Herbert Werner was one of the few surviving German u-boat captains at the end of WWII. This is his account of the war from the vessels he served in to his views of Germany in general during his visits to his home and family. I've read several American submarine captain's books and this tops most of them.

I work in a relatively small industry - telecom. Yeah, the companies can be big, but the technical teams are relatively small so we don't get recognized in power debates. Even working in the cellular part of telecom, we still adhere to the wired telecom legacy - -48VDC!! I used to work for $BIG_INFRASTRUCTURE_VENDOR and when we first went to packet based systems, Cisco was invited to the party. They were blindsided by the question of "Do you have a -48V DC power supply to fit that?" The MSC (Mobile Switching Center) I work in now for $BIG_WIRELESS_PROVIDER has a rather large room filled with lead/acid batteries. Each one is an almost 700lb 2V cell, 24 to a string and several strings. Our problem isn't keeping things running long enough for a generator to start (or even to drive a generator half-way across the country if needed), but keeping things cool as the HVAC doesn't run on battery. BTW, if anything goes wrong in that battery room, I don't even want to be in the same county!!!!

There was a period of time where Pepsi and Coke very much minded. Servers everywhere were distinguishing which vendors product they carried ("Coke please". "Sorry, we only have Pepsi".) as if they were each individually monitored at all times. I quite often did not care, so I would ask for a diet cola. The response? "Sorry, we only have..."

This. I >>HATE movies based on books that I've read. I know what is missing. Quite often, they are not even recognizable as the same story. Cool CGI & special effects do NOTHING if there is no story. The books typically reveal the small background/backstory items that really allow you to follow the current story line. Most of which is lost in the movie format - not enough time :( One of my early eye doctors had an entry in his notes "...is a bookworm..."

Bolo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolo_(tank)

Your thinking about the wrong type of equipment. Don't think about typical data room servers, think VERY specialized telephony equipment. Something you don't have redundant racks for. Instead, it is usual that the rack has redundant cards for the specialized functions.

'course, in this case, you would think that we can swap to a redundant card and reload the now inactive one with a pre-patched image. But in reality, this depends on the software management on the box. Some will not allow card-by-card updates and force the entire box to reboot if the software is updated. Those boxes that require a system boot to update the software could benefit from this. But then, there can be company policies about applying "patches". My company got bitten a few too many times by patching live equipment, so patches were suspended unless you got signoff by a number of managers for extraordinary cases.

I remember one time many moons ago, I needed to patch some object on disk & restart a board. I had honed my procedure in a lab all day long. The night of the patch, I had managers & project managers watching over my shoulder and the customer on the speaker phone. So I cranked up the disk editor and went to work. CLICK CLICK CLIKETY CLICK.... You know how key strokes sound over a speaker phone, right? CLICK CLICK ... "Oh!".. Tap Tap Tap... CLICK CLICK CLICK. I've always wondered if the people on the other end of the phone took a moment to look at each other about then. :)