Yet another collection of random links and rantings of a greying unix geek with a photography bent. Pass the Guinness and Grecian Formula.
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I am:an Ibico® KomboTM lever-operated punch for making a row of rectangular holes in a stack of paper and fitting a plastic “comb” binding into them If you haven’t seen one in use, you’d probably have no idea what it is. |
Reading about the Great Depression and hearing about it from grandparents or other old timers is one thing, but actually seeing pictures from that time has a more lasting effect, at least for me.
For all the wailing about the homeless problem we have today, it would seem to pale in comparison to the dirty thirties.
The mother in a family of nine holds her baby. The family lives in a field on U.S. Route 70 in Tennessee, near the Tennessee River. Photograph by Carl Mydans, 1936.
Check out the boy on the right. Even in such hardship, there seems to always be a way for children to be happy despite their situation.
More stunning, thought provoking pictures on this topic and others can be found on the Shorpy “100 year old photo blog”
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I am:Stanislav Lem This pessimistic Pole has spent a whole career telling ironic stories of futility and frustration. Yet he is also a master of wordplay so witty that it sparkles even when translated into English. |
Has anyone checked out the ParkPlus trial area downtown yet?
Aside from the ParkPlus site saying that you do not need to get a sticker printed and then taken back to put on your car (you just register your license plate and what ‘zone’ on the block you are parked in), I wonder if it will otherwise resemble the system in this article ?
I presume that one of its business objectives for the kiosk is to generate as much parking revenue as possible. Unlike with traditional parking meters, where you might spot an empty space with time still on the meter, every person parking in this city must buy a separate kiosk sticker for his use of the parking space. Building a user interface that encourages drivers to buy more time than they need generates additional revenue for the city. A single parking space thus can generate revenue from multiple drivers concurrently if the first one bought more time than necessary.
As a user of the kiosk, though, my objective is to buy just the right amount of time that I need. This kiosk made it too easy for me to spend more than required. Sure, I could have calculated how much money to spend to buy just enough time, but not everyone wears a calculator watch.
Just like radar speed traps are not primarily a revenue stream for the police. Yeah, right.
.. that various vendors have been trying to sell to everyone for the past 4 or 5 years.
Too hot in fact. Most datacentres have moved to charging strictly for power (and cooling that is related to the power charge) instead of square footage of space or bandwidth.
Now they are moving to say they’d rather not have a pile of blade servers in their colos anyways…
I know that even without going to blade servers, the place I work for has basically run the colo space at a Tier 1 datacentre out of power. They have square footage they can’t utilize because we’ve had gobs of extra power rerouted to our cage to power the tightly packed power hungry 1U servers we have jammed in there as it is.
Going to blades would only make it worse.
How? Read on.
This was posted as part of a comment on an article about an IBM mainframe consolidation project :
Every day another vendor tells us that blades are the solution to all our problems, so long as those problems are how to get the air to plasma temperatures in our data centres.
Of course this power density is our excuse to buy the next ‘green’ solution and deliver in rack water cooling because that is the only way to stop the blades frying.
Best not forget the few million for that really expensive box for your disks to live in either, or the floor reinforcements to hold it all up.
Kinda says it all, when it comes to blade servers, eh?