Reminds me of an early release build of Win95. It would properly set time back an hour for Daylight Saving Time, but not set a flag that it had been done, so it would do it over, and over, and over...
I worked in oil and gas (Halliburton) for 12 years.
The amount of stuff we got in "for review", "for test", "preview", etc. was simply amazing. Even pre-production gear a lot of the times. I found a pair of Tesla cards just sitting in a box in an office I cleaned out one day... and I know we got a system with some Phi cards in it when they came out.
The most interesting thing I ran into was when cleaning out a facility after a move, we found a Dell Itanium-1 box that not only did Dell not want back, they wouldn't even admit to making it in the first place... It ended up going home with one of our devs...
Nice thing about being a sysadmin was that we would get "video cards and such from our developers who had just upgraded to the latest and greatest - and the stuff they were throwing out was only one or two years old.. so our own desktop workstations built with cast-off parts were pretty nice.
It wasn't really the sysadmins that got free stuff - it was department managers / tech leads, etc, that would get gear in for review to see if it fit with our workflow, processes, etc.
Us sysadmins just had to install/maintain it, and occasionally would "profit" when it was retired and the company/vendor didn't want it back.
Managed to build an entire multi-node NetApp cluster out of spare and retired parts one day when we were bored. Our NetApp rep said "I didn't see this, I don't know it's here, I don't know it exists, as far as I care it's a bunch of spare parts you just happened to put in a rack..." :D
It's not just workstation hardware - I've recently bought a couple of Dell T410s off eBay for $125 each (shipped!). Quad-core Xeon E5620s, 4G RAM, 6-bay hotswap chassis, DVD-ROM, iDRAC 6 Enterprise, PERC 6i RAID card.
Upgrades: $25 for 120G SSD (boot drive, goes in the empty second 5.25" bay), $27 for 16G RAM, $20ish for an E5670 6-core CPU, $35 for an LSI HBA in IT-mode (supports >2T drives), $10 for a set of SFF-8087 cables to go from the HBA to the existing hotswap backplane. 30-45 minutes to upgrade all the firmware for the DRAC, lifecycle controller, BIOS, etc.
Grand total of around $250 for a really nice server with full remote management, and for the cost of another E5670 and a Dell heatsink I can upgrade to dual-CPU (12 cores/24 threads).
They're so cheap that I've gotten two systems to upgrade as described, and this morning ordered a third (yet again $125) to have for spare parts.
The eBay vendor emailed me and offered to sell me a pallet of 24 for $80 each, but I don't have that kind of need or money lying around...
As for laptops, I tend to get refurb/off-lease Thinkpads from arrowdirect.com (coupon code ARROW gives 15% off), then max out the (cheap DDR3) RAM and throw a SSD in where the HD was. I've built up a T420s and an X230 like this for when I need a decent portable machine but don't want to take my expensive Macbook Pro somewhere. For the T420s I even got a $50 adapter board from a guy in China that let me put a FHD IPS screen in, instead of the 1440x900 TN LCD that it came with...
I upgraded a free T410 with two X5675, 32GB ECC RAM, PCIe to NVMe adapter, a RAID array of 2TB drives and an USB3 controller.
I's a quite capable machine. I needed it to learning about NUMA archs and test my software.
However there is no sleep mode. The boot time is not that bad for a server so I start it with IPMI bounced from a SBC.
I made it quiet the hard way, mainly for fun and learning about embedded control loops: water cooling with a passive motorbike radiator and a Arduino to control pumps and monitor temperatures while feeding fake hall sensor data to the original BMC so it doesn't freak out.
Building my own home server I went a different route with the latest, fastest i3 processor (at the time i3-7350k, not i3-8350k) to prioritize lower power and single thread execution speed.
E5670 holds up surprisingly well, similar total performance – 1/2 single thread execution speed 2x threads – in a similar power envelope for half the cost.
The value in those used workstations is mostly in the case and that is hard to replicate in these days of style-driven (wtf?) computer hardware where everything has LEDs and is generally targeted to excite 12-year-olds.
I'm amazed that they can sell them for $125 including shipping (which has to be at least $40-50) and still make a profit. Makes me wonder what THEY paid for them..
Vendor said they had more than 100 still available, and both of the units I've gotten so far are the original config as shipped from Dell according to a service tag lookup.
It definitely still exists - I used my old DECUS membership number to get a new set of license PAKs (and a link to download the install media and software kits) last week.
Tap once or twice on your sarcasm detector and see if it's running. It might just need calibration since it didn't pick up the tone of the message or the emoticons.
In the worst case, a complete overhaul might be required.
You might want to test it on this message and note the result.
Here are some emoticons to complete the test: ;) :) :D
I used the heck out of it in the Nexus 5 days, but got so used to plugging in my Pixel 1 in the interim that I hardly used it at all once I got the P3.
I'm currently using a Pixel 3, but just ordered the 3a as my new "backup" phone (replacing my OG Pixel 1 and a P1XL I bought refurbished).
I'll probably use the 3a as my primary phone for a month so I get the $100 Fi credit on my account, then move back and put the Fi data-only SIM in the 3a.
Just dropping this in for anyone that comes here afterward, but the author is a prize winning historian who's mentioned maybe a third of the way through the piece. His other work, such as Empires Workshop, are outstanding.
