Cool!, Notes, Video, Wait, what?

Be nice to your servers

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4

Yelling at your servers can measurably negatively affect their performance. No joke. Make sure to treat your servers with respect, and keep it quiet in the datacenter!

Perhaps there is a “brown note” for disks (“rust note”?) – some harmonic that destroys their performance; although based on what we think is happening (disk heads being thrown off track), we think this has more to do with shock force than resonance. I’m sure there are disk vendor engineers out there who know all about this (Bryan links to a good reference in his blog entry).

[Source: Sun Microsystems Blog (now Oracle)]

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Life, Notes, Wait, what?

ERAU Nukes My E-Mail Account, Says “Too Bad”

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4 years, over 100 grand, and endless repetition “you must use your e-mail account”, then after graduating and 6 months later, they delete it. I was too busy in the midst of relocating my life halfway across the country, never mind accepting a new job the education helped to provide, and now my account was nuked.

I called up their tech support line, hoping to get it reactivated for just a week or two, so I can move services that were associated with that account over to a new email account, but it’s a no-can-do. They’ve killed it for good and were unwilling to re-activate it. I even offered to pay, since working at the school I also know that the services their email servers provide aren’t free. Come on guys, I just need it turned on for a week.

Honestly I was hoping they would treat their alumni better, but they still don’t mind calling every now and then to ask for money. To make it worse, I can’t sign up on their alumni website either.

What a bunch of jerks. FYI any recent graduates, your account expires in 180 days.

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SERO 500 + Palm Pre

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The Palm Pre – supossed real competition for the iPhone with true multitasking and oodles of other cool features – isn’t going to be available for SERO users. For those that don’t know, SERO is an older employee referral plan that has:

  • Unlimited data
  • Unlimited text messaging
  • Unlimited picture and MMS messaging
  • between 500-unlimited voice calling
  • Unlimited roaming
  • 7PM Nights and Weekends
  • Unlimited nights and weekends

The most basic plan of $30 (around $35 after taxes) is for 500 minutes, which is plenty for me.  Most of my calls are nights and weekends anyways, and I have never exceeded 100 minutes of peak usage. 

The downside is that Sprint says with the upcoming Palm Pre, you must upgrade to a plan with “Everything” in it such as “Simply Everything” or “Everything Plus” – this is assuming that you want the $200 in rebates and the $150 in instant discount for extending your contract to get the Palm Pre at a decent price of $200 in contract. So…what if I don’t want to extend my contract? What if I pay full price for the phone and activate it, will it work?

So I started a chat session with an online Sprint CSR to see if I could purchase a Palm Pre out of contract at full price ($549) to activate on my (awesome) SERO 500 plan. After explaining that no, I wasn’t interested in extending my contract, I got this response back:

…no guarantee that this will allow you to work with this plan due to the plan being out of before the device came out.

At this point I gave up and decided I’ll go to a Sprint store and ask in person. Results soon!

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Government to Recoup 90% of Bailout Money

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With all the ruckus about the absurd bonuses that employees and executives of recieved, a bill was passed to raise the tax rate of executives that have been paid with bailout money to…90%, ouch! Read more about it here.

In the face of public outrage at the fact that AIG paid $165 million in bonuses after receiving $180 billion in government aid, the House voted 328-93 to approve a 90 percent tax on bonuses for certain executives at companies that are getting taxpayer-financed help.

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