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Fire Destroys Iron Mountain Data Warehouse, Argentina's Bank Records Lost
cagraham writes "A fire at Iron Mountain's data warehouse in Buenos Aires left the facility 'ruined' and killed nine first-responders, according to the Washington Post. The origin of the fire is unknown. The facility was supposedly equipped with sprinkler systems, fire control systems, and had a private emergency team on standby. Among the records destroyed are Argentina's bank archives, the loss of which could have some surprisingly far-reaching implications."
I'm masochistically viewing this story in slashdot beta. It's horrible.
A few replies down a tree, and comments are squished into a bar about 1/16 the width of the screen. Half of the left-hand side is taken up with whitespace and vertical rules, the right-hand side is taken up with ads.
The comment threshold system is fundamentally broken.
There's a stupid ever-present menubar at the top of the page.
The fucking 'dept' joke is *below* the summary, not above it. Why? Who the hell knows.
I'm pissed, because I've been coming to this site since 1998, I like the community, and I fear that a good chunk of the regulars will leave if Beta is really forced on us.
The survey asks:
What do you like the most about Slashdot Beta?
My response: "It encourages me to find and read new sites."
Yea, if any of you haven't been in one of these data centers, the sear improbability of this kind of fire is staggering.
The rooms are usually kept so cold you need a jacket.
There are firewalls everywhere (and I mean the physical kind)
They have sprinkler systems in the looses sense of the term, They more likely dump CO2 to avoid damaging the equipment.
If all else fails the room seal and Halon dumps (or one of its alternatives) making combustion almost completely impossible.
The only way I could see it happening is if things were shut down for a test or something...
or some neighboring building that was much larger exploded or something.
Aren't there?
Not quite. It was designed by someone who (sadly) knows what they're doing, and more importantly knows what advertisers currently want.
A lot of sites have shifted over to this kind of design, so Slashdot is far from alone. Advertisers like it for various reasons - mostly it comes down to ads being more eye-catching - and of course advertisers control the purse strings. But at the same time the public has also had it ingrained into their heads that such a design is the definition of "modern", and therefore any site not using such a design is by definition not modern, and therefore not worth their time ("the site's owners can't be bothered to keep up with the times?"). Which just leads to a feedback loop of advertisers liking it even more, since they want to advertise on sites that the public perceives as hip/modern so that their products are seen in a similar manner.
But the truly terrifying thing is that the industry isn't done yet. I can show you what the future will look like and it isn't pretty: http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/21/5307992/inside-the-mind-of-a-fanboy. By all accounts the advertisers seem to love it; the text is big and readable (i.e. not threatening), there's animation and lots of flashy effects, etc. It basically reads and behaves like an interactive glossy magazine (People, not Popular Science).
Not that I agree with any of this. Beta needs to be buried 6ft under in a grave lined with lead. But there is a method to their madness; despite what a lot of people here think, Dice hasn't gone off of their rockers. The rest of the world is just slowly moving on from text to images and iconography, as sad as that may be.
Obviously you don't know squat about my country's economy or the facts which led to this. Argentinian justice department was investigating a massive fraud commited mostly by US based companies sucha as Monsanto and Shell, and several international baks were impled in the maneuver, the HSBC to name one. This fire looks more a way to cover up for that fraud. If you'd like to exercise your memory, I recommend you to take a [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Mountain_Incorporate]trip down Wikipedia lane[/url]. Iron Mountain has a long history of destroying their own facilites to safeguard their customer's data from Justice investigations.