=== No, it's not preventative. It does nothing to prevent the problem. It detects the problem earlier (before, say, a business user does). That's monitoring. It's proactive, not reactive - perhaps that's what you mean? ===
It is deeply unclear whether what is traditionally termed "preventative maintenance" (intrusive work involving disassembling, eyeballing, software probing, etc) actually improves reliability over conditioning monitoring tests followed by break-fix work as described by the parent post. More PM, more procedures, more teardowns, and so forth are the standard prescription for improving reliability but there is metric tons of evidence the universe just doesn't work that way.
=== "Is preventive maintenance on data center equipment not really that preventive after all? With human error cited as a leading cause of downtime, a vigorous maintenance schedule can actually make a data center less reliable, according to some industry experts.' ===
It isn't just human error: the very act of performing intrusive tasks under the theory of "preventative maintenance" can greatly reduce reliability of systems built of reasonably reliable components. This was studied extensively by the US airlines, US FAA, and later the USAF in the 1970s when the concept of reliability centered maintenance was developed for turbine engines and eventually full airliners. Look up the classic report by Nowland & Heap. Very much counter-intuitive if one has been trained to believe in the classics of "preventative teardowns" and fully known failure probability distribution functions, but matches up well to what experience field mechanics have been saying since the days of the pyramid construction.
sPh
Of course, today there is a huge "RCM" consulting industry, 7-step programs, etc that bears little resemblance to the original research and theories; don't confuse that with the core work.
Re:Only "troubled" if you're not Lockheed Martin
on
The F-35 Story
·
· Score: 1
I should note too that if you read through the history of the National Bureau of Standards you will find that they started producing precision materials and electrical components in bulk quantities during WWI because no private manufacturer could meet the necessary standards, and actually kept a fairly substantial manufacturing operation through the missile age of the 1950s before finally turning it over the Air Force and various private industries.
sPh
Re:Only "troubled" if you're not Lockheed Martin
on
The F-35 Story
·
· Score: 1
Well, you could try googling "navy aircraft factory" which brings this up as the first hit:
but the US services built their own airplanes at other locations too including Wright Field.
sPh
Re:Only "troubled" if you're not Lockheed Martin
on
The F-35 Story
·
· Score: 1
> Heck, the Army never built and supplied the guns, Jeeps, etc > that they utilized.
Ah, you might want to google "Rock Island Arsenal" and read up a bit on its history. That's just one among many. And while much of that work was contracted out, even in the early days (by which I mean starting with the Continental Congress), there was also the principle of doing much key work and some volume work in-house to maintain the knowledge that is crucial for successful outsourcing.
sPh
Re:Isn't that the point of the aircraft?
on
The F-35 Story
·
· Score: 1
> Fix welfare; and by "fix" I mean "nuke from orbit" and start over from scratch. Welfare is hopelessly > broken, because it is no longer the temporary assistance program it was intended to be but has > become a system which ensures people remain a slave to it.
Somewhat curious as to how the changes to what you term "welfare" which were put in place by the Clinton Administration and Congress specifically to address the concerns you note have been undone? Because I have seen no sign of such undoing either in Congress or the state governments; just the opposite if anything.
> I know multiple people who are struggling financially and are receiving assistance, want to get off > it but because their industries are dead, or are unable to perform their old jobs, have sought > alternate work, but taking a lower-paying job as a temporary stepping stone results in losing all > assistance, including food stamps, which leaves them in a worse predicament than they started out in.
That's an entirely different problem from that of "welfare" you started out with, and one which is far less tractable (particularly given the social constraints imposed on the US by its 1%).
sPh
Re:F-4 Phantom II - a joint service success
on
The F-35 Story
·
· Score: 1
> he F-111 may have failed
It certainly failed against its original spec, but as a medium bomber it had no equal. The RAAF just retired their last batch and there is nothing in the arsenal (the non-Russian arsenal anyway) that comes even close to replacing them for Australia's sea control requirements.
sPh
Re:Only "troubled" if you're not Lockheed Martin
on
The F-35 Story
·
· Score: 2
> I believe weapons development of this type was always done by contractors. NASA never built rockets, the Navy never > built ships and the Army/Air Force never built planes.
Both the US Navy and the Army built airplanes in the 1910-194x time period, and did so in part so that they could stay on top of manufacturing technology and costing to allow better management of contracted production. I believe the Navy has also built its own ships from time to time for the same reason, and it certainly maintained very large design bureaus through at least the 1970s which did much of the research, engineering, design, and project management of ship construction.
> If Gardacil prevents 90% of those cases (it's a very effective vaccine), then vaccination > has an effective cost of approximately $157,000 per case (assuming we amortize the initial > 14Bn hit over 20 years). > > I understand there are other public health benefits than simply prevention of cervical cancer, > but let's hope we get a biosimilar quickly to drive the cost of vaccination down significantly.
Even on a pure cost/benefit basis the key is that cervical cancer hits women around the 20-25 age range, which means their value-of-life is in the $3 million range. Very much a win by public policy analysis alone (not to say a human suffering analysis given the young age at death).
> You don't have to use Google if you don't want to.
That's really not true. It is becoming essentially impossible to get a job, deal with a hospital, open a utility account, enroll in a school, etc etc etc without having a solid accessible e-mail address and using a variety of web services. You might be able to escape one of the big providers (e.g. Google) but you essentially cannot function in a modern society and escape them all.
> The ability to sell all a company's IT needs from datacenter to desktop was > actually a non-trivial advantage over IBM for a lot of procurement situations, > this means they will forfeit that advantage going forward and lose server sales.
As long as the master vendor takes ownership of the commodity product (specs, warranty, service, etc) does it matter what the name is on the box? Historically IBM would (re)sell you almost anything except Amdahl, and I have purchased plenty of non-IBM stuff from them over the years as part of larger contracts. Same thing should apply to HP, and eventually they will have greater flexibility to offer other brands besides the ex-HP PC units if it makes sense to do so.
> An awful lot of people the world over, especially in the US, do not > fetishize anonymity to anywhere near the extent that you do.
Perhaps you could expand a little on why you chose the word 'fetishize' in that sentence instead of, say, 'value'.
sPh
Does anyone really like 3D?
on
Beyond HDTV
·
· Score: 2
Does anyone really like 3D, particularly in the home environment? One or maybe two 3D movies per half-decade is OK, but I don't hear (or see in line at the theater) any great demand for 3D other than among Hollywood marketing execs.
> To be fair, Facebook had to customize both PHP and MySQL to get > "serious" throughput out of them... naturally this is an example of the > OSS model triumphing, but it does suggest that there was some truth to the idea.
Also to be fair, Facebook's business model does not require transactional integrity and a 95% or so success rate in committing updates is acceptable to them, so with that model the advantages of an Oracle or DB2 are not necessary. If Facebook guaranteed commits to its customers the situation would be different.
Not every nation/culture on Earth uses the concept of the fixed "Legal Name" as used in the US. Even in the US there are many situations where it is generally believed that one "must" provide some sort of government-issued ID showing one's "legal name" where that is not actually the case.
George RR Martin has 2 pages on his web site of people who named their babies after characters in Game of Thrones (and not just the relatively good characters either!).
SAP develops and sells various forms of business process management software (which generally includes subsystems such as financials {General Ledger, A/P, A/R, etc}, customer order processing, manufacturing management, purchasing, warehouse management, shipping, receiving, payroll, etc), often known as ERP (originally Enterprise Resource Planning). SAP AG generally trades places from year to year with IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle as the world's largest software supplier.
I dunno - after my first 10 ERP implementations I sort of lost track of which system I worked on for which project/employer. Clearly you know far more than I.
> If you're actually suggesting writing X versions of stored procedures > just to be able to run on X different DBs that's not solving the > migration problem. That's continuously living in the migration problem.
Yes, that is exactly what the parent is suggesting, since experience shows it is the only way to get correct, performant, scalable systems. Organizations that actually have a need to support multiple databases (few truly do) generally find that this method is in the end less labor-intensive than attempting to recreate the features and services that Oracle, IBM, Microsoft/Sybase have spent 10s of millions of manhours developing over 30 years; instead they use those features that they (and their customers, if they are software vendors) paid the big bucks for.
I'd would ask that you think deeply about this and do some research before replying; keep in mind that "common practice since 2000" is not the same thing as most efficient practice.
There's this thing out there called "business", which tends to use software to assist with running its day-to-day activities. You might want to Google a bit along those lines - I hear these "business" thingies might hire some people from time to time.
Slashdot Mirror
===
No, it's not preventative. It does nothing to prevent the problem. It detects the problem earlier (before, say, a business user does). That's monitoring. It's proactive, not reactive - perhaps that's what you mean?
===
It is deeply unclear whether what is traditionally termed "preventative maintenance" (intrusive work involving disassembling, eyeballing, software probing, etc) actually improves reliability over conditioning monitoring tests followed by break-fix work as described by the parent post. More PM, more procedures, more teardowns, and so forth are the standard prescription for improving reliability but there is metric tons of evidence the universe just doesn't work that way.
sPh
===
n the 1970s when
===
Sorry; that should be "1960s" not 70s.
===
"Is preventive maintenance on data center equipment not really that preventive after all? With human error cited as a leading cause of downtime, a vigorous maintenance schedule can actually make a data center less reliable, according to some industry experts.'
===
It isn't just human error: the very act of performing intrusive tasks under the theory of "preventative maintenance" can greatly reduce reliability of systems built of reasonably reliable components. This was studied extensively by the US airlines, US FAA, and later the USAF in the 1970s when the concept of reliability centered maintenance was developed for turbine engines and eventually full airliners. Look up the classic report by Nowland & Heap. Very much counter-intuitive if one has been trained to believe in the classics of "preventative teardowns" and fully known failure probability distribution functions, but matches up well to what experience field mechanics have been saying since the days of the pyramid construction.
sPh
Of course, today there is a huge "RCM" consulting industry, 7-step programs, etc that bears little resemblance to the original research and theories; don't confuse that with the core work.
I should note too that if you read through the history of the National Bureau of Standards you will find that they started producing precision materials and electrical components in bulk quantities during WWI because no private manufacturer could meet the necessary standards, and actually kept a fairly substantial manufacturing operation through the missile age of the 1950s before finally turning it over the Air Force and various private industries.
sPh
Well, you could try googling "navy aircraft factory" which brings this up as the first hit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Aircraft_Factory
but the US services built their own airplanes at other locations too including Wright Field.
sPh
> Heck, the Army never built and supplied the guns, Jeeps, etc
> that they utilized.
Ah, you might want to google "Rock Island Arsenal" and read up a bit on its history. That's just one among many. And while much of that work was contracted out, even in the early days (by which I mean starting with the Continental Congress), there was also the principle of doing much key work and some volume work in-house to maintain the knowledge that is crucial for successful outsourcing.
sPh
> Fix welfare; and by "fix" I mean "nuke from orbit" and start over from scratch. Welfare is hopelessly
> broken, because it is no longer the temporary assistance program it was intended to be but has
> become a system which ensures people remain a slave to it.
Somewhat curious as to how the changes to what you term "welfare" which were put in place by the Clinton Administration and Congress specifically to address the concerns you note have been undone? Because I have seen no sign of such undoing either in Congress or the state governments; just the opposite if anything.
> I know multiple people who are struggling financially and are receiving assistance, want to get off
> it but because their industries are dead, or are unable to perform their old jobs, have sought
> alternate work, but taking a lower-paying job as a temporary stepping stone results in losing all
> assistance, including food stamps, which leaves them in a worse predicament than they started out in.
That's an entirely different problem from that of "welfare" you started out with, and one which is far less tractable (particularly given the social constraints imposed on the US by its 1%).
sPh
> he F-111 may have failed
It certainly failed against its original spec, but as a medium bomber it had no equal. The RAAF just retired their last batch and there is nothing in the arsenal (the non-Russian arsenal anyway) that comes even close to replacing them for Australia's sea control requirements.
sPh
> I believe weapons development of this type was always done by contractors. NASA never built rockets, the Navy never
> built ships and the Army/Air Force never built planes.
Both the US Navy and the Army built airplanes in the 1910-194x time period, and did so in part so that they could stay on top of manufacturing technology and costing to allow better management of contracted production. I believe the Navy has also built its own ships from time to time for the same reason, and it certainly maintained very large design bureaus through at least the 1970s which did much of the research, engineering, design, and project management of ship construction.
sPh
> If Gardacil prevents 90% of those cases (it's a very effective vaccine), then vaccination
> has an effective cost of approximately $157,000 per case (assuming we amortize the initial
> 14Bn hit over 20 years).
>
> I understand there are other public health benefits than simply prevention of cervical cancer,
> but let's hope we get a biosimilar quickly to drive the cost of vaccination down significantly.
Even on a pure cost/benefit basis the key is that cervical cancer hits women around the 20-25 age range, which means their value-of-life is in the $3 million range. Very much a win by public policy analysis alone (not to say a human suffering analysis given the young age at death).
sPh
> You don't have to use Google if you don't want to.
That's really not true. It is becoming essentially impossible to get a job, deal with a hospital, open a utility account, enroll in a school, etc etc etc without having a solid accessible e-mail address and using a variety of web services. You might be able to escape one of the big providers (e.g. Google) but you essentially cannot function in a modern society and escape them all.
sPh
In other words, CERN studies lack of connection between cosmic rays and climate change.
sPh
> The ability to sell all a company's IT needs from datacenter to desktop was
> actually a non-trivial advantage over IBM for a lot of procurement situations,
> this means they will forfeit that advantage going forward and lose server sales.
As long as the master vendor takes ownership of the commodity product (specs, warranty, service, etc) does it matter what the name is on the box? Historically IBM would (re)sell you almost anything except Amdahl, and I have purchased plenty of non-IBM stuff from them over the years as part of larger contracts. Same thing should apply to HP, and eventually they will have greater flexibility to offer other brands besides the ex-HP PC units if it makes sense to do so.
sPh
> An awful lot of people the world over, especially in the US, do not
> fetishize anonymity to anywhere near the extent that you do.
Perhaps you could expand a little on why you chose the word 'fetishize' in that sentence instead of, say, 'value'.
sPh
Does anyone really like 3D, particularly in the home environment? One or maybe two 3D movies per half-decade is OK, but I don't hear (or see in line at the theater) any great demand for 3D other than among Hollywood marketing execs.
sPh
> To be fair, Facebook had to customize both PHP and MySQL to get
> "serious" throughput out of them... naturally this is an example of the
> OSS model triumphing, but it does suggest that there was some truth to the idea.
Also to be fair, Facebook's business model does not require transactional integrity and a 95% or so success rate in committing updates is acceptable to them, so with that model the advantages of an Oracle or DB2 are not necessary. If Facebook guaranteed commits to its customers the situation would be different.
sPh
Not every nation/culture on Earth uses the concept of the fixed "Legal Name" as used in the US. Even in the US there are many situations where it is generally believed that one "must" provide some sort of government-issued ID showing one's "legal name" where that is not actually the case.
sPh
George RR Martin has 2 pages on his web site of people who named their babies after characters in Game of Thrones (and not just the relatively good characters either!).
sPh
Throw TrackMeNot in there too to confuse the sniffers installed at your ISP.
sPh
Better Privacy + Cookie Monster + separate browser just for Facebook. Seems to do a fairly good job in total.
sPh
Or you could go here:
http://www.sap.com/solutions/business-suite/erp/index.epx
sPh
By the way, my posts in no way constitute an endorsement or anti-endorsement of SAP; purely informational ;-)
SAP develops and sells various forms of business process management software (which generally includes subsystems such as financials {General Ledger, A/P, A/R, etc}, customer order processing, manufacturing management, purchasing, warehouse management, shipping, receiving, payroll, etc), often known as ERP (originally Enterprise Resource Planning). SAP AG generally trades places from year to year with IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle as the world's largest software supplier.
sPh
I dunno - after my first 10 ERP implementations I sort of lost track of which system I worked on for which project/employer. Clearly you know far more than I.
sPh
> If you're actually suggesting writing X versions of stored procedures
> just to be able to run on X different DBs that's not solving the
> migration problem. That's continuously living in the migration problem.
Yes, that is exactly what the parent is suggesting, since experience shows it is the only way to get correct, performant, scalable systems. Organizations that actually have a need to support multiple databases (few truly do) generally find that this method is in the end less labor-intensive than attempting to recreate the features and services that Oracle, IBM, Microsoft/Sybase have spent 10s of millions of manhours developing over 30 years; instead they use those features that they (and their customers, if they are software vendors) paid the big bucks for.
I'd would ask that you think deeply about this and do some research before replying; keep in mind that "common practice since 2000" is not the same thing as most efficient practice.
sPh
There's this thing out there called "business", which tends to use software to assist with running its day-to-day activities. You might want to Google a bit along those lines - I hear these "business" thingies might hire some people from time to time.
sPh