Ask A Sleep-Deprived Technical Consultant Who Was Up All Night Playing Half-Life 2 And Is Now Hallucinating He Is In City 17.

Dear S-DTCWWUANPH-L2AINHHIIC17,

I have question regarding modeling a fault-tolerant equipment configuration with a switching delay. A 6 of 7 configuration is shown below. When one of the blocks fails, the 7th block (the bottom block) requires 3 hours manual reconfiguration before it is ready to function as the replacement. (Each failure has a spare part associated with it that takes 24 hours to obtain, so this 3 hour reconfiguration is better than repairing the failed block). They way I’ve modeled this is:
-Assigned a switching delay of 3 hours for each of the 7 blocks.
-Set the “Local Standby” attribute to “checked” in the Node at the right of the blocks.
Is this the correct way to model this situation?

Thanks, Ted

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Dear Dr. Kleiner,

Could you repeat that again? To me it sounded like you said you modeled it by:
-Assigned a switching delay of 3 hours for each of the 7 teleportation units.
-Set the “Head crab” attribute to “checked” in the Lambda Bunker at the right of the blocks.
Is this the correct way to model this gravity gun?

Regards, S-DTCWWUANPH-L2AINHHIIC17.

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Dear S-DTCWWUANPH-L2AINHHIIC17,

Following are the issues I did notice during the software testing:
- If copy/paste function is used for blocks within the model the result is not correct. Pasted block is not taken in to calculation as expected
- MTTR calculation is not always as expected - I will give you one example. If I have two blocks in parallel (each with MTTR=4) the calculated MTTR for the system is 2 hrs!

Regards, Max

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Dear G-Man

Yes, the crowbar function can be used to smash boxes within the level to find hidden power-ups. The smashed box will not always break apart as expected.
I will note your issues about the ammo clips not having as much ammo as you would expect. In the case you describe, the two boxes don't contain as much ammo because there are two in parallel next to each other, so they each only contain two clips instead of 4.

Regards, S-DTCWWUANPH-L2AINHHIIC17.

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Dear S-DTCWWUANPH-L2AINHHIIC17,

I have attached for you an example i have produced by converting the current commercial parts Mil-217 file to the new format. Note that the failure rate, unavailability and failure data type fields are Null - they will not be used for the electronic parts. PI factors are not used - you can see the keyword format field as an example.

Regards, Stan

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Dear Combine Soldier,

Die! Die! Die! Scum! Eat hot lead! Ha! I shall dangle you by your foot with my gravity gun! What's this? Oh no, you've summoned a Strider! Die, Strider scum! You've got a bright red dot on your face that looks like a pimple. Well, let me remove it with this rocket!

Regards, S-DTCWWUANPH-L2AINHHIIC17.

Sleep-Deprived Technical Consultant Who Was Up All Night Playing Half-Life 2 And Is Now Hallucinating He Is In City 17 is a syndicated advice columnist whose weekly column appears in 1700 newspapers worldwide.