You know, my engineering and chemistry profs were always ranting how important lab books were. Naturally, they were very anal about everything having to be documented in there. Hours of my life were wasted copying things from neatly rendered diagrams and text in the lab handouts as crude, hand-drawn facsimiles and block print rendered in carbon copy for the lab submission.
"You will thank me someday; lab books are admissible in court! As a matter of fact, this one guy who actually works in industry told me that people who forget to sign a page in their lab notebook are summarily fired!"—literally every engineering and chem lab prof I ever had (I swear, it's like they all compared notes and decided to give the suggested speech written by a lab book sales rep)
You know what? In the decade since I graduated, I have heard about *one* of my former classmates seeing a lab book used by someone *once*. Call it "roughly as common as a Bigfoot sighting". So, chalk all that up under "Lies My Professors Told Me".
FWIW, it's not that hard to tell what someone was doing/whether they're working. Have them write decent log messages when they commit. Or check the ticketing system revision history, whatever. If someone isn't checking in work for a suspicious amount of time, then follow up. If you wonder whether someone is worth their salt, dump a log of their diffs/work product from a chosen time range.
I would take versioned work in a repo over a handwritten lab book any day. Also, I would wonder how much time my report spent handwriting a personal lab book. I would rather see that time spent submitting work-in-progress diffs with meaningful logs that are checked into a server repo that is backed up, accessible to everyone else on the team, and forms a coherent history of our project for future analysis.
I retract my statement if your industry relies on hand drawings on paper, with no electronic document interchange or electronic work product. In that case, I suggest saving the carbon copies of the memos you type with your Selectric to exchange via interdepartmental mail.
It would be interesting if somebody did an empirical experiment on this.
There have been such studies in the US already; Google "ballot name order effect". It even looks like some of them have controlled for whether party affiliation was displayed.
I also wanted to mention the related Australian concept of the donkey vote, though that's an unintended consequence of compulsory voting.
So Revelations is when a bad update crashes the system? The four programmers of the apocalypse?
No! Didn't you read the passage? The horsemen clearly were driving hardware, and their names were Stack-Overflow, Divide-By-Zero, Off-By-One, and behold! The driver of the pale hardware was named IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL, and Non-Maskable Interrupt was following close behind him.
Well it's not just fileserving. I have a software RAID5, so everytime I write a file, it has to calculate parity information in addition to writing to 5 SATA drives simultaneously, and the bottleneck is still the Gigabit network.
Even Intel talks about Atom's abysmal performance. The good news is the next gen Atoms will be bringing real performance to low power. They're going to be completely difference archs.
Yes, but will they support more than 4 GB of RAM? No doubt it was Intel's marketing department that foisted that limitation on all previous versions. Can't "cannibalize" the lower end of your Core market, eh?
Well, that particular decision made me choose the AMD Fusion platform instead. Too bad, because I really would have preferred Atom-based systems.
My next purchase will be awarded to the 18 W TDP CPU system that supports 16 GB RAM and AES-NI crypto acceleration—and this opportunity is Intel's to lose (not that they care about it).
The distinction between compensation and wages/salary is not artificial; it is important. As a matter of fact, when companies attempt to conflate "compensation" with "salary" it is often to deceive normal workers into thinking they will be getting more money than they really will.
Salary/wages is a particular type of compensation. Do not make false dichotomies.
Merely alleging salary/wages is a synecdoche for earnings/compensation does not make it so, not least because the US tax law is written this way.
Unless, of course, you believe that all dividends are "salary", in which case I suppose I earned a "salary" from Whole Foods and Union Pacific last year, despite never having been employed by them. If you count capital gains, then this year I earned a "salary" from Netflix, despite never having seen their corporate campus.
Having a distinction between monetary compensation (salary/wages) and total compensation in employment is important and necessary, unless you really believe employer-paid health insurance, employee stock ownership programs, and 'free bagel Fridays' should be lumped with cash compensation and referred to as "salary". However, most people would be upset if they took a job offering a high "salary" only to discover their "salary" was a $1 paycheck and the rest as restricted stock options that couldn't be exercised for 5 years.
My friend once received a job offer from a startup that tried that stunt: they attempted to count the projected, eventual value of the offered stock options as part of the dollar compensation to try to disguise the fact that the salary was so low it would be hard to pay the rent ("...but our stock will *definitely* be worth at least 5x what it's worth today once you can exercise the options in five years, so your annual pay really should be considered as 4x the option strike price + salary!"). That kind of semantics is obviously bullshit and very disingenuous.
Note that I do not argue in favor of preferential tax treatment for capital gains, etc; quite the opposite, in fact.
Who makes $1-2 billion per year as a salary on a regular basis?
Just to answer the question: David Tepper made $4,000,000,000.
Just to correct your misstatement: no, he did *not* make a $4e9 salary. Don't conflate compensation/earnings with salary/wages. They aren't the same.
Top 50 hedge fund managers make hundreds of millions of dollars. Each. Pay 15% in taxes.
I actually don't believe there should be a limit on salaries but I don't believe people in higher tax brackets should pay less percent in taxes than people in the lower tax bracket.
Then perhaps your real complaint is that capital gains are taxed at a privileged rate. They would have been paying in the highest tax bracket (35% + 1.45% in federal tax *alone*) if their compensation was salary, which would represent a much higher tax rate than people in the lower brackets.
FWIW, I can find no reason why capital gains should be taxed differently than income. I think the Buffett Rule is needlessly complex: just tax capital gains as income and be done with it.
Today they are no where near what the government could throw at you (know anybody that owns an A-10 warthog, or a Tomahawk cruise missile?). The idea of the 2nd amendment acting as the people's deterrent to corrupt government is absurd, firstly because of the aforementioned mismatch in weaponry.
This is a rather weak argument, as the Iraqis recently convincingly demonstrated to the US military. Before that, the Viet Cong were quite effective as well.
If forces are engaged in asymmetric warfare then it is insane for the disadvantaged belligerent to engage in set piece battles.
Just thought I would let you know that you aren't the only one who would prefer if this guy kept a lower profile.
I also wanted to lend a modicum of support—having a positive perspective on all our civil liberties isn't considered acceptable in this echo chamber of hoplophobes, as is amply evidenced by the other replies you have garnered so far.
That all makes sense. However, as a practical example, let's say you take a computer that has a power supply that's rated for 600 W and has a power factor of 0.5: that computer will require 1200 VA to drive the load. Furthermore, a computer monitor is practically the definition of a low power factor load, as well as the motors on the printers you wisely exclude from the UPS circuit.
BTW, adding power factor correction is what the 80 Plus power supply certification program is about.
If you want to compare your wattage, true VA load, and power factor (watts / power_factor == VA) then I suggest grabbing a Kill A Watt meter. Amazon has them for less than $20.
So, doubling the wattage in VA is certainly a reasonable thing to do and would be precisely correct if the power factor for everything nets to be 0.5. Also, when your clients are upgrading their computers have them get power supplies with active power factor correction. It will decrease the load on their UPS as well as decreasing the day-to-day load on their HVAC (less waste heat).
Need a Kilowatt? Buy 2. Yes it sucks but you have to play the game and that I've found is a good hard fast rule that works for pretty much any company in the UPS business.
Yes, that sucks, and I am no defender of the UPS industry.
However, remember that UPS's are listed VA rather than watts. Power factor is an important issue, and that's why a UPS/small gasoline generator sucks for spinning up an A/C unit motor, or in the case of technology, a highly capacitive load. If (and only if) your load is purely resistive then VA==watts, otherwise, watts < VA consumption. All computer systems will have a power factor of <1. Simply put, if you drive an incandescent light bulb then VA is the same as wattage, but if there is any capacitance (computer hardware) or inductance (motors), then VA is higher than wattage because the power factor is less than 1.
VA is the only fair metric for a UPS manufacturer to use, because it's trivial to come up with a load that has very high VA consumption while having close to zero wattage (ie. very low power factor)... however, that high VA load still drains the UPS battery that is running an inverter to produce an AC waveform.
Watts pulled from the wall (ie. with no power factor applied) is most certainly not the same as the VA that UPS capacity is listed in. It makes sense that it is harder to spin up a motor or drive the capacitive load on a computer than it is to drive a simple resistor like an incandescent light bulb.
Now, if you're alleging that the manufacturer-cited UPS VA capacity is being treated similarly to the laptop manufacturers' "estimated runtime" inflation then you may be right. I just wanted to ensure you were comparing apples to apples.
You make good points, but the particular SmartUPS I cited was acquired brand new.
I can even understand the thermal shutdown (despite the irony it caused); however, why didn't it use the built-in alarm sound when it was approaching thermal shutdown? These units scream incessantly if they don't like their battery anymore... even worse than a smoke detector does. Why couldn't it have done similarly if it was approaching a thermal cutout? "Happy, happy, happy... DEAD!"
The fact remains that if the client hadn't bothered with the effort and cost of installing a UPS then they would have suffered *zero* power outages over the course of the 18+ months I was there.
I don't understand how if they claim that it takes up to 20 sec for the final write to finalize that a computer that simply shutsdown in 10 sec won't have the same problem.
Drives support a blocking "sync" command that is only supposed to return when the drive has flushed all pending writes and has reached quiescence. If there is nothing pending to flush then the command will return immediately. If not, it may take the cited 20 seconds to return. Normal reboot/poweroff procedure in the OS waits for this condition, and this has been around forever (the HDD equivalent is to flush write cache and park the heads). That's why a 10 second shutdown can be safe even with the putative 20 second worst-case writeout window—if there are pending writes then there is nothing to do.
Yanking the power prevents this sanity check from happening.
That multi-grid relay was supposed to be a warm standby approach, but it was too clever for its own good
Haha, absolutely. Once I had a client who "upgraded" their gigabit ethernet topology to provide multipath IO from their production servers to their SAN. All these switches had dual power supplies connected to dual distribution power systems and the servers had dual power supplies, dual NICs on separate VLANS, etc. Fair enough; I enabled MPIO for the ISCSI SAN access on the production servers.
What *actually* happened? A month later we experienced massive data loss from production server process output because the mulitpath IO to the SAN triggered a firmware bug in the SAN and made it abruptly drop offline completely (and also corrupt recently-written data FTW). Comparatively speaking, how often was it likely that we would lose network access from the server to the SAN (which was in the same rack) in a single-path ethernet configuration? What, failure of the solid-state ethernet switch? Ethernet cable failure in unmoving cables? Ha.
Later on in a separate incident, we lost access to the SAN because someone was doing maintenance to the switch plug configuration during business hours and redundantly unplugged the redundantly-powered switches.
The ironies caused by attempting to prevent faults through increased complexity are multifarious.
I had one client whose installation was at a datacenter with the "standard" triple redundancy of power supply: grid, UPS, and generator. Furthermore, all racks had an "A" and "B" power distribution network. One day they were attempting to bring the "A" power distribution system back into code after inspection (WTF?), so they took "A" offline to make changes. No planned effects, because all the units in the rack had dual power supplies... but then a worker dropped a wrench and "B" went down too after the breaker tripped—for the whole datacenter. Total power loss... and yet the grid was still up.
Lovely.
There's no escape from the fact that increased complexity increases the risk of catastrophic failure. To wit: if the 2013 Super Bowl didn't have the multi-grid relay installed, they wouldn't have had any outage. The power failure prevention mechanism caused the outage. Simpler is usually better, unless people want to pay massively to eliminate all their single points of failure in order to escape the bathtub curve of ironically-diminished reliability caused by the increased complexity of a naively-implemented "redundant system". Even in "properly engineered, no-single-point-of-failure" systems there are often hidden failure vectors, so I normally advocate simplicity and "warm standby" approaches.
Uhhh...we solved this problem ages ago with UPS. If you care about your data put the machine on a UPS. I've had my business customers on UPS systems for years, showed them how to test the batteries and swap 'em when they get worn out, no problems.
That may help, but it isn't sufficient. I had one client on an APC SmartUPS that caused more power failures than it prevented. Why? Ambient thermal shutdown of the SmartUPS resulted in it abruptly powering off repeatedly even while the grid was up. So, if they did not have a UPS installed they would not have had any of those power outages, and, for bonus irony, grid failures were quite rare and never occurred while I was there.
This may seem like it goes without saying, but the installation context matters.
Most enterprise SSDs do have small supercapacitors or capacitor arrays onboard for exactly this reason. Some of the higher-end consumer drives do too. But most consumer drives don't.
The answer? Get a UPS.
A UPS is no panacea: I experience grid failure very rarely.
However, relatively speaking I experience many more kernel lockups that require an ACPI-initiated poweroff by holding down the power button until the machine abruptly powers off. What do you do when a reboot/poweroff command causes your Linux/BSD machine to hang? I/O handle leaks in the Samba SMB client (ie. *not* the smbd daemon) and the Samba Winbind code are notorious for this. The only times I have ever had to "yank power" from a production Linux database machine were due to SMB share mount zombies or Winbind that the kernel couldn't kill even during an issued reboot command.
I have several OCZ Vertex 4 SSDs, and this concerns me—especially due to the fact that the paper/presentation does not disclose the test results. I guess I will just have to hope that my device models aren't affected and/or that waiting a minute or two during a hung poweroff/reboot means the kernel has stopped attempting to write to the devices and everything has flushed.
PS. If you compare the vague results in the summary with the paper you will find that only two of the fifteen drives passed the tests, yet four of the devices were cited to have power protection capacitors.
Of course, I realize there are "anti-science" people who don't believe in the existence of Martian dinosaurs.
Everyone knows that Ares is just testing our faith by giving people false memories of encountering these vaunted-yet-imaginary animals, their scat, their remains, etc. Some people even falsely "remember" friends or family members being devoured by carnivorous Martian dinosaurs. Of course, that just means the memories of those people are just part of the faith test.
Repeat after me: Martian dinosaurs are only a THEORY, and a contradictory one at that. The Book of Beginnings clearly states that all life was made in Ares' image, and these so-called "Martian dinosaurs" look nothing like we Martians. How do you answer *that* one, science? Ha, you can't!
Just walk into any store and buy a prepaid visa with cash. Use prepaid visa to buy bitcoins. Done and done.
Have you actually tried to do that? The approach doesn't work.
Yes, you can buy an anonymous prepaid Visa with cash, but it's effectively worthless for purchasing bitcoins. As I said before, services don't take credit/debit card payments for bitcoins because those payments are reversible and bitcoin transfers are irreversible. Furthermore, PayPal will not let you setup a payment using these cards (it's automatically detected based on card number and the payment blocked)—not that many sellers take PayPal for bitcoins anyway because it's likely against the PayPal AUP (cf. "currency exchanges").
I have seen a few individual seller offers to take preloaded value cards such as MoneyPak or Visa gift cards for bitcoins, but they require you to either physically mail the card to the seller and/or wait until the value is drained from the card before they will transfer the bitcoins. Some individual sellers might take MoneyPak with a scanned image of the receipt (which can then be used to immediately load the seller's PayPal account), but sellers get nervous about this due to fraud, chargebacks, etc.
In synopsis, you might find individual sellers who take these kinds of payments, but it's just as slow, inefficient, and insecure as paying with literal cash, except with the added overhead of the prepaid card fees. Furthermore, the approach definitely doesn't work for any bitcoin exchange service (at least not while preserving anonymity).
It's one of few anonymous ways to obtain bitcoins
on
World's First Bitcoin ATM
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· Score: 5, Interesting
It is actually quite hard to obtain bitcoins anonymously.
The days of CPU-based mining are long over, and even the current "economy" of multi-GPU-based mining rigs is about to be eclipsed by the ASIC-based devices coming online this year.
There are effectively no services that will take anonymous payment for bitcoins. Paying via bank account ACH or check is certainly not anonymous, and the same goes for credit/debit card payment. Furthermore, any credit/debit based payment is potentially reversible via chargebacks, etc, so most places don't take that kind of payment due to the fact that bitcoin transfers are irreversible.
Services like Bitinstant claim to take cash for bitcoins, but what that really means is that they require payment via MoneyGram, which requires you to present government-issued ID when sending payment. This is linked to the Bitinstant anti-money laundering policy, which requires your real name, etc. Dwolla wants a name, SSN, government ID, etc, to setup an account. As for Mt. Gox? Heh, they require everything but a DNA sample in order to use the exchange. Any service registered as a "money services business" in FinCEN will have these kinds of restrictions.
Obtaining bitcoins locally requires finding someone offering them for sale, negotiating price each time, and likely a face-to-face meeting to hand over cash. If one is really patient and trusting, a deal might be able to be struck for sending cash in an envelope. However, the bitcoin market is extremely volatile, which tends to undermine these types of deals.
Anyway, this ATM seems very convenient and anonymous; ergo, it likely will fall afoul of the anti-money laundering laws in one way or another.
The FCC should put the entire radio spectrum up for sale to the highest bidder on a rotating 10-year cycle, nothing exempt except for a few bands set aside for emergency services, military, and scientific use.
So, who exactly is going to bid on making part of the spectrum unlicensed and then pay to allocate it for nonexclusive use? Or does the current 2.4 & 5 GHz unlicensed spectra for WiFi/"whatever the hell anyone wants to use it for" count under one of those exemptions you list? None of them seem applicable to me.
I'm one of those pinko liberal democrats. But where electromagnetic spectrum is concerned, I'm as mercenary as they come.
I'm therefore surprised you didn't come out in strong support of a public commons of unlicensed spectra. You talked about selling off this spectrum for exclusive access, but you didn't mention the option of not selling it at all.
I like the fact that we have all these gadgets playing together (and yes, sometimes interfering) in unlicensed spectra. How many of these things wouldn't exist if their inventor/manufacturer had to purchase expensive exclusive access frequency because no public commons existed?
Your argument seems analogous to advocating preventing city planners from allocating space for a public park and arguing that citizens who really want a park will just band together and buy the real estate to make one. Who cares if the local landfill cartel can outbid the neighborhood park boosters?
Nebraska would only be a relevant comparison if it allowed Democrats to claim a majority of it's EC votes, as opposed to one or two. And that's assuming Democrats were the ones to pass that law in the first place, in a heavily Republican state.
One electoral college vote is more than the zero Democrats have historically enjoyed (or had any prospect of claiming) in Nebraska. As I mentioned repeatedly, the Nebraska Republicans have tried to abolish the split electoral college vote in Nebraska precisely because it does not favor Republicans there.
I like the concept, I like the approach, and I would support its implementation in *all* states. As I have explained several times, I like the approach for non-partisan reasons and I would still be supporting the idea if Democrats were the ones who stood to benefit. I have endorsed this idea for years, even when Maine and Nebraska were the only states who had implemented this system, it netted in favor of Democrats, and no other states were publicly considering it.
I dislike gerrymandering and I believe that is the crux of most objections about this concept (ie. most of the complaints are about the effects rather than the root cause). Feel free to read some of the other posts with vakuona exploring the idea. The major problem with implementing the system is that whichever party presently has the edge in the "winner take all" system will be opposed to any change, and in swing states neither party will want to change for fear of reducing the massive amount of pandering and attention they receive during the general election cycle.
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You know, my engineering and chemistry profs were always ranting how important lab books were. Naturally, they were very anal about everything having to be documented in there. Hours of my life were wasted copying things from neatly rendered diagrams and text in the lab handouts as crude, hand-drawn facsimiles and block print rendered in carbon copy for the lab submission.
"You will thank me someday; lab books are admissible in court! As a matter of fact, this one guy who actually works in industry told me that people who forget to sign a page in their lab notebook are summarily fired!"—literally every engineering and chem lab prof I ever had (I swear, it's like they all compared notes and decided to give the suggested speech written by a lab book sales rep)
You know what? In the decade since I graduated, I have heard about *one* of my former classmates seeing a lab book used by someone *once*. Call it "roughly as common as a Bigfoot sighting". So, chalk all that up under "Lies My Professors Told Me".
FWIW, it's not that hard to tell what someone was doing/whether they're working. Have them write decent log messages when they commit. Or check the ticketing system revision history, whatever. If someone isn't checking in work for a suspicious amount of time, then follow up. If you wonder whether someone is worth their salt, dump a log of their diffs/work product from a chosen time range.
I would take versioned work in a repo over a handwritten lab book any day. Also, I would wonder how much time my report spent handwriting a personal lab book. I would rather see that time spent submitting work-in-progress diffs with meaningful logs that are checked into a server repo that is backed up, accessible to everyone else on the team, and forms a coherent history of our project for future analysis.
I retract my statement if your industry relies on hand drawings on paper, with no electronic document interchange or electronic work product. In that case, I suggest saving the carbon copies of the memos you type with your Selectric to exchange via interdepartmental mail.
It would be interesting if somebody did an empirical experiment on this.
There have been such studies in the US already; Google "ballot name order effect". It even looks like some of them have controlled for whether party affiliation was displayed.
I also wanted to mention the related Australian concept of the donkey vote, though that's an unintended consequence of compulsory voting.
So Revelations is when a bad update crashes the system? The four programmers of the apocalypse?
No! Didn't you read the passage? The horsemen clearly were driving hardware, and their names were Stack-Overflow, Divide-By-Zero, Off-By-One, and behold! The driver of the pale hardware was named IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL, and Non-Maskable Interrupt was following close behind him.
Well it's not just fileserving. I have a software RAID5, so everytime I write a file, it has to calculate parity information in addition to writing to 5 SATA drives simultaneously, and the bottleneck is still the Gigabit network.
I don't know if you are aware of the risks that have been mounting for RAID-5, but I am constructing an 18 TB total capacity home NAS and I have chosen software-based, double-parity RAID-Z2 for that reason.
If you are interested in standard RAID levels, then consideration for a double-parity RAID-6 may be in order.
Even Intel talks about Atom's abysmal performance. The good news is the next gen Atoms will be bringing real performance to low power. They're going to be completely difference archs.
Yes, but will they support more than 4 GB of RAM? No doubt it was Intel's marketing department that foisted that limitation on all previous versions. Can't "cannibalize" the lower end of your Core market, eh?
Well, that particular decision made me choose the AMD Fusion platform instead. Too bad, because I really would have preferred Atom-based systems.
My next purchase will be awarded to the 18 W TDP CPU system that supports 16 GB RAM and AES-NI crypto acceleration—and this opportunity is Intel's to lose (not that they care about it).
The distinction between compensation and wages/salary is not artificial; it is important. As a matter of fact, when companies attempt to conflate "compensation" with "salary" it is often to deceive normal workers into thinking they will be getting more money than they really will.
I discussed a real example of this in my reply to the GP.
Compensation != salary/wages. This distinction is orthogonal to the debate about tax policy.
Salary/wages is a particular type of compensation. Do not make false dichotomies.
Merely alleging salary/wages is a synecdoche for earnings/compensation does not make it so, not least because the US tax law is written this way.
Unless, of course, you believe that all dividends are "salary", in which case I suppose I earned a "salary" from Whole Foods and Union Pacific last year, despite never having been employed by them. If you count capital gains, then this year I earned a "salary" from Netflix, despite never having seen their corporate campus.
Having a distinction between monetary compensation (salary/wages) and total compensation in employment is important and necessary, unless you really believe employer-paid health insurance, employee stock ownership programs, and 'free bagel Fridays' should be lumped with cash compensation and referred to as "salary". However, most people would be upset if they took a job offering a high "salary" only to discover their "salary" was a $1 paycheck and the rest as restricted stock options that couldn't be exercised for 5 years.
My friend once received a job offer from a startup that tried that stunt: they attempted to count the projected, eventual value of the offered stock options as part of the dollar compensation to try to disguise the fact that the salary was so low it would be hard to pay the rent ("...but our stock will *definitely* be worth at least 5x what it's worth today once you can exercise the options in five years, so your annual pay really should be considered as 4x the option strike price + salary!"). That kind of semantics is obviously bullshit and very disingenuous.
Note that I do not argue in favor of preferential tax treatment for capital gains, etc; quite the opposite, in fact.
I always back up my cloud data to a local harddrive, just to be safe.
That sounds like vaporware.
Who makes $1-2 billion per year as a salary on a regular basis?
Just to answer the question: David Tepper made $4,000,000,000.
Just to correct your misstatement: no, he did *not* make a $4e9 salary. Don't conflate compensation/earnings with salary/wages. They aren't the same.
Top 50 hedge fund managers make hundreds of millions of dollars. Each. Pay 15% in taxes.
I actually don't believe there should be a limit on salaries but I don't believe people in higher tax brackets should pay less percent in taxes than people in the lower tax bracket.
Then perhaps your real complaint is that capital gains are taxed at a privileged rate. They would have been paying in the highest tax bracket (35% + 1.45% in federal tax *alone*) if their compensation was salary, which would represent a much higher tax rate than people in the lower brackets.
FWIW, I can find no reason why capital gains should be taxed differently than income. I think the Buffett Rule is needlessly complex: just tax capital gains as income and be done with it.
Today they are no where near what the government could throw at you (know anybody that owns an A-10 warthog, or a Tomahawk cruise missile?). The idea of the 2nd amendment acting as the people's deterrent to corrupt government is absurd, firstly because of the aforementioned mismatch in weaponry.
This is a rather weak argument, as the Iraqis recently convincingly demonstrated to the US military. Before that, the Viet Cong were quite effective as well.
If forces are engaged in asymmetric warfare then it is insane for the disadvantaged belligerent to engage in set piece battles.
Just thought I would let you know that you aren't the only one who would prefer if this guy kept a lower profile.
I also wanted to lend a modicum of support—having a positive perspective on all our civil liberties isn't considered acceptable in this echo chamber of hoplophobes, as is amply evidenced by the other replies you have garnered so far.
That all makes sense. However, as a practical example, let's say you take a computer that has a power supply that's rated for 600 W and has a power factor of 0.5: that computer will require 1200 VA to drive the load. Furthermore, a computer monitor is practically the definition of a low power factor load, as well as the motors on the printers you wisely exclude from the UPS circuit.
BTW, adding power factor correction is what the 80 Plus power supply certification program is about.
If you want to compare your wattage, true VA load, and power factor (watts / power_factor == VA) then I suggest grabbing a Kill A Watt meter. Amazon has them for less than $20.
So, doubling the wattage in VA is certainly a reasonable thing to do and would be precisely correct if the power factor for everything nets to be 0.5. Also, when your clients are upgrading their computers have them get power supplies with active power factor correction. It will decrease the load on their UPS as well as decreasing the day-to-day load on their HVAC (less waste heat).
Need a Kilowatt? Buy 2. Yes it sucks but you have to play the game and that I've found is a good hard fast rule that works for pretty much any company in the UPS business.
Yes, that sucks, and I am no defender of the UPS industry.
However, remember that UPS's are listed VA rather than watts. Power factor is an important issue, and that's why a UPS/small gasoline generator sucks for spinning up an A/C unit motor, or in the case of technology, a highly capacitive load. If (and only if) your load is purely resistive then VA==watts, otherwise, watts < VA consumption. All computer systems will have a power factor of <1. Simply put, if you drive an incandescent light bulb then VA is the same as wattage, but if there is any capacitance (computer hardware) or inductance (motors), then VA is higher than wattage because the power factor is less than 1.
VA is the only fair metric for a UPS manufacturer to use, because it's trivial to come up with a load that has very high VA consumption while having close to zero wattage (ie. very low power factor)... however, that high VA load still drains the UPS battery that is running an inverter to produce an AC waveform.
Watts pulled from the wall (ie. with no power factor applied) is most certainly not the same as the VA that UPS capacity is listed in. It makes sense that it is harder to spin up a motor or drive the capacitive load on a computer than it is to drive a simple resistor like an incandescent light bulb.
Now, if you're alleging that the manufacturer-cited UPS VA capacity is being treated similarly to the laptop manufacturers' "estimated runtime" inflation then you may be right. I just wanted to ensure you were comparing apples to apples.
You make good points, but the particular SmartUPS I cited was acquired brand new.
I can even understand the thermal shutdown (despite the irony it caused); however, why didn't it use the built-in alarm sound when it was approaching thermal shutdown? These units scream incessantly if they don't like their battery anymore... even worse than a smoke detector does. Why couldn't it have done similarly if it was approaching a thermal cutout? "Happy, happy, happy... DEAD!"
The fact remains that if the client hadn't bothered with the effort and cost of installing a UPS then they would have suffered *zero* power outages over the course of the 18+ months I was there.
I don't understand how if they claim that it takes up to 20 sec for the final write to finalize that a computer that simply shutsdown in 10 sec won't have the same problem.
Drives support a blocking "sync" command that is only supposed to return when the drive has flushed all pending writes and has reached quiescence. If there is nothing pending to flush then the command will return immediately. If not, it may take the cited 20 seconds to return. Normal reboot/poweroff procedure in the OS waits for this condition, and this has been around forever (the HDD equivalent is to flush write cache and park the heads). That's why a 10 second shutdown can be safe even with the putative 20 second worst-case writeout window—if there are pending writes then there is nothing to do.
Yanking the power prevents this sanity check from happening.
That multi-grid relay was supposed to be a warm standby approach, but it was too clever for its own good
Haha, absolutely. Once I had a client who "upgraded" their gigabit ethernet topology to provide multipath IO from their production servers to their SAN. All these switches had dual power supplies connected to dual distribution power systems and the servers had dual power supplies, dual NICs on separate VLANS, etc. Fair enough; I enabled MPIO for the ISCSI SAN access on the production servers.
What *actually* happened? A month later we experienced massive data loss from production server process output because the mulitpath IO to the SAN triggered a firmware bug in the SAN and made it abruptly drop offline completely (and also corrupt recently-written data FTW). Comparatively speaking, how often was it likely that we would lose network access from the server to the SAN (which was in the same rack) in a single-path ethernet configuration? What, failure of the solid-state ethernet switch? Ethernet cable failure in unmoving cables? Ha.
Later on in a separate incident, we lost access to the SAN because someone was doing maintenance to the switch plug configuration during business hours and redundantly unplugged the redundantly-powered switches.
The ironies caused by attempting to prevent faults through increased complexity are multifarious.
I had one client whose installation was at a datacenter with the "standard" triple redundancy of power supply: grid, UPS, and generator. Furthermore, all racks had an "A" and "B" power distribution network. One day they were attempting to bring the "A" power distribution system back into code after inspection (WTF?), so they took "A" offline to make changes. No planned effects, because all the units in the rack had dual power supplies... but then a worker dropped a wrench and "B" went down too after the breaker tripped—for the whole datacenter. Total power loss... and yet the grid was still up.
Lovely.
There's no escape from the fact that increased complexity increases the risk of catastrophic failure. To wit: if the 2013 Super Bowl didn't have the multi-grid relay installed, they wouldn't have had any outage. The power failure prevention mechanism caused the outage. Simpler is usually better, unless people want to pay massively to eliminate all their single points of failure in order to escape the bathtub curve of ironically-diminished reliability caused by the increased complexity of a naively-implemented "redundant system". Even in "properly engineered, no-single-point-of-failure" systems there are often hidden failure vectors, so I normally advocate simplicity and "warm standby" approaches.
Uhhh...we solved this problem ages ago with UPS. If you care about your data put the machine on a UPS. I've had my business customers on UPS systems for years, showed them how to test the batteries and swap 'em when they get worn out, no problems.
That may help, but it isn't sufficient. I had one client on an APC SmartUPS that caused more power failures than it prevented. Why? Ambient thermal shutdown of the SmartUPS resulted in it abruptly powering off repeatedly even while the grid was up. So, if they did not have a UPS installed they would not have had any of those power outages, and, for bonus irony, grid failures were quite rare and never occurred while I was there.
This may seem like it goes without saying, but the installation context matters.
Most enterprise SSDs do have small supercapacitors or capacitor arrays onboard for exactly this reason. Some of the higher-end consumer drives do too. But most consumer drives don't.
The answer? Get a UPS.
A UPS is no panacea: I experience grid failure very rarely.
However, relatively speaking I experience many more kernel lockups that require an ACPI-initiated poweroff by holding down the power button until the machine abruptly powers off. What do you do when a reboot/poweroff command causes your Linux/BSD machine to hang? I/O handle leaks in the Samba SMB client (ie. *not* the smbd daemon) and the Samba Winbind code are notorious for this. The only times I have ever had to "yank power" from a production Linux database machine were due to SMB share mount zombies or Winbind that the kernel couldn't kill even during an issued reboot command.
I have several OCZ Vertex 4 SSDs, and this concerns me—especially due to the fact that the paper/presentation does not disclose the test results. I guess I will just have to hope that my device models aren't affected and/or that waiting a minute or two during a hung poweroff/reboot means the kernel has stopped attempting to write to the devices and everything has flushed.
PS. If you compare the vague results in the summary with the paper you will find that only two of the fifteen drives passed the tests, yet four of the devices were cited to have power protection capacitors.
Of course, I realize there are "anti-science" people who don't believe in the existence of Martian dinosaurs.
Everyone knows that Ares is just testing our faith by giving people false memories of encountering these vaunted-yet-imaginary animals, their scat, their remains, etc. Some people even falsely "remember" friends or family members being devoured by carnivorous Martian dinosaurs. Of course, that just means the memories of those people are just part of the faith test.
Repeat after me: Martian dinosaurs are only a THEORY, and a contradictory one at that. The Book of Beginnings clearly states that all life was made in Ares' image, and these so-called "Martian dinosaurs" look nothing like we Martians. How do you answer *that* one, science? Ha, you can't!
Just walk into any store and buy a prepaid visa with cash. Use prepaid visa to buy bitcoins. Done and done.
Have you actually tried to do that? The approach doesn't work.
Yes, you can buy an anonymous prepaid Visa with cash, but it's effectively worthless for purchasing bitcoins. As I said before, services don't take credit/debit card payments for bitcoins because those payments are reversible and bitcoin transfers are irreversible. Furthermore, PayPal will not let you setup a payment using these cards (it's automatically detected based on card number and the payment blocked)—not that many sellers take PayPal for bitcoins anyway because it's likely against the PayPal AUP (cf. "currency exchanges").
I have seen a few individual seller offers to take preloaded value cards such as MoneyPak or Visa gift cards for bitcoins, but they require you to either physically mail the card to the seller and/or wait until the value is drained from the card before they will transfer the bitcoins. Some individual sellers might take MoneyPak with a scanned image of the receipt (which can then be used to immediately load the seller's PayPal account), but sellers get nervous about this due to fraud, chargebacks, etc.
In synopsis, you might find individual sellers who take these kinds of payments, but it's just as slow, inefficient, and insecure as paying with literal cash, except with the added overhead of the prepaid card fees. Furthermore, the approach definitely doesn't work for any bitcoin exchange service (at least not while preserving anonymity).
It is actually quite hard to obtain bitcoins anonymously.
The days of CPU-based mining are long over, and even the current "economy" of multi-GPU-based mining rigs is about to be eclipsed by the ASIC-based devices coming online this year.
There are effectively no services that will take anonymous payment for bitcoins. Paying via bank account ACH or check is certainly not anonymous, and the same goes for credit/debit card payment. Furthermore, any credit/debit based payment is potentially reversible via chargebacks, etc, so most places don't take that kind of payment due to the fact that bitcoin transfers are irreversible.
Services like Bitinstant claim to take cash for bitcoins, but what that really means is that they require payment via MoneyGram, which requires you to present government-issued ID when sending payment. This is linked to the Bitinstant anti-money laundering policy, which requires your real name, etc. Dwolla wants a name, SSN, government ID, etc, to setup an account. As for Mt. Gox? Heh, they require everything but a DNA sample in order to use the exchange. Any service registered as a "money services business" in FinCEN will have these kinds of restrictions.
Obtaining bitcoins locally requires finding someone offering them for sale, negotiating price each time, and likely a face-to-face meeting to hand over cash. If one is really patient and trusting, a deal might be able to be struck for sending cash in an envelope. However, the bitcoin market is extremely volatile, which tends to undermine these types of deals.
Anyway, this ATM seems very convenient and anonymous; ergo, it likely will fall afoul of the anti-money laundering laws in one way or another.
I forgot. Slashdot doesn't do Unicode :D
Slashdot Japan has been UTF-8 for approximately a decade now. So, what's the excuse here?
The FCC should put the entire radio spectrum up for sale to the highest bidder on a rotating 10-year cycle, nothing exempt except for a few bands set aside for emergency services, military, and scientific use.
So, who exactly is going to bid on making part of the spectrum unlicensed and then pay to allocate it for nonexclusive use? Or does the current 2.4 & 5 GHz unlicensed spectra for WiFi/"whatever the hell anyone wants to use it for" count under one of those exemptions you list? None of them seem applicable to me.
I'm one of those pinko liberal democrats. But where electromagnetic spectrum is concerned, I'm as mercenary as they come.
I'm therefore surprised you didn't come out in strong support of a public commons of unlicensed spectra. You talked about selling off this spectrum for exclusive access, but you didn't mention the option of not selling it at all.
I like the fact that we have all these gadgets playing together (and yes, sometimes interfering) in unlicensed spectra. How many of these things wouldn't exist if their inventor/manufacturer had to purchase expensive exclusive access frequency because no public commons existed?
Your argument seems analogous to advocating preventing city planners from allocating space for a public park and arguing that citizens who really want a park will just band together and buy the real estate to make one. Who cares if the local landfill cartel can outbid the neighborhood park boosters?
Nebraska would only be a relevant comparison if it allowed Democrats to claim a majority of it's EC votes, as opposed to one or two. And that's assuming Democrats were the ones to pass that law in the first place, in a heavily Republican state.
One electoral college vote is more than the zero Democrats have historically enjoyed (or had any prospect of claiming) in Nebraska. As I mentioned repeatedly, the Nebraska Republicans have tried to abolish the split electoral college vote in Nebraska precisely because it does not favor Republicans there.
I like the concept, I like the approach, and I would support its implementation in *all* states. As I have explained several times, I like the approach for non-partisan reasons and I would still be supporting the idea if Democrats were the ones who stood to benefit. I have endorsed this idea for years, even when Maine and Nebraska were the only states who had implemented this system, it netted in favor of Democrats, and no other states were publicly considering it.
I dislike gerrymandering and I believe that is the crux of most objections about this concept (ie. most of the complaints are about the effects rather than the root cause). Feel free to read some of the other posts with vakuona exploring the idea. The major problem with implementing the system is that whichever party presently has the edge in the "winner take all" system will be opposed to any change, and in swing states neither party will want to change for fear of reducing the massive amount of pandering and attention they receive during the general election cycle.