> I doubt very much the company is going to survive this

I'm sick of hearing this stuff. I heard it about virtually every Trump-related news story for the last year, I heard it about New Orleans, I heard it about BP. I heard it about Volkswagen.

Look, the market already priced this disaster, based on what data is available. They lost about 15% of their value. They have solid fundamentals that aren't changing in any sort of way that pose an existential threat to the company; unless there's a lot more of this than we can see.

>Do you believe rehabilitation is impossible or do you want revenge?

I don't believe that someone who commits mass murder can be rehabilitated, no. It isn't about revenge; it's about public safety.

Someone once pointed out that hoping a rapist gets raped in prison isn't a victory for his victim(s), because it somehow gives him what he had coming to him, but it's actually a victory for rape and violence. I wish I could remember who said that, because they are right. The score doesn't go Rapist: 1 World: 1. It goes Rape: 2.

What this man did is unspeakable, and he absolutely deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison. If he needs to be kept away from other prisoners as a safety issue, there are ways to do that without keeping him in solitary confinement, which has been shown conclusively to be profoundly cruel and harmful.

Putting him in solitary confinement, as a punitive measure, is not a victory for the good people in the world. It's a victory for inhumane treatment of human beings. This ruling is, in my opinion, very good and very strong for human rights, *precisely* because it was brought by such a despicable and horrible person. It affirms that all of us have basic human rights, even the absolute worst of us on this planet.

This is precisely why I lost all interest in Oculus the instant I heard that it had been acquired by Facebook.

It doesn't look like anything spectacular to me, but the tree placement, giant warehouse, and that it's on the side of a hill make me wonder if it's just a disposal site of some sort.

If it's anything of importance, I'll bet it's a nuclear or toxic waste disposal site.

I always get frustrated when I have to dig deep and manually read over scanned non-OCR'd PDFs.

Honestly, all I want is for all the documents and laws to be available. I would think that SVN with a web component would be great to be able to see the current laws, including the ability to 'go back in time', and it would work for posting minutes and agendas as well.

I'm not overly concerned with -presentation-, having the data available in a digital form alone is a major step forward, and you can build out from there.

The difference is that most network admins shirk from the task of responsibly implementing QoS, but they'd gladly pay a hefty licensing fee to their wireless vendors for a product with a name like WiFox that 'boosts performance' by clobbering the network instead of cleverly balancing it to perform well.

And a reason for poor uptake of Vista over 7 was immature image deployment and customization tools. Half the options weren't documented, and the process was very unclear. By the time 7 came out, there was enough backfill on the documentation and examples online for people like me to actually work on customizing corporate images.

This is actually something that's woefully inadequate in the Linux world, real-world examples of the cool stuff you can do with HOWTOs for building a server and clients that are running off of shared volumes and centralized authentication. All the parts are there, and they work fantastically, but you sort of have to figure it out yourself how to put it all together.

This isn't why Windows 7 is 6.1, or why Windows 8 is 6.2.

The reason is that Windows 7 actually is just a minor revision on Vista, and 8 is a minor revision from that. Under the hood, the big changes were between NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 (Windows NT 5), then between 2000 and Vista (Windows 6). The changes from 5.0 to 5.1 (2000 to XP) or from 6.0 to 6.1 to 6.2 (Vista, 7, and 8) were incremental in nature as far as the inner workings of the OS are concerned.

The real reason 7 felt so much faster than Vista: When they made Vista, they planned on you booting up very infrequently, so they scheduled a lot of junk to happen at boot and login, thinking that users would just 'sleep' instead of rebooting. Windows 7 (And Vista SP2) backs off a bit and does the housekeeping when you're not using the computer. Vista actually wasn't really 'slow', it's just 'irrationally busy' doing stuff with the I/O (indexing, precaching, defragmenting, etc.) while you're just trying to get to your gosh-darned desktop.

So your de-dupe ran for a week before you cut it out? On a modern CPU, the de-dupe is limited not by the CPU speed (since deduplication basically just checksums blocks of storage), but by the speed of the drives.

What you need to do is put all this data onto a single RAID10 array with high IO performance. 5TB of data, plus room to grow on a RAID10 with decent IOPS would probably be something like 6 3TB SATA drives on a new array controller. Set up the array with a large stripe size to prioritize reads (writes are going to be 'fast enough' on a RAID10, trust me). Once you have that hooked-up with your files copied onto it, you want to connect the drive to an OS that can natively deduplicate, like Windows Server 2012. If you must, you can set this box up as a storage server (with a low-end CPU, an old 'Core 2' should be able to keep up with 180MB/sec I/O), and keep your workstation separate. Reading this entire array (when full) through the CPU -should- take about 6-10 hours, deduplication will take slightly longer.

If you don't want to do deduplication at the block level, and you want to actually only have one copy of each duplicated file, you'll need to write scripts that do something like this:

1. Run through the data store and checksum each file (except for those ending in ".mychecksum" with AES128.
2. For each file, create an empty file named .."mychecksum" next to it. This will create the 'index' using the filesystem, which will be MUCH faster than having to read the data from inside each file.
3. Search through the store and concatenate all the ".mychecksum" files into a single CSV.
4. Run sed+unique on the file to see what will be nixed (i.e. Get a report)
5. Create another script that actually takes the output from step 4 and deletes ONE of the duplicate files. You can test by -renaming- ONE of the files to .deleteme and then deleting all those files after you confirm that it worked.
6. Repeat as necessary, possibly with a scheduled job.

I'm in the northeast, a very low-end power user (bottom quartile), and the math still doesn't work out for me on PV. What DOES work is solar thermal to warm up a tank in the basement that sits before the hot water heaters (preheating water) and pumping heat into the living space via baseboard radiators. Unfortunately, those systems are not as cookie-cutter, so getting someone to put them in is almost impossible.

Unfortunately, all the energy saving stuff I see seems geared for newer homes or homes in sunny and hot areas. Where I am, people generally don't even have Air Conditioning, they have 110 year-old homes that aren't well insulated (and often can't be without $15K of asbestos remediation and $5K of rewiring, neither is subsidized). I have yet to meet a contractor who understands that I want windows on the south and that ALLOW lots of infrared in.

I've been the 'young buck' in IT at every job I've had, but I'm starting to get a bit older now. I'm actually the guy who builds images for a university. What you have is important, but an IT department can't just be filled with young folks. I rely on the same kind of people you work with to *actually deploy the work* that I do, and fix the computers when they break, and file tickets when my stuff has bugs in it. It's frustrating having to deal with people who are always working around bugs or limitations that no longer exist, but I can't take on all the responsibility myself.

What I would suggest in your situation is to ask your manager or their manager to give you some time to build newer images, using the tools Microsoft gives people like us to work with modern hardware. Make it a project to modernize imagine deployment. Learn some Powershell so you can write some kick-ass 'firstrun' and management scripts. Investigate how to do things like app virtualization, user data redirection, and remote BIOS management that will make things better for everyone. And most of all, DOCUMENT the processes for the old-timers so they're able to do the things that you figure out.

If you want, you can contact me off-list and I can help you get started with Windows Imaging and some handy scripts we use.

I have my PC (a Lenovo ThinkServer TS130, 16GB RAM, dual HDD, Quadro 600 video card, Sandy Bridge i7) plugged-in via a kill-a-watt. It idles at about 50W. When it's crunching away (compressing video on 8 threads, virtualizing three computers, and playing a movie), it uses about 220w.

The fact is that gamers tend to buy big PSUs because they use them as a pissing-contest. Few but the true monster rigs use more than 300W. Even high-end workstations from the Pentium 4 era came with 375W PSUs, and they had plenty of overhead for fully-decking the system with SLI video cards and RAID arrays.

I was actually shopping for a 160W PSU for a Core 2 workstation that I'm looking to give away recently, I never managed to get the thing to use more than 140W, and it seemed silly to have a 400W PSU sitting there being inefficient all the time. I ended up using a PSU from mini-box that uses an AC->DC brick.

People need to understand and respect just how awesome water is as a coolant. The specific heat of the stuff (basically, how much heat you can 'sink' into a gram of it) and its benign, well-understood nature, and the fact that its density only changes a little bit between freezing and boiling points make it quite awesome.

I live in a city with a river through it. I really don't know why they aren't doing cooling via air-to-water heat pumps. It's really absurd to blow fans all day when the river could carry away 100X the heat without too many ill effects.

Actually, there is. Microsoft is prohibited from doing this on x86-based stuff by the antitrust agreement they're in. They can't prohibit vendors from allowing other operating systems and locking-in 'wintel' hardware/software. The agreement does NOT cover ARM.