It's an attempt at humor. A lame one, but worth 5 karma points nonetheless.:-) Not a bit of it is true.
That said, most of the Nigerian Foreign Bank Account Scam spam is probably from some thug in a smoke-filled back room behind Joe's Leather Shop in Muncie (sp?), Indiana with a PFY spoofing IP's. Or something like that. Regardless, it's fun to speculate what "high-tech" must be in third world countries.
Don't you know that the Internet backbone of Nigeria consists of a drumbeat relay to a guy on the phone doing voice-mimicked modulation long-distance to a dial-up account in Rugby, North Dakota? (Note to self: Self, someone needs to write an RFC for this.)
You're going to kill the percussion section of the Nigerian Symphony Orchestra by posting to Slashdot!
"ATTENTION NIGERIA: All your bandwidth are belong to us!"
I had a camera store salesman tell me that JPEG is higher quality than TIFF, and why would I want to use TIFF, it just takes up more space on the memory chip?
This salesman is an accomplished photographer. Any questions on traditional film photography he can answer correctly. He's a valuable resource in that respect. But when it comes to computers and digital photography, he is absolutely clueless.
Directional, shmectional. The only time directional matters is when you're hooking up sewer pipes. Shit rolls downhill.
In an audio system, you're dealing with AC in your signal lines, and in AC you don't have electrons flowing from point A to point B. It's more of an oscillation. That means the electrons are going both directions.
If you've got a cable that "sounds better" in one direction than the other, you don't have a cable, you have a diode. But more likely you have a weak connection somewhere.
As for "oxygen free" or gold-plated connectors, all that does is tell your friends "look how much money I have to waste." An audiophile friend of mine made speaker cables out of TELEPHONE WIRE and they sound just as good as the thousand-dollar-a-foot-silver-wire-blah-blah cables the golden-fleece store wanted to sell him. And he's got a golden ear.
Someone mentioned the Belkin gold-plated telephone line cord for your modem. Granted, the gold-plated isn't going to do a lot for you, but the cord DOES have twisted-pair inside (the grey flat line cord doesn't). The twisting resists electrical interference, and there's a lot of it in the rat's nest behind your computer. Of course, this only benefits you if your premises wiring is twisted pair AND the telco wiring down the street is, too. I have seen it make a difference.
A gold plated sewer pipe doesn't make your shit smell any better.;-)
Onto another rant, why does a stinkin' Belkin USB cable cost 20 bucks? Anyplace that sells Belkin seems to only sell Belkin, and that's anyplace that is a chain. I go over to my hole-in-the-wall screwdriver shop and they've got a no-name cable that's just as good for 6 bucks. What's up with that?
This man is unabashedly associated with the two most despised groups in the history of mankind: lawyers and spammers. More than just associated, he is called the "the father of modern spam."
I forgot one thing that can be a big problem: Dimmer switches, especially if they are the cheap SCR hardware-store variety.
Do this first: Turn them all the way down/off and see if your problem goes away. Cheap SCR dimmers are *the biggest problem* in causing noise in audio systems, that's why you never find them in radio stations, auditoriums, or recording studios (they've got mucho-buck lighting control systems that don't put out dirty-waveform EMFs).
One thing you may be able to try is powering down EVERYTHING in the building... and I mean everything: water heater, coffee pot, alarm panel, wall clock in addition to the usual lights & computers. Unplug other computers, monitors, small appliances, and TVs. Turn large appliances off at the electrical panel; some have transformers and electronics that remain energized when you hit the power button. Remove battery powered devices like cell phones and PDAs from the building. Well, maybe you'll need a flashlight, but it will be pretty easy to tell if that's the culprit.
Leave the computer and monitor in question on, though. Does it flicker? If so, problem is external to the building. No? Start turning things on one by one, checking the monitor every time. If it's one thing that's doing it, this should isolate the problem.
No, it is not two phase. It's single phase. Bear with me and I'll explain:
The power company transformer has a secondary winding with a grounded center tap. The voltage between the two poles of the transformer is 240V; the voltage between one pole ant the center tap (ground) is 120V. The grounded "neutral" wire is connected to this center tap.
If you hook up a scope between pole "A" and neutral, then hook it up to pole "B" and neutral, (providing the neutral is connected to the same pole of the scope) you will find that one is the INVERSE of the other, or reverse polarity. They are not 180 degrees out of phase, because YOU have reversed the polarity in hooking it up. Connect the scope between the two poles, and you will find a 60Hz sine wave of twice the amplitude (240V) as between one pole and neutral. There is no point to 180-degree 2-phase, because summed with cross polarity you get 0V and summed with same polarity you get single phase twice amplitude.
If there was a two-phase situation, you would see a sine wave that is the sum of two sine waves, offset by 120 degrees from each other. No point to this, because the resulting waveform is ugly and inefficient.
Three phase power is used primarily for electric motors. For a given power rating, a 3-ph motor can be made smaller and cheaper, runs cooler and more efficiently, and has greater starting torque than a 1-ph motor. Besides, a 3-ph motor can be reversed easily.
Occasionally in a commercial or industrial setting, you will find lighting which is "208" or "277" volts (odd numbers, hey?). This is because they are running from different legs of a 3-ph transformer bank than your ordinary stuff.
Back to the 1-ph system... it's not truly a neutral wire unless the loads on both poles of the transformer are equal. In a 120V circuit, it is NEVER a neutral wire because it is carrying current back to the power source.
In spite of the fact that the "neutral" wire (properly termed, "grounded current-carrying conductor") carries current, the potential between it and ground should always be zero. Anything else indicates a very serious and hazardous problem. If this center-tap wire fails between the transformer and your electrical panel, you may get a situation where the voltage between pole A and ground is greater than pole B and ground (depending on load), summing to 240V. This is a very dangerous situation (kills every appliance and computer and in the event of a ground lift energizes the metal frames of everything) and if you have it, turn off ALL POWER NOW and call either an electrician or the power company immediately.
Just read the comment, I can't think of a subject
on
Flickering Monitors?
·
· Score: 2
One of my clients (a large law firm) had a user who seemed to be death to monitors. They tried new monitors. They tried new video cards. They tried a new computer. They even tried moving her to a different office. Monitors still died.
One day, they called me and said "the monitor flickers." I went over there, asked some questions, and found out that the monitor has ALWAYS flickered, but it just now started to drive her nuts.
So I turned off the typewriter that was next to the monitor (which stopped the flicker) and told them that the typewriter (which was always turned on and always next to the monitor) was the likely perpetrator of death, and physically separating them was the only solution.
Another client, a large print house and manufacturing facility, has a few which flicker whenever a machine starts up.
In your case, unlikely it's the backup generator, because it's not running all the time.
If the problem is indeed in the power, you'll need to get a power filter. What that does is takes dirty power and gives you a nice, smooth, clean 60Hz (or 50Hz in Europe) sine wave.
All they need to do is select "request return receipt" in Microsoft Outlook.
And hope that the recipient is also using Outlook and lemmingly click's "yes" when asked if the return receipt can be sent.
What? You say that pine doesn't send return receipts? You say you can read/var/spool/mail/fred without altering it in any way? We'd better make Outlook the law!
You have a fast CD burner (24x) with which you can make perhaps 10 CDs per hour. That means 1000 hours for 10,000 CDs, or about 6 months. Assuming a wage of $6/hr, to pay someone to babysit this machine would be in the range of $6000. Plus your media cost of around $5000 if you're paying $0.50 per, including label. You are looking at $11,000. Ouch!
On the other hand, you could purchase an automated duplicator for $2500. Yup, that's a lot of money to lay down in one chunk. Now you're down to a month and a half (your duplicator can crank away 24/7, your schmuck 8/5). Your cost? $7500.
Of course, you could build a changer out of Lego Mindstorms for a hundred bucks plus your labor and have it up and running by April... 2003.:-)
Or, you could just pay a replication house to press the CD's, print a fancy label on them, and get them to you in a week for probably $5,000 or less (wild guess). Remember, as quantity goes up, price per goes down. Way down. Don't let the "setup charge" scare you; consider the total cost and compare that with the total cost of one-at-a-timing it.
My boss has a saying: "A poor man can't afford cheap tools." You don't save money by buying cheap. If you skimp now, you'll spend a lot more later. If you do it right the first time, you won't have to do it right the second time.
Documentation takes a lot of time. Perhaps up to as much as half of your development time, especially in the initial stages. Plan for this extra time.
Having a record of what you did to get to the point you're at is INVALUABLE in saving time later on: a process that takes 4 hours (including documentation) may take only 1 hour the second time, IF you have proper documentation, 3 hours if you don't.
It can suck to plaster your english essay over the boot sector of your hardrive.
This is exactly what I did once. Well, it wasn't an English essay, but close enough. I had to use the drive manufacturer's low-level format utility just to make it useable again. Of course, that effectively fragged the disk. Thankfully, nothing important or irreplaceable.
My boss laughed for a week.
Re:Not so stupid question
on
ORBZ Shuts Down
·
· Score: 4, Informative
why can't ORBZ use a different envelope that doesn't bounce to 127.0.0.1?
Mail servers need to be configured to relay mail from the localhost (themselves). Otherwise, things just don't work. What using the 127.0.0.1 does is attempt to fool the mail server into thinking that the mail is coming from itself. Also, it makes sysadmins aware that there's a config problem in their mail servers.:-)
If a server can't relay, it should REJECT the mail ("error: no relay thru here") but Lotus seems to be bouncing it.
A properly configured mail server will be able to look at the mail and say to itself, "I've seen this before, let's trash it."
A mail server should NEVER crash do to malformed messages. The strongest lock is no good if the door is weak.
In 1968, Engelbart demonstrated the mouse with the rest of the NLS system to a group of computer scientists and engineers. It was a landmark in computer history for a number of reasons, outside of the mouse. Designed as a machine that assisted the user throughout the working day, NLS was the first system that linked ideas together in "hyperlinks," much like the Internet we enjoy today.
Ermmm.... who is it that's tried to patent hyperlinks?
OK, this is so far down on the list nobody will read it, but here goes...
I don't think that VNC is the issue here, because the EULA seems to be prohibiting running multiple instances of a program on separate displays. This is not what VNC is on the Windows platform: VNC is simply showing one instance on multiple displays.
In this sense, VNC is no different than having a monitor splitter (like stores often have to showcase their monitor selection, being driven by one computer running XP).
I have to wonder: is Microsoft's next tactic going to be requiring a separate license for each pair of EYES viewing their product?
I think it would have been most appropriate had this article have been published online in TeX format as opposed to the proprietary, closed-source PDF format.
Hmm. My understanding was that the award was for developing a solution to accurately determining longitude by whatever means.
It was theorized that an accurate and consistent clock could be used to determine longitude, however none had been made at that time so it could not be proven. Other solutions proposed involved various methods of celestial and solar navigation, but each of those solutions proved to have critical shortcomings.
With H4, Harrison was able to prove in sea trials that an accurate chronograph could be used to determine longitudinal position with acceptable accuracy.
Harrison's "gridiron pendulum" DID compensate for temperature variations very well. He used concepts from this in developing the H4. It's really quite remarkable for its day, when you consider that modern clockmakers don't bother to include this near-250-year-old technology.
There's a reason for that: it makes such a clock terribly expensive. Few people have need for such an accurate chronograph: need does not justify the cost. Really, the only people who have such a need are those who depend on a consistent time source over a long period, typically mariners. Most mariners now receive a time signal from a radio tuned to an atomic clock (which is really all GPS is), so they don't need a consistent chronograph. H4 is surprisingly accurate, but not nearly as accurate as Harrison's longcase clocks, which varied by less than a second per month, at a time when a "good" chronograph varied by minutes per day.
Also interesting is the carriage house clock which has been running continuously for something like 240 years, having been stopped for cleaning only once and never for repair, and never lubricated.
Harrison's cabinetmaking skills are what led to his ability to make such fantastic clocks: it sounds strange to use wooden gears, but the woods chosen for the gears are extremely durable and self-lubricating.
Ignoring the technological merits of the invention, "The remarkable, unique Harrison clock LIVES".
I read the book, the illustrated version. You should, too. The person who said "The...clock LIES" obviously has never read the book.
Lots of good suggestions here, but I don't see any mention of accessibility (yet).
Make sure that you can walk -- and stand up -- BEHIND your servers. Make sure you can open cabinet doors fully. Make sure you can pull a server out of the rack without moving stuff around. Be able to have two people in the room: one in front and one behind the rack at the same time. Make sure you don't have to move the rack to work on it.
You want a server ROOM, not a server CLOSET. I've seen far too many situations where work on a server involved crawling under desks, moving stuff, craning necks. Hey, moving computer while they are running is A BAD THING: you don't want heads crashing into a hard disk platter. Besides, you risk knocking the (power) cords loose, something I've done on several occasions. I've got one customer whose server closet is so small I have to move the rack forward to access the back and then push it back to access the front again.
I would say that you want at least 3 feet in front of and behind the rack. Typical racks are nearly 3 feet deep, so you want your server room to be at least 9 feet in one of the dimensions. Now placing your rack in the middle of the room means you have to get your cabling and power to the middle of the room. Having your patch panel or power outlets on the wall just won't cut it. Use either overhead cable trays (NOT conduit) or a subfloor with removable tiles. Don't run cables above a drop ceiling from point to point in the server room (cables headed out of the room are OK to be in the ceiling). NEVER run cables across the floor.
Bolt your rack to the floor so you (or an earthquake) don't knock it over.
DO NOT allow non-network junk to clutter up the server room. That old dot matrix machine gun that nobody will ever use again but you can't bear to throw away can go in a storage closet somewhere else.
Again, give yourself elbow room. It may be hard to convince the person with the purse strings to pay for space ("but the server will fit in a 3' x 3' closet, why do you need a 10' x 12' room?") that will be mostly empty, but it will make your life easier and will -- practice saying this -- REDUCE UNPRODUCTIVE DOWNTIME. Make sure you get the "unproductive" in there.
Slashdot Mirror
This will be the LAST POST I will put to Slashdot until the no-a/c policy is revoked.
:-)
Or until April fool's day is over.
Whichever comes last.
It's an attempt at humor. A lame one, but worth 5 karma points nonetheless. :-) Not a bit of it is true.
That said, most of the Nigerian Foreign Bank Account Scam spam is probably from some thug in a smoke-filled back room behind Joe's Leather Shop in Muncie (sp?), Indiana with a PFY spoofing IP's. Or something like that. Regardless, it's fun to speculate what "high-tech" must be in third world countries.
Don't you know that the Internet backbone of Nigeria consists of a drumbeat relay to a guy on the phone doing voice-mimicked modulation long-distance to a dial-up account in Rugby, North Dakota? (Note to self: Self, someone needs to write an RFC for this.)
You're going to kill the percussion section of the Nigerian Symphony Orchestra by posting to Slashdot!
"ATTENTION NIGERIA: All your bandwidth are belong to us!"
I had a camera store salesman tell me that JPEG is higher quality than TIFF, and why would I want to use TIFF, it just takes up more space on the memory chip?
This salesman is an accomplished photographer. Any questions on traditional film photography he can answer correctly. He's a valuable resource in that respect. But when it comes to computers and digital photography, he is absolutely clueless.
Directional, shmectional. The only time directional matters is when you're hooking up sewer pipes. Shit rolls downhill.
;-)
In an audio system, you're dealing with AC in your signal lines, and in AC you don't have electrons flowing from point A to point B. It's more of an oscillation. That means the electrons are going both directions.
If you've got a cable that "sounds better" in one direction than the other, you don't have a cable, you have a diode. But more likely you have a weak connection somewhere.
As for "oxygen free" or gold-plated connectors, all that does is tell your friends "look how much money I have to waste." An audiophile friend of mine made speaker cables out of TELEPHONE WIRE and they sound just as good as the thousand-dollar-a-foot-silver-wire-blah-blah cables the golden-fleece store wanted to sell him. And he's got a golden ear.
Someone mentioned the Belkin gold-plated telephone line cord for your modem. Granted, the gold-plated isn't going to do a lot for you, but the cord DOES have twisted-pair inside (the grey flat line cord doesn't). The twisting resists electrical interference, and there's a lot of it in the rat's nest behind your computer. Of course, this only benefits you if your premises wiring is twisted pair AND the telco wiring down the street is, too. I have seen it make a difference.
A gold plated sewer pipe doesn't make your shit smell any better.
Onto another rant, why does a stinkin' Belkin USB cable cost 20 bucks? Anyplace that sells Belkin seems to only sell Belkin, and that's anyplace that is a chain. I go over to my hole-in-the-wall screwdriver shop and they've got a no-name cable that's just as good for 6 bucks. What's up with that?
This man is unabashedly associated with the two most despised groups in the history of mankind: lawyers and spammers. More than just associated, he is called the "the father of modern spam."
Must be the devil himself.
The gen set is great, but what about the lag time between power failure and generator startup?
You need something to carry you through. A UPS is great for this. (Now if you have a whole-building UPS for this purpose, that's great.)
What if the gen set fails?
I forgot one thing that can be a big problem: Dimmer switches, especially if they are the cheap SCR hardware-store variety.
Do this first: Turn them all the way down/off and see if your problem goes away. Cheap SCR dimmers are *the biggest problem* in causing noise in audio systems, that's why you never find them in radio stations, auditoriums, or recording studios (they've got mucho-buck lighting control systems that don't put out dirty-waveform EMFs).
One thing you may be able to try is powering down EVERYTHING in the building... and I mean everything: water heater, coffee pot, alarm panel, wall clock in addition to the usual lights & computers. Unplug other computers, monitors, small appliances, and TVs. Turn large appliances off at the electrical panel; some have transformers and electronics that remain energized when you hit the power button. Remove battery powered devices like cell phones and PDAs from the building. Well, maybe you'll need a flashlight, but it will be pretty easy to tell if that's the culprit.
Leave the computer and monitor in question on, though. Does it flicker? If so, problem is external to the building. No? Start turning things on one by one, checking the monitor every time. If it's one thing that's doing it, this should isolate the problem.
No, it is not two phase. It's single phase. Bear with me and I'll explain:
The power company transformer has a secondary winding with a grounded center tap. The voltage between the two poles of the transformer is 240V; the voltage between one pole ant the center tap (ground) is 120V. The grounded "neutral" wire is connected to this center tap.
If you hook up a scope between pole "A" and neutral, then hook it up to pole "B" and neutral, (providing the neutral is connected to the same pole of the scope) you will find that one is the INVERSE of the other, or reverse polarity. They are not 180 degrees out of phase, because YOU have reversed the polarity in hooking it up. Connect the scope between the two poles, and you will find a 60Hz sine wave of twice the amplitude (240V) as between one pole and neutral. There is no point to 180-degree 2-phase, because summed with cross polarity you get 0V and summed with same polarity you get single phase twice amplitude.
If there was a two-phase situation, you would see a sine wave that is the sum of two sine waves, offset by 120 degrees from each other. No point to this, because the resulting waveform is ugly and inefficient.
Three phase power is used primarily for electric motors. For a given power rating, a 3-ph motor can be made smaller and cheaper, runs cooler and more efficiently, and has greater starting torque than a 1-ph motor. Besides, a 3-ph motor can be reversed easily.
Occasionally in a commercial or industrial setting, you will find lighting which is "208" or "277" volts (odd numbers, hey?). This is because they are running from different legs of a 3-ph transformer bank than your ordinary stuff.
Back to the 1-ph system... it's not truly a neutral wire unless the loads on both poles of the transformer are equal. In a 120V circuit, it is NEVER a neutral wire because it is carrying current back to the power source.
In spite of the fact that the "neutral" wire (properly termed, "grounded current-carrying conductor") carries current, the potential between it and ground should always be zero. Anything else indicates a very serious and hazardous problem. If this center-tap wire fails between the transformer and your electrical panel, you may get a situation where the voltage between pole A and ground is greater than pole B and ground (depending on load), summing to 240V. This is a very dangerous situation (kills every appliance and computer and in the event of a ground lift energizes the metal frames of everything) and if you have it, turn off ALL POWER NOW and call either an electrician or the power company immediately.
One of my clients (a large law firm) had a user who seemed to be death to monitors. They tried new monitors. They tried new video cards. They tried a new computer. They even tried moving her to a different office. Monitors still died.
One day, they called me and said "the monitor flickers." I went over there, asked some questions, and found out that the monitor has ALWAYS flickered, but it just now started to drive her nuts.
So I turned off the typewriter that was next to the monitor (which stopped the flicker) and told them that the typewriter (which was always turned on and always next to the monitor) was the likely perpetrator of death, and physically separating them was the only solution.
Another client, a large print house and manufacturing facility, has a few which flicker whenever a machine starts up.
In your case, unlikely it's the backup generator, because it's not running all the time.
If the problem is indeed in the power, you'll need to get a power filter. What that does is takes dirty power and gives you a nice, smooth, clean 60Hz (or 50Hz in Europe) sine wave.
All they need to do is select "request return receipt" in Microsoft Outlook.
/var/spool/mail/fred without altering it in any way? We'd better make Outlook the law!
And hope that the recipient is also using Outlook and lemmingly click's "yes" when asked if the return receipt can be sent.
What? You say that pine doesn't send return receipts? You say you can read
Let's assume you need to make 10,000 CDs.
:-)
You have a fast CD burner (24x) with which you can make perhaps 10 CDs per hour. That means 1000 hours for 10,000 CDs, or about 6 months. Assuming a wage of $6/hr, to pay someone to babysit this machine would be in the range of $6000. Plus your media cost of around $5000 if you're paying $0.50 per, including label. You are looking at $11,000. Ouch!
On the other hand, you could purchase an automated duplicator for $2500. Yup, that's a lot of money to lay down in one chunk. Now you're down to a month and a half (your duplicator can crank away 24/7, your schmuck 8/5). Your cost? $7500.
Of course, you could build a changer out of Lego Mindstorms for a hundred bucks plus your labor and have it up and running by April... 2003.
Or, you could just pay a replication house to press the CD's, print a fancy label on them, and get them to you in a week for probably $5,000 or less (wild guess). Remember, as quantity goes up, price per goes down. Way down. Don't let the "setup charge" scare you; consider the total cost and compare that with the total cost of one-at-a-timing it.
My boss has a saying: "A poor man can't afford cheap tools." You don't save money by buying cheap. If you skimp now, you'll spend a lot more later. If you do it right the first time, you won't have to do it right the second time.
Umm.... try $2500. If they were $500, I'd say "what're you whining about?" but when it's $2500 it's hard to recoup your costs.
But if you've got "thousands of CDs" you should be having them pressed, not burned. Better quality, shorter turn-around.
Documentation takes a lot of time. Perhaps up to as much as half of your development time, especially in the initial stages. Plan for this extra time.
Having a record of what you did to get to the point you're at is INVALUABLE in saving time later on: a process that takes 4 hours (including documentation) may take only 1 hour the second time, IF you have proper documentation, 3 hours if you don't.
It can suck to plaster your english essay over the boot sector of your hardrive.
This is exactly what I did once. Well, it wasn't an English essay, but close enough. I had to use the drive manufacturer's low-level format utility just to make it useable again. Of course, that effectively fragged the disk. Thankfully, nothing important or irreplaceable.
My boss laughed for a week.
why can't ORBZ use a different envelope that doesn't bounce to 127.0.0.1?
:-)
Mail servers need to be configured to relay mail from the localhost (themselves). Otherwise, things just don't work. What using the 127.0.0.1 does is attempt to fool the mail server into thinking that the mail is coming from itself. Also, it makes sysadmins aware that there's a config problem in their mail servers.
If a server can't relay, it should REJECT the mail ("error: no relay thru here") but Lotus seems to be bouncing it.
A properly configured mail server will be able to look at the mail and say to itself, "I've seen this before, let's trash it."
A mail server should NEVER crash do to malformed messages. The strongest lock is no good if the door is weak.
Next time you head out to the woods to protest a logging operation, be sure to bring a roll of plastic toilet tissue with you in case nature calls.
~Karma to spare, karma to spare~
In 1968, Engelbart demonstrated the mouse with the rest of the NLS system to a group of computer scientists and engineers. It was a landmark in computer history for a number of reasons, outside of the mouse. Designed as a machine that assisted the user throughout the working day, NLS was the first system that linked ideas together in "hyperlinks," much like the Internet we enjoy today.
Ermmm.... who is it that's tried to patent hyperlinks?
I think this is evidence of "prior art."
OK, this is so far down on the list nobody will read it, but here goes...
I don't think that VNC is the issue here, because the EULA seems to be prohibiting running multiple instances of a program on separate displays. This is not what VNC is on the Windows platform: VNC is simply showing one instance on multiple displays.
In this sense, VNC is no different than having a monitor splitter (like stores often have to showcase their monitor selection, being driven by one computer running XP).
I have to wonder: is Microsoft's next tactic going to be requiring a separate license for each pair of EYES viewing their product?
Pretty soon there's be no option except Microsoft brand trojans!
Reminds me of a joke I heard just after BG himself was married:
"Did you hear that Melinda is filing for divorce from Bill?"
"No.."
"Yeah, on their honeymoon, she found out what 'microsoft' really means."
I think it would have been most appropriate had this article have been published online in TeX format as opposed to the proprietary, closed-source PDF format.
Hmm. My understanding was that the award was for developing a solution to accurately determining longitude by whatever means.
It was theorized that an accurate and consistent clock could be used to determine longitude, however none had been made at that time so it could not be proven. Other solutions proposed involved various methods of celestial and solar navigation, but each of those solutions proved to have critical shortcomings.
With H4, Harrison was able to prove in sea trials that an accurate chronograph could be used to determine longitudinal position with acceptable accuracy.
Harrison's "gridiron pendulum" DID compensate for temperature variations very well. He used concepts from this in developing the H4. It's really quite remarkable for its day, when you consider that modern clockmakers don't bother to include this near-250-year-old technology.
There's a reason for that: it makes such a clock terribly expensive. Few people have need for such an accurate chronograph: need does not justify the cost. Really, the only people who have such a need are those who depend on a consistent time source over a long period, typically mariners. Most mariners now receive a time signal from a radio tuned to an atomic clock (which is really all GPS is), so they don't need a consistent chronograph.
H4 is surprisingly accurate, but not nearly as accurate as Harrison's longcase clocks, which varied by less than a second per month, at a time when a "good" chronograph varied by minutes per day.
Also interesting is the carriage house clock which has been running continuously for something like 240 years, having been stopped for cleaning only once and never for repair, and never lubricated.
Harrison's cabinetmaking skills are what led to his ability to make such fantastic clocks: it sounds strange to use wooden gears, but the woods chosen for the gears are extremely durable and self-lubricating.
Ignoring the technological merits of the invention, "The remarkable, unique Harrison clock LIVES".
I read the book, the illustrated version. You should, too. The person who said "The...clock LIES" obviously has never read the book.
Lots of good suggestions here, but I don't see any mention of accessibility (yet).
Make sure that you can walk -- and stand up -- BEHIND your servers. Make sure you can open cabinet doors fully. Make sure you can pull a server out of the rack without moving stuff around. Be able to have two people in the room: one in front and one behind the rack at the same time. Make sure you don't have to move the rack to work on it.
You want a server ROOM, not a server CLOSET. I've seen far too many situations where work on a server involved crawling under desks, moving stuff, craning necks. Hey, moving computer while they are running is A BAD THING: you don't want heads crashing into a hard disk platter. Besides, you risk knocking the (power) cords loose, something I've done on several occasions. I've got one customer whose server closet is so small I have to move the rack forward to access the back and then push it back to access the front again.
I would say that you want at least 3 feet in front of and behind the rack. Typical racks are nearly 3 feet deep, so you want your server room to be at least 9 feet in one of the dimensions.
Now placing your rack in the middle of the room means you have to get your cabling and power to the middle of the room. Having your patch panel or power outlets on the wall just won't cut it. Use either overhead cable trays (NOT conduit) or a subfloor with removable tiles. Don't run cables above a drop ceiling from point to point in the server room (cables headed out of the room are OK to be in the ceiling). NEVER run cables across the floor.
Bolt your rack to the floor so you (or an earthquake) don't knock it over.
DO NOT allow non-network junk to clutter up the server room. That old dot matrix machine gun that nobody will ever use again but you can't bear to throw away can go in a storage closet somewhere else.
Again, give yourself elbow room. It may be hard to convince the person with the purse strings to pay for space ("but the server will fit in a 3' x 3' closet, why do you need a 10' x 12' room?") that will be mostly empty, but it will make your life easier and will -- practice saying this -- REDUCE UNPRODUCTIVE DOWNTIME. Make sure you get the "unproductive" in there.