I never said it was an honest measure, but it is the measure used by the hard drive industry. It is also very similar to quality measures in many other industries. You take a reasonable sample, run a test for a certain amount of time and infer/extrapolate reliability figures based on the test. On the back-end, you redesign your process to eliminate as many variations as possible on the manufacturing side.

The alternative would be to really test the disks for 3-5 years in a lab before releasing them on the market, or really testing a large amount of drive trains for 10 years and so many miles before releasing to market. The first company to really do that will go bankrupt before shipping the next generation of devices.

Which would explain why repeated studies have found the MTBF published by manufacturers to be orders of magnitude higher than reality.

The same way it is calculated for rotating platters, I would guess.

The lab sets up a test with 1000 drives for 1000 hours. If one drive failed during the 1000 hours, the MTBF will be advertised as 1,000,000 hours ([1000x1000]/1). [short time period] * [number of pieces tested] / [number of pieces tested which failed within that time period] = MTBF.

That's actually a fair point... maybe it should be modified to "there is no wrong honest answer to this question" :)

He may not have lied...

I usually ask a variation of that question... What's something you see about yourself as a potential weakness for this role?

The question is open enough that you don't need to pick your worst weakness. I actually don't really care about the potential weakness, I expect the candidate to be mature enough to be honest/candid and to come up with an improvement plan or a way to work around the weakness. Answering "I don't have any weakness" is usually a sure way to be put in the circular filing device.

Remember... Oracle stands for: One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison

You forgot the 4th position.

This question has no bearing on my life whatsoever and I can't believe how retarded society at large must be for that question to receive so much attention. Believe what you want to believe (or not believe) and respect others ability to do the same.

Your rehash of Pascal's wager is overly simplistic, just like the original.

What about you believe in God and it turns out Allah/Zeus/Odin/Pan/Quetzalcoatl/Invisible Pink Unicorn do(es) exist while God doesn't?

By the way, Pascal's wager was put on the Index by the Vatican... because faith through logic is not faith.

I haven't seen the CPU as the bottleneck on any of the DB servers I have administered in the last 4 years, except on seriously under-spec'd systems. The most CPU intensive DB at work is peaking at 3 cores out of 24, but maxes on IOPS (8GB link to an auto-tiered SAN, 50% SSD disk pool) and RAM (256GB) throughout the entire job.

It makes me wonder how the Jomon and associated cultures fit in the picture.

Imagine a large corporation where every department has its own IT department, where no embedded IT department trusts any other embedded IT department and where few people trust the centralized IT. Throw in the fact that most of the IT is managed from Luxembourg, the political impossibility to enforce rules across the network, the relatively low salary for the IT people not on the paper pusher path (becoming internal would have cost me a whole third of my salary), the insanity of the promotion rules, core services being outsourced to the lowest bidder every five years... and you've got the recipe for the mess they're in.

The technical solutions to fix the EP IT issues are known and easy, the problem is getting the political support to make them stick.

That is because corporate is strictly short term. There are two evaluation windows in the corporate world: quarterly profits of the corporation and annual review of the employee. Delaying a project by up to 24-to-32 weeks instead of 14-to-22 weeks by hiring a "promising candidate" is definitely a career limiting move as you have introduced a serious risk to the project.

Not necessarily, because in those 6 months he (or the rest of his team) would have been less productive as the promising applicant was trained.

I have been in that situation twice in the last two years and now the "promising applicant" would need to be exceptionally close or hired straight from the direct network of a team member... If I spend more time over 6 months training a new hire or controlling/correcting his work than I'd have spent doing the work myself in the first place, then it makes no sense to hire the "promising applicant". I would rather temporarily spread the workload across the team (and drop less important tasks if necessary) until "the right one" turns up.

Belgium effectively had a government. The exiting government handled the day to day business until the newly elected one finally moved in. The "crisis" actually reduced the Belgian deficit.

Second layer of icing on the cake, Belgian education is essentially free.

They don't even need to nationalise the whole electricity system. My local supplier generates 99.9% of the electricity locally through one renewable source... that is the way it has been locally for as far as I can tell. And yet, we pay through the nose "to encourage the switch to renewable energies".