Yes, that was my first thought, once I'd worked out whether the article was about a microscope, telescope or oscilloscope.. Trust the military to re-invent something and give it a $100 name.
ISTM the main drawback is the unreliability of the technique. I wonder what acronym they'll assign to adaptive optics when they "discover" that, too?
OK, we have some instances of small fluctuations causing major effects. Rather than just sitting back and says "wow, that was close", the next stage is to calculate the possibility of these events being statistically random.
To promote your cause, get someone famous on your side. The masses will accept whatever they say - provided your pet celeb. is a "goody". However put someone in a white coat (unless they're famous, of course) up as your representative and you get an immediate turn-off.
Why is this? Because what people believe is based on trust, not facts. They trust faces that are familiar to them and (thanks to the education system) are not capable of working out for themselves which answer is correct.
Not just people set on doing something bad (which may "merely" involve stealing your laptop). Everyone worries whether they'll be detained - more so if these completely inadequate machines get rolled out - whether they'll miss their flight, or even if they'll get lost.
If these machines pick up on stress then they'll get near to a 100% hit rate for travellers. Possibly the most serene people in an airport lounge are those who've already accepted their fate and are willingly going to meet their makers shortly after the plane takes off.
When I said there would never be any Microsoft servers running in my department, I don't think they quite got my meaning.
They weren't microsoft servers - they were HP servers. For some reason MS are getting all the publicity and credit from this article, although they've actually done very little to deserve it. The hardware that should get the plaudits - typical!
> We KNOW that excess heat, water, humidity, etc can kill servers. These are facts that cannot be ignored.
This harps back to mainframe days. In order to keep your warranty valid, you had to strictly control the environment - including having strip recorders to PROVE that you hadn't exceeded temp or humidity limits. The reason was that the heat output of these ECL beasts was so high that they were teetering on the brink of temperature-induced race conditions, physically burning their PCBs and causing thermal-expansion induced stresses in the mechanical components.
Nowadays we are nowhere near as close to max. rated tolerances and therefore can open windows in datacentres when the air-con fails.
However, the old traditions die hard and what was true even 10 years ago (the last time I specc'd an ECL mainframe) is no longer valid.
I'd suggest that if it wasn't for security reasons, plus the noise they make and the dust they suck up, most IT equipment could be run in a normal office.
I've been using my Nokia phone with a data "bono" - 1GB for 60 euro. As said, it's surprising how quickly it goes. Just loading the BBC homepage is 250kb.
Having a house out there, in the middle of nowehere without even a landline, this is just the sort of thing I've been waiting for.
Can you tell me the name of the service and what the price of the modem stick is?
Thanks
You even mentioned the main driving force but fail to see the effect! All of those people NOT traveling and NOT meeting will be telecommuting instead. The demands on the networks will go up dramatically both for economic functions as well as the panicking chatter of the masses.
Not so much. the main bandwidth hogs these days are P2P and other miscellaneous downloading. The personal use the people make from work will just be transferred to their houses, rather than to work IP addresses The usage from a remote desktop isn't so great - particularly since most people don't type too fast, so the upstream/refresh traffic is low.
What could really kill it is if everyone decides that voice is no longer enough and they all start videoconferencing from home. However, they'll have to make sure they're dressed for that to happen;-0
The biggest problem will be lack of staff. People won't want to meet up with too many others, for fear of catching whatever it is that's going around. While ISP staff can work from home, that's only a a small part of the problem.
Suppliers will also have key people unavailable, so orders will take longer to process, technicians will not be able to provide the 24*7 cover you're used to (even if you're contracted for it) and help desks will be even less help, as their agents won't come in to work.
None of these points is unique to ISPs, and it's rather self-important of them to think that they will have any special requirements. In fact, what is more likely to affect them is the realisation, after the problems have cleared, that the business can run just as well with only half the staff doing their jobs - so the other half can be cut. Guess what? It'll be the ones who made it in to work who'll get retained.
Basically, doctoring involves knowing a lot of facts and being able to apply the correct ones to any given situation.
What differentiates a good doctor from a bad one is mainly their ability to communicate and form a sympathetic relationship with their customers.
However, since med. school has no ability to teach people to be good at dealing with customers, selecting candidates on their ability to remember a bunch of facts is a poor second best (but better than other selection criteria). Since organic chemistry is full of arcane knowledge, it serves as a good filter: if you can't be bothered to learn that, then you probably don't have the dedication needed to deal with people for the next 40 years.
Organic chemistry also has the effect of proving to everyone who takes it that they cannot count up to 4 (everyone makes the mistake of assigning a valency of 3 or 5 to carbon atoms at some point). It's better that putative doctors learn their fallibilities early, rather then when people's lives depend on them.
How about killing off maths - so tentative doctors aren't required to know the difference between a 10mg dose and a 10g dose.
Let's get rid of a need to know physics, so doctors won't need to bother with the difference between a dietary intake of 2000 calories and 20,000 calories - they're only arbitrary numbers, after all.
How about english? Do doctor's really need to know how to spell, or read properly. Let's face it, there's not a lot of difference between death and dearth, or patients and patience.
In fact why not open the doors wide and let anyone who can pay the fees become a doctor - issue them with white coats and stethoscopes on receipt of $100k and let them prescribe whatever they like to whom ever they choose.
The major cost of purging is the manpower and downtime. Therefore it's easier to keep the stuff, possibly with occasional housekeeping if your schema isn't as scalable as it should be.
While the legal and tax requirements (which vary from country to country) have a limited lifetime, there are always possibilities, such as legal defences, where old data may be needed.
These uses will not require the performance (and cost) of enterprise class storage: speed, redundancy, administration, warranties.So migrate it to a few 1TB drives in someone's desk. That way if subpoena'd you can plausibly have "lost" it, whereas if it's in your interests, it can miraculously be found.
Everything's at risk - the question is: how much risk and do these risks justify the benefits (of leaving thins as they are), or should money be spent on reducing the risks.
Until someone can quantify these risks, the whole survey is pointless. Although it does make a nice, juicy headline for the innumerate masses.
If it means yo have to heat or cool your residence because you're there during the day (whereas if you were at work you wouldn't have to) the savings may not be as big as you thought.
Worse, your employer may not pay you for the extra power you use - most won't even consider it. Plus, you're effectively giving your employer a cube-sized chuck of your house for free, try asking them for rent and I could hear them laughing at you from here!
Even when they're doing nothing, the PCs in an organisation pull 40+ watts. From 6pm to 8 the next morning is 70 useless hours a week. Add in weekends and over 100 hours you'll save 60% of the power used by your most common asset.
The only IT issue here, is how to roll out patches/updates - but any IT manager with a grain of talent can sort that out.
They're talking about digging up streets to lay fibre to provide households with 1GB/S internet connections.
Apart from retaining the bottlenecks present at the sites people visit (what point is 1GB to the home, when the site you're downloading from is limited to 300KBit/S) isn't this simply the last throes of "old" technology?
Countries are already starting to use WiMax and no doubt when the problems around scaling it are fixed, this will be a much more cost effective (and far less disruptive) approach than cutting more trenches just to lay fibre to the home).
The biggest part fo the problem is providing a service in rural areas - where the low population density makes the cost of each circuit disproportionately high. Even if the decision is made (on purely financial grounds) to "fibre" urban areas, there's still need to be a different solution for areas where this isn't economically viable.
You store the database on these, so fragmentation questions are moot. Provided you've set the (database) block size correctly, the only time you'd have to modify (as opposed to write new) a block is to update a VARCHAR field that won't fit in the original size.
What would be interesting would be to put an Oracle database block interface on these puppies, instead of the normal filesystem interface. then you'd just have the database say to the storage "get me block X" and it appears. No filesystem overheads - which given the speed of these things could turn out to be significant.
Looks like we'll be back on RAW "disks" for databases. Plus ca change!
Apols, for just posting a "me too", but that's close to my experience, as well. Frequently when I actually have to wait for a website to load, FF has the link for an ad-farm or 'plex as the site being waited for.
The other thing that does delay websites is when their front page is a multi-megabyte FLASH. What's wrong with good ole plain text, guys?
Slashdot Mirror
ISTM the main drawback is the unreliability of the technique. I wonder what acronym they'll assign to adaptive optics when they "discover" that, too?
OK, we have some instances of small fluctuations causing major effects. Rather than just sitting back and says "wow, that was close", the next stage is to calculate the possibility of these events being statistically random.
Don't you mean - "these were the districts where the voting machines were hacked by a few hundred votes to give the required outcome"?
Why is this? Because what people believe is based on trust, not facts. They trust faces that are familiar to them and (thanks to the education system) are not capable of working out for themselves which answer is correct.
Ultimately it comes down to emotions
"Testing students at a University, psychologists
Like most psychological studies, it takes a small sample of american students and extrapolates the entire world's behaviour from that.
No wonder the "science" is so bad
If these machines pick up on stress then they'll get near to a 100% hit rate for travellers. Possibly the most serene people in an airport lounge are those who've already accepted their fate and are willingly going to meet their makers shortly after the plane takes off.
When I said there would never be any Microsoft servers running in my department, I don't think they quite got my meaning.
They weren't microsoft servers - they were HP servers. For some reason MS are getting all the publicity and credit from this article, although they've actually done very little to deserve it. The hardware that should get the plaudits - typical!
This harps back to mainframe days. In order to keep your warranty valid, you had to strictly control the environment - including having strip recorders to PROVE that you hadn't exceeded temp or humidity limits. The reason was that the heat output of these ECL beasts was so high that they were teetering on the brink of temperature-induced race conditions, physically burning their PCBs and causing thermal-expansion induced stresses in the mechanical components.
Nowadays we are nowhere near as close to max. rated tolerances and therefore can open windows in datacentres when the air-con fails. However, the old traditions die hard and what was true even 10 years ago (the last time I specc'd an ECL mainframe) is no longer valid.
I'd suggest that if it wasn't for security reasons, plus the noise they make and the dust they suck up, most IT equipment could be run in a normal office.
I've been using my Nokia phone with a data "bono" - 1GB for 60 euro. As said, it's surprising how quickly it goes. Just loading the BBC homepage is 250kb.
Having a house out there, in the middle of nowehere without even a landline, this is just the sort of thing I've been waiting for. Can you tell me the name of the service and what the price of the modem stick is? Thanks
You even mentioned the main driving force but fail to see the effect! All of those people NOT traveling and NOT meeting will be telecommuting instead. The demands on the networks will go up dramatically both for economic functions as well as the panicking chatter of the masses.
Not so much. the main bandwidth hogs these days are P2P and other miscellaneous downloading. The personal use the people make from work will just be transferred to their houses, rather than to work IP addresses The usage from a remote desktop isn't so great - particularly since most people don't type too fast, so the upstream/refresh traffic is low.
What could really kill it is if everyone decides that voice is no longer enough and they all start videoconferencing from home. However, they'll have to make sure they're dressed for that to happen ;-0
None of these points is unique to ISPs, and it's rather self-important of them to think that they will have any special requirements. In fact, what is more likely to affect them is the realisation, after the problems have cleared, that the business can run just as well with only half the staff doing their jobs - so the other half can be cut. Guess what? It'll be the ones who made it in to work who'll get retained.
What differentiates a good doctor from a bad one is mainly their ability to communicate and form a sympathetic relationship with their customers.
However, since med. school has no ability to teach people to be good at dealing with customers, selecting candidates on their ability to remember a bunch of facts is a poor second best (but better than other selection criteria). Since organic chemistry is full of arcane knowledge, it serves as a good filter: if you can't be bothered to learn that, then you probably don't have the dedication needed to deal with people for the next 40 years.
Organic chemistry also has the effect of proving to everyone who takes it that they cannot count up to 4 (everyone makes the mistake of assigning a valency of 3 or 5 to carbon atoms at some point). It's better that putative doctors learn their fallibilities early, rather then when people's lives depend on them.
Let's get rid of a need to know physics, so doctors won't need to bother with the difference between a dietary intake of 2000 calories and 20,000 calories - they're only arbitrary numbers, after all.
How about english? Do doctor's really need to know how to spell, or read properly. Let's face it, there's not a lot of difference between death and dearth, or patients and patience.
In fact why not open the doors wide and let anyone who can pay the fees become a doctor - issue them with white coats and stethoscopes on receipt of $100k and let them prescribe whatever they like to whom ever they choose.
The major cost of purging is the manpower and downtime. Therefore it's easier to keep the stuff, possibly with occasional housekeeping if your schema isn't as scalable as it should be. While the legal and tax requirements (which vary from country to country) have a limited lifetime, there are always possibilities, such as legal defences, where old data may be needed. These uses will not require the performance (and cost) of enterprise class storage: speed, redundancy, administration, warranties.So migrate it to a few 1TB drives in someone's desk. That way if subpoena'd you can plausibly have "lost" it, whereas if it's in your interests, it can miraculously be found.
Enough Douglas Adams milking already, please for the love of -
- do not destroy the legacy of this great author.
That would be Zarquon - but he's running late
The mice are underwriting the next book - they want to know what'll happen, too.
when the americans and the chinese have the same goals
Until someone can quantify these risks, the whole survey is pointless. Although it does make a nice, juicy headline for the innumerate masses.
Worse, your employer may not pay you for the extra power you use - most won't even consider it. Plus, you're effectively giving your employer a cube-sized chuck of your house for free, try asking them for rent and I could hear them laughing at you from here!
The only IT issue here, is how to roll out patches/updates - but any IT manager with a grain of talent can sort that out.
Apart from retaining the bottlenecks present at the sites people visit (what point is 1GB to the home, when the site you're downloading from is limited to 300KBit/S) isn't this simply the last throes of "old" technology?
Countries are already starting to use WiMax and no doubt when the problems around scaling it are fixed, this will be a much more cost effective (and far less disruptive) approach than cutting more trenches just to lay fibre to the home).
The biggest part fo the problem is providing a service in rural areas - where the low population density makes the cost of each circuit disproportionately high. Even if the decision is made (on purely financial grounds) to "fibre" urban areas, there's still need to be a different solution for areas where this isn't economically viable.
What would be interesting would be to put an Oracle database block interface on these puppies, instead of the normal filesystem interface. then you'd just have the database say to the storage "get me block X" and it appears. No filesystem overheads - which given the speed of these things could turn out to be significant.
Looks like we'll be back on RAW "disks" for databases. Plus ca change!
At least, after that, the farmers affected with drought, or torrential rains, or whatever, will be able to sue somebody.
Nah, they'd create the company in Guantanamo Bay or somesuch, explicitly to move it outside the US legal system.
The other thing that does delay websites is when their front page is a multi-megabyte FLASH. What's wrong with good ole plain text, guys?