What I want to know is, what the heck does a RC build mean to these guys? The (only) RC is dropped one week ahead of the final release? That's not really enough time to even get feedback from the test userbase, much less actually do anything about the bugs that might show up. So, are we to assume that the RC is basically just a marketing stunt?
Ah, erm, no. That's not what InfraStruXure is. And there is a good reason. What happens when you need to work in the front or back of the cabinet? All of a sudden your cooling mechanism is offline and you have precious few minutes without forced air before your servers roach themselves.
The reason this has never (and probably will never) been done is the amount of form factor standardization required from top to bottom in the vendor lineup. Even if the heavens parted and God himself handed down a standard, it wouldn't be six months before some vendor decided they would one-up the market and come out with something "Better" that breaks it, and then you are back to the basics. Given the huge amount of heterogeneity in a given data center, asking every bit of equipment to conform to the same standard, and to stick to that standard for more than one product release cycle, is something of a pipe dream.
After giving that paper a closer look (the best link is this one, btw, the engaget link is dead: http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf ) The failure rate went up with cold AND hot temperatures. How they got the disk temps that cold is beyond me, but their hot end seemed a little optimistic since I have seen desktops in comfortably air conditioned rooms running disk temps of 50C or more, and have a strong set of anecdotal evidence that these are the disks that fail most often.
Until what point? You can't consistently say "increase the temperature to decrease the MTBF".
You'll end up with molten slag.
Yes, you can. MTBF = mean time before/between failure. To decrease, reduce, lower, however you want to say it, it is going to fail SOONER meaning it is getting LESS reliable. That was the point, hotter temps = less reliability. Same goes for just about any physical/chemical process (fans, batteries, hard drive motors, etc.)
It still means a relatively small (11 channels in the US) amount to choose from compared to bluetooth's 79 slices. With few devices, there isn't a problem, but why even bother with it if it can't work in a crowded business meeting where a dozen people each have their phone out, tethered to their laptop, earpiece paired to their phone, mouse tethered to their laptop, wi-fi trying to push a video stream to a projector, etc.
What about the difference between Wi-Fi being DSSS (direct sequencing spread spectrum, meaning it uses one fixed slice of the spectrum) vs Bluetooth's FHSS (frequency hopping spread spectrum, meaning it hops around the spectrum in a pseudorandom way such that multiple bluetooth devices will never interfere with each other)? Unless the new Wi-Fi standard includes something smarter than "default to channel 6" these devices will not be as friendly to each other as Bluetooth.
And Verizon sells the previous phone (storm 1) with a FREE 8GB card, bringing the usable device space to 9GB. Suck on that, Apple. That, and 16GB or even 32GB microSD cards aren't hard to come by. The upside is you aren't stuck with a fixed amount of memory (as in the case of the iPhone). But no one would ever need more than 8GB anyway, right?
This is a relevant complaint, except in the case of Verizon it takes a 90 second phone call to support (or use of an automated tool) in order to change phones. As long as the new phone is compatible with the network, they will switch it over no questions asked. Your hyperbole about how much easier this is to accomplish with a GSM SIM card is pretty, well, hyperbolic. You may have had a point if you told us that contact lists in non-SIM enabled phones are harder to transfer, but again there are several tools thanks to Verizon that make it an easy task. That being said, even if it were a hassle to switch devices when one broke, I still would never consider signing with ATT, Tmobile, or Sprint. Their networks, in EVERY area I have traveled in the past few years, have been noticeably inferior to Verizon's. I can't even remember the number of times I have had to say "here, use my phone, it works here" when traveling. Too many, to be certain.
[quote]a software developer position in a company that supplies software to the gambling and betting industry[/quote]
Seems to me that the worst thing that could happen is you work for a company called "We hire unreliable louts" or maybe "Bad gambles, Inc". As you probably can predetermine this, you shouldn't worry about anything that your instincts don't already clue you in on. Your friends are probably just narrow minded or jealous. Just make sure that your official job title doesn't hint at bookmaking, card dealing, or something called 'fluffing' and you will be OK.
Find a nice used laserjet or color laserjet, these printers last for decades, they will have replacement parts available for that long, and they are platform independent supporting either poststript or PCL.
Why used? If you are looking to save money (I assume this is what " I'd rather get a smaller, personal-size printer than a heavy workgroup printer" means) this is the way to go. If you are looking for an all around smaller printer, get a cheap disposable color inkjet and save yourself the trouble of maintaining a cheap color laser printer. Unless you get a workhorse, it probably won't last no matter what kind you buy.
So "other radio waves" means "only the rest of the ones at 2.4ghz"? It even states in the summary that it "may block AM/FM signals" which are WAY below anything used by a cellphone. From the sound of the article, they are interested in blocking the widest range possible, with the researcher boasting about blocking all frequencies up to 200 GHz. Add to that the tendency of cellphones to use a LOT less transmit power and reception attenuation than typical Wi-Fi hardware, and it sounds a lot like this would certainly be an issue for cellphones.
While it's hard to argue that outages would still occur from things like fires and explosions in a fully redundant environment, it's easy to connect the dots and notice that fully redundant systems rarely experience fires or explosions, if only for the fact that they spend almost all of their service lives operating at less than 50% capacity. Many "bargain basement" hosting companies (I won't name names) choose to run far closer to 80% or 90% of nameplate capacity because it's cheaper.
Also, the question of transfer switches causing additional points of failure is valid, however; it's perfectly possible (and practiced, by paranoid data center managers) to put two switches in parallel and two or more switches (of varying types) in series along the power path, so a failure at any one spot (or in some cases even more than one failure) can be corrected with zero impact to the critical load.
Why go with a huge, multiple 9's datacenter, when you can go the way of google, and have a RAID:
Redundant Array of Inexpensive Datacenters..
Is really better to have 1000 machines in a 5-9's location, or 500 systems each in a 4-9's, with extra cash in hand?
That all depends. A 5 9s datacenter is a full ten times more reliable than a 4 9s datacenter (mathematically speaking). So, all things being equal (again, mathematically), you would need ten 4-9 centers to be as reliable as your one 5-9 center. However geographic dispersion, outage recover lead time, bandwidth costs, maintenance, etc. can all factor in to sway the equation either way. It really comes down to itemizing your outage threats, pairing that with the cost of redundancy for each threatened component, and then looking at the cost of downtime as part of the business process. It's rarely as simple as "why not just build two at twice the price".
Given the recent series of data center outages and the current focus on corporate cost control, the debate reflects the industry focus on how to get the most uptime for the data center dollar.
Repeat after me: There is no replacement for redundancy. There is no replacement for redundancy.
Every outage you read about involves a failure in a feature of the datacenter that was not redundant and was assumed to not need to be redundant... assumed *incorrectly*. Redundancy is irreplaceable. If you rely on your servers (the servers housed in one place) you had better have redundancy for EVERY. SINGLE. OTHER. ASPECT. If not, you can expect downtime, and you can expect it to happen at the worst possible moment.
Duh, haven't you heard of Ohmmygod's Law of energy-saving distances? Why do you think the guy trying to run an extension cord to the moon was 'taken out' by Big Energy. They are trying to keep us addicted!
Except I could make the accompanying argument that "just because words have the same spelling like read and read, bear and bear, lead and lead, (insert your favorite same-spelling homonym here), doesn't mean they describe the same thing!"
The English language is full of precedent nonsense. Complaining that to/too is going to derail civilization is just a tad hyperbolic.
Damn SMS and IM is killing all languages all over the planet. And don't tell me that "languages evolve", this is de-evolution. Just because words sound the same when spoken aloud doesn't mean they describe the same thing. Example: too != to != two, etc.
No such thing as de-evolution. If language is moving in a direction determined by natural selection promoting good features and demoting bad features, it is forward evolution. Evolution cannot move backward just as time cannot move backward. On top of that, poor spelling and poor grammar has been around since, well, the invention of spelling and grammar.
The bottom line is that just because you don't like the changes that are happening, doesn't make them bad. If you think proper spelling is important (I am not saying that it isn't) then you should make a case, not a complaint.
"We must all rally toward a single goal: without sacrificing the growth of knowledge or scientific innovation, we must invest in a sweeping project to make science relevant to the whole of America's citizenry."
Science is relevant to every last person on the planet, given the science behind world-altering technology related to Nuclear energy, Climate Change, and biological engineering (just to name a few). The problem isn't that it's irrelevant (although that may not have been the author's precise intent in that word.) The problem is that what little science is picked up by the general public is subject to spin by those who have nothing to do with (and little comprehension of) science, namely politicians.
What's required isn't to make science popular, it's to make fact checking and critical thinking popular. It doesn't matter how little or much you understand of Clean coal technology (as an example); when you are subject to misleading information from all angles of mainstream media what you need is the ability to think for yourself or you are going to be led astray (from science). Too many people are willing to believe whatever 'preferred news outlet x' has to say on a subject and their beliefs quickly align with whatever interest the "journalist" has in mind for them. They proceed with their lives thinking that they are sufficiently informed since they were assured by their favorite news outlet that the "science behind" a particular issue aligns with their interests.
You can't change the laws of the universe, and well done science is almost as unwavering. When these things conflict with what you want, your best bet is distraction and misunderstanding. THATS the problem we face.
Not a big deal if (a) you happened to already do this during rollout or (b) you are properly notified about this and config changes are trivial on your network. In cases where you have a very large network and no centralized configuration manager, you will have to sink a lot of time into this 'fix' and that's assuming you don't use OTAP. In the case that you do use OTAP, or in the case that you are too busy to notice this and/or too busy to spend time reconfiguring all the affected devices, then yes, it can be a 'big deal'.
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What I want to know is, what the heck does a RC build mean to these guys? The (only) RC is dropped one week ahead of the final release? That's not really enough time to even get feedback from the test userbase, much less actually do anything about the bugs that might show up. So, are we to assume that the RC is basically just a marketing stunt?
Ah, erm, no. That's not what InfraStruXure is. And there is a good reason. What happens when you need to work in the front or back of the cabinet? All of a sudden your cooling mechanism is offline and you have precious few minutes without forced air before your servers roach themselves.
The reason this has never (and probably will never) been done is the amount of form factor standardization required from top to bottom in the vendor lineup. Even if the heavens parted and God himself handed down a standard, it wouldn't be six months before some vendor decided they would one-up the market and come out with something "Better" that breaks it, and then you are back to the basics. Given the huge amount of heterogeneity in a given data center, asking every bit of equipment to conform to the same standard, and to stick to that standard for more than one product release cycle, is something of a pipe dream.
Things like that are why SI switched from Fahrenheit and Rankine to Celsius and Kelvin.
Sure, blame climate change. Everyone else does!
After giving that paper a closer look (the best link is this one, btw, the engaget link is dead: http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf ) The failure rate went up with cold AND hot temperatures. How they got the disk temps that cold is beyond me, but their hot end seemed a little optimistic since I have seen desktops in comfortably air conditioned rooms running disk temps of 50C or more, and have a strong set of anecdotal evidence that these are the disks that fail most often.
Until what point? You can't consistently say "increase the temperature to decrease the MTBF".
You'll end up with molten slag.
Yes, you can. MTBF = mean time before/between failure. To decrease, reduce, lower, however you want to say it, it is going to fail SOONER meaning it is getting LESS reliable. That was the point, hotter temps = less reliability. Same goes for just about any physical/chemical process (fans, batteries, hard drive motors, etc.)
Careful with that, there are numerous patents to that effect. You wouldn't want to be suggesting IP theft, now, would you?
It still means a relatively small (11 channels in the US) amount to choose from compared to bluetooth's 79 slices. With few devices, there isn't a problem, but why even bother with it if it can't work in a crowded business meeting where a dozen people each have their phone out, tethered to their laptop, earpiece paired to their phone, mouse tethered to their laptop, wi-fi trying to push a video stream to a projector, etc.
What about the difference between Wi-Fi being DSSS (direct sequencing spread spectrum, meaning it uses one fixed slice of the spectrum) vs Bluetooth's FHSS (frequency hopping spread spectrum, meaning it hops around the spectrum in a pseudorandom way such that multiple bluetooth devices will never interfere with each other)? Unless the new Wi-Fi standard includes something smarter than "default to channel 6" these devices will not be as friendly to each other as Bluetooth.
And Verizon sells the previous phone (storm 1) with a FREE 8GB card, bringing the usable device space to 9GB. Suck on that, Apple. That, and 16GB or even 32GB microSD cards aren't hard to come by. The upside is you aren't stuck with a fixed amount of memory (as in the case of the iPhone). But no one would ever need more than 8GB anyway, right?
This is a relevant complaint, except in the case of Verizon it takes a 90 second phone call to support (or use of an automated tool) in order to change phones. As long as the new phone is compatible with the network, they will switch it over no questions asked. Your hyperbole about how much easier this is to accomplish with a GSM SIM card is pretty, well, hyperbolic. You may have had a point if you told us that contact lists in non-SIM enabled phones are harder to transfer, but again there are several tools thanks to Verizon that make it an easy task. That being said, even if it were a hassle to switch devices when one broke, I still would never consider signing with ATT, Tmobile, or Sprint. Their networks, in EVERY area I have traveled in the past few years, have been noticeably inferior to Verizon's. I can't even remember the number of times I have had to say "here, use my phone, it works here" when traveling. Too many, to be certain.
From my cold dead hands! I love my Storm 1.
Oh, and might I add: You damn, dirty apes!
What they meant was it is going to be designed to keep three Amiga 1000's powered up. You know, for the good of mankind.
Divided by Libraries of Congress per second?
[quote]a software developer position in a company that supplies software to the gambling and betting industry[/quote] Seems to me that the worst thing that could happen is you work for a company called "We hire unreliable louts" or maybe "Bad gambles, Inc". As you probably can predetermine this, you shouldn't worry about anything that your instincts don't already clue you in on. Your friends are probably just narrow minded or jealous. Just make sure that your official job title doesn't hint at bookmaking, card dealing, or something called 'fluffing' and you will be OK.
Find a nice used laserjet or color laserjet, these printers last for decades, they will have replacement parts available for that long, and they are platform independent supporting either poststript or PCL.
Why used? If you are looking to save money (I assume this is what " I'd rather get a smaller, personal-size printer than a heavy workgroup printer" means) this is the way to go. If you are looking for an all around smaller printer, get a cheap disposable color inkjet and save yourself the trouble of maintaining a cheap color laser printer. Unless you get a workhorse, it probably won't last no matter what kind you buy.
So "other radio waves" means "only the rest of the ones at 2.4ghz"? It even states in the summary that it "may block AM/FM signals" which are WAY below anything used by a cellphone. From the sound of the article, they are interested in blocking the widest range possible, with the researcher boasting about blocking all frequencies up to 200 GHz. Add to that the tendency of cellphones to use a LOT less transmit power and reception attenuation than typical Wi-Fi hardware, and it sounds a lot like this would certainly be an issue for cellphones.
While it's hard to argue that outages would still occur from things like fires and explosions in a fully redundant environment, it's easy to connect the dots and notice that fully redundant systems rarely experience fires or explosions, if only for the fact that they spend almost all of their service lives operating at less than 50% capacity. Many "bargain basement" hosting companies (I won't name names) choose to run far closer to 80% or 90% of nameplate capacity because it's cheaper. Also, the question of transfer switches causing additional points of failure is valid, however; it's perfectly possible (and practiced, by paranoid data center managers) to put two switches in parallel and two or more switches (of varying types) in series along the power path, so a failure at any one spot (or in some cases even more than one failure) can be corrected with zero impact to the critical load.
Why go with a huge, multiple 9's datacenter, when you can go the way of google, and have a RAID: Redundant Array of Inexpensive Datacenters.. Is really better to have 1000 machines in a 5-9's location, or 500 systems each in a 4-9's, with extra cash in hand?
That all depends. A 5 9s datacenter is a full ten times more reliable than a 4 9s datacenter (mathematically speaking). So, all things being equal (again, mathematically), you would need ten 4-9 centers to be as reliable as your one 5-9 center. However geographic dispersion, outage recover lead time, bandwidth costs, maintenance, etc. can all factor in to sway the equation either way. It really comes down to itemizing your outage threats, pairing that with the cost of redundancy for each threatened component, and then looking at the cost of downtime as part of the business process. It's rarely as simple as "why not just build two at twice the price".
Given the recent series of data center outages and the current focus on corporate cost control, the debate reflects the industry focus on how to get the most uptime for the data center dollar.
Repeat after me: There is no replacement for redundancy. There is no replacement for redundancy. Every outage you read about involves a failure in a feature of the datacenter that was not redundant and was assumed to not need to be redundant... assumed *incorrectly*. Redundancy is irreplaceable. If you rely on your servers (the servers housed in one place) you had better have redundancy for EVERY. SINGLE. OTHER. ASPECT. If not, you can expect downtime, and you can expect it to happen at the worst possible moment.
An anorexic young woman lying on the bed in his room at the Sainte-Anne hospital in Paris 2007
Yep. Spot on.
Duh, haven't you heard of Ohmmygod's Law of energy-saving distances? Why do you think the guy trying to run an extension cord to the moon was 'taken out' by Big Energy. They are trying to keep us addicted!
Except I could make the accompanying argument that "just because words have the same spelling like read and read, bear and bear, lead and lead, (insert your favorite same-spelling homonym here), doesn't mean they describe the same thing!"
The English language is full of precedent nonsense. Complaining that to/too is going to derail civilization is just a tad hyperbolic.
Yes there is, but he can't spell.
Damn SMS and IM is killing all languages all over the planet. And don't tell me that "languages evolve", this is de-evolution. Just because words sound the same when spoken aloud doesn't mean they describe the same thing. Example: too != to != two, etc.
No such thing as de-evolution. If language is moving in a direction determined by natural selection promoting good features and demoting bad features, it is forward evolution. Evolution cannot move backward just as time cannot move backward. On top of that, poor spelling and poor grammar has been around since, well, the invention of spelling and grammar. The bottom line is that just because you don't like the changes that are happening, doesn't make them bad. If you think proper spelling is important (I am not saying that it isn't) then you should make a case, not a complaint.
"We must all rally toward a single goal: without sacrificing the growth of knowledge or scientific innovation, we must invest in a sweeping project to make science relevant to the whole of America's citizenry."
Science is relevant to every last person on the planet, given the science behind world-altering technology related to Nuclear energy, Climate Change, and biological engineering (just to name a few). The problem isn't that it's irrelevant (although that may not have been the author's precise intent in that word.) The problem is that what little science is picked up by the general public is subject to spin by those who have nothing to do with (and little comprehension of) science, namely politicians.
What's required isn't to make science popular, it's to make fact checking and critical thinking popular. It doesn't matter how little or much you understand of Clean coal technology (as an example); when you are subject to misleading information from all angles of mainstream media what you need is the ability to think for yourself or you are going to be led astray (from science). Too many people are willing to believe whatever 'preferred news outlet x' has to say on a subject and their beliefs quickly align with whatever interest the "journalist" has in mind for them. They proceed with their lives thinking that they are sufficiently informed since they were assured by their favorite news outlet that the "science behind" a particular issue aligns with their interests.
You can't change the laws of the universe, and well done science is almost as unwavering. When these things conflict with what you want, your best bet is distraction and misunderstanding. THATS the problem we face.
Not a big deal if (a) you happened to already do this during rollout or (b) you are properly notified about this and config changes are trivial on your network. In cases where you have a very large network and no centralized configuration manager, you will have to sink a lot of time into this 'fix' and that's assuming you don't use OTAP. In the case that you do use OTAP, or in the case that you are too busy to notice this and/or too busy to spend time reconfiguring all the affected devices, then yes, it can be a 'big deal'.