So does an "Yes" Part 3 Item 3a get hot chicks into the country? It seems like a good filter. "She's hot. She's worked as a prostitute. We can ask for a few "favors" to make her paperwork move easier."
I'd do Part 3 Item 14, except having one at a time is bad enough.
It's not much of a place, unless you like limestone. Well, sand on top, clay from 1' to 4' down, and limestone until you hit water.
That is unless you go over to the power plant. The islands that they created with the dredging for the outlet canal are lots and lots (and lots) of old seashells, and not much else. Well, that's from what I remember. Maybe a sharp eyed geologist would spot the... well... limestone mixed in with the seashells.:)
Be careful though, I was out with a group testing for heavy metal contaminations. There were some pretty notable traces of a few in the outlet. Probably safe to swim in, but not exactly safe to drink. So much for the idea of "clean" energy. Clean out of the smoke stacks, dirty out of the warm water outlets. It's kinda hard for the casual observer to test for contamination in the steam outlets, but I'd suspect it exists too.
It was owned by FPL when I was there, but it's now owned by Progress Energy. It's one of those locations that folks don't like to visit from out of town. "Fly into the nearest large airport. Drive 80 miles. Continue 10 miles out of the last resemblance of civilization, and take a left. If you cross an abandon Corps of Engineers project, you've gone too far. Continue down what looks like a road to nowhere, and eventually you'll get to a guard shack. Show your ID, and then hang a left, and follow the road around to the reactor":)
Oh, the memories. It reminds me of why I left there.
Well, I know there are glaring exceptions to that. I'm not arguing your general points though.
Where I grew up, there was a nuclear plant nearby. When I was a kid, it usually managed to average 1 month/year online. It had multiple coal plants providing the real power. Well, that and power shared on the grid. We never suffered from load related blackouts there. There were plenty of thunderstorm related outages though.:) From what I've heard, it's offline indefinitely do to some physical fault. It doesn't seem to be reported that there was any leak, it's just a hazard that's keeping it offline. of course, I trust everything I read.:)
I suspect they were calling more than just that one location. I'd name the area, but I wouldn't want to offend LADWP.:)
Really, that was a good measure to know where emergency resources were available when they didn't have the available capacity.
If my knowledge of power plants is correct, it takes some time to spin one up to full capacity (like 12 to 24 hours), so if there is a spike in usage, they may not be prepared. For example, an unexpected hot day may require more power because people are running their air conditioners for longer duty cycles. An unexpected outage at one of their plants could hurt the situation also.
In calling up non-company resources, the average consumer would be completely unaware that it happened, and they power company still makes money. To the best of my knowledge, any power fed back into the grid is paid on at wholesale rates, but it's still sold to customers at full retail rates.
I believe they've changed that for residential customers though, but I may be mistaken. I know some areas of the US are paying on full retail rates for surplus energy made through alternative means, such as solar, wind, and generators. If you set up your home properly at either rate, you can bring your residential cost down to almost nothing by supplying your own residence during the day and providing power to the grid, and using on-grid off-peak pricing at night. For many people, the power requirements at night are low, where they only have their HVAC and refrigerator running at lighter duty cycles, but all the lights and other electronics are turned off.
Actually, the price tag was $100k/mo, which included the bandwidth at about $15 per Mb/s (not $15k for bandwidth). Floor space and port charges aren't all that bad, or most people would be doing their work in-house.:)
For a while, we were, but that was a long time ago, and that big fat T3 only did the job for so long before we had to start weighing the difference between having circuits run to us, and putting our stuff in datacenters. The tipping point on that one was one hurricane with a 12 hour outage attached to it. It wasn't a power issue, our connectivity was out. I called the provider, and their response was "You know there's a hurricane on top of you, right? What the hell are you still doing there? We've evacuated all of our people already. There's no one to help you until the storm passes."
The storm suddenly got very boring, when I couldn't surf the net while babysitting the machines, and I was all by myself there.
I live in Florida. Subtropical is the norm. This "cold" is driving folks crazy. I've seen people wearing ski jackets to be able to handle it. I know a lot of people don't travel a lot. I've had my time in various climates (anywhere from 24 degrees N to 62 degrees N), so I can handle it, but most of my time was spent between 27 degrees N to 34 degrees N, where it's nice and warm. That's been split between the dry-summer subtropical and humid subtropical.
It's not how many people you have warming seats, it's how many customers are paying for your service.
In an ideal world, you could put up the best self-sustaining site, and all you'd need is one part time person to make sure the payments were coming in.:)
Like I said, our company had less than 30 people, but no less than 1 million daily viewers. Since I don't work there any more, and I don't have the records, I have to do this from memory.
There was a science behind a lot of what we did, so we could actually tune down our utilization by selectively removing content on the fly. Like, if Slashdot temporarily removed all sections but the main story, I'd bet they could drop 25% of their bandwidth and server load within minutes. We could shed over 50% of the traffic very easily. Folks may have noticed that links just weren't there any more, but we never got complaints as those were short-term fixes.
For us, a 20 person company, that was easily doable.
I worked at another place that had over 30 employees. When I left there, they did have multiple GigE circuits, but they were rarely using more than about 10Mb/s per circuit. Their pricing was a *LOT* lower.
Space and port charges are one thing. Bandwidth is another. Even though pricing gets better as you use more bandwidth, the total still goes up. Like, if you paid $100 per Mb/s with a 10Mb/s dedication, with an aggregate usage of 6Gb/s and a dedication of 12Gb/s (so our 95th percentile didn't go through the freakin' roof), the bandwidth bill was something more on the order of $15 per Mb/s.
I have a site that gets decent traffic. It makes a few hundred dollars per year. It's not worth it for me to spend even $100 on even a good UPS.
You have to consider the need. If it makes a few hundred dollars per year, 2 days of outage is a trivial cost. Say at $1,200/yr ($100/mo, a high estimate), an outage of a full day has a lost income of $3.28. I fix whatever breaks in my spare time, so my manhour expense is $0. If my server were to go down at 10am on a weekday, I'd be there around 7pm to fix it, and it would (hopefully) be up before midnight.
So, you have to weigh the difference between the cost of the hardware, and the loss of income for the period.
I think he was talking about in-house servers, but I could be mistaken. it's good to be in a *GOOD* datacenter that has the proper redundancy. Most of the good ones have multiple generators and tens of thousands of gallons of fuel stored. They can stay running indefinitely, assuming they can get fuel supplied before they ran out.
I did work in one good one. They had a DC powerplant to supply at least 24 hours of power. They also had two diesel turbine generators, and something like 10,000 gallons of fuel, which would provide power for 7 days. In talking to the senior techs who had been there an awful long time, they said the generators had kicked on quite a few times. Only once in about 20 years had they needed to refuel. It got touchy. The power was out for about 14 days. It took 6 days to get a refueling truck in, because it was a nasty blizzard, and all the roads had been closed for days. They were starting to notify the customers of a potential power outage, when two fuel trucks finally arrived. One refilled their tank, and the second was left parked there, in case power wasn't restored in time.
That was a huge facility, and they had the power to say "bring us trucks now", and not be put off for larger customers.
I wasn't impressed by the advertised specs of the site. They were good, but it's easy to lie about the specs. I *was* impressed by the site, when I walked through, and was allowed (with an escort) to see their primary data room (many OC192's), the DC power room, and generators. I wasn't getting the sales tour. I was getting the tech tour, because the senior guys wanted to tell me all about their stuff, and we had a chance to talk about all of it.
I've been to many datacenters over the years, and many have failed to be as good as their advertising made them sound. N+1 generators can be a few 11Kw generators out by their dumpsters, or massive industrial generators. Maybe they test them once a year, or once a week. Maybe they work, maybe they don't. It's less than impressive to see the generators sitting outside, covered in rust, and looking like they were purchased 2nd hand and hadn't been maintained since 1950.
At one site (again, an impressive site), they had an absolutely huge DC room, and I was there a couple times when the received phone calls to turn on their generators because the power company needed the extra capacity. A couple 1Mw generators may make the difference between constant power, and widespread brownouts.
The impressive datacenters were way beyond anything I could possibly talk my management into doing in-house.
It's not about the amount of people, servers, or a fixed time limit to preserve power.
You're absolutely right. One place I worked had about 20 employees, 150 servers, but had an income of millions per year. The income averaged out to about $5,700/hr. 12 hours of outages per year could cost almost $70,000 in lost revenue. Is it worth $10k in extra equipment to mitigate that? Obviously.
Smaller companies have to evaluate their acceptable losses. Sometimes it's not worth $100 to make sure you stay up through power outages.
"5 9's" of reliability still leaves 1.14 hours per year of outages. Of course, that doesn't assume that it's all power related outages. Redundancy across physically diverse locations can and will help there.
There's an awful lot to be said for redundancy. I think he's talking in-house applications, but I'm not positive.
One company I worked for, we maintained equipment in multiple datacenters, that were fully redundant. Normally, we served from all of them (no warm-standby sites). Over the years, we'd lose datacenters for various reasons. Sometimes it was power. Sometimes it was connectivity. Sometimes it was simple things, like our own hardware died. We've all seen where portions of the Internet can't reach other portions. Such redundancy will save you. It's better to have the reputation of "they just always work", rather than "they're down every time there's a problem in [insert area]".
Most users won't say "thank you", but they'll be more than happy to complain when you're down. If you have such a presence, you're probably making money on it, so an hour of downtime can easily cost more than the cost of a couple redundant datacenters. With say 3 datacenters, I always made sure we had capacity at each datacenter, in case we had two sites fail simultaneously. While it seems like an almost unheard of event, we did have it happen a couple times in a decade. The providers will apologize profusely, but that doesn't make up for the money lost during the outage.
It sounds like you may have outgrown the traditional "UPS". They're fine and dandy as long as you're only powering so much equipment. There are some huge options (large in physical size, and more so in price).
A decent alternative may be a DC power room, with generator backup.
Basically, you have banks of batteries, with true sine wave power inverters on them. The power coming in goes to charge controllers. Depending on how you set up, these can get pricey too. There are some nice (and expensive) units that handle both the charge controlling and inverting, and will automatically switch between the incoming power and batteries. Look at the higher end Xantrex units, made for on/off grid purposes.
The less expensive way would be to break up your battery banks by power circuit. Say a 15A power circuit per set. Put a dependable inverter on the rack side of the batteries, and a good charge controller on the line side. Separate inverters for each circuit may not seem like the best idea, and the overall efficiency will hurt because of it, but an inverter failure will only mean one circuit goes down, not the whole place. It's affordable to keep a few spare $300 inverters on hand, where it's harder to ask for a few spare $3,000 inverters.
You'll also want an automatic crossover, if your line power should fail, you can bring up a generator. The batteries shouldn't be intended to last for hours. They should only last as long as it takes to bring up the generator (say 1 minute). Expect that there may be generator problems though. In a prolonged outage, you may need to shut down the generator to refuel, so the batteries may need to last for hours. At very least, if your generator fails, and line power doesn't come back up, you have that hour to gracefully shut down your equipment.
Such a setup can be made to make your company more "green" too. Are you in a situation where you could put a large array of solar panels on the roof, and have enough battery power to last you through the night and then some? You could bring your power bill down to almost nil, or possibly feed back to the power grid (with the appropriate permission and power meter), and make a little money in the process. The long term savings may warrant a raise for you.:)
There are plenty of consultants that can evaluate your needs, and provide the appropriate solutions. As you talk to various consultants, several will say the others are giving you bad advice. Look at all of them, and research them for yourself before making a decision. Remember too, it's in *their* best interest to sell you the most expensive units possible, while you probably want the most reliable and cost effective.
Nope, to be REALLY successful in the corporate world, you need to know how to delegate your work in such a fashion that it's completed in a fraction of the time of your peers, and is accurate.
Once you're management, you'll get the praise for successes, and can pass blame on any failures down to your subordinates.
I've known many managers who have no clue how to do their required tasks, but they do know how to tell someone else how to do it. It becomes painfully apparent when a department is downsized, and the manager is left holding tasks that they have no clue on how to do.
At one company, my manager left suddenly. I told the boss just to direct anything to me. Nothing in speed or quality changed, so the boss asked me why. I responded, "Because I was already doing all the work. He didn't know how to do any of it."
I don't really believe in that management style (delegate everything), but it happens so often, I'm surprised most operations manage to continue working. At very least, they could trim off quite a bit of their management staff, and things would continue working, and decrease their operational expenses.
I love the way moderation works on here. I give a description of what the page does so folks don't have to go to it, and that doesn't get modded up (or down). The guy who says he's retarded goes up.:) But hey, whatever. It's not like there's a cash prize for karma on here. My karma is good enough where I could post almost anything, and it won't drop below excellent.
Well, they actually do own a few aircraft. I was only able to track down information on 4 of them. The other three have been well referenced, I just haven't found their tail numbers.
"Yes! Sign me up for your fabulous and intrusive service, including the Home Invasion Cam!"
"No, I need another 90 days to decide, but I'm pretty sure I want this."
It then goes along with a bunch of overly used sales pitches, with some interesting changes. They seem to be randomized. I've heard a few duplicates so far.
There were dozes of popups stopped so far. I wouldn't recommend it if you are on a Windows machine, and/or allow popups. The popups seem to be for comedic value, but looking through them (on my terms, not the will of the page), it appears to flood your machine with popups until... well, I'd assume your machine crashes, since there doesn't seem to even be a time delay on them.:)
Good plan. You'd never run into problems with your credit card number on American networks. Oh ya. Wasn't it Best Buy and TGX that both got caught sending cc info via unencrypted wireless?
Stay safe, play in the US. Be sure you email your name, address, date of birth, SSN, bank account info, and all your credit cards to hacker@i.promise.not.to.steal.your.identity.us
You really expect children in a third world country to have access to a power outlet absolutely everywhere that they go?
Likewise, do you really expect children in a third world country to be able to run down to the 7-11 and pick up 8 new AA batteries? Remember that whole "$0.50 feeds this child for a week". Hmmm, batteries for my laptop for a few hours, or food for the next three weeks. That becomes a pretty tough decision, where batteries won't win.
I will agree with you, it's been nice to be able to swap batteries in my camera on demand. But then again, I've been in civilized parts of the world when I wanted new batteries. It doesn't take going to a starving country to find batteries difficult to acquire. On a few cross country road trips, we didn't bring enough AA batteries, and stopped at tiny gas stations in the middle of nowhere. Like areas where it's 100 miles between exits with anything resembling civilization, and even that is just a gas station with an old generator powering it, because there's no way the power company will run 100 miles of wire for one store.
Usually you do ok with the shelf life of batteries in most stores. There are places that may sell a set of batteries every decade. Sometimes we'd get the batteries, and be on our way before we put them in the camera, just to find out that they were well beyond their shelf life.
That's in the luxurious United States of America, where we have paved roads almost everywhere, and you won't find entire cities of people starving. Ya, I don't expect they can just buy more batteries when they want. But, batteries may be more accessible than power outlets.
Slashdot Mirror
So does an "Yes" Part 3 Item 3a get hot chicks into the country? It seems like a good filter. "She's hot. She's worked as a prostitute. We can ask for a few "favors" to make her paperwork move easier."
I'd do Part 3 Item 14, except having one at a time is bad enough.
We invented multiple personalities for a reason.
For us, it's not about empathy, it's just to have a few sane people to talk to. We have very interesting conversations.
It's not much of a place, unless you like limestone. Well, sand on top, clay from 1' to 4' down, and limestone until you hit water.
That is unless you go over to the power plant. The islands that they created with the dredging for the outlet canal are lots and lots (and lots) of old seashells, and not much else. Well, that's from what I remember. Maybe a sharp eyed geologist would spot the ... well ... limestone mixed in with the seashells. :)
Be careful though, I was out with a group testing for heavy metal contaminations. There were some pretty notable traces of a few in the outlet. Probably safe to swim in, but not exactly safe to drink. So much for the idea of "clean" energy. Clean out of the smoke stacks, dirty out of the warm water outlets. It's kinda hard for the casual observer to test for contamination in the steam outlets, but I'd suspect it exists too.
But hey, whatcha going to do?
It was owned by FPL when I was there, but it's now owned by Progress Energy. It's one of those locations that folks don't like to visit from out of town. "Fly into the nearest large airport. Drive 80 miles. Continue 10 miles out of the last resemblance of civilization, and take a left. If you cross an abandon Corps of Engineers project, you've gone too far. Continue down what looks like a road to nowhere, and eventually you'll get to a guard shack. Show your ID, and then hang a left, and follow the road around to the reactor" :)
Oh, the memories. It reminds me of why I left there.
Well, I know there are glaring exceptions to that. I'm not arguing your general points though.
Where I grew up, there was a nuclear plant nearby. When I was a kid, it usually managed to average 1 month/year online. It had multiple coal plants providing the real power. Well, that and power shared on the grid. We never suffered from load related blackouts there. There were plenty of thunderstorm related outages though. :) From what I've heard, it's offline indefinitely do to some physical fault. It doesn't seem to be reported that there was any leak, it's just a hazard that's keeping it offline. of course, I trust everything I read. :)
I suspect they were calling more than just that one location. I'd name the area, but I wouldn't want to offend LADWP. :)
Really, that was a good measure to know where emergency resources were available when they didn't have the available capacity.
If my knowledge of power plants is correct, it takes some time to spin one up to full capacity (like 12 to 24 hours), so if there is a spike in usage, they may not be prepared. For example, an unexpected hot day may require more power because people are running their air conditioners for longer duty cycles. An unexpected outage at one of their plants could hurt the situation also.
In calling up non-company resources, the average consumer would be completely unaware that it happened, and they power company still makes money. To the best of my knowledge, any power fed back into the grid is paid on at wholesale rates, but it's still sold to customers at full retail rates.
I believe they've changed that for residential customers though, but I may be mistaken. I know some areas of the US are paying on full retail rates for surplus energy made through alternative means, such as solar, wind, and generators. If you set up your home properly at either rate, you can bring your residential cost down to almost nothing by supplying your own residence during the day and providing power to the grid, and using on-grid off-peak pricing at night. For many people, the power requirements at night are low, where they only have their HVAC and refrigerator running at lighter duty cycles, but all the lights and other electronics are turned off.
Actually, the price tag was $100k/mo, which included the bandwidth at about $15 per Mb/s (not $15k for bandwidth). Floor space and port charges aren't all that bad, or most people would be doing their work in-house. :)
For a while, we were, but that was a long time ago, and that big fat T3 only did the job for so long before we had to start weighing the difference between having circuits run to us, and putting our stuff in datacenters. The tipping point on that one was one hurricane with a 12 hour outage attached to it. It wasn't a power issue, our connectivity was out. I called the provider, and their response was "You know there's a hurricane on top of you, right? What the hell are you still doing there? We've evacuated all of our people already. There's no one to help you until the storm passes."
The storm suddenly got very boring, when I couldn't surf the net while babysitting the machines, and I was all by myself there.
I live in Florida. Subtropical is the norm. This "cold" is driving folks crazy. I've seen people wearing ski jackets to be able to handle it. I know a lot of people don't travel a lot. I've had my time in various climates (anywhere from 24 degrees N to 62 degrees N), so I can handle it, but most of my time was spent between 27 degrees N to 34 degrees N, where it's nice and warm. That's been split between the dry-summer subtropical and humid subtropical.
It's not how many people you have warming seats, it's how many customers are paying for your service.
In an ideal world, you could put up the best self-sustaining site, and all you'd need is one part time person to make sure the payments were coming in. :)
Like I said, our company had less than 30 people, but no less than 1 million daily viewers. Since I don't work there any more, and I don't have the records, I have to do this from memory.
DC1 - 1 cage, 8 racks, 4 GigE circuits, 50% utilized (normal peak).
DC2 - 1 cage, 8 racks, 4 GigE circuits, 50% utilized (normal peak).
DC3 - 2 racks, 4 GigE circuits, 40% utilized (normal peak).
Price tag? About $100k/mo.
There was a science behind a lot of what we did, so we could actually tune down our utilization by selectively removing content on the fly. Like, if Slashdot temporarily removed all sections but the main story, I'd bet they could drop 25% of their bandwidth and server load within minutes. We could shed over 50% of the traffic very easily. Folks may have noticed that links just weren't there any more, but we never got complaints as those were short-term fixes.
For us, a 20 person company, that was easily doable.
I worked at another place that had over 30 employees. When I left there, they did have multiple GigE circuits, but they were rarely using more than about 10Mb/s per circuit. Their pricing was a *LOT* lower.
Space and port charges are one thing. Bandwidth is another. Even though pricing gets better as you use more bandwidth, the total still goes up. Like, if you paid $100 per Mb/s with a 10Mb/s dedication, with an aggregate usage of 6Gb/s and a dedication of 12Gb/s (so our 95th percentile didn't go through the freakin' roof), the bandwidth bill was something more on the order of $15 per Mb/s.
24C is 75F. That sounds like a wonderful place to work, as long as you don't have to go outside. :)
Sorry, my math failed me this morning. Don't expect too much from the math department on weekends. :)
That all depends though.
I have a site that gets decent traffic. It makes a few hundred dollars per year. It's not worth it for me to spend even $100 on even a good UPS.
You have to consider the need. If it makes a few hundred dollars per year, 2 days of outage is a trivial cost. Say at $1,200/yr ($100/mo, a high estimate), an outage of a full day has a lost income of $3.28. I fix whatever breaks in my spare time, so my manhour expense is $0. If my server were to go down at 10am on a weekday, I'd be there around 7pm to fix it, and it would (hopefully) be up before midnight.
So, you have to weigh the difference between the cost of the hardware, and the loss of income for the period.
I think he was talking about in-house servers, but I could be mistaken. it's good to be in a *GOOD* datacenter that has the proper redundancy. Most of the good ones have multiple generators and tens of thousands of gallons of fuel stored. They can stay running indefinitely, assuming they can get fuel supplied before they ran out.
I did work in one good one. They had a DC powerplant to supply at least 24 hours of power. They also had two diesel turbine generators, and something like 10,000 gallons of fuel, which would provide power for 7 days. In talking to the senior techs who had been there an awful long time, they said the generators had kicked on quite a few times. Only once in about 20 years had they needed to refuel. It got touchy. The power was out for about 14 days. It took 6 days to get a refueling truck in, because it was a nasty blizzard, and all the roads had been closed for days. They were starting to notify the customers of a potential power outage, when two fuel trucks finally arrived. One refilled their tank, and the second was left parked there, in case power wasn't restored in time.
That was a huge facility, and they had the power to say "bring us trucks now", and not be put off for larger customers.
I wasn't impressed by the advertised specs of the site. They were good, but it's easy to lie about the specs. I *was* impressed by the site, when I walked through, and was allowed (with an escort) to see their primary data room (many OC192's), the DC power room, and generators. I wasn't getting the sales tour. I was getting the tech tour, because the senior guys wanted to tell me all about their stuff, and we had a chance to talk about all of it.
I've been to many datacenters over the years, and many have failed to be as good as their advertising made them sound. N+1 generators can be a few 11Kw generators out by their dumpsters, or massive industrial generators. Maybe they test them once a year, or once a week. Maybe they work, maybe they don't. It's less than impressive to see the generators sitting outside, covered in rust, and looking like they were purchased 2nd hand and hadn't been maintained since 1950.
At one site (again, an impressive site), they had an absolutely huge DC room, and I was there a couple times when the received phone calls to turn on their generators because the power company needed the extra capacity. A couple 1Mw generators may make the difference between constant power, and widespread brownouts.
The impressive datacenters were way beyond anything I could possibly talk my management into doing in-house.
You're absolutely right. One place I worked had about 20 employees, 150 servers, but had an income of millions per year. The income averaged out to about $5,700/hr. 12 hours of outages per year could cost almost $70,000 in lost revenue. Is it worth $10k in extra equipment to mitigate that? Obviously.
Smaller companies have to evaluate their acceptable losses. Sometimes it's not worth $100 to make sure you stay up through power outages.
"5 9's" of reliability still leaves 1.14 hours per year of outages. Of course, that doesn't assume that it's all power related outages. Redundancy across physically diverse locations can and will help there.
There's an awful lot to be said for redundancy. I think he's talking in-house applications, but I'm not positive.
One company I worked for, we maintained equipment in multiple datacenters, that were fully redundant. Normally, we served from all of them (no warm-standby sites). Over the years, we'd lose datacenters for various reasons. Sometimes it was power. Sometimes it was connectivity. Sometimes it was simple things, like our own hardware died. We've all seen where portions of the Internet can't reach other portions. Such redundancy will save you. It's better to have the reputation of "they just always work", rather than "they're down every time there's a problem in [insert area]".
Most users won't say "thank you", but they'll be more than happy to complain when you're down. If you have such a presence, you're probably making money on it, so an hour of downtime can easily cost more than the cost of a couple redundant datacenters. With say 3 datacenters, I always made sure we had capacity at each datacenter, in case we had two sites fail simultaneously. While it seems like an almost unheard of event, we did have it happen a couple times in a decade. The providers will apologize profusely, but that doesn't make up for the money lost during the outage.
It sounds like you may have outgrown the traditional "UPS". They're fine and dandy as long as you're only powering so much equipment. There are some huge options (large in physical size, and more so in price).
A decent alternative may be a DC power room, with generator backup.
Basically, you have banks of batteries, with true sine wave power inverters on them. The power coming in goes to charge controllers. Depending on how you set up, these can get pricey too. There are some nice (and expensive) units that handle both the charge controlling and inverting, and will automatically switch between the incoming power and batteries. Look at the higher end Xantrex units, made for on/off grid purposes.
The less expensive way would be to break up your battery banks by power circuit. Say a 15A power circuit per set. Put a dependable inverter on the rack side of the batteries, and a good charge controller on the line side. Separate inverters for each circuit may not seem like the best idea, and the overall efficiency will hurt because of it, but an inverter failure will only mean one circuit goes down, not the whole place. It's affordable to keep a few spare $300 inverters on hand, where it's harder to ask for a few spare $3,000 inverters.
You'll also want an automatic crossover, if your line power should fail, you can bring up a generator. The batteries shouldn't be intended to last for hours. They should only last as long as it takes to bring up the generator (say 1 minute). Expect that there may be generator problems though. In a prolonged outage, you may need to shut down the generator to refuel, so the batteries may need to last for hours. At very least, if your generator fails, and line power doesn't come back up, you have that hour to gracefully shut down your equipment.
Such a setup can be made to make your company more "green" too. Are you in a situation where you could put a large array of solar panels on the roof, and have enough battery power to last you through the night and then some? You could bring your power bill down to almost nil, or possibly feed back to the power grid (with the appropriate permission and power meter), and make a little money in the process. The long term savings may warrant a raise for you. :)
There are plenty of consultants that can evaluate your needs, and provide the appropriate solutions. As you talk to various consultants, several will say the others are giving you bad advice. Look at all of them, and research them for yourself before making a decision. Remember too, it's in *their* best interest to sell you the most expensive units possible, while you probably want the most reliable and cost effective.
You know, there are probably a whole lot of people who have no idea what we're talking about..
instead of this:
it would be written like this (stolen from Wikipedia)
Would that be goto with tags, or line numbers?
Oh, how I miss goto's with line numbers. :)
[sarcasm off]
Nope, to be REALLY successful in the corporate world, you need to know how to delegate your work in such a fashion that it's completed in a fraction of the time of your peers, and is accurate.
Once you're management, you'll get the praise for successes, and can pass blame on any failures down to your subordinates.
I've known many managers who have no clue how to do their required tasks, but they do know how to tell someone else how to do it. It becomes painfully apparent when a department is downsized, and the manager is left holding tasks that they have no clue on how to do.
At one company, my manager left suddenly. I told the boss just to direct anything to me. Nothing in speed or quality changed, so the boss asked me why. I responded, "Because I was already doing all the work. He didn't know how to do any of it."
I don't really believe in that management style (delegate everything), but it happens so often, I'm surprised most operations manage to continue working. At very least, they could trim off quite a bit of their management staff, and things would continue working, and decrease their operational expenses.
I love the way moderation works on here. I give a description of what the page does so folks don't have to go to it, and that doesn't get modded up (or down). The guy who says he's retarded goes up. :) But hey, whatever. It's not like there's a cash prize for karma on here. My karma is good enough where I could post almost anything, and it won't drop below excellent.
Universe: 0
Law of averages: +1
(Ok, it's "Law of Large Numbers")
Well, they actually do own a few aircraft. I was only able to track down information on 4 of them. The other three have been well referenced, I just haven't found their tail numbers.
Boeing 757
Gulfstream V/550
Gulfstream V/550
(yes, two Gulfstreams, it's not an error)
N2767 Boeing 767-238/ER
N2165 Dornier Alpha Jet # N2165
N13471 Cessna 172M
N42PE Homebuilt(?) RV-9A
It starts with two options:
"Yes! Sign me up for your fabulous and intrusive service, including the Home Invasion Cam!"
"No, I need another 90 days to decide, but I'm pretty sure I want this."
It then goes along with a bunch of overly used sales pitches, with some interesting changes. They seem to be randomized. I've heard a few duplicates so far.
There were dozes of popups stopped so far. I wouldn't recommend it if you are on a Windows machine, and/or allow popups. The popups seem to be for comedic value, but looking through them (on my terms, not the will of the page), it appears to flood your machine with popups until ... well, I'd assume your machine crashes, since there doesn't seem to even be a time delay on them. :)
Good plan. You'd never run into problems with your credit card number on American networks. Oh ya. Wasn't it Best Buy and TGX that both got caught sending cc info via unencrypted wireless?
Stay safe, play in the US. Be sure you email your name, address, date of birth, SSN, bank account info, and all your credit cards to hacker@i.promise.not.to.steal.your.identity.us
Likewise, do you really expect children in a third world country to be able to run down to the 7-11 and pick up 8 new AA batteries? Remember that whole "$0.50 feeds this child for a week". Hmmm, batteries for my laptop for a few hours, or food for the next three weeks. That becomes a pretty tough decision, where batteries won't win.
I will agree with you, it's been nice to be able to swap batteries in my camera on demand. But then again, I've been in civilized parts of the world when I wanted new batteries. It doesn't take going to a starving country to find batteries difficult to acquire. On a few cross country road trips, we didn't bring enough AA batteries, and stopped at tiny gas stations in the middle of nowhere. Like areas where it's 100 miles between exits with anything resembling civilization, and even that is just a gas station with an old generator powering it, because there's no way the power company will run 100 miles of wire for one store.
Usually you do ok with the shelf life of batteries in most stores. There are places that may sell a set of batteries every decade. Sometimes we'd get the batteries, and be on our way before we put them in the camera, just to find out that they were well beyond their shelf life.
That's in the luxurious United States of America, where we have paved roads almost everywhere, and you won't find entire cities of people starving. Ya, I don't expect they can just buy more batteries when they want. But, batteries may be more accessible than power outlets.
That's gotta be one of the longest press releases (written to be an review) that I've seen in a long time.
I wonder what it costs to have your ad run on the front of Slashdot as a story these days.