I didn't say cost, I said "worth". Using (revenue-cost)/lifespan, each extra month is worth millions even for relatively inexpensive commercial satellites.
But it's my understanding that this technique is also useful on, um, more expensive birds. Your tax dollars at work.:)
A friend of mine was hired to work on this project. It's actually pretty tricky. Attitude correction generally involves very brief "puffs" of jets. Of course they measure the fuel consumed in these brief blasts but over years the errors accumulate.
You can't let it run out of fuel since you need enough fuel to deorbit it at end of life. But given the cost of a satellite, each extra month of life is worth millions.
The fuel is floating around in microgravity so you can't weigh it. I'm not sure but I think the most promising technique involves looking at the rate of heating when the tank-heaters are on. But accurately correcting out the effects of solar-heating and the various forms of heat loss is still lots of work.
I don't know anything about this judge's background but I'm not at all convinced that he seriously wants this outcome.
To me it looks equally plausible that he is taking the stand that the current system is flawed and unfair and that making it fair is infeasable - ie. we are storing DNA on an arbitrary and racially biased selection of innocent people so to make it fair we should get DNA from everyone.
The "solution" he proposes is tailor-made to provoke outrage and highlight the problems he sees with the current system.
Unfortunately in the most-surveilled-society-in-the-world there seem to be plenty of people saying, "hmmm, not a bad idea."
Now if it were to come to pass, I would never travel there again.
Where I grew up (Mojave Desert) there was a Beach Access Crisis. It was far harder for us to enjoy water activities than those people in urban areas like Los Angeles and San Francisco. But the smog and traffic in LA was hideous. In California, we have better access to fresh fruit and vegetables than people in many parts of the country.
Broadband is not "unavailable", it is merely more expensive. Wherever you live, some things will be more available and others will be less available. Get over it. The fees that were (stupidly, I believe) tacked on to all phone bills to fund rural access are still there - just a big pot of cash that the telco's squabble over even though routing phone service to rural areas is no longer a real issue.
Whenever I hear talk of rural access fees, I wonder why the same people aren't championing an urban affordibility fee. Tacking a huge additional fee onto transfer and property taxes in rural areas to help fund the ability to live in San Francisco or Silicon Valley makes about as much (non)sense.
Boy, you sure are certain of what I want. Except, you are 100% wrong (and helping to validate Godwin's Law.
Let me make this clear. It is not my intent that he be harassed or threatened. It is not my desire that he be harassed or threatened. I do not condone harassing or threatning him. Furthermore, if he is harassed and I become aware of any information that would assist law enforcement in apprehending the culprits I will contact the appropriate agency or agencies without delay. Am I now open enough about my true feelings for you?
As to known and credible, my feelings regarding his campaign are independent of his credentials. But given the number of cases where non-IE users have run into stupid issues with IE-only sites, I believe that the source of the "campaign" is germaine to the discussion. What if the registrant was Microsoft (who was caught artificially restricting and hindering non-IE browsers)? Or one of the large ad distribution networks? Or a network or news organization like Forbes, PBS or NBC? That would certainly shed a different light on the issue.
Then again, maybe he is just unknown in my part of the country so I take a peek to see what his address seems to be (knowing, of course, that the registrant address could possibly be a mail-drop, some other business the registrant runs, etc.). Perhaps it will be a large colocation building. Maybe a modern office tower?
Instead, we can see that what we have is apparently the ranting of a lone man seemingly operating out of what looks to be a run-down warehouse in the sticks.
I remember a few years ago a new Linux vendor suddenly appeared (don't recall their name at the moment) and they were posturing for an IPO. Much of the discussion here and elsewhere was sceptical about the company's claims which included large unit sales including a multi-million-dollar contract with a company headquartered a mile or so from my house. I took a look and a couple photos of the place. What the photo shows is a business selling discounted porn CDs and (post 2000), ratty cardboard boxes of things like broken keyboards, PC serial cards, clock cards and other components that were obsolete in the mid-80's. But few, if any, new or modern computers. What the photos showed better than any description could have was that this was clearly not a multi-million-dollar corporation. So yes, photos of the business are important.
And we are talking about business. This guy has scads of operations from Christian sites to web-design to web-hosting - all of which can be cross-referenced by....the whois registrant information. And by the way, I provided no new information. That was provided in plain sight by Google, Verisign, etc. all easily available with 10-20 seconds of work.
But that info does, with a few clicks, allow us to start uncovering interesting info. While you can, of course, run a business anywhere, his does not have the appearance of any major web operation that I've seen. We see that he rants against Firefox and advocates blocking it, yet no site of his that I came across did so. We read that his justification for Firefox blocking is the "theft" of ad revenue yet some of his operations show at least some evidence of link-farming (at minimum he extensively cross-links to his other properties plus at least one site of his brokers blog cross-linking). Makes one suspicious.
So to sum up:
Pulling back the curtain to reveal the wizard: yes.
Advocating, condoning, or tolerating harassment or threats: absolutely no.
My K-12 days were in the 60s/70s. My mother was a teacher who quit after my sister and I were born. She used to be infuriated after parent/teacher meetings where she would ask a question and get the "don't worry, we're the professionals, you're an untrained parent" attitude when she had her education masters from Stanford.
Frustration with the schools led a group of parents to form an action group that discovered, among other things, that the district had claimed they had a MGM (Mentally Gifted Minors) program to get funds when they actually weren't doing anything for the gifted children but rather just grabbing money for the budget.
They did make a small dent - especially when my dad was elected and re-elected as head of the Board of Education. But I'm not sure that any of the good they did lasted much past his term of office.
The former Secretary of Education commented on NPR the other day that 40 years ago the best option for college-educated women was teaching and that's what about 50% of them did. That pool of (probably unfairly) cheap teaching labor dried up long ago. If you want good people as teachers you are going to have to pay them. Conversely, the teaching establishment needs to stop the same-pay-for-all nonsense. Teachers in difficult-to-fill specialties like science and math should be paid more. Top-flight teachers should be compensated better as well. Bad teachers should be fired. (There's no excuse for tenure in K-12.)
Just quick cut-n-paste of whois. Nothing more. All freely available info anyway.
In part it shows that this isn't coming from some known and credible source but is just the random rant of some guy. It also provides reference data that ties him to his stable of domains only a few of which are listed above but which also include phpav.com (bible info), looklistenlearn.org, elevenoclock.com, radiojesus.com and scads of others. Makes me wonder if he isn't link-farming himself.
whois whyfirefoxisblocked.com... Registrant:
Danny Carlton
19724 E Pine St
Suite #149
Catoosa, Oklahoma 75015
United States
See also, dannycarlton.com/net/org.
Living in Cantoosa must leave you with lot of time to ponder the big questions and it seems like Danny has plenty of opinions. His blog (which does not, by the way, block FireFox) includes his opinions on everything from homeshooling to "Jesus Camp" to pet food names like "baby-poop mustard" (to distinguish the fancy kind from plain yellow) and "booger bread" (9-grain style).
All we have here is an insignificant Internet rant. Nothing original there.
Thank goodness I did my homework and selected PostgreSQL and not, as one consultant suggested, MySQL back when we selected the database for our application. I've never had it crash and on the few occasions where it was unceremoniously shutdown (accidental powerdown and such), it's always come right back up with no data loss. And it's just been getting better by leaps and bounds.
Somebody needs to take a cluestick to the heads of a whole bunch of county election officials. They are "concerned" about this report. Because it goes to the heart of the legitimacy of our election system??? NO! Last thing on their minds. They are worried that having to switch to a proven reliable and secure system would inconvenience them. The lot of them ought to be tossed out on their ears.
It's been a long time since I went on a tour of several data centers to locate a new facility for our dot-com. I believe that 365 Main was a facility that does not use a battery UPS. Instead, they have engine-backed flywheel UPS system (see http://www.enterprisenetworksandservers.com/monthl y/art.php?2813 for a description). At the time, they have 10 2-megawatt generators on the roof in a N+2 configuration. The engines are kept heated and are spec'd to go from stop to engage-clutch/deliver-power in 3 seconds. The flywheel can deliver 11 seconds of power so they can fail through a couple of bad engines before running out of flywheel power. They periodidally do a 20-hour load test into a pair of 500,000 watt heat-sinks. Time will tell if this outage was a failure of design, failure of maintenance, or outright malfeasance. But it wasn't supposed to happen. They've got some 'splainin' to do.
As to diesel storage, use of diesel is widespread for emergency use everywhere from hospitals to emergency-services to hospitals. Those systems are run regularly - typically weekly. The use of biocides, stabilizers, and mobile fuel-scrubbing services, and extra filtration systems can maintain the fuel quality. Our colo currently maintains a 1-week fuel-supply and has multiple quick-refuel contracts in place. I can't imagine any colo having less than 24-48 hours in-the-tank with quick-refill on-call.
But one thing that is missing is cooling. Our colo has a typical contract that says something like blah-blah won't exceed 80F for more than 4 hours blah blah. OK, but a rack full of blade servers can crank out 15-20kW of heat load and a data center can heat up real quick without AC. By contract, 150F for 3.5 hours would be in-spec.
All that supercomputing power and they come up with "a one-building electricity bill of $3 per second - or about $1,500,000 per year". I'm sure they meant $3/minute with is much more in line with all the other figures they quote. Still, that puts their electricity rate in the 10-cents/kWh range - surprisingly high for a large industrial customer.
First, find "an itch to scratch". What excites you? Databases? Web development? Audio processing? Image editing? The first step is to find a project that you would be interested in using.
Second, read, read, read. Lurk in the mailing lists, IRC, etc. Get a feel for how the project is maintained and the tone of the developers and users. Don't be one of those who shows up new on the scene and suggests ideas that have been repeatedly rejected for the project or patches that break things or show no understanding of the project design and goals. Try to determine if you would "fit in" with the group.
Third, use the program and dig through the code till you have a good understanding of it. You will learn a lot...including whether or not you want to find a different project.:)
Fourth, if you have found that exciting project and the code or people haven't scared you away, find out where you can contribute. It's not just about coding. Large projects have people contributing to code, documentation, public-relations, mail-list management, answering questions on the mailing lists, and so on. If you are really focused on programming, peruse the bug list and find some solutions. You will build your reputation by repeated posting of quality patches.
Fifth, be humble. There's nothing wrong with "I'm new to this project and have been digging through and learning the code. I think this patch might fix bug #1138? Is there something I have overlooked?". It's far better than "Hey guys - here's how to fix that dumb bug..." You could be right, but it's more likely you will find 15 developers jumping into the discussion to tell you what you forgot to take into account with your stupid suggestion. That will set your reputation way back.
On the other hand, if you are just looking for something to jump into so it can go on your resume, forget it. You won't have the interest and passion to stick around long enough to be useful.
We have used DNS failover from dnsmadeeasy.com for a couple years and have put it to the test a couple times. They have had perfect reliability and a low cost (typically well under $100/year).
The method is not perfect, but it is plenty good enough for our needs to protect against something that takes a datacenter down for a prolonged time (several minutes/hours/days). And the price
And to those who recommend avoiding "disaster prone" places: they all have people. People like the backhoe guy who took out the OC192 down the street. Or the core drillers who managed to punch both the primary and secondary optical links to a building of ours at a point where they were too close to each other.
You can roll your own by having a DNS server at each site and DNS 1 always issues IP of server 1 while DNS 2 always issues IP of server 2. But there are a number of issues like traffic hitting both sites at the same time. And you will have to detect more than just a down link so you will be scripting web test and DNS update systems. By the time you are done, you will have spent decades' worth of dnsmadeeasy fees.
Note: dnsmadeeasy isn't the only game in town. Just the one we happen to use.
Last time I checked, legislators wrote the waste-disposal laws. And legislators (here in California) have introduced bills to outright ban sale of standard incandescents. Seems like they should get the flourescent disposal process and laws figured out before basically forcing people to convert to them.
Bear in mind that with the exception of a single bulb in the dining-room, every overhead light in the house, the garage, and the lights by the front and rear doors have been flourescent for many years. I have a small battery-bucket I take to recycling periodically, and I batch flourescents for recycling.
But that means finding a safe place where my toddler won't find them and where someone won't shove a box against them and break them. It also means remembering when the facility is open and hoping there isn't a schedule conflict.
I'll bet if you totalled up the lamps sold vs. the lamps actually taken in for recycling, you'd find that most people don't bother and just dump them. And they will continue to do so until there is a reasonable alternative.
I don't consider a facility that is located in the gunfire-plagued part of west-county and which is open only a few weekend hours on one day each month to be an effective way of encourgaging recycling.
And not practical, either. There are well over 60,000 households covered by the waste facility. If everyone stored up three-year's worth before driving them to recycling, that's over 20,000 trips per year or 200,000 vehicle miles if the average round-trip is 10 miles (I'm not sure of the exact average). If half of the people can take time to go on a weekday, that still leaves nearly a line of nearly a thousand households to be processed on the monthly weekend drop-off day in addition to all the people dropping off pesticides, paint, batteries, medications and the like.
I'd much prefer to just drop off the old when I buy an new and let a single purpose-designed truck collect from the stores.
I went to an art-show/Earth Day event a couple blocks from my house Saturday (yes, our town has it a week late). They had representatives of various environmental and recycling organizations.
The sign-in sheet had a place to check a box "pledging" to convert one incandescent lamp to flourescent. So I asked about where to return them when they die. After all, safe and convenient disposal is a critical component of encouraging their use.
Man, you would have thought I was watching roaches scurry when the light came on.
Dump them in the trash? No! - that's illegal dumping of toxic waste.
Save them and take them to the thrice-yearly e-waste event? No! - they are specifically prohibited.
Take them to the recycling center a couple blocks from my house? No! - "We're supposed to be self-supporting and the permit cost would bankrupt us."
Pretty much the only option provided was to wait for the "convenient" once-a-month Saturday the waste facility is open, put the burned-out bulb in my car, drive a half-dozen miles to the waste facility (they were helpful in telling me how to get to the facility while dodging the most dangerous parts of Richmond), wait in line (start/stop engine repeatedly or idle constantly), fill out paperwork, hand them the bulb, drive a half-dozen miles back home.
If that's the best the powers-that-be can come up with, they shouldn't be surprised that CFL adoption is less than they hoped. With cans, bottles and electronics they tack on a recycling fee up-front. And any store that sells ni-cads is required to accept them for recycling. Seems like a couple ideas that should be considered for flourescents.
No, it would mean patching all over again. TZ info is a cumulative record of time changes. If changed back, we will have to update everything with files that reflect those changes without changing history. Nobody is going to go back and say that noon March 30 Daylight Time was now, retroactively, 11am March 30 Standard Time.
You provided a tool that gave a manager some information. This is a good thing.
The manager used it. This is a good thing.
The tool revealed something. This is a good thing.
The manager may be seeking to decide what action, if any, is required. This a good thing. (I hear lots more complaints from people who build systems that aren't used or where the information supplied is ignored. As someone once said, "If you ignore your consultant's recommendations, fire him. It doesn't matter how good the advice is - if your plan is to ignore it you are wasting your money." Similarly, a system that only produces output which is ignored can be scrapped.)
The manager wants to make sure the decision is based on sound data. This is a good thing. Especially if the manager is "situationally aware" enough to be correlating information from different sources. The information may not completely agree and your data may not be the only data being investigated.
So...look deeper into the question. It could really mean all sorts of things like:
I panic at the slightest change.
-or-
This is interesting, but your tool doesn't let me dig-down to the level necessary to get useful insight. Please help me.
-or-
Your tool has the ability to dig into the data, but I'm too lazy to do so. (Or it's too hard to use or the ability is hidden or.....fill in usability/training issue here)
-or-
Your tools have a bad reputation for accuracy so I'm double-checking.
So it's your choice. Treat the manager as stupid/untrusting/lazy. Or spend a moment to find out the underlying reason for the question. In the worst case you will build goodwill and political-capital for IT and in the best case you will let IT really shine by tweaking your systems and/or training to make the company more competitive.
I'm glad I took assembly. I've never "used" it in the traditional sense of writing an application other than in school, but understanding how things work "under the covers" (whether at the CPU, hard-disk or network level) has provided valuable guidance in day-to-day design and troubleshooting.
I've worked with people with very focused high-level programming skills and found that while they could write mostly decent code, their code was also most likely to fail in production since they were completely mentally removed from concepts like disk-seek times or bandwidth constraints. Programmers with a deeper understanding of what actually happened when their code ran tended to make wiser programming choices.
As they say, there are two things you don't want to see being made. Law and sausage.
This proposal goes way, way back.
Part of Clinton's "balanced" budget (whatever "balanced" can be stretched to mean in the halls of gov't) was based on accelerating the switchover to digital and reaping the windfall from sale of the analog frequencies.
But, some lawcritters argued, this would be an undue burden on the TV-addicted public.
So they reached a compromise. Accelerate the sale but set aside some of the revenue to pay for converter boxes.
Of course the switchover date kept getting pushed back while the converter-box-bucks have remained.
Slashdot Mirror
Why does this remind me of the little sister who smacks her big brother then immediately crys "mommy, he's picking on me" when he pushes her back?
We scrapped all our remaining SCO stuff and completed converting to Linux. There will be no tears here when SCO is dead and buried.
I didn't say cost, I said "worth". Using (revenue-cost)/lifespan, each extra month is worth millions even for relatively inexpensive commercial satellites.
:)
But it's my understanding that this technique is also useful on, um, more expensive birds. Your tax dollars at work.
A friend of mine was hired to work on this project. It's actually pretty tricky. Attitude correction generally involves very brief "puffs" of jets. Of course they measure the fuel consumed in these brief blasts but over years the errors accumulate.
You can't let it run out of fuel since you need enough fuel to deorbit it at end of life. But given the cost of a satellite, each extra month of life is worth millions.
The fuel is floating around in microgravity so you can't weigh it. I'm not sure but I think the most promising technique involves looking at the rate of heating when the tank-heaters are on. But accurately correcting out the effects of solar-heating and the various forms of heat loss is still lots of work.
I don't know anything about this judge's background but I'm not at all convinced that he seriously wants this outcome.
To me it looks equally plausible that he is taking the stand that the current system is flawed and unfair and that making it fair is infeasable - ie. we are storing DNA on an arbitrary and racially biased selection of innocent people so to make it fair we should get DNA from everyone.
The "solution" he proposes is tailor-made to provoke outrage and highlight the problems he sees with the current system.
Unfortunately in the most-surveilled-society-in-the-world there seem to be plenty of people saying, "hmmm, not a bad idea."
Now if it were to come to pass, I would never travel there again.
Where I grew up (Mojave Desert) there was a Beach Access Crisis. It was far harder for us to enjoy water activities than those people in urban areas like Los Angeles and San Francisco. But the smog and traffic in LA was hideous. In California, we have better access to fresh fruit and vegetables than people in many parts of the country.
Broadband is not "unavailable", it is merely more expensive. Wherever you live, some things will be more available and others will be less available. Get over it. The fees that were (stupidly, I believe) tacked on to all phone bills to fund rural access are still there - just a big pot of cash that the telco's squabble over even though routing phone service to rural areas is no longer a real issue.
Whenever I hear talk of rural access fees, I wonder why the same people aren't championing an urban affordibility fee. Tacking a huge additional fee onto transfer and property taxes in rural areas to help fund the ability to live in San Francisco or Silicon Valley makes about as much (non)sense.
Boy, you sure are certain of what I want. Except, you are 100% wrong (and helping to validate Godwin's Law.
Let me make this clear. It is not my intent that he be harassed or threatened. It is not my desire that he be harassed or threatened. I do not condone harassing or threatning him. Furthermore, if he is harassed and I become aware of any information that would assist law enforcement in apprehending the culprits I will contact the appropriate agency or agencies without delay. Am I now open enough about my true feelings for you?
As to known and credible, my feelings regarding his campaign are independent of his credentials. But given the number of cases where non-IE users have run into stupid issues with IE-only sites, I believe that the source of the "campaign" is germaine to the discussion. What if the registrant was Microsoft (who was caught artificially restricting and hindering non-IE browsers)? Or one of the large ad distribution networks? Or a network or news organization like Forbes, PBS or NBC? That would certainly shed a different light on the issue.
Then again, maybe he is just unknown in my part of the country so I take a peek to see what his address seems to be (knowing, of course, that the registrant address could possibly be a mail-drop, some other business the registrant runs, etc.). Perhaps it will be a large colocation building. Maybe a modern office tower?
Instead, we can see that what we have is apparently the ranting of a lone man seemingly operating out of what looks to be a run-down warehouse in the sticks.
I remember a few years ago a new Linux vendor suddenly appeared (don't recall their name at the moment) and they were posturing for an IPO. Much of the discussion here and elsewhere was sceptical about the company's claims which included large unit sales including a multi-million-dollar contract with a company headquartered a mile or so from my house. I took a look and a couple photos of the place. What the photo shows is a business selling discounted porn CDs and (post 2000), ratty cardboard boxes of things like broken keyboards, PC serial cards, clock cards and other components that were obsolete in the mid-80's. But few, if any, new or modern computers. What the photos showed better than any description could have was that this was clearly not a multi-million-dollar corporation. So yes, photos of the business are important.
And we are talking about business. This guy has scads of operations from Christian sites to web-design to web-hosting - all of which can be cross-referenced by....the whois registrant information. And by the way, I provided no new information. That was provided in plain sight by Google, Verisign, etc. all easily available with 10-20 seconds of work.
But that info does, with a few clicks, allow us to start uncovering interesting info. While you can, of course, run a business anywhere, his does not have the appearance of any major web operation that I've seen. We see that he rants against Firefox and advocates blocking it, yet no site of his that I came across did so. We read that his justification for Firefox blocking is the "theft" of ad revenue yet some of his operations show at least some evidence of link-farming (at minimum he extensively cross-links to his other properties plus at least one site of his brokers blog cross-linking). Makes one suspicious.
So to sum up:
Pulling back the curtain to reveal the wizard: yes.
Advocating, condoning, or tolerating harassment or threats: absolutely no.
I hope this clears things up.
My K-12 days were in the 60s/70s. My mother was a teacher who quit after my sister and I were born. She used to be infuriated after parent/teacher meetings where she would ask a question and get the "don't worry, we're the professionals, you're an untrained parent" attitude when she had her education masters from Stanford.
Frustration with the schools led a group of parents to form an action group that discovered, among other things, that the district had claimed they had a MGM (Mentally Gifted Minors) program to get funds when they actually weren't doing anything for the gifted children but rather just grabbing money for the budget.
They did make a small dent - especially when my dad was elected and re-elected as head of the Board of Education. But I'm not sure that any of the good they did lasted much past his term of office.
The former Secretary of Education commented on NPR the other day that 40 years ago the best option for college-educated women was teaching and that's what about 50% of them did. That pool of (probably unfairly) cheap teaching labor dried up long ago. If you want good people as teachers you are going to have to pay them. Conversely, the teaching establishment needs to stop the same-pay-for-all nonsense. Teachers in difficult-to-fill specialties like science and math should be paid more. Top-flight teachers should be compensated better as well. Bad teachers should be fired. (There's no excuse for tenure in K-12.)
Just quick cut-n-paste of whois. Nothing more. All freely available info anyway.
1 9724+E+Pine+St.,+Catoosa,+Oklahoma&sll=37.910873,- 122.298367&sspn=1.410643,2.260437&ie=UTF8&ll=36.17 6942,-95.755827&spn=0.002819,0.004415&t=k&z=18&om= 1
In part it shows that this isn't coming from some known and credible source but is just the random rant of some guy. It also provides reference data that ties him to his stable of domains only a few of which are listed above but which also include phpav.com (bible info), looklistenlearn.org, elevenoclock.com, radiojesus.com and scads of others. Makes me wonder if he isn't link-farming himself.
As to doing anything to him...I absolutely advocate nothing more that what I suggested in the OP. Ignoring him. Not that it appears that you could do anything that hasn't been done already:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=
So he's schitzo, too? :)
Apparently he also owns familynethome.com "Offering family oriented web hosting for safe, clean internet experience."
whois whyfirefoxisblocked.com...
Registrant:
Danny Carlton
19724 E Pine St
Suite #149
Catoosa, Oklahoma 75015
United States
See also, dannycarlton.com/net/org.
Living in Cantoosa must leave you with lot of time to ponder the big questions and it seems like Danny has plenty of opinions. His blog (which does not, by the way, block FireFox) includes his opinions on everything from homeshooling to "Jesus Camp" to pet food names like "baby-poop mustard" (to distinguish the fancy kind from plain yellow) and "booger bread" (9-grain style).
All we have here is an insignificant Internet rant. Nothing original there.
PostgreSQL 8.2.4. :)
Thank goodness I did my homework and selected PostgreSQL and not, as one consultant suggested, MySQL back when we selected the database for our application. I've never had it crash and on the few occasions where it was unceremoniously shutdown (accidental powerdown and such), it's always come right back up with no data loss. And it's just been getting better by leaps and bounds.
Somebody needs to take a cluestick to the heads of a whole bunch of county election officials. They are "concerned" about this report. Because it goes to the heart of the legitimacy of our election system??? NO! Last thing on their minds. They are worried that having to switch to a proven reliable and secure system would inconvenience them. The lot of them ought to be tossed out on their ears.
It's been a long time since I went on a tour of several data centers to locate a new facility for our dot-com. I believe that 365 Main was a facility that does not use a battery UPS. Instead, they have engine-backed flywheel UPS system (see http://www.enterprisenetworksandservers.com/monthl y/art.php?2813 for a description). At the time, they have 10 2-megawatt generators on the roof in a N+2 configuration. The engines are kept heated and are spec'd to go from stop to engage-clutch/deliver-power in 3 seconds. The flywheel can deliver 11 seconds of power so they can fail through a couple of bad engines before running out of flywheel power. They periodidally do a 20-hour load test into a pair of 500,000 watt heat-sinks. Time will tell if this outage was a failure of design, failure of maintenance, or outright malfeasance. But it wasn't supposed to happen. They've got some 'splainin' to do.
As to diesel storage, use of diesel is widespread for emergency use everywhere from hospitals to emergency-services to hospitals. Those systems are run regularly - typically weekly. The use of biocides, stabilizers, and mobile fuel-scrubbing services, and extra filtration systems can maintain the fuel quality. Our colo currently maintains a 1-week fuel-supply and has multiple quick-refuel contracts in place. I can't imagine any colo having less than 24-48 hours in-the-tank with quick-refill on-call.
But one thing that is missing is cooling. Our colo has a typical contract that says something like blah-blah won't exceed 80F for more than 4 hours blah blah. OK, but a rack full of blade servers can crank out 15-20kW of heat load and a data center can heat up real quick without AC. By contract, 150F for 3.5 hours would be in-spec.
I bet these 2.3 million people don't want the law weakened.
All that supercomputing power and they come up with "a one-building electricity bill of $3 per second - or about $1,500,000 per year". I'm sure they meant $3/minute with is much more in line with all the other figures they quote. Still, that puts their electricity rate in the 10-cents/kWh range - surprisingly high for a large industrial customer.
First, find "an itch to scratch". What excites you? Databases? Web development? Audio processing? Image editing? The first step is to find a project that you would be interested in using.
:)
Second, read, read, read. Lurk in the mailing lists, IRC, etc. Get a feel for how the project is maintained and the tone of the developers and users. Don't be one of those who shows up new on the scene and suggests ideas that have been repeatedly rejected for the project or patches that break things or show no understanding of the project design and goals. Try to determine if you would "fit in" with the group.
Third, use the program and dig through the code till you have a good understanding of it. You will learn a lot...including whether or not you want to find a different project.
Fourth, if you have found that exciting project and the code or people haven't scared you away, find out where you can contribute. It's not just about coding. Large projects have people contributing to code, documentation, public-relations, mail-list management, answering questions on the mailing lists, and so on. If you are really focused on programming, peruse the bug list and find some solutions. You will build your reputation by repeated posting of quality patches.
Fifth, be humble. There's nothing wrong with "I'm new to this project and have been digging through and learning the code. I think this patch might fix bug #1138? Is there something I have overlooked?". It's far better than "Hey guys - here's how to fix that dumb bug..." You could be right, but it's more likely you will find 15 developers jumping into the discussion to tell you what you forgot to take into account with your stupid suggestion. That will set your reputation way back.
On the other hand, if you are just looking for something to jump into so it can go on your resume, forget it. You won't have the interest and passion to stick around long enough to be useful.
We have used DNS failover from dnsmadeeasy.com for a couple years and have put it to the test a couple times. They have had perfect reliability and a low cost (typically well under $100/year).
The method is not perfect, but it is plenty good enough for our needs to protect against something that takes a datacenter down for a prolonged time (several minutes/hours/days). And the price
And to those who recommend avoiding "disaster prone" places: they all have people. People like the backhoe guy who took out the OC192 down the street. Or the core drillers who managed to punch both the primary and secondary optical links to a building of ours at a point where they were too close to each other.
You can roll your own by having a DNS server at each site and DNS 1 always issues IP of server 1 while DNS 2 always issues IP of server 2. But there are a number of issues like traffic hitting both sites at the same time. And you will have to detect more than just a down link so you will be scripting web test and DNS update systems. By the time you are done, you will have spent decades' worth of dnsmadeeasy fees.
Note: dnsmadeeasy isn't the only game in town. Just the one we happen to use.
If tech is the answer, the initial attempts aren't going so well:2 9244
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/27/12
Last time I checked, legislators wrote the waste-disposal laws. And legislators (here in California) have introduced bills to outright ban sale of standard incandescents. Seems like they should get the flourescent disposal process and laws figured out before basically forcing people to convert to them.
Only partially kidding.
Bear in mind that with the exception of a single bulb in the dining-room, every overhead light in the house, the garage, and the lights by the front and rear doors have been flourescent for many years. I have a small battery-bucket I take to recycling periodically, and I batch flourescents for recycling.
But that means finding a safe place where my toddler won't find them and where someone won't shove a box against them and break them. It also means remembering when the facility is open and hoping there isn't a schedule conflict.
I'll bet if you totalled up the lamps sold vs. the lamps actually taken in for recycling, you'd find that most people don't bother and just dump them. And they will continue to do so until there is a reasonable alternative.
I don't consider a facility that is located in the gunfire-plagued part of west-county and which is open only a few weekend hours on one day each month to be an effective way of encourgaging recycling.
And not practical, either. There are well over 60,000 households covered by the waste facility. If everyone stored up three-year's worth before driving them to recycling, that's over 20,000 trips per year or 200,000 vehicle miles if the average round-trip is 10 miles (I'm not sure of the exact average). If half of the people can take time to go on a weekday, that still leaves nearly a line of nearly a thousand households to be processed on the monthly weekend drop-off day in addition to all the people dropping off pesticides, paint, batteries, medications and the like.
I'd much prefer to just drop off the old when I buy an new and let a single purpose-designed truck collect from the stores.
I went to an art-show/Earth Day event a couple blocks from my house Saturday (yes, our town has it a week late). They had representatives of various environmental and recycling organizations.
The sign-in sheet had a place to check a box "pledging" to convert one incandescent lamp to flourescent. So I asked about where to return them when they die. After all, safe and convenient disposal is a critical component of encouraging their use.
Man, you would have thought I was watching roaches scurry when the light came on.
Dump them in the trash? No! - that's illegal dumping of toxic waste.
Save them and take them to the thrice-yearly e-waste event? No! - they are specifically prohibited.
Take them to the recycling center a couple blocks from my house? No! - "We're supposed to be self-supporting and the permit cost would bankrupt us."
Pretty much the only option provided was to wait for the "convenient" once-a-month Saturday the waste facility is open, put the burned-out bulb in my car, drive a half-dozen miles to the waste facility (they were helpful in telling me how to get to the facility while dodging the most dangerous parts of Richmond), wait in line (start/stop engine repeatedly or idle constantly), fill out paperwork, hand them the bulb, drive a half-dozen miles back home.
If that's the best the powers-that-be can come up with, they shouldn't be surprised that CFL adoption is less than they hoped. With cans, bottles and electronics they tack on a recycling fee up-front. And any store that sells ni-cads is required to accept them for recycling. Seems like a couple ideas that should be considered for flourescents.
No, it would mean patching all over again. TZ info is a cumulative record of time changes. If changed back, we will have to update everything with files that reflect those changes without changing history. Nobody is going to go back and say that noon March 30 Daylight Time was now, retroactively, 11am March 30 Standard Time.
You provided a tool that gave a manager some information. This is a good thing.
The manager used it. This is a good thing.
The tool revealed something. This is a good thing.
The manager may be seeking to decide what action, if any, is required. This a good thing. (I hear lots more complaints from people who build systems that aren't used or where the information supplied is ignored. As someone once said, "If you ignore your consultant's recommendations, fire him. It doesn't matter how good the advice is - if your plan is to ignore it you are wasting your money." Similarly, a system that only produces output which is ignored can be scrapped.)
The manager wants to make sure the decision is based on sound data. This is a good thing. Especially if the manager is "situationally aware" enough to be correlating information from different sources. The information may not completely agree and your data may not be the only data being investigated.
So...look deeper into the question. It could really mean all sorts of things like:
I panic at the slightest change.
-or-
This is interesting, but your tool doesn't let me dig-down to the level necessary to get useful insight. Please help me.
-or-
Your tool has the ability to dig into the data, but I'm too lazy to do so. (Or it's too hard to use or the ability is hidden or.....fill in usability/training issue here)
-or-
Your tools have a bad reputation for accuracy so I'm double-checking.
So it's your choice. Treat the manager as stupid/untrusting/lazy. Or spend a moment to find out the underlying reason for the question. In the worst case you will build goodwill and political-capital for IT and in the best case you will let IT really shine by tweaking your systems and/or training to make the company more competitive.
I'm glad I took assembly. I've never "used" it in the traditional sense of writing an application other than in school, but understanding how things work "under the covers" (whether at the CPU, hard-disk or network level) has provided valuable guidance in day-to-day design and troubleshooting.
I've worked with people with very focused high-level programming skills and found that while they could write mostly decent code, their code was also most likely to fail in production since they were completely mentally removed from concepts like disk-seek times or bandwidth constraints. Programmers with a deeper understanding of what actually happened when their code ran tended to make wiser programming choices.
As they say, there are two things you don't want to see being made. Law and sausage.
This proposal goes way, way back.
Part of Clinton's "balanced" budget (whatever "balanced" can be stretched to mean in the halls of gov't) was based on accelerating the switchover to digital and reaping the windfall from sale of the analog frequencies.
But, some lawcritters argued, this would be an undue burden on the TV-addicted public.
So they reached a compromise. Accelerate the sale but set aside some of the revenue to pay for converter boxes.
Of course the switchover date kept getting pushed back while the converter-box-bucks have remained.