The real problems aren't 13-hour outages, they are outages that can last a month or more. A good earthquake in the right place destroys the insulators on transmission lines, and shuts down natural gas service. This takes a huge amount of time to repair. Likewise, damaging transmission transformers requires substantial time to repair/replace.
Fortunately, distributed generation can limit the impact of these major events, but if requires power plants in your backyard to work. When you import power from other areas then it is hard to recover-- too many links in the chain.
US hospitals have four "independent" power networks, although most rooms only have two (normal branch and critical branch). Moreover, critical equipment generally also has internal batteries.
Back to the utility grid, the design is to be maintainable rather than fault-tolerant. Maintenance causes limited impact in theory. Faults are isolated and can be repaired. Personally, I think everyone should have a small backup power source-- when Mother Nature or nut jobs do something bad it could take significant time to repair to 100%.
Containerized non field-serviceable data centers that operate in clusters of 4-6 nodes. At the time it would go to 500kW per node; not sure what is economically viable today though. Swap nodes every 30 months and replace bad parts in a service center.
It was innovative but impractical in 2005... today not so much (on both counts).
Interesting, thanks. I know they have a lot of traditional facilities that continue to grow, but I thought the economics of a pre-populated, configured, and tested node with xx,xxx servers was hard to beat. The 4-pack racks might have some simplification in terms of a "universal" standard module, but at the scale they are deploying them...wow.
Aren't all the Aszure data centers just Butler Buildings with shipping container compute nodes stacked inside? I would doubt they can make a traditional data center work economically for the server capaicty they are deploying.
The problem with "edge" data centers is you need nearly the same operating staff as you do for a large "core" facility, and it is hard to get the same efficiencies. My business model from 2005 is about to take off though, unfortunately without me being able to capitalize on it.
...and drove oil prices down. (Just pointing out the irony.)
While I am not interested in the US being the world's police force or moral compass, when looking at the alternatives I don't think it is the worst outcome. Other options are Russia, China, Japan, Germany, UK, India, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. Regional power centers don't work very well-- and pretty much every government acts in their own self-interest. Even when you have governments that act in the common good like Sweden, you are still stuck with the issues of internal backlash and the situation eventually becoming abused.
Router performance goes down and and memory requirements go up with IPv6. That is a tough pill to swallow when people want higher bandwidth. Ten years ago, a small business getting more than 5/1 ADSL was nearly unheard of-- today gigabit is within reach.
Every time I see slashvertisements or articles for this type of equipment I cringe at the fact that there is no easy end user solution for security with all these devices. How can your grandma put these devices in a dmz where security compromises don't impact her online banking or whatever? For most people, the limit of their home network security is their wifi pass phrase-- once that is known little is protected.
Where are these good out of work sysadmins you speak of? In the Los Angeles area, I have found exactly one (contractor). It is pushing me to need to migrate off Samba and onto Windows/AD for our office after a decade. Systemd also pushes me in that direction, as it becomes closer to a Windows type of solution anyway... just not as mature.
And before you suggest a full time sysadmin, we are a 40 person shop and there just isn't enough to justify a full time position. I would much rather pay $135-150/hour for the ~200 hours a year of work we have and let someone make a lot more money than they could as a FTE.
Just looked at an ICA receipt and it does not show the cardholder name. However, the checkout gun did display a first name, so it might just be a policy on receipts.
They also have links in the story for the actual biggest failures in recent history (F35 not among them).
The one I was disappointed about was one I had read about in ~2003 on/. -- the floating radar installation that went to Alaska, but is now decommissioned and rusting away in Perl Harbor. It is amazing how many of these projects are impossible based on simple math/geometry, but it takes millions/billions anyway.
And if you want to get political, most of the problems are related to an unrealistic timeline mandated by GWB in 2002.
In fairness, they are open completely to the bottom, so not really a damp environment. A great solution over the Anerican "drying rack" misery. There are other Scandanavian design concepts that don't transfer as well due to climate, but that isn't one of them.
While my parents taught me the same things in terms of financial planning, it is still a poor strategy to use only cash. Income, spending, (savings), and financing are different issues. If you defer a cash outflow of $1,000 for 30 days that is $2-10 of interest you could have made. If you get "points" for credit card spending, that is another $10-20. If you think in terms of insuring the cash against theft or loss, that is another $10-20. How much value this has to a person is a function of how much they spend.
That said, if you can negotiate a $50 savings on that $1,000 transaction for using cash rather than credit it is clearly a better use of capital.
That is really poor use of your capital, amped a terrible sense of financial planning. If your weakness is you can't manage your spending without using cash, you should figure out how to deal with that. A credit card can offer rebate points, can have no up-front costs, offers fraud protection, etc. which make it a zero-cost or negative-cost tool.
Short term debt is financial leverage. If the goods you purchase have the same cost, there is no benefit to using cash.
Carrying a balance and paying interest though is stupid.
Way back when, they were putting in Hitec UPSs, a diesel-rotary flywheel system for backup power. About 7-10 years ago, 365 Main In San Francisco had an outage with these units after a few consecutive short outages. I know Hitec updated the firmware on the system to change timings, but I wonder if these units were ever "patched."
Unfortunately from what I understand you are wrong. It takes services like Apple Pay to tokenize transactions. I have no idea why, but I guess it is a backward compatibility issue, and the merchant's desire to track customers.
At least in my industry (power), there is still a demand for good young engineers, in pretty well paying positions. A good part of that is retirement, but there is a bit of growth as well. You might not start at six figures, but you will get there in 4-5 years if you are solid.
Moreover, the remote hack can be designed to impact systems when an externality occurs rather than just causing one at will. That can often have a much larger impact on a target.
I mostly agree with what you are saying, but as a simple example of 3MW diesel gensets, say a paralleled bus of 12x3MW, that happens to be controlled via Ethernet for sync and paralleling. If the switches are not properly secured then you end up with the ability to lockout all the generators. (Sadly, this particular major manufacturer does not have backup sync and start controls.)
The most common protective relay on the market is another interesting example-- while they are much better in understanding security than most, to secure their systems you need fairly extensive infrastructure which would not be common for less than 20 or so relays.
Point being it is easy to fuck up with security-- one mistake can destroy a good system.
Really it is a lot more complicated than that. I was speaking to a vendor last week, and asked about how they do spanning tree within their system for redundant network links to their engine controllers. "Oh, we program a couple little DIN rail switch ourselves and provide a single network handoff to the building." While I am sure they can figure out the basics, security is hard enough that without dedicated people and systems you aren't going to defeat a committed attacker.
Solid security is very hard when dealing with any kind of interconnected system. It gets even harder when you need different systems to have their own IOT crap without RADIUS authentication or the like.
You had me until Starbucks cards; as a stored value card they are great. The account also has value in being able to pre order your drinks. Everything is relative, but whatever.
Acceptable advertising varies by culture. Personally, I can't tolerate much of it. Other people might be able to spend every day in Times Square without batting an eye. It also seems to vary by medium within a culture. I am not sure how you can cater advertising to the user in terms of magnitude, but my gut feeling is that people that use Adblock should just be left alone by advertisers until they get a better sense of what the users find non-offensive.
That said, I do know there are advertisements that I respond to, but the blinky, moving, invasive shit will not be tolerated.
Slashdot Mirror
The real problems aren't 13-hour outages, they are outages that can last a month or more. A good earthquake in the right place destroys the insulators on transmission lines, and shuts down natural gas service. This takes a huge amount of time to repair. Likewise, damaging transmission transformers requires substantial time to repair/replace.
Fortunately, distributed generation can limit the impact of these major events, but if requires power plants in your backyard to work. When you import power from other areas then it is hard to recover-- too many links in the chain.
US hospitals have four "independent" power networks, although most rooms only have two (normal branch and critical branch). Moreover, critical equipment generally also has internal batteries.
Back to the utility grid, the design is to be maintainable rather than fault-tolerant. Maintenance causes limited impact in theory. Faults are isolated and can be repaired. Personally, I think everyone should have a small backup power source-- when Mother Nature or nut jobs do something bad it could take significant time to repair to 100%.
Containerized non field-serviceable data centers that operate in clusters of 4-6 nodes. At the time it would go to 500kW per node; not sure what is economically viable today though. Swap nodes every 30 months and replace bad parts in a service center.
It was innovative but impractical in 2005... today not so much (on both counts).
Interesting, thanks. I know they have a lot of traditional facilities that continue to grow, but I thought the economics of a pre-populated, configured, and tested node with xx,xxx servers was hard to beat. The 4-pack racks might have some simplification in terms of a "universal" standard module, but at the scale they are deploying them...wow.
Aren't all the Aszure data centers just Butler Buildings with shipping container compute nodes stacked inside? I would doubt they can make a traditional data center work economically for the server capaicty they are deploying.
Verizon is also shedding land lines...
The problem with "edge" data centers is you need nearly the same operating staff as you do for a large "core" facility, and it is hard to get the same efficiencies. My business model from 2005 is about to take off though, unfortunately without me being able to capitalize on it.
...and drove oil prices down. (Just pointing out the irony.)
While I am not interested in the US being the world's police force or moral compass, when looking at the alternatives I don't think it is the worst outcome. Other options are Russia, China, Japan, Germany, UK, India, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. Regional power centers don't work very well-- and pretty much every government acts in their own self-interest. Even when you have governments that act in the common good like Sweden, you are still stuck with the issues of internal backlash and the situation eventually becoming abused.
Router performance goes down and and memory requirements go up with IPv6. That is a tough pill to swallow when people want higher bandwidth. Ten years ago, a small business getting more than 5/1 ADSL was nearly unheard of-- today gigabit is within reach.
Every time I see slashvertisements or articles for this type of equipment I cringe at the fact that there is no easy end user solution for security with all these devices. How can your grandma put these devices in a dmz where security compromises don't impact her online banking or whatever? For most people, the limit of their home network security is their wifi pass phrase-- once that is known little is protected.
Where are these good out of work sysadmins you speak of? In the Los Angeles area, I have found exactly one (contractor). It is pushing me to need to migrate off Samba and onto Windows/AD for our office after a decade. Systemd also pushes me in that direction, as it becomes closer to a Windows type of solution anyway... just not as mature.
And before you suggest a full time sysadmin, we are a 40 person shop and there just isn't enough to justify a full time position. I would much rather pay $135-150/hour for the ~200 hours a year of work we have and let someone make a lot more money than they could as a FTE.
One of the b's in Abba...
Just looked at an ICA receipt and it does not show the cardholder name. However, the checkout gun did display a first name, so it might just be a policy on receipts.
They also have links in the story for the actual biggest failures in recent history (F35 not among them).
The one I was disappointed about was one I had read about in ~2003 on /. -- the floating radar installation that went to Alaska, but is now decommissioned and rusting away in Perl Harbor. It is amazing how many of these projects are impossible based on simple math/geometry, but it takes millions/billions anyway.
And if you want to get political, most of the problems are related to an unrealistic timeline mandated by GWB in 2002.
In fairness, they are open completely to the bottom, so not really a damp environment. A great solution over the Anerican "drying rack" misery. There are other Scandanavian design concepts that don't transfer as well due to climate, but that isn't one of them.
While my parents taught me the same things in terms of financial planning, it is still a poor strategy to use only cash. Income, spending, (savings), and financing are different issues. If you defer a cash outflow of $1,000 for 30 days that is $2-10 of interest you could have made. If you get "points" for credit card spending, that is another $10-20. If you think in terms of insuring the cash against theft or loss, that is another $10-20. How much value this has to a person is a function of how much they spend.
That said, if you can negotiate a $50 savings on that $1,000 transaction for using cash rather than credit it is clearly a better use of capital.
That is really poor use of your capital, amped a terrible sense of financial planning. If your weakness is you can't manage your spending without using cash, you should figure out how to deal with that. A credit card can offer rebate points, can have no up-front costs, offers fraud protection, etc. which make it a zero-cost or negative-cost tool.
Short term debt is financial leverage. If the goods you purchase have the same cost, there is no benefit to using cash.
Carrying a balance and paying interest though is stupid.
Way back when, they were putting in Hitec UPSs, a diesel-rotary flywheel system for backup power. About 7-10 years ago, 365 Main In San Francisco had an outage with these units after a few consecutive short outages. I know Hitec updated the firmware on the system to change timings, but I wonder if these units were ever "patched."
Oh well... Nothing of value lost and all that.
Unfortunately from what I understand you are wrong. It takes services like Apple Pay to tokenize transactions. I have no idea why, but I guess it is a backward compatibility issue, and the merchant's desire to track customers.
At least in my industry (power), there is still a demand for good young engineers, in pretty well paying positions. A good part of that is retirement, but there is a bit of growth as well. You might not start at six figures, but you will get there in 4-5 years if you are solid.
Moreover, the remote hack can be designed to impact systems when an externality occurs rather than just causing one at will. That can often have a much larger impact on a target.
I mostly agree with what you are saying, but as a simple example of 3MW diesel gensets, say a paralleled bus of 12x3MW, that happens to be controlled via Ethernet for sync and paralleling. If the switches are not properly secured then you end up with the ability to lockout all the generators. (Sadly, this particular major manufacturer does not have backup sync and start controls.)
The most common protective relay on the market is another interesting example-- while they are much better in understanding security than most, to secure their systems you need fairly extensive infrastructure which would not be common for less than 20 or so relays.
Point being it is easy to fuck up with security-- one mistake can destroy a good system.
Really it is a lot more complicated than that. I was speaking to a vendor last week, and asked about how they do spanning tree within their system for redundant network links to their engine controllers. "Oh, we program a couple little DIN rail switch ourselves and provide a single network handoff to the building." While I am sure they can figure out the basics, security is hard enough that without dedicated people and systems you aren't going to defeat a committed attacker.
Solid security is very hard when dealing with any kind of interconnected system. It gets even harder when you need different systems to have their own IOT crap without RADIUS authentication or the like.
You had me until Starbucks cards; as a stored value card they are great. The account also has value in being able to pre order your drinks. Everything is relative, but whatever.
Deals aren't blocked by the checkbox...
Acceptable advertising varies by culture. Personally, I can't tolerate much of it. Other people might be able to spend every day in Times Square without batting an eye. It also seems to vary by medium within a culture. I am not sure how you can cater advertising to the user in terms of magnitude, but my gut feeling is that people that use Adblock should just be left alone by advertisers until they get a better sense of what the users find non-offensive.
That said, I do know there are advertisements that I respond to, but the blinky, moving, invasive shit will not be tolerated.