This was why I got bored of it. I didn't get beyond about half way through the first season. It was basically a soap opera that happened to be set in Silicon Valley. The storylines just seemed - goofy. Silicon Valley is far more believable, and more what I'd expect a series about Silicon Valley to be about.

Once upon a time, we called this 'leasing'. But, whatever, call it something new and pretend it's a fantastic new thing.

I prefer to buy physical media. I agree with you. And most people I know seem to work on the basis that because they can copy it, they will, whether they know it's right or not. These are all sorts of people from all walks of life. Besides, I was talking about DRM, not physical versus download.

I agree. The trouble is - people. If people can get something for nothing, they will. I can fully understand the reason why content producers will wrap things in DRM, but by the same token I want to do with my media what I want. A CD can play in any CD player. A DVD and play in any DVD player. If a universal DRM container could be created that was a light touch (i.e. stopped people casually copying files) then it would be great. But the infrastructure to do that would be huge IMHO, hence why nobody has yet bothered to do it. If a content producer can make somebody buy something twice, then it's in their shareholder's best interests to do so.

It started as underfloor. Great big CRAC. However, it died, the parts were no longer available, and getting a new CRAC in was apparently impossible. So the wallmounted units went up. We've got 12 of them, and they barely keep up. Many are blowing into the back of racks. It's a right mess. There's massive hot and cold spots. As I say tho, the room is being wound down, so there won't be much left in there soon.

That was pretty much my thought. Or other data centre is a horrible mess of cages, walls, and wall-mounted AC units. It's being slowly closed down, luckily!

If we were to retro-fit it at work, I'd say cold aisle. To do so would mean curtains at the end of the aisles, as the under-floor vent grids are in front of the racks. The CRACs are at the end of the room sucking in air through the top, so it'd be cool air pumped up through the floor, into a cold-only zone, sucked through the racks, blown out the back into the rest of the room where it just swirls about until it's pulled into the CRACs again. I reckon it could be done cheaply and quickly. Do do it with the hot aisles would require more containment to get the air back to the CRACs. I think it'd be a case of which air flow it fits best.

Yes, yes, and a thousand times yes. So much cool stuff to see at BP. Contrary to popular beleif, there's a LOT more to England than London. You'll pay through the nose in London, so take a trip out to the other towns and places, and see what you can find. Nearly every major town has a museum of some kind (the County Towns are best for this), and there's a ton of other places inbetween. Visit London by all means, but don't forget about the rest of this country.

We recently had to power down our main data centre, three times in fairly quick succession due to major power work that had to be carried out (no building UPS or generator unfortunately... boo!). Doing it was all well and good, but so many things are inter-connected, we found we almost had circular dependencies of things, so we had to be very careful in shutting down and bringing back services. The end result was something different every time wouldn't shut down, and something different every time wouldn't come back right, causing downtime to users. In testing and development it's never an issue when you're bringing something new up. It's when - six months down the line - you've integrated it into everything that you're really into a tangled web of systems, and taking it all down results in much hilarity. We were shutting down 90-odd servers; Windows, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, and various other things like Cisco CallManager and other random network kit. It's NOT something I'd want to do again, and having it all scripted would scare the crap out of me quite frankly. It'd require so much testing and checking, you'd be bringing things up and down all the time and causing more trouble than just keeping it up. Try and save the power elsewhere - raise the A/C temp, or virtualise some stuff.

Man, I remember those days! Like, when the Internet wasn't graphical and you had to use Lynx; and you knew AT Modem commands by heart!