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Tech-Op-ed February, 2017
SOUNDING OFF By Walter Salm
Editor Emeritus
How Much Is Enough? S
itting on my desk, next to my computer screen, is a 3 TB USB-3 exter- nal hard disk drive, purchased at Costco. It’s been there for a couple of years, acting as a backup. Sitting on the floor behind the tower is a much
smaller, 500 GB HDD. Hanging over the left side of the tower, plugged into a USB extension cable is a 256 GB USB-3 flash dongle. A 16 GB ultra-minia- ture flash dongle is plugged into one of the two available front-of-the-case USB-2 ports. Inside the computer box is a 1 TB main HDD, and I use anoth- er 16 GB flash drive for my active work files. Why all the redundant storage? Because I’m paranoid and live in fear of a
major HDD failure. I still live with the mantra, “It’s not if your hard disk drive will fail, it’s when it will fail.” I have weathered several of these catastrophic crashes over the years, although it has been six years since my last one, and it was a humdinger. I am way past due, hence the paranoia. Safety and security have also guided my work, which I never save to the main HDD, except as back- up number 4. My primary storage media is a 16 GB thumb drive, and when I get ready to shut down the computer at night, I copy the files to 2 additional dongles and then to the hard disk drive. I border on being obsessive-compulsive when it comes to data storage. Working this way has the bonus advantage of making my work very mobile when I travel with a laptop computer. I clip the thumb drive onto a lanyard, loop it around my neck and I’m good to go. I will never carry a thumb drive in my pocket because I lost a flash drive that way once on a transatlantic flight. Been there, done that. I remember oh so well my very first hard disk drive. I installed it in the
blank front panel area that had been reserved for it in my IBM clone desktop computer. It was a whopping 20 MB, and at first, I wondered what ever I would do with all that storage space. In those days (1986-87), desktop com- puters were mostly all the same physical size, had a very simplistic and straightforward design, and could be put together like a Tinkertoy set. There was the flat computer case, designed to support the weight of a monochrome CRT monitor, and it contained a rather simple (by today’s standards) moth- erboard. There were a whole bunch of “expansion” bus connectors on the motherboard, and this very simplicity lured me into the business of assem- bling computers for those unfortunate souls who didn’t know how to use a screwdriver. I developed a small side business of computer assembly and re- sale, customizing machines for my customers. MS-DOS was king, and there were no hard disk drives involved — at least not for a while. Those computers typically had two floppy disk drives — one to hold the
operating system and application software; the other held data files. The 5- 1/4 in. floppies held just one megabyte each. Software was tightly written and not very memory hungry. Installed RAM was typically 256 kB, and this in turn limited the size of the software that could be run. For a while, a very con- venient way of upgrading such a PC with a HDD was a skinny hard disk drive on a plug-in board, designed to take up 2 of those precious slots on the ever- present expansion bus. Miniaturization had not yet caught up with the desk- top computer industry. These plug-and-play HDDs were usually 20 to 40 MB. I soon found myself adding RAM to computers that came equipped with
additional empty memory bus sockets, and this was touchy, because memory chips in that era were extremely sensitive to static discharge. I learned to wear a grounded antistatic bracelet when performing this operation. Fast-forward to 2017, and I have all this HDD and flash drive capacity
hanging on my computer — a large portion unused. This is because I don’t download movies or TV programs or games. To be sure, I stream TV shows and movies and videos on my computer or TV set, but I rarely record them. I do have several hundred music CDs ripped to my computer’s HDD, and every so often, I will update the copy of them on an ultra-miniature 64 GB micro- SD chip that plugs into my car’s stereo. I continue to be totally amazed by the amount of music I can plug into my car’s Kenwood infotainment center this way on a chip that’s smaller than my little fingernail. And six years without a crash. Have HDDs been that much improved? And no anti-static grounding wrist straps needed. r
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
By Jacob Fattal Publisher
We Don’t Make ‘Em Like We Used To
T
he age of mass employment in manufacturing has passed, likely never to re- turn. Often cited by political figures, the need to renew and create manufac- turing jobs at home has been a sort of Holy Grail for policymakers in the
U.S. This is not a uniquely American issue. Politicians in the UK, France, and many other European countries are articulating a similar ideal: Bring manufac- turing jobs back. However, over the past decades of the manufacturing industry’s apparent hiatus, technology has kept up a relentless pace. There is an ongoing push for onshoring and reshoring — popular names for creating or bringing back manufacturing jobs to the U.S. An oft-cited patriotic gesture is to only purchase products that carry labels saying “Made in U.S.A.” The difficulty lies in the fact that manufacturing has not really disap-
peared, but has changed so drastically that it has become unrecognizable. The top manufacturing employers are now multinational entities that have spread from continent to continent, filling their once accessible lower-skill positions with workers in lower-cost locations. The jobs left at home have much higher skill requirements and are much more competitive. Also, today’s manufactur- ing jobs, such as those in design and R&D, and even those in areas like sup- ply chain management, are not the same kind of stable, unchanging positions that our politicians seem to yearn for. Many of the lower-skill positions have disappeared altogether, owing to
technological progress in automation and other productivity-boosting solu- tions. Among other advances, we have seen the rise of interconnected sensing technology that provides detailed information about production machines and production line status to manufacturers. The resulting increase in efficiency across the board has led many companies to streamline their services and to outsource manufacturing to others that are able to build a given product more quickly and at lower cost. A study conducted by the Brookings Institute in 2015 found that manufacturing-related service jobs in the U.S. outnumbered actual manufacturing jobs by almost two to one. This year, as discussion about manufacturing job creation moves from
campaign rhetoric to actual policymaking, we should keep a fresh eye on the shifting landscape of manufacturing. Technology has changed manufacturing irreversibly and turned the much romanticized task of the common, hard- working assembly worker into a complex web of competing services. We should take a careful look at the reality of the situation and be open to change. Manufacturing is going through continuing transformation, turning entire in- dustries upside-down, and the electronics industry is no exception. There is a bright future for manufacturing, but we have to be careful not to look too far backward to build what’s ahead. r
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