Its good the be aware that one component of higher efficiency in an AC/Heat Pump is thinner tubing. Thinner tubing is more prone to develop leaks and costly coil replacements and refrigerant refills.
This seems to be primarily an issue with copper coils. I was bitten by this with a brand new system that I had installed about 9 or 10 years ago. It was pretty tough to eat the labor costs of having a new coil installed (that was covered under warranty) as well as a complete refrigerant fill (at the time ~$900 for the full R410A fill) on a system that was less than one year old. Its been good since then though!
I just finished the book Acid Test (http://www.amazon.com/Acid-Test-Ecstasy-Power-Heal/dp/039916...). The stories about the progress that the lucky individuals, who have been part of MDMA therapy studies for PTSD, have made; combined with government's refusal to fund research as well as their stonewalling during permitting (DEA primarily) is heartbreaking and infuriating.
The author quotes some numbers about how much the US Dept of Defense and Veterans Affairs Administration spend (and are projected to spend) "treating" PTSD in veterans over the coming decades. They are shockingly large and unfortunately the US keeps sending more meat into the grinder.
The date on some of those posts in interesting. 2009 is quite a while ago now, and I'd suggest that columnar datastores haven't exactly taken over. Some implementations have made some progress (eg Cassandra), but OTOH many non-traditional datastores have added traditional-database like features (eg, Facebook's SQL front end on their NoSQL system), and traditional databases have added NoSQL features too.
Stonebraker is a very smart person but he's also not shy about promoting his own companies/research. You generally get a well-informed but very opinionated take on things from him.
VoltDB, for example, is good for certain complex workloads over large but not-too-large data sets. For a lot of situations it isn't really an alternative to memcache+MySQL or a NoSQL solution.
If I may drool a little, you guys represent the heart of Hacker News. Insightful summary, mentioning that somewhere somebody gave such a talk. As I was reading the first comment I was silently cheering for "a librarian's follow-up", and there it was!
The log mechanism Prof. Stonebraker prefers, command logging vs ARIES, almost all newer data stores use command logging w/checkpoints (i.e., redis, mongo) and ship changes to other nodes similarly.
After running a large production redis environment, having a large redo log makes startup/recovery painful. I'm not convinced command logging is the most efficient in all scenarios especially when doing counters where the command is more verbose than the resulting change.
I saw this as well - there are a lot of strange passwords that occur frequently. I suspect that people make bots all with the same password, though I don't know what they're used for.
I guess the uproar over the sleaziness of patent trolls, and Lodsys in particular is over. A shame. I wish that these stories would stay in the news and at the top of Hacker News everyday until a positive change to the system is made.
This seems to be primarily an issue with copper coils. I was bitten by this with a brand new system that I had installed about 9 or 10 years ago. It was pretty tough to eat the labor costs of having a new coil installed (that was covered under warranty) as well as a complete refrigerant fill (at the time ~$900 for the full R410A fill) on a system that was less than one year old. Its been good since then though!