How many millions of dollars of taxpayer money went to 'prove' an ocean exists up to 330km beneath the moon of a planet 365 million miles away. What use is this to us... other than for a bunch of scientists to continue justifying their budget? Bah!
Get up off your lazy fucking asses and throw the light switch yourself!!
Home automation is neat - and towards the end of every season of "This Old House" they're pimping something that the average home owner cannot afford to control lights and the such... and everything seems to be on some proprietary platform.
My brother got me an X-10 starter kit some years ago - and while it was "neat" - I found it to be more time/trouble than it was worth. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. I still have it boxed up after we sold the last house - just don't have a real need for it here. My house is a modest 1,300 sq feet... not a mansion.
Other than some motion sensing lights outside and a programmable thermostat - I have all the automation I need. Would a $300 Nest thermostat save me money? My guess is it would take longer to achieve ROI for something like that above and beyond what I get out of a $40 day/night/weekend thermostat from Home Depot.
For the mobility impaired - automation makes some sense - but it needs to be simple, reliable, cost-effective and easy to maintain/service. Who is someone in a wheelchair gonna call at 10:00 PM when their lights won't turn on?
In the PBX world - it's easier to speak pro to pro. Most of the DIY IT guys who want to try and manage their 20 year old Nortel 81C PBX with 3,000 extensions by themselves are just trying to get away without having to pay someone with years of experience / certifications who know what they're doing and vendor partnerships that would erode if they found out we were selling them grey market parts and giving them free software upgrades. I understand IT dept's want to save money - but when it comes to specialized equipment - either send your guys out for a few weeks of training - or just let your vendor take the responsibility.
So while I'll jump on tek-tips.com and give out some free advice from time to time - anything that goes beyond what a 'newbie' person cannot figure out on his own outside of moves/adds/changes - I always tell them don't be a hero, contact your Nortel vendor. Because if I show up to their site at 2:00 am in a snowstorm because someone didn't know what he was doing when a T1 went down and they started pulling cards and not doing things in order - then it's time and materials ($$$$$) regardless of how much they pay us in monthly maintenance.
When telemarketers start being publicly executed by firing squad for DNC violations, maybe then they'll start taking notice.
Problem is - overseas call centers using spoofed CLID tables and SIP trunks to the United States that are beyond the reach of state and federal law. Not a thing we can do about it. Anyone with a few years experience with a PBX knowledge of SIP trunks or PRI's can figure this out easily. Hardware is cheap, software is freely available.
Google Voice for my cell phone, Microsoft Lync for my work phone. My home phone # I don't even give out - and what we do get is crap anyway... in fact it doesn't even ring... just goes straight to voice mail which I can retrieve by e-mail - but since most of that voice mail is telemarketing crap, it ends up in my e-mail SPAM folder anyway (I need a landline to dial into remote sites, send out the rare fax, etc... as I work from home).
Speech to text is reasonably OK on either platform - I get the gist of the message from it. Rarely ever listen to VM anymore unless the transcription is indecipherable.
The Seneca LORAN-C station in upstate NY between Rochester and Syracuse, while silent, didn't destroy it's tower or buildings - instead it was taken down one section at a time - and is stacked neatly in the parking lot. Wonder if it's simply been mothballed in case they need to reactivate the system?
Because labeling Obama as "black" fits the liberal progressive social agenda here in America. Problem is - 98% of the black vote went to a a president who didn't do shit for his own people once he ascended to the presidency.
AF447 transmitted ACARS data via either satellite or HF with trouble codes when the aircraft began having trouble with iced-up pitot tubes and the resulting issues from the pilots' errors. Along with this data was GPS coordinates. They found the wreckage about 5-6 miles from the last reported position sent via the aircraft's ACARS system.
MH370's last-known position is a series of educated guesses at best. If it hit the water like US Airways 1549 did in the Hudson, it may have landed relatively intact, but the underside of the fuselage on US1549 was torn open from the landing, and eventually sank where it was towed to before it was fished out of the river. If passengers/crew were incapacitated when they hit the water - they likely drowned if they weren't already dead from asphyxiation.
Event he Alaska Railroad doesn't have a physical connection to the lower 48 states. Train cars to and from the Alaska Railroad are barged in via Seattle.
Paying around $130/mo for cable, internet and phone (yes - I still need a POTS line for the work I do from home). It's not terribly cheap, but for the bundle I do see value in it. Between me, the wife and daughter, we regularly watch about 12 or so channels on and off. Most of what we watch is DVR'ed - so between the three of us, we usually have an evening's worth of viewing on any given night, with Netflix as a fall-back option. It works for us.
As for a la carte programming... what we may see in the not too distant future is customers paying a trivial amount for each channel you want in your a la carte package. How they're gonna make their money is in bandwidth utilization. The more you watch, the more you pay... but will most likely be tiered bandwidth plans like most wireless carriers are doing now - rather than a metered per MB service. Your content will be delivered via IP streaming to something like a Roku box that can only be used on your home network so you're not piggybacking off a neighbor's unlimited bandwidth WiFi.
As more cable customers cut the cord, the ISP's (usually your cable company, or telco with a deal with the content providers to carry the content for a fee) will be the new content delivery service and will want a cut of the action too.
Security by obscurity. Good luck finding a PC with an 8" floppy drive that still works these days.
A couple of years ago I came across an 8" floppy drive and 8" head cleaning floppies that were still sealed and moist with cleaner fluid in the basement storage of a large gas/electric utility I was doing work at. Hadn't seen those since the TRS-80 Model II days.
* 1964 Mercury 650 outboard engine (65 HP / 4 cyl / 2-cycle) - starts up every time and runs like a champ * Nortel Meridian phone systems - I maintain these for a living, and see a good number of 15-20+ year old systems that are still up and running with 100% uptime... digital phones that are 20+ years old still in service and of course, the 500 rotary and 2500 touchtone analog phones that are still in service too. You'll never see that kind of reliability with the newer PBX's and VoIP systems. * Bose Wave Radio - 15 years and still works as well as the day I got it
Impossible. My 13 yr old has an iPhone 4 that would break just by looking at it. I've yet to see any iPod, iPhone or iPad that doesn't have a broken screen.
At some point some water got inside it and now it just stopped working.
Growing up she was 'mainstreamed' in public schools but did attend a local school for the deaf when she was in HS. For the most part she's done well for herself. She has very good lip reading and oral skills so she did well around most hearing people.
Many of her deaf friends who weren't mainstreamed usually held menial jobs and received public assistance.
I have a friend who was born hearing, but lost his hearing in both ears due to acoustic neuromas in both ears... and as a result has had a hard time finding work as stuff he did when he could hear he cannot do anymore.
... but really doesn't matter what your degree is in. As a hiring manager, I could care less if you majored in basket weaving or circle jerking. So long as you have the experience I need - then you resume doesn't make a bee-line to the recycle bin. But to me - a college degree (especially a 4-year degree) demonstrates to me that you have goals, forward looking thinking and most importantly, you finished what you started. Bonus points if you went away to college, learned a little bit about life, got laid and didn't spend 10 years after high school scratching the inside of your mom's uterus.
College isn't for everyone. Too many kids with freshly minted degrees competing for jobs that don't exist. And not just college degrees, but worthless ones where they majored in stupid shit like history or philosophy. Good luck getting a job with that. Or social workers who make $30k a year and still have to get a masters degree to make $40k a year... and be paying that shit off for the rest of their lives.
When I was an IT manager - I'd get a ton of resumes from recent grads with not a single day of real-world experience outside of the college intern/co-op bubble - many expecting $65,000+ salaries for a Network Admin job requiring 5+ years of experience in Windows this, Linux that, etc... with a starting salary of $40,000 that I have 400 laid off IT guys standing in line for. Some of these kids I'd have to pull aside and tell them look - you have no experience. I need verifiable references from people in my professional peer group (not the part-time adjunct instructor who taught you the basics of Cisco Routing for a semester) who'll stick their neck out for you. Go work for Company X who is a large helpdesk outsourcing company and man the phones all day long walking 62 year old people through the basics of Quicken, make a good impression, if you're lucky you'll move up the ladder there, otherwise come see me in a year or two with a few good references from that shitty job and I'll see what I can do for you. If not a job with me - a job with someone who I know is looking for a few good people.
Truth is - I don't care what your degree says. It's a piece of fucking paper you probably paid too much for in the first place. Most jobs out there you can train a monkey to do - and Microsoft networking in the classroom, Contoso, Ltd., or Fabrikam, Inc. is nothing like Microsoft networking in my enterprise. Come to me with the basics and some verifiable experience and I'll teach you the rest. What I really want is someone with a good work ethic who'll show up on time, put in an 8 hour day, check the attitude at the door and become a productive member of my team. Not some kid with an entitlement mentality. Otherwise, everything your high school guidance counselor (sitting in an office full of chotchkies and 40 lbs overweight from free lunches with admissions folks from 50 different colleges year after year) sold you on is bullshit.
That said - there are plenty of blue collar types who never set foot on a college campus pulling down some serious coin. My brother nearly dropped out of HS, did 2 years in the Army, and is making more $$ than my 4-year degree ass. That along with a number of union trades guys, cops, etc... all making some good money without a day of college. Skilled tradesmen are in huge demand these days - many good paying openings go unfilled because spoiled kids these days are afraid to get a little bit of dirt under their fingernails.
These days it's the guy with the shitty blue collar job with no student loans succeeding and not the college grad.
Here in NY - base load is comprised of hydro, nuclear and natural gas. Coal was once a major part of the base load but now makes up about 9% of base load now - and is on the decline thanks to Obama and the state with a number of coal plants either idle, mothballed or in the process of bring demolished. Wind/solar make up about 3% of the state's base load now.
There's a 1.7MW peak load oil burning plant on the shore of Lake Ontario in Oswego that has been fired up this week - usually doesn't run more than several days out of the entire year. Once upon a time, it was a base load plant when oil was cheap... they would bring oil in primarily by ship with railroad tracks as a backup route for when the St. Lawrence Seaway would shut down for the winter. The tracks to the plant's tank farm a few miles away are still in place, but grade crossings are all paved over and hasn't seen a train in at least 15 years.
You know mainstream media news has gotten bad...
on
The Rise of Hoax News
·
· Score: 1
... when The Onion becomes more and more believable.
Alcoa in upstate NY has a 478 MW allotment of hydro power from the NY Power Authority - and located not too far from the hydro plant on the St. Lawrence River in Messena. There's rolled aluminum Alcan plant in Scriba, NY with a large 1,000 MW natural gas electric plant right next door, and a few miles from a three-reactor nuclear power plant with a combined output of 2,400 MW.
However, if it makes you feel better, a few miles away in Oswego, NY - there's a large oil-fired 1,700 MW "peaker" generating plant that fires up during periods of peak demand (i.e., very hot days).
Most power production in NY is hydro, nuclear and natural gas. Coal makes up about 9% of the state's generating capacity and is being phased out with most coal plants mothballed or in the process of demolition. The rest comes from oil (rarely used) and wind (about 3% now).
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How many millions of dollars of taxpayer money went to 'prove' an ocean exists up to 330km beneath the moon of a planet 365 million miles away. What use is this to us... other than for a bunch of scientists to continue justifying their budget? Bah!
Get up off your lazy fucking asses and throw the light switch yourself!!
Home automation is neat - and towards the end of every season of "This Old House" they're pimping something that the average home owner cannot afford to control lights and the such... and everything seems to be on some proprietary platform.
My brother got me an X-10 starter kit some years ago - and while it was "neat" - I found it to be more time/trouble than it was worth. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. I still have it boxed up after we sold the last house - just don't have a real need for it here. My house is a modest 1,300 sq feet... not a mansion.
Other than some motion sensing lights outside and a programmable thermostat - I have all the automation I need. Would a $300 Nest thermostat save me money? My guess is it would take longer to achieve ROI for something like that above and beyond what I get out of a $40 day/night/weekend thermostat from Home Depot.
For the mobility impaired - automation makes some sense - but it needs to be simple, reliable, cost-effective and easy to maintain/service. Who is someone in a wheelchair gonna call at 10:00 PM when their lights won't turn on?
In the PBX world - it's easier to speak pro to pro. Most of the DIY IT guys who want to try and manage their 20 year old Nortel 81C PBX with 3,000 extensions by themselves are just trying to get away without having to pay someone with years of experience / certifications who know what they're doing and vendor partnerships that would erode if they found out we were selling them grey market parts and giving them free software upgrades. I understand IT dept's want to save money - but when it comes to specialized equipment - either send your guys out for a few weeks of training - or just let your vendor take the responsibility.
So while I'll jump on tek-tips.com and give out some free advice from time to time - anything that goes beyond what a 'newbie' person cannot figure out on his own outside of moves/adds/changes - I always tell them don't be a hero, contact your Nortel vendor. Because if I show up to their site at 2:00 am in a snowstorm because someone didn't know what he was doing when a T1 went down and they started pulling cards and not doing things in order - then it's time and materials ($$$$$) regardless of how much they pay us in monthly maintenance.
When telemarketers start being publicly executed by firing squad for DNC violations, maybe then they'll start taking notice.
Problem is - overseas call centers using spoofed CLID tables and SIP trunks to the United States that are beyond the reach of state and federal law. Not a thing we can do about it. Anyone with a few years experience with a PBX knowledge of SIP trunks or PRI's can figure this out easily. Hardware is cheap, software is freely available.
Google Voice for my cell phone, Microsoft Lync for my work phone. My home phone # I don't even give out - and what we do get is crap anyway... in fact it doesn't even ring... just goes straight to voice mail which I can retrieve by e-mail - but since most of that voice mail is telemarketing crap, it ends up in my e-mail SPAM folder anyway (I need a landline to dial into remote sites, send out the rare fax, etc... as I work from home).
Speech to text is reasonably OK on either platform - I get the gist of the message from it. Rarely ever listen to VM anymore unless the transcription is indecipherable.
The Seneca LORAN-C station in upstate NY between Rochester and Syracuse, while silent, didn't destroy it's tower or buildings - instead it was taken down one section at a time - and is stacked neatly in the parking lot. Wonder if it's simply been mothballed in case they need to reactivate the system?
http://tinyurl.com/senecaloran
Pay up deadbeats!
Because labeling Obama as "black" fits the liberal progressive social agenda here in America. Problem is - 98% of the black vote went to a a president who didn't do shit for his own people once he ascended to the presidency.
AF447 transmitted ACARS data via either satellite or HF with trouble codes when the aircraft began having trouble with iced-up pitot tubes and the resulting issues from the pilots' errors. Along with this data was GPS coordinates. They found the wreckage about 5-6 miles from the last reported position sent via the aircraft's ACARS system.
MH370's last-known position is a series of educated guesses at best. If it hit the water like US Airways 1549 did in the Hudson, it may have landed relatively intact, but the underside of the fuselage on US1549 was torn open from the landing, and eventually sank where it was towed to before it was fished out of the river. If passengers/crew were incapacitated when they hit the water - they likely drowned if they weren't already dead from asphyxiation.
Event he Alaska Railroad doesn't have a physical connection to the lower 48 states. Train cars to and from the Alaska Railroad are barged in via Seattle.
Paying around $130/mo for cable, internet and phone (yes - I still need a POTS line for the work I do from home). It's not terribly cheap, but for the bundle I do see value in it. Between me, the wife and daughter, we regularly watch about 12 or so channels on and off. Most of what we watch is DVR'ed - so between the three of us, we usually have an evening's worth of viewing on any given night, with Netflix as a fall-back option. It works for us.
As for a la carte programming... what we may see in the not too distant future is customers paying a trivial amount for each channel you want in your a la carte package. How they're gonna make their money is in bandwidth utilization. The more you watch, the more you pay... but will most likely be tiered bandwidth plans like most wireless carriers are doing now - rather than a metered per MB service. Your content will be delivered via IP streaming to something like a Roku box that can only be used on your home network so you're not piggybacking off a neighbor's unlimited bandwidth WiFi.
As more cable customers cut the cord, the ISP's (usually your cable company, or telco with a deal with the content providers to carry the content for a fee) will be the new content delivery service and will want a cut of the action too.
Great movie!
Security by obscurity. Good luck finding a PC with an 8" floppy drive that still works these days.
A couple of years ago I came across an 8" floppy drive and 8" head cleaning floppies that were still sealed and moist with cleaner fluid in the basement storage of a large gas/electric utility I was doing work at. Hadn't seen those since the TRS-80 Model II days.
* 1964 Mercury 650 outboard engine (65 HP / 4 cyl / 2-cycle) - starts up every time and runs like a champ
* Nortel Meridian phone systems - I maintain these for a living, and see a good number of 15-20+ year old systems that are still up and running with 100% uptime... digital phones that are 20+ years old still in service and of course, the 500 rotary and 2500 touchtone analog phones that are still in service too. You'll never see that kind of reliability with the newer PBX's and VoIP systems.
* Bose Wave Radio - 15 years and still works as well as the day I got it
Pffft... I'll take a World War One vintage Colt 1911 over some crap plastic Glock.
Impossible. My 13 yr old has an iPhone 4 that would break just by looking at it. I've yet to see any iPod, iPhone or iPad that doesn't have a broken screen.
At some point some water got inside it and now it just stopped working.
I second that. I have the AM/FM only model and it's been working like a charm since 1999 (gift from my then girlfriend).
$6.00USD - http://www.harborfreight.com/7...
Sometimes they have them on sale for 2-3 bucks.
Growing up she was 'mainstreamed' in public schools but did attend a local school for the deaf when she was in HS. For the most part she's done well for herself. She has very good lip reading and oral skills so she did well around most hearing people.
Many of her deaf friends who weren't mainstreamed usually held menial jobs and received public assistance.
I have a friend who was born hearing, but lost his hearing in both ears due to acoustic neuromas in both ears... and as a result has had a hard time finding work as stuff he did when he could hear he cannot do anymore.
... but really doesn't matter what your degree is in. As a hiring manager, I could care less if you majored in basket weaving or circle jerking. So long as you have the experience I need - then you resume doesn't make a bee-line to the recycle bin. But to me - a college degree (especially a 4-year degree) demonstrates to me that you have goals, forward looking thinking and most importantly, you finished what you started. Bonus points if you went away to college, learned a little bit about life, got laid and didn't spend 10 years after high school scratching the inside of your mom's uterus.
College isn't for everyone. Too many kids with freshly minted degrees competing for jobs that don't exist. And not just college degrees, but worthless ones where they majored in stupid shit like history or philosophy. Good luck getting a job with that. Or social workers who make $30k a year and still have to get a masters degree to make $40k a year... and be paying that shit off for the rest of their lives.
When I was an IT manager - I'd get a ton of resumes from recent grads with not a single day of real-world experience outside of the college intern/co-op bubble - many expecting $65,000+ salaries for a Network Admin job requiring 5+ years of experience in Windows this, Linux that, etc... with a starting salary of $40,000 that I have 400 laid off IT guys standing in line for. Some of these kids I'd have to pull aside and tell them look - you have no experience. I need verifiable references from people in my professional peer group (not the part-time adjunct instructor who taught you the basics of Cisco Routing for a semester) who'll stick their neck out for you. Go work for Company X who is a large helpdesk outsourcing company and man the phones all day long walking 62 year old people through the basics of Quicken, make a good impression, if you're lucky you'll move up the ladder there, otherwise come see me in a year or two with a few good references from that shitty job and I'll see what I can do for you. If not a job with me - a job with someone who I know is looking for a few good people.
Truth is - I don't care what your degree says. It's a piece of fucking paper you probably paid too much for in the first place. Most jobs out there you can train a monkey to do - and Microsoft networking in the classroom, Contoso, Ltd., or Fabrikam, Inc. is nothing like Microsoft networking in my enterprise. Come to me with the basics and some verifiable experience and I'll teach you the rest. What I really want is someone with a good work ethic who'll show up on time, put in an 8 hour day, check the attitude at the door and become a productive member of my team. Not some kid with an entitlement mentality. Otherwise, everything your high school guidance counselor (sitting in an office full of chotchkies and 40 lbs overweight from free lunches with admissions folks from 50 different colleges year after year) sold you on is bullshit.
That said - there are plenty of blue collar types who never set foot on a college campus pulling down some serious coin. My brother nearly dropped out of HS, did 2 years in the Army, and is making more $$ than my 4-year degree ass. That along with a number of union trades guys, cops, etc... all making some good money without a day of college. Skilled tradesmen are in huge demand these days - many good paying openings go unfilled because spoiled kids these days are afraid to get a little bit of dirt under their fingernails.
These days it's the guy with the shitty blue collar job with no student loans succeeding and not the college grad.
I'm fucking smart. That's how.
Here in NY - base load is comprised of hydro, nuclear and natural gas. Coal was once a major part of the base load but now makes up about 9% of base load now - and is on the decline thanks to Obama and the state with a number of coal plants either idle, mothballed or in the process of bring demolished. Wind/solar make up about 3% of the state's base load now.
There's a 1.7MW peak load oil burning plant on the shore of Lake Ontario in Oswego that has been fired up this week - usually doesn't run more than several days out of the entire year. Once upon a time, it was a base load plant when oil was cheap... they would bring oil in primarily by ship with railroad tracks as a backup route for when the St. Lawrence Seaway would shut down for the winter. The tracks to the plant's tank farm a few miles away are still in place, but grade crossings are all paved over and hasn't seen a train in at least 15 years.
... when The Onion becomes more and more believable.
No - no gasoline used.
Alcoa in upstate NY has a 478 MW allotment of hydro power from the NY Power Authority - and located not too far from the hydro plant on the St. Lawrence River in Messena. There's rolled aluminum Alcan plant in Scriba, NY with a large 1,000 MW natural gas electric plant right next door, and a few miles from a three-reactor nuclear power plant with a combined output of 2,400 MW.
However, if it makes you feel better, a few miles away in Oswego, NY - there's a large oil-fired 1,700 MW "peaker" generating plant that fires up during periods of peak demand (i.e., very hot days).
Most power production in NY is hydro, nuclear and natural gas. Coal makes up about 9% of the state's generating capacity and is being phased out with most coal plants mothballed or in the process of demolition. The rest comes from oil (rarely used) and wind (about 3% now).