Frank Herbert book where a biophysicist(!?), distraught over the death of his wife at the hands of IRA terrorists, develops a bug to hit them back. He spreads it by spraying it on currency, and mailing it to the target nations.
While the bugs would have to be rather hardy to live on currency for any period of time, if it could be managed, it would be one heck of a way to spread - particularly if you used $100 bills (the most numerous type in existance, and the most widely used of the US currencies outside of the US).
Actually, they wanted tape backup, which would then be stored securely offsite.
It was sort of funny dealing with them on the tour of the facility. They wanted to know how long our cooling would last if someone threw a satchel charge over our fence and took out the cooling towers. They also didn't want to host in two centers on the same coast, regardless of distance, in case a hurricane came along and took both out.
A potential customer of my company's (we do web hosting, amongst other things) wanted to be able to backup to tape a completely filled 11.7TB EMC unit. Nightly. A consulting firm that they hired figured it could be done using the proper type of tape (not DLT - far too slow), but it would require a pallet of tapes each night. This evidently didn't faze the customer. I don't know what they finally did, and they didn't host with us.
A Terabyte of mp3's comes out to be around two years worth of music, if you encode at 128kbps. Fill up the server, play till it ends, then replace with the one Petabyte model that will be out by then.
Our cabinets (Wrightline) have a plexi front with grill around it, and a full grill back. We can get full grill fronts from Wrightline, but there was something about their choices not aesthetically matching the rest of the cabinets (hey, I don't make the decisions around there, I just keep the network running).
The customer with the 1U servers got a cage, and we installed fans at the top back of the cabinets. That seems to keep the machines alive, but you could still broil meat from the heat coming off their cabinets.
I work in a web hosting data center of a backbone provider. I could see some company wanting to be cheap on real estate and rent a half cabinet (the smallest we have) and putting a bunch of these in there.
However, I have to agree with what others have already commented about power and heat - these will draw a lot. We have a customer who tried to fill a cabinet with the 1U IBM servers (37 of them) and we finally convinced them that it was going to work, despite what IBM claims. The things would cook themselves. Turns out the fine print on IBM's claim was that it would work if you used an open rack - not practical in a hosting environment with other companies, even if you have a cage. These things will be even worse.
Oh, as far as the cost is concerned, sure you can home build something cheaper - that's not where the cost comes in. The cost comes in the support, which is much more expensive with servers than home machines, as they often are 'replace within 24 hours' at a minimum. We've got contracts with Sun that are 'replace within 2 hours, 24x7' that annually cost something like 40% of the cost of the servers.
Powder a condom well with the stuff, and the various bodily fluids wouldn't be able to touch, even in the event of breakage. The question then becomes the toxicity of the spores.
Let's not forget Motorola. True, they've got the PowerPC, but it wouldn't hurt them to have another product, particularly one that is used in the server market, where the PowerPC is virtually non-existant.
Motorola is primarily an embedded processor maker, and perhaps the Alpha can see some life there as well.
The piece is very light on details (naturally) but I have to wonder how close to the tower the plane would have to fly in order for this to have an appreciable affect. I'd expect that you have an r^2 attenuation of the signals from the tower, and a similar one from the scatter from the plane.
..."In other news, the USAF has announced that they will only use stealth aircraft in campaigns involving counties with no or poorly developed cellular networks..."
"Plaintiffs offered the testimony, at a prior hearing, of an expert who testified that other, less-intrusive means to filter the reception of obscene materials exist. A parent may utilize filters or child-friendly software to accomplish similar restrictions. The Court previously took judicial notice that every computer is manufactured with an on/off switch, that parents may utilize, in the end, to control the information which comes into their home via the Internet."
Looks like the judge had a good grasp of the practicalities of the situation, and a sense of humor as well.
smaller particulate doesn't become embedded in the lung walls - it is able to traverse further down into the lungs. Larger particulate get's stuck early on in the larger passageways, and gets cleared more readily, as it is closer to the top of the lungs. Smaller particulate takes longer to be cleared because is has a longer and more convoluted route out.
You think this is *heavy*?
on
Flywheel UPS
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· Score: 4
Do folks realize what the UPS's that server farms are like? Try 5000lb. Where I work, we've got ten such UPS's. For media or bandwidth providers, all you really are looking for your UPS's to do is be on line till the diesel generators can in. Our 25 tons of batteries will last us about 15 minutes. That's enough time to get the 4MW of diesel generators going.
The real attraction to these is that they live for a long time. Even if you have power problems, they won't be stressed very much, and in the long run, you save money by not having to keep on buying new batteries when the old ones inevitably die, regardless of use.
How about if someone wrote a program that continuously and randomly adjusted the speed and acceleration of the mouse? Your patterns of using the mouse would have a random element introduced (though it would be a headache to use if the differences were big enough). You might be able to do something about the keyboard as well.
Now, what about mouse wheels? I the wheel alot, particularly on long pages like slashdot.
So many misconceptions, so little time...
on
Smart Routers
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· Score: 2
1) On the topic of encryption, you're talking about something at layer 5 or 6, whereas these routers would be looking at layer 4. At least, that's my view of how they work.
2) QoS. Again, we are talking about the core. The backbone providers presently use a 'dumb' core. It doesn't care about QoS and can't implement it. They route purely at layer 3, usually using IS-IS as a routing protocol. What Caspian is proposing is to enable the backbone to route at a higher layer - presumably 4 - to prioritize packets, and to keep packets of the same stream together, rather than scattering them all over the place, hoping that they all get to the destination in some useful order.
3) The ISP's and backbone providers to a degree can already favor one customer over another. They can adjust BGP costs, set static routes, etc. so that certain traffic flows in a certain way.
4) They new routers are meant for the backbone/ISP level. Your typical business won't have them. The biggest barrier is going to be replacing the existing hardware with the new stuff. That's a lot of hardware to replace, and it doesn't look like an ISP can replace things piecemeal.
If people had bothered to read the Wired article in the first place, a lot of these questions would not have been asked in the first place.
The practice, as others have noted, is different than what Amazon did. The problem is that what Amazon did was well publisized, making the consumer more suspicious of these practices. This is best summed up at the end of the article:
Emily Andren, a senior analyst at Boston-based Aberdeen Group, warns that IBM must communicate with its customers to avoid confusion and a potential backlash, similar to what happened with Amazon.com's failed dynamic pricing experiment.
"It's hard to see the benefit to the customer," Andren said.
...if they are going to enact it as law. This should be made one of the conditions of a private group writing the guidelines for public law. The government purchases the copyright after the law has been passed (so that they aren't buying every oddball guideline that any thinks up) with taxpayer money, and releases it to the public domain. That way the people who devised the guidelines are reimbursed for their effort, and the public doesn't need to shell out money each time they want to see the guidelines.
Everyone benefits from things like building guidelines, regardless of whether they build a house themselves or not, as any structure they live or work in has to conform, and that benefits them. That justifies the use of public funds to purchase the guidelines.
"We are disappointed with the Court's decision and plan to appeal the ruling," Rambus CEO Geoff Tate said. "If today's decision is allowed to stand, all companies that innovate risk having their intellectual property rights unjustly expropriated."
Companies innovate new technologies all the time, and profit from them. It's the "innovate while sitting on a industry standards board, keeping quiet about what you've done but help lead the consensus toward your unannounced innovation, drop out of the board and try to make them all pay for your patent" that companies will have a hard time doing in the future. And rightly so.
Authors are not going to mention two things in the same article unless they have a reason to. An article has a topic, which tends to be a very narrowly defined. If the authors are discussing a particular gene, and mention another gene in the same article, there is likely already a relationship between the two, otherwise they wouldn't be discussing them in the same article.
If you were writing an article about a gene that regulates insulin production, you probably wouldn't be mentioning a gene that produces monoamine oxidase. In fact, the program relies on the fact that there will be some relationship between the genes. Otherwise, it's all random.
I'd say you lose, but as you posted anonymously, that's a given.
Slashdot Mirror
If this is a collection of multiple structures combined into one platform, would JMOB then stand for Just a Mass of Boats?
Recaps of sporting events read in the voice of Howard Cosell, with the script written by William Safire.
Fred Astair singing about vacuum cleaners, not merely dancing with them.
Aahhhhh!
"Mr. Jones, if you don't start behaving, I'll get The Suit, then insert your catheter."
While the bugs would have to be rather hardy to live on currency for any period of time, if it could be managed, it would be one heck of a way to spread - particularly if you used $100 bills (the most numerous type in existance, and the most widely used of the US currencies outside of the US).
It was sort of funny dealing with them on the tour of the facility. They wanted to know how long our cooling would last if someone threw a satchel charge over our fence and took out the cooling towers. They also didn't want to host in two centers on the same coast, regardless of distance, in case a hurricane came along and took both out.
They were planning on having a presence in two data centers, with mirroring between the two. This was a Fortune 10 company - they could afford it.
A potential customer of my company's (we do web hosting, amongst other things) wanted to be able to backup to tape a completely filled 11.7TB EMC unit. Nightly. A consulting firm that they hired figured it could be done using the proper type of tape (not DLT - far too slow), but it would require a pallet of tapes each night. This evidently didn't faze the customer. I don't know what they finally did, and they didn't host with us.
A Terabyte of mp3's comes out to be around two years worth of music, if you encode at 128kbps. Fill up the server, play till it ends, then replace with the one Petabyte model that will be out by then.
The customer with the 1U servers got a cage, and we installed fans at the top back of the cabinets. That seems to keep the machines alive, but you could still broil meat from the heat coming off their cabinets.
However, I have to agree with what others have already commented about power and heat - these will draw a lot. We have a customer who tried to fill a cabinet with the 1U IBM servers (37 of them) and we finally convinced them that it was going to work, despite what IBM claims. The things would cook themselves. Turns out the fine print on IBM's claim was that it would work if you used an open rack - not practical in a hosting environment with other companies, even if you have a cage. These things will be even worse.
Oh, as far as the cost is concerned, sure you can home build something cheaper - that's not where the cost comes in. The cost comes in the support, which is much more expensive with servers than home machines, as they often are 'replace within 24 hours' at a minimum. We've got contracts with Sun that are 'replace within 2 hours, 24x7' that annually cost something like 40% of the cost of the servers.
"No ma'am, it's not a yeast infection...
IBM once, perhaps still, has demonstrated Windows NT on AS/400. Will there be Linux for AS/400?
Motorola is primarily an embedded processor maker, and perhaps the Alpha can see some life there as well.
Adenosine is not a protein. It is a nucleoside (base + sugar). Add phosphate group(s), and you would have a nucleotide.
Looks like the judge had a good grasp of the practicalities of the situation, and a sense of humor as well.
smaller particulate doesn't become embedded in the lung walls - it is able to traverse further down into the lungs. Larger particulate get's stuck early on in the larger passageways, and gets cleared more readily, as it is closer to the top of the lungs. Smaller particulate takes longer to be cleared because is has a longer and more convoluted route out.
The real attraction to these is that they live for a long time. Even if you have power problems, they won't be stressed very much, and in the long run, you save money by not having to keep on buying new batteries when the old ones inevitably die, regardless of use.
Now, what about mouse wheels? I the wheel alot, particularly on long pages like slashdot.
1) On the topic of encryption, you're talking about something at layer 5 or 6, whereas these routers would be looking at layer 4. At least, that's my view of how they work.
2) QoS. Again, we are talking about the core. The backbone providers presently use a 'dumb' core. It doesn't care about QoS and can't implement it. They route purely at layer 3, usually using IS-IS as a routing protocol. What Caspian is proposing is to enable the backbone to route at a higher layer - presumably 4 - to prioritize packets, and to keep packets of the same stream together, rather than scattering them all over the place, hoping that they all get to the destination in some useful order.
3) The ISP's and backbone providers to a degree can already favor one customer over another. They can adjust BGP costs, set static routes, etc. so that certain traffic flows in a certain way.
4) They new routers are meant for the backbone/ISP level. Your typical business won't have them. The biggest barrier is going to be replacing the existing hardware with the new stuff. That's a lot of hardware to replace, and it doesn't look like an ISP can replace things piecemeal.
If people had bothered to read the Wired article in the first place, a lot of these questions would not have been asked in the first place.
Emily Andren, a senior analyst at Boston-based Aberdeen Group, warns that IBM must communicate with its customers to avoid confusion and a potential backlash, similar to what happened with Amazon.com's failed dynamic pricing experiment. "It's hard to see the benefit to the customer," Andren said.
Everyone benefits from things like building guidelines, regardless of whether they build a house themselves or not, as any structure they live or work in has to conform, and that benefits them. That justifies the use of public funds to purchase the guidelines.
Reminds me of the definition of a strip club in the glossary from alt.sex.strip-clubs: "something you do not want to own."
Companies innovate new technologies all the time, and profit from them. It's the "innovate while sitting on a industry standards board, keeping quiet about what you've done but help lead the consensus toward your unannounced innovation, drop out of the board and try to make them all pay for your patent" that companies will have a hard time doing in the future. And rightly so.
If you were writing an article about a gene that regulates insulin production, you probably wouldn't be mentioning a gene that produces monoamine oxidase. In fact, the program relies on the fact that there will be some relationship between the genes. Otherwise, it's all random.
I'd say you lose, but as you posted anonymously, that's a given.