I agree. For an inkjet all-in-one, I'd recommend the Canon MX882 or its follow-on models. The printer is fast and high-quality, and has a bypass input slot and a duplexer. The scanner is as good as any standalone consumer-grade photo scanner you can find nowadays—which is not a given in the multifunction machines—and it has an automatic document feeder with duplexer. It has wired and WiFi networking, and it generally just works.
My place of work insists that I have a Brother MFC-J5910DW as a home-office printer. Next to the Canon, it's a piece of crap. The print quality is atrocious. The paper tray was designed by a sadist. It jams far too often—I don't think I've ever had a paper jam in the Canon. While it can duplex print, the ADF cannot duplex scan. Scans are washed out with poor color fidelity. The front-panel interface has a strong affinity for fax mode, even when there's no phone line connected: if the thing's been idle for any period of time, it's in fax mode the next time you try to use it... and if you push a different mode button to wake it up, it give you error beeps until it finishes waking up and starting fax mode. At least once every 48 hours, it startles you by entering a loud self-cleaning cycle that purges a little more ink from the system.
Given that Thunderbolt carries not only the equivalent of a PCIe x4 connection, but also a DisplayPort connection... and that the new Mac Pro has six Thunderbolt 2 connections... it's obvious that the HDMI port is there as a convenience for those who would otherwise bitch about having to buy a Mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort/DVI/HDMI/VGA cable. Since Apple has advertised the unit as supporting three 4K displays out of the box, obviously at least three of those Thunderbolt 2 ports can be used for DisplayPort video.
Yes, Time Warner's top-tier 50Mbps is priced beyond the reach of most customers. At $100/month, it's a luxury.
But there's another issue. Right now, the biggest reason to get big bandwidth at home is to support multiple users with diverse interests. There are a lot of potential uses where the upstream bandwidth just isn't there to justify a fatter pipe. Netflix may have a content-delivery network to support higher speeds... but TWC hasn't signed on for it. For most people who work from home, their employer doesn't have enough bandwidth to make a bigger pipe useful. If your employer has only a 45Mbps connection shared by all business needs, you're going to saturate any remaining bandwidth with a 50Mbps connection at home; why would you need gigabit to work from home? In that scenario, 50Mbps is only useful so the kids can Netflix without crimping your VPN speeds... And to get the higher return-path speeds that come with it.
Netflix and its rivals don't come close to using 50Mbps bandwidth per stream. They usually stream closer to 3Mbps. If they offered hire quality streams, or if there was a lot of 4K-resolution content out there, there'd be more demand.
The uses for ultra wideband bandwidth will come, but they're not here yet for most people... And especially not at those prices.
I had a better solution for long-distance sales calls for a while before Do Not Call. I worked for a telecom company. When the marketer would call and assure me that he could save me money and beat my current rates, I could truthfully reply "Well, I work for XYZ Telecom, and so I get free long distance. So how much are you willing to pay me to use your service?" This would reliably end the call...
Oh, and unless you have a minimum of three able-bodied people on site at all times, some sort of server lift is a must. Preferably one that is electric, has no fluids to leak, and has a shelf that slides to ease insertion and removal of servers. They are expensive, but they turn three-man jobs into one-man jobs... And prevent worker's-comp cases.
A label maker designed to make cable labels. That means it's designed to use wide tape and print on it sideways, and it will take flexible vinyl tape. The best ones print on "self-laminating" labels that are opaque where the label is printed, but clear at the end, so the overlap protects the printing.
At least one, and preferably two, USB 2.0 to IDE/SATA converters. There are plenty of ways in which you can find yourself with a bare drive you need data from, and no good way to plug it in. Also, in a pinch, a bare CD-ROM can become an external drive for a server with no drive. These things are cheap, and when you need one, you REALLY need one right now.
You must be trolling; surely you're not so thick as to not grasp the meaning of "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States"?
The First Amendment guarantees your right of freedom of speech. The Fourteenth Amendment, as quoted above, says no state can pass a law that takes away rights granted by the United States Constitution. Being part of the United States, New York, like the other 49 states, is bound by the United States Constitution, including the Fourteenth Amendment... and thus, by extension, the First Amendment. QED.
So there was a tiny 3kg uranium pile at Kodak Park... that'd be south and a bit west of the nuclear power plant, and more or less due north from the University's massive laser-pumped fusion reactor that generates temperatures of 200,000,000K. Somehow, I think those of us living in Rochester were already aware of the possibility of an atomic disaster.;)
And you have to realize that Kodak Park, back then, was big enough to have its own fire department. Not a fire engine. Not a fire house. A fire department with multiple stations throughout the Park, all trained to handle utterly massive hazmat incidents and fires. Kodak Park was the biggest chemical-processing facility this side of the Mississippi... which, of course, includes all of New Jersey. When local fire departments needed hazmat training, they went to Kodak. I worked there; trust me, three kilograms of uranium was probably one of the smallest disaster risks inherent in the operation. Miles of pipelines carrying acids and solvents, massive steam works from a power plant big enough to run a small city... Every day I drove past this gleaming stainless steel tank, think a milk tanker stood on end, labelled "LIQUID NITROGEN—NOT COMPATIBLE WITH LIFE". That was fun on windy days when it would sway, and images from Terminator 2 unavoidably came to mind.
Kodak has its problems and warts, but anyone accusing Kodak of disdain for Rochester is exhibiting an utter ignorance of the histories of Rochester, Kodak, and George Eastman. I'd frankly be hard-pressed to come up with an example of a company that's done more for their community. (Recent run-into-the-ground years excepted...)
Not effectively, as they cannot arrest someone claiming self-defense without provable probable cause that it wasn't self-defense. Since there's often no other living witness than the shooter, and you can't compel the shooter to provide evidence without an arrest, there's damned little investigation possible. See, e.g., http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2012/03/trayvon-martin-and-floridas-stand-your-ground-law.html
In "duty to flee" states, you must run from a conflict if you are sure it is safe to do so. In most cases where you would need to use force in self-defense legitimately, it is not clearly safe to run away. In duty-to-flee states, if you're cornered, you're free to use as much force as necessary in self-defense.
The problem with Florida's law is that it takes self-defense from being a defense against a charge of homicide, and turns it into utter immunity from arrest or prosecution for anyone with even a barely-plausible claim of self-defense. The police can't investigate, because it could lead to violating that immunity. The previous law, which still protected you from legitimately shooting first in self-defense, at least let the police detain you to make sure your story was legit and collect evidence to back it up. Not so with the new law.
Plus, there IS a direct link to Google's core businesses. Google pays people to drive cars around the world taking photographs for Street View, and collecting WiFi data for geolocation services. To keep that information up-to-date, they have to keep driving those cars around. If they can figure out how to automate those cars, they can reduce the cost of acquiring that data: no driver to pay, no human limits on the hours driven... Yes, the whole program will cost a lot, and it would take forever to recoup the costs from the savings... but if you look at it from a "what will we spend this year" standpoint, you could see a potential benefit in a reasonable time.
In the meantime, they're learning how to make high-powered servers run in a low-power environment that doesn't have the ability to support super-exotic cooling infrastructure. Want to bet that pays off in future generations of custom-built server farms that have DC power from solar panels?
I have no idea if these things are true, but they're plausible. The folks who wrote this article didn't try too hard to figure out the synergies.
I had a Philips Pronto remote control, one of the early ones. The great thing was that you could program its touchscreen with anything you wanted, down to a pixel level if you wanted to take the time. So, it could emulate any remote. Sounds great... but in practice, it sucked. The thing had hard buttons for channel up/down, volume up/down, and mute. There were two additional programmable hard buttons. For anything else, you'd have to hit the button on the side to turn on the backlight (if it was dark in the room at all), look down at the screen, possibly scroll through a number of pages, find the button, and press it. Trying to use a TiVo was an exercise in frustration; you simply cannot target taps on a touchscreen accurately without looking.
The Pronto quickly became the device we used to turn the A/V system on and off, and change modes... a macro device. For actually watching TV, we used the TiVo peanut, because it could be operated by touch while you were looking elsewhere.
I tried using various iPad apps to control the TiVo. They suffer from the same problem. The official TiVo app is a little better; it offers gesture-based control as an option, but it's not compelling. Besides, I want to be doing other things on my iPad while I'm watching TV, not using it as an outrageously expensive yet awkward remote. The few things the apps are good for are text entry and browsing the program guide without interrupting the current program.
I've since upgraded from the Pronto to a Logitech Harmony One. It's not perfect, and it's not as customizable as the old Pronto, but it's pretty good. It has enough hard buttons to control everything without looking. It supports macros to turn stuff on and off and change settings. It has a touchscreen to accommodate those few functions that don't have hard buttons. Of course, any time you have to use the touchscreen, it's the same problem: you have to look down and find the button.
The solution isn't making the tablet a remote, or making the tablet the TV and the TV a remote display. I'm not sure what the solution is, but part of it would be some way to simply "flick" what I'm watching from tablet to TV and back again, without locking the tablet into feeding the TV or vice-versa.
Oh good Lord, no... Given how often my tape robots break. They jam, they get confused... The last thing I need with a downed server is some robot trying to crimp it in two because a roller got worn and lacked grip. Plus, when the robot breaks, how hard will it be for a human to get in and do things manually? Especially when the mechanism is from the low bidder, because the execs will never pay for a good one...
I'm a professional UNIX admin. I've worked extensively with both FreeBSD and Solaris for years. Most of my recent work experience has been with Solaris 10, but I've run FreeBSD at home for years.
I recently needed to stand up a new application server at home. I considered using Linux, using OpenSolaris, or using FreeBSD.
I considered Fedora because the handwriting is on the wall where I work: the company will not permit new Solaris installations, in large part because it's not clear that Sun will still be a viable concern in a year or two. The corporate direction is to move to Red Hat. However, I quickly became infuriated with the poor quality of Fedora's documentation. I couldn't find clear answers to setup questions. This wasn't a problem with either FreeBSD or OpenSolaris. This took Fedora out of the running for me.
I decided to try OpenSolaris, because I know Solaris 10 and it might be useful to have the extra practice system at home. But OpenSolaris isn't Solaris 10. It doesn't have the driver support.
What really caused me to wipe out my OpenSolaris install and go with FreeBSD, however, was learning that Sun doesn't even supply security patches for OpenSolaris. If a security issue arises, you either have to wait for the next OpenSolaris release, or go about rebuilding from source. If you want prompt security patches, you have to pay for a Sun support contract -- and pay just as much as you'd pay for the "commercially supported" Solaris 10.
This astounded me. On Solaris 10, Sun provides critical security patches free of charge. Why does the "commerical" package provide free security patches, but the "open source" package doesn't?
There are features in OpenSolaris and Solaris 10 that FreeBSD doesn't have. But, speaking as a certified Solaris admin, I have to say that FreeBSD is more supportable if you can't afford the Sun support contract.
So, I would, and did, go with FreeBSD. It works great, it's solid, it's well supported, it runs well on all sorts of hardware, and it's likely to be around for a while. If the European Union drags out the Oracle/Sun deal much longer, I don't know that Sun will be able to avoid liquidation. Even if the deal goes through, Sun has a big challenge; a lot of their best customers have pulled away because of the uncertainty -- and the decline in support quality over the past year or two. I don't think that Solaris experience means quite as much as it used to on a resume.
LIDAR requires that the officer be stationary, have their window rolled down, be parked such that they are shooting LIDAR as close to parallel with the flow of traffic as possible, and not have any weather conditions that would obstruct the laser (or make life really miserable for the officer, as the window is down). The officer has to actively aim the device at each car he wishes to clock.
On the New York State Thruway, most of the traffic enforcement still uses Ka-band radar. The radar units are permanently installed on the cars and don't require exposure to the elements. They can provide accurate readings while the car is in motion, allowing the officer to patrol while still checking speed. Many cars have dual fore-and-aft antennas so they can clock cars ahead of and behind them. They can park the car and leave the radar on, not only slowing down traffic that has radar detectors, but letting them work on other things while waiting for the radar's "too fast" alarm to go off.
I'm not surprised NYS Troopers don't use LIDAR as often -- it's much more of a hassle for them to use.
As for detecting LIDAR: If you have a dark-colored car without a lot of reflective chrome or a front license plate, and you leave your headlights on, it is possible to detect LIDAR before it locks on to you, at least some of the time. Car and Driver tested this several years ago and found that, while it's difficult to beat LIDAR, it's not impossible.
As for "instant-on" radar: Yes, it exists, but there's that convenience issue again. Rarely do I ever see officers using it on the highway. Should one wish to speed while using their radar detector, the safe thing is to only do so when there's at least a few cars visible ahead of you. That way, your detector will be set off when the officer uses their "instant-on" to clock the cars ahead of you.
One of my ex-girlfriends was of Hispanic descent, and was born in New Mexico. While living in Rochester, NY, she was driving her mother's Ford Escort, which had New Mexico plates on it.
One evening, a Rochester police officer followed her home to our suburban apartment from her downtown office. In the parking lot, he proceeded to detain her and demand that she present her green card, since she was obviously a Mexican given the plates on her car. The fact that she had a valid New York driver's license, and plenty of other supporting identification documents, didn't override the damning evidence of the registration tags for this officer.
The ex-girlfriend, having relatives who were cops, politely objected. The officer apparently called his sergeant for backup. When the sergeant arrived, he educated the patrolman on the fact that New Mexico is part of the United States, and people from New Mexico are U.S. citizens who do not need green cards...
There are plenty of intelligent cops out there. There are also some astoundingly stupid ones. This is why we have laws and Constitutions that limit police power.
Customers turned away by employees who were on their lunch break?
In the U.S., depending on the state, that could be a legal obligation of the company. For instance, in New York, most day-shift employees are entitled to a half-hour lunch break sometime between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. during which time their employer may not permit them to work. The employee cannot waive this. It's part of the state Labor Law. It even applies to salaried workers and managers.
If the company needs to serve customers during the lunch hour, it's on the employer to make sure they're staffed adequately so that they have people who aren't on lunch break to provide that service.
The Bill of Rights enumerates certain natural rights that you have which the U.S. Government is forbidden from taking away from you.
The Bill of Rights wasn't part of the Constitution from day one, because the Founding Fathers thought these "inalienable human rights" were so blindly obvious that it wasn't necessary to write them down. Read the Declaration of Independence--they broke away from England because the Crown had abridged these rights, and they said so. They felt that should be enough. Later, they reconsidered how stupid their descendants might be, and wrote the Bill of Rights.
You do not have a Constitutional right to free speech. You have a natural right to free speech, that the founders of this country considered a basic right of any human being regardless of their location or government. The United States Government is prohibited from abridging that right by the First Amendment, as you noted:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Read it closely: It assumes that you already have those rights.
Don't believe me? Go to your local library and look up Constitutional law.
The OP is trying to secure a seven-year-old's computer from her parents. That's nuts -- no responsible parent is going to let that stand.
Our 15-year-old doesn't have unfettered access to the Internet or her computer.
The basic rules on our house are simple:
If you want to have a computer in your room, it will be monitored.
The web access is filtered and logged. The filtering is frequently revised depending on how much maturity and responsibility you show.
Your chats are logged.
It's my computer. I have root. I can see everything. Including your screen, via VNC.
I own the network, and any packet you push over it can be read by me.
Most importantly, I have many, many better things to do with my time than obsess over what you're doing and play voyeur. If you don't give me any reason to wonder what the hell you're up to, I probably won't look at the logs. If you stop talking to us, if you're acting weird and all secretive, expect that we will check up on you.
I remember what I got away with, back when all we had was CompuServe and PeopleLink.
If you don't want all that monitoring, we can put the computer in the living room, where you can only use it when we're around.
I can hear the younger set already getting their feathers ruffled, ready to reply about how fascist this policy is. Let me pretend for a moment that you're my daughter, and give you my reply:
Remember that time you IM'd your boyfriend and told him to come over as soon as we were asleep? Remember how I noticed you were acting strange all evening and watched your chat log, and pretended to sleep? And we caught him sneaking over just before the neighbor came home from his night-shift job as a prison guard? What do you think the armed policeman would have done to your hoodie-wearing, punk-looking boyfriend skulking in the shadows between our homes?
We won't go into all the other little embarrassing moments where we caught a lapse in judgement and helped you learn from it before it hurt you.
Thankfully those are getting less frequent. You're maturing. That's why you're seeing more swear words.
But you still don't know the difference between a trojan horse and a Trojan Magnum, despite our best efforts, so don't expect that I'm about to let you download executables. And as long as the RIAA is on the warpath, if your attitude toward "downloading MP3s is illegal" is "so?" you'd better believe I'm blocking those, too.
And stop saying that all your friends have unfettered access. We know better. Your friends all come over to use your computer because you don't have us literally watching over your shoulder all the time. They think we're pretty cool, no matter how often you say they hate us when they're not around.
Now get out there and shovel the driveway, the snow's starting to pile up out there.
Besides... although I keep a careful eye on her activities... it is not as airtight as I could make it. If she really wanted to, she could find ways past it. And if she put the effort into it, I'd even be proud.
I had a Nintendo 64 when it came out, and I played with it occasionally. I got one of the last "thick" PS2s, and a small handful of games for it. Every 6 to 9 months, I'd see some game that seemed interesting, and play it for a week or two. Between times the PS2 gathered dust.
I finally got my hands on a Wii last February. Since then, it's been used at least three times a week, sometimes daily. I played through Twilight Princess, then downloaded Ocarina and played farther through it than I ever had on the N64. The girlfriend and daughter enjoy the Everybody Votes Channel, and once the Wii is on to "check for questions" it usually winds up being used for some game or other. Games where the people watching can "help" are popular at my house: Twilight Princess, Super Paper Mario, GameCube titles like Wind Waker and Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door. I play a lot of Virtual Console games from my childhood. Lately, I've not used the Wii quite as much... because I'm playing Phantom Hourglass on the DS. (The girlfriend has complained that Nintendo needs to provide some way of mirroring the DS screen to the TV via the Wii, so that she can watch me play.) We occasionally play Mario Party 8 or Wii Sports together as a family.
In short, the Wii has seen several orders of magnitude more play time than any other console I've owned since the Atari 2600.
It'll get a lot more use when Nintendo releases some form of Tetris for it. The girlfriend will shove me aside to get her mitts on the Wiimote when that happens.
I'm not a kid anymore, but I still like me some toys. The Wii is just plain fun. Nintendo understands how to make fun games, and that they don't have to be hi-def eye candy if they're actually enjoyable. The "shovelware" vendors don't get this. That's why they're scared -- their business model is based on pretty, not fun, and that business model doesn't work for Wii owners.
I'm a professional UNIX administrator. I use Macs at home because they just work. By the time I get home, I don't want to muck with the computer anymore, I just want to do things. The Wii, especially with Nintendo games, is just fun. I'm not a Nintendo fanboy -- I hated Nintendo when I was young and an Atari fanboy -- I just think that this product meets an untapped need really well.
In my opinion, the people pooh-poohing the Wii because of its graphics seem a lot like the folks who derided the Mac's "toy-like" graphic interface, or the iPod's "limited" interface compared to the Rio... such people completely miss the point that they aren't the mass market, and sometimes simpler is better. "The Wii is dying" is the "BSD is dying" for 2007, I guess.
Actually, AT&T is the local telco in Connecticut. It used to be Southern New England Telephone (SNET), but SBC bought SNET, and then SBC bought AT&T and renamed themselves.
There's a similar bug in SimCity 2000, at least for Mac.
Type "FUND", which gave you $20K in the original SimCity, and SC2K offers to give you a bond at 25% interest instead, which would be insane. Take it anyway. Then do the same thing again. Then go to your financial advisor and take out a bond the normal way. You'll be offered a bond at ".%" interest. Thanks to the miracle of integer wraparound, you will now have a bond with a huge negative interest rate that will throw over a million dollars a year into your city's coffers. Just don't pay back that third bond...
As a long-time Mac fan, the first thing that occurred to me when the Wii was so hard to find this winter was... is this a Nintendo problem? or an IBM problem?
IBM is notorious for production volume issues with PowerPC chips. Several times, Apple had to delay planned product refreshes because IBM simply couldn't churn out enough new-model chips to meet the projected demand. (Motorola was even worse.) It was IBM's supply issues, combined with an inability to break certain performance-per-watt barriers in the PowerPC design, that lead Steve Jobs to switch the Mac to Intel chips.
I strongly suspect that IBM is unable to supply enough Broadway chips to meet Nintendo's needs, even if Nintendo hired as much contract-manufacturing capacity as they could find to churn out Wiis. A Wii without a CPU isn't much use. Perhaps the problem is made worse by IBM also having to turn out Cell processors for Sony at the same time.
If my theory is true, I wonder... once Sony stops stuffing the retail channel with unwanted PS3s just so they can say they've "shipped" umpteen thousand units... will we see more Wiis as IBM diverts manufacturing capacity from Cell to Broadway?
...or you just get a decent universal remote, like a Philips Pronto, and make your life simple without sacrificing quality...
They aren't cheap, but good things never are. I have an early model Pronto, and it works great. You can program it for pretty much anything, and because it's a touchscreen there's no worry that it won't have the buttons you need.
Best part is that you can set up macros. My Pronto's main screen just has a list: Watch TV, Watch DVD, Play PS2, Play Wii...
When I touch "Play PS2"
the TV turns on
the TV input gets set to Video 3
the TV's color mode is set to Standard (which is set brighter than the Pro setting I use for watching TV, so games aren't too muddy) using a sequence of menu commands
the receiver gets turned on and set to TV
the PlayStation gets turned on
the Pronto's display changes to a new screen with the options "Back to TV" and "Turn All Off"
That's the proper geek way to handle remotes -- more technology!
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I agree. For an inkjet all-in-one, I'd recommend the Canon MX882 or its follow-on models. The printer is fast and high-quality, and has a bypass input slot and a duplexer. The scanner is as good as any standalone consumer-grade photo scanner you can find nowadays—which is not a given in the multifunction machines—and it has an automatic document feeder with duplexer. It has wired and WiFi networking, and it generally just works.
My place of work insists that I have a Brother MFC-J5910DW as a home-office printer. Next to the Canon, it's a piece of crap. The print quality is atrocious. The paper tray was designed by a sadist. It jams far too often—I don't think I've ever had a paper jam in the Canon. While it can duplex print, the ADF cannot duplex scan. Scans are washed out with poor color fidelity. The front-panel interface has a strong affinity for fax mode, even when there's no phone line connected: if the thing's been idle for any period of time, it's in fax mode the next time you try to use it... and if you push a different mode button to wake it up, it give you error beeps until it finishes waking up and starting fax mode. At least once every 48 hours, it startles you by entering a loud self-cleaning cycle that purges a little more ink from the system.
Given that Thunderbolt carries not only the equivalent of a PCIe x4 connection, but also a DisplayPort connection... and that the new Mac Pro has six Thunderbolt 2 connections... it's obvious that the HDMI port is there as a convenience for those who would otherwise bitch about having to buy a Mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort/DVI/HDMI/VGA cable. Since Apple has advertised the unit as supporting three 4K displays out of the box, obviously at least three of those Thunderbolt 2 ports can be used for DisplayPort video.
Yes, Time Warner's top-tier 50Mbps is priced beyond the reach of most customers. At $100/month, it's a luxury.
But there's another issue. Right now, the biggest reason to get big bandwidth at home is to support multiple users with diverse interests. There are a lot of potential uses where the upstream bandwidth just isn't there to justify a fatter pipe. Netflix may have a content-delivery network to support higher speeds... but TWC hasn't signed on for it. For most people who work from home, their employer doesn't have enough bandwidth to make a bigger pipe useful. If your employer has only a 45Mbps connection shared by all business needs, you're going to saturate any remaining bandwidth with a 50Mbps connection at home; why would you need gigabit to work from home? In that scenario, 50Mbps is only useful so the kids can Netflix without crimping your VPN speeds... And to get the higher return-path speeds that come with it.
Netflix and its rivals don't come close to using 50Mbps bandwidth per stream. They usually stream closer to 3Mbps. If they offered hire quality streams, or if there was a lot of 4K-resolution content out there, there'd be more demand.
The uses for ultra wideband bandwidth will come, but they're not here yet for most people... And especially not at those prices.
I had a better solution for long-distance sales calls for a while before Do Not Call. I worked for a telecom company. When the marketer would call and assure me that he could save me money and beat my current rates, I could truthfully reply "Well, I work for XYZ Telecom, and so I get free long distance. So how much are you willing to pay me to use your service?" This would reliably end the call...
Oh, and unless you have a minimum of three able-bodied people on site at all times, some sort of server lift is a must. Preferably one that is electric, has no fluids to leak, and has a shelf that slides to ease insertion and removal of servers. They are expensive, but they turn three-man jobs into one-man jobs... And prevent worker's-comp cases.
A label maker designed to make cable labels. That means it's designed to use wide tape and print on it sideways, and it will take flexible vinyl tape. The best ones print on "self-laminating" labels that are opaque where the label is printed, but clear at the end, so the overlap protects the printing.
At least one, and preferably two, USB 2.0 to IDE/SATA converters. There are plenty of ways in which you can find yourself with a bare drive you need data from, and no good way to plug it in. Also, in a pinch, a bare CD-ROM can become an external drive for a server with no drive. These things are cheap, and when you need one, you REALLY need one right now.
You must be trolling; surely you're not so thick as to not grasp the meaning of "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States"?
The First Amendment guarantees your right of freedom of speech. The Fourteenth Amendment, as quoted above, says no state can pass a law that takes away rights granted by the United States Constitution. Being part of the United States, New York, like the other 49 states, is bound by the United States Constitution, including the Fourteenth Amendment... and thus, by extension, the First Amendment. QED.
So there was a tiny 3kg uranium pile at Kodak Park... that'd be south and a bit west of the nuclear power plant, and more or less due north from the University's massive laser-pumped fusion reactor that generates temperatures of 200,000,000K. Somehow, I think those of us living in Rochester were already aware of the possibility of an atomic disaster. ;)
And you have to realize that Kodak Park, back then, was big enough to have its own fire department. Not a fire engine. Not a fire house. A fire department with multiple stations throughout the Park, all trained to handle utterly massive hazmat incidents and fires. Kodak Park was the biggest chemical-processing facility this side of the Mississippi... which, of course, includes all of New Jersey. When local fire departments needed hazmat training, they went to Kodak. I worked there; trust me, three kilograms of uranium was probably one of the smallest disaster risks inherent in the operation. Miles of pipelines carrying acids and solvents, massive steam works from a power plant big enough to run a small city... Every day I drove past this gleaming stainless steel tank, think a milk tanker stood on end, labelled "LIQUID NITROGEN—NOT COMPATIBLE WITH LIFE". That was fun on windy days when it would sway, and images from Terminator 2 unavoidably came to mind.
Kodak has its problems and warts, but anyone accusing Kodak of disdain for Rochester is exhibiting an utter ignorance of the histories of Rochester, Kodak, and George Eastman. I'd frankly be hard-pressed to come up with an example of a company that's done more for their community. (Recent run-into-the-ground years excepted...)
Not effectively, as they cannot arrest someone claiming self-defense without provable probable cause that it wasn't self-defense. Since there's often no other living witness than the shooter, and you can't compel the shooter to provide evidence without an arrest, there's damned little investigation possible. See, e.g., http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2012/03/trayvon-martin-and-floridas-stand-your-ground-law.html
Except that's not true.
In "duty to flee" states, you must run from a conflict if you are sure it is safe to do so. In most cases where you would need to use force in self-defense legitimately, it is not clearly safe to run away. In duty-to-flee states, if you're cornered, you're free to use as much force as necessary in self-defense.
The problem with Florida's law is that it takes self-defense from being a defense against a charge of homicide, and turns it into utter immunity from arrest or prosecution for anyone with even a barely-plausible claim of self-defense. The police can't investigate, because it could lead to violating that immunity. The previous law, which still protected you from legitimately shooting first in self-defense, at least let the police detain you to make sure your story was legit and collect evidence to back it up. Not so with the new law.
Plus, there IS a direct link to Google's core businesses. Google pays people to drive cars around the world taking photographs for Street View, and collecting WiFi data for geolocation services. To keep that information up-to-date, they have to keep driving those cars around. If they can figure out how to automate those cars, they can reduce the cost of acquiring that data: no driver to pay, no human limits on the hours driven... Yes, the whole program will cost a lot, and it would take forever to recoup the costs from the savings... but if you look at it from a "what will we spend this year" standpoint, you could see a potential benefit in a reasonable time.
In the meantime, they're learning how to make high-powered servers run in a low-power environment that doesn't have the ability to support super-exotic cooling infrastructure. Want to bet that pays off in future generations of custom-built server farms that have DC power from solar panels?
I have no idea if these things are true, but they're plausible. The folks who wrote this article didn't try too hard to figure out the synergies.
I agree, and I've been there and done that.
I had a Philips Pronto remote control, one of the early ones. The great thing was that you could program its touchscreen with anything you wanted, down to a pixel level if you wanted to take the time. So, it could emulate any remote. Sounds great... but in practice, it sucked. The thing had hard buttons for channel up/down, volume up/down, and mute. There were two additional programmable hard buttons. For anything else, you'd have to hit the button on the side to turn on the backlight (if it was dark in the room at all), look down at the screen, possibly scroll through a number of pages, find the button, and press it. Trying to use a TiVo was an exercise in frustration; you simply cannot target taps on a touchscreen accurately without looking.
The Pronto quickly became the device we used to turn the A/V system on and off, and change modes... a macro device. For actually watching TV, we used the TiVo peanut, because it could be operated by touch while you were looking elsewhere.
I tried using various iPad apps to control the TiVo. They suffer from the same problem. The official TiVo app is a little better; it offers gesture-based control as an option, but it's not compelling. Besides, I want to be doing other things on my iPad while I'm watching TV, not using it as an outrageously expensive yet awkward remote. The few things the apps are good for are text entry and browsing the program guide without interrupting the current program.
I've since upgraded from the Pronto to a Logitech Harmony One. It's not perfect, and it's not as customizable as the old Pronto, but it's pretty good. It has enough hard buttons to control everything without looking. It supports macros to turn stuff on and off and change settings. It has a touchscreen to accommodate those few functions that don't have hard buttons. Of course, any time you have to use the touchscreen, it's the same problem: you have to look down and find the button.
The solution isn't making the tablet a remote, or making the tablet the TV and the TV a remote display. I'm not sure what the solution is, but part of it would be some way to simply "flick" what I'm watching from tablet to TV and back again, without locking the tablet into feeding the TV or vice-versa.
Oh good Lord, no... Given how often my tape robots break. They jam, they get confused... The last thing I need with a downed server is some robot trying to crimp it in two because a roller got worn and lacked grip. Plus, when the robot breaks, how hard will it be for a human to get in and do things manually? Especially when the mechanism is from the low bidder, because the execs will never pay for a good one...
I'm a professional UNIX admin. I've worked extensively with both FreeBSD and Solaris for years. Most of my recent work experience has been with Solaris 10, but I've run FreeBSD at home for years.
I recently needed to stand up a new application server at home. I considered using Linux, using OpenSolaris, or using FreeBSD.
I considered Fedora because the handwriting is on the wall where I work: the company will not permit new Solaris installations, in large part because it's not clear that Sun will still be a viable concern in a year or two. The corporate direction is to move to Red Hat. However, I quickly became infuriated with the poor quality of Fedora's documentation. I couldn't find clear answers to setup questions. This wasn't a problem with either FreeBSD or OpenSolaris. This took Fedora out of the running for me.
I decided to try OpenSolaris, because I know Solaris 10 and it might be useful to have the extra practice system at home. But OpenSolaris isn't Solaris 10. It doesn't have the driver support.
What really caused me to wipe out my OpenSolaris install and go with FreeBSD, however, was learning that Sun doesn't even supply security patches for OpenSolaris. If a security issue arises, you either have to wait for the next OpenSolaris release, or go about rebuilding from source. If you want prompt security patches, you have to pay for a Sun support contract -- and pay just as much as you'd pay for the "commercially supported" Solaris 10.
This astounded me. On Solaris 10, Sun provides critical security patches free of charge. Why does the "commerical" package provide free security patches, but the "open source" package doesn't?
There are features in OpenSolaris and Solaris 10 that FreeBSD doesn't have. But, speaking as a certified Solaris admin, I have to say that FreeBSD is more supportable if you can't afford the Sun support contract.
So, I would, and did, go with FreeBSD. It works great, it's solid, it's well supported, it runs well on all sorts of hardware, and it's likely to be around for a while. If the European Union drags out the Oracle/Sun deal much longer, I don't know that Sun will be able to avoid liquidation. Even if the deal goes through, Sun has a big challenge; a lot of their best customers have pulled away because of the uncertainty -- and the decline in support quality over the past year or two. I don't think that Solaris experience means quite as much as it used to on a resume.
LIDAR requires that the officer be stationary, have their window rolled down, be parked such that they are shooting LIDAR as close to parallel with the flow of traffic as possible, and not have any weather conditions that would obstruct the laser (or make life really miserable for the officer, as the window is down). The officer has to actively aim the device at each car he wishes to clock.
On the New York State Thruway, most of the traffic enforcement still uses Ka-band radar. The radar units are permanently installed on the cars and don't require exposure to the elements. They can provide accurate readings while the car is in motion, allowing the officer to patrol while still checking speed. Many cars have dual fore-and-aft antennas so they can clock cars ahead of and behind them. They can park the car and leave the radar on, not only slowing down traffic that has radar detectors, but letting them work on other things while waiting for the radar's "too fast" alarm to go off.
I'm not surprised NYS Troopers don't use LIDAR as often -- it's much more of a hassle for them to use.
As for detecting LIDAR: If you have a dark-colored car without a lot of reflective chrome or a front license plate, and you leave your headlights on, it is possible to detect LIDAR before it locks on to you, at least some of the time. Car and Driver tested this several years ago and found that, while it's difficult to beat LIDAR, it's not impossible.
As for "instant-on" radar: Yes, it exists, but there's that convenience issue again. Rarely do I ever see officers using it on the highway. Should one wish to speed while using their radar detector, the safe thing is to only do so when there's at least a few cars visible ahead of you. That way, your detector will be set off when the officer uses their "instant-on" to clock the cars ahead of you.
One of my ex-girlfriends was of Hispanic descent, and was born in New Mexico. While living in Rochester, NY, she was driving her mother's Ford Escort, which had New Mexico plates on it.
One evening, a Rochester police officer followed her home to our suburban apartment from her downtown office. In the parking lot, he proceeded to detain her and demand that she present her green card, since she was obviously a Mexican given the plates on her car. The fact that she had a valid New York driver's license, and plenty of other supporting identification documents, didn't override the damning evidence of the registration tags for this officer.
The ex-girlfriend, having relatives who were cops, politely objected. The officer apparently called his sergeant for backup. When the sergeant arrived, he educated the patrolman on the fact that New Mexico is part of the United States, and people from New Mexico are U.S. citizens who do not need green cards...
There are plenty of intelligent cops out there. There are also some astoundingly stupid ones. This is why we have laws and Constitutions that limit police power.
Customers turned away by employees who were on their lunch break?
In the U.S., depending on the state, that could be a legal obligation of the company. For instance, in New York, most day-shift employees are entitled to a half-hour lunch break sometime between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. during which time their employer may not permit them to work. The employee cannot waive this. It's part of the state Labor Law. It even applies to salaried workers and managers.
If the company needs to serve customers during the lunch hour, it's on the employer to make sure they're staffed adequately so that they have people who aren't on lunch break to provide that service.
The Constitution does not grant you any rights.
The Bill of Rights enumerates certain natural rights that you have which the U.S. Government is forbidden from taking away from you.
The Bill of Rights wasn't part of the Constitution from day one, because the Founding Fathers thought these "inalienable human rights" were so blindly obvious that it wasn't necessary to write them down. Read the Declaration of Independence--they broke away from England because the Crown had abridged these rights, and they said so. They felt that should be enough. Later, they reconsidered how stupid their descendants might be, and wrote the Bill of Rights.
You do not have a Constitutional right to free speech. You have a natural right to free speech, that the founders of this country considered a basic right of any human being regardless of their location or government. The United States Government is prohibited from abridging that right by the First Amendment, as you noted:
Read it closely: It assumes that you already have those rights.
Don't believe me? Go to your local library and look up Constitutional law.
The OP is trying to secure a seven-year-old's computer from her parents. That's nuts -- no responsible parent is going to let that stand.
Our 15-year-old doesn't have unfettered access to the Internet or her computer.
The basic rules on our house are simple:
I can hear the younger set already getting their feathers ruffled, ready to reply about how fascist this policy is. Let me pretend for a moment that you're my daughter, and give you my reply:
Besides... although I keep a careful eye on her activities... it is not as airtight as I could make it. If she really wanted to, she could find ways past it. And if she put the effort into it, I'd even be proud.
I had a Nintendo 64 when it came out, and I played with it occasionally. I got one of the last "thick" PS2s, and a small handful of games for it. Every 6 to 9 months, I'd see some game that seemed interesting, and play it for a week or two. Between times the PS2 gathered dust.
I finally got my hands on a Wii last February. Since then, it's been used at least three times a week, sometimes daily. I played through Twilight Princess, then downloaded Ocarina and played farther through it than I ever had on the N64. The girlfriend and daughter enjoy the Everybody Votes Channel, and once the Wii is on to "check for questions" it usually winds up being used for some game or other. Games where the people watching can "help" are popular at my house: Twilight Princess, Super Paper Mario, GameCube titles like Wind Waker and Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door. I play a lot of Virtual Console games from my childhood. Lately, I've not used the Wii quite as much... because I'm playing Phantom Hourglass on the DS. (The girlfriend has complained that Nintendo needs to provide some way of mirroring the DS screen to the TV via the Wii, so that she can watch me play.) We occasionally play Mario Party 8 or Wii Sports together as a family.
In short, the Wii has seen several orders of magnitude more play time than any other console I've owned since the Atari 2600.
It'll get a lot more use when Nintendo releases some form of Tetris for it. The girlfriend will shove me aside to get her mitts on the Wiimote when that happens.
I'm not a kid anymore, but I still like me some toys. The Wii is just plain fun. Nintendo understands how to make fun games, and that they don't have to be hi-def eye candy if they're actually enjoyable. The "shovelware" vendors don't get this. That's why they're scared -- their business model is based on pretty, not fun, and that business model doesn't work for Wii owners.
I'm a professional UNIX administrator. I use Macs at home because they just work. By the time I get home, I don't want to muck with the computer anymore, I just want to do things. The Wii, especially with Nintendo games, is just fun. I'm not a Nintendo fanboy -- I hated Nintendo when I was young and an Atari fanboy -- I just think that this product meets an untapped need really well.
In my opinion, the people pooh-poohing the Wii because of its graphics seem a lot like the folks who derided the Mac's "toy-like" graphic interface, or the iPod's "limited" interface compared to the Rio... such people completely miss the point that they aren't the mass market, and sometimes simpler is better. "The Wii is dying" is the "BSD is dying" for 2007, I guess.
Actually, AT&T is the local telco in Connecticut. It used to be Southern New England Telephone (SNET), but SBC bought SNET, and then SBC bought AT&T and renamed themselves.
There's a similar bug in SimCity 2000, at least for Mac.
Type "FUND", which gave you $20K in the original SimCity, and SC2K offers to give you a bond at 25% interest instead, which would be insane. Take it anyway. Then do the same thing again. Then go to your financial advisor and take out a bond the normal way. You'll be offered a bond at ".%" interest. Thanks to the miracle of integer wraparound, you will now have a bond with a huge negative interest rate that will throw over a million dollars a year into your city's coffers. Just don't pay back that third bond...
As a long-time Mac fan, the first thing that occurred to me when the Wii was so hard to find this winter was... is this a Nintendo problem? or an IBM problem?
IBM is notorious for production volume issues with PowerPC chips. Several times, Apple had to delay planned product refreshes because IBM simply couldn't churn out enough new-model chips to meet the projected demand. (Motorola was even worse.) It was IBM's supply issues, combined with an inability to break certain performance-per-watt barriers in the PowerPC design, that lead Steve Jobs to switch the Mac to Intel chips.
I strongly suspect that IBM is unable to supply enough Broadway chips to meet Nintendo's needs, even if Nintendo hired as much contract-manufacturing capacity as they could find to churn out Wiis. A Wii without a CPU isn't much use. Perhaps the problem is made worse by IBM also having to turn out Cell processors for Sony at the same time.
If my theory is true, I wonder... once Sony stops stuffing the retail channel with unwanted PS3s just so they can say they've "shipped" umpteen thousand units... will we see more Wiis as IBM diverts manufacturing capacity from Cell to Broadway?
...or you just get a decent universal remote, like a Philips Pronto, and make your life simple without sacrificing quality...
They aren't cheap, but good things never are. I have an early model Pronto, and it works great. You can program it for pretty much anything, and because it's a touchscreen there's no worry that it won't have the buttons you need.
Best part is that you can set up macros. My Pronto's main screen just has a list: Watch TV, Watch DVD, Play PS2, Play Wii...
When I touch "Play PS2"
That's the proper geek way to handle remotes -- more technology!