One would think if a few large retailers got together and set a base standard of images they expect a mfr. to provide for a product, this may alleviate some of the issues. While it shifts the "burden" to the mfr, its in their marketing dept's best interest to take the time to provide the pictures so the product moves off the shelves.

From there, the standard could mature into 360 views and maybe one day in my lifetime 3D. Baby steps ...

Having been involved in Technical Ops of both large and small companies for many years, I have seen DR exercises and design that have run the gambit. I tend to think The key thing I have found to the success of any organization, exercise, or philosophy, is the underlying process that drives execution. The larger the team/org, the more change points, which in turn leads to more variables between tests. This creates complexity, as a test that ran fine a few months ago may not run the same today. However, ensuring change does not overrun process in understanding and applying the change into the greater design is a key to ensuring each test improves upon the last, until such time this is a finite process.

For example, when working for one of the big 401k's, the first DR exercise evaluated the data center completely being leveled and re-locating both technical services as well as the ~300 on site employees to another location. Long story short, the first exercise of this was scheduled for 2 days, and while it worked, we identified dozens of issues. We scheduled the next test 6 months later and addressed what we believed were all of the issues; on next test, we ran into perhaps ~10 issues. The next test we scheduled 3 months ahead and ran into ~2 issues. All awhile, things continue to change and innovation is occurring, change process control is ensuring that new things are being factored into the continual DR process/exercise. For a small telecom I worked for, the same type of testing was accomplished with ~2-3 week turn around time (smaller team, less change points, more dynamic response), but with same underlying principles.

Documentation of such things is critical, and employee turnover is often one of the greatest risk points. Having a diversified staff with overlapping knowledge should minimize the later risk to some degree, and if implemented fully, risk should be diminished.

So how does all this tie back into maint? Well, it is anticipated that if any system runs long enough, their will be opportunity for failure. It is preparation for when such failure occurs, one can balance the capability of providing a measured window of downtime (if any) and provide some degree of predictability (i.e. I test once a quarter). The counter to this can certainly be overzealous maint, so certainly their is a point to being reasonable. For example, what many of go through with our cars - the dealer wants us to come in every 3k miles for an oil change, whereas realistically most mfr's and my own experience dictates that ~5k (if not longer depending on circumstance) is much more cost effective. Either way, this is providing some degree of confidence that this should prolong engine life.

While TMobile service languishes in some areas, as a subscriber of ~7 years (flipped in years ago after AT&T Cellular last went tits up), while their domestic service presence isn't quite as dominant as Verizon, I enjoy international travel with my cell and a respectable domestic rate versus the competitors that I continue to pray they don't get sucked into the vortex of Verizon, AT&T, and increasingly Sprint of all companies. I have no contract, pay $100 a month for two phones between my wife & I, unlimited text, plenty of voice, and unlimited data on one phone where this seems like a "bargain" (the rest of the developed world laughs at what I consider a good rate).

What I enjoy for "landline" service (Ooma VOIP "free" $5 a year to cover taxes), the rest of the world enjoys a similar experience for wireless. TMobile seems like the black horse right now, and I rather see them follow through on a merger with Sprint than AT&T, mainly to bring back the third competitor in the pack similar to what was enjoyed in the late 80's/early 90's between MCI, AT&T, and Sprint. That set the bar for me personally where 3 competitors in telecom was a minimum number necessary for what I considered a truly competitive balance where they made their money and I felt I got value for my money. This is necessarily in the telecom space in my humble opinion with how things are looking. If a Verizon and AT&T duopoply were to happen .. watch Sprint disappear (as their coverage contract with Verizon "mysteriously" disappears and their coverage would suck worse than TMobile again) and rates suck ass across the board. The ability to enter the wireless market would continue to entertain higher barriers, so this would be difficult to overcome.

At a previous employer, we were a moderately sized company with a significant Oracle DB back-end behind an online platform. While the relationship had been rather professional in the beginning, Oracle's sales tactics over the years have really taken a turn to the point of being beyond what I ever saw from Microsoft in the 90's. As an existing DB customer, we were looking for an SSO solution to the platform. Oracle has such a bundle, and in exchange for buying the solution, our VP negotiated for them to provide several weeks of consulting services to help implement. Months later, it was a disaster (its a hodgepodge of companies they have purchased over the years and nothing overly coherent) and so the org decided to completely abort and go in another direction. We agreed to part ways and let them keep the up front cost and first year of support, but come the end of our support year, asked to remove the recurring support option on our contract for this software we no longer used. The two sales folks in charge of our contract were afraid of looking like they lost an option, and decided to strong-arm and said that if we pushed to have this line item removed, they would increase the support costs of all the remaining items we continued to use beyond what we would pay if we just kept the line item. We were now forced to continue to pay for a completely separate SKU/product we were not using if we wished to maintain consistent terms on the Oracle DB we could not easily displace.

And if you want to see the shit they have been pulling with CPU's going multi-core and beyond over the past several years, look up the crap they pulled with HP when they tried to provide a BIOS option to lock a multicore CPU down to a single one to allow the server to remain Oracle compliant. Their explicit BIOS notes said as much at one point. Hint: F_ck Oracle again. You have no choice in this model of growing core density but to continue to pay more to Oracle, even if you hard-limit the cores down.

Massachusetts has been using roundabouts for years. What is more remarkable, is given the local driving habits (I live just tad north in NH), they even have several two lane roundabouts in use at various junctures which somehow don't stand out with significant numbers of fatalities. Some of these are marked as such, some not so much and the drivers take some initiative and make it into two lanes on their own. I would propose that in my years of driving, one of the most creative maneuvers a driver can engage in is migrating from an internal round-about lane to an outside exit, particularly when they are busy (as again, one could postulate that the two lanes one were made two lanes for a reason).

I agree that the market is still very much developing. The day Sony and other vendors start actually supporting a wider range of native media formats on their respective devices through their half-ass "DLNA" support which is near useless, rather than forcing me to convert file formats constantly and burn power/CPU time, I will look at this as a sign of real maturity. Sony won't ever do this as far as I can tell due to conflicting interests, similar with many other BluRay and TV type hardware vendors.

Until then, I buy WD Live! media players and place throughout my home that easily handle this internally and only burn a few watts, playing whatever media format I throw at it. I stream my media from a single network share, put my daughters videos, my wife's crap Lifetime movies, and all of my movies and music galore. Everyone is happy. Remove WD and replace with whatever other smaller tech company 3rd party media player is, and solving a very similar problem that the TV/Bluray makers don't wish to tackle.

Beyond this, the physical costs versus 8gig are just not justified yet. With the overhead of FCoE, you can roughly say 10gig FCoE is the same speed as more traditional 8gig FC. If you believe that to be roughly true, then price is the next factor to consider, as what are you really getting?

8gig Fibre Channel GBIC for a SAN fabric averages around $150-$200.
10gig network (CNA) GBIC for a more traditional network averages around $1100.

I am building out a new virtual farm now, and much as we tried to go the converged route with 10gig network, the price point simply isn't there yet (technology is still maturing this year as well). You can work around this with copper for very short runs, but the expense comes in per-rack network gear.

This should start to settle in the fall as the standards fall together better.

Newspapers provide an important role in our society, particularly the larger papers such as this, the Boston Globe, Washington Post, etc. I never appreciated this more than when I lived in Arizona several years ago and realized, not to diminish the efforts of the good folks of AZ, but the quality of material was just not quite the same. With more and more newspapers just printing press releases and less original content, this becomes of great concern, and should for everyone who lives in the US, as papers often go out on their own to investigate political corruption, businesses acting unethically, etc. For the larger newspapers, this results in things such as Watergate, etc.

I am not a big fan of paying for any online subscription, and to contradict myself I am not sure I would for this (I pay for a regular Boston Globe as my own attempt to try and keep the journalist machine going), but somehow, I still wish for them to be successful. Like their own struggles, I have no idea what the obvious answer is. If you value similar, I am not saying pay for the NYT, but I recommend finding something you are willing to put a few dollars into every month, even if its just your local Sunday paper.

I agree. Water cooling of a data center has a history. The only thing I see here is they are attempting to bring the water at a small, scalable, "standardized" manner to each blade.

I worked for a large investment company some time ago, and we had an "older" data center that was originally designed to house mainframes and used a pool to hold water for cooling. A side benefit of the pool was that employees could use it for swimming, and the water was at quite an agreeable temperature. The benefit here (besides the kosher swimming) is that component failure impact can be minimized, and the cross contamination much more controlled. It was converted over the years to support servers of today, and last I knew of about 7-8 years ago, they were replacing some of the main pumps and were extending the life. The nice thing in the updated design was that standard commodity x86 HP servers were being used in the room, requiring no fancy server hardware re-designs.

There is money to be made by carriers through many odd and complex loopholes.

- Placing calls from certain prefixes to other area codes and/or prefixes can result in actually making money from chargebacks between the carriers, and often times a carrier will partner with the organization doing the calling to give them a slice of the profit.

- Displaying a certain phone # is another one where money can be made, as a carrier may need to pay to "dip" into another's system to obtain the details of the calling number, and the profit again is shared.

- Certain states provide a legally friendly environment for the above, and then some (Iowa). If you know what you are doing and have the money, buying a small block in a small town and running your own carrier has historically been a steady income.

In regards to a common file system, one interesting scenario I ran into awhile ago was the need for a clustered filesys on Windows against an EMC for common storage. Being heavily involved in Solaris at the time, I put the feelers out to Veritas for VxFS, and wanted to probe into VxCFS, their own cluster filesystem. They had working versions in production for Solaris, Linux, and HPUX, so this seemed sensible. When engaging Veritas, I discovered they had just about every component from the "suite" _BUT_ the filesystem, which was quite curious considering its implementation everywhere else. Feedback was that they in fact had a working version for Windows, but Microsoft squashed the idea of them selling it. They didn't want to upset the apple-cart with the software they did have and the need to maintain a relationship with Microsoft, and so as far as I know, it never came to market.

If this is all in fact true, which from what anyone can see in their other broad implementations I had no reason to doubt, then Microsoft did what they could to DISCOURAGE other filesystems.

Guybrush Threepwood: Well, if there's one thing I've learned, it's this: never pay more than 20 dollars for a computer game.
Elaine: What's that?
Guybrush Threepwood: Never mind. I don't know why I said that.

I perform computer forensics work, and part of my research towards obtaining my degree was going to the MIT Swap Meet (great event) and buying used hard disks from vendors on occasion. In about 90% of the cases, the user appeared to have simply "deleted" the files, with nothing more. Now, I would expect this for a normal home user, not knowing any better, but the biggest thing of concern was the number of drives that came from various corporate entities. I was able to see and read data from drives that clearly came from several major banks, including mortgage apps, SSN's, corporate planning documents, etc. Again, the files appeared to have been simply "deleted" by the IT folk, instead of securely wiped, making it trivial at best to read everything.

So while this example is no better, I believe it highlights an ongoing problem that involves better user education and disk encryption helps solve.

The list:

10. Boston
9. Romania
8. Fort Meade, Maryland
7. Finland
6. Zhongguancun, China
5. San Fransisco
4. Japan
3. Bangalore
2. Taiwan
1. Silicon Valley