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Comment Can confirm (Score 2) 114

At a previous employer, we lost an entire row of servers in a DC after a water leak (somehow) triggered the suppression system. The 'explosion' was strong enough to knock the doors off cabinets, bend 2 cabinets, and cause a couple hundreds drives to be dead. Thankfully our service was spread out far enough to survive the loss of a row for a few week while we waited for all new disks to arrive from IBM.

The pictures were crazy, it looks like a bomb went off.

Comment Hadoop (Score 1) 219

Sounds like a fairly simple case for a Hadoop cluster - a smallish one at that. We're currently deploying to clusters at 1PB/rack density, which means you could deploy a rack or two easily enough. You'd get compute, you get a single flat filesystem, you get redundancy, all built in. Our biggest cluster is now up to 16PB, all one big compute/storage beast, chugging away all day.

I'd suggest starting with the Hortonworks Sandbox VM - grab it, fire it up, play with it. Add some files, poke around, see if it meets your needs. Learn about mapreduce, or maybe your data can be put in to HIVE for analysis.

The nice thing is that yo ucan use hardware you may already have to get things going. Hortonworks is pretty much at the point of a 'next next finish' installer, so you really only need to dedicate a few hours to getting something up to test. Then, thre's a lot of tuning and craziness to running a bigger cluster, but a POC is simple.

Anyhow, I'm blind, because all I do is Hadoop clusters all day, but this seems like an easy win for ya.

GL;HF!

Comment Already happening (Score 5, Interesting) 417

This has been going on in Canada for years now. Even if you aren't landing IN the States, so long as you fly OVER you are subject to screening. My father spoke to someone at the airport one day who was not cleared by DBS, but still managed to get on his flight to the Carribean. His plane had mechanical problems and was forced to land in Florida. When he got off the plane he was met by law enforcement, who read him the riot act and took him directly to jail. He waited there overnight, then was put ona plane home.

Living in southern Ontario, it is pretty much impossible not to fly over the states, even for domestic flights. That means we are all screwed by US rules, living in another country. Our freedom is limited by their assinine rules.

Comment Re:The free market (Score 1) 203

I politely disagree - when you have corporation that have their hands on lawmakers strings, or you have lawmakers who are on the boards of various corporations/etc, you have the 'free market' influencing who is a criminal.

Want proof - read the front page of slashdot today. Or any other day .. the BSA, RIAA, etc ...

So, more realistically, it's the government who decides, with the influence of the free market.

Comment Re:Best Buy tried to sell me an HDMI cable... (Score 1) 664

No the real mistake was thinking you could haggle with service-level employees at a multinational company. That's the dumbest thing I've heard in a while.

My fiancee has managed to swing deals in many big retail chains - it takes a little persistence, and the ability/desire to walk away. even if walk away means walking out the door, waiting 20 minutes, and coming back to get a different sales guy.

She's Chinese, and says that white people are nuts for paying full price ... and I've seen that it's true. Just asking a simple question ("Can you do anything on the price?") has saved us hundreds of dollars (or gotten us lots of stuff thrown in).

I'm a convert, but I still have a hard time with it. I look at the price tag, decide if I can afford to pay that, and buy it if I can. She looks at a price tag and sees a challenge.

Comment ... and then it went down (Score 1) 195

Last night I tried to sign in to play, and TF2 wouldn't even launch. It looks like their service was *massively* overloaded.

I bought the game 4 years ago now and I have gotten my money out of it in hours played, however it still irks me that a game I paid for is unavailable to me because of free players jumping on board.

TF2 servers were already frequently full of whiners and trolls, I'm afraid of what this new influx of players will mean. Hopefully the TF2 servers (yes, I know games aren't hosted on their servers, but login/etc is) can handle the new load.

Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft buys 666,000 IP addresses (internetgovernance.org) 1

RabidMonkey writes: "Microsoft has managed to purchase 666,624 IP addresses from the bankrupt Canadian company Nortel for $7.5 million. This works out to $11.25/ip. An exact list of blocks isn't available yet. There has been a lot of discussion on NANOG about whether this allowed or not, and what the implications to the dwindling IPv4 pool may be. Is this the first of many such moves as IPv4 address space has run out? Will ARIN step in and block the sale/transfer? How long will such measures drag out the eventual necessity of IPv6?"

Comment public sentiment - HA (Score 2) 208

> It should also be noted that public sentiment towards China is getting very, very testy.

I'm part of the public, and I know lots of other members of the public - I don't see anyones sentiment anywhere near "testy" about China.

Papers, tv news, radio ... I spend a good amount of time keeping up on them, and I don't think I've heard anything 'testy' about China expressed.

Given that that statement doesn't come from the article, I'm guessing either the submitter or editor added that. Either way, stop making shit up. We have Fox News/the Toronto Sun for that

Comment mental "sick days" (Score 2) 610

I wish and hope that some day companies will start to address mental health as well as physical heath, specifically related to sick days. If you have a sniffle, they tell you not to come in to work, you'll make someone sick, but if you're stressed out, unable to sleep, on-call for weeks, going through a breakup/divorce, have sick parents etc, and can't handle the mental strain, then you're SOL. Work on a salary? you know all those extra hours you put in for free for the company? Want to get something *back* from them? yeah, right ...

"Mental Health" days are widely recognized by non-management types as beneficial, but you don't see companies promoting them. 'take a vacation day' is the common line, but when you're only provided with 10 of them a year , it's awefully 'expensive' to take one because your boss has had you working 12 hour days for 2 weeks and you just need 1 freakin day off to sleep, do laundry, maybe buy some real food for a change.

But seriously, mental health, when you work in a job that is focused on mental performance (as much of IT/geekery is), is just as, or more, important as physical health. I can sit and read documents/manuals, catch up on email, update a few spreadsheets etc with a cold, but if I'm tired/stressed/"out of it", I'm next to useless.

Taking care of employees isn't a concern of companies any longer, if it ever was, despite the fact that giving a little can get them a lot. Policy, process, executive bonuses are all worked around 'you must be in your desk working from x to y and always being productive, or else', instead of the realization that we aren't machines and our brains are more valuable when they're functional than not.

$0.02.

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