Nice job, submitting and subsequently accepting, an article with a link to the NASA article instead of some random blog linking to a multipage ad-heavy website that only vaguely discusses the NASA article. More of this, please.
Which American internships do you mean? I was watching an episode of Ice Pilots (a documentary TV show about a north Canadian airlines.) They were showing one guy (a ramp hand, aka "rampie") who had aspirations of being a pilot. I guess part of the industry is starting at the very bottom and then working your way up... Anyway, this guy was doing 12 to 14 hours of work each day, seven days a week. Outside in -40F (and C!) weather!
So maybe Canada is as bad as China for punches to the head? (wink) I honestly don't know what a ramp hand is paid, though, and it probably has better prospects for advancement. But it's certainly no cushy office internship.
It's very easy to imagine what they state of the automobile industry would be today if there were patent wars, because that's actually what happened from what I can tell. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_B._SeldenGeorge Selden had a patent on four wheeled motorized vehicles, and sued Ford and an array of nascent automobile manufacturers. This went on for nearly a decade, Selden initially won, but eventually lost on appeal a case against Ford. Whatever argument you have against Apple is not bolstered by references to automobile history - what's happening now seems to have happened back then too.
I've worked with large (3000+ servers) IT environments, and small (50 servers) environments. I'm used to a typical server from Dell or HP, plus VMware licnesing and MS licensing, SAN storage, offsite tape backup, remote mirroring, large battery UPS, diesel generator, Liebert CRAC, command-center monitoring, etc. to end up costing many thousands of dollars. For a large corporation, it's worth it. But for a really small shop (eg, like this one, needing only a single server supporting a single db, maybe some email and web hosting...) I have to wonder if cloud services wouldn't be the way to go. Certainly, I know that clouds have gone down (Apple, Amazon and Microsoft at various times) but surely the uptime is greater than a server in the back room of a restaurant? I just checked MS's website and see that a 2 GB Azure database is only $13.99/mo, and 52 GB of data transfer is $6.24/mo. That's pretty cheap for redundancy, backups, load balancing, etc. (I have no idea how big, and how much bandwidth a POS db requires, sorry.)
Various universities structure things differently. I have no idea what computer science "should" be, but here's a sampling:
Carnegie Mellon - School of Computer Science.
Computer Science Department
Entertainment Technology Center
Institute for Software Research
Robotics Institute
Human-Computer Interaction Institute
Lane Center for Computational Biology
Language Technologies Institute
Machine Learning Department
At CMU, CS gets its own school/department/division, as well as its own major within that.
MIT - School of Engineering
Includes:
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Materials Science and Engineering
Mechanical Engineering
Nuclear Science and Engineering
Aeronautics and Astronautics
Biological Engineering
Chemical Engineering
Civil and Environmental Engineering
So it's a combined program within the engineering department.
CalTech - similar to MIT - Division of Engineering and Applied Science
Aerospace
Applied Physics and Materials Science
Bioengineering
Computing and Mathematical Sciences
Electrical Engineering
Environmental Science and Engineering
Mechanical and Civil Engineering
Again combined, but with math, and under sciences.
Ah, yes, I see what you mean. If Apple touts "Mastered for iTunes" as a superior sound quality, and the content owners simply ship off their CD files to take advance of the marketing - yep, garbage out.
Be nice if somehow Apple could insure the files they get are actually produce following their guidelines, but there's nothing from keeping a content owner from, say, simply up-sampling the CD files and submitting those. Minimal effort on their part. Sigh.
Although I wonder what the analysis on Rush tracks would show? TFA mentions those by name as having been re-worked for the iTunes world.
From what I understand, "to master" is a verb in the sound engineering realm meaning to produce a product, after recorging, mixing and other sound engineering tweaks, for a particular purpose.
One can "master" for iTunes, "master" for CD, "master" for live DJ performance, "master" for 64kbps online streaming, "master" for FM radio, etc. "Master" does not imply a particular level of audio fidelity, although it has been misused and misundersood as such. Apple uses the term correctly in their "Mastered for iTunes" guidelines. They're a set of suggestions on what to do to produce the highest quality iTunes Plus 256 kbps variable-bit-rate AAC files. The GIGO principle applies here. Simply running a loudness war victim 44/16 CD track through Apple's "Mastered for iTunes" tools will simply produce a normal AAC. The magic is in providing to Apple a high-quality 196/24 file, with targeted audience specific tweaks, to begin with. There's no hype from Apple going on - just a lot of misunderstanding from other folks.
No surprise. And it's a misunderstanding on the author's part, not a misrepresentation on Apple's part.
Apple's "Mastered for iTunes" is a set of guidelines about how to turn a master recording into an iTunes-optimized digital file. The author of TFA, however, is talking about taking a CD track and making a compressed version that's as close as possible to the CD track. A CD track is NOT a master file. (We don't want a track that's merely a CD representation - we've heard plenty on/. about how a lot of CD tracks just suck.) "Mastered for iTunes" talks about taking a high-resolution digitial file, like 96/24 or 192/24, and then producing the best possible iTunes Plus file (256 kbps VBR AAC.)
So of course if you make an iTunes track from a CD track via the "Mastered for iTunes" process, you'll get a 256 kbps VBR AAC that's identical to ripping a CD track to a 256 kbps VBR AAC. However, if you follow Apple's recommendations, quoted here:
To take best advantage of our latest encoders send us the highest resolution master file possible, appropriate to the medium and the project.
An ideal master will have 24-bit 96kHz resolution. These files contain more detail from
which our encoders can create more accurate encodes. However, any resolution above
16-bit 44.1kHz, including sample rates of 48kHz, 88.2kHz, 96kHz, and 192kHz, will benefit
from our encoding process.
you'll probably get something different, perhaps better, than a CD track ripped to AAC.
Apple is providing the tools they use to convert to AAC so that sound engineers can preview the product before it goes on sale, but they appear to be the same tools they've been using all along. As I said before, "Mastered for iTunes" isn't a new encoding tool - it's a process workflow. Other recommendations:
- Apple
recommends listening to your masters on the devices your audience will be using
- Be Aware of Dynamic Range and Clipping
- Master for Sound Check and Other Volume Controlling Technology
- Remaster for iTunes [That is, they suggest starting over from the original recordings, rather than send in a file that was mastered with CDs in mind.]
Dietary Reference Intakes: (similar concept to RDA)
Calcium: 1000 mg
Magnesium: 420 mg
Sodium: 500 to 2400 mg
Sampled tap waters on average (and std dev):
Calcium: 37mg/L (22.4) - 3.7% of DRI
Magnesium: 11.47 mg/L (10.64) - 2.7% of DRI
Sodium: 44 mg/L (49) - 8.8% to 1.8% of DRI
So anybody who's relying on tap water for their mineral intake needs to be drinking 11 to 55 liters per day on average. (It's hard to find numbers regarding deaths from drinking too much water, but my impression is that the above amounts could easily lead to death. Drinking tap vs mineral-free water would not a factor.) Anybody who's not getting any minerals from drinking water isn't missing out on much at all.
I didn't realize that 22.5 billion is a rounding error for hospitals.
Considering that the total amount of money spent on healthcare in America in 2008 was 2.3 trillion USD, yeah, you should realize it. Especially since that $22.5 billion is over five years - ie, only $4.5 billion per year. If somebody rounds the entire cost of healthcare to the closest 1%, the entire cost of HIPAA for hospitals essentially disappears entirely. Especially since we like to only use two or three significant digits. 2.3 is basically the same as 2.3045, no error required. It's not an unsubstantial amount, mind you, but certainly in line with the GP's point. So - $22.5 billion is a lot, but $2.3 trillion is even more. I think the numbers just get so large that they lose meaning. Perhaps it would be better to say America spent $2,300 billion on healthcare, of which only $4.5 billion was HIPAA related? Just like when purchasing a $2,300 USD server, you probably wouldn't quibbble (much) over a $4.50 USD SAS cable. (Keep in mind, also, the GP is talking about the "Medical Industrial Complex," which includes more than just hospitals.)
Senator Paul was apparently on his way to Washington, where the Senate has votes scheduled for this afternoon. It appears that the Executive Branch (TSA) just violated Article I section 6 of the Constitution.
They shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged...
I ask because I don't know - is boarding a commercial airliner without going through a full screening a felony? I suspect so, because I can't imagine it being classified as just a misdemeanor. Therefore it seems perfectly Constitutional to me for the TSA or some other government agency to detain and even arrest a Senator going to session for the felony of bypassing a security screening. (Assuming that, like I ask about, the violation is actually a felony.)
Hey there. It seems you've mis-read what the report is actually saying.
1) The 22.67 mph change in speed did not happen during data retreival. It happened during the 712.8 ms that the recording algorithm was running during the crash.
2) Yes, the swings from +40g to -40g in 1.6 ms are odd. (I suspect vibrations through the frame of the car. 40g, by the way, is the max the sensor reads.) However, your stating that the crash was more like 1g isn't accurate. From time 0 (the moment of impact) to 70.4 ms (the end of time being reported) the delta-v is 15.13 mph. That's equivalent to an acceleration of 214.9 mph per second, or about 9.8 g. 10-ish g seems reasonable to me for the first moment of impact of a crash. Too bad the document only covers 152.8 ms.
And besides all that, a job with on-call duties is a job that has need of them. That means they either have an unstable system or they aren't staffed properly. It's a huge sign that things are not right, and that company is best avoided.
Yeah, I pretty much agree with that. For Job 00, I was one of three server techs supporting about 100 servers. We knew every server inside and out and were responsible for pretty much everything about them except corporate policies. We rarely got any off-hours calls, so we could go to the movies, etc. Job 01 was in the datacenter of a huge global company - seven of us supporting 3000 servers. When oncall, we were guaranteed to not get a full night's sleep for that week, rarely was dinner not interrupted, etc., and we were still expected to do our normal 8-5 job. We got OT but that certainly didn't make it worth the degradation in quality of life. Fixes took longer because we had no idea off the top of our heads what the hardware/software config for a particular server was, and we often had to call the SAN team, network team, VMWare team, etc. because everything was siloed. Getting cooperation wasn't easy sometimes. It was a fubar staffing situation. They could staff a helpdesk 24x7 to place the calls - but to actually FIX the problem? No. Just as I was leaving they transitioned to a schedule that had everybody working only 40 hours a week, but because 24x7 support was still required everybody worked an ever-changing schedule. One week you might be M,Tu,Th,F,Sat 8-5, next week you might be M,W,Th,Sa,Sun midnight-8, etc. After complaints to HR, they went back to the same oncall rotation. I've heard that now they have a much larger department with a mix of US and India based techs, so things aren't quite as crazy. Anyway, Job 02 now is back to a team of two people supporting only 50 servers. Again, we know all the systems, what they're temperamental about, and basically we only rarely get called. Having only two people sucks sometimes because we can't both be on vacation at the same time, but it's much better than Job 01.
Actually, I will disagree with you about the "need" of oncall duties - even if itâ(TM)s not being used I'd rather deal with a blow up SAN controller when it happens at 3am than at 8am when I get in. But if being on-call has a significant impact on your life, either the systems aren't being managed properly, or the staffing to deal with the known volume of work is screwed up. The first should be fixable, the second means you should be sending out your resume IMO.
Nice link, thanks. It's good to have actual numbers.
It's worth noting, though, that while the Feb 2011 anual report does show growth, much of the doom and gloom news reports we've been hearing stem from recent quarterly reports, which are showing a good bit of contraction. From the Aug 2011 quarterly summary: "Compared to the same quarter last year, Research In Motion Limited has seen revenues fall from $4.6B to $4.2B. This along with an increase in the cost of goods sold expense has led to a reduction in the bottom line from $797.0M to $329.0M."
Oh, I totally believed you about the 2.5 minutes thing.:-) What I was questioning was the total amount of extra time because of the two point five minutes for each reboot. That is, the "more than DOUBLED the first few man days" bit.
Are you perhaps exagerating the extra time added because of the 2.5 minute bootup time? I recently set up a couple new Dell R710 servers, and as another posted indicated they boot very slowly because of BIOS checks and the like. But that certainly didn't double the amount of days it took to set them up. Assume a two-day affair becomes four, and that's an extra 16 hours - or 384 reboots. I suspect you didn't actually reboot them that many times, and are simply frustrated with the process? Yeah, that extra 2.5 minutes seems like an eternity when you're standing in a cold, loud datacenter and your feet hurt. But if you're sitting at your desk using a DRAC or ILO, doing other work at the same time, 2.5 minutes is negigible. You might even have spent more time on the phone with HP than the reboots took, you know?
Regardless, I do sympathise with you about long booting times. (My long-boot-time-story is about a NetFrame running NetWare 3.11 that took about 45 minutes because of memory and disk scans.) If the server is critical enough that the 2.5 minutes makes a difference, you need to look into virtualization products. The amount of time spent outside of the OS during the reboot of a virtualized machine isn't much more than a second or two. With multiple physical servers you can replace motherboards, CPUs and the like without bringing down the virtual machine. You just have to pay through the nose for the software (if you're talking about something like VMWare) so you'll have to decide how cirital the system is to the business.
Oh, one last thing about boot times - I'm always amused when people compare PCs to TVs. "Why can't my PC be instant-on like my TV?" they ask. Well, my TV is a DLP unit - and it takes about 30 seconds to boot from a complete power-off. Because it basically has a little PC inside it! PCs are a far cry from the old tube sets... Fortunately (or not, since it draws power) it has a quick-boot setting that at least turns off the lamp and color wheel, so a "boot" only takes three or four seconds.
Do LCD and plasma TVs take this long to boot from complete power-off? I haven't messed with one in a while.
I'm no cosmologist, but my understand is that there IS direct evidence of dark matter - in the way galaxies collide. Normal matter collides because it interacts through EM and hence slows down, while dark matter doesn't and doesn't. This can be seen by comparing X-ray imaging to map the normal matter and gravitational lensing to map the dark matter.
None of which, as Hadlock indicated, are natural. Every single one of those lakes you mention - except Caddo Lake, already mentioned, on the Texas/Luisiana border - is the result of a man-made dam. (Although I'm not sure if it matters whether a lake is natural or man-made in terms of JWSmythe's comments about finding water for one or two weeks after an ELE. The lakes, and the water they hold, will still be there for a while.)
In TFA, there is no indication that the OSG actually cited Wikipedia. There is only a statement by the petitioning ex-wife that the OSG cited the DSM-IV-TR, and that the DSM-IV-TR is mentioned in Wikipedia. Based on the facts presented in TFA, it very well could have been that the OSG never mentioned Wikipedia at all, but the petitioner cleverly tricked the judge into think that the DSM-IV-TR had "no guarantee of validity," because it's mentioned in Wikipedia.
TFA needs a big fat [citation needed]. As it stands, without a link to the actual case documents it's much less reliable than a typical Wikipedia article and we don't know what's really going on.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice job, submitting and subsequently accepting, an article with a link to the NASA article instead of some random blog linking to a multipage ad-heavy website that only vaguely discusses the NASA article. More of this, please.
Invisible nano QR codes have been proposed as a way to stop forgery of U.S currency by students of Michigan University.
Why are Michigan students forging US currency? Has the Secret Service been informed?
Which American internships do you mean? I was watching an episode of Ice Pilots (a documentary TV show about a north Canadian airlines.) They were showing one guy (a ramp hand, aka "rampie") who had aspirations of being a pilot. I guess part of the industry is starting at the very bottom and then working your way up... Anyway, this guy was doing 12 to 14 hours of work each day, seven days a week. Outside in -40F (and C!) weather!
So maybe Canada is as bad as China for punches to the head? (wink) I honestly don't know what a ramp hand is paid, though, and it probably has better prospects for advancement. But it's certainly no cushy office internship.
It's very easy to imagine what they state of the automobile industry would be today if there were patent wars, because that's actually what happened from what I can tell. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_B._SeldenGeorge Selden had a patent on four wheeled motorized vehicles, and sued Ford and an array of nascent automobile manufacturers. This went on for nearly a decade, Selden initially won, but eventually lost on appeal a case against Ford. Whatever argument you have against Apple is not bolstered by references to automobile history - what's happening now seems to have happened back then too.
I've worked with large (3000+ servers) IT environments, and small (50 servers) environments. I'm used to a typical server from Dell or HP, plus VMware licnesing and MS licensing, SAN storage, offsite tape backup, remote mirroring, large battery UPS, diesel generator, Liebert CRAC, command-center monitoring, etc. to end up costing many thousands of dollars. For a large corporation, it's worth it. But for a really small shop (eg, like this one, needing only a single server supporting a single db, maybe some email and web hosting...) I have to wonder if cloud services wouldn't be the way to go. Certainly, I know that clouds have gone down (Apple, Amazon and Microsoft at various times) but surely the uptime is greater than a server in the back room of a restaurant? I just checked MS's website and see that a 2 GB Azure database is only $13.99/mo, and 52 GB of data transfer is $6.24/mo. That's pretty cheap for redundancy, backups, load balancing, etc. (I have no idea how big, and how much bandwidth a POS db requires, sorry.)
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/ferret.jpg
Brings a tear to my eye.
Various universities structure things differently. I have no idea what computer science "should" be, but here's a sampling:
Carnegie Mellon - School of Computer Science.
Computer Science Department
Entertainment Technology Center
Institute for Software Research
Robotics Institute
Human-Computer Interaction Institute
Lane Center for Computational Biology
Language Technologies Institute
Machine Learning Department
At CMU, CS gets its own school/department/division, as well as its own major within that.
MIT - School of Engineering Includes:
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Materials Science and Engineering
Mechanical Engineering
Nuclear Science and Engineering
Aeronautics and Astronautics
Biological Engineering
Chemical Engineering
Civil and Environmental Engineering
So it's a combined program within the engineering department.
CalTech - similar to MIT - Division of Engineering and Applied Science
Aerospace
Applied Physics and Materials Science
Bioengineering
Computing and Mathematical Sciences
Electrical Engineering
Environmental Science and Engineering
Mechanical and Civil Engineering
Again combined, but with math, and under sciences.
WISC - Department of Computer Sciences under the College of Letters & Science
Again, nested, but not a combined major.
YMMV.
Ah, yes, I see what you mean. If Apple touts "Mastered for iTunes" as a superior sound quality, and the content owners simply ship off their CD files to take advance of the marketing - yep, garbage out.
Be nice if somehow Apple could insure the files they get are actually produce following their guidelines, but there's nothing from keeping a content owner from, say, simply up-sampling the CD files and submitting those. Minimal effort on their part. Sigh.
Although I wonder what the analysis on Rush tracks would show? TFA mentions those by name as having been re-worked for the iTunes world.
From what I understand, "to master" is a verb in the sound engineering realm meaning to produce a product, after recorging, mixing and other sound engineering tweaks, for a particular purpose.
One can "master" for iTunes, "master" for CD, "master" for live DJ performance, "master" for 64kbps online streaming, "master" for FM radio, etc. "Master" does not imply a particular level of audio fidelity, although it has been misused and misundersood as such. Apple uses the term correctly in their "Mastered for iTunes" guidelines. They're a set of suggestions on what to do to produce the highest quality iTunes Plus 256 kbps variable-bit-rate AAC files. The GIGO principle applies here. Simply running a loudness war victim 44/16 CD track through Apple's "Mastered for iTunes" tools will simply produce a normal AAC. The magic is in providing to Apple a high-quality 196/24 file, with targeted audience specific tweaks, to begin with. There's no hype from Apple going on - just a lot of misunderstanding from other folks.
Apple's "Mastered for iTunes" is a set of guidelines about how to turn a master recording into an iTunes-optimized digital file. The author of TFA, however, is talking about taking a CD track and making a compressed version that's as close as possible to the CD track. A CD track is NOT a master file. (We don't want a track that's merely a CD representation - we've heard plenty on
So of course if you make an iTunes track from a CD track via the "Mastered for iTunes" process, you'll get a 256 kbps VBR AAC that's identical to ripping a CD track to a 256 kbps VBR AAC. However, if you follow Apple's recommendations, quoted here:
To take best advantage of our latest encoders send us the highest resolution master file possible, appropriate to the medium and the project.
An ideal master will have 24-bit 96kHz resolution. These files contain more detail from which our encoders can create more accurate encodes. However, any resolution above 16-bit 44.1kHz, including sample rates of 48kHz, 88.2kHz, 96kHz, and 192kHz, will benefit from our encoding process.
you'll probably get something different, perhaps better, than a CD track ripped to AAC.
Apple is providing the tools they use to convert to AAC so that sound engineers can preview the product before it goes on sale, but they appear to be the same tools they've been using all along. As I said before, "Mastered for iTunes" isn't a new encoding tool - it's a process workflow. Other recommendations:
- Apple recommends listening to your masters on the devices your audience will be using
- Be Aware of Dynamic Range and Clipping
- Master for Sound Check and Other Volume Controlling Technology
- Remaster for iTunes [That is, they suggest starting over from the original recordings, rather than send in a file that was mastered with CDs in mind.]
I'll pile on the bandwagon, but with some numbers to back up my comments. *grin*
Here's a study on the NIH website comparing tap to bottled water.
Dietary Reference Intakes: (similar concept to RDA)
Calcium: 1000 mg
Magnesium: 420 mg
Sodium: 500 to 2400 mg
Sampled tap waters on average (and std dev):
Calcium: 37mg/L (22.4) - 3.7% of DRI
Magnesium: 11.47 mg/L (10.64) - 2.7% of DRI
Sodium: 44 mg/L (49) - 8.8% to 1.8% of DRI
So anybody who's relying on tap water for their mineral intake needs to be drinking 11 to 55 liters per day on average. (It's hard to find numbers regarding deaths from drinking too much water, but my impression is that the above amounts could easily lead to death. Drinking tap vs mineral-free water would not a factor.) Anybody who's not getting any minerals from drinking water isn't missing out on much at all.
I didn't realize that 22.5 billion is a rounding error for hospitals.
Considering that the total amount of money spent on healthcare in America in 2008 was 2.3 trillion USD, yeah, you should realize it. Especially since that $22.5 billion is over five years - ie, only $4.5 billion per year. If somebody rounds the entire cost of healthcare to the closest 1%, the entire cost of HIPAA for hospitals essentially disappears entirely. Especially since we like to only use two or three significant digits. 2.3 is basically the same as 2.3045, no error required. It's not an unsubstantial amount, mind you, but certainly in line with the GP's point. So - $22.5 billion is a lot, but $2.3 trillion is even more. I think the numbers just get so large that they lose meaning. Perhaps it would be better to say America spent $2,300 billion on healthcare, of which only $4.5 billion was HIPAA related? Just like when purchasing a $2,300 USD server, you probably wouldn't quibbble (much) over a $4.50 USD SAS cable. (Keep in mind, also, the GP is talking about the "Medical Industrial Complex," which includes more than just hospitals.)
Senator Paul was apparently on his way to Washington, where the Senate has votes scheduled for this afternoon. It appears that the Executive Branch (TSA) just violated Article I section 6 of the Constitution.
They shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged...
I ask because I don't know - is boarding a commercial airliner without going through a full screening a felony? I suspect so, because I can't imagine it being classified as just a misdemeanor. Therefore it seems perfectly Constitutional to me for the TSA or some other government agency to detain and even arrest a Senator going to session for the felony of bypassing a security screening. (Assuming that, like I ask about, the violation is actually a felony.)
Predictions of the Year 2000 from The Ladies Home Journal of December 1900
http://www.yorktownhistory.org/homepages/1900_predictions.htm
Some spot on. Others... not so much.
1) The 22.67 mph change in speed did not happen during data retreival. It happened during the 712.8 ms that the recording algorithm was running during the crash.
2) Yes, the swings from +40g to -40g in 1.6 ms are odd. (I suspect vibrations through the frame of the car. 40g, by the way, is the max the sensor reads.) However, your stating that the crash was more like 1g isn't accurate. From time 0 (the moment of impact) to 70.4 ms (the end of time being reported) the delta-v is 15.13 mph. That's equivalent to an acceleration of 214.9 mph per second, or about 9.8 g. 10-ish g seems reasonable to me for the first moment of impact of a crash. Too bad the document only covers 152.8 ms.
And besides all that, a job with on-call duties is a job that has need of them. That means they either have an unstable system or they aren't staffed properly. It's a huge sign that things are not right, and that company is best avoided.
Yeah, I pretty much agree with that. For Job 00, I was one of three server techs supporting about 100 servers. We knew every server inside and out and were responsible for pretty much everything about them except corporate policies. We rarely got any off-hours calls, so we could go to the movies, etc. Job 01 was in the datacenter of a huge global company - seven of us supporting 3000 servers. When oncall, we were guaranteed to not get a full night's sleep for that week, rarely was dinner not interrupted, etc., and we were still expected to do our normal 8-5 job. We got OT but that certainly didn't make it worth the degradation in quality of life. Fixes took longer because we had no idea off the top of our heads what the hardware/software config for a particular server was, and we often had to call the SAN team, network team, VMWare team, etc. because everything was siloed. Getting cooperation wasn't easy sometimes. It was a fubar staffing situation. They could staff a helpdesk 24x7 to place the calls - but to actually FIX the problem? No. Just as I was leaving they transitioned to a schedule that had everybody working only 40 hours a week, but because 24x7 support was still required everybody worked an ever-changing schedule. One week you might be M,Tu,Th,F,Sat 8-5, next week you might be M,W,Th,Sa,Sun midnight-8, etc. After complaints to HR, they went back to the same oncall rotation. I've heard that now they have a much larger department with a mix of US and India based techs, so things aren't quite as crazy. Anyway, Job 02 now is back to a team of two people supporting only 50 servers. Again, we know all the systems, what they're temperamental about, and basically we only rarely get called. Having only two people sucks sometimes because we can't both be on vacation at the same time, but it's much better than Job 01.
Actually, I will disagree with you about the "need" of oncall duties - even if itâ(TM)s not being used I'd rather deal with a blow up SAN controller when it happens at 3am than at 8am when I get in. But if being on-call has a significant impact on your life, either the systems aren't being managed properly, or the staffing to deal with the known volume of work is screwed up. The first should be fixable, the second means you should be sending out your resume IMO.
It's worth noting, though, that while the Feb 2011 anual report does show growth, much of the doom and gloom news reports we've been hearing stem from recent quarterly reports, which are showing a good bit of contraction. From the Aug 2011 quarterly summary: "Compared to the same quarter last year, Research In Motion Limited has seen revenues fall from $4.6B to $4.2B. This along with an increase in the cost of goods sold expense has led to a reduction in the bottom line from $797.0M to $329.0M."
"the first time this method has worked in a carnivore"? Eh? Here's a report of glowing cats from 2007: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-9833107-1.html
Hard to tell what the veracity of the South Korean report is, though, and what sort of technique they used. So maybe "this method" really is new?
Oh, I totally believed you about the 2.5 minutes thing. :-) What I was questioning was the total amount of extra time because of the two point five minutes for each reboot. That is, the "more than DOUBLED the first few man days" bit.
Are you perhaps exagerating the extra time added because of the 2.5 minute bootup time? I recently set up a couple new Dell R710 servers, and as another posted indicated they boot very slowly because of BIOS checks and the like. But that certainly didn't double the amount of days it took to set them up. Assume a two-day affair becomes four, and that's an extra 16 hours - or 384 reboots. I suspect you didn't actually reboot them that many times, and are simply frustrated with the process? Yeah, that extra 2.5 minutes seems like an eternity when you're standing in a cold, loud datacenter and your feet hurt. But if you're sitting at your desk using a DRAC or ILO, doing other work at the same time, 2.5 minutes is negigible. You might even have spent more time on the phone with HP than the reboots took, you know?
Regardless, I do sympathise with you about long booting times. (My long-boot-time-story is about a NetFrame running NetWare 3.11 that took about 45 minutes because of memory and disk scans.) If the server is critical enough that the 2.5 minutes makes a difference, you need to look into virtualization products. The amount of time spent outside of the OS during the reboot of a virtualized machine isn't much more than a second or two. With multiple physical servers you can replace motherboards, CPUs and the like without bringing down the virtual machine. You just have to pay through the nose for the software (if you're talking about something like VMWare) so you'll have to decide how cirital the system is to the business.
Oh, one last thing about boot times - I'm always amused when people compare PCs to TVs. "Why can't my PC be instant-on like my TV?" they ask. Well, my TV is a DLP unit - and it takes about 30 seconds to boot from a complete power-off. Because it basically has a little PC inside it! PCs are a far cry from the old tube sets... Fortunately (or not, since it draws power) it has a quick-boot setting that at least turns off the lamp and color wheel, so a "boot" only takes three or four seconds.
Do LCD and plasma TVs take this long to boot from complete power-off? I haven't messed with one in a while.
I'm no cosmologist, but my understand is that there IS direct evidence of dark matter - in the way galaxies collide. Normal matter collides because it interacts through EM and hence slows down, while dark matter doesn't and doesn't. This can be seen by comparing X-ray imaging to map the normal matter and gravitational lensing to map the dark matter.
Google's obviously behind the times - they should have bid Tau, not Pi. :-)
None of which, as Hadlock indicated, are natural. Every single one of those lakes you mention - except Caddo Lake, already mentioned, on the Texas/Luisiana border - is the result of a man-made dam. (Although I'm not sure if it matters whether a lake is natural or man-made in terms of JWSmythe's comments about finding water for one or two weeks after an ELE. The lakes, and the water they hold, will still be there for a while.)
The line isn't geographic, like you're asking (district, city, country, etc.) The line gets drawn between the people in our http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.htmlmonkeysphere and the people outside it.
In TFA, there is no indication that the OSG actually cited Wikipedia. There is only a statement by the petitioning ex-wife that the OSG cited the DSM-IV-TR, and that the DSM-IV-TR is mentioned in Wikipedia. Based on the facts presented in TFA, it very well could have been that the OSG never mentioned Wikipedia at all, but the petitioner cleverly tricked the judge into think that the DSM-IV-TR had "no guarantee of validity," because it's mentioned in Wikipedia.
TFA needs a big fat [citation needed]. As it stands, without a link to the actual case documents it's much less reliable than a typical Wikipedia article and we don't know what's really going on.