No. The MTBF tells you the expected failure rate of the drives over their service life, say five years for a hard drive. So if you have a room full of servers, you can calculate how many drives can be expected to fail each year, and how many spare drives you need to stock.
More spindles equals more speed and throughput. For many servers, that is more important than gigabytes per drive. There's no point in having 500 gigabytes of storage on a single drive if your system performance goes in the crapper due to I/O bottlenecks.
But didn't it occur to anyone to try this out by, say, building a unit without the science part, bringing it along on a pre-scheduled Shuttle flight, and de-orbiting it?
That would be complex and expensive. How are you going to deorbit it? Design, test and install a retro-rocket package? Anything that goes on board the Shuttle as payload has to pass a stringent design and safety review, which would probably require the payload to be redesigned. A deployment mechanism has to be designed, tested and installed. Procedures have to be written for the astronauts, and they have to be trained for them. The deployment has to be added to the mission plan.
Where is the money going to come from to do all this stuff? Contrary to popular belief, money doesn't grow on trees at NASA. Years ago, before the spacecraft was built, someone had to write a proposal, with a detailed budget and schedule, that covered every phase of the program. Engineering is the art of balancing cost and risk. If the total project cost is too high, your proposal gets rejected. If the science return per dollar spent is too low, your proposal gets rejected. Even if your proposal is approved, major cost overruns will probably result in its cancellation. If external circumstances cause your budget to be cut, you either figure out a way to do more with less, accepting more risks, or you cancel the project.
That's assuming that shelf space and inventory are free. There is also a factor of diminishing returns. The more CDs you stock, the longer it takes to sell the average CD, resulting in lower sales per square foot of floor space and more money tied up in inventory.
Paper doesn't scale well. There is a big difference between an election where you vote for a party and an American election with dozens and dozens of things to vote for.
I don't think that the parties are obligated to participate in the primary process. They could go back to the old system of local caucuses and state/national conventions. The advantage of the primary is that the election is organized and paid for by the state. I believe primaries were viewed as a political reform, making the nomination process more democratic.
It does make sense in the world of retail. Wal-Mart is single-minded about only stocking products that sell quickly. If it doesn't move, they get rid of it.
Campaign reform usually seems to involve limiting their access to big money, as opposed to our big money, strike that, enlightened individuals and organizations with large bank accounts. They have "special interests", we have concerned citizens and grass roots organizations.
Writing off Vietnam vets as a bunch of "stupid, angry, old men" is an insult to every Vietnam veteran. We didn't lose the war, we quit, leaving the South Vietnamese to fend for themselves. The war was a very complicated situation, with both good and bad aspects. It can't be summarized in a paragraph or two. Why don't you talk to some Vietnam vets and Vietnamese refugees living in America?
They can, and have been, rigged. I've heard stories about people intentionally jamming selected gears to reduce the vote count for the opposition. Any machine can be rigged given enough time, money and motivation. Seals can be removed and replaced. Counters can be misread. Independent observers can be bribed, intimidated, or physically kept out of the area where the fraud is being perpetrated.
MTBF is computed over the service life of the component. For a hard drive, this might be five years. After that, you start getting into decreasing reliability due to wear-out.
One problem may be the quality of the images in the driver's license database. The last time I renewed my license, they gave me one of the new computer generated licenses. The quality of the picture was horrible. It's a blurry postage stamp sized picture that vaguely looks like me.
Building a box yourself is fine, but how much time are you going to spend on testing to make sure that the components are compatible with each other and your software?
One of the advantages of an off-the-shelf server is that you can get a box that the manufacturer has already tested and certified for your OS. When you take into account labor costs, doing it yourself can be more expensive.
A coworker did something similar to what you are talking about. While it did save cash up-front, he spent a huge amount of time researching and ordering parts, filling out purchase orders, assembling systems, troubleshooting systems, returning defective parts for exchange, burning in and testing assembled systems. Looking at the total costs, it only made sense if you treated his labor as free. In a rational organization, we would have bought tested and assembled systems. But our management had a fixed budget for labor and a small budget for capital expenditures, which led them to ignore labor costs.
If you look at the motherboard in my server, everywhere they made a choice about chips, they went with something that had a proven track-record of stability and reliability.
One of the reasons that I bought it was that I couldn't find a desktop with the features that I wanted.
Get Dantz Retrospect. I've used it for years to backup and restore Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X systems.
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I use it for both Windows and Mac OS X. It works great.
Check their hardware compatibility list before you buy it. It can be picky about backup hardware. It uses CD/DVD features that are not always implemented fully or properly on some drives.
There is a major difference between servers and desktops in design philosophy and support. Servers are designed for stability and reliability, not for benchmarks or to demo the latest cutting edge technology. They are tested much more thoroughly and have better support from the manufacturer.
I have an "obsolete" low-end server that I use for running FreeBSD. It has SMP, ECC RAM, SCSI disks, a boring but very reliable chipset, extensive documentation, diagnostics software, and a high-quality case and power supply. It is also tested and certified to run all of the popular server operating systems. The manufacturer support is excellent. The video card would suck for a modern desktop, but who cares. It never crashes, it just works. If it does break, I can get parts and service.
The problem is that the safety ratings are for cars in the same weight class, like the safety ratings in the USA. I own a small car that has an excellent safety rating. Unfortunately, many of my neighbors drive SUV land yachts that weigh twice as much as my car.
I like my crumple zones to be between the passenger compartment and the impinging object.
Many years ago, Volvo found out that a strong, rigid box may protect the car from catastrophic damage, and yet kill the passengers. The g-forces from a collision can kill you while the car body stays intact.
It looks like a death trap to me. Low mass. No crush zones to absorb impact energy. A steel "walnut" may protect the passenger compartment from intrusions, but a rigid frame is generally a minus for passenger safety.
Considering Polaroid's extensive patent portfolio on instant photography and other subjects, Kodak's behavior was a bit like walking into a biker bar and loudly proclaiming that "Only pussies and cowards ride Harleys". They knew they were entering a legal minefield.
Visible light is just a small part of the EM spectrum. The fact that a material is opaque to visible light does not mean that it is opaque to photons of other wavelengths.
The photon is also the mediating particle of the electromagnetic force.
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No. The MTBF tells you the expected failure rate of the drives over their service life, say five years for a hard drive. So if you have a room full of servers, you can calculate how many drives can be expected to fail each year, and how many spare drives you need to stock.
More spindles equals more speed and throughput. For many servers, that is more important than gigabytes per drive. There's no point in having 500 gigabytes of storage on a single drive if your system performance goes in the crapper due to I/O bottlenecks.
That would be complex and expensive. How are you going to deorbit it? Design, test and install a retro-rocket package? Anything that goes on board the Shuttle as payload has to pass a stringent design and safety review, which would probably require the payload to be redesigned. A deployment mechanism has to be designed, tested and installed. Procedures have to be written for the astronauts, and they have to be trained for them. The deployment has to be added to the mission plan.
Where is the money going to come from to do all this stuff? Contrary to popular belief, money doesn't grow on trees at NASA. Years ago, before the spacecraft was built, someone had to write a proposal, with a detailed budget and schedule, that covered every phase of the program. Engineering is the art of balancing cost and risk. If the total project cost is too high, your proposal gets rejected. If the science return per dollar spent is too low, your proposal gets rejected. Even if your proposal is approved, major cost overruns will probably result in its cancellation. If external circumstances cause your budget to be cut, you either figure out a way to do more with less, accepting more risks, or you cancel the project.
That's assuming that shelf space and inventory are free. There is also a factor of diminishing returns. The more CDs you stock, the longer it takes to sell the average CD, resulting in lower sales per square foot of floor space and more money tied up in inventory.
Paper doesn't scale well. There is a big difference between an election where you vote for a party and an American election with dozens and dozens of things to vote for.
I don't think that the parties are obligated to participate in the primary process. They could go back to the old system of local caucuses and state/national conventions. The advantage of the primary is that the election is organized and paid for by the state. I believe primaries were viewed as a political reform, making the nomination process more democratic.
It does make sense in the world of retail. Wal-Mart is single-minded about only stocking products that sell quickly. If it doesn't move, they get rid of it.
Campaign reform usually seems to involve limiting their access to big money, as opposed to our big money, strike that, enlightened individuals and organizations with large bank accounts. They have "special interests", we have concerned citizens and grass roots organizations.
Writing off Vietnam vets as a bunch of "stupid, angry, old men" is an insult to every Vietnam veteran. We didn't lose the war, we quit, leaving the South Vietnamese to fend for themselves. The war was a very complicated situation, with both good and bad aspects. It can't be summarized in a paragraph or two. Why don't you talk to some Vietnam vets and Vietnamese refugees living in America?
It's a very selective list. That might be grounds for considering it to be flamebait.
They can, and have been, rigged. I've heard stories about people intentionally jamming selected gears to reduce the vote count for the opposition. Any machine can be rigged given enough time, money and motivation. Seals can be removed and replaced. Counters can be misread. Independent observers can be bribed, intimidated, or physically kept out of the area where the fraud is being perpetrated.
MTBF is computed over the service life of the component. For a hard drive, this might be five years. After that, you start getting into decreasing reliability due to wear-out.
The majority of those 3,000 "innocent civilians" were Palestinian combatants and terrorists.
One problem may be the quality of the images in the driver's license database. The last time I renewed my license, they gave me one of the new computer generated licenses. The quality of the picture was horrible. It's a blurry postage stamp sized picture that vaguely looks like me.
A coworker did something similar to what you are talking about. While it did save cash up-front, he spent a huge amount of time researching and ordering parts, filling out purchase orders, assembling systems, troubleshooting systems, returning defective parts for exchange, burning in and testing assembled systems. Looking at the total costs, it only made sense if you treated his labor as free. In a rational organization, we would have bought tested and assembled systems. But our management had a fixed budget for labor and a small budget for capital expenditures, which led them to ignore labor costs.
If you look at the motherboard in my server, everywhere they made a choice about chips, they went with something that had a proven track-record of stability and reliability.
One of the reasons that I bought it was that I couldn't find a desktop with the features that I wanted.
Get Dantz Retrospect. I've used it for years to backup and restore Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X systems.
Check their hardware compatibility list before you buy it. It can be picky about backup hardware. It uses CD/DVD features that are not always implemented fully or properly on some drives.
I have an "obsolete" low-end server that I use for running FreeBSD. It has SMP, ECC RAM, SCSI disks, a boring but very reliable chipset, extensive documentation, diagnostics software, and a high-quality case and power supply. It is also tested and certified to run all of the popular server operating systems. The manufacturer support is excellent. The video card would suck for a modern desktop, but who cares. It never crashes, it just works. If it does break, I can get parts and service.
A management handbook is no substitute for a brain.
The problem is that the safety ratings are for cars in the same weight class, like the safety ratings in the USA. I own a small car that has an excellent safety rating. Unfortunately, many of my neighbors drive SUV land yachts that weigh twice as much as my car.
Many years ago, Volvo found out that a strong, rigid box may protect the car from catastrophic damage, and yet kill the passengers. The g-forces from a collision can kill you while the car body stays intact.
It looks like a death trap to me. Low mass. No crush zones to absorb impact energy. A steel "walnut" may protect the passenger compartment from intrusions, but a rigid frame is generally a minus for passenger safety.
Considering Polaroid's extensive patent portfolio on instant photography and other subjects, Kodak's behavior was a bit like walking into a biker bar and loudly proclaiming that "Only pussies and cowards ride Harleys". They knew they were entering a legal minefield.
The photon is also the mediating particle of the electromagnetic force.