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Sun Puts Data Center Through 6.7 Earthquake
An anonymous reader sent in a video clip showing Sun experimenting with shoving a data center through a simulated 6.7 Earthquake.
Everything stays running, but some power cords came out and some screws worked loose. It's still kind of neat to see a bunch of racks shake like a polaroid.
Hard drives are not as fragile as you might think. I was running our tiny company's "data center" (3 consumer '486s, two HDs each, screwed down to a metal rack bolted to the wall) 35 miles from Northridge during the 6.75 Northridge quake.
Didn't lose a single drive.
Instamatic was Kodak's cartridge loading technology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instamatic), not Polaroid.
Each company's products evolved through many generations. Large cartridges, small cartridges, flash cubes, flash bars, wet developer/fixer, dry process. We gave my dad a Polaroid SX-70 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SX-70) when it first came out. Something very satisfying about the whirr and thunk of the ejection mechanism. The batteries were contained in the film cartridge.
I recall some Japanese tourists stopping him to take a look at the camera - this may have been the last cool technology that the U.S. saw before Japan.
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/TECH/ptech/02/17/polaroid.warns.reut/index.html
In older cameras, there was no protective plastic cover, the chemicals were exposed to the air, and shaking or blowing on the picture would make it dry faster.
In newer cameras, there is a protective plastic cover, the chemicals are not exposed to the air, and shaking will not cause it to dry faster.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
I designed a navigation display product some years ago for shipborne application (think bridge of supertankers) and we put it through a standard shake & vibe test. Everything came through fine except the video was scruzled. At first we assumed the CRTs died but upon investigation we found that the connectors on the MB ate their way through the gold fingers on the PCI video card. As electrical engineers we learned a lot of hard lessons. Shake and vibe are tough and since every system is going to have different harmonics it is hard to generalize. Simple rules of thumb and intuition may serve you poorly. In some cases shock mounts made things worse.
Real computers have more than one power cord.