systems administration
Dear User! Your windows profile is over quota! You have been sent emails about this! You’re not supposed to be using more than 50 megabytes! You’re using over 150! We don’t even know how many over! Why aren’t you using your Y drive?!? Your Y drive can store up to 200 megs! Firefox alone needs 50 for cache! Don’t touch the firefox!
D, do I get more than 4 lifetime exclaimation points if they’re used in parody?
For the record, I only had like 350 megs on my windows profile. For a little historical context, when we bought our 486DX 50Mhz computer, IT had 200 megs of storage. That was over 15 years ago. Let’s do some quick math, shall we? Right now, in an individual hard drive, you can get 1gb for about 50 cents. Let’s say that for reliability this price goes up 10x–this is probably more than generous. So $5 per gig. Now, every graduate student pays a fee to use certain computer labs on campus. For the absurdly complicated rules, see this. I myself paid this fee for five terms, relinquishing more than $825 of my own money–this is not covered by teaching or research assistantships. This fee presumably covers both the cs and itlabs systems, though I will never have to use itlabs again. We’ll say the university has provided me with 400 megs of space anyway. Which means they’ve spent an adjusted cost of $2 on storage for me. Time to go find out where the other $823 went.