At a previous employer, we lost an entire row of servers in a DC after a water leak (somehow) triggered the suppression system. The 'explosion' was strong enough to knock the doors off cabinets, bend 2 cabinets, and cause a couple hundreds drives to be dead. Thankfully our service was spread out far enough to survive the loss of a row for a few week while we waited for all new disks to arrive from IBM.
The pictures were crazy, it looks like a bomb went off.
Sounds like a fairly simple case for a Hadoop cluster - a smallish one at that. We're currently deploying to clusters at 1PB/rack density, which means you could deploy a rack or two easily enough. You'd get compute, you get a single flat filesystem, you get redundancy, all built in. Our biggest cluster is now up to 16PB, all one big compute/storage beast, chugging away all day.
I'd suggest starting with the Hortonworks Sandbox VM - grab it, fire it up, play with it. Add some files, poke around, see if it meets your needs. Learn about mapreduce, or maybe your data can be put in to HIVE for analysis.
The nice thing is that yo ucan use hardware you may already have to get things going. Hortonworks is pretty much at the point of a 'next next finish' installer, so you really only need to dedicate a few hours to getting something up to test. Then, thre's a lot of tuning and craziness to running a bigger cluster, but a POC is simple.
Anyhow, I'm blind, because all I do is Hadoop clusters all day, but this seems like an easy win for ya.
These are the types of Articles I still come to Slashdot for... and for the comments, which have (sadly) diminished in quantity in the last decade. Amazing engineering work, amazing science.
This has been going on in Canada for years now. Even if you aren't landing IN the States, so long as you fly OVER you are subject to screening. My father spoke to someone at the airport one day who was not cleared by DBS, but still managed to get on his flight to the Carribean. His plane had mechanical problems and was forced to land in Florida. When he got off the plane he was met by law enforcement, who read him the riot act and took him directly to jail. He waited there overnight, then was put ona plane home.
Living in southern Ontario, it is pretty much impossible not to fly over the states, even for domestic flights. That means we are all screwed by US rules, living in another country. Our freedom is limited by their assinine rules.
As a Canadian who travels in the US on occasion, what are my rights if I am stopped by one of these? Anyone have any thoughts on the matter? The thought of randomly being searched makes me want to go back to avoiding travel in the US, as I did during the Bush years.
I politely disagree - when you have corporation that have their hands on lawmakers strings, or you have lawmakers who are on the boards of various corporations/etc, you have the 'free market' influencing who is a criminal.
Want proof - read the front page of slashdot today. Or any other day.. the BSA, RIAA, etc...
So, more realistically, it's the government who decides, with the influence of the free market.
No the real mistake was thinking you could haggle with service-level employees at a multinational company. That's the dumbest thing I've heard in a while.
My fiancee has managed to swing deals in many big retail chains - it takes a little persistence, and the ability/desire to walk away. even if walk away means walking out the door, waiting 20 minutes, and coming back to get a different sales guy.
She's Chinese, and says that white people are nuts for paying full price... and I've seen that it's true. Just asking a simple question ("Can you do anything on the price?") has saved us hundreds of dollars (or gotten us lots of stuff thrown in).
I'm a convert, but I still have a hard time with it. I look at the price tag, decide if I can afford to pay that, and buy it if I can. She looks at a price tag and sees a challenge.
Last night I tried to sign in to play, and TF2 wouldn't even launch. It looks like their service was *massively* overloaded.
I bought the game 4 years ago now and I have gotten my money out of it in hours played, however it still irks me that a game I paid for is unavailable to me because of free players jumping on board.
TF2 servers were already frequently full of whiners and trolls, I'm afraid of what this new influx of players will mean. Hopefully the TF2 servers (yes, I know games aren't hosted on their servers, but login/etc is) can handle the new load.
Another significant hurdle is that the TTL on records in the TLDs is generally 7 days, which makes backing out take a little longer than most people are comfortable with, should something bad go down.
you are the target of IPv6 day then - it's a chance for you to try and find out whats wrong. contact your isp, look at your OS version, do upgrades, look at your router. If you're having problems now, you'll have them later - don't wait and hope they go away magically.
> It should also be noted that public sentiment towards China is getting very, very testy.
I'm part of the public, and I know lots of other members of the public - I don't see anyones sentiment anywhere near "testy" about China.
Papers, tv news, radio... I spend a good amount of time keeping up on them, and I don't think I've heard anything 'testy' about China expressed.
Given that that statement doesn't come from the article, I'm guessing either the submitter or editor added that. Either way, stop making shit up. We have Fox News/the Toronto Sun for that
I wish and hope that some day companies will start to address mental health as well as physical heath, specifically related to sick days. If you have a sniffle, they tell you not to come in to work, you'll make someone sick, but if you're stressed out, unable to sleep, on-call for weeks, going through a breakup/divorce, have sick parents etc, and can't handle the mental strain, then you're SOL. Work on a salary? you know all those extra hours you put in for free for the company? Want to get something *back* from them? yeah, right...
"Mental Health" days are widely recognized by non-management types as beneficial, but you don't see companies promoting them. 'take a vacation day' is the common line, but when you're only provided with 10 of them a year , it's awefully 'expensive' to take one because your boss has had you working 12 hour days for 2 weeks and you just need 1 freakin day off to sleep, do laundry, maybe buy some real food for a change.
But seriously, mental health, when you work in a job that is focused on mental performance (as much of IT/geekery is), is just as, or more, important as physical health. I can sit and read documents/manuals, catch up on email, update a few spreadsheets etc with a cold, but if I'm tired/stressed/"out of it", I'm next to useless.
Taking care of employees isn't a concern of companies any longer, if it ever was, despite the fact that giving a little can get them a lot. Policy, process, executive bonuses are all worked around 'you must be in your desk working from x to y and always being productive, or else', instead of the realization that we aren't machines and our brains are more valuable when they're functional than not.
You must have dealt with the 407 ETR highway in Ontario.
I am being chased by collections by them right now, even though I am still disputing the $8000 bill they suddenly sent me.
With no warning they sent me the bill, and though I called them the next day, they'd already sent it to collections. So now I have a ding on my credit, I have collections after me, all for a bill that isn't even REAL. There is no way I used $8000 of their services in a month - it's clearly a billing error. however, they refuse to settle things and insist that I drove thousands and thousands of km on their highway in a month, even though I don't even live in the area.
Companies have no feedback loop on this sort of shady billing. It costs them very little money to bill someone for some huge amount, argue with them, send it to collections and wait. Reading online, 407 ETR does this ALL the time, to people that don't even live in Canada, and have never been here.
I love The Shining, as well as Full Metal Jacket, for this exact reason. Some of the long takes in those movies are beyond impressive. Kubrick had a great vision, and demanded a lot from his actors, but when everything comes together the long takes make you sit up and pay attention.
The long (30 second?) shot of Danny on his big-wheel riding through the empty Overlook in The Shining is one of my favorite scenes in any movie... the sound of the wheels moving from each surface to the next is perfect, and it is the perfect expression of an empty space. That would have been ruined if there had been cut shots to various angles. Same with the chase through the maze - one long shot of Jack slogging through trying to catch Danny. amazingly, thought the shot is ahead of the character, it's not obvious that a camera and sound crew are running ahead of him.
I love long shots, especially ones that start off standard (say, a person walking down the street) but then after a bit of following them, the shot backs off and up into the air - makes you sit up and go 'how the hell??'
The author is right - CGI doesn't impress anymore, it's just assumed. Long shots show skill and dedication to the craft.
Since you talk like someone who knows what they're talking about, pretend that not all of us (me) do...
Why exactly is it that the ISS in a silly orbit, that can't be reasonably used to reach the moon? My knowledge of orbital mechanics/physics is par for the average highschool student, so this isn't immediately obvious to me.
I have worked for a large retail chain, and I can whole-heartedly confirm this logic. They have a chain of over 1000 stores, and some of the costing that was done blew your mind.
Want to put a lock on the IT cabinet in each store? $100 per cabinet (buy the lock, pay the service guy to go in, train the store people to use the key/make duplicates). *1000 stores, and you're suddenly looking at a non-trivial amount of money for something that should be a simple, no brainer.
We saw similar things when we wanted to put a shelf in each cabinet to help organize the various little device that went in the cabinet. $200 per store... forget it. Print labels to put on each piece of equipment to help the store identify it? $50 per store. Forget it.
It was a good experience... we learned how to think in massive scale for every project, every little idea we had, but we also found it incredibly stifling. And thats why I *used* to work there.
Worse still, I wonder how many of those kids are permanently put on drugs.
As an ADHD child myself, on various drugs from grade 1 to OAC (Grade 13 in Ontario), I was put on drugs, but I assure you that by the time I reached the end of school, there was no permanently about it. Maybe when you're younger it's easier to make a child take the drugs, but as they get older and more independent, and as they start to see the effects the drugs have on their personality, there is no permanence unless they want it.
By the time I reached my final years of high school, I hated every day I took my pill. I used to not take them over the summer, and can still remember the week before school started, taking my pills and feeling like I wasn't me anymore. First of all, I was on Dexedrine, which severely impacted my appetite (which is probably why I was a bean pole in high school), but the effect on my personality was drastic. I guess that was the intended effect of the pills, to change me from wildly unfocused, silly and far too chatty/outgoing into a quiet, obedient child who would do as they were told. But as the person taking it, and feeling myself changing every time I took the pill, I found (and still find) the whole thing very unsettling.
Having said that, I am now dating a wonderful girl who is startlingly like me, except she didn't have parents who made her take the ADD meds. Seeing how much of a mess her education was, how much it impacted her social and family life and even her career, made me respect the decision my parents made for me, even if I still disagree with it. Without the drugs I took through elementary and highschool, the odds are I wouldn't have passed, or learned as much as I have, and I probably wouldn't be where I am in life.
To bring things back to the subject at hand, over-diagnosing ADD/ADHD puts millions of kids through the crap I had to go through, as well as putting their parents through it both emotionally and financially. I'm sure my dad (who will most likely read this) could comment on how hard the decision to put me on drugs was, and keeping me on them, fighting me sometimes daily to take them, but I assume the decision wasn't always easy. However, I'm sure these TV parents, which my parents were most assuredly not, enjoy their quieter, more docile children, so maybe they don't care if their child is mis-diagnosed.
ADD/ADHD is a real thing, that should be treated with drugs or behaviour modification (I went through various training classes about "coping skills", learning to identify ADD moments and control them). Just assigning any child who is energetic, or even just a normal 6/16 year old, to the ADD/ADHD bucket in hopes of making them docile is tantamount to a crime. Modifying someones behaviour through drugs for your own convenience and for the teachers convenience is morally reprehensible.
I sure spend a lot of my time altruistically handing my iPad over to every nay-sayer who says that the "iPad sucks/why would you want one/why don't you get a netbook", and have been pretty amazed at the change of heart when they start using it.
I've converted 2 hardcore haters into buyers, and a bunch of "mehs" into "hey, can I borrow your iPad for a bit, I want to show someone this..."
I don't know if the hate comes from the giant price tag, or the closed platform, but once you actually use it, instead of looking at it from a theoretical standpoint, it's incredibly useful.
So sure, maybe us iPad owners have a little more money, but when the base model costs over $600 (stupid taxes) you aren't going to find many minimum wage earners that can afford to play yet...
When I was in grade 7 we learned about nothing even remotely as interesting as this. I think we looked at plant cells under a microscope.
It is pretty amazing that students can work with data like this, with computers and tools that enable it. Makes me wish I could go back to school and work on some of the stuff they teach in basic courses, particularly in high school.
Slashdot Mirror
At a previous employer, we lost an entire row of servers in a DC after a water leak (somehow) triggered the suppression system. The 'explosion' was strong enough to knock the doors off cabinets, bend 2 cabinets, and cause a couple hundreds drives to be dead. Thankfully our service was spread out far enough to survive the loss of a row for a few week while we waited for all new disks to arrive from IBM.
The pictures were crazy, it looks like a bomb went off.
Sounds like a fairly simple case for a Hadoop cluster - a smallish one at that. We're currently deploying to clusters at 1PB/rack density, which means you could deploy a rack or two easily enough. You'd get compute, you get a single flat filesystem, you get redundancy, all built in. Our biggest cluster is now up to 16PB, all one big compute/storage beast, chugging away all day.
I'd suggest starting with the Hortonworks Sandbox VM - grab it, fire it up, play with it. Add some files, poke around, see if it meets your needs. Learn about mapreduce, or maybe your data can be put in to HIVE for analysis.
The nice thing is that yo ucan use hardware you may already have to get things going. Hortonworks is pretty much at the point of a 'next next finish' installer, so you really only need to dedicate a few hours to getting something up to test. Then, thre's a lot of tuning and craziness to running a bigger cluster, but a POC is simple.
Anyhow, I'm blind, because all I do is Hadoop clusters all day, but this seems like an easy win for ya.
GL;HF!
These are the types of Articles I still come to Slashdot for ... and for the comments, which have (sadly) diminished in quantity in the last decade. Amazing engineering work, amazing science.
This has been going on in Canada for years now. Even if you aren't landing IN the States, so long as you fly OVER you are subject to screening. My father spoke to someone at the airport one day who was not cleared by DBS, but still managed to get on his flight to the Carribean. His plane had mechanical problems and was forced to land in Florida. When he got off the plane he was met by law enforcement, who read him the riot act and took him directly to jail. He waited there overnight, then was put ona plane home.
Living in southern Ontario, it is pretty much impossible not to fly over the states, even for domestic flights. That means we are all screwed by US rules, living in another country. Our freedom is limited by their assinine rules.
As a Canadian who travels in the US on occasion, what are my rights if I am stopped by one of these? Anyone have any thoughts on the matter? The thought of randomly being searched makes me want to go back to avoiding travel in the US, as I did during the Bush years.
Dammit .. now the CSI "Can you clean that up?" question is yes, and people will continue to expect miracles from technology.
I politely disagree - when you have corporation that have their hands on lawmakers strings, or you have lawmakers who are on the boards of various corporations/etc, you have the 'free market' influencing who is a criminal.
Want proof - read the front page of slashdot today. Or any other day .. the BSA, RIAA, etc ...
So, more realistically, it's the government who decides, with the influence of the free market.
No the real mistake was thinking you could haggle with service-level employees at a multinational company. That's the dumbest thing I've heard in a while.
My fiancee has managed to swing deals in many big retail chains - it takes a little persistence, and the ability/desire to walk away. even if walk away means walking out the door, waiting 20 minutes, and coming back to get a different sales guy.
She's Chinese, and says that white people are nuts for paying full price ... and I've seen that it's true. Just asking a simple question ("Can you do anything on the price?") has saved us hundreds of dollars (or gotten us lots of stuff thrown in).
I'm a convert, but I still have a hard time with it. I look at the price tag, decide if I can afford to pay that, and buy it if I can. She looks at a price tag and sees a challenge.
Last night I tried to sign in to play, and TF2 wouldn't even launch. It looks like their service was *massively* overloaded.
I bought the game 4 years ago now and I have gotten my money out of it in hours played, however it still irks me that a game I paid for is unavailable to me because of free players jumping on board.
TF2 servers were already frequently full of whiners and trolls, I'm afraid of what this new influx of players will mean. Hopefully the TF2 servers (yes, I know games aren't hosted on their servers, but login/etc is) can handle the new load.
Another significant hurdle is that the TTL on records in the TLDs is generally 7 days, which makes backing out take a little longer than most people are comfortable with, should something bad go down.
you are the target of IPv6 day then - it's a chance for you to try and find out whats wrong. contact your isp, look at your OS version, do upgrades, look at your router. If you're having problems now, you'll have them later - don't wait and hope they go away magically.
> It should also be noted that public sentiment towards China is getting very, very testy.
I'm part of the public, and I know lots of other members of the public - I don't see anyones sentiment anywhere near "testy" about China.
Papers, tv news, radio ... I spend a good amount of time keeping up on them, and I don't think I've heard anything 'testy' about China expressed.
Given that that statement doesn't come from the article, I'm guessing either the submitter or editor added that. Either way, stop making shit up. We have Fox News/the Toronto Sun for that
I wish and hope that some day companies will start to address mental health as well as physical heath, specifically related to sick days. If you have a sniffle, they tell you not to come in to work, you'll make someone sick, but if you're stressed out, unable to sleep, on-call for weeks, going through a breakup/divorce, have sick parents etc, and can't handle the mental strain, then you're SOL. Work on a salary? you know all those extra hours you put in for free for the company? Want to get something *back* from them? yeah, right ...
"Mental Health" days are widely recognized by non-management types as beneficial, but you don't see companies promoting them. 'take a vacation day' is the common line, but when you're only provided with 10 of them a year , it's awefully 'expensive' to take one because your boss has had you working 12 hour days for 2 weeks and you just need 1 freakin day off to sleep, do laundry, maybe buy some real food for a change.
But seriously, mental health, when you work in a job that is focused on mental performance (as much of IT/geekery is), is just as, or more, important as physical health. I can sit and read documents/manuals, catch up on email, update a few spreadsheets etc with a cold, but if I'm tired/stressed/"out of it", I'm next to useless.
Taking care of employees isn't a concern of companies any longer, if it ever was, despite the fact that giving a little can get them a lot. Policy, process, executive bonuses are all worked around 'you must be in your desk working from x to y and always being productive, or else', instead of the realization that we aren't machines and our brains are more valuable when they're functional than not.
$0.02.
You must have dealt with the 407 ETR highway in Ontario.
I am being chased by collections by them right now, even though I am still disputing the $8000 bill they suddenly sent me.
With no warning they sent me the bill, and though I called them the next day, they'd already sent it to collections. So now I have a ding on my credit, I have collections after me, all for a bill that isn't even REAL. There is no way I used $8000 of their services in a month - it's clearly a billing error. however, they refuse to settle things and insist that I drove thousands and thousands of km on their highway in a month, even though I don't even live in the area.
Companies have no feedback loop on this sort of shady billing. It costs them very little money to bill someone for some huge amount, argue with them, send it to collections and wait. Reading online, 407 ETR does this ALL the time, to people that don't even live in Canada, and have never been here.
http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/fixer/article/732443--407-bills-can-hound-drivers-for-15-years
I wonder how many people just pay to get rid of them, and how much money they clear every month due to their disgusting billing practices.
And the icing on this cake - the Government has given them the power to block you from getting your licenese renewed if you have unpaid bills.
I wish there was actually someone on _our_ side against these kinds of practicies.
I love The Shining, as well as Full Metal Jacket, for this exact reason. Some of the long takes in those movies are beyond impressive. Kubrick had a great vision, and demanded a lot from his actors, but when everything comes together the long takes make you sit up and pay attention.
The long (30 second?) shot of Danny on his big-wheel riding through the empty Overlook in The Shining is one of my favorite scenes in any movie ... the sound of the wheels moving from each surface to the next is perfect, and it is the perfect expression of an empty space. That would have been ruined if there had been cut shots to various angles. Same with the chase through the maze - one long shot of Jack slogging through trying to catch Danny. amazingly, thought the shot is ahead of the character, it's not obvious that a camera and sound crew are running ahead of him.
I love long shots, especially ones that start off standard (say, a person walking down the street) but then after a bit of following them, the shot backs off and up into the air - makes you sit up and go 'how the hell??'
The author is right - CGI doesn't impress anymore, it's just assumed. Long shots show skill and dedication to the craft.
Since you talk like someone who knows what they're talking about, pretend that not all of us (me) do ...
Why exactly is it that the ISS in a silly orbit, that can't be reasonably used to reach the moon? My knowledge of orbital mechanics/physics is par for the average highschool student, so this isn't immediately obvious to me.
Thanks for helping edjimicate me.
I have worked for a large retail chain, and I can whole-heartedly confirm this logic. They have a chain of over 1000 stores, and some of the costing that was done blew your mind.
Want to put a lock on the IT cabinet in each store? $100 per cabinet (buy the lock, pay the service guy to go in, train the store people to use the key/make duplicates). *1000 stores, and you're suddenly looking at a non-trivial amount of money for something that should be a simple, no brainer.
We saw similar things when we wanted to put a shelf in each cabinet to help organize the various little device that went in the cabinet. $200 per store ... forget it. Print labels to put on each piece of equipment to help the store identify it? $50 per store. Forget it.
It was a good experience ... we learned how to think in massive scale for every project, every little idea we had, but we also found it incredibly stifling. And thats why I *used* to work there.
they didn't really play up the fact that purchasing through them rather than torrenting provided a *legal* copy to the purchaser
This is why I didn't end up buying from them, I was never sure if it was legit or not. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is ...
wow .. you could actually be the worst person I've even come across on the Internet ... and I've spent a lot of time here.
'grats to you.
As an ADHD child myself, on various drugs from grade 1 to OAC (Grade 13 in Ontario), I was put on drugs, but I assure you that by the time I reached the end of school, there was no permanently about it. Maybe when you're younger it's easier to make a child take the drugs, but as they get older and more independent, and as they start to see the effects the drugs have on their personality, there is no permanence unless they want it.
By the time I reached my final years of high school, I hated every day I took my pill. I used to not take them over the summer, and can still remember the week before school started, taking my pills and feeling like I wasn't me anymore. First of all, I was on Dexedrine, which severely impacted my appetite (which is probably why I was a bean pole in high school), but the effect on my personality was drastic. I guess that was the intended effect of the pills, to change me from wildly unfocused, silly and far too chatty/outgoing into a quiet, obedient child who would do as they were told. But as the person taking it, and feeling myself changing every time I took the pill, I found (and still find) the whole thing very unsettling.
Having said that, I am now dating a wonderful girl who is startlingly like me, except she didn't have parents who made her take the ADD meds. Seeing how much of a mess her education was, how much it impacted her social and family life and even her career, made me respect the decision my parents made for me, even if I still disagree with it. Without the drugs I took through elementary and highschool, the odds are I wouldn't have passed, or learned as much as I have, and I probably wouldn't be where I am in life.
To bring things back to the subject at hand, over-diagnosing ADD/ADHD puts millions of kids through the crap I had to go through, as well as putting their parents through it both emotionally and financially. I'm sure my dad (who will most likely read this) could comment on how hard the decision to put me on drugs was, and keeping me on them, fighting me sometimes daily to take them, but I assume the decision wasn't always easy. However, I'm sure these TV parents, which my parents were most assuredly not, enjoy their quieter, more docile children, so maybe they don't care if their child is mis-diagnosed.
ADD/ADHD is a real thing, that should be treated with drugs or behaviour modification (I went through various training classes about "coping skills", learning to identify ADD moments and control them). Just assigning any child who is energetic, or even just a normal 6/16 year old, to the ADD/ADHD bucket in hopes of making them docile is tantamount to a crime. Modifying someones behaviour through drugs for your own convenience and for the teachers convenience is morally reprehensible.
I don't know if I can handle another iconic game this year, already the lawn is growing longer, and that's just Starcraft 2.
Next up, a WoW expansion, then CIV5.
A good excuse to upgrade the computer, but I can only handle one addiction at a time ... which ones are going to suffer?
I'm going to have to see if I can get my girlfriend hooked on one to save me some pain. Thank goodness the winters are long and cold.
Well, given that the tablet PCs in the office don't get any attention, I'd have to say no, I've proven that people are interested in the iPad
I don't want a keyboard. I have a laptop that has a keyboard. And a PC. And another PC. And a server. And another server.
yes, because stating something that is obvious (people who make less money have less money to spend) makes me arrogant.
I sure spend a lot of my time altruistically handing my iPad over to every nay-sayer who says that the "iPad sucks/why would you want one/why don't you get a netbook", and have been pretty amazed at the change of heart when they start using it.
I've converted 2 hardcore haters into buyers, and a bunch of "mehs" into "hey, can I borrow your iPad for a bit, I want to show someone this..."
I don't know if the hate comes from the giant price tag, or the closed platform, but once you actually use it, instead of looking at it from a theoretical standpoint, it's incredibly useful.
So sure, maybe us iPad owners have a little more money, but when the base model costs over $600 (stupid taxes) you aren't going to find many minimum wage earners that can afford to play yet ...
Again with the personal attacks. While I enjoy a spirited discussion, there is no need for that.
You know nothing about me to judge me, and we will leave it at that.
Cheers
When I was in grade 7 we learned about nothing even remotely as interesting as this. I think we looked at plant cells under a microscope.
It is pretty amazing that students can work with data like this, with computers and tools that enable it. Makes me wish I could go back to school and work on some of the stuff they teach in basic courses, particularly in high school.
Kids these days! (are damned lucky!)