Even high end shops can be like this. I recently wanted to buy some new speakers and amplifier. All I wanted was a simple stereo setup with an integrated amplifier with balanced input. No need for surround, dsp processing, video inputs, etc. Just enough to play music.
The store that I went into had lots of nice gear, but also crazy gear like $10,000 belt drive turntables that are made out of 50 pound blocks of acrylic. They also sell good acoustic absorber gear and the audiophile nutcase level stuff like expensive power cables and little metal bits you can place around the room to change the acoustics *cough* *bullshit*.
The sales guy was great. He setup speakers and then left me alone to listen to music. I think the primary reason he did this was because as soon as we got the speakers setup I pulled out a SPL meter to calibrate the volume level with pink noise. I've had friends who tried to go speaker shopping and the sales guys like to fiddle with the volume up and down a ton in order to trick you into not being able to properly compare gear. As soon as the SPL meter came out he stopped fucking with things.
I see blocked up traffic light intersections all the time in San Francisco. Nobody can go anywhere because people enter the intersection while it's still green but not empty and then block traffic going the other direction. This happens all the time on the large 4 lane 1-way streets.
Thankfully I ride my bike around SF and can just zip through the congestion.
ding ding ding, you nailed this exactly. The Model S is going to sell like hotcakes to the BMW/Audi/Merc/Lexus/etc luxury sedan crowd. Tesla's market planning has so far been flawless.
Don't forget to factor in PUE into the power costs. An average datacenter has a 1.5x multiplier for power. Over 3 years a 400W machine will cost about $1500 to power.
Not how it works, sorry. Have you ever heard of any "marketers and advertisers" getting data from google? It doesn't happen. People buy ads for keywords and Google does the matching bits.
If it were true that "marketers and advertisers" could get your data, even anonymized, I could go and buy it through the sale service right now.
Certs are probably the best signal I have for hiring. A negative signal. The certs are the one of the few things that show up in the resume keyword statistical analysis that show "not a good hire".
Yup, I loved my walkman and and then discman. And decent earbuds. I tried to love minidisc, but it was just too painful to keep using sony's proprietary bullshit. Between the minidisc fail, the memory stick fail, and the general shit-tastic quality of stuff these days I've just given up.
Yea, when I worked at a university we had to install some split pairs in order to wire 2 computers into some offices. We didn't want to setup local switches at the time and 10/100 was good enough. We normally would pull more cable but the walls were full of asbestos and getting guys in bunny suits to pull cat5 cable was damn expensive.
Ugh, that reminds me of this guy I replaced a long time ago. He would only crimp 2 pairs in cat5 cables because "the other two aren't used". Thankfully I left that place before gige got popular. I wasn't looking forward to re-terminating every cable in that place.
Caltrain is heavy rail, not light rail. Durring commute rush hours this situation can happen at the Mountain View caltrain station:
North trains: 5:37, 5:46, 5:58, 6:03 South trains: 5:36, 5:50, 5:56
The timing is pretty good for north and south bound trains arriving at the same time. The problem is that the station is 200 feet from downtown mountain view's main street which crosses the busy central expressway. The expressway is not a freeway and has traffic lights.
When the northbound train arrives the lights are cycled to make sure there are no cars blocking the track in case the train is unable to stop. This causes the lights to be cycled twice per northbound train. If the southbound train is off by a few min this can cause a continual reset of the light cycle backing up traffic for a while. There are some other grade crossings that are worse due to the long cycle length of the central expressway lights.
This causes more than just traffic problems. Lots of pedestrians and cyclists are trying to cross the expressway to get to the train station. This causes some people to make dangerous against the crosswalk light crosses in order to try and make it to a train on time.
Grade level crossings need to be removed in order to provide smoother train operation.
Sure, it was cheap, only $77mil.. But you might have been lucky to make $0.50/hour
Adjusting for inflation that's 1.1 billion, and the thing failed in a 7.1 earthquake. Imagine what would have happened if the 9.0 that hit Japan happened in SF.
Yup, this is one of the major problems with some train routes in the US. There are tons and tons of train routes, the only ones you notice and get annoyed at are the ones with grade level crossings.
Nobody gets upset because there's a BART going by. But people (including myself) have to wait for Caltrain to go by in a lot of places. Thankfully I only bike over Caltrain's right of way about once every few weeks these days.
The US needs a major infrastructure push to get rail fixed.
A) Eliminate grade level crossings in urban/suburban areas B) Electrify track to reduce noise and allow for more modern trainsets C) Fix regulations so passenger trains don't need to be as heavy (fixed by automation and better track scheduling systems) D) Fix tracks so that we can go faster than 79mph for both passenger and freight traffic.
Imagine if lighter weight freight goods could be moved at 150+ mph. UPS/Fedex could move online orders cross country in 1-2 days instead of 4-5 via ground shipping.
Most of your quaint roadside diners were eliminated by the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. People stop are herded along the interstate and only stop long enough for gas, mcdonalds, and starbucks.
You're on the list for "most short sighted person in humanity". Just because something is an inconvenience for you doesn't mean that there is no benefit.
It sounds like you're delivering stuff by trucks/cars. Guess what, there might be something more important out there than you.
Trains deliver huge amounts of raw materials. Things like steel that are used to make trucks.
Trains deliver huge amounts of energy, namely coal used to power nearly half of the electricity in the US.
OpenID allows you to keep your password AWAY from various sites. For example if I wanted to login to slashdot I can use any OpenID provider I want. This means that slashdot never gets my password. Slashdot gets a just-for-it token that my OpenID provider gives. If slashdot gets broken, no big deal that token can't be used for anything else, and my password is never released.
Guess what, I run my own OpenID provider so the only one to blame for loss of my authentication is myself. My own server is the only thing that gets the password and that exchange is done entirely over SSL.
So what caused this problem? We released a storage software update that introduced the unexpected bug, which caused 0.02% of Gmail users to temporarily lose access to their email. When we discovered the problem, we immediately stopped the deployment of the new software and reverted to the old version.
Of course you can divide by 3. Common metric http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drywall sheets are 120cm x 240cm. This means every stud is 40cm apart ~=15.75 inches. Basically the same shape and size.
A blue LED like the ones used are probably 5-10mW max. A not so bright 5mW LED * 10k machines = 50W used. 50W is probably 0.001% of the power used by a cluster of that size.
But the thing is, even with big iron you still need to plan for downtimes and maintenance. For the scale of some of the "big" sites out there you still end up having to build software that can tolerate failure. Planned or unplanned. All of the utility of the big iron goes away when you still have to plan to fail over.
Slashdot Mirror
Even high end shops can be like this. I recently wanted to buy some new speakers and amplifier. All I wanted was a simple stereo setup with an integrated amplifier with balanced input. No need for surround, dsp processing, video inputs, etc. Just enough to play music.
The store that I went into had lots of nice gear, but also crazy gear like $10,000 belt drive turntables that are made out of 50 pound blocks of acrylic. They also sell good acoustic absorber gear and the audiophile nutcase level stuff like expensive power cables and little metal bits you can place around the room to change the acoustics *cough* *bullshit*.
The sales guy was great. He setup speakers and then left me alone to listen to music. I think the primary reason he did this was because as soon as we got the speakers setup I pulled out a SPL meter to calibrate the volume level with pink noise. I've had friends who tried to go speaker shopping and the sales guys like to fiddle with the volume up and down a ton in order to trick you into not being able to properly compare gear. As soon as the SPL meter came out he stopped fucking with things.
I see blocked up traffic light intersections all the time in San Francisco. Nobody can go anywhere because people enter the intersection while it's still green but not empty and then block traffic going the other direction. This happens all the time on the large 4 lane 1-way streets.
Thankfully I ride my bike around SF and can just zip through the congestion.
ding ding ding, you nailed this exactly. The Model S is going to sell like hotcakes to the BMW/Audi/Merc/Lexus/etc luxury sedan crowd. Tesla's market planning has so far been flawless.
Don't forget to factor in PUE into the power costs. An average datacenter has a 1.5x multiplier for power. Over 3 years a 400W machine will cost about $1500 to power.
Not how it works, sorry. Have you ever heard of any "marketers and advertisers" getting data from google? It doesn't happen. People buy ads for keywords and Google does the matching bits.
If it were true that "marketers and advertisers" could get your data, even anonymized, I could go and buy it through the sale service right now.
I think the term you're looking for there is ASIC:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application-specific_integrated_circuit
Certs are probably the best signal I have for hiring. A negative signal. The certs are the one of the few things that show up in the resume keyword statistical analysis that show "not a good hire".
But then again, I'm not looking to hire monkeys.
As someone who sysadmins for HPC clusters that rank highly in the top500, vi is very much the best editor.
Yup, I loved my walkman and and then discman. And decent earbuds. I tried to love minidisc, but it was just too painful to keep using sony's proprietary bullshit. Between the minidisc fail, the memory stick fail, and the general shit-tastic quality of stuff these days I've just given up.
http://www.google.com/chat/video
Best part is it you can voice/video chat with non-google users including non-google jabber servers with Empathy
http://live.gnome.org/Empathy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingle_(protocol)
Yea, when I worked at a university we had to install some split pairs in order to wire 2 computers into some offices. We didn't want to setup local switches at the time and 10/100 was good enough. We normally would pull more cable but the walls were full of asbestos and getting guys in bunny suits to pull cat5 cable was damn expensive.
Or you can just order from a vendor that doesn't bullshit.
Plug: http://www.bluejeanscable.com/
I ordered a 35' HDMI/DVI cable so I could put a slightly noisy machine in a closet away from my desk area.
Ugh, that reminds me of this guy I replaced a long time ago. He would only crimp 2 pairs in cat5 cables because "the other two aren't used". Thankfully I left that place before gige got popular. I wasn't looking forward to re-terminating every cable in that place.
You're cracked. There is no "main conductor". All conductors in Cat5 (and other Category twisted pair specs) are identical.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_5_cable
Caltrain is heavy rail, not light rail. Durring commute rush hours this situation can happen at the Mountain View caltrain station:
North trains: 5:37, 5:46, 5:58, 6:03
South trains: 5:36, 5:50, 5:56
The timing is pretty good for north and south bound trains arriving at the same time. The problem is that the station is 200 feet from downtown mountain view's main street which crosses the busy central expressway. The expressway is not a freeway and has traffic lights.
When the northbound train arrives the lights are cycled to make sure there are no cars blocking the track in case the train is unable to stop. This causes the lights to be cycled twice per northbound train. If the southbound train is off by a few min this can cause a continual reset of the light cycle backing up traffic for a while. There are some other grade crossings that are worse due to the long cycle length of the central expressway lights.
This causes more than just traffic problems. Lots of pedestrians and cyclists are trying to cross the expressway to get to the train station. This causes some people to make dangerous against the crosswalk light crosses in order to try and make it to a train on time.
Grade level crossings need to be removed in order to provide smoother train operation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostalgia
Try building a bridge that can take an earthquake and then have a planned life span of 150 years.
http://baybridgeinfo.org/projects/sas-tower
Sure, it was cheap, only $77mil.. But you might have been lucky to make $0.50/hour
Adjusting for inflation that's 1.1 billion, and the thing failed in a 7.1 earthquake. Imagine what would have happened if the 9.0 that hit Japan happened in SF.
Yup, this is one of the major problems with some train routes in the US. There are tons and tons of train routes, the only ones you notice and get annoyed at are the ones with grade level crossings.
Nobody gets upset because there's a BART going by. But people (including myself) have to wait for Caltrain to go by in a lot of places. Thankfully I only bike over Caltrain's right of way about once every few weeks these days.
The US needs a major infrastructure push to get rail fixed.
A) Eliminate grade level crossings in urban/suburban areas
B) Electrify track to reduce noise and allow for more modern trainsets
C) Fix regulations so passenger trains don't need to be as heavy (fixed by automation and better track scheduling systems)
D) Fix tracks so that we can go faster than 79mph for both passenger and freight traffic.
Imagine if lighter weight freight goods could be moved at 150+ mph. UPS/Fedex could move online orders cross country in 1-2 days instead of 4-5 via ground shipping.
Proofreading is not my strong suit today.
People are herded along the interstate and only stop long enough for gas, mcdonalds, and starbucks
Most of your quaint roadside diners were eliminated by the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. People stop are herded along the interstate and only stop long enough for gas, mcdonalds, and starbucks.
You're on the list for "most short sighted person in humanity". Just because something is an inconvenience for you doesn't mean that there is no benefit.
It sounds like you're delivering stuff by trucks/cars. Guess what, there might be something more important out there than you.
Trains deliver huge amounts of raw materials. Things like steel that are used to make trucks.
Trains deliver huge amounts of energy, namely coal used to power nearly half of the electricity in the US.
Try looking past your nose some time.
Then you don't understand the concept.
OpenID allows you to keep your password AWAY from various sites. For example if I wanted to login to slashdot I can use any OpenID provider I want. This means that slashdot never gets my password. Slashdot gets a just-for-it token that my OpenID provider gives. If slashdot gets broken, no big deal that token can't be used for anything else, and my password is never released.
Guess what, I run my own OpenID provider so the only one to blame for loss of my authentication is myself. My own server is the only thing that gets the password and that exchange is done entirely over SSL.
Yup, here's a good example of what you're talking about:
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/gmail-back-soon-for-everyone.html
So what caused this problem? We released a storage software update that introduced the unexpected bug, which caused 0.02% of Gmail users to temporarily lose access to their email. When we discovered the problem, we immediately stopped the deployment of the new software and reverted to the old version.
Of course you can divide by 3. Common metric http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drywall sheets are 120cm x 240cm. This means every stud is 40cm apart ~=15.75 inches. Basically the same shape and size.
A blue LED like the ones used are probably 5-10mW max. A not so bright 5mW LED * 10k machines = 50W used. 50W is probably 0.001% of the power used by a cluster of that size.
But the thing is, even with big iron you still need to plan for downtimes and maintenance. For the scale of some of the "big" sites out there you still end up having to build software that can tolerate failure. Planned or unplanned. All of the utility of the big iron goes away when you still have to plan to fail over.