Major state universities with good athletic programs use those programs to generate revenue, which then is used to fund both academic and athletic programs. The University of Florida's athletic department feeds millions of dollars a year back into research and non-athletic scholarship programs. I went to UF on a full-ride academic scholarship that was funded indirectly by the athletic department.
It's in my best interest to see my school's academic rankings increase or at least remain constant because it raises the value of my degree. And in order to have a solid academic program, we obviously need money to lure and keep good professors and to build new programs and facilities to bring in top students.
I'll bet that the athletic department contributed to a slush fund that in some way paid for salaries, equipment, or facilities for the original article's research. It may just be a game, but it's a game that generates funds, and an athletic program that is going downhill is going to generate less money, eventually getting to the point where it is no longer even self-sufficient.
As a recent graduate of the University of Florida, I have one question to ask of these researchers: How many days do we have to wait until they have a prototype that can function as the football team's head coach? It can't be too hard to do better than Coach Zook.
We're having what might be a slightly unusual problem for a mirroring IDE RAID card: excessive numbers of hard drive failures.
A bit of background: We have 550 sites with Dell Optiplex GX240s. Most installations have been in place for around a year and a half now. They are configured identically with Promise FastTrak100 TX2 cards, all of which are in the same PCI slot (except for a few test machines which were used to verify that the PCI slot was not the issue... these test machines had the same rate of failure as the main configuration). The card is on its own IRQ line, even though IRQs shouldn't matter anymore. When we purchased the systems from Dell, we received two drives per unit and installed a postfactory Promise RAID card and modem. The software is Windows 2000 Server with SQL Server 2000.
Since Day 1, we've noticed that a far greater than normal percentage of drives fail. Of the 550 systems, two or three a week will suffer a hard drive failure. When we received the systems, the initial mixture of drives was about 70% Maxtor, 20% Western Digital, and 10% Seagate. 95% of failures are Maxtor drives, and 95% of failures are of the drive attached to the primary controller.
Very recently, we did some testing. We took a known good hard drive and plugged it into a controller that had toasted a drive. We ran some disk churn creating programs and the previously good drive failed. We ran the hdd manufacturer's diagnostics on another system before and after, so we know it was good before and bad after.
Now, my question... has anyone ever seen this before? Is there something wrong with a controller or with a driver or something? Anybody have any troubleshooting ideas? We've been banging our heads against this for a year now and can't come up with any good explanation for the results we're seeing. And calling dell tech support to return 20 drives is not something anyone wants to do because they make you run their "diagnostics" -- a five minute process that tells you the drive that fails the manufacturer's diags with severe failure errors and such is really a good drive.
$2 billion in late 80s (1986 specifically) dollars = $3.2 billion in 2002 (most recent available Consumer Price Index data). I'm sure technology will have improved and parts will be cheaper, but then again we wouldn't be putting another telescope into orbit using 1980s technology... it would have to be FAR superior to the HST, or why bother?
Using your figure of $600 mil for a launch brings the price of a new telescope to $3.8 billion dollars. Remember, you do have to get it into space once you've built it!
Add another $700 mil for corrective lenses and a launch to deploy them when they inevitably muck up the mirror... and your new telescope could cost $4.5 billion dollars.
Plus maintenance costs, which you were seeking to avoid in the first place.
I say keep the Hubble. If nothing else, it provides great desktop backgrounds.
I'm going to do a quick spoiler pad here, even though if you've read this article and comments you've already subjected yourself to endless spoilers. Anyway...
It seems to me that everyone has forgotten that the end of this movie contains worldwide nuclear holocaust. And that the premise of Skynet is that it's a giant distributed app. Adding those two important components together, doesn't Skynet kill itself when it destroys all of the cities containing its hosts, all of the power plants powering those hosts, and the network infrastructure connecting its hosts? What computers will still be running without power, indefinitely? How useful are disconnected computers? And in nuclear winter, will it really be a priority for regular people to maintain their PCs?
Unless Skynet somehow trained those T1s to repair T1s...
I wonder if they'll include the Airplane Crash disaster from previous versions. Just think of all of the people who would demand to see the game banned from stores!
What they need to do is put miniature black holes in the center of the spindle to cancel out some of the centrifugal force. Also, you could let the black hole out of the CD-ROM drive when you weren't using it and it would clean your room for you!
I noticed one sitting on the shelf at the Camelot (or possibly Suncoast.. they're right next to each other) in the mall here a few days ago. Since I'm not an anime fan, I didn't pay any attention to it, and the only reason I noticed it at all was because someone mentions it here every few weeks. If you look around you might be able to find it too. Remember, there's such a thing as a brick-and-mortar retailer... you don't have to buy EVERYTHING off the web.
Slashdot Mirror
Major state universities with good athletic programs use those programs to generate revenue, which then is used to fund both academic and athletic programs. The University of Florida's athletic department feeds millions of dollars a year back into research and non-athletic scholarship programs. I went to UF on a full-ride academic scholarship that was funded indirectly by the athletic department.
It's in my best interest to see my school's academic rankings increase or at least remain constant because it raises the value of my degree. And in order to have a solid academic program, we obviously need money to lure and keep good professors and to build new programs and facilities to bring in top students.
I'll bet that the athletic department contributed to a slush fund that in some way paid for salaries, equipment, or facilities for the original article's research. It may just be a game, but it's a game that generates funds, and an athletic program that is going downhill is going to generate less money, eventually getting to the point where it is no longer even self-sufficient.
As a recent graduate of the University of Florida, I have one question to ask of these researchers: How many days do we have to wait until they have a prototype that can function as the football team's head coach? It can't be too hard to do better than Coach Zook.
We're having what might be a slightly unusual problem for a mirroring IDE RAID card: excessive numbers of hard drive failures.
A bit of background: We have 550 sites with Dell Optiplex GX240s. Most installations have been in place for around a year and a half now. They are configured identically with Promise FastTrak100 TX2 cards, all of which are in the same PCI slot (except for a few test machines which were used to verify that the PCI slot was not the issue... these test machines had the same rate of failure as the main configuration). The card is on its own IRQ line, even though IRQs shouldn't matter anymore. When we purchased the systems from Dell, we received two drives per unit and installed a postfactory Promise RAID card and modem. The software is Windows 2000 Server with SQL Server 2000.
Since Day 1, we've noticed that a far greater than normal percentage of drives fail. Of the 550 systems, two or three a week will suffer a hard drive failure. When we received the systems, the initial mixture of drives was about 70% Maxtor, 20% Western Digital, and 10% Seagate. 95% of failures are Maxtor drives, and 95% of failures are of the drive attached to the primary controller.
Very recently, we did some testing. We took a known good hard drive and plugged it into a controller that had toasted a drive. We ran some disk churn creating programs and the previously good drive failed. We ran the hdd manufacturer's diagnostics on another system before and after, so we know it was good before and bad after.
Now, my question... has anyone ever seen this before? Is there something wrong with a controller or with a driver or something? Anybody have any troubleshooting ideas? We've been banging our heads against this for a year now and can't come up with any good explanation for the results we're seeing. And calling dell tech support to return 20 drives is not something anyone wants to do because they make you run their "diagnostics" -- a five minute process that tells you the drive that fails the manufacturer's diags with severe failure errors and such is really a good drive.
$2 billion in late 80s (1986 specifically) dollars = $3.2 billion in 2002 (most recent available Consumer Price Index data). I'm sure technology will have improved and parts will be cheaper, but then again we wouldn't be putting another telescope into orbit using 1980s technology... it would have to be FAR superior to the HST, or why bother?
Using your figure of $600 mil for a launch brings the price of a new telescope to $3.8 billion dollars. Remember, you do have to get it into space once you've built it!
Add another $700 mil for corrective lenses and a launch to deploy them when they inevitably muck up the mirror... and your new telescope could cost $4.5 billion dollars.
Plus maintenance costs, which you were seeking to avoid in the first place.
I say keep the Hubble. If nothing else, it provides great desktop backgrounds.
I'm going to do a quick spoiler pad here, even though if you've read this article and comments you've already subjected yourself to endless spoilers. Anyway...
It seems to me that everyone has forgotten that the end of this movie contains worldwide nuclear holocaust. And that the premise of Skynet is that it's a giant distributed app. Adding those two important components together, doesn't Skynet kill itself when it destroys all of the cities containing its hosts, all of the power plants powering those hosts, and the network infrastructure connecting its hosts? What computers will still be running without power, indefinitely? How useful are disconnected computers? And in nuclear winter, will it really be a priority for regular people to maintain their PCs?
Unless Skynet somehow trained those T1s to repair T1s...
I wonder if they'll include the Airplane Crash disaster from previous versions. Just think of all of the people who would demand to see the game banned from stores!
What they need to do is put miniature black holes in the center of the spindle to cancel out some of the centrifugal force. Also, you could let the black hole out of the CD-ROM drive when you weren't using it and it would clean your room for you!
Didn't we used to call "tracks" small cars would take directly to their intended destination something else? I could swear they were called "roads"...
I noticed one sitting on the shelf at the Camelot (or possibly Suncoast.. they're right next to each other) in the mall here a few days ago. Since I'm not an anime fan, I didn't pay any attention to it, and the only reason I noticed it at all was because someone mentions it here every few weeks. If you look around you might be able to find it too. Remember, there's such a thing as a brick-and-mortar retailer... you don't have to buy EVERYTHING off the web.