Past that, XM and Sirius have rather different philosophies on programming. Sirius tends to stick mostly to the hits, making them a commercial free version of normal FM. XM mixes in album tracks and occasionally rather obscure stuff. There's a LOT more variety to XM playlists. I know I wouldn't consider paying for Sirius style stations, but I gladly do for XM. I've never had a chance to listen to Sirius, so I'm afraid I don't know anything about that. In that case, I guess I'm just lucky my car came with an XM receiver as I usually start off by listening to Deep Tracks.
If there is only minimal duplication, then I guess my dream of CD quality audio will have to remain a dream, but that's what my CD changer is for.
My last electricity bill was $220. Since you believe it can be lowered, please tell me how. I'm simply saying that if you only have one choice for those suppliers, you will pay more than if you have multiple suppliers and some competition. For example if I think my water and sewer rate is too high, there's nothing I can do about it since there are no alternative suppliers.
Also, most individual consumers don't have enough clout with any of those suppliers to negotiate a lower rate. When Toyota was negotiating to build their plant here, they had enough clout to negotiate much lower rates for water and electricity while residential users were threatened with criminal citations for watering at the wrong time of day due to the multi-year drought.
BTW, my last electric bill was under $140. Perhaps you live in the wrong part of the country.
My guess is that the submitter works in a high school or a prison. It could be a church. My wife works at a church and womens purses and wallets have been stolen from their offices.
It could be any large corporation. When I worked at DEC, some field service techs were stealing memory from people's PCs and selling it at flea markets. One guy came in on a Monday morning and tried to boot his PC. When he got a hardware error, he opened the case and discovered that all the memory was missing.
I'm not sure what you listen to on Sirius but their main draw, the Howard Stern Show, started advertising 2 days into their broadcast. You can bet that since it is tolerated now, they will slowly creep in more across their line-up. I just purchased a new car that came with XM free for a month. I turned on the comedy channel and what did I find? Yep. Ads. I've had a car with an XM subscription for about two years now and have never heard a commercial. I suspect that XM/Sirrius have figured out that people who listen to them for the music won't tolerate ads.
Having said that, even though I make trips like this at least twice a year, I still don't have satellite radio, because I don't see the need. Even with my cheap factory installed car stereo with no auxiliary jacks, I can burn a few CDs from my MP3 collection to fill the hours when there are no decent radio stations. Maybe if I did that sort of traveling on a monthly basis or something. Regardless, I have a hard time seeing the appeal of paying a monthly fee for radio unless I'm a traveling salesman or something. In our case, that "something" is the following: I live in a city of over 1.5 million people but there is no jazz radio station of any type. This makes the price of satellite radio worth it to my wife. In my case, the fact that I can listen to several rock channels without any annoying commercials makes it worth it to me.
My only complaint is that both satellite services went for quantity in the quantity vs. quality tradeoff and as a result their audio is better than FM but not CD quality. I'm hoping that if the merger goes through and digital FM takes off, they will merge the duplicate satellite channels into CD quality channels.
My guess is that the submitter works in a high school or a prison. Or a church. My wife works in a church and stuff gets stolen from there periodically.
That's a similar structure to how electricity, water, and phone utilities are priced for consumers (albeit with differing dollar amounts). Consumers. Yes, that's how people who have no choice are charged. Users who have a choice pay vastly lower per until charges for all of the above.
Why a recent spate? Mods are now given 10 points to allocate rather than 5. That must have just happened in the past few days because I had mod points last week and only had 5.
In short: The software will monitor for abort conditions, at a point where any are detected the Launch Abort System (LAS) will take over and "pull" the CM in the proper direction away from the rocket. This sounds like an interesting challenge. How do you differentiate between a sensor failure and the destruction of the sensor? In the first case, an abort is the wrong thing to do, and in the second case, it's the right thing to do.
In one of the many articles on the Discovery loss, there was mention made of the person monitoring some of the wing temperature sensors noticed an unexpected rise in the temperature reported and then zero degrees was reported. The person wondered if they were observing a sensor failure.
I recall watching a PBS documentary on the Apollo program and it was mentioned that the LAS on Apollo was useless on the pad if the 1st stage of the Saturn V exploded as the Apollo CM would be consumed in the ensuing explosion before the LAS could detect the explosion and trigger the escape rockets.
I wonder if this is also the case for the new system.
IBM used to sell hardware but as the hardware business turned into a commodity market (driven largely by cheaper IBM compatibles) they shifted into a services/consultancy business and sold off the original hardware side to Lenovo. What about the new z-series hardware they just announced? And the new version of z-os to go with it?
When a client performs a large SELECT on a MyISAM table, it obtains a read lock on the data. Until the SELECT completes, the server won't release the lock and service any pending write requests for the table. I don't have a dog in this hunt so I'm not taking sides here. Why did you post a quote concerning MyISAM when AC said they had to move to InnoDB due to table locking issues with MyISAM?
If there is something about college campuses that casts some evil magical spell over otherwise law-abiding, properly trained, and licensed people carrying firearms, that causes them to become mass murders as so many people seem to fear, perhaps we should ban college campuses.
Depends how you define saving. You can't read a book, use a computer, watch a movie (yay for portable media players) or think deeply about something while driving, at not legally and sanely. In that sense you waste more time driving than taking a bus as those 40 minutes in the car can't be used for anything else. You also can't spend time with your family or do any number of household chores that can only be done at home, while you're on mass transit.
There's a Park & Ride about a mile from my house, so I checked to see how long it would take to get to/from work by taking the bus from the Park & Ride. It currently takes me a maximum of 40 minutes each way to/from work in my car. When I entered my start and end points into the web site, it thought about it for quite a while and returned me a message that indicated that it would either take more than two hours to get to work or that I couldn't get to work on the bus.
Toll roads are becoming more and more common in the U.S. as the effects of continual tax-cutting for the sake of tax cuts become evident. In the absence of a wider distributed funding base, the only remaining source of funding are direct fees, use taxes that affect the poor disproportionately. Uh, no. The Texas legislature has not raised the state gas tax in about 20 years, with that useless governor, spit, Perry, spit, discouraging any attempt to raise it. At the same time, the legislature with that useless governor's, spit, Perry, spit, approval, continues to divert billions of dollars of gas tax money to non-highway use. Then that useless governor, spit, Perry, spit, claims the only way to solve the transportation problem is more privately owned toll roads with guaranteed profits to the owners.
Tie the gas tax to the inflation rate and actually spend the collected money on highways and you wouldn't need toll roads.
Re:Software is under the eyes of regulators
on
Geekonomics
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· Score: 1
I worked in the pharmacy division, and as far as I ever heard there was little to no government oversight of our product (this was back in the early 90s). That makes sense since there is a licensed pharmacist who must approve every scrip filled.
Even with that safeguard, I, and many people I know, have been been the victim of a pharmacy error. In my case, I was given another person's scrip. The receipt had my name, the correct medication, and co-pay, but the medication inside the bag belonged to someone else. I discovered it when I got home, so I didn't take the wrong med, but the extra 22 mile round trip to the pharmacy was a pain.
I can lock my house, but even if I do not do so, you will still be trespassing if you enter my house. Maybe. In Texas you can only be convicted of tresspassing if you are given proper notice. There are generally three ways to give proper notice:
1) Post a No Tresspassing sign. 2) Display blue marks spaced a certain distance apart around your property.
or, if you didn't do 1 or 2,
3) and you encounter someone on your property, tell the person they are tresspassing and to leave. If the person refuses to leave, you can call a peace officer and have the person arrested.
Note that entering someone's house through an unlocked door in Texas could be hazardous to your health. If you do so and cause someone inside to fear for their life, the law allows them to use deadly force to defend themselves.
You know you can solo a plane with only 20 hours of flight time, correct? You know that when you solo, you are restricted to the equivalent of driving around the neighborhood, correct?
That's less time then most teenagers have to log with their parents driving before they get a driver's license. Your comparison is invalid. Once a student pilot has soloed, there is additional training required with the instructor before the student can take the flying portion of the private pilot exam.
Also, parents are not certified by anyone as to their ability to teach someone how to drive, the the training program is not standardized, and the parents don't lose their jobs if too many of their children fail their driving test.
Thats why I don't have much respect for programmers who completely disregard the performance of their design/software. If their software is part of a particular success story, then its bound to get used much more than it is when they initially design it, so why not design for that success story instead of something that only works right now? With the exception of the cases where management had already decided a given technology, architecture, etc. was EOL, I have never been allowed to design beyond the current architecture and/or more than 5 years out for scalability. Part of the reason is that going beyond that is a lot like trying to predict the weather more than a week or so out.
My first programming language in college was IBM 360 Assembler. The last time I wrote any assembly code was on a DEC VAX, 10+ years ago. I still find the concepts somewhat useful today when I'm trying to debug weird errors.
Now I think of it, you could just wear contact lenses. Unfortunately, for many of the approximately 1/3 of the population over 30 with astigmatism, the shape of their eyes makes contact lenses too painful to wear.
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If there is only minimal duplication, then I guess my dream of CD quality audio will have to remain a dream, but that's what my CD changer is for.
Also, most individual consumers don't have enough clout with any of those suppliers to negotiate a lower rate. When Toyota was negotiating to build their plant here, they had enough clout to negotiate much lower rates for water and electricity while residential users were threatened with criminal citations for watering at the wrong time of day due to the multi-year drought.
BTW, my last electric bill was under $140. Perhaps you live in the wrong part of the country.
It could be any large corporation. When I worked at DEC, some field service techs were stealing memory from people's PCs and selling it at flea markets. One guy came in on a Monday morning and tried to boot his PC. When he got a hardware error, he opened the case and discovered that all the memory was missing.
My only complaint is that both satellite services went for quantity in the quantity vs. quality tradeoff and as a result their audio is better than FM but not CD quality. I'm hoping that if the merger goes through and digital FM takes off, they will merge the duplicate satellite channels into CD quality channels.
In one of the many articles on the Discovery loss, there was mention made of the person monitoring some of the wing temperature sensors noticed an unexpected rise in the temperature reported and then zero degrees was reported. The person wondered if they were observing a sensor failure.
I recall watching a PBS documentary on the Apollo program and it was mentioned that the LAS on Apollo was useless on the pad if the 1st stage of the Saturn V exploded as the Apollo CM would be consumed in the ensuing explosion before the LAS could detect the explosion and trigger the escape rockets.
I wonder if this is also the case for the new system.
For over 30 years copyright and trade secret worked just fine to protect software. We don't need software patents.
If there is something about college campuses that casts some evil magical spell over otherwise law-abiding, properly trained, and licensed people carrying firearms, that causes them to become mass murders as so many people seem to fear, perhaps we should ban college campuses.
There's a Park & Ride about a mile from my house, so I checked to see how long it would take to get to/from work by taking the bus from the Park & Ride. It currently takes me a maximum of 40 minutes each way to/from work in my car. When I entered my start and end points into the web site, it thought about it for quite a while and returned me a message that indicated that it would either take more than two hours to get to work or that I couldn't get to work on the bus.
Tie the gas tax to the inflation rate and actually spend the collected money on highways and you wouldn't need toll roads.
Even with that safeguard, I, and many people I know, have been been the victim of a pharmacy error. In my case, I was given another person's scrip. The receipt had my name, the correct medication, and co-pay, but the medication inside the bag belonged to someone else. I discovered it when I got home, so I didn't take the wrong med, but the extra 22 mile round trip to the pharmacy was a pain.
1) Post a No Tresspassing sign.
2) Display blue marks spaced a certain distance apart around your property.
or, if you didn't do 1 or 2,
3) and you encounter someone on your property, tell the person they are tresspassing and to leave. If the person refuses to leave, you can call a peace officer and have the person arrested.
Note that entering someone's house through an unlocked door in Texas could be hazardous to your health. If you do so and cause someone inside to fear for their life, the law allows them to use deadly force to defend themselves.
Also, parents are not certified by anyone as to their ability to teach someone how to drive, the the training program is not standardized, and the parents don't lose their jobs if too many of their children fail their driving test.
Did the university really just slide your dismisal letter under your dorm room door?
ASR-33 Teletype connected to GE timesharing system over 110 baud acoustic coupler.
Yes, GE did actually make computers at one time. I think the OS was called something like GECOS - GE Commercial Operating System.
My first programming language in college was IBM 360 Assembler. The last time I wrote any assembly code was on a DEC VAX, 10+ years ago. I still find the concepts somewhat useful today when I'm trying to debug weird errors.