Good points. You don't really have "dogmas" in science, just hypotheses and results that you better not question because then you might piss off someone, lose you grants and be blackballed in peer reviews.
Sadly, the peer review system does not shield scientists from flaring egos and grant sucking. It's a great system where it works, and surely beats the old ways of taunting competitors with results they couldn't reproduce as was the case during the Renaissance. But it still breaks sometimes when seniority, ego and money are involved.
And of course, politics now play a role. Take something that should be as neutral as cosmology, namely, climate study. Now it's tainted with politics. That's rather disquieting.
The motto of the Royal Society -- the 500-year old British academy of sciences -- is "Nullius in Verba", meaning you are not compelled by the word of someone else, only by truth. I wish it were the case.
I have a DSL broadband subscription with AT&T (it used to be a small local company and they got bought by whatever is now called AT&T).
I noticed that their DNS was unpatched and I used their support forms to report the problem.
The reply came only a few hours later. To quote: "We regret we cannot help you with your WorldNet dialup problem".
Huh?
So their networking department is not patching critical protocol flaws, and they programmed their answerbots to laugh at us users if we attempt to point out said flaws. Since when does Simon the BOFH work for AT&T DSL support?
AT&T network admin? It's a great job if you can get it.
And that, boys 'n girls, is the difference between an amateur and a grizzled pro. A pro is always collecting war stories to add to his collection of "when things go wrong" tales. Because in this industry, experience is measured in the number of botched projects and boneheaded mistakes you survived.
Since there are only so many blunders and disastrers you can get involved with and keep your job, you benefit greatly from the tales of disasters from other people.
So, dgatwood, please do tell us your tale so that we all benefit. That way, your drives would not have died in vain.:-)
When a model takes variability into account, the cycle they use is the 11-year cycle. This is not what we are talking about here.
The spot absence that we are noticing currently is not a phenomenon with an 11-year period. To be more precise, it looks like a long delay in the start of a new 11-year cycle. The closest equivalent was the Maunder Minimum four centuries ago. And I certainly never saw a model accounting for this. Can't blame the modellers either.
Oh, I don't want you to assume I am a big scientist and all. All I do is push code through production and help turn analyses and models into code. It just gives me a good opportunity to discuss at length with the owners of payloads.
The interesting part is R&D with some academic and research payloads in the mix. We also having the "boring" rows of racks such as the usual bunch of Windows servers for business apps.
Do you honestly think climate scientists don't take this into account?
Actually, they don't. All the models I am running in my datacenter are using a "solar constant" for solar energy flux, and modulate it only through albedo variations.
I have yet to see a model that takes solar variability into account. Mostly because, to be honest, we don't know much about said variability. So we'd be hard pressed to model it. Hey, give us a break, we have had satellites up there for only a few decades, and the Sun has cycles measured in centuries!
Side note: numerical simulation is a mess today. Everyone and their dog do it, with mixed results. I even came across people who write flow simulations in Excel VB (!) and manage to get budgets for this. It doesn't inspire confidence.
Well, you wanted a big Federal gummint and a nanny state, you got it. What are you complaining about?
See, these darn rocket engines are dangerous. Someone, somewhere, could get hurt. Or worse, could have fun without a Federal authorization.
Oh no, I just saw a Connecticut biker ride without a helmet. Aaaaah! It's so dangerous! And it's legal in that darn state! We need a Federal bike helmet law! Quick, Robin, to the legislat-o-mobile!
Get this book. It comes with a pre-filled order form for a complete chemistry lab kit and it has dozen of experiments. So it's basically a chemistry kit manual.
And remember, a good experiment is an experiment that leaves a crater. A great experiment is an experiment that leaves a crater from which you can walk away.
Amen to that! With a little bit of luck, metered strips will become increasingly more common, saving everyone a lot of headaches. You would not believe what can be found in some DCs. Daisy-chained strips spanning multiple racks, redundant power supplies all fed by the same UPS, etc.
Out of professional curiosity, how does your DC manage to keep track of equipment status, installs and decommissions? Do you use a specific DC management package, or do you subscribe to the "ad-hoc spreadsheet on a shared drive" school of thought?
Plus, data center managers are generally busy enough to avoid yet another stack of forms to fill.
Finally, some DC managers barely know where the power is going. They see the power bill, they seem some automated power meter reading at key points such as power distribution units, but they cannot really tell you how much a machine, or even a rack, is consuming.
The problem with manufacturers' plates is that the power rating on the plates is ridiculous overkill. A rack-moounted server rated for 600 W on the plate might draw 500 W at start up, when all the fans and hard drive motors are going to max power consumption (electric motors consume more power when starting up than in normal operations). The rest of the time, the server might consume less that 400 W. So you need to drag the server to a lab where its power consumption will be tested under various conditions.
Baring this, the DC people practice the fine art of "de-rating", in other words, they make an educated guess about how much the manuf's plate is exagerated. This can be hard to explain to bureaucrats looking for precise answers for their surveys.
You are absolutely right. The problem is that Spain, for example, is not a rich nation. If they want to set up new power plants to attract investment, they'll go for the cost-effective options. Currently, the applicable ones are natural gas, heavy oil, nuclear, solar, in order of increasing cost per watt.
Cost is the problem. Solar power remains expensive and diffuse, thus cannot be used as the baseload power.
Consider, for instance, that California has only 250 MW of solar power after investing tens of billions in solar power. This represents a quarter of a modern thermal generator that would cost about 2 dollar per watt (plus fuel costs to operate, alas). Very few places can afford to spend so much for such a pathetic result. Californians spend all these public funds in feel-good solar projects that produce a trickle of power, then they turn around and import power from neighboring states -- states that are more reasonable and do produce an excedent of power with thermal plants to feed the silly Californians's grid. Obviously, if California's stupidity was contagious, their economy would collapse for lack of energy.
Personally, my favorite options would be fusion (but it's always been "thirty years away" since 1970...) and space-based solar power plus microwave transmitters (but NASA has killed the private space lift industry by subsidizing shuttle launches). So these are for the future. We need a solution today while we prepare tomorrow's.
Yup, some parts of Spain rival the Nevada desert (and that's why Italian Western flicks are filmed there). However, they also rival the Nevada desert for development levels -- in other words, not many industries around to consume electricity.
I went to a seminar on building new data centers. There we a part about location of new data center. The favorite places in Europe were France and Germany, because of cheap power generated by non-polluting nuclear power plant.
I am aware of the end-of-life problem surrounding nuclear power, but you got to admit that if your goal is to avoid burning stuff, you cannot get any better than this. Especially in crowded, not-so-sunny Europe, where you cannot even make a "what if we paved the desert with solar cells" hypothesis.
I suspect they're more likely to be nice to them so they don't have to worry about finding a replacement and paying them a fair salary, or replacing them with someone else (I assume getting someone in on a visa like that isn't cheap?)
That's the beauty of an H1B. They are tied to a specific company. If your indentured servant H1B employee wants to seek greener pastures, he has to find another company willing to sponsor him.
Of course, nowadays, the majority of H1Bs visas are obtained by consulting companies fron India. They charge a fair rate for consultants (of which only a small fraction goes to the consultant), but you have all the loyalty you can expect from a contractor.
But IT outsourcing might very well come to a screeching halt. Wait until the fat cat lawyers in Congress hear about
companies that offer legal outsourcing. Why, they will make outsourcing illegal overnight! So anybody in DC who can tell them?
Overall, it's hard to disagree with the article. Heck, a guy who has the persistence and brains to go through the gruesome class schedules of an Engineering school will not be easily deterred by obstacles. And he is inventive by training if not nature.
An engineer could easily turn bad... And he'd be very good at being bad, if he has the motivation. So the conclusion should be obvious: don't alienate engineers.
That said, I recently met a very nice and competent guy from Pakistan who is in the USA on an H1B visa. He is a PHP developer, and he is quite good. We discussed finances, and to my horror, I found out that he is making $1100/month. His employer houses him in an appartment along with six other H1Bs, so he prolly saves $1000/month in rent, but still, this is an insultingly low pay rate for such a qualified guy, but a factor 4 at least.
Now, this guy is very nice, and way too busy to even think about trouble. But I can't help thinking my reaction if I was dropped into a country where I would make less than your average waiter, after years of hard schooling. I'd harbor a grudge, that's for sure.
So a piece of advice for Execs and VPs: don't be too stingy with your folks. Them techie weirdos can turn into rampaging monster at the drop of a hat. Heck, I'll give them free espressos and decent raisses if I were you.:-)
I think it's a great idea to warn people about the danger of the nanny state. I showed that article to a friend of mine, who is a Congress staffer in Washington D.C. He was enthusiastic. His boss will present it in commission. They'll form a committee to formalize these recommandation and will draft a bill.
The bill will create a new Federal agency, the Protection Against Nanny State Agency. This new Agency will monitor public behavior and watch for complacency and exaggerated reliance on the State. Its agents will have power to monitor private conversations and intervene in public or private places. Whenever someone will be heard saying "they oughta be a law" or "why doesn't Congress do something", the agents will intervene, battering down doors if needed, and vigorously wag an aseptic, non-latex-gloved finger in the face of the offender, who will be sternly warned: "That would be asking for a nanny state, Sonny".
The new Agency will cost an estimated $134 billion a year. But this is a small price to pay, considering the Federal government will protect us against the growing menace of the Nanny State.
I.B.M. overhauled the insides of the mainframe, using low-cost microprocessors as the computing engine.
The NYT is wrong. There are no low-cost processors in the mainframes. The "CPUs" are multi-chip assemblies of 16 to 20 chips, each devoted to a specific function. While the processing units in these assemblies might share some technical background with Power processors found in UNIX servers, the similarities are only skin-deep and the processors are anything but off-the-shelf low-cost chips.
Except that those types of missiles depend on fins and wings for steering. How well would that work in space?
Actually, back in the 50s, the standard way to steer a missile was to orient its nozzle, which was gimball-mounted. It was much simpler mechanically. See for example the French AS-20.
This method doesn't depend on air for steering. One problem is that air and fins do provide a degree of stabilization that would obviously be lacking in space.
Evidently, the US sats lack a self-destruct charge. It would be useful in case something large and unwieldy is heading toward Earth, and, as luck would have it, might very well end up in Russian or Chinese hands with several critical components in good enough shape to be reverse-engineered. I wonder how many megabytes of classified algorithms those embedded EEPROMs would reveal.
Slashdot Mirror
Good points. You don't really have "dogmas" in science, just hypotheses and results that you better not question because then you might piss off someone, lose you grants and be blackballed in peer reviews.
Sadly, the peer review system does not shield scientists from flaring egos and grant sucking. It's a great system where it works, and surely beats the old ways of taunting competitors with results they couldn't reproduce as was the case during the Renaissance. But it still breaks sometimes when seniority, ego and money are involved.
And of course, politics now play a role. Take something that should be as neutral as cosmology, namely, climate study. Now it's tainted with politics. That's rather disquieting.
The motto of the Royal Society -- the 500-year old British academy of sciences -- is "Nullius in Verba", meaning you are not compelled by the word of someone else, only by truth. I wish it were the case.
I have a DSL broadband subscription with AT&T (it used to be a small local company and they got bought by whatever is now called AT&T).
I noticed that their DNS was unpatched and I used their support forms to report the problem.
The reply came only a few hours later. To quote: "We regret we cannot help you with your WorldNet dialup problem".
Huh?
So their networking department is not patching critical protocol flaws, and they programmed their answerbots to laugh at us users if we attempt to point out said flaws. Since when does Simon the BOFH work for AT&T DSL support?
AT&T network admin? It's a great job if you can get it.
And that, boys 'n girls, is the difference between an amateur and a grizzled pro. A pro is always collecting war stories to add to his collection of "when things go wrong" tales. Because in this industry, experience is measured in the number of botched projects and boneheaded mistakes you survived.
Since there are only so many blunders and disastrers you can get involved with and keep your job, you benefit greatly from the tales of disasters from other people.
So, dgatwood, please do tell us your tale so that we all benefit. That way, your drives would not have died in vain. :-)
I don't know much about failure modes of Netgear routers, but your string of disk failures is alarming. Can you please provide some details?
Were these disks at home or in an office?
Were the failing disk in a server (with a lot of continual I/O) or a workstation with only intermittent I/O?
Thank you.
When a model takes variability into account, the cycle they use is the 11-year cycle. This is not what we are talking about here.
The spot absence that we are noticing currently is not a phenomenon with an 11-year period. To be more precise, it looks like a long delay in the start of a new 11-year cycle. The closest equivalent was the Maunder Minimum four centuries ago. And I certainly never saw a model accounting for this. Can't blame the modellers either.
Oh, I don't want you to assume I am a big scientist and all. All I do is push code through production and help turn analyses and models into code. It just gives me a good opportunity to discuss at length with the owners of payloads.
The interesting part is R&D with some academic and research payloads in the mix. We also having the "boring" rows of racks such as the usual bunch of Windows servers for business apps.
Actually, they don't. All the models I am running in my datacenter are using a "solar constant" for solar energy flux, and modulate it only through albedo variations.
I have yet to see a model that takes solar variability into account. Mostly because, to be honest, we don't know much about said variability. So we'd be hard pressed to model it. Hey, give us a break, we have had satellites up there for only a few decades, and the Sun has cycles measured in centuries!
Side note: numerical simulation is a mess today. Everyone and their dog do it, with mixed results. I even came across people who write flow simulations in Excel VB (!) and manage to get budgets for this. It doesn't inspire confidence.
Well, you wanted a big Federal gummint and a nanny state, you got it. What are you complaining about?
See, these darn rocket engines are dangerous. Someone, somewhere, could get hurt. Or worse, could have fun without a Federal authorization.
Oh no, I just saw a Connecticut biker ride without a helmet. Aaaaah! It's so dangerous! And it's legal in that darn state! We need a Federal bike helmet law! Quick, Robin, to the legislat-o-mobile!
Get this book. It comes with a pre-filled order form for a complete chemistry lab kit and it has dozen of experiments. So it's basically a chemistry kit manual.
http://www.amazon.com/Illustrated-Guide-Home-Chemistry-Experiments/
And remember, a good experiment is an experiment that leaves a crater. A great experiment is an experiment that leaves a crater from which you can walk away.
Amen to that! With a little bit of luck, metered strips will become increasingly more common, saving everyone a lot of headaches. You would not believe what can be found in some DCs. Daisy-chained strips spanning multiple racks, redundant power supplies all fed by the same UPS, etc.
Out of professional curiosity, how does your DC manage to keep track of equipment status, installs and decommissions? Do you use a specific DC management package, or do you subscribe to the "ad-hoc spreadsheet on a shared drive" school of thought?
Exactly.
Plus, data center managers are generally busy enough to avoid yet another stack of forms to fill.
Finally, some DC managers barely know where the power is going. They see the power bill, they seem some automated power meter reading at key points such as power distribution units, but they cannot really tell you how much a machine, or even a rack, is consuming.
The problem with manufacturers' plates is that the power rating on the plates is ridiculous overkill. A rack-moounted server rated for 600 W on the plate might draw 500 W at start up, when all the fans and hard drive motors are going to max power consumption (electric motors consume more power when starting up than in normal operations). The rest of the time, the server might consume less that 400 W. So you need to drag the server to a lab where its power consumption will be tested under various conditions.
Baring this, the DC people practice the fine art of "de-rating", in other words, they make an educated guess about how much the manuf's plate is exagerated. This can be hard to explain to bureaucrats looking for precise answers for their surveys.
You are absolutely right. The problem is that Spain, for example, is not a rich nation. If they want to set up new power plants to attract investment, they'll go for the cost-effective options. Currently, the applicable ones are natural gas, heavy oil, nuclear, solar, in order of increasing cost per watt.
Cost is the problem. Solar power remains expensive and diffuse, thus cannot be used as the baseload power.
Consider, for instance, that California has only 250 MW of solar power after investing tens of billions in solar power. This represents a quarter of a modern thermal generator that would cost about 2 dollar per watt (plus fuel costs to operate, alas). Very few places can afford to spend so much for such a pathetic result. Californians spend all these public funds in feel-good solar projects that produce a trickle of power, then they turn around and import power from neighboring states -- states that are more reasonable and do produce an excedent of power with thermal plants to feed the silly Californians's grid. Obviously, if California's stupidity was contagious, their economy would collapse for lack of energy.
Personally, my favorite options would be fusion (but it's always been "thirty years away" since 1970...) and space-based solar power plus microwave transmitters (but NASA has killed the private space lift industry by subsidizing shuttle launches). So these are for the future. We need a solution today while we prepare tomorrow's.
Yup, some parts of Spain rival the Nevada desert (and that's why Italian Western flicks are filmed there). However, they also rival the Nevada desert for development levels -- in other words, not many industries around to consume electricity.
I went to a seminar on building new data centers. There we a part about location of new data center. The favorite places in Europe were France and Germany, because of cheap power generated by non-polluting nuclear power plant.
I am aware of the end-of-life problem surrounding nuclear power, but you got to admit that if your goal is to avoid burning stuff, you cannot get any better than this. Especially in crowded, not-so-sunny Europe, where you cannot even make a "what if we paved the desert with solar cells" hypothesis.
That's the beauty of an H1B. They are tied to a specific company. If your indentured servant H1B employee wants to seek greener pastures, he has to find another company willing to sponsor him.
Of course, nowadays, the majority of H1Bs visas are obtained by consulting companies fron India. They charge a fair rate for consultants (of which only a small fraction goes to the consultant), but you have all the loyalty you can expect from a contractor.
But IT outsourcing might very well come to a screeching halt. Wait until the fat cat lawyers in Congress hear about companies that offer legal outsourcing. Why, they will make outsourcing illegal overnight! So anybody in DC who can tell them?
We shall watch your carreer with great interest.
Overall, it's hard to disagree with the article. Heck, a guy who has the persistence and brains to go through the gruesome class schedules of an Engineering school will not be easily deterred by obstacles. And he is inventive by training if not nature.
An engineer could easily turn bad... And he'd be very good at being bad, if he has the motivation. So the conclusion should be obvious: don't alienate engineers.
That said, I recently met a very nice and competent guy from Pakistan who is in the USA on an H1B visa. He is a PHP developer, and he is quite good. We discussed finances, and to my horror, I found out that he is making $1100/month. His employer houses him in an appartment along with six other H1Bs, so he prolly saves $1000/month in rent, but still, this is an insultingly low pay rate for such a qualified guy, but a factor 4 at least.
Now, this guy is very nice, and way too busy to even think about trouble. But I can't help thinking my reaction if I was dropped into a country where I would make less than your average waiter, after years of hard schooling. I'd harbor a grudge, that's for sure.
So a piece of advice for Execs and VPs: don't be too stingy with your folks. Them techie weirdos can turn into rampaging monster at the drop of a hat. Heck, I'll give them free espressos and decent raisses if I were you. :-)
Too bad this was posted as AC, it deserved some funny mod points.
Beware of overloaded acronyms.It doesn't mean what you think it means.
I think it's a great idea to warn people about the danger of the nanny state. I showed that article to a friend of mine, who is a Congress staffer in Washington D.C. He was enthusiastic. His boss will present it in commission. They'll form a committee to formalize these recommandation and will draft a bill.
The bill will create a new Federal agency, the Protection Against Nanny State Agency. This new Agency will monitor public behavior and watch for complacency and exaggerated reliance on the State. Its agents will have power to monitor private conversations and intervene in public or private places. Whenever someone will be heard saying "they oughta be a law" or "why doesn't Congress do something", the agents will intervene, battering down doors if needed, and vigorously wag an aseptic, non-latex-gloved finger in the face of the offender, who will be sternly warned: "That would be asking for a nanny state, Sonny".
The new Agency will cost an estimated $134 billion a year. But this is a small price to pay, considering the Federal government will protect us against the growing menace of the Nanny State.
The NYT is wrong. There are no low-cost processors in the mainframes. The "CPUs" are multi-chip assemblies of 16 to 20 chips, each devoted to a specific function. While the processing units in these assemblies might share some technical background with Power processors found in UNIX servers, the similarities are only skin-deep and the processors are anything but off-the-shelf low-cost chips.
There is a nice set of slides here.
The subminiature phones are good news for a certain category of users that have a special, warm place in their, err, body for their small cell phone.
Actually, back in the 50s, the standard way to steer a missile was to orient its nozzle, which was gimball-mounted. It was much simpler mechanically. See for example the French AS-20.
This method doesn't depend on air for steering. One problem is that air and fins do provide a degree of stabilization that would obviously be lacking in space.
Thanks!
Evidently, the US sats lack a self-destruct charge. It would be useful in case something large and unwieldy is heading toward Earth, and, as luck would have it, might very well end up in Russian or Chinese hands with several critical components in good enough shape to be reverse-engineered. I wonder how many megabytes of classified algorithms those embedded EEPROMs would reveal.