As someone who once worked for a rural electric cooperative, a municipal or coop utility has serious problems operating in this country.
Every time a section of our territory became populated enough to turn a profit for the Investor Owned Utility (IOU) next door, they went to the utilities commission at the state level and annexed that territory. We were turning a profit overall and paying that profit back to the customers, while charging them a lower rate and giving them as good or better service - but we were only supposed to serve areas that the IOU wasn't willing to provide power to.
The one municipal power utility in the area also was better and cheaper. We were all buying our power from the same source at the same price - just the IOU had stockholders who demanded high profits.
If your municipal ISP does really well, I'm glad. Most city councils will decide that they should just let capitalism run its course, especially if they want the big ISP to keep sponsoring their labor day parade/new stadium/vacation home for the mayor. The investor-owned ISP could also sue for "non-competitive behavior" due to underpricing, "government subsidies" because the ISP benefits from the overall city infrastructure, or lobby at the state level to make municipal ISPs illegal; IOU's have done both successfully in the past to municipal utilities.
Seriously, if you're on a website where the content is in English, testing english comprehension isn't unreasonable. If the site's in swahili, feel free to use swahili captcha-replacements.
I still like the replacement idea of: (picture of clock) What is this? (check entered text for local-language word for "clock")
A past lover went by the nickname "Cat." She had me install an alternate man page for cat that a previous boyfriend had written, including such tidbits as both of the command-line options chocolate and sex were required for cat to function normally. Also mentioned that any problems with cat were the fault of the user.
Sadly, there was no -q option, nor were there any debug features. I had to remove the program after a few months.
One of our clients insisted on installing a Token Ring MAU which our servers would use to talk to their mainframe using a proprietary IBM layer-3 protocol. The mainframe didn't support IP at the time (2001).
Did you know that, if token ring cards get disconnected, you have to reboot the host machine to get the link back? True for both Windows and HP-UX servers, so I assume it's something monumentally stupid in the cards themselves.
When working at a power company, we got a great complaint letter. Among other misguided ideas, he told us to put solar cells under all the street lights so that we would never need to build additional power plants.
As a data center manager myself, I can understand your pain. Unfortunately, I'm in charge of a corporate data center rather than a pure hosting arrangement; many of the tricks I've used to manage power consumption wouldn't work for you, but...
I'm able to play building load for the laptops/desktops off against data center consumption, and also able to relocate equipment to other sites to juggle the load. I have the option of passing the cost on to the customers because most of what I do is cost-plus contracts. I know this might cost you business, but it's something to consider. Other things that may help:
This may sound silly, but don't leave systems running with a failed component. A lot of servers run the cooling fans at higher RPMs if there's a power supply or fan failure.
If you're not already using SAN storage, consider switching to it. If you are, make full use of it by having your servers treat the SAN as the boot drive and removing all local drives. Better to have 20 servers accessing a 20-disk RAID on the SAN than those same 20 keeping 2-8 hard drives each spinning.
I'm going to assume that you're a high-availability setup, with UPS and generator coverage for a multi-day power outage. One of the simplest things you could do is set up a system where, if your power draw approaches your previous peak (or acceptable peak if there is a limiting factor), you switch to generator power. Whether this really helps you would depend on how far you need to limit your use, and how much refueling the generator costs you.
The other option may not be workable for you, but... if there's other office space in whatever building you're in, I'd look into renting it as a separate office of your company, and set up a second data center (shared staff, but separate electric service.) Dividing your current electrical load between two bills even 75%/25% would be a great way to limit peak load. This may even work with your current space if you occupy multiple suites in the building.
If the next generation of PCs is silent, you can bet that white noise generators will become more popular for hard-core geeks.
I know I've lived the last 10+ years of my life with the whirr (or roar) of computer fans as a constant presense in my home and office. I've had problems falling asleep in the "unnatural" silence on the rare occasions when all my computers are turned off for the night.
Thank you. I'm working for a publicly traded company and the SEC site is about as user-friendly as an iron maiden to someone trying to figure out what to do/not do.
The original purpose of a signed credit card receipt was not necessarily to prevent a thief from making the purchase. It was to identify the person making the purchase.
Whether on the spot, or in court months later, it would be provable that the thief whose image is on the store's video tape was not who they claimed to be - thus allowing conviction on credit card fraud charges. Conversely, this crosscheck also prevents people from claiming credit card theft to avoid paying for purchases.
The fact that vendors and cardholders don't always practice due diligence is the only reason why there are unconvicted criminals who make a living in this way. The wanted poster really should make a comeback, posted outside the stores where the crime was committed. Imagine someone coming back to thier favorite scamming spot, only to see a 8-1/2x11 with the security camera picture... and a lot of curious shoppers, including the two or three heading for the security desk.
*sigh* the store would probably be sued for "causing mental distress". Wouldn't want suspected criminals to be treated with suspicion. No sirree.
The only change here is that (a) they get to know who's accessing the data, and (b) those who access the data can't restribute it. This doesn't keep them from distributing the result of calculations based on the data, however.
Heavens-above.com has data regarding when satellites are visible from a given location on the earth's surface. I'm not sure if this gives any data on classified satellites. This site does currently still show orbital elements on the "orbit" page of each satellite's detail list - these are probably coming from non-Airforce tracking radars.
JTrack 3D is a great little java applet (warning, the applet loads in a separate window) that shows you a real-time view of near-earth space. You can even pull up description pages for each of the satellites shown. The "Launch/Orbital information" link on the detail page is broken, and seems to be the only part of this service affected. Again this is unlikely to ever have shown classified satellites.
Conspiracy theorists, take note. Every spacefaring nation on the planet knows where everything is in space including the orbital elements mentioned, to make sure thier expensive new pr0nosat won't crash into that random chunk of "damaged hardware that can't be de-orbited, oops" that's taking pictures of Osama's outhouse. This just keeps people from anonymously having the US Air Force do their orbit tracking for them.
A lot of us here are aware that this buffoon is to the presidency what Kenneth Lay was to CEOs. Hopefully we can vote the bum out of office before he finds another expensive hobby on which to dump our money, lives, and reputations.
Everyone seems to be expected infected pr0n or e-mail... it's so much simpler than that it's been scring me since this exploit was announced. I'd say about 2/3rds of the corporate computers in this country are still vulnerable, and enough of them visit MSN or CNN.com on a regular basis for a simple banner ad to give someone a REALLY nice assortment of zombie PCs.
I seem to recall that, some two years ago, an article (slashdot or not, I wasn't able to find it) quoted an engineer who was looking at the effects of individual nanotube lengths on the tensile strength of a nanotube composite.
The quote I'm remembering was that, if they could reliably build single-walled nanotubes at least an inch long and use that composite design, the tensile strength would be enough to build the elevator.
My thought on the whole discussion of a backup was not to give it to the reporters/evil public/left-wing conspiracy theorists, but to restore it somewhere other than the production system and work with it from there to fulfill your legal requirement to answer the request. This would be at no risk to the "real" database since everything would be separate... but then, maybe every other Hollerith card reader has been scrapped already.
You're right. I forgot to mention that I was using some ridiculously low assumptions to show that, even in the best possible world, this equipment is going to need more than 1/2 ton cooling.
Aside from power to heat conversion, I assumed that they'd be using the lowest-power-consumption blades on the market and that the systems would be running below full load. Realistically, they've probably got a 120kW+ power bill and it all gets turned into heat.
... I wonder how they came up with the numbers here.
A blade chassis full of dual PIII's similar to what they showed in the "render wall" photo will, in my experience, pull 300 to 600 watts of power depending on CPU load and configuration - the maximum power use is 850 W. At least a third of that is turned into heat.
This puts the minimum heat load at around ((1600 servers / 6 servers per chassis) * 150 watts average heat output) = approx. 40,000 watts.
There was a LOT of clapping and cheering just after the "to be concluded" in my showing - mostly because, when it showed that on screen, one guy in the front row stood up, and, in a voice filled with a sincere mixture of awe, disbelief and frustration, yelled "WHAT - THE - F*CK????"
Having the Hugo Program in front of me, I thought I'd shed some light on why Harry Potter won. The other nominees:
"A Storm of Swords" by George R. R. Martin
"Calculating God" by Robert J. Sawyer
"Midnight Robber" by Nalo Hopkinson
"The Sky Road" by Ken Macleod
Keep in mind that the award is for the "best science fiction or fantasy novel published in 2000." There were some grumblings to the effect that separate categories for each should be established, since "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" also beat "Frank Herbert's Dune" and "X-Men" for Best Dramatic Presentation.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone who once worked for a rural electric cooperative, a municipal or coop utility has serious problems operating in this country.
Every time a section of our territory became populated enough to turn a profit for the Investor Owned Utility (IOU) next door, they went to the utilities commission at the state level and annexed that territory. We were turning a profit overall and paying that profit back to the customers, while charging them a lower rate and giving them as good or better service - but we were only supposed to serve areas that the IOU wasn't willing to provide power to.
The one municipal power utility in the area also was better and cheaper. We were all buying our power from the same source at the same price - just the IOU had stockholders who demanded high profits.
If your municipal ISP does really well, I'm glad. Most city councils will decide that they should just let capitalism run its course, especially if they want the big ISP to keep sponsoring their labor day parade/new stadium/vacation home for the mayor. The investor-owned ISP could also sue for "non-competitive behavior" due to underpricing, "government subsidies" because the ISP benefits from the overall city infrastructure, or lobby at the state level to make municipal ISPs illegal; IOU's have done both successfully in the past to municipal utilities.
"Command of the English language?"
Seriously, if you're on a website where the content is in English, testing english comprehension isn't unreasonable. If the site's in swahili, feel free to use swahili captcha-replacements.
I still like the replacement idea of: (picture of clock) What is this? (check entered text for local-language word for "clock")
A past lover went by the nickname "Cat." She had me install an alternate man page for cat that a previous boyfriend had written, including such tidbits as both of the command-line options chocolate and sex were required for cat to function normally. Also mentioned that any problems with cat were the fault of the user.
Sadly, there was no -q option, nor were there any debug features. I had to remove the program after a few months.
One of our clients insisted on installing a Token Ring MAU which our servers would use to talk to their mainframe using a proprietary IBM layer-3 protocol. The mainframe didn't support IP at the time (2001).
Did you know that, if token ring cards get disconnected, you have to reboot the host machine to get the link back? True for both Windows and HP-UX servers, so I assume it's something monumentally stupid in the cards themselves.
I would write a scathing reply to you, but Days of Our Lives is about to start...
When working at a power company, we got a great complaint letter. Among other misguided ideas, he told us to put solar cells under all the street lights so that we would never need to build additional power plants.
Perhaps he now works for these gentlemen.
Really, picking undergrads to e-mail each other and try to guess the tone...
Example e-mail:
I rly lv teh cateferia food!
now, identify whether the d00d typing this meant to be sarcastic.
As a data center manager myself, I can understand your pain. Unfortunately, I'm in charge of a corporate data center rather than a pure hosting arrangement; many of the tricks I've used to manage power consumption wouldn't work for you, but...
I'm able to play building load for the laptops/desktops off against data center consumption, and also able to relocate equipment to other sites to juggle the load. I have the option of passing the cost on to the customers because most of what I do is cost-plus contracts. I know this might cost you business, but it's something to consider. Other things that may help:
This may sound silly, but don't leave systems running with a failed component. A lot of servers run the cooling fans at higher RPMs if there's a power supply or fan failure.
If you're not already using SAN storage, consider switching to it. If you are, make full use of it by having your servers treat the SAN as the boot drive and removing all local drives. Better to have 20 servers accessing a 20-disk RAID on the SAN than those same 20 keeping 2-8 hard drives each spinning.
I'm going to assume that you're a high-availability setup, with UPS and generator coverage for a multi-day power outage. One of the simplest things you could do is set up a system where, if your power draw approaches your previous peak (or acceptable peak if there is a limiting factor), you switch to generator power. Whether this really helps you would depend on how far you need to limit your use, and how much refueling the generator costs you.
The other option may not be workable for you, but... if there's other office space in whatever building you're in, I'd look into renting it as a separate office of your company, and set up a second data center (shared staff, but separate electric service.) Dividing your current electrical load between two bills even 75%/25% would be a great way to limit peak load. This may even work with your current space if you occupy multiple suites in the building.
If the next generation of PCs is silent, you can bet that white noise generators will become more popular for hard-core geeks.
I know I've lived the last 10+ years of my life with the whirr (or roar) of computer fans as a constant presense in my home and office. I've had problems falling asleep in the "unnatural" silence on the rare occasions when all my computers are turned off for the night.
Thank you. I'm working for a publicly traded company and the SEC site is about as user-friendly as an iron maiden to someone trying to figure out what to do/not do.
The original purpose of a signed credit card receipt was not necessarily to prevent a thief from making the purchase. It was to identify the person making the purchase.
Whether on the spot, or in court months later, it would be provable that the thief whose image is on the store's video tape was not who they claimed to be - thus allowing conviction on credit card fraud charges. Conversely, this crosscheck also prevents people from claiming credit card theft to avoid paying for purchases.
The fact that vendors and cardholders don't always practice due diligence is the only reason why there are unconvicted criminals who make a living in this way. The wanted poster really should make a comeback, posted outside the stores where the crime was committed. Imagine someone coming back to thier favorite scamming spot, only to see a 8-1/2x11 with the security camera picture... and a lot of curious shoppers, including the two or three heading for the security desk.
*sigh* the store would probably be sued for "causing mental distress". Wouldn't want suspected criminals to be treated with suspicion. No sirree.
The only change here is that (a) they get to know who's accessing the data, and (b) those who access the data can't restribute it. This doesn't keep them from distributing the result of calculations based on the data, however.
Heavens-above.com has data regarding when satellites are visible from a given location on the earth's surface. I'm not sure if this gives any data on classified satellites. This site does currently still show orbital elements on the "orbit" page of each satellite's detail list - these are probably coming from non-Airforce tracking radars.
JTrack 3D is a great little java applet (warning, the applet loads in a separate window) that shows you a real-time view of near-earth space. You can even pull up description pages for each of the satellites shown. The "Launch/Orbital information" link on the detail page is broken, and seems to be the only part of this service affected. Again this is unlikely to ever have shown classified satellites.
Conspiracy theorists, take note. Every spacefaring nation on the planet knows where everything is in space including the orbital elements mentioned, to make sure thier expensive new pr0nosat won't crash into that random chunk of "damaged hardware that can't be de-orbited, oops" that's taking pictures of Osama's outhouse. This just keeps people from anonymously having the US Air Force do their orbit tracking for them.
How about the Egyptian Mau, the Ocicat, the Bombay for a panther-like look? You can even see a bit of a lion in the common Maine Coon.
Selective breeding has done the job already.
A lot of us here are aware that this buffoon is to the presidency what Kenneth Lay was to CEOs. Hopefully we can vote the bum out of office before he finds another expensive hobby on which to dump our money, lives, and reputations.
Everyone seems to be expected infected pr0n or e-mail... it's so much simpler than that it's been scring me since this exploit was announced. I'd say about 2/3rds of the corporate computers in this country are still vulnerable, and enough of them visit MSN or CNN.com on a regular basis for a simple banner ad to give someone a REALLY nice assortment of zombie PCs.
I seem to recall that, some two years ago, an article (slashdot or not, I wasn't able to find it) quoted an engineer who was looking at the effects of individual nanotube lengths on the tensile strength of a nanotube composite.
The quote I'm remembering was that, if they could reliably build single-walled nanotubes at least an inch long and use that composite design, the tensile strength would be enough to build the elevator.
4 cm / 2.54 = orbit?
My thought on the whole discussion of a backup was not to give it to the reporters/evil public/left-wing conspiracy theorists, but to restore it somewhere other than the production system and work with it from there to fulfill your legal requirement to answer the request. This would be at no risk to the "real" database since everything would be separate... but then, maybe every other Hollerith card reader has been scrapped already.
You're right. I forgot to mention that I was using some ridiculously low assumptions to show that, even in the best possible world, this equipment is going to need more than 1/2 ton cooling.
Aside from power to heat conversion, I assumed that they'd be using the lowest-power-consumption blades on the market and that the systems would be running below full load. Realistically, they've probably got a 120kW+ power bill and it all gets turned into heat.
... I wonder how they came up with the numbers here.
A blade chassis full of dual PIII's similar to what they showed in the "render wall" photo will, in my experience, pull 300 to 600 watts of power depending on CPU load and configuration - the maximum power use is 850 W. At least a third of that is turned into heat.
This puts the minimum heat load at around ((1600 servers / 6 servers per chassis) * 150 watts average heat output) = approx. 40,000 watts.
While I've never heard of "farenheit weight" before, "tons refrigeration" is pretty common in the air conditioning world - 40,000 watts heat load = 136,500 BTU/hr = 10 tons of refrigeration (in UK units, 11 in US). It's amazing how well that 1/2 ton air conditioner is operating!
There was a LOT of clapping and cheering just after the "to be concluded" in my showing - mostly because, when it showed that on screen, one guy in the front row stood up, and, in a voice filled with a sincere mixture of awe, disbelief and frustration, yelled "WHAT - THE - F*CK????"
Having the Hugo Program in front of me, I thought I'd shed some light on why Harry Potter won. The other nominees:
"A Storm of Swords" by George R. R. Martin
"Calculating God" by Robert J. Sawyer
"Midnight Robber" by Nalo Hopkinson
"The Sky Road" by Ken Macleod
Keep in mind that the award is for the "best science fiction or fantasy novel published in 2000." There were some grumblings to the effect that separate categories for each should be established, since "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" also beat "Frank Herbert's Dune" and "X-Men" for Best Dramatic Presentation.