Favourite quote: "Last year, not long after taking over as Sun's head of software, Schwartz brought his staff members together at the company's campus in Menlo Park to review more than 100 of Sun's crucial software applications, people who were in the meeting recall. After looking at the first 20, however, Schwartz threw up his hands in frustration at what he perceived as substandard work, and said bluntly, "Shoot me now!""
ROFL.
I don't blame him. It's a good sign for Sun though. First step to improvement.
I'd have thought OpenVMS or Tandem systems would be what you go for if you _needed_ 24x7 _guaranteed_.
Sun hardware/software isn't that much more reliable/available as decent PC hardware/software, (and depends on model - it's like comparing models of Seagate vs Maxtor vs et all - you have the usual duds and lemons).
An OpenVMS site migrated their cluster to a different _physical_ location miles away and during the migration (when the parts of the cluster were on different sites) the users complained that things were a bit slower. That's about it.. No downtime.
Try that on Sun or Linux. You'd need scheduled downtime. Same for IBM systems.
An E10K isn't going to save you if a CPU goes poof - you lose the processes running on that CPU. Whereas if you are using Tandem Nonstop, no problem.
Ironically Sun SPARCs didn't even have hardware instruction retry, whereas _Fujitsu_ SPARCS had.
The sad thing is given the environment - these systems are probably more reliable than the companies selling and "supporting" them through the decades. I suspect at least a few have clusters/systems that have been up since the days when Compaq bought Tandem+Digital and now Compaq "isn't around" but these clusters are still chugging along...
Sure doesn't look like HP is making the best of these systems either.
Solving the real HA software issues on Solaris will be very similar to doing the same on Linux. Unless Solaris is going to come up with a few tricks using their Zone stuff, or some other new Solaris 10 feature.
With the mid-high end Suns, if you are lucky you can probably detect soft-errors - e.g. oops RAM/CPU is flaky (ECC failing), then move stuff off the relevant board(s), switch em off and take em out.
In the x86 environment isn't really that different - detect ECC problems etc, move stuff off the relevant server(s) and take it offline. But how much are those boards compared to a single equivalent performance Dell Server or x86 blade server?
Sure you don't get the single huge memory space you get with the E10K etc. But ( correct me if I'm wrong ) that single memory space system isn't HA - it's more for performance. You'd have to cluster for HA anyway using similar cluster architectures as you would for x86 servers.
The last I checked x86 address space and performance is getting rather better, as is I doubt it's a problem for 95% of the companies out there.
That's the problem Sun has. Their stuff is not really that high-end. And x86 servers are killing em.
Will be interesting to see what they do with their next range of opteron servers.
Most people get focused on how well the system works when everything in the system is well maintained etc. Makes for good brochures, proposals etc.
If a human driver gets a massive stroke at the wheel, you already have a tragedy anyway.
What would be good if you had systems that work WITH humans, rather than INSTEAD OF humans. So if a human becomes incapacitated or something, the car turns on the hazard light and slows down gradually (and if advanced enough pulls over).
The car could also highlight objects like kids legs visible under parked cars (when little kids are running around, while you can't see their bodies and heads behind the parked cars, you can sometimes see their legs), animals etc, or create 3-D audible warnings of vehicles in blindspots.
As long as the human drivers are taking legal responsibility for the consequences, the role of the systems are to provide good information and assistance to the humans.
Even if the human intentionally wants to seemingly RAM a pedestrian in the middle of the road, the system should let it. Said pedestrian could be an armed hijacker.
He could even have paused the Universe Simulator 3.2 and spent some "time" (whatever that is) tweaking a few parameters. Not that I'm saying he did that or anything similar.
Those who believe they can take the Bible 100% literally are _sheep_ just as literally. There are some advantages to being as dumb as sheep, still it would be for the best if they kept quiet and stuck to following their Shepherd.
It's got more security problems every other week or so. And the author sure didn't handle the security bug reports well when I last checked.
Friends don't let friends use PHPNuke.
The people handling my church site wanted a PHP based solution, when I vetoed PHPNuke and its cousins for security issues, they suggested EzPublish. Their source code didn't look that icky (signs of some clue being present) - on my brief look at it. Yes I looked at PHPNuke's source code, and it was crap. I had actually looked at it before that too when my prev boss was hyped about it, and it was crap then too.
From bugtraq reports it sure looks like it's still crap.
Consistent lack of significant improvement after so many years = developer(s) does not have the ability/desire to handle the issues AND/OR the issues are architectural.
There's just so much "W3 0wn3d y3w! US RULEZ!!!" someone can take...
And when the l337 5k1llz boy warrior finds out there's NO automatic respawn in the next battle - his dead teammate ain't coming back, not surprised he starts shooting at almost anything.
Yeah sure appears that there are a lot more "Yee-Haw Cowboys" in the US army. It's not surprising due to the numbers of reservists, and the numbers of those who joined the US Army because they wanted cheaper education not because they wanted to be a SOLDIER.
I recall some time back that a Brit soldier commented that while he was in a US area, a US soldier fired some random shots at a disused/abandoned building. When the Brit asked the US soldier why he did that, the Yank effectively said he was doing that to show them who's in charge - apparently some days/weeks back they were fired upon from the building. Can't seem to find the reference at the moment, will see if I can find it on my other PC.
If this is not atypical behaviour amongst the US ground troops, I'm not surprised the US are having trouble. They are unlikely to endear themselves to the local population with that sort of thing. Imagine if those random shots actually hit some little Iraqi kid at play.
There were also comments about the US troops wearing mirror shades whilst dealing with the locals, whereas the Brit troops spoke eye to eye with a less threatening pose.
Sure these are scared, young and inexperienced soldiers. But the supposedly experienced people in higher COMMAND are putting them in this situation.
If the US had got support from the UN, they could have played the Big BadAss Cop role, wiped out the Bad Guys (and a few friendlies) (which is what the US is good at), and let the UN (3rd party) and others do the policing. But no, the US put themselves in this situation. It's a pity the Iraqis have to suffer for it.
As you mentioned: if you're very sick and in a confused state, you may not even have enough energy to kick up a big enough fuss to get treated. Fortunately in your case you had friends around to kick up the fuss for you.
Looks like the best way in to the ER is on a stretcher, if you walk in yourself they'd ignore you.
Maybe one day patients will have to shoot themselves in order to be treated seriously...:)
Moral of the story: try to stay healthy and fit as possible coz getting help from the medical system is like rolling a dice.
What have you got against ants anyway? Most common ants are OK. Termites are a different case tho.
I don't even have much against roaches - usually if they are _visibly_ around it's because you leave food lying around. Not even sure if there's much proof that they are major disease carriers.
Yeah, but: 1) The US hasn't spent billions on fighting the Al Qaeda. They've spent those on the war in Iraq. Despite what many US citizens think, the links between Iraq and the Al Qaeda are extremely tenuous at best. There are stronger links between the Al Qaeda and the US's allies/favorite nations than Iraq (e.g. Saudi Arabia).
2) Osama can say whatever he wants, but he needs recruits who hate the US enough to want to die to hurt the US. If Osama goes to the US and blows himself up in a shopping mall, that has more pluses than the US trying to blow up Osama directly - success leads to Osama being declared a martyr, failure = lots of other people being declared martyrs - either would result in far more terrorist recruits.
I'm sure your friendly safe manufacturer has a range of safes that can protect HDDs and CD-Rs from the typical fire.
BTW if the safe falls through a burnt floor, fragile stuff inside could be damaged by the eventual impact. If you are storing fragile stuff like HDDs you may wish to put the safe on the lowest floor on solid ground.
I rarely delete stuff - I may uninstall apps, but I rarely delete data. The fewer times you delete, the fewer times you'd delete the wrong thing.
If you have to, put the ephemeral/temporary/test stuff in a separate place and never mix the permanent stuff with the temporary.
Hard drives are cheap. So if you run out of space, get a new bigger one.
OK so I'm a bit "pack rat"-ish. But hey a 200GB drive takes up the same amount of space as a 40GB one, and only costs 2X more.
In my experience HDDs aren't that reliable esp the 7200rpm ATA ones- I've had many with bad sectors. And when a drive dies unexpectedly I do lose data since the last backup. The fact that most HDD manufacturers switched to 1 year warranties for ranges of their drives some time back should have been a signal to people to start backing up a lot more regularly...
Re:A better version of the backup warning
on
Creative Data Loss
·
· Score: 1
Tape drives are a bit of a scam - look at the prices of the drives and media. Look at the performance too - how many hours to restore/backup? Might as well buy a few 200GB ATA drives stick them in caddies in a "backup server", then copy stuff from the main servers to the backup server. Power down, remove the drives and put them somewhere safe.
Yeah. Money makes a difference, but once the pay gets above a certain point, the lack of money stops getting in the way of teaching. If Uni education is expensive, maybe children of teachers should get big discounts for their education in state universities, that seems fair to me (they still have to make the grade of course).
One of the probs is when the _systems_ get in the way of teaching.
If teachers end up spending more time doing nonteaching-related administrative tasks, playing politics, dealing with lawsuit threats and very little time actually teaching, I can see why _real_ teachers would get discouraged or become less effective.
Slashdot Mirror
How about whipping up a cgi script to query the data and send the boss the URL?
"Unfortuanetely, it metabolizes to formaldehyde and formic acid, which are among the major factors in hangovers."
Not to mention these stuff is what makes you go blind.
So usually they give you something else to metabolize to reduce the creation and thus concentration of the nasties.
Well only if they drink enough of it AND drink it before they have kids.
If they attempted to light up a cigarette after such a drink, it could minimize the dosage required for the desired effect.
With all these WiFi networks springing up, don't they interfere with each other? Esp when people are planning to have city-wide WiFi networks.
What happens when WiFi networks interfere with each other? commercial vs noncommercial? public vs private?
[Gack- repost with working link]
Sun software? Go read this.
Favourite quote: "Last year, not long after taking over as Sun's head of software, Schwartz brought his staff members together at the company's campus in Menlo Park to review more than 100 of Sun's crucial software applications, people who were in the meeting recall. After looking at the first 20, however, Schwartz threw up his hands in frustration at what he perceived as substandard work, and said bluntly, "Shoot me now!""
ROFL.
I don't blame him. It's a good sign for Sun though. First step to improvement.
Sun software? Go read a >.
Favourite quote: "Last year, not long after taking over as Sun's head of software, Schwartz brought his staff members together at the company's campus in Menlo Park to review more than 100 of Sun's crucial software applications, people who were in the meeting recall. After looking at the first 20, however, Schwartz threw up his hands in frustration at what he perceived as substandard work, and said bluntly, "Shoot me now!""
ROFL.
I don't blame him. It's a good sign for Sun though. First step to improvement.
24x7 guaranteed on Sun?
I'd have thought OpenVMS or Tandem systems would be what you go for if you _needed_ 24x7 _guaranteed_.
Sun hardware/software isn't that much more reliable/available as decent PC hardware/software, (and depends on model - it's like comparing models of Seagate vs Maxtor vs et all - you have the usual duds and lemons).
An OpenVMS site migrated their cluster to a different _physical_ location miles away and during the migration (when the parts of the cluster were on different sites) the users complained that things were a bit slower. That's about it.. No downtime.
Try that on Sun or Linux. You'd need scheduled downtime. Same for IBM systems.
An E10K isn't going to save you if a CPU goes poof - you lose the processes running on that CPU. Whereas if you are using Tandem Nonstop, no problem.
Ironically Sun SPARCs didn't even have hardware instruction retry, whereas _Fujitsu_ SPARCS had.
The sad thing is given the environment - these systems are probably more reliable than the companies selling and "supporting" them through the decades. I suspect at least a few have clusters/systems that have been up since the days when Compaq bought Tandem+Digital and now Compaq "isn't around" but these clusters are still chugging along...
Sure doesn't look like HP is making the best of these systems either.
Solving the real HA software issues on Solaris will be very similar to doing the same on Linux. Unless Solaris is going to come up with a few tricks using their Zone stuff, or some other new Solaris 10 feature.
With the mid-high end Suns, if you are lucky you can probably detect soft-errors - e.g. oops RAM/CPU is flaky (ECC failing), then move stuff off the relevant board(s), switch em off and take em out.
In the x86 environment isn't really that different - detect ECC problems etc, move stuff off the relevant server(s) and take it offline. But how much are those boards compared to a single equivalent performance Dell Server or x86 blade server?
Sure you don't get the single huge memory space you get with the E10K etc. But ( correct me if I'm wrong ) that single memory space system isn't HA - it's more for performance. You'd have to cluster for HA anyway using similar cluster architectures as you would for x86 servers.
The last I checked x86 address space and performance is getting rather better, as is I doubt it's a problem for 95% of the companies out there.
That's the problem Sun has. Their stuff is not really that high-end. And x86 servers are killing em.
Will be interesting to see what they do with their next range of opteron servers.
HOW WELL WOULD THE SYSTEM _FAIL_?
Most people get focused on how well the system works when everything in the system is well maintained etc. Makes for good brochures, proposals etc.
If a human driver gets a massive stroke at the wheel, you already have a tragedy anyway.
What would be good if you had systems that work WITH humans, rather than INSTEAD OF humans. So if a human becomes incapacitated or something, the car turns on the hazard light and slows down gradually (and if advanced enough pulls over).
The car could also highlight objects like kids legs visible under parked cars (when little kids are running around, while you can't see their bodies and heads behind the parked cars, you can sometimes see their legs), animals etc, or create 3-D audible warnings of vehicles in blindspots.
As long as the human drivers are taking legal responsibility for the consequences, the role of the systems are to provide good information and assistance to the humans.
Even if the human intentionally wants to seemingly RAM a pedestrian in the middle of the road, the system should let it. Said pedestrian could be an armed hijacker.
He could even have paused the Universe Simulator 3.2 and spent some "time" (whatever that is) tweaking a few parameters. Not that I'm saying he did that or anything similar.
Those who believe they can take the Bible 100% literally are _sheep_ just as literally. There are some advantages to being as dumb as sheep, still it would be for the best if they kept quiet and stuck to following their Shepherd.
He's probably thinking of the "man evolved from monkeys" booboo.
But who knows what he's actually thinking?
To misread the article you'd have to attempt to read it.
It's got more security problems every other week or so. And the author sure didn't handle the security bug reports well when I last checked.
Friends don't let friends use PHPNuke.
The people handling my church site wanted a PHP based solution, when I vetoed PHPNuke and its cousins for security issues, they suggested EzPublish. Their source code didn't look that icky (signs of some clue being present) - on my brief look at it. Yes I looked at PHPNuke's source code, and it was crap. I had actually looked at it before that too when my prev boss was hyped about it, and it was crap then too.
From bugtraq reports it sure looks like it's still crap.
Consistent lack of significant improvement after so many years = developer(s) does not have the ability/desire to handle the issues AND/OR the issues are architectural.
Oh man. That explains the Iraqi insurgency.
There's just so much "W3 0wn3d y3w! US RULEZ!!!" someone can take...
And when the l337 5k1llz boy warrior finds out there's NO automatic respawn in the next battle - his dead teammate ain't coming back, not surprised he starts shooting at almost anything.
Script kiddies with military weapons. Doh.
Yeah sure appears that there are a lot more "Yee-Haw Cowboys" in the US army. It's not surprising due to the numbers of reservists, and the numbers of those who joined the US Army because they wanted cheaper education not because they wanted to be a SOLDIER.
I recall some time back that a Brit soldier commented that while he was in a US area, a US soldier fired some random shots at a disused/abandoned building. When the Brit asked the US soldier why he did that, the Yank effectively said he was doing that to show them who's in charge - apparently some days/weeks back they were fired upon from the building. Can't seem to find the reference at the moment, will see if I can find it on my other PC.
If this is not atypical behaviour amongst the US ground troops, I'm not surprised the US are having trouble. They are unlikely to endear themselves to the local population with that sort of thing. Imagine if those random shots actually hit some little Iraqi kid at play.
There were also comments about the US troops wearing mirror shades whilst dealing with the locals, whereas the Brit troops spoke eye to eye with a less threatening pose.
Sure these are scared, young and inexperienced soldiers. But the supposedly experienced people in higher COMMAND are putting them in this situation.
If the US had got support from the UN, they could have played the Big BadAss Cop role, wiped out the Bad Guys (and a few friendlies) (which is what the US is good at), and let the UN (3rd party) and others do the policing. But no, the US put themselves in this situation. It's a pity the Iraqis have to suffer for it.
Whatever it is I hope they figure out ASAP what it is though.
Man it's so scary that the docs are so crap.
:)
As you mentioned: if you're very sick and in a confused state, you may not even have enough energy to kick up a big enough fuss to get treated. Fortunately in your case you had friends around to kick up the fuss for you.
Looks like the best way in to the ER is on a stretcher, if you walk in yourself they'd ignore you.
Maybe one day patients will have to shoot themselves in order to be treated seriously...
Moral of the story: try to stay healthy and fit as possible coz getting help from the medical system is like rolling a dice.
I believe tonsils are part of your immune system. If they get infected it means something else is wrong.
Not sure if it's a good idea for everyone with recurring tonsil problems to have bits of their immune system removed.
In your case they're probably so screwed up that the docs think removing them would be better than leaving them in.
Still, I'd get a 2nd and 3rd opinion before I'd let docs chop parts out of my body.
Wonder if there's a course of antibiotics you can go through to clear whatever it is that's taken hold in your tonsils.
I personally think the docs ripping out tonsils are missing something - just like the h.pylori + stomach ulcer thing.
What have you got against ants anyway? Most common ants are OK. Termites are a different case tho.
:D
I don't even have much against roaches - usually if they are _visibly_ around it's because you leave food lying around. Not even sure if there's much proof that they are major disease carriers.
Blood sucking mosquitoes? Kill em all!
Yeah, but:
1) The US hasn't spent billions on fighting the Al Qaeda. They've spent those on the war in Iraq. Despite what many US citizens think, the links between Iraq and the Al Qaeda are extremely tenuous at best. There are stronger links between the Al Qaeda and the US's allies/favorite nations than Iraq (e.g. Saudi Arabia).
2) Osama can say whatever he wants, but he needs recruits who hate the US enough to want to die to hurt the US. If Osama goes to the US and blows himself up in a shopping mall, that has more pluses than the US trying to blow up Osama directly - success leads to Osama being declared a martyr, failure = lots of other people being declared martyrs - either would result in far more terrorist recruits.
Nope- it could be just like how people overclock CPUs/RAM by use of cooling.
I believe there are things called "data" safes.
I'm sure your friendly safe manufacturer has a range of safes that can protect HDDs and CD-Rs from the typical fire.
BTW if the safe falls through a burnt floor, fragile stuff inside could be damaged by the eventual impact. If you are storing fragile stuff like HDDs you may wish to put the safe on the lowest floor on solid ground.
I rarely delete stuff - I may uninstall apps, but I rarely delete data. The fewer times you delete, the fewer times you'd delete the wrong thing.
If you have to, put the ephemeral/temporary/test stuff in a separate place and never mix the permanent stuff with the temporary.
Hard drives are cheap. So if you run out of space, get a new bigger one.
OK so I'm a bit "pack rat"-ish. But hey a 200GB drive takes up the same amount of space as a 40GB one, and only costs 2X more.
In my experience HDDs aren't that reliable esp the 7200rpm ATA ones- I've had many with bad sectors. And when a drive dies unexpectedly I do lose data since the last backup. The fact that most HDD manufacturers switched to 1 year warranties for ranges of their drives some time back should have been a signal to people to start backing up a lot more regularly...
Tape drives are a bit of a scam - look at the prices of the drives and media. Look at the performance too - how many hours to restore/backup? Might as well buy a few 200GB ATA drives stick them in caddies in a "backup server", then copy stuff from the main servers to the backup server. Power down, remove the drives and put them somewhere safe.
Just a note: while it works for ext2, I think it doesn't work for ext3.
Yeah. Money makes a difference, but once the pay gets above a certain point, the lack of money stops getting in the way of teaching. If Uni education is expensive, maybe children of teachers should get big discounts for their education in state universities, that seems fair to me (they still have to make the grade of course).
One of the probs is when the _systems_ get in the way of teaching.
If teachers end up spending more time doing nonteaching-related administrative tasks, playing politics, dealing with lawsuit threats and very little time actually teaching, I can see why _real_ teachers would get discouraged or become less effective.