Of course, as long as it is built (or dug) sufficiently large, there's no reason why "indoors" couldn't have trees, fields, plants, lakes, houses, simulated weather...
There's no reason to simulate weather. Any significantly large space will have climates you can't finely control. With that said, there are few reasons to have real trees. Most nutrient rich foods (like spinach and beans) don't take much space to grow. Lakes, fields and trees may not have much value until tourism plays a role in colonization. You don't need a Biosphere 2 -- if carbon can be treated as a closed system, the plants you eat should soak up what you exhale. As long as you have plants on hand for every person introduced instead of supplying additional MREs or the like, the system should balance out. If colonists lose weight, one may need to sequester some carbon to even things out, but that's a different discussion.
If "Griffin is 1000% correct here", that means he's absolutely right on all accounts. You don't have to read much about the Ares program to realize there's more than a little dissent among the ranks about some of the design decisions here. You also seem to equate replacing Griffin, who silences opposition as best as he can through demotions instead of communal discourse, with disbanding the entire space program. Seriously, who makes that kind of absolute?
If we can find a replacement who can listen to the educated engineers who think the program is too risky or that it can be done more efficiently, or if we can efficiently accelerate the whole program, why not do it? Seems to me that there's more than enough disagreement on the entire program that there's room for improvement. Nobody seems to think he's got the right compromise between all the objectives.
Austin, TX, I use RoadRunner without TV or phone (Vonage). When I was a few miles North of here, I used Cox until 2005, no TV. In my experience, DSL is the only thing you need to use the magic words to get happen without phone, but I've read plenty of success stories when people use the keyword "naked DSL".
That said, there's a reason you don't see much GaAS integrated circuits, even though GaAs has been around for decades, and has much higher carrier mobility (and therefore top speeds) than silicon: it's hard to devise a good IC technology for GaAs.
We used to say the same thing about SiGe, but that's starting to make its way into CMOS technologies. Standard 100% bulk Si is hitting the wall of what's possible. Even if geometries are 10-20% bigger, but provide better switching speeds, on currents or lower off currents, we're going to have to keep working in order to improve. Further improvements, like our accomplishments to date, will not be easy. I don't know what advantages GaAs or graphene will have to them once their issues are worked out (you can bet several advantages will have to be compromised to ramp production), but I know that GaAs has higher defect rates, so that's one thing that's going to have to improve before we see it changing ICs as we know them.
There's no way you could describe today's technology that we take for granted to an expert 20 years ago and have them believe you. Copper and SOI before 2000 (in 1997, some experts predicted each were 10+ years away, to say nothing of merging them)? A return to metal gates? Vertical FETs?
Seems to me that they'd be catching people that were carrying only legal items. It wouldn't be a stretch for an evildoer to put their toothpaste and mouthwash in someone else's carryon luggage intending to get it back later if the innocent got through security.
Of course, I don't know who you'd plant it on. The families with screaming babies and old ladies seem to be the only people who get randomly selected to get the truly invasive screenings.
For Vuze, formerly Azureus, there are Ono and P4P, which should do what you're looking for, although for different reasons. Unfortunately, they both rely on people in your region being interested in the same torrents you are, while P4P additionally benefits from an iTracker, an ISP provided tracker that's topology aware (they did some work to prioritize based on ping latency, using that as a distance estimate, but I don't know if it's a fallback mechanism). Due to the iTracker infrastructure and possibly conflicting supporters, there are some privacy concerns.
BitTorrent is going to find out, very soon, that it shouldn't try to be a bully; it's making other customers vote with their wallets, and if you force the point, there are actually a ton of ways to stop this cold (which unfortunately hurt the rest of us too, like caps).
BitTorrent is responding to the bully. ISPs have a choice here, acknowledge customer behavior and find a way to work with it, or fight it. They almost managed to work with it with the P4P initiatives, but they involved media companies who will undoubtedly find the centralized and friendly owned tracker logs easier to get. If ISPs went with common carrier arguments and found a way to publish their network topologies and got trackers to behave similarly to P4P, then everyone would benefit. P4P isn't about denying people access to off-ISP data, it's about preferentially treating free pipes. If you need to upload and the free pipe isn't available, you still get access -- and those off big company owned ISPs still get their data.
BitTorrent is designed to maximize use of everyone's available bandwidth. Azureus can give me better transfer speeds than any single HTTP or FTP server I've found. If the ISPs want to continue to ratchet up this game, then maybe the 'net truly is in for a meltdown. If the ISPs backed off just a hair, there wouldn't be a reason to investigate these harder to block methods and we could all find solutions that work for everyone (except maybe copyright holders) because siding with the copyright holders will only harm consumers and ISPs.
In a court of law, reading the pirated version may be interpreted as a violation of copyright. Your defense attorney would have to discuss intent, and the degree of your "good faith effort".
Why are ebooks so much better than paper books? Did you look around for the paper book new, did you look for it locally used, did you only look at Amazon, did you write to the author, etc. This can easily become a very gray area, although my understanding of "fair use" interpretations of copyright would suggest that if you bought the dead tree version, scanned it, then read the scan, that would be fine. I personally don't believe substituting someone else's scan (or transcribing) would materially affect the ethical question.
Of course, in my opinion, discussing morality and legality are two different questions, but they must both be asked at the same time often. For example, what if you bought it from a local seller, scanned it, then resold it in the same condition? The book's value does not change, you don't net any positive or negative money, so why bother buying and selling the book anyway?
Are you stealing if you make a sandwich during commercials for your favorite TV show? If you read a paper someone left behind at the coffee shop?
I would wager that if you put the 2 screen side by side, one showing the signal in true HD and the other in SD. Anyone without vision problems can tell the difference.
Who cares? Do you want to go out creating more videophiles? Does this world lack enough audiophiles for you? Side by side, I can tell the difference, but most content on television is not actually improved by increased bitrates or resolutions. Sitcoms and dramas, in particular -- you don't need to see the flaws of the actors' and actress' faces, in fact, they distract. The only time HD matters is sports and special effects laden movies.
If you showed a relative that he's missing out, did you do him a favor? Maybe he's got a 10+ year old TV with analog cable (or broadcast), and can't afford a whiz-bang LCD (let alone plasma) or digital cable -- which is a lot of America, by the way. People are often much happier before they found out there were others doing better than they were.
I know the difference between HD and SD, and I can afford the upgrade, but I choose not to. I have a 32" Trinitron, and it does what I need (AppleTV for transcoded DVDs, DVDs, Wii). There's actually nothing I care about that a 720p (or higher) would improve, aside from power consumption and weight.
Look, I don't think overclocking in liquid nitrogen is cause for a slam dunk conclusion that AMD is now competitive with Intel, but stating that it's not impressive and not an indication of the performance of the processor indicates a complete lack of understanding of electrical design.
This wouldn't have worked, for example, with the original PPC 7400 (G4) past 500MHz. As it turned out, there was a hard stop getting past that. Finding FMax (maximum frequency) independent of reliability and power concerns highlights design weaknesses. If they can overclock by 50% with adequate cooling, one can conclude they don't have any early or late mode problems preventing higher frequencies, and that metal isn't the limiting factor. In fact, they can easily conclude that the electrical design is sound and that their limit will be what they can qualify from a reliability perspective.
I'm certain everybody has their own hard drive death story, but here's mine.
I had a summer internship for an IT department at a large engineering firm. I wasn't afraid of Unix, so I was blessed working with that department (1995?). There were these HP 735 (PA-RISC) systems that had recalled hard drives. We were given serial numbers of the drives recalled, but had no way to map the recalled serial numbers to the workstations themselves. The team decided there was no way to realistically handle the recall, so we'd just swap out drives as they failed. Everything was stored on the network and there were only about 4 config files that were unique to each box, so the inconvenience was minimal. After about three failures, I learned the sound they made. Each day I'd walk through a building or a floor, track down and record the boxes that made the sound, take them down at lunch to verify the serial number, then schedule a swapout with the user. "Listening to your hard drive, I have reason to believe it's been recalled and will fail soon" was a pretty good way to get flexibility from a user.
One day, I'd forgotten my list of recalled serial numbers so I called the admin who was overseeing this issue and asked her if she'd mind looking for some numbers. She thought I was kidding and told me to just come back and get my list (way on the other side of the plant). On the third hit on her list, she asked me why I was asking her for these numbers if I already knew they were there. She didn't believe me that I could hear the failing drives but I was able to get over 50 this method; I think I missed about 5. There were areas of the plant that had workstations I never knew to look for, but they came to us soon enough.
Along with "write", "wall" is useful. Additionally, "xterm -ut" can be useful for unmonitored windows as it doesn't modify the utmp. It's great when you want a persistent process, like "tail -f", not to get overwritten by some admin with "write". Or, as a user, if you are on a machine you shouldn't be on in interactive mode (only batch), then you can keep your interactive shell and not show up on "who".
I've been working for an American... er... Globalized company for 9 years now. Sometimes you have to do things you don't like. Sometimes you have to do things that don't seem right or obvious, but procedural e-mails like this one are not strictly CYA, they're also for documenting procedures. If anybody has a question as to what you did or on whose authority, it's good to have that documentation. This can be used for deadline tracking or promotion fodder. It's far easier to forward a procedural document along with "It's online now" to some line managers than a phone call, and that forwarded document can help careers all around.
It's only any good if the other party co-operates. The boss can easily phone you or walk up to you and say "Yes I want you to do it." and you have no record, and for many people this is their default mode of operation because that way no-one can pin anything on them. Unless they're singing their own praises, when everyone gets cc'd in.
"Thanks for the phone call. I understand that I am to amend the below procedure by inserting a 20 second delay with a 5 second standard deviation in order to reduce visibility in the logs, but otherwise the description is as intended. I'll have it in place by the end of the week."
Not to stereotype Slashdot readers or anything, but I notice nobody sees any difference between sunlight and electric light. If you go outdoors during the day, you may be surprised to find daylight has many ambient properties not provided by your basement's fluorescent bulb (warmth, happy feelings, etc).
Sounds like someone needs to ask his Mommy for a broad spectrum fluorescent bulb!
I've read a lot of people with great advice on removing water and even sea water. They've got a lot more expertise than I do, although I find their stories interesting to read.
The OP mentions mold. As a resident of central Texas, I think I can safely say that mold is evil. Once you get a little, it's really hard to get rid of it all, and any mold infestation will have serious health implications in the short and long term. I realize that it may be painfully expensive, but if you suspect any mold on anything, you should either quarantine it until you can thoroughly kill it or just trash it. A basement with two sump pumps suggests to me that it's not a typically dry place. If this is the case, you're in pretty rough shape structurally -- I hope you can afford a good mold removal service. If there's any delay while you save up money or have to wait for service availability, get a good dehumidifier for the affected spaces and make sure that it either drains properly or is emptied regularly. Cutting down the humidity will hinder further mold growth, although it shouldn't harm what you already have.
Mold is evil. A little leads to a lot. Kill 99.9% of it, and that last 0.1% will grow a hundredfold while you recover from the effort of killing 99.9% of it.
So I suppose you're a Blizzard fan boy? Sounds like you have more of a nostalgia attachment... you know the one... where everyone's (well most) childhood was the best time of their life. How will you feel when you find out all you bought for the "expansions" was a map pack that any map creator could make (and already has). If I recall, the "official" maps in Starcraft/Broodwar sucked. It was all about the user created maps, because of the freedom of the map editor tool. It was revolutionary compared to the other ones at the time (being Age of Empires)
I'm a Blizzard fan boy, as long as your definition of such allows me to dislike WoW, both Diablo installments and WC3 (except DoTA).
I didn't appreciate most of the user created Broodwar / SC maps, but I did waste a lot of time with the UMS "Sunken Defense" type games. Those maps were largely algebra and logistics problems, which entertain me. I played the hell out of the single player maps on Broodwar and SC, even iterating on some of the maps to get the best possible solution. In particular, the one where the Terrans need to defeat the Protoss while not destroying a single Zerg building -- I loved finding good defenses to hold off the end "inevitable doom" overrun so it was obvious I had a stalemate at worst. I never did well in the competitive SC games on battle.net, but in private games, I had a blast. Typically my wife and I would play cooperatively and see how many computers we could defeat.
And what do you call a 32 year old fan boy who's got a stable and reasonably paying job? "Customer".
1) Inflate tires properly. If you don't mind some increased stopping distance, overinflate some. If you're rated for 35, consider 40 or even 45. It's not in danger of explosion, but you might see less tire in contact with the road, so the stopping distance might go up some.
2) Take the foot off the gas whenever you anticipate the need to slow or stop. If you take your foot off the gas early and coast down to 20 so you don't need to stop at a red light, you burn less gas than staying at 55 longer and having to accelerate from a stop. As a corellary, increase stopping distance in traffic whenever you don't see brake lights (traffic speed minus 1 or 2 mph), decrease when you see brake lights (but maintain safe distances). This will absorb some accelerations and remove some braking in addition to improving overall traffic flow.
The best thing you can do to improve fuel economy is educate the loose nut behind the wheel. Smooth starts, easy stops, realize every acceleration hurts, especially up a hill.
I loved Starcraft. Played it regularly for many years, often going through bouts where my girlfriend, later wife, and I would play every weekend for 8-10 weeks in a row. We played through the single player, and it certainly was compelling, but multiplayer was "where it's at". I've put more time into Starcraft than any other game, hands down. Possibly more than every other game I've played put together, although you might have to take Starflight and its sequelsout.
I can easily look at Starcraft 2 and justify buying all three races the same way a WoW player can say "$15/month is cheaper entertainment than anything else I can do". I am totally sold on the new visual direction they're going in, even making single player more muted and dirty than bright and easy to distinguish multiplayer. I love the characters I'm supposed to love and I have the characters I'm supposed to hate.
I just wonder how much money this is going to cost me in babysitting and white chocolate mochas at my local wifi-enabled coffee house. 3 discs may be the cheapest part.
I read about Warhammer, and was impressed. I saw a few game clips online, and was impressed. I spoke with a friend involved in the beta, and was intrigued. I now read about a concerted effort to keep gold sellers minimized, and I'm almost ready to cough up the money.
But my brand new 3GHz iMac and I aren't welcome. I'm not coughing up the money for a Windows license just to play this.
If you people are seriously marrying women with the intention of being doormats your entire lives, you will be a miserable, pathetic wretch long before she ruins you in the divorce.
Any marriage based on "yes dear, yes dear" over and over again is an eternity in HELL. If you care even an ounce about yourself, you won't do turn into "that guy".
It's not about being a doormat, it's about picking your battles. Do you give a damn what the ring looks like? If not, defer. Does she? If so, she has a say. As a general case, if there's "defer/say" or "say/defer", then the decision is made. If there's "say/say", then a discussion is in line. If it's "defer/defer" then a minimal amount of expense and effort should be put into it, if at all. No team is about being a doormat, nor can it be about asserting your will when you don't care. In the specific case of a wedding band she'll look at for the rest of her life and I'll only see when I specifically look at her hand instead of her eyes (*ahem*), I've got to go with imasu. Have her pick it out so it's "perfect" according to her definition instead of a compromise (I went with her and offered my opinion, but it was her decision).
It's a simple formula
Kill 1 person, Destroy the life of at least 2 other persons = You have to suffer for at least 3 lifetimes.
And this has nothing to do with personal revenge or anything. But what else would you punish murderers for? If you can get out of jail faster than what it actually takes to "make" a new life (and I'm talking grown up, adulthood, family life here). Where's the point?
When did prison go from rehabilitation to punishment? Why not toss in mandatory tasering? Why give them televisions, gym equipment, access to GED material, job training, or even outside time? Why not just file individuals in 6x10 cells?
Punishment makes victims feel better, but society is not bettered. If someone shoplifts, and you punish him, he'll shoplift again. If, instead, you better the person, provide some education and help them find a job and contribute to society, they'll have less incentive to shoplift. The only thing is to provide a way to those social services without necessarily committing the crime.
To paraphrase, give a man a fish, he eats for a day [and will come back to beg for a fish tomorrow]. Teach a man to fish, and he eats for a whole lifetime.
How do you rehabilitate someone who commits a murder and destroys the lives of his two children? That will depend on his psychiatric situation, and none of us knows enough. Maybe he's psychopathic and feels superior-- a lifetime of making license plates (or hacking the kernel from a secure location, I don't really care) may be the best societal good. But if his outlook on life can be bettered, I see no reason to continue to punish.
Most people who have better options would prefer not to be imprisoned for even a year. Having your whole life taken away for 6 months is a really big deal. 5 years, 15 years, 25 years, it's all the same. But they have to have those "better options".
If you're marrying a horrible bitch I guess.
If the wedding is somehow all about her, imagine what a discussion about laundry will be 10 years from now.
Don't be an idiot. Who the fuck rated this shit insightful?
I've been married nearly 8 years, we've got 2 kids now, and we're very happy. Our wedding day was 100% about her. You kick thousands of dollars to a wedding dress maker to buy something she'll wear for 8 hours and a few hundred to rent a tux (or get it for free with enough groomsmen). Most guys don't care about actually being married, and those that do wouldn't mind heading down to city hall and filling out the paperwork to do it the easy way. The relatives want to see her in the dress -- that's our culture.
Our discussion about laundry is pretty straightforward: "Did you wash the whites today? Thanks, I'll fold 'em and put 'em away." Dishes are an uglier topic, but I think that's born from similar personalities as opposed to the prima donna attitude someone with little wedding experience might expect.
The built-in flash memory (and any flash memory like an SD card) will only hold data for a few years without power. I couldn't find anything that says exactly how many years it will last, but probably not 25 years without at least a few corrupted bits.
In the course of my job, I ended up talking with technology development guys for one of the flash manufacturers-- I won't say who, just in case this is proprietary, but they designed their process to last 10 years between refreshes. As such, they had their 99.999% (or whatever) confidence that every cell would be readable after 10 years. Not knowing the standard deviation, I can't fathom a guess as to how much ECC hashing would be necessary to take that to 25 years, but I will suggest that the process is not designed for everyone to be able to last 25 years.
I would go with magnetic media, and put in a lot of error protection. RAID mirroring over multiple drives, or without that luxury, over multiple partitions on the same drive just to increase the number of times the data is written.
25 years ago, your hard drive would have been RLL or MFM. In either case, we wouldn't be able to read it without a controller -- and the ISA bus is gone from modern machines, so we'd still be pretty stuck.
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There's no reason to simulate weather. Any significantly large space will have climates you can't finely control. With that said, there are few reasons to have real trees. Most nutrient rich foods (like spinach and beans) don't take much space to grow. Lakes, fields and trees may not have much value until tourism plays a role in colonization. You don't need a Biosphere 2 -- if carbon can be treated as a closed system, the plants you eat should soak up what you exhale. As long as you have plants on hand for every person introduced instead of supplying additional MREs or the like, the system should balance out. If colonists lose weight, one may need to sequester some carbon to even things out, but that's a different discussion.
Didn't Hugh and Lore do this already?
You're wrong, flat out wrong.
If "Griffin is 1000% correct here", that means he's absolutely right on all accounts. You don't have to read much about the Ares program to realize there's more than a little dissent among the ranks about some of the design decisions here. You also seem to equate replacing Griffin, who silences opposition as best as he can through demotions instead of communal discourse, with disbanding the entire space program. Seriously, who makes that kind of absolute?
If we can find a replacement who can listen to the educated engineers who think the program is too risky or that it can be done more efficiently, or if we can efficiently accelerate the whole program, why not do it? Seems to me that there's more than enough disagreement on the entire program that there's room for improvement. Nobody seems to think he's got the right compromise between all the objectives.
Austin, TX, I use RoadRunner without TV or phone (Vonage). When I was a few miles North of here, I used Cox until 2005, no TV. In my experience, DSL is the only thing you need to use the magic words to get happen without phone, but I've read plenty of success stories when people use the keyword "naked DSL".
We used to say the same thing about SiGe, but that's starting to make its way into CMOS technologies. Standard 100% bulk Si is hitting the wall of what's possible. Even if geometries are 10-20% bigger, but provide better switching speeds, on currents or lower off currents, we're going to have to keep working in order to improve. Further improvements, like our accomplishments to date, will not be easy. I don't know what advantages GaAs or graphene will have to them once their issues are worked out (you can bet several advantages will have to be compromised to ramp production), but I know that GaAs has higher defect rates, so that's one thing that's going to have to improve before we see it changing ICs as we know them.
There's no way you could describe today's technology that we take for granted to an expert 20 years ago and have them believe you. Copper and SOI before 2000 (in 1997, some experts predicted each were 10+ years away, to say nothing of merging them)? A return to metal gates? Vertical FETs?
Seems to me that they'd be catching people that were carrying only legal items. It wouldn't be a stretch for an evildoer to put their toothpaste and mouthwash in someone else's carryon luggage intending to get it back later if the innocent got through security.
Of course, I don't know who you'd plant it on. The families with screaming babies and old ladies seem to be the only people who get randomly selected to get the truly invasive screenings.
For Vuze, formerly Azureus, there are Ono and P4P, which should do what you're looking for, although for different reasons. Unfortunately, they both rely on people in your region being interested in the same torrents you are, while P4P additionally benefits from an iTracker, an ISP provided tracker that's topology aware (they did some work to prioritize based on ping latency, using that as a distance estimate, but I don't know if it's a fallback mechanism). Due to the iTracker infrastructure and possibly conflicting supporters, there are some privacy concerns.
BitTorrent is responding to the bully. ISPs have a choice here, acknowledge customer behavior and find a way to work with it, or fight it. They almost managed to work with it with the P4P initiatives, but they involved media companies who will undoubtedly find the centralized and friendly owned tracker logs easier to get. If ISPs went with common carrier arguments and found a way to publish their network topologies and got trackers to behave similarly to P4P, then everyone would benefit. P4P isn't about denying people access to off-ISP data, it's about preferentially treating free pipes. If you need to upload and the free pipe isn't available, you still get access -- and those off big company owned ISPs still get their data.
BitTorrent is designed to maximize use of everyone's available bandwidth. Azureus can give me better transfer speeds than any single HTTP or FTP server I've found. If the ISPs want to continue to ratchet up this game, then maybe the 'net truly is in for a meltdown. If the ISPs backed off just a hair, there wouldn't be a reason to investigate these harder to block methods and we could all find solutions that work for everyone (except maybe copyright holders) because siding with the copyright holders will only harm consumers and ISPs.
In a court of law, reading the pirated version may be interpreted as a violation of copyright. Your defense attorney would have to discuss intent, and the degree of your "good faith effort".
Why are ebooks so much better than paper books? Did you look around for the paper book new, did you look for it locally used, did you only look at Amazon, did you write to the author, etc. This can easily become a very gray area, although my understanding of "fair use" interpretations of copyright would suggest that if you bought the dead tree version, scanned it, then read the scan, that would be fine. I personally don't believe substituting someone else's scan (or transcribing) would materially affect the ethical question.
Of course, in my opinion, discussing morality and legality are two different questions, but they must both be asked at the same time often. For example, what if you bought it from a local seller, scanned it, then resold it in the same condition? The book's value does not change, you don't net any positive or negative money, so why bother buying and selling the book anyway?
Are you stealing if you make a sandwich during commercials for your favorite TV show? If you read a paper someone left behind at the coffee shop?
Who cares? Do you want to go out creating more videophiles? Does this world lack enough audiophiles for you? Side by side, I can tell the difference, but most content on television is not actually improved by increased bitrates or resolutions. Sitcoms and dramas, in particular -- you don't need to see the flaws of the actors' and actress' faces, in fact, they distract. The only time HD matters is sports and special effects laden movies.
If you showed a relative that he's missing out, did you do him a favor? Maybe he's got a 10+ year old TV with analog cable (or broadcast), and can't afford a whiz-bang LCD (let alone plasma) or digital cable -- which is a lot of America, by the way. People are often much happier before they found out there were others doing better than they were.
I know the difference between HD and SD, and I can afford the upgrade, but I choose not to. I have a 32" Trinitron, and it does what I need (AppleTV for transcoded DVDs, DVDs, Wii). There's actually nothing I care about that a 720p (or higher) would improve, aside from power consumption and weight.
Look, I don't think overclocking in liquid nitrogen is cause for a slam dunk conclusion that AMD is now competitive with Intel, but stating that it's not impressive and not an indication of the performance of the processor indicates a complete lack of understanding of electrical design.
This wouldn't have worked, for example, with the original PPC 7400 (G4) past 500MHz. As it turned out, there was a hard stop getting past that. Finding FMax (maximum frequency) independent of reliability and power concerns highlights design weaknesses. If they can overclock by 50% with adequate cooling, one can conclude they don't have any early or late mode problems preventing higher frequencies, and that metal isn't the limiting factor. In fact, they can easily conclude that the electrical design is sound and that their limit will be what they can qualify from a reliability perspective.
The Enterprise may have been, but Columbia wasn't. We got to see her in the orbital shipyards.
I'm certain everybody has their own hard drive death story, but here's mine.
I had a summer internship for an IT department at a large engineering firm. I wasn't afraid of Unix, so I was blessed working with that department (1995?). There were these HP 735 (PA-RISC) systems that had recalled hard drives. We were given serial numbers of the drives recalled, but had no way to map the recalled serial numbers to the workstations themselves. The team decided there was no way to realistically handle the recall, so we'd just swap out drives as they failed. Everything was stored on the network and there were only about 4 config files that were unique to each box, so the inconvenience was minimal. After about three failures, I learned the sound they made. Each day I'd walk through a building or a floor, track down and record the boxes that made the sound, take them down at lunch to verify the serial number, then schedule a swapout with the user. "Listening to your hard drive, I have reason to believe it's been recalled and will fail soon" was a pretty good way to get flexibility from a user.
One day, I'd forgotten my list of recalled serial numbers so I called the admin who was overseeing this issue and asked her if she'd mind looking for some numbers. She thought I was kidding and told me to just come back and get my list (way on the other side of the plant). On the third hit on her list, she asked me why I was asking her for these numbers if I already knew they were there. She didn't believe me that I could hear the failing drives but I was able to get over 50 this method; I think I missed about 5. There were areas of the plant that had workstations I never knew to look for, but they came to us soon enough.
Along with "write", "wall" is useful. Additionally, "xterm -ut" can be useful for unmonitored windows as it doesn't modify the utmp. It's great when you want a persistent process, like "tail -f", not to get overwritten by some admin with "write". Or, as a user, if you are on a machine you shouldn't be on in interactive mode (only batch), then you can keep your interactive shell and not show up on "who".
I've been working for an American... er... Globalized company for 9 years now. Sometimes you have to do things you don't like. Sometimes you have to do things that don't seem right or obvious, but procedural e-mails like this one are not strictly CYA, they're also for documenting procedures. If anybody has a question as to what you did or on whose authority, it's good to have that documentation. This can be used for deadline tracking or promotion fodder. It's far easier to forward a procedural document along with "It's online now" to some line managers than a phone call, and that forwarded document can help careers all around.
"Thanks for the phone call. I understand that I am to amend the below procedure by inserting a 20 second delay with a 5 second standard deviation in order to reduce visibility in the logs, but otherwise the description is as intended. I'll have it in place by the end of the week."
Sounds like someone needs to ask his Mommy for a broad spectrum fluorescent bulb!
I've read a lot of people with great advice on removing water and even sea water. They've got a lot more expertise than I do, although I find their stories interesting to read.
The OP mentions mold. As a resident of central Texas, I think I can safely say that mold is evil. Once you get a little, it's really hard to get rid of it all, and any mold infestation will have serious health implications in the short and long term. I realize that it may be painfully expensive, but if you suspect any mold on anything, you should either quarantine it until you can thoroughly kill it or just trash it. A basement with two sump pumps suggests to me that it's not a typically dry place. If this is the case, you're in pretty rough shape structurally -- I hope you can afford a good mold removal service. If there's any delay while you save up money or have to wait for service availability, get a good dehumidifier for the affected spaces and make sure that it either drains properly or is emptied regularly. Cutting down the humidity will hinder further mold growth, although it shouldn't harm what you already have.
Mold is evil. A little leads to a lot. Kill 99.9% of it, and that last 0.1% will grow a hundredfold while you recover from the effort of killing 99.9% of it.
I'm a Blizzard fan boy, as long as your definition of such allows me to dislike WoW, both Diablo installments and WC3 (except DoTA).
I didn't appreciate most of the user created Broodwar / SC maps, but I did waste a lot of time with the UMS "Sunken Defense" type games. Those maps were largely algebra and logistics problems, which entertain me. I played the hell out of the single player maps on Broodwar and SC, even iterating on some of the maps to get the best possible solution. In particular, the one where the Terrans need to defeat the Protoss while not destroying a single Zerg building -- I loved finding good defenses to hold off the end "inevitable doom" overrun so it was obvious I had a stalemate at worst. I never did well in the competitive SC games on battle.net, but in private games, I had a blast. Typically my wife and I would play cooperatively and see how many computers we could defeat.
And what do you call a 32 year old fan boy who's got a stable and reasonably paying job? "Customer".
1) Inflate tires properly. If you don't mind some increased stopping distance, overinflate some. If you're rated for 35, consider 40 or even 45. It's not in danger of explosion, but you might see less tire in contact with the road, so the stopping distance might go up some.
2) Take the foot off the gas whenever you anticipate the need to slow or stop. If you take your foot off the gas early and coast down to 20 so you don't need to stop at a red light, you burn less gas than staying at 55 longer and having to accelerate from a stop. As a corellary, increase stopping distance in traffic whenever you don't see brake lights (traffic speed minus 1 or 2 mph), decrease when you see brake lights (but maintain safe distances). This will absorb some accelerations and remove some braking in addition to improving overall traffic flow.
The best thing you can do to improve fuel economy is educate the loose nut behind the wheel. Smooth starts, easy stops, realize every acceleration hurts, especially up a hill.
I loved Starcraft. Played it regularly for many years, often going through bouts where my girlfriend, later wife, and I would play every weekend for 8-10 weeks in a row. We played through the single player, and it certainly was compelling, but multiplayer was "where it's at". I've put more time into Starcraft than any other game, hands down. Possibly more than every other game I've played put together, although you might have to take Starflight and its sequels out.
I can easily look at Starcraft 2 and justify buying all three races the same way a WoW player can say "$15/month is cheaper entertainment than anything else I can do". I am totally sold on the new visual direction they're going in, even making single player more muted and dirty than bright and easy to distinguish multiplayer. I love the characters I'm supposed to love and I have the characters I'm supposed to hate.
I just wonder how much money this is going to cost me in babysitting and white chocolate mochas at my local wifi-enabled coffee house. 3 discs may be the cheapest part.
I read about Warhammer, and was impressed. I saw a few game clips online, and was impressed. I spoke with a friend involved in the beta, and was intrigued. I now read about a concerted effort to keep gold sellers minimized, and I'm almost ready to cough up the money. But my brand new 3GHz iMac and I aren't welcome. I'm not coughing up the money for a Windows license just to play this.
It's not about being a doormat, it's about picking your battles. Do you give a damn what the ring looks like? If not, defer. Does she? If so, she has a say. As a general case, if there's "defer/say" or "say/defer", then the decision is made. If there's "say/say", then a discussion is in line. If it's "defer/defer" then a minimal amount of expense and effort should be put into it, if at all. No team is about being a doormat, nor can it be about asserting your will when you don't care. In the specific case of a wedding band she'll look at for the rest of her life and I'll only see when I specifically look at her hand instead of her eyes (*ahem*), I've got to go with imasu. Have her pick it out so it's "perfect" according to her definition instead of a compromise (I went with her and offered my opinion, but it was her decision).
When did prison go from rehabilitation to punishment? Why not toss in mandatory tasering? Why give them televisions, gym equipment, access to GED material, job training, or even outside time? Why not just file individuals in 6x10 cells?
Punishment makes victims feel better, but society is not bettered. If someone shoplifts, and you punish him, he'll shoplift again. If, instead, you better the person, provide some education and help them find a job and contribute to society, they'll have less incentive to shoplift. The only thing is to provide a way to those social services without necessarily committing the crime.
To paraphrase, give a man a fish, he eats for a day [and will come back to beg for a fish tomorrow]. Teach a man to fish, and he eats for a whole lifetime.
How do you rehabilitate someone who commits a murder and destroys the lives of his two children? That will depend on his psychiatric situation, and none of us knows enough. Maybe he's psychopathic and feels superior-- a lifetime of making license plates (or hacking the kernel from a secure location, I don't really care) may be the best societal good. But if his outlook on life can be bettered, I see no reason to continue to punish.
Most people who have better options would prefer not to be imprisoned for even a year. Having your whole life taken away for 6 months is a really big deal. 5 years, 15 years, 25 years, it's all the same. But they have to have those "better options".
I've been married nearly 8 years, we've got 2 kids now, and we're very happy. Our wedding day was 100% about her. You kick thousands of dollars to a wedding dress maker to buy something she'll wear for 8 hours and a few hundred to rent a tux (or get it for free with enough groomsmen). Most guys don't care about actually being married, and those that do wouldn't mind heading down to city hall and filling out the paperwork to do it the easy way. The relatives want to see her in the dress -- that's our culture.
Our discussion about laundry is pretty straightforward: "Did you wash the whites today? Thanks, I'll fold 'em and put 'em away." Dishes are an uglier topic, but I think that's born from similar personalities as opposed to the prima donna attitude someone with little wedding experience might expect.
In the course of my job, I ended up talking with technology development guys for one of the flash manufacturers-- I won't say who, just in case this is proprietary, but they designed their process to last 10 years between refreshes. As such, they had their 99.999% (or whatever) confidence that every cell would be readable after 10 years. Not knowing the standard deviation, I can't fathom a guess as to how much ECC hashing would be necessary to take that to 25 years, but I will suggest that the process is not designed for everyone to be able to last 25 years.
I would go with magnetic media, and put in a lot of error protection. RAID mirroring over multiple drives, or without that luxury, over multiple partitions on the same drive just to increase the number of times the data is written.
25 years ago, your hard drive would have been RLL or MFM. In either case, we wouldn't be able to read it without a controller -- and the ISA bus is gone from modern machines, so we'd still be pretty stuck.