spinoff.nasa.gov

Email the very nice person there, and she'll send you a copy of the 2011 book for free (in the USA).

Go find an open source or commodity system that can be deployed in a heavily regulated power industry with SCADA systems.

Make sure it's so cheap that the difference in cost for buying Itaniums and this software will pay the millions in training people all over the country, interfacing in the financial and billing systems, as well as covering the cost of redeveloping all of the customized code that is required to operate coal, natural gas and nuclear plants.

Please call me when you're done.

I'll be buying a number of systems with these in a few months when they hit the street and the budget's ready. I'll be able to virtualize a lot of our old PA-RISC boxes into a smaller and more efficient set of systems.

But you're right, they suck because you can't play Angry Birds on it.

Security logging.

If EventX happens on Box1 and EventY happens on Box2, I'd like to see which happened first, etc. I can correlate that with networks sniffs, firewall logs, etc. If all are on damn near the same millisecond, then I can walk the trail. If one is 3 seconds off, or a minute off, etc., it gets fuzzy.

If DoorA opens at Time1 and CameraX sees something at Time2...

If I have two GPS time boxes (with two weeks of time retention/accuracy in case of signal loss), I can have something that should stand up in court.

If I have a home built box, or hope that pool.ntp.org was working perfectly as well as my connection to it, during a time that an event happened that puts us in court, it might not stand up.

Go get a GPS satellite receiver/time server. Actually, get two. Don't screw with time.

THEN, virtualize the rest of the stuff. Monitoring, syslogging, management, patchers, etc.

We've virtualized everything except for
- a Windows DC so that it stays up if the vmware datastores or SAN eats itself in a horrible way.
- The NIS server we have to use on our UX environment due to an ancient regulation. I'm not willing to put up HP-UX VMs for this right now, otherwise it'd be safe in a VM as well.
- Anything we can't virtualize due to licensing/contract/support issues. So our VOIP environments, phone call recording, access control systems for the doors,

My datacenter is getting a lot nicer to look at, and a lot easier to upgrade. I can shift servers or volumes all over the room so I can do live maintenance during the day.

11 years at a company, let go with 50% of my team in one day because an executive got a bonus for cutting costs, without correlation to customer satisfaction or service level agreements.

The exec only got caught when he tried to fire the other 50% 6 months later.

His excuse? My bonus maxed out at 50% every six months, so he didn't fire everybody once because he could get twice the bonus by doing two firings.

655 mpg so far.
Silent, moves quickly in traffic and on the open road.

I charge at work, so even the whopping $2.50 a week it would cost me to charge it at home is gone.

The only time I've had to use the gas engine was the time I purposely drove to another town for a Greek restaurant, just to prove the engine actually worked. Otherwise, my commute and errands don't come close to using a 50 mile charge. In fact, it's usually 20 when I really push it. So I can charge every 3-4 days depending on my destinations that week. I plug it in every day though since my company put up the 240V chargers, it gets me front row parking.

It is absolutely not the car for everybody. But for me, living 7 miles from work, it's awesome. And knowing I can hop in and drive a couple of states away if I have to is mighty nice.

I've been to a gas station twice since I bought my car. Both times because I needed a large Dr. Pepper.

I'm in the power industry. We have some applications that are only built in Solaris, HP-UX or AIX due to the underlying Cobol code, etc.

If we want to maintain certain regs, or have access to certain markets, we have to keep this particular app.

The day Oracle crapped on Itanium, we had to get HP in to tell us what the plan was as it would take us a few years to migrate to AIX if HP was really dumping it. (there is no way in hell we're running Oracle on a (now) Oracle operating system). Talk about vendor lock in. Woof.

Since then, I have been provided HP-UX and Itanium roadmaps for a ways out. (under NDA so no more details than that)

If Oracle wins on this, and really does dump UX, then I need to bring a bunch of AIX gear in and put a team of developers to work porting our custom code which means no optimization, no rewrites, no efficiency. All of our work to improve security, and kill off bugs will be wasted as we get it barely working in a new environment before we lose support. Just in case we get a nuclear project, etc.

The thought of training hundreds of people in a new system at multiple power plants and dozens of substations alone makes me nauseous. But if we screw up the migration process and wreck compliance, we could be out of business as the fines are incredible.

I'll bet half of this could have been avoided if when Hurd was found screwing around at HP, they could have just had him executed. Then he wouldn't be at Oracle and probably influencing this situation quite a bit.

Put a dome over the airport, or just the whole city. Scan at all times.

They'll promote some sort of biometric implants at some point. You don't have an implant? What are you trying to hide?

There's a reason these problems are never solved. There is more money in fixing/upgrading the gear than there is building it right the first time. CompanyA builds box to current specifications. Turns out those specs suck. CompanyA now given new money to build it better. Rinse. Repeat. As it's been mentioned already, the only people these systems help are the shareholders.

I saw a similar bit by Eddie Izzard. Wow, you must have to get up pretty early in the morning for that.

Death, death, death, death, breakfast, death, death, tea, death, death...

What did I find when I joined the sysadmin team at my place?

Putting cold air vents behind the racks doesn't help. Pull cold air through the front to the back? Nope. Chill the exhausted air because it sucks to walk behind the servers. Nice.

You have a lot of nerve asking that question. Or at least the person who underwent the treatment would.

You said rape twice!

Try the middle initial.

John Kennedy might be on the list
John Fitzgerald Kennedy might be on the list.
John F. Kennedy or J. Fitzgerald Kennedy might not be. How stupid is that?

Smartly done, lad.