harmony, deviants and LA's are all extra credit I am just assuming that each of N (presume at least 6) samples within 1 hour are above 8, the uptime command already does some averaging for you. ________________________________ From: Reidy, Ron [mailto:Ron.Reidy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] Sent: Monday, November 14, 2005 1:39 PM To: Post, Ethan; oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: RE: A Challenge Ethan, 1. Are you looking for a sustained LA >= 8? 2. During the 60 minute period, are you looking at a harmonic mean for the time period, or an arithmetic mean? 3. Do you account for standard deviation?