Despite that significant time lag, we still all come here to share insight and get a deeper understand of a story. I notice myself thinking that stories are dupes because I read about them aday earlier somewhere else, but being spared the trite and inane commentary of some of the other blogs creates value. Too many MSM articles are so devoid of real insight and are missing fundamental information...
Semi-monthly pull-the-plug tests would reduce reliability. Monthly load tests on generator and a battery monitoring system ensure electrical reliability quite effectively. Only the most inadequate facilities fail to do this.
The larger problems come from improper change control, a lack of scripting, or an abnormal failure mode. Lack of testing and maintenance is a real problem, and in data centers it is far too often that it is caused by the IT team not understanding the risks of inaction. If you have an accumulation of cobwebs and dust in your switchgear due to lack of maintenance, it is only a matter of time before a failure.
Fischer plaza is actually pretty robust of a site, and well compartementalized. The problem with most telecom hotels though is the battery plant is the main line of defense; generator and utility equipment are often located in the same room.
With Verizon, their HUB there should go 8 hours on battery in this type of failure while they are trying to coordinate with Aggrecco for a roll-up unit. Depending on timing and the fire department, they would expect a 6-8 hour outage.
Not really. Keep it close to industrial sites and it isn't hard at all. A couple of projects I am working on are easily 30MW services. What gets hard is breaking the loads into enough pieces that you can't get any real information from tracking the power demand, which requires significant on-site generation and stored energy.
Looking at one of my clients annual time-of-use power data, I can quickly tell how their business is doing and what kind of anomalies and business spikes they have. It becomes much harder when you have to correlate multiple data sources with truly random power cycles.
On-site generation helps some, but the cooling towers or stacks give away how much load you are supporting.
When you do load recording at classified sites, usually you can only use a thermal tape recorder, nothing electronic for just this reason. (Well, there are TEMPEST concerns as well, but that is another matter...)
Subsidized phones aren't the problem; the fact that the cost isn't a separate line-item on your bill is. When you are out of contract, why don't your rates go down? You have paid off the cost of the phone...
If people are too stupid to understand, well, not much you can do for them.
No, that was the genius of everything; they are only syncing non-DRM music (since they can't decode FairPlay), and anything Palm is doing should come under the interoperability banner.
I'm all for interoperability, but I do worry a little when less-elegant players try to do the same as Palm.
Apple's only (obvious) option is to encode everything in FairPlay as it goes to the 'iPod.'
I appreciate the idealism here, but it isn't always so simple. We paid a squatter $3k for our domain when we really had better things to spend our money on; that was 5% of our start-up capital. We still regard it as the best investment we made. (Our original name was 25 characters and we got down to 7)
Just be sure to set up a backup domain name in case things fall through and to give yourself better bargaining position. I think he wanted $6k for it.
Another word to the wise-- don't make a domain extortion be your first purchase for a start-up. Sort out more important things first like getting clients. If your web presence is all you have going, things get harder.
Release keys don't work as well now with the accented characters as they used to. If you dwell long enough for an accent, you must select one of the options presented, even if you meant the next key over.
Fiber without tracer lines is very difficult to locate accurately. For one major data center I worked for, we made a contractor who was doing excavation for utility improvements within 20' of the recorded location use air lances and vacuum trucks. They ended up needing to excavate a 24" trench 4' deep for a total length of 300'.
And, they still managed to cut two fibers and a 500-pair cable...
Welcome to News Corp, the owner of WSJ. Every article that impacts News Corp on WSJ has an obvious slant. I canceled my subscription it was getting so bad.
Same thing happened to me; I had the automatically recharge unchecked, but the payment confirmation indicated thank you for using automatic recharge. Didn't worry too much about it, but Skype is definitely having some issues in the billing department...
I'm in the same boat, but remember that you paid an extra $300 up front which is $12.50/month. The 3G isn't that much faster in real life use (processor and memory control a number of things), and it ends up on Edge often enough (in Los Angeles!) that the other benefits are minimal.
I contemplate moving back to a Blackberry for improved flexibility and better plans! The iPhone may be a premium product, but AT&T's service is by no means a premium offering.
I hope the telcos do some serious soul-searching when pricing smart-phone plans this round. I think they could do themselves a lot of harm. (I am even considering dropping back to a "dumb" phone to keep the costs under control!)
I miss my old Nokia 770 with bluetooth connection to a cheap phone. I think Apple might stand to gain something with a cheap phone with tethering ability to a Touch.
While that was my first reaction as well, consider the potential impact on telecommuting with telepresence and high-speed links to business networks. Gigabit should give plenty of wiggle room for the next 3-5 years, but after that...
My company is looking at software that can't survive without gigabit to the desk. We have more and more of our employees working from home one or two days a week. This type of deployment could keep that viable.
We forget how far we have come in the last 15 years-- exernal business connectivity has grown 1000-fold (on a per employee metric at least), and internal networks 100-500 fold. Who knows what will drive the next round...
You seem to think that the purpose of news is to inform the audience. This hasn't been the case for at least a decade. It is just there to sell ad space.
The newspapers are doomed. Their focus is to be able to get the same revenue for ads with a bigger device. They completely miss the point. They think that "giving away content" on the internet was their biggest mistake.
In reality, their biggest mistake was not containing costs 10 years ago (slowly) to reflect the structural shift of information to a different medium.
I used to have a subscription to the Wall Street Journal, which gave me both dead-tree and online information. While the content was ok at first, when NewsCorp destroyed the editorial content it was no longer worth the effort. Only about 10% of the dead-tree editions would be read because the format was unwieldy at the desk.
They need to bring costs in-line and generate quality content at the same time. (No, I didn't say it was easy.) There isn't a top-line solution that will make them viable long-term. Look no farther than ad rates to understand the limited value that the papers can generate for most of their advertisers.
Some projects have deliberate fake information produced at the same time. It is pretty easy to modify a few details at design time to make something useless, or better require man-years to re-work the logic.
I haven't done Bangladesh, but in Thailand if I had it to do over again I would go for four low-spec machines, and a sealed enclosure with compressed air cooling. It isn't the most energy efficient approach, but having a sealed (and slightly positively-pressurized) enclosure does wonders at keeping out moisture, dust, and ants.
The general idea is to have a couple small compressors (with check-valves) feed into a common reservoir that has adequate time to cool to ambient temperatures. Ideally, you would run at about 300 psi/20 bar, and have a pressure reducing valve inside the enclosure to drop the air to about 10 psi with a 1/16" orifice into the enclosure. (You might have to experiment on orifice and pressure.) Provide a pressure relief valve to keep the enclosure under 2 psig. (Another constrained orifice would work, but you will lose more air.)
Keep a spare machine in a pelican box with desiccant along with two or three spare hard drives. Keep a backup external USB hard drive in a separate pelican box with dessiccant and only open it up when you are doing a backup.
I'd also second comments about running everything in virtual machines and being willing to make compromises when one of them isn't working.
Back in my day, getting 12V power supplies wasn't nearly as easy as Google makes it sound. (You need to have a high enough float voltage to charge the batteries, and have a regulated output that will handle the end cell voltage of the batteries.) The logical alternative is to use 48VDC power supplies which are much more expensive. They are designed to operate within the float/ECV requirements of a VRLA. Don't forget your blocking diodes! Try to stay away from car batteries if you can and find some real deep-cycle batteries. Getting through monsoon season on battery isn't realistic without a huge battery plant. Our island's phone switch was pretty well equipped, but for two months a year the phones only worked when the sun was shining.
External connectivity was always my nemesis; when the phone switch was down, everything else crapped out. Satellite phones weren't viable from a cost perspective; the consumer satellite service was too unreliable to even be considered.
While the train station might not be as convenient for me to get to as the airport, I would relocate both my home and office in a flash if rail transit within California was viable for 100-500 mile trips.
With the money spent on expanding airports in California, Phoenix, and Las Vegas, you could do a lot to provide a viable rail link with long-term economic benefit. Reduce carbon footprint too, if you care about that.
Inter-urban links are an important component, but don't invalidate the need for urban and sub-urban rail systems.
Slashdot Mirror
Despite that significant time lag, we still all come here to share insight and get a deeper understand of a story. I notice myself thinking that stories are dupes because I read about them aday earlier somewhere else, but being spared the trite and inane commentary of some of the other blogs creates value. Too many MSM articles are so devoid of real insight and are missing fundamental information...
Wince was done for branding/advertising, not for functionality.
C'mon, this is slashdot... think of the nerds!
Semi-monthly pull-the-plug tests would reduce reliability. Monthly load tests on generator and a battery monitoring system ensure electrical reliability quite effectively. Only the most inadequate facilities fail to do this.
The larger problems come from improper change control, a lack of scripting, or an abnormal failure mode. Lack of testing and maintenance is a real problem, and in data centers it is far too often that it is caused by the IT team not understanding the risks of inaction. If you have an accumulation of cobwebs and dust in your switchgear due to lack of maintenance, it is only a matter of time before a failure.
Fischer plaza is actually pretty robust of a site, and well compartementalized. The problem with most telecom hotels though is the battery plant is the main line of defense; generator and utility equipment are often located in the same room.
With Verizon, their HUB there should go 8 hours on battery in this type of failure while they are trying to coordinate with Aggrecco for a roll-up unit. Depending on timing and the fire department, they would expect a 6-8 hour outage.
Not really. Keep it close to industrial sites and it isn't hard at all. A couple of projects I am working on are easily 30MW services. What gets hard is breaking the loads into enough pieces that you can't get any real information from tracking the power demand, which requires significant on-site generation and stored energy.
Looking at one of my clients annual time-of-use power data, I can quickly tell how their business is doing and what kind of anomalies and business spikes they have. It becomes much harder when you have to correlate multiple data sources with truly random power cycles.
On-site generation helps some, but the cooling towers or stacks give away how much load you are supporting.
When you do load recording at classified sites, usually you can only use a thermal tape recorder, nothing electronic for just this reason. (Well, there are TEMPEST concerns as well, but that is another matter...)
Subsidized phones aren't the problem; the fact that the cost isn't a separate line-item on your bill is. When you are out of contract, why don't your rates go down? You have paid off the cost of the phone...
If people are too stupid to understand, well, not much you can do for them.
No, that was the genius of everything; they are only syncing non-DRM music (since they can't decode FairPlay), and anything Palm is doing should come under the interoperability banner.
I'm all for interoperability, but I do worry a little when less-elegant players try to do the same as Palm.
Apple's only (obvious) option is to encode everything in FairPlay as it goes to the 'iPod.'
I appreciate the idealism here, but it isn't always so simple. We paid a squatter $3k for our domain when we really had better things to spend our money on; that was 5% of our start-up capital. We still regard it as the best investment we made. (Our original name was 25 characters and we got down to 7)
Just be sure to set up a backup domain name in case things fall through and to give yourself better bargaining position. I think he wanted $6k for it.
Another word to the wise-- don't make a domain extortion be your first purchase for a start-up. Sort out more important things first like getting clients. If your web presence is all you have going, things get harder.
I think that was fixed in the first OS update; the proximity sensor by the earpiece de-activates the touchscreen...
Release keys don't work as well now with the accented characters as they used to. If you dwell long enough for an accent, you must select one of the options presented, even if you meant the next key over.
Fiber without tracer lines is very difficult to locate accurately. For one major data center I worked for, we made a contractor who was doing excavation for utility improvements within 20' of the recorded location use air lances and vacuum trucks. They ended up needing to excavate a 24" trench 4' deep for a total length of 300'.
And, they still managed to cut two fibers and a 500-pair cable...
look up SCIF. Security is all about compartmentalization. Make sure no one person knows all the secrets.
With the cost of tunnel boring machines now, you would think anything really critical would be far too deep for things like this.
Hell, just put the fiber in a 4" gas line! Valves become a little problem, but you could have some cast with a bypass for the fiber to pass through.
Welcome to News Corp, the owner of WSJ. Every article that impacts News Corp on WSJ has an obvious slant. I canceled my subscription it was getting so bad.
Same thing happened to me; I had the automatically recharge unchecked, but the payment confirmation indicated thank you for using automatic recharge. Didn't worry too much about it, but Skype is definitely having some issues in the billing department...
I'm in the same boat, but remember that you paid an extra $300 up front which is $12.50/month. The 3G isn't that much faster in real life use (processor and memory control a number of things), and it ends up on Edge often enough (in Los Angeles!) that the other benefits are minimal.
I contemplate moving back to a Blackberry for improved flexibility and better plans! The iPhone may be a premium product, but AT&T's service is by no means a premium offering.
I hope the telcos do some serious soul-searching when pricing smart-phone plans this round. I think they could do themselves a lot of harm. (I am even considering dropping back to a "dumb" phone to keep the costs under control!)
I miss my old Nokia 770 with bluetooth connection to a cheap phone. I think Apple might stand to gain something with a cheap phone with tethering ability to a Touch.
While that was my first reaction as well, consider the potential impact on telecommuting with telepresence and high-speed links to business networks. Gigabit should give plenty of wiggle room for the next 3-5 years, but after that...
My company is looking at software that can't survive without gigabit to the desk. We have more and more of our employees working from home one or two days a week. This type of deployment could keep that viable.
We forget how far we have come in the last 15 years-- exernal business connectivity has grown 1000-fold (on a per employee metric at least), and internal networks 100-500 fold. Who knows what will drive the next round...
You seem to think that the purpose of news is to inform the audience. This hasn't been the case for at least a decade. It is just there to sell ad space.
The newspapers are doomed. Their focus is to be able to get the same revenue for ads with a bigger device. They completely miss the point. They think that "giving away content" on the internet was their biggest mistake.
In reality, their biggest mistake was not containing costs 10 years ago (slowly) to reflect the structural shift of information to a different medium.
I used to have a subscription to the Wall Street Journal, which gave me both dead-tree and online information. While the content was ok at first, when NewsCorp destroyed the editorial content it was no longer worth the effort. Only about 10% of the dead-tree editions would be read because the format was unwieldy at the desk.
They need to bring costs in-line and generate quality content at the same time. (No, I didn't say it was easy.) There isn't a top-line solution that will make them viable long-term. Look no farther than ad rates to understand the limited value that the papers can generate for most of their advertisers.
Some projects have deliberate fake information produced at the same time. It is pretty easy to modify a few details at design time to make something useless, or better require man-years to re-work the logic.
I haven't done Bangladesh, but in Thailand if I had it to do over again I would go for four low-spec machines, and a sealed enclosure with compressed air cooling. It isn't the most energy efficient approach, but having a sealed (and slightly positively-pressurized) enclosure does wonders at keeping out moisture, dust, and ants.
The general idea is to have a couple small compressors (with check-valves) feed into a common reservoir that has adequate time to cool to ambient temperatures. Ideally, you would run at about 300 psi/20 bar, and have a pressure reducing valve inside the enclosure to drop the air to about 10 psi with a 1/16" orifice into the enclosure. (You might have to experiment on orifice and pressure.) Provide a pressure relief valve to keep the enclosure under 2 psig. (Another constrained orifice would work, but you will lose more air.)
Keep a spare machine in a pelican box with desiccant along with two or three spare hard drives. Keep a backup external USB hard drive in a separate pelican box with dessiccant and only open it up when you are doing a backup.
I'd also second comments about running everything in virtual machines and being willing to make compromises when one of them isn't working.
Back in my day, getting 12V power supplies wasn't nearly as easy as Google makes it sound. (You need to have a high enough float voltage to charge the batteries, and have a regulated output that will handle the end cell voltage of the batteries.) The logical alternative is to use 48VDC power supplies which are much more expensive. They are designed to operate within the float/ECV requirements of a VRLA. Don't forget your blocking diodes! Try to stay away from car batteries if you can and find some real deep-cycle batteries. Getting through monsoon season on battery isn't realistic without a huge battery plant. Our island's phone switch was pretty well equipped, but for two months a year the phones only worked when the sun was shining.
External connectivity was always my nemesis; when the phone switch was down, everything else crapped out. Satellite phones weren't viable from a cost perspective; the consumer satellite service was too unreliable to even be considered.
Where is this stated? Everything I have read about the pre-Obama California plan involved dedicated track, and almost entirely dedicated right-of-way.
Oh. Then explain air travel.
While the train station might not be as convenient for me to get to as the airport, I would relocate both my home and office in a flash if rail transit within California was viable for 100-500 mile trips.
With the money spent on expanding airports in California, Phoenix, and Las Vegas, you could do a lot to provide a viable rail link with long-term economic benefit. Reduce carbon footprint too, if you care about that.
Inter-urban links are an important component, but don't invalidate the need for urban and sub-urban rail systems.
They are proposing a federal law, which would simply allow the states to collect the taxes...