In the real world, I have never been able to get even close to the announced mpg-rating of the 2011 econetic fiesta. I had one for 3 months as a replacement vehicle and I enjoyed it except for the mileage. My 2011 A3 2.0TDI has consistently given me a better mileage, even with the DSG gearbox... I do get around 54 MPG with the Audi.

8. Oracle managed services failed to grasp what a replication timestamp was. For a week, their daily report was indicating that the replication had worked flawlessly even tho the timestamp on the target hadn't changed.

9. Oracle managed services sent me the daily report of another company, with financial information, on more than one occasion. They have also obviously sent my customer's data to other companies.

10. Back when Sun was still a separate entity, they won a 4 years staffing/project contract where the first action point was implementing unified authentication with LDAP (the site was mostly Solaris 8, with some HP-UX and a pair of AIX boxen). They only successfully delivered this feature 7 years later, after three contract extensions, when the whole site had been migrated to Solaris 10. They were surprised when they didn't win the new staffing/project contract and even more surprised when the customer massively migrated to RHEL.

I guess somebody probably meant to write "peas and vegetables". At least that would make sense as peas are legumes and not vegetables...

• Automate, everything
• Do not hide behind forms, user-filled requirements waste even more time than collecting the requirements yourself
• Get involved in project as far upstream as you can
• Communicate

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.