Wiring a delay between the compressor start and outdoor blower would be trivial and thermostats with even a small amount of smarts delay starting the indoor airhandler a few seconds after the outdoor unit starts. But, no matter how you slice it, a motor just starting up is effectively "Stalled" and draws a crap load of inrush current. There's designs to reduce that a bit, but they're expensive to build.

That really depends on the size of your datacenter and your server load. If you've got a huge room with one rack in the middle, you're good to go. If you've got a 10x10 room with 2 or 3 loaded racks and your chiller goes tits up, you're going to be roasting hardware in a few short minutes. Some quick back-of-the-napkin calculations show that a 10x10x8 room with a single rack pulling all the juice it can from a 20 amp circuit will raise the temperature in the room about 10 degrees every 2 minutes. From 82 to 95 is about 3 minutes, from 65 to 95 is about 6.

That's where social networking (and I don't mean Facebook) come into play. And not just in technical circles either. I attended ITT straight out of high school, mostly because I thought I would need a piece of paper to prove what I knew.

I made friends with the placement director at the school and so she knew who I was when a company came by and asked for qualified people to fill PC tech support spots. She put me on the top of the pile and I got an interview. I passed the HR interview without a problem and then I got to meet with the manager of Network Services. Turns out that he was former business partners with the scoutmaster I worked with when I was assistant scoutmaster at a troop. One quick phone call to said scoutmaster and I was asked if I could start that night.

Out of all the jobs I've had, almost everything else has been 'a friend recommended me' or I had some sort of "in" with the company. One job was a direct call to a staffing company to inquire about a posted position and the other was a one week Asterisk contract that turned into a full time gig when I impressed the hell out of them.

You took one of the business classes. Then you got to learn how to be an applications jockey for Wordperfect and PFS: First Publisher. There were some simple computer literacy classes during middle school, but it was a semester of "spend 4 45 minute classes during a week listening to lectures and 1 45 minute class actually punching keys". There was a second semester elective class of "computer programming" in Apple BASIC and there were 4 people in that class.

The heaviest use of computing in the high school was the yearbook and newspaper staff trying to get their feet wet with desktop publishing using Pagemaker and the only reason those got done properly is because I plowed through Pagemaker to learn it and ended up teaching the rest of the staff (and I got made Editor senior year...woo me!).

For time reference, I graduated in 1993.

Nobody "codes" in Perl. Perl programs are written by eating a bag of alphabet pasta and then chasing it with ipecac.

LOL, budget owned. A Global Hawk costs $104 million. $104 million * 122 WFOs = $12.6 billion dollars. Somehow I think they'll stick with cheap radiosondes twice a day.
 

You're assuming that you can even recover them. The balloons launched from NWS offices near the coast end up in the drink 99% of the time. When I was touring their office, one of the meteorologists at NWS Tampa said in his service years, he's heard of 2, maybe 3, of the radiosondes being launched from their office be recovered.

It'll be a long while before something will "lessen the importance of weather balloons". Unless you can figure out a way to measure air pressure, humidity, temperature, and wind direction from 0-70k ft regularly without launching balloons or dropsondes, they'll be needed. And if you can figure out a way to do it, the folks who fly the Hurricane Hunter aircraft would like a word with you so they can stop flying in and around tropical cyclones.

I always like the systems (I'm looking at you Dell!) that send you through the song and dance of entering information, then when the time comes to hit the queue the system says "We're sorry, call volumes are too high at the moment. Please call back later. *CLICK*".

You're assuming that there's decent data coverage in the area (Texas Hill Country). It may have improved over the past few years, but there wasn't shit for data coverage when I lived there. Voice coverage on anything other than 800Mhz analogue cellular sucked. There was one Sprint tower in the area, but it was perpetually overloaded.

My old department got hand-me-down trucks from the Texas Forest Service that we converted to brush trucks. We also got a 5000 gallon flight-line fuel truck from them that we converted to a mobile hydrant. The one "new" truck we bought, we bought as a used truck from a department in Chicago and had to take out a loan to pay for it. The bi-annual fundraising BBQ we held covered operating expenses, but that was just about it. Everything else came from handouts from the government.

The radio system? Patched together with stuff my dad & I bought at hamfests.

And there was more than a few times during the summer and we were fighting multihundred acre brush fires that I wish I knew exactly where each truck was, how much fuel and water they had onboard, and be able to set a waypoint for them to drive to for their next task.

That may not have all been able to have been done with an ad-hoc wireless system, but that would have helped immensely.

I read the headline + first part of the article summary. I thought some fan of Topher's had some how edited him into the movies. I was hoping for Darth Vader calling him a dumbass and then using the Force to make him stick his own foot up his ass.

How will it teach them? The money isn't coming out their pockets. Its the equivalent of getting a parking ticket and paying for it by shaking down the neighbors, putting the money in your checking account, and then happily paying the fine.

North GA mountains. Went up there for an anniversary trip because there was no cell phone service and I could get away from the office.

Dumbest move ever, work wise. Machines got powercycled repeatedly to fix "problems".

I'm on SS disability, you insensitive clod! And two lines of AT&T iPhone service. And 25mbit DSL service. And I can eat too!