Friday, November 06, 2009

Unemployment numbers

They are a disaster, pure and simple. According to the New York Times, real unemployment is at its highest rate since the Great Depression. I will talk more about the numbers -- especially regarding labor force participation declines (which indicate that the number of unemployed is significantly higher than the official figures, even the U-6 figures) later, because I'm out of disk space on my hard drive and thus need to upgrade to a larger hard drive, which will take all night...

-- Badtux the Geeky Penguin

Update: MacOS is installing on my hard drive right now. I'm bored and hooked up a monitor and keyboard to my Ubuntu Linux server to type this, usually my Macbook Pro is the only thing with a keyboard and monitor hooked to it.

4 comments:

  1. You actually ran out of hard disk space? I've kept every file for the last ten years or so, and installed dozens of software packages I'll never use, and I barely make a dent in my hard drive's capacity. I even have a hundred gigs or so on a Vista partition. Vista came with the computer, I never wanted it, and it still got 100 gigs.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I have 20 years worth of files on my computer (!). Yes, I released my first software product in 1988. Yes, I have most of that source code somewhere around here... but all that only adds up to around 200GB.

    My primary problem is that I develop for three different Linux platforms (two 32-bit and one 64-bit environment), *plus* must keep a Windows environment around to run stuff (mostly mapping and GPS stuff) that won't work with MacOS or Linux. *PLUS* some of our biggest customers have released their own particular Linux environments for their own purposes, and from time to time I need to pull one in off the main file server and see if the software works in big customer FOO's Linux environment. For development environments, I have a compile environment, then a prestine install environment to use for testing, which gets snapshotted so I can roll it back to the starting point. All those various VMware environments take up a lot of space. But it makes development *much* faster than the old days, when we needed actual physical machines to do all this which resulted in much frustration at times when we needed a test machine to make sure the latest fix actually worked and there were no free ones because they were all in use.

    So anyhow, now you know why I was using 420GB of a 500GB hard drive, and have now bumped that to a 640GB hard drive to have a bit more headroom :).

    - Badtux the Geeky Penguin

    ReplyDelete
  3. Sounds like excuse-mongering to me.

    I suspect it's mostly penguin porn.

    Couldn't you just dump the 10+ year-old stuff onto an external HD, or some other type of storage device?

    Chers!
    Jzb the suspicious trombonist

    ReplyDelete
  4. My penguin porn actually lives on an external hard drive, Jazz, it's hooked up to my Airport Extreme so it's available to me anywhere that I have Internet access. That's also where all the ISO files for my operating system collection live, and so forth, things that I could go find somewhere else and download if they got lost. I keep the important stuff on my MacBook Pro because it automatically gets backed up by Time Machine that way, and backups are important(!).

    As for why so bulky: Amongst the stuff on there are: dozens of raw .wav files for songs (remember, this is my recording studio and the raw data files for a typical song are around 80mb vs. the 2mb of the .mp3 that you get), a half dozen novels and fragments of numerous others, the entire code base of a BBS system and various other software applications that I've written over the years, and six complete operating systems (Windows 7 32 bit, MacOS Snow Leopard, Red Hat 3 / 4 / 5, Red Hat 5 64-bit). I put the larger hard drive on there so I could chop off a 64gb slice for dual booting into Windows to play games. And let's not forget close to ten years of digital photographs that I need to go thru and prune (sigh!)...

    So anyhow, I have a couple hundred gigs free with the new drive. I figure that'll last me a year or two until the 1TB laptop hard drives come out :).

    - Badtux the Too-many-Bytes Penguin

    ReplyDelete

Ground rules: Comments that consist solely of insults, fact-free talking points, are off-topic, or simply spam the same argument over and over will be deleted. The penguin is the only one allowed to be an ass here. All viewpoints, however, are welcomed, even if I disagree vehemently with you.

WARNING: You are entitled to create your own arguments, but you are NOT entitled to create your own facts. If you spew scientific denialism, or insist that the sky is purple, or otherwise insist that your made-up universe of pink unicorns and cotton candy trees is "real", well -- expect the banhammer.

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.