Friday with Means - August 5th, 2011 - Magnetic times

[Means]

After a blessed two days of vacation last week I came back to help the team continue to work through the two new instances and big pile of new Daily Missions. We are hoping to get a new version up on the Test Dimension later today and we are very grateful for all the great constructive feedback we have been getting to polish up the instances and missions. Other time this week was spent trying to locate the cause of 12 disk failures on the team's machines in the last 6 months..we are beginning to think it might be a power line in the floor generating a small magnetic field...but it is beyond being a statistical anomaly at this point so we need to find a cause.

One small interesting thing to note is that Macrosun spent some time with me this week on a *very* old issue...and in the next update Notum Wars towers should once again explode properly as they used to. This always bugged me but it was always hard to find time to get to it...we made time this week...thanks to all who have been writing me to remind me of this issue. I always thought that this was one of the best visual moments of the game and it will be great to see it again.

Have a great weekend!

Kintaii Edit: German Translation

[zymos]

1st

[Tazalanche]

Are they all the same brand &/or model hard drive?

[Stigman]

\o/

You know what would ensure the integrity of your hardward.....

Stacking Personal Furnaces.

I sure implementing this ingame would solve ALL your problems.

[Means]

Are they all the same brand &/or model hard drive?

No. A completely diverse number of setups and drives. Very, very odd.

[snakeeyes]

Yay! Exploding towers are back!

[gaiatry]

Any rebalancing progress ?

[Aikey]

Uhoh!

[Hvyshadows]

Yay! Omni SB with OS is back!

[Tazalanche]

No. A completely diverse number of setups and drives. Very, very odd.

Let's just blame it on their transport across the Atlantic Ocean & get current generation systems for all affected.

[Vhax]

I was caught off guard!
And I was going to use first post to advertise Vha.Chat!

Also, yay for explosions!

[Means]

Let's just blame it on their transport across the Atlantic Ocean & get current generation systems for all affected.

Happened on transported and non-transported and new and old systems.

But yes..New phatz for everyone!

[haxi]

Try firmware updates for the drives? Seagate has put out bad batches before. Odd you have all different manufacturers though.

[Graftmage]

When does Q2 end?

[zymos]

Strange, just as Tazalanche was hinting at it would be a "normal" thing if many drives from same batch started to crash but when it's diffrent setups it could be magnetic field thoug it sounds strange. Should be affecting more than the harddrives in that case.
What I could consider a more likely cause of the problem is when you shipped those computers over to Canada they were handled badly physically, went through rough electric fields or something like that.
Anyway, go ahead and replace the other computers hard drives just in case before they go bad too

/Z

[Vhax]

Happened on transported and non-transported and new and old systems.

But yes..New phatz for everyone!

I might have brought in a drive flu
I had a HD crash only a few weeks into the internship.

[haxi]

Some proper power conditioning could be in order as well. Good luck with it.

[Niles]

beer tiem!

[haxi]

Other possible causes in order of likeliness:

1) Skynet is eliminating nodes that are unable to transition to self-awareness.
2) Stuxnet! Someone or some institution does not wish to see an upgraded AO come to fruition

[Mythking]

What's that? You killed 12hamsters? You should probably feed them from time to time.