Having just had the misfortune of recently experiencing a 7.1 @ 15km and then a 6.2 @ 7km can only say that it was the 7.1 that really made me crap myself. It feels like an endless amount of energy has unleashed under your feet. I just can't imagine what an 8.5+ would be like.
But the devastation of a tsunami makes our problems minuscule...
In the days before broadband and cheap CD-R drives Linux updates used to come from Infomagic on CDs.
I would eagerly await when the local computer store would get this quarterly update of "shovel-ware" CDs, and hidden in it would be a gem, the six-CDs-in-a-box of Linux, and maybe a Slackware distro too.
I was sort of like having a geek Christmas every season, heading home and reading the package list, trying everything out, seeing what new drivers were now in the Kernel so I could get a better VGA card. And then one had DOOM on Linux!
All that pent up anticipation has now disappeared - I hate you yum!
You are missing the point. "How many 2KB sets of data could be on the disk? A billion" is being played off against "What is the chance that this email appeared in random data? 128^1024" which is also true.
So the weasel question is "So, assuming the data on the drive is random, then it's safe to say there are at least two billion opportunities on this drive to produce this email?" - (Actually it is even more - who says that the email needs to be byte aligned?).
The answer is "Because the size of the email is relatively larfge there is about the same amount of chance as all the atoms in your underwear jumping a meter to the left in the next 5 seconds - it is very, very, very improbable".
Agreed - As anybody who has thrown a paper plane knows that they have an innate tendency to locate and circle in updrafts, and they are not at affected by the drop in air pressure at altitude...
Dropping a paper plane from 30km, where the air pressure only a few % of that at sea level, where it is most probably plummeting like a stone for half the distance, and we are expected to believe that they make it around the world? I would be very impressed if this was true.
But I think GPS Boomerang is far more geek. An EPP foam plane that flys home from up to 100,000ft to land where I want it to go.
Mostly correct, but flash isn't THAT slow. My nice little Digilent FPGA board has 70ns flash on it - I can read read a location in under a 10th of a microsecond.
The latency on SSDs isn't due to the flash itself, but due mostly to the time taken for the data to be squirted up the SATA interface. That is why flash on PCIe cards making an appearance in high-end systems.
In my iTunes collection I have many GB of audio and podcasts, and I assume that the first bytes of all the blocks would be different. If only I could just get the files to fragment in such a away that when reading the raw device the first character of each sector was the values I wanted... I could even use RC4 or some other stream cypher to generate block offsets, giving a password and further defying analysis. As long as I don't defrag the disk, my data is safely hidden in files that just look like files.
Just hope I don't need to update the data often, as read and write time would be rather shabby...
Well! There is somebody who believes the basic assumptions of an outdated economic dogma can be applied to all areas of life. Here are a few ideas to ponder over....
1. Do people and companies react in a sane rational way, especially when it comes to healthcare?
2. Are you aware that large free markets have been proven to be disconnected from what is called "the fundamentals"?
3. Is a person or company acting in what is in their best interest always acting in the interests of the whole community?
5. Can we expect everybody patients have access to all information, allowing them to act rationally, or will they be making decisions on incomplete information?
And for some more direct questions:
1. Would it not be in a hospital's best interest to only admit "nice and easy" cases, and turn away 'hard cases', to help their statistics look good?
2. Why do the foreign quacks selling Cancer treatments and fake stem cell therapies not go out of business?
3. Homeopathy still attracts dollars, even when it doesn't actually work. Why?
I *remember* passwords in my head, and hate to admit it but they are short phrases... if I was a Blade Runner fan I might choose "Time2DiE!" for a not so important account.
I *record* as few passwords of my passwords as possible, but at my employer we record all the details in a special area of our CRM system. It isn't very secure, but it works. I prefer not to have any record of my employer's client's passwords and check the CRM every time - it is embarrassing to lock out the Admin account when another engineer changes the password!
I feel sorry for one customer who needed to give us admin access. His "never tell anybody" password was the brand name and model of s personal electronic device for appling mild electric shocks to sensitive parts of the body... I just HAD to google it!
As far as I can tell, nobody buys ringtones for content, they buy it for "branding" themselves. They use the ringtone to announce something about themselves to everybody they are with.
Some people are willing to pay $4 in an attempt to announce "look at me, gosh I'm hip" every time their phone rings... It is not about quality or work that went into the creation!
I agree, but you have to remember back in the 80s and early 90s there was a lot less people doing IT work, so those that did it were usually those with a natural talent for it. Nowdays there are so many IT staff that it half of them don't have a deep talent for it... for them it is just a job. We can't expect everybody to be brilliant.
You and I may know how to assign IRQs, or maybe even real mode x86 assembler, but it doesn't really prove much other than we have a lot of outdated skills. Perhaps you and I are the equivalent of "Coach builders", practicing soon to be forgotten skills.
I initially suspected something was up , but I have tested and got roughly the same figures on other systems.
I just tested a different system on my work bench. The PSU not plugged into anything other than the mains sinks 13W, and 18W when plugged to a system board.
I've done a bit of power supply design, and I guess they have a small load in there to sink a bit of power allowing the PSU to stabilize the standby rails. It will also need the mandatory discharge resistors over the HV caps, to prevent people killing themselves if they open the box. Switch-mode supplies are efficient at rated power, but they can be very inefficient when providing a tiny amount of that rating.
What a waste of power - PC Power management just sucks...
I still can't understand why when my PC is shutdown it draws more than a (compact fluorescent) light bulb... it metered at 19W. 74W on (and idle), 19W off, pathetic!
BTW my cell phone charger didn't register at all....
Oh, that is right, you have to draw less than 20W to put an energy star sticker on it.
Sorry, UNIX time is exactly 86400 seconds per day.
If you read this history of POSIX time it becomes apparent that POSIX time is a mashup of UTC and GMT that is different to either.
The standard does not require your system clock to be accurate. When a leap second occurs, unless your POSIX system makes the effort to adjust its clock (say via the adjtimex(2) call), your POSIX system's clock will ignore the leap second.
To make matters worse, people are now syncing their systems to a UTC or TIA time source, or perhaps even GPS time which are all defined on different foundations.
You can not assume that POSIX time actually means anything better than the time on your watch does, unless you are fully aware the whole chain.
Do you really suggest I shut off all your servers and spin down my SANs every night & weekend to a bucks worth of power each? (0.6KW for a 1U server for 12Hr @ 15c/KWhr is about $1)
Obviously you are a different environment to most. Mine run from 7am to 7pm doing core business, 7pm to midnight doing batch type stuff and reporting, then slogs it out from midnight to 6am doing backup. Email comes in 24x7, and the web site needs to be up 24x7. Business trade on Saturday, and people work remotely on Sunday (and it is the maintenance window).
And even for the little-used archived imaging data, having applications freeze for 7 or so minutes while a tray of disks to spins up one by one is completely out of the question - "please hold while I save power...".
Yeap, I really need to have a tick box on my RFP response that unused disks can spin down. The only time I'll use that is when the disks are sitting in their original box!
But hey, your needs are obviously different - just don't forget to set HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Disk\DiskTimeOut to 900 to stop all your machines blue-screening from those pesky 10 minute I/O response times when users arrive in the morning....
I put a Watt Meter on my PC - 19W when "switched off". More than the TV's, Stereo's, DVD Player's and HDD Recorder's standby power combined. I guess it comes from the 90s when to qualify as ENergy Start complaint you needed to draw less than 20W. An ATX power supply's standby is rated at 10W - that is a heck of a lot of standby!
And I also like Clarion's ability to spin down idle disks in their SANs. When it comes to spinning them up, each disk takes 30 seconds to spin up and come on line, and spins up one at a time. How many sites will actually use that feature?
But I guess at least VMware's ability to migrate VMs away from ESX nodes, allowing them to power down and then Wake-on-LAN when needed seems sound.
It is being done to allow people who complete RFPs to tick the "Yes I am being green" box.
Never underestimate the power of coincidence to make things seem as they arn't. Here is my own "I am in deep trouble" moment.
I was doing the monthly audit of a NT3.51 cluster that performed call routing for a telco. five nines and all that stuff.
Part of the Audit was to check that little used cables (in this case a dial in support modem) were still properly connected. We were instructed to trace the cables and verify that it had not been replugged as it was not unknown for other engineers to 'borrow' outside lines.
As i touched the cable the whole telephone exchange went dark and quiet - completely dead, lights and all.
Just as I touched the cables the exchange's "bulletproof" power died. I nearly pooed myself!
It was only half an hour later when the true cause was discovered that I could even start to laugh about it. The telco were amazed at how quickly they had an engineer on site though!
Environments where it doesn't make sense are any where you have only 1+1 redundancy, or you can not effectively load balance live load.
To make this all transparent it is important that your environments require at least three or more servers during peak loads, so when load falls you can power off servers and still maintain some level of redundancy. If your environment has 10 identical servers, and one doesn't come back in the morning, it isn't going to cripple you to run on 9 while you get the vendor in to replace the failed one.
To be most effective it required true application-level clusters where workloads can be moved through load balancing. It is no good when at the end of the day you have 10 terminal servers with one or two idle sessions each - you can't consolidate the workload back to two servers and switch the other eight off.
VMware is good, but you need to either power off the VMs at night, or have a few nodes with lots and lots of memory to hold the RAM requirements of the mostly idle VMs
In the good old days thermal issues used to be a problem - socket mounted ICs would 'walk' out of sockets over hot/cold cycles. Now all the chips are hard soldered. Now we have redundant PSUs in most servers it doesn't really matter so much if a PSU fails... just pull it and install a new one!
At the opposite end of the spectrum I have my own Linux based server that powers on when a PC boots (using a magic packet utility in the startup) and powers itself off after if nobody is on the network. Works well for me.
I still think that a large number of American residential homes have much smaller footprints than their total floor area, with a large proportion now living in multilevel dwellings...
But yes, a large sloped sun-facing roof would be great, allowing you it to 'shadow' a greater surface area than it's own when the sun is at zenith.
If only you could rotate the whole house so the panels could track the sun too...:-)
"According to the US Census Bureau, the average size of a US home as of 2006 is 2,469 square feet" (close enough to 225m^2), and the average household size in the US is 2.6 people.
So assuming that they are all single level homes (so the dwelling's roof area is about that of the floor area - a pretty bad assumptions). No - you will be short by about 15%.
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Having just had the misfortune of recently experiencing a 7.1 @ 15km and then a 6.2 @ 7km can only say that it was the 7.1 that really made me crap myself. It feels like an endless amount of energy has unleashed under your feet. I just can't imagine what an 8.5+ would be like.
But the devastation of a tsunami makes our problems minuscule...
In the days before broadband and cheap CD-R drives Linux updates used to come from Infomagic on CDs.
I would eagerly await when the local computer store would get this quarterly update of "shovel-ware" CDs, and hidden in it would be a gem, the six-CDs-in-a-box of Linux, and maybe a Slackware distro too.
I was sort of like having a geek Christmas every season, heading home and reading the package list, trying everything out, seeing what new drivers were now in the Kernel so I could get a better VGA card. And then one had DOOM on Linux!
All that pent up anticipation has now disappeared - I hate you yum!
I think you miss the point - isn't learning while having fun but doing something that is ultimately pointless what a good hobby should be?
I like Arduino. It is a fun hoppy - My example: I wanted to build a "big switch" interface for my special needs son.
Option one - a 3.5mm socket on a USB mouse
Option two - An Arduino with a bit bashing USB stack, emulating a USB keyboard.
Guess which works best? Option one - The mouse is always connected to the PC so I just plug the switch into the mouse and it works.
Guess which I learnt the most doing, and I had the most fun with, and maybe even feel proud of?
You are missing the point. "How many 2KB sets of data could be on the disk? A billion" is being played off against "What is the chance that this email appeared in random data? 128^1024" which is also true.
So the weasel question is "So, assuming the data on the drive is random, then it's safe to say there are at least two billion opportunities on this drive to produce this email?" - (Actually it is even more - who says that the email needs to be byte aligned?).
The answer is "Because the size of the email is relatively larfge there is about the same amount of chance as all the atoms in your underwear jumping a meter to the left in the next 5 seconds - it is very, very, very improbable".
So are you saying that the terminal velocity of a screwed up piece of paper is 1km/h? (or 1fps for our American friends...)
Agreed - As anybody who has thrown a paper plane knows that they have an innate tendency to locate and circle in updrafts, and they are not at affected by the drop in air pressure at altitude...
Dropping a paper plane from 30km, where the air pressure only a few % of that at sea level, where it is most probably plummeting like a stone for half the distance, and we are expected to believe that they make it around the world? I would be very impressed if this was true.
But I think GPS Boomerang is far more geek. An EPP foam plane that flys home from up to 100,000ft to land where I want it to go.
I would much rather have one of those.
Mostly correct, but flash isn't THAT slow. My nice little Digilent FPGA board has 70ns flash on it - I can read read a location in under a 10th of a microsecond.
The latency on SSDs isn't due to the flash itself, but due mostly to the time taken for the data to be squirted up the SATA interface. That is why flash on PCIe cards making an appearance in high-end systems.
In my iTunes collection I have many GB of audio and podcasts, and I assume that the first bytes of all the blocks would be different. If only I could just get the files to fragment in such a away that when reading the raw device the first character of each sector was the values I wanted... I could even use RC4 or some other stream cypher to generate block offsets, giving a password and further defying analysis. As long as I don't defrag the disk, my data is safely hidden in files that just look like files.
Just hope I don't need to update the data often, as read and write time would be rather shabby...
Well! There is somebody who believes the basic assumptions of an outdated economic dogma can be applied to all areas of life. Here are a few ideas to ponder over....
1. Do people and companies react in a sane rational way, especially when it comes to healthcare?
2. Are you aware that large free markets have been proven to be disconnected from what is called "the fundamentals"?
3. Is a person or company acting in what is in their best interest always acting in the interests of the whole community?
4. Have you ever heard of game theory or the prisoner's dilemma?
5. Can we expect everybody patients have access to all information, allowing them to act rationally, or will they be making decisions on incomplete information?
And for some more direct questions:
1. Would it not be in a hospital's best interest to only admit "nice and easy" cases, and turn away 'hard cases', to help their statistics look good?
2. Why do the foreign quacks selling Cancer treatments and fake stem cell therapies not go out of business?
3. Homeopathy still attracts dollars, even when it doesn't actually work. Why?
You need to read more advanced economic theory...
I *remember* passwords in my head, and hate to admit it but they are short phrases... if I was a Blade Runner fan I might choose "Time2DiE!" for a not so important account.
I *record* as few passwords of my passwords as possible, but at my employer we record all the details in a special area of our CRM system. It isn't very secure, but it works. I prefer not to have any record of my employer's client's passwords and check the CRM every time - it is embarrassing to lock out the Admin account when another engineer changes the password!
I feel sorry for one customer who needed to give us admin access. His "never tell anybody" password was the brand name and model of s personal electronic device for appling mild electric shocks to sensitive parts of the body... I just HAD to google it!
If Civilization ended, I'ld rather the tiny smidgen of knowledge that can fit on equivilent of 1000 boxes double-sided paper than nothing!
But given that if civilization had ended, I guess a decent set of maps would be far more useful than knowing Michael Jackson's birthday...
As far as I can tell, nobody buys ringtones for content, they buy it for "branding" themselves. They use the ringtone to announce something about themselves to everybody they are with.
Some people are willing to pay $4 in an attempt to announce "look at me, gosh I'm hip" every time their phone rings... It is not about quality or work that went into the creation!
I agree, but you have to remember back in the 80s and early 90s there was a lot less people doing IT work, so those that did it were usually those with a natural talent for it. Nowdays there are so many IT staff that it half of them don't have a deep talent for it... for them it is just a job. We can't expect everybody to be brilliant.
You and I may know how to assign IRQs, or maybe even real mode x86 assembler, but it doesn't really prove much other than we have a lot of outdated skills. Perhaps you and I are the equivalent of "Coach builders", practicing soon to be forgotten skills.
I initially suspected something was up , but I have tested and got roughly the same figures on other systems.
I just tested a different system on my work bench. The PSU not plugged into anything other than the mains sinks 13W, and 18W when plugged to a system board.
I've done a bit of power supply design, and I guess they have a small load in there to sink a bit of power allowing the PSU to stabilize the standby rails. It will also need the mandatory discharge resistors over the HV caps, to prevent people killing themselves if they open the box. Switch-mode supplies are efficient at rated power, but they can be very inefficient when providing a tiny amount of that rating.
What a waste of power - PC Power management just sucks...
I still can't understand why when my PC is shutdown it draws more than a (compact fluorescent) light bulb... it metered at 19W. 74W on (and idle), 19W off, pathetic!
BTW my cell phone charger didn't register at all....
Oh, that is right, you have to draw less than 20W to put an energy star sticker on it.
Sorry, UNIX time is exactly 86400 seconds per day.
If you read this history of POSIX time it becomes apparent that POSIX time is a mashup of UTC and GMT that is different to either.
The standard does not require your system clock to be accurate. When a leap second occurs, unless your POSIX system makes the effort to adjust its clock (say via the adjtimex(2) call), your POSIX system's clock will ignore the leap second.
To make matters worse, people are now syncing their systems to a UTC or TIA time source, or perhaps even GPS time which are all defined on different foundations.
You can not assume that POSIX time actually means anything better than the time on your watch does, unless you are fully aware the whole chain.
You jest! :-) I'll bite!!! :-)
Do you really suggest I shut off all your servers and spin down my SANs every night & weekend to a bucks worth of power each? (0.6KW for a 1U server for 12Hr @ 15c/KWhr is about $1)
Obviously you are a different environment to most. Mine run from 7am to 7pm doing core business, 7pm to midnight doing batch type stuff and reporting, then slogs it out from midnight to 6am doing backup. Email comes in 24x7, and the web site needs to be up 24x7. Business trade on Saturday, and people work remotely on Sunday (and it is the maintenance window).
And even for the little-used archived imaging data, having applications freeze for 7 or so minutes while a tray of disks to spins up one by one is completely out of the question - "please hold while I save power...".
Yeap, I really need to have a tick box on my RFP response that unused disks can spin down. The only time I'll use that is when the disks are sitting in their original box!
But hey, your needs are obviously different - just don't forget to set HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Disk\DiskTimeOut to 900 to stop all your machines blue-screening from those pesky 10 minute I/O response times when users arrive in the morning....
I put a Watt Meter on my PC - 19W when "switched off". More than the TV's, Stereo's, DVD Player's and HDD Recorder's standby power combined. I guess it comes from the 90s when to qualify as ENergy Start complaint you needed to draw less than 20W. An ATX power supply's standby is rated at 10W - that is a heck of a lot of standby!
And I also like Clarion's ability to spin down idle disks in their SANs. When it comes to spinning them up, each disk takes 30 seconds to spin up and come on line, and spins up one at a time. How many sites will actually use that feature?
But I guess at least VMware's ability to migrate VMs away from ESX nodes, allowing them to power down and then Wake-on-LAN when needed seems sound.
It is being done to allow people who complete RFPs to tick the "Yes I am being green" box.
Never underestimate the power of coincidence to make things seem as they arn't. Here is my own "I am in deep trouble" moment.
I was doing the monthly audit of a NT3.51 cluster that performed call routing for a telco. five nines and all that stuff.
Part of the Audit was to check that little used cables (in this case a dial in support modem) were still properly connected. We were instructed to trace the cables and verify that it had not been replugged as it was not unknown for other engineers to 'borrow' outside lines.
As i touched the cable the whole telephone exchange went dark and quiet - completely dead, lights and all.
Just as I touched the cables the exchange's "bulletproof" power died. I nearly pooed myself!
It was only half an hour later when the true cause was discovered that I could even start to laugh about it. The telco were amazed at how quickly they had an engineer on site though!
As far as I can hear, the hardest sounds to encode are things like white noise. The sound of an audience clapping, is particularly hard.
Environments where it doesn't make sense are any where you have only 1+1 redundancy, or you can not effectively load balance live load.
To make this all transparent it is important that your environments require at least three or more servers during peak loads, so when load falls you can power off servers and still maintain some level of redundancy. If your environment has 10 identical servers, and one doesn't come back in the morning, it isn't going to cripple you to run on 9 while you get the vendor in to replace the failed one.
To be most effective it required true application-level clusters where workloads can be moved through load balancing. It is no good when at the end of the day you have 10 terminal servers with one or two idle sessions each - you can't consolidate the workload back to two servers and switch the other eight off.
VMware is good, but you need to either power off the VMs at night, or have a few nodes with lots and lots of memory to hold the RAM requirements of the mostly idle VMs
In the good old days thermal issues used to be a problem - socket mounted ICs would 'walk' out of sockets over hot/cold cycles. Now all the chips are hard soldered. Now we have redundant PSUs in most servers it doesn't really matter so much if a PSU fails... just pull it and install a new one!
At the opposite end of the spectrum I have my own Linux based server that powers on when a PC boots (using a magic packet utility in the startup) and powers itself off after if nobody is on the network. Works well for me.
Well, I just built a home NAS server, 2TB of disk, Gigabit NIC, S3 Virge PCI 2MB graphics... who could ask for anything more!
I still think that a large number of American residential homes have much smaller footprints than their total floor area, with a large proportion now living in multilevel dwellings...
But yes, a large sloped sun-facing roof would be great, allowing you it to 'shadow' a greater surface area than it's own when the sun is at zenith.
If only you could rotate the whole house so the panels could track the sun too... :-)
"According to the US Census Bureau, the average size of a US home as of 2006 is 2,469 square feet" (close enough to 225m^2), and the average household size in the US is 2.6 people.
So assuming that they are all single level homes (so the dwelling's roof area is about that of the floor area - a pretty bad assumptions). No - you will be short by about 15%.