Is it a good idea to leave your financial account password at a known place? A wife will get the husband's money anyway in several months after death.
I don't want my wife to need to get a court order and wait for several months to have access to my accounts upon my death.
But withdrawing money from husband's account after his death may look highly suspicious, especially if one is acquainted with real murder statistics.
What kind of paranoid reality do you live in? My mother moved funds around almost immediately after my father's accidental death (after all, she still had mortgages to pay, funeral arrangements, etc), but there was no murder investigation.
The time of death is routinely recorded, and the time of money withdrawal too. An investigator will just have to look at the timing. It is simple to notice.
If a wife killed her husband to get his money, wouldn't she be more careful than to empty his accounts moments after his death?
I don't see the use case for these. Any sizeable office that wants server capacity is going to have a room indoors where they can put it - pouring a concrete slab outside and running power + network + water to it doesn't seem much better than dedicating a small server closet inside the building. I can see some niche market in remote sites (mining sites, research sites, etc) that need more servers than they can stack in the corner of their office trailer, but if they have that many servers, this single rack is probably not what they are looking for. They are probably more interested in a datacenter in a shipping container.
How does this tie in to AOL? If they want to get their content closer to users, colocating the servers at the telco or ISP makes more sense since the only way I'm going to get data from the server pod across the street is via my ISP connection. I don't think I'm going to want AOL content badly enough to set up a point to point wireless link or trench a data line under the street.
Bottom line, when it comes to lawyers do not assume they have an ounce of common sense and depend upon them to charge you for their own mistakes.
Don't blame it on the lawyers not having common sense -- blame on it them having an abundance of common sense when it comes to exploiting loopholes to protect their clients. I once worked for a company that was shutting down and the lead investor wanted the source code he "owned". My boss and the corporate attorney (who were interested in resurrecting the company) wanted to give him everything he was owed without giving him what he really "wanted", so they had me send them the complete source code history out of CVS in printed form (yes, before the days of SVN and Git) - this was thousands of pages of nearly unusable source code since rewriting the whole thing was probably less work that transcribing it from printouts.
In the end everyone was happy, my boss got his company back, and the lead investor eventually got a nice return on his investment.
Or you could just put a monitor and keyboard there till the KVM was fixed.
Across 90 servers? Staffing someone on a holiday weekend just in case a server needed help? $25/hour * 24 * 4 * double time = $4800... versus $125/hour * 2 hours. A replacement KVM with the same capabilities would have cost around $8K at the time.
All 90 servers were replaced by 4 VMware servers 6 months later after upgrading the software to use TCP/IP instead of RS-485, so they also saved $8K on a replacement KVM (the impending VMWare migration was the whole reason they were using an old, outdated KVM).
So $200 of my labor plus a $50 PC power supply (and a few dollars in heat shrink tubing + solder) saved them around $13K in materials and labor. I don't know if you've ever worked at a manufacturing company, but cash really is king and saving even $1000 makes you a hero.
I'm well into my 40's, and it's the opposite around here. The young guys here have no patience (or deeper understanding) for technology and are the ones that are ready to kick something to the curb when they can't get it to work, but I'm willing to take the time to figure out why it's not working. When our KVM switch failed and smoked, I was the one to pull out a multimeter and discovered that the power supply had failed, and I was the one that took a PC power supply and wired it up as a replacement. They are too used to the disposable economy where everything that breaks is unfixable and needs to be replaced.
It's well past the time when I can debug a PC using an oscilloscope "hey, look, something is is generating an IRQ conflict - are you sure the DIP switches are set correctly on that new board?!", but my EE background still helps me troubleshoot hardware problems - and my background in software development (from back before frameworks and libraries took care of the heavy lifting) helps troubleshoot software problems. Things like "I don't get it, we moved it from a quad core machine to a 16 core machine, but the app is just as slow as it was before!" are much easier to explain when you know the difference between a single-threaded and multi-threaded app. We're hiring guys fresh out of school that barely know what a compiler is, but when I was in school, we had to write a compiler (and assembler). Then again, they are much more adept at programming with modern libraries and frameworks than I am.
The funny thing is that I'm a "manager", and haven't been doing hands-on sys admin for quite some time, but I'm still the go-to guy for weird problems that no one else can solve.
Well, I probably wouldn't be jury-rigging a new power supply into a KVM (unless it was my personal KVM at home).
Granted, fixing hardware that's outside of a service contract is not a normal part of my job, but when the opportunity presents itself (see above - Holiday weekend, let a lot of people keep their holiday plans), you seem like a hero (and save the company thousands of dollars in replacing a KVM they are going to retire soon anyway).
It's amazing how many recent grads don't really understand how multithreading works. Cache coherency, cache snooping, etc are all foreign concepts. Mention a Global Interpreter Lock for some of their favorite languages and their eyes glaze over. They are perplexed that an app that scales well on a single CPU with a shared L3 cache suddenly won't scale on a 2 socket server.
Like, you, I still amaze people when I can convert from hex to decimal *in my head*! (ok, only the easy numbers - but I can still disassemble a few x85 instructions in my head, but even I admit that I can't keep up with modern optimizing compilers, keeping the CPU pipeline full is beyond my capabilities).
When everything works well, you really don't need to know binary or hex or how cache coherency works, but when the sh*t hits the fan, it's nice to know how things work under the hood and I'm finding that many (but certainly not all) of today's kids just don't care. If their favorite library call performs poorly, they don't know how to debug it. Even strace on Linux (or better, dtrace on osx) is like black magic.
This stuff is still taught in CS courses, but the MIS degrees that many applicants are getting don't get down to the nitty-gritty about how software *really* works.
At times I worry that my skills are stagnating, but other times I wonder if the same basic skills are even being taught in schools. Recently, most of the people I've nterviewed for development positions don't even know what a CPU register is,
97M pages at a generous 100kB per page is just under 10 TB, which costs about $1000 to store. Let be generous again, and multiply the cost of raw disk capacity by a factor of 100 to account for redundancy, hosting, rack space, and bandwidth... Nope, still only $100,000!
So, yeah, $97M is a bit much. The only way I can think to account for such a ludicrously high cost would be if they used an archaic manual technology, like making crude pigment-based marks on dead trees! But that would be ludicrous, it would make justice impossible to afford for the common man! Such a system wouldn't be allowed in a modern society, right?
yYou've ignored that they are asking for $2.9M, not $97M.
Now, looking at the $2.9M figure, you're ignoring the labor costs -- you're paying someone to review and organize the docs (and either copy them or categorize them into some document management system). Assuming you're paying someone who actually knows something about software or the case, i think $30/hour is reasonable. You can pay $20/hour for an administrative assistant to a temp agency.
If they can review a document and sort it appropriately in 10 seconds, that's 360 documents/hour. $30/hour / 360 docs/hour = 8.3 cents/document. Since many documents (i.e. source code files) are probably multiple pages long, 3 cents/document sounds reasonable. You'd probably pay an agency around 10 cents/page to scan a document. Plus 2 or 3 cents for printed docs.
"Google has not publicly revealed an itemized list of its expenses, but the total bill included $2.9 million spent copying and organizing documents. According to the brief, the company juggled a mind-boggled 97 million documents during the case.""
Couldn't they have just put them on some sort of server and used some kind to search software to allow access.
I think it's hard to present electronic documents on a server as evidence since it's hard to prove that the documents weren't altered after being submitted. (not impossible, but verifying cryptographic checksums is not how the courts are used to working)
So how long did that take you to do? A half hour maybe a little longer, how much time was spent by your coworkers diagnosing the issue trying to repair it and half hour? Was it really worth it to your company for you and your coworkers to waste X hours to attempt to repair the old KVM switch that accounting probably depreciated the value on anyway?
Took around 2 hours start to finish. It doesn't take long to pull the power supply plug from the motherboard and see that 0 volts is not the same as the 12V and 5V marked on the motherboard.Clipping the leads from the old power supply and splicing onto the new one didn't take long either. The hardest part was unplugging and labeling all of the KVM ports to remove the server from the rack, then plugging them all back in again.
Anyway, is it really wise to be jerry rigging KVM power supplies, it certainly doesn't seem professional? If I was your customer and I was touring your facility and saw that, I would certainly have doubts about an organization that finds shoestringing power supplies onto KVMs acceptable practice, tell me you wouldn't feel the same way.https://ask.slashdot.org/story/12/07/06/2014207/ask-slashdot-old-dogs-vs-new-technology#
Customers never toured our data center (and in fact, were not legally allowed inside for security reasons), but given the choice between fixing our KVM so we could do remote server support over the 4 day weekend, or getting a new KVM overnighted in on Wednesday and then having staff cancel Thanksgiving travel plans to rewire 90 servers to the new KVM, our datacenter manager was more than happy to have a PC power supply sitting on top of the KVM for the weekend. As it was, they bought a new smaller 24 port KVM to cover critical servers and left the jury rigged one in place until they finished the VMware migration several months later that made most of the physical servers (and the KVM) unneeded.
I'm well into my 40's, and it's the opposite around here. The young guys here have no patience (or deeper understanding) for technology and are the ones that are ready to kick something to the curb when they can't get it to work, but I'm willing to take the time to figure out why it's not working. When our KVM switch failed and smoked, I was the one to pull out a multimeter and discovered that the power supply had failed, and I was the one that took a PC power supply and wired it up as a replacement. They are too used to the disposable economy where everything that breaks is unfixable and needs to be replaced.
It's well past the time when I can debug a PC using an oscilloscope "hey, look, something is is generating an IRQ conflict - are you sure the DIP switches are set correctly on that new board?!", but my EE background still helps me troubleshoot hardware problems - and my background in software development (from back before frameworks and libraries took care of the heavy lifting) helps troubleshoot software problems. Things like "I don't get it, we moved it from a quad core machine to a 16 core machine, but the app is just as slow as it was before!" are much easier to explain when you know the difference between a single-threaded and multi-threaded app. We're hiring guys fresh out of school that barely know what a compiler is, but when I was in school, we had to write a compiler (and assembler). Then again, they are much more adept at programming with modern libraries and frameworks than I am.
The funny thing is that I'm a "manager", and haven't been doing hands-on sys admin for quite some time, but I'm still the go-to guy for weird problems that no one else can solve.
Why do all these programming books have to be so fat? The original Algol-60 report was 17 pages. "Pascal - User Manual and Report" was 283 pages. "The C Programming Language" ("K&R") is 274 pages. This thing is over 400 pages. Python isn't a big language.
One reason is because when someone's shopping for a "Programming for dummies" book, they try to get the best value by buying the biggest book. If Book A is twice as thick as Book B, then it must be twice as good, right?
Plus, many languages have a rich set of libraries and frameworks that are a large part of the strength of the language, so are also covered in the same book (things like MVC concepts, Android scripting, Django, Google App engine, etc). K&R didn't try to describe the Motif libraries or how to program a GUI application.
I almost used the example of Google's Go language - it's relatively new and doesn't have nearly as many libraries behind it as a more mature language like Python, yet A Thorough Introduction To The Go Programming Language is over 600 pages long. Can I claim that's the exception that proves the rule? (a saying that has never made sense to me).
Since people do use python for data analysis (hence the data analysis related packages that are available), of course it's legitimate.
Just like how when you're standing on the roof and you need to pound in a couple nails, that heavy pair of pliers in your pocket is a legitimate tool. It may not be the best tool for the job, the best tool might be a pneumatic nail gun, but if all you have with you and what you know how to use is pliers, then that's the right tool. Why spend time and money learning some other "more appropriate" language (or buying an air compressor and nail gun) when you already have a tool at your fingertips that will do what you need.
As your needs grow you might need to find another more appropriate tool, but if you can get the job done with Python, why bother searching for the "perfect" tool?
Depending on your needs, sh, awk, sed, sort, and uniq may be all the tools you need - many log parsing, analysis and reporting programs have been writing with those tools, often ingesting more rows of data per day than many small business BI systems.
Although the chance of a false negative may be 1 in 12, the actual probability of getting AIDS is less.. because you have to account for the probability of encountering an HIV positive person. Also, many false negatives are for cases where the person may have been recently infected so the immune system has not created enough antibodies. If you have been dating your partner for a while and can be sure he/she hasn't had an HIV exposure within a recent time frame.. the chance of false negative reduces. What this test allows you to do is have an added layer of security. It's like this, when you get in a car.. you can reduce your chance of getting seriously hurt in an accident by being a good driver, driving a safe vehicle, and wearing a seatbelt. Does it offer a guarantee of safety? No. I'm pretty sure people have died with their seatbelt on, in fact i recall hearing that some side impact collisions resulted in fatalities BECAUSE the person was wearing a seatbelt. However, seatbelts have saved many lives, so it's a good idea to use one. It reduces the probability of serious injury. That's what this test is about.. it's helping people who can't help but engage in a particular behavior pattern reduce the risk from that behavior -- yes for maximum benefit it must be coupled with other things like not choosing a high risk partner etc. But simply telling people to just plain abstain has not worked for everyone. So in combination with all the other things such as abstinence education, this test is a good thing.
Note, I am not in blanket favor of testing someone for HIV or anything else without their consent.
Or does it act like a false layer of security like an airbag. Drivers may think "Oh hey, I don't need a seatbelt, I have an airbag!" even though the seatbelt is what keeps them in place so the airbag is most effective.
Likewise, is someone who is in a high-risk group for HIV going to take this test, come up with a negative result, and then go out and tell his partners "Don't worry dude, I'm clean, I was tested". While if he'd had a test at a clinic (even if they use the same test), they would have explained that a clean result doesn't necessarily mean that he's HIV negative. While I'm sure that the literature packed with the test will tell them the same thing, most people don't read the literature, but at least they have to sit there and listen to the doctor.
This filament is between two neighboring GALAXIES.
Compare:
fastest manmade objects in existence: voyager space probes.
But the lightbulbs-as-dark-suckers theory is still correct, right?
P.S. You're off by a few orders of magnitude - these galaxies are 2.7 billion light years away, if Voyager 1's 10 miles / second speed is comparable (currently the fastest speed from the sun as any manmade object though I suspect we could do better if we were only interested in launching the probe into interstellar space), it would take around 5 x 10^13 years for the probe to reach the galaxy.
I don't know about you, but I've already set my DVR to record that moment just in case I'm not home when it happens.
I don't know if I believe you about the dark suckers, but I know how to prove that Dark Matter exists - just redirect one of the mars probes to go visit this dark matter filament and bring back a sample. The Curiosity Rover already has a drill, which would aid in extracting the matter. It should be a simple matter of stellar mathematics (provided that we're willing to wait a bit longer) to set it on a course to the filament. On the way there the rover can be reprogrammed to autonomously land and extract the matter. Since it will be a bit further from Earth than it was designed for, it might be out of radio contact so it will have to be self sufficient.
Easy-peasy, in a "few" years we could be examining samples from this dark filament here on earth.
Why is it that Google can release a 7" tablet for $199, but an unlocked Android phone with a 4" screen costs $400 - $800?
Is the cellular chipset (and related testing and integration) really that expensive? is it the miniaturization to make a phone formfactor that makes it expensive?
That is absolutely ridiculous...they want to do the test themselves? Its like a huge neon sign going "HI I MAY BE HIV POSITIVE!!!". EVERYONE is going to want to do that now and they will know what it means, just like a pregnancy test, so the whole "do it at home to not feel ashamed" thought process goes right out the window. Not to mention that without the proper treatment, the people who are infected will have a bad life expectancy, won't live normal lives...just so many issues with this.
I think that's the problem this test is supposed to solve - one out of 5 people with HIV don't realize it, so the sooner they take the test, the sooner they can begin treatment since the longer they wait the harder it is to treat.
I don't know why you think that picking up a home test "for a friend" from the pharmacy or ordering it through mail order is more of a stigma than making an appointment at a clinic or with your doctor for the test.
This seems like a really good idea in that a lot of people who really should get tested never will due to the stigma of going to a clinic.
On the other hand, it seems like now 1 in 12 will never go to a clinic because the home test gave them a clean bill of health when really, they were carrying the virus. I understand that a false positive is going to be hugely upsetting to the individual, but on a society-wide level, such a massive false negative rate is really much more concerning. In my opinion, it makes the test not only useless (as a high false-positive rate would) but counter-productive.
And it's not just the fact that they won't go to a clinic for themselves, but now those 1 in 12 will proclaim to future partners "Don't worry, I'm clean, I was just tested". And if there's a biological reason that makes an individual more likely to get a false negative, this makes the problem even worse as he continues to get negative results, test after test despite being infected.
I'd feel better about this test if the false positive and false negative rates were reversed. Sending 1 out of 12 people to the doctor because they got a false positive (and missing just 1 out of 5000 actual HIV infections) sounds a lot better than the reverse.
Nobody seems to have noticed the "best" thing about this test: it should be possible to use it on your partner. With or without their consent. So you can invite that random girl at the bar home for a drink and a swab, or secretly swab your boyfriend while he's sleeping, just in case he's lying to you about being clean.
Unethical? Yes. Unromantic? Yes. False sense of security? Yup. But potentially lifesaving? Also yes.
If you distrust this partner so much that you're willing to give them an HIV test without their consent, do you really want to bet your life on the 1 in 12 chance that the test will give a false negative result?
Besides, there are lots of other diseases you can pick up from this partner even if he/she is not infected with HIV. Better to be safe than sorry.
Why a complicated solution with an LCD screen on the window? Just a mechanical gadget, that moves a coin sized item.
Because an LCD panel has no moving parts and will likely last the lifetime of the windshied and can react instantly, even if you sneeze. Plus it can dim your windshield during the day for overall sun protection. But the modified etch-a-sketch guts that move this little coin around the windshield will need regular lubrication and maintenance and the guys at the car wash are going to break it the first time they clean your windshield without deactivating it.
Yeah. Impressive to spend years and $$$ to achieve an overly complex version of something that can be achieved by wearing your (polarised) sunglasses. Added bonus: you don't need to buy a new car.
How is this at all similar to wearing polarized sunglasses?
Polarized sunglasses reduce horizontally polarized glare, such as when sunlight reflects off the flat road. However, this doesn't help reduce the glare reflected back from a spherical raindrop. This technology prevents light from your headlamp from illuminating the rain drop in the first place. And it does this while reducing the overall headlamp light level by a few percent, as opposed to the much greater reduction you'd see with sunglasses.
Few have the resources to donate $2M to a project, so pretty much any solution anyone comes up with on here is going to rely on other people for the bulk of the funding.
However, Paul Allen's net worth is $14B. So, comparing him to an above average person with a $500K net worth, if Paul Allen donated $2M to the cause, it would be equivalent to the $500K net worth guy donating $71.
If someone told me that I could fund the project for a year by kicking in $75, I'd do it. If they told me that me and 26,000 of my friends had to come up with $75 each, well, I'd be a less likely to donate.
If we find intelligent life then what? Presumably we're going to try to engage in a dialog. Is that really a good idea at this point in human development?
Whether a dialog is a good idea or not won't really matter to you since you will likely die of old age before we could exchange the first message.
But if incontrovertible proof of life on other planets is found, even if you can't talk to them, can you think of a more profound scientific discovery?
On theory is that the aliens will encode plans in their communications stream that teaches us how to build a spaceship that will let us reach their "planet". Of course, skeptics will claim that the spaceship is a fraud and any stories the "astronaut" comes back with will be dismissed as a dream. .
The meter is also right next to my head due to the shitty design of the house I live in, and personally I am not as sanguine as the rest of you seem to be about the effects of RF on my brain. I do not believe that there will be any cancer risk, but that's not the same as believing that there are definitely no negative effects.
If you're concerned about the effect of electric fields on your body, I'd be more worried about the EMF field from all of the power used by your house flowing right next to your head than from a low power RF transmitter. Millions of people sleep with a phone on their bedside table, but I haven't heard of a huge increase in cancer rates from it.
My meter is locked inside my house, and unless I unlock the door and let them in, they aren't allowed to force their way in.
That violates almost every building code I've heard of for decades. You're probably grandfathered in, but don't expect to see this in new construction, and if you ever remodel that general part of the house, expect a hassle from them demanding the meter be moved outdoors. The theory is if the building is burning the FD wants to come in and rescue your kids but they can't shut the power off before spraying water if the meter is inside the building. Ditto the gas meter which is also almost always located outdoors for the same reason.
Since my house was built in the 1920's, I'm sure it doesn't meet any current building codes. Until about 5 years ago it still had a lot of knob and tube wiring and heavily corroded steel water pipes.
I've seen a number of bare-stud rebuilds in my neighborhood, but haven't seen any that moved the electric meter out to the street where it's accessible. In my neighborhood houses tend to be built so they are right up against the neighbors house, so the only way to make a meter accessible would be to put it out on the sidewalk
Here's a Google streetview picture of a house similar to mine. The gas/electric meters are likely behind that little square window:
Most houses don't have a little window like that, so they hang a meter reading tag on their door on meter reading day (and I assume the electric company periodically schedules an appointment to physically read the meter).
Slashdot Mirror
Is it a good idea to leave your financial account password at a known place? A wife will get the husband's money anyway in several months after death.
I don't want my wife to need to get a court order and wait for several months to have access to my accounts upon my death.
But withdrawing money from husband's account after his death may look highly suspicious, especially if one is acquainted with real murder statistics.
What kind of paranoid reality do you live in? My mother moved funds around almost immediately after my father's accidental death (after all, she still had mortgages to pay, funeral arrangements, etc), but there was no murder investigation.
The time of death is routinely recorded, and the time of money withdrawal too. An investigator will just have to look at the timing. It is simple to notice.
If a wife killed her husband to get his money, wouldn't she be more careful than to empty his accounts moments after his death?
I don't see the use case for these. Any sizeable office that wants server capacity is going to have a room indoors where they can put it - pouring a concrete slab outside and running power + network + water to it doesn't seem much better than dedicating a small server closet inside the building. I can see some niche market in remote sites (mining sites, research sites, etc) that need more servers than they can stack in the corner of their office trailer, but if they have that many servers, this single rack is probably not what they are looking for. They are probably more interested in a datacenter in a shipping container.
How does this tie in to AOL? If they want to get their content closer to users, colocating the servers at the telco or ISP makes more sense since the only way I'm going to get data from the server pod across the street is via my ISP connection. I don't think I'm going to want AOL content badly enough to set up a point to point wireless link or trench a data line under the street.
The executable, not the source code!
Bottom line, when it comes to lawyers do not assume they have an ounce of common sense and depend upon them to charge you for their own mistakes.
Don't blame it on the lawyers not having common sense -- blame on it them having an abundance of common sense when it comes to exploiting loopholes to protect their clients. I once worked for a company that was shutting down and the lead investor wanted the source code he "owned". My boss and the corporate attorney (who were interested in resurrecting the company) wanted to give him everything he was owed without giving him what he really "wanted", so they had me send them the complete source code history out of CVS in printed form (yes, before the days of SVN and Git) - this was thousands of pages of nearly unusable source code since rewriting the whole thing was probably less work that transcribing it from printouts.
In the end everyone was happy, my boss got his company back, and the lead investor eventually got a nice return on his investment.
Or you could just put a monitor and keyboard there till the KVM was fixed.
Across 90 servers? Staffing someone on a holiday weekend just in case a server needed help? $25/hour * 24 * 4 * double time = $4800... versus $125/hour * 2 hours. A replacement KVM with the same capabilities would have cost around $8K at the time.
All 90 servers were replaced by 4 VMware servers 6 months later after upgrading the software to use TCP/IP instead of RS-485, so they also saved $8K on a replacement KVM (the impending VMWare migration was the whole reason they were using an old, outdated KVM).
So $200 of my labor plus a $50 PC power supply (and a few dollars in heat shrink tubing + solder) saved them around $13K in materials and labor. I don't know if you've ever worked at a manufacturing company, but cash really is king and saving even $1000 makes you a hero.
I'm well into my 40's, and it's the opposite around here. The young guys here have no patience (or deeper understanding) for technology and are the ones that are ready to kick something to the curb when they can't get it to work, but I'm willing to take the time to figure out why it's not working. When our KVM switch failed and smoked, I was the one to pull out a multimeter and discovered that the power supply had failed, and I was the one that took a PC power supply and wired it up as a replacement. They are too used to the disposable economy where everything that breaks is unfixable and needs to be replaced.
It's well past the time when I can debug a PC using an oscilloscope "hey, look, something is is generating an IRQ conflict - are you sure the DIP switches are set correctly on that new board?!", but my EE background still helps me troubleshoot hardware problems - and my background in software development (from back before frameworks and libraries took care of the heavy lifting) helps troubleshoot software problems. Things like "I don't get it, we moved it from a quad core machine to a 16 core machine, but the app is just as slow as it was before!" are much easier to explain when you know the difference between a single-threaded and multi-threaded app. We're hiring guys fresh out of school that barely know what a compiler is, but when I was in school, we had to write a compiler (and assembler). Then again, they are much more adept at programming with modern libraries and frameworks than I am.
The funny thing is that I'm a "manager", and haven't been doing hands-on sys admin for quite some time, but I'm still the go-to guy for weird problems that no one else can solve.
Well, I probably wouldn't be jury-rigging a new power supply into a KVM (unless it was my personal KVM at home).
Granted, fixing hardware that's outside of a service contract is not a normal part of my job, but when the opportunity presents itself (see above - Holiday weekend, let a lot of people keep their holiday plans), you seem like a hero (and save the company thousands of dollars in replacing a KVM they are going to retire soon anyway).
It's amazing how many recent grads don't really understand how multithreading works. Cache coherency, cache snooping, etc are all foreign concepts. Mention a Global Interpreter Lock for some of their favorite languages and their eyes glaze over. They are perplexed that an app that scales well on a single CPU with a shared L3 cache suddenly won't scale on a 2 socket server.
Like, you, I still amaze people when I can convert from hex to decimal *in my head*! (ok, only the easy numbers - but I can still disassemble a few x85 instructions in my head, but even I admit that I can't keep up with modern optimizing compilers, keeping the CPU pipeline full is beyond my capabilities).
When everything works well, you really don't need to know binary or hex or how cache coherency works, but when the sh*t hits the fan, it's nice to know how things work under the hood and I'm finding that many (but certainly not all) of today's kids just don't care. If their favorite library call performs poorly, they don't know how to debug it. Even strace on Linux (or better, dtrace on osx) is like black magic.
This stuff is still taught in CS courses, but the MIS degrees that many applicants are getting don't get down to the nitty-gritty about how software *really* works.
At times I worry that my skills are stagnating, but other times I wonder if the same basic skills are even being taught in schools. Recently, most of the people I've nterviewed for development positions don't even know what a CPU register is,
97M pages at a generous 100kB per page is just under 10 TB, which costs about $1000 to store. Let be generous again, and multiply the cost of raw disk capacity by a factor of 100 to account for redundancy, hosting, rack space, and bandwidth... Nope, still only $100,000!
So, yeah, $97M is a bit much. The only way I can think to account for such a ludicrously high cost would be if they used an archaic manual technology, like making crude pigment-based marks on dead trees! But that would be ludicrous, it would make justice impossible to afford for the common man! Such a system wouldn't be allowed in a modern society, right?
yYou've ignored that they are asking for $2.9M, not $97M.
Now, looking at the $2.9M figure, you're ignoring the labor costs -- you're paying someone to review and organize the docs (and either copy them or categorize them into some document management system). Assuming you're paying someone who actually knows something about software or the case, i think $30/hour is reasonable. You can pay $20/hour for an administrative assistant to a temp agency.
If they can review a document and sort it appropriately in 10 seconds, that's 360 documents/hour. $30/hour / 360 docs/hour = 8.3 cents/document. Since many documents (i.e. source code files) are probably multiple pages long, 3 cents/document sounds reasonable. You'd probably pay an agency around 10 cents/page to scan a document. Plus 2 or 3 cents for printed docs.
"Google has not publicly revealed an itemized list of its expenses, but the total bill included $2.9 million spent copying and organizing documents. According to the brief, the company juggled a mind-boggled 97 million documents during the case.""
Couldn't they have just put them on some sort of server and used some kind to search software to allow access.
I think it's hard to present electronic documents on a server as evidence since it's hard to prove that the documents weren't altered after being submitted. (not impossible, but verifying cryptographic checksums is not how the courts are used to working)
2.9 million in copying?
I think I want to die.
97M pages @ $2.9M = 3 cents/page. Pretty reasonable since "copying and organizing" presumably includes labor.
So how long did that take you to do? A half hour maybe a little longer, how much time was spent by your coworkers diagnosing the issue trying to repair it and half hour? Was it really worth it to your company for you and your coworkers to waste X hours to attempt to repair the old KVM switch that accounting probably depreciated the value on anyway?
Took around 2 hours start to finish. It doesn't take long to pull the power supply plug from the motherboard and see that 0 volts is not the same as the 12V and 5V marked on the motherboard.Clipping the leads from the old power supply and splicing onto the new one didn't take long either. The hardest part was unplugging and labeling all of the KVM ports to remove the server from the rack, then plugging them all back in again.
Anyway, is it really wise to be jerry rigging KVM power supplies, it certainly doesn't seem professional? If I was your customer and I was touring your facility and saw that, I would certainly have doubts about an organization that finds shoestringing power supplies onto KVMs acceptable practice, tell me you wouldn't feel the same way.https://ask.slashdot.org/story/12/07/06/2014207/ask-slashdot-old-dogs-vs-new-technology#
Customers never toured our data center (and in fact, were not legally allowed inside for security reasons), but given the choice between fixing our KVM so we could do remote server support over the 4 day weekend, or getting a new KVM overnighted in on Wednesday and then having staff cancel Thanksgiving travel plans to rewire 90 servers to the new KVM, our datacenter manager was more than happy to have a PC power supply sitting on top of the KVM for the weekend. As it was, they bought a new smaller 24 port KVM to cover critical servers and left the jury rigged one in place until they finished the VMware migration several months later that made most of the physical servers (and the KVM) unneeded.
I'm well into my 40's, and it's the opposite around here. The young guys here have no patience (or deeper understanding) for technology and are the ones that are ready to kick something to the curb when they can't get it to work, but I'm willing to take the time to figure out why it's not working. When our KVM switch failed and smoked, I was the one to pull out a multimeter and discovered that the power supply had failed, and I was the one that took a PC power supply and wired it up as a replacement. They are too used to the disposable economy where everything that breaks is unfixable and needs to be replaced.
It's well past the time when I can debug a PC using an oscilloscope "hey, look, something is is generating an IRQ conflict - are you sure the DIP switches are set correctly on that new board?!", but my EE background still helps me troubleshoot hardware problems - and my background in software development (from back before frameworks and libraries took care of the heavy lifting) helps troubleshoot software problems. Things like "I don't get it, we moved it from a quad core machine to a 16 core machine, but the app is just as slow as it was before!" are much easier to explain when you know the difference between a single-threaded and multi-threaded app. We're hiring guys fresh out of school that barely know what a compiler is, but when I was in school, we had to write a compiler (and assembler). Then again, they are much more adept at programming with modern libraries and frameworks than I am.
The funny thing is that I'm a "manager", and haven't been doing hands-on sys admin for quite some time, but I'm still the go-to guy for weird problems that no one else can solve.
Why do all these programming books have to be so fat? The original Algol-60 report was 17 pages. "Pascal - User Manual and Report" was 283 pages. "The C Programming Language" ("K&R") is 274 pages. This thing is over 400 pages. Python isn't a big language.
One reason is because when someone's shopping for a "Programming for dummies" book, they try to get the best value by buying the biggest book. If Book A is twice as thick as Book B, then it must be twice as good, right?
Plus, many languages have a rich set of libraries and frameworks that are a large part of the strength of the language, so are also covered in the same book (things like MVC concepts, Android scripting, Django, Google App engine, etc). K&R didn't try to describe the Motif libraries or how to program a GUI application.
I almost used the example of Google's Go language - it's relatively new and doesn't have nearly as many libraries behind it as a more mature language like Python, yet A Thorough Introduction To The Go Programming Language is over 600 pages long. Can I claim that's the exception that proves the rule? (a saying that has never made sense to me).
Since people do use python for data analysis (hence the data analysis related packages that are available), of course it's legitimate.
Just like how when you're standing on the roof and you need to pound in a couple nails, that heavy pair of pliers in your pocket is a legitimate tool. It may not be the best tool for the job, the best tool might be a pneumatic nail gun, but if all you have with you and what you know how to use is pliers, then that's the right tool. Why spend time and money learning some other "more appropriate" language (or buying an air compressor and nail gun) when you already have a tool at your fingertips that will do what you need.
As your needs grow you might need to find another more appropriate tool, but if you can get the job done with Python, why bother searching for the "perfect" tool?
Depending on your needs, sh, awk, sed, sort, and uniq may be all the tools you need - many log parsing, analysis and reporting programs have been writing with those tools, often ingesting more rows of data per day than many small business BI systems.
Although the chance of a false negative may be 1 in 12, the actual probability of getting AIDS is less .. because you have to account for the probability of encountering an HIV positive person. Also, many false negatives are for cases where the person may have been recently infected so the immune system has not created enough antibodies. If you have been dating your partner for a while and can be sure he/she hasn't had an HIV exposure within a recent time frame .. the chance of false negative reduces. What this test allows you to do is have an added layer of security. It's like this, when you get in a car .. you can reduce your chance of getting seriously hurt in an accident by being a good driver, driving a safe vehicle, and wearing a seatbelt. Does it offer a guarantee of safety? No. I'm pretty sure people have died with their seatbelt on, in fact i recall hearing that some side impact collisions resulted in fatalities BECAUSE the person was wearing a seatbelt. However, seatbelts have saved many lives, so it's a good idea to use one. It reduces the probability of serious injury. That's what this test is about .. it's helping people who can't help but engage in a particular behavior pattern reduce the risk from that behavior -- yes for maximum benefit it must be coupled with other things like not choosing a high risk partner etc. But simply telling people to just plain abstain has not worked for everyone. So in combination with all the other things such as abstinence education, this test is a good thing.
Note, I am not in blanket favor of testing someone for HIV or anything else without their consent.
Or does it act like a false layer of security like an airbag. Drivers may think "Oh hey, I don't need a seatbelt, I have an airbag!" even though the seatbelt is what keeps them in place so the airbag is most effective.
Likewise, is someone who is in a high-risk group for HIV going to take this test, come up with a negative result, and then go out and tell his partners "Don't worry dude, I'm clean, I was tested". While if he'd had a test at a clinic (even if they use the same test), they would have explained that a clean result doesn't necessarily mean that he's HIV negative. While I'm sure that the literature packed with the test will tell them the same thing, most people don't read the literature, but at least they have to sit there and listen to the doctor.
Uhm?
This filament is between two neighboring GALAXIES.
Compare:
fastest manmade objects in existence: voyager space probes.
But the lightbulbs-as-dark-suckers theory is still correct, right?
P.S. You're off by a few orders of magnitude - these galaxies are 2.7 billion light years away, if Voyager 1's 10 miles / second speed is comparable (currently the fastest speed from the sun as any manmade object though I suspect we could do better if we were only interested in launching the probe into interstellar space), it would take around 5 x 10^13 years for the probe to reach the galaxy.
I don't know about you, but I've already set my DVR to record that moment just in case I'm not home when it happens.
I don't know if I believe you about the dark suckers, but I know how to prove that Dark Matter exists - just redirect one of the mars probes to go visit this dark matter filament and bring back a sample. The Curiosity Rover already has a drill, which would aid in extracting the matter. It should be a simple matter of stellar mathematics (provided that we're willing to wait a bit longer) to set it on a course to the filament. On the way there the rover can be reprogrammed to autonomously land and extract the matter. Since it will be a bit further from Earth than it was designed for, it might be out of radio contact so it will have to be self sufficient.
Easy-peasy, in a "few" years we could be examining samples from this dark filament here on earth.
Why is it that Google can release a 7" tablet for $199, but an unlocked Android phone with a 4" screen costs $400 - $800?
Is the cellular chipset (and related testing and integration) really that expensive? is it the miniaturization to make a phone formfactor that makes it expensive?
That is absolutely ridiculous...they want to do the test themselves? Its like a huge neon sign going "HI I MAY BE HIV POSITIVE!!!". EVERYONE is going to want to do that now and they will know what it means, just like a pregnancy test, so the whole "do it at home to not feel ashamed" thought process goes right out the window. Not to mention that without the proper treatment, the people who are infected will have a bad life expectancy, won't live normal lives...just so many issues with this.
I think that's the problem this test is supposed to solve - one out of 5 people with HIV don't realize it, so the sooner they take the test, the sooner they can begin treatment since the longer they wait the harder it is to treat.
I don't know why you think that picking up a home test "for a friend" from the pharmacy or ordering it through mail order is more of a stigma than making an appointment at a clinic or with your doctor for the test.
This seems like a really good idea in that a lot of people who really should get tested never will due to the stigma of going to a clinic.
On the other hand, it seems like now 1 in 12 will never go to a clinic because the home test gave them a clean bill of health when really, they were carrying the virus. I understand that a false positive is going to be hugely upsetting to the individual, but on a society-wide level, such a massive false negative rate is really much more concerning. In my opinion, it makes the test not only useless (as a high false-positive rate would) but counter-productive.
And it's not just the fact that they won't go to a clinic for themselves, but now those 1 in 12 will proclaim to future partners "Don't worry, I'm clean, I was just tested". And if there's a biological reason that makes an individual more likely to get a false negative, this makes the problem even worse as he continues to get negative results, test after test despite being infected.
I'd feel better about this test if the false positive and false negative rates were reversed. Sending 1 out of 12 people to the doctor because they got a false positive (and missing just 1 out of 5000 actual HIV infections) sounds a lot better than the reverse.
Nobody seems to have noticed the "best" thing about this test: it should be possible to use it on your partner. With or without their consent. So you can invite that random girl at the bar home for a drink and a swab, or secretly swab your boyfriend while he's sleeping, just in case he's lying to you about being clean.
Unethical? Yes. Unromantic? Yes. False sense of security? Yup. But potentially lifesaving? Also yes.
If you distrust this partner so much that you're willing to give them an HIV test without their consent, do you really want to bet your life on the 1 in 12 chance that the test will give a false negative result?
Besides, there are lots of other diseases you can pick up from this partner even if he/she is not infected with HIV. Better to be safe than sorry.
Why a complicated solution with an LCD screen on the window? Just a mechanical gadget, that moves a coin sized item.
Because an LCD panel has no moving parts and will likely last the lifetime of the windshied and can react instantly, even if you sneeze. Plus it can dim your windshield during the day for overall sun protection. But the modified etch-a-sketch guts that move this little coin around the windshield will need regular lubrication and maintenance and the guys at the car wash are going to break it the first time they clean your windshield without deactivating it.
Yeah. Impressive to spend years and $$$ to achieve an overly complex version of something that can be achieved by wearing your (polarised) sunglasses. Added bonus: you don't need to buy a new car.
How is this at all similar to wearing polarized sunglasses?
Polarized sunglasses reduce horizontally polarized glare, such as when sunlight reflects off the flat road. However, this doesn't help reduce the glare reflected back from a spherical raindrop. This technology prevents light from your headlamp from illuminating the rain drop in the first place. And it does this while reducing the overall headlamp light level by a few percent, as opposed to the much greater reduction you'd see with sunglasses.
Make someone else do it. Always the solution, eh?
Few have the resources to donate $2M to a project, so pretty much any solution anyone comes up with on here is going to rely on other people for the bulk of the funding.
However, Paul Allen's net worth is $14B. So, comparing him to an above average person with a $500K net worth, if Paul Allen donated $2M to the cause, it would be equivalent to the $500K net worth guy donating $71.
If someone told me that I could fund the project for a year by kicking in $75, I'd do it. If they told me that me and 26,000 of my friends had to come up with $75 each, well, I'd be a less likely to donate.
If we find intelligent life then what? Presumably we're going to try to engage in a dialog. Is that really a good idea at this point in human development?
Whether a dialog is a good idea or not won't really matter to you since you will likely die of old age before we could exchange the first message.
But if incontrovertible proof of life on other planets is found, even if you can't talk to them, can you think of a more profound scientific discovery?
On theory is that the aliens will encode plans in their communications stream that teaches us how to build a spaceship that will let us reach their "planet". Of course, skeptics will claim that the spaceship is a fraud and any stories the "astronaut" comes back with will be dismissed as a dream. .
The meter is also right next to my head due to the shitty design of the house I live in, and personally I am not as sanguine as the rest of you seem to be about the effects of RF on my brain. I do not believe that there will be any cancer risk, but that's not the same as believing that there are definitely no negative effects.
If you're concerned about the effect of electric fields on your body, I'd be more worried about the EMF field from all of the power used by your house flowing right next to your head than from a low power RF transmitter. Millions of people sleep with a phone on their bedside table, but I haven't heard of a huge increase in cancer rates from it.
My meter is locked inside my house, and unless I unlock the door and let them in, they aren't allowed to force their way in.
That violates almost every building code I've heard of for decades. You're probably grandfathered in, but don't expect to see this in new construction, and if you ever remodel that general part of the house, expect a hassle from them demanding the meter be moved outdoors. The theory is if the building is burning the FD wants to come in and rescue your kids but they can't shut the power off before spraying water if the meter is inside the building. Ditto the gas meter which is also almost always located outdoors for the same reason.
Since my house was built in the 1920's, I'm sure it doesn't meet any current building codes. Until about 5 years ago it still had a lot of knob and tube wiring and heavily corroded steel water pipes.
I've seen a number of bare-stud rebuilds in my neighborhood, but haven't seen any that moved the electric meter out to the street where it's accessible. In my neighborhood houses tend to be built so they are right up against the neighbors house, so the only way to make a meter accessible would be to put it out on the sidewalk
Here's a Google streetview picture of a house similar to mine. The gas/electric meters are likely behind that little square window:
http://goo.gl/maps/6QmX
Most houses don't have a little window like that, so they hang a meter reading tag on their door on meter reading day (and I assume the electric company periodically schedules an appointment to physically read the meter).