No you cannot get a 1500" inhabitable house sitting on 0.5 acres of land in California. I did an MLS search for the entire state and could not find any.
The one I was specifically references was JUST removed between yesterday and today, so it probably just went into escrow.
If you would have taken a few seconds to look, you would have seen that already I posted a follow-up with a list of several properties:
There are plenty of auctions starting anywhere from $10K to $30K, but they don't count because you do know the final bid.
That's true of ANY house for sale. If more than one person wants it, the price will go up. Banks are notorious for listing properties at low prices, but refusing to sell if they aren't exceeded. It's a terrible system, but that's the one we've got, and the only easy source of prices.
If you'd like to search through all the homes sold in the past 6 months to find a similar one and give us the price it went for, THAT would be useful information.
Just saying "Nope" without any numbers or figures really doesn't advance the discussion any.
When I see every new laser printer coming out with bluetooth included, I'll agree with you. Until then, no.
IrDA didn't have a lot of practical uses, but back in college, I was God-like for being able to write-up documents with full formatting, embedded charts, graphs, and images on my pocket-sized Psion PDA, and just use IrDA to print it out, right there in class, the lab, or at the library. The time saved was tremendous versus scribbling notes, going home to type it up and print it out.
Only a few could afford laptops, and they:
1) Didn't carry them around much because of size/weight and expense. Being too big to carry every time someone got up (e.g. to grab a book), several got stolen. 2) Took too long to pull out and start-up to use for quickly scribbling notes. Suspend/Hibernate didn't exist yet, and Standby was inconsistent and used lots of power. 3) Were big, taking up most of a desk. And were distractingly noisy. 4) Couldn't directly print on-campus. Instead had to find a PC without many restrictions on it, use a floppy (or e-mail) to copy the file over, and print from there.
Cell phones are vastly more powerful than my old PDA, but phones don't have touch-type keyboards, battery life is poor, and direct IrDA printing is a thing of the past. WiFi printing might be an option these days, but it is far more complex to setup.
We have a whole bunch of other solutions, like bluetooth for example, that's low power, invisible, and go way further than that.
Let me know when bluetooth hits "3.5 Gbps"...
And bluetooth really needs MORE power, because something like this can use your already-on LED lights in your house.
Something like this could make sense for any high-speed and mostly one-way communications. Streaming video to your TVs (or tablets, phones, etc.) around the house is an obvious use that WiFi does very, very poorly.
Costs extra if you want the half acre to be roughly horizontal and have electricity and water to the site.
Nope, not at all. California is just a huge state, with TONS of cheap vacant land wide open once you get some distance away from the big cities.
In fact, last time I checked: "BLM California manages 15.2 million acres of public lands, nearly 15% of the state's land area." http://www.blm.gov/ca/st/en.html
By the way, I live in NY, and there is not even cell service at my house. Currently it looks as if I will have satellite internet for the foreseeable future.
How far from the edge of cellular coverage are you? The limiting factor tends to be ground-level obstacles, so I'd try climbing up to the roof, and putting a cell phone on a pole, walking it around to seeing if I could get 1-bar. If so, a cell signal booster (or a MiFi device) on such a pole would give you access to much cheaper and lower-latency access. Just make sure the signal booster you buy is specifically designed for 4G/LTE frequencies of whatever carrier as well...
If you must absolutely have a stupid floating balloon or massive balloon parade, use hydrogen. When something happens, people will be so scared (even though a large hydrogen fire in an open space or a small one indoors aren't particularly dangerous by fire standards) they'll never want a balloon again unless it's filled with air.
But hydrogen is not easy for average folks to source, and not cheap... Meanwhile, natural gas is also lighter than air, and is cheap and very widely available. My cheap stove with detachable burners has an ideal orifice that makes it trivially easy to inflate balloons...
Microsoft imagined tablets back in the 90s. Nobody cared. Apple imagined them a couple years ago and people wet themselves like an excited dog
Actually, Apple imagined them back in the 80s, and nobody cared. See the Newton.
various data centers were built in various parts of the country due to low electricity costs, only to find that once they had built it, the utilities and local municipalities decided to jack the rates up.
And the EXACT SAME THING could happen with the natural gas utilities just as easily.
the local monopolistic energy companies wouldn't be able to dictate terms to anyone anymore. In effect, it would break their natural monopoly.
Major consumers are NOT at the mercy of the power grid. Many, MANY companies have built their own generators on-site. There's no reason Google, Facebook, Microsoft, the NSA, or others, couldn't build a power plant next to their data centers, and get electricity at COST. And they can get good prices for dumping any excess power into the grid. Just ask Alcoa about all that... In fact several of them HAVE installed large PV solar arrays on-site to cut down on their electrical costs already, so they're quite familiar with the concept.
All that said... let's be honest... it's still on the drawing board. Just like the flying car.
The real problem is that they're comparing hypothetical fuel cells, with real-world electrical prices.
Fuel cells absolutely have the potential to greatly increase the efficiency of converting natural gas into electricity, but there's no reason at all for them not to just be tied to the grid as soon as they become practical, getting maximum utilization, and driving down wholesale electricity prices.
They're also foolishly pretending that fuel cells would be 100% reliable, and would allow complete elimination of battery banks and on-site backup generators, which is laughable.
And even if you did need low-power, a tablet or an old netBook would be cheaper and lower power... Even a NEW Acer ChromeBook is pretty inexpensive and low powered, while having far superior specs, including the screen.
The 7" one you listed is utter joke. First of all it is not under $100. You forgot to look at the sneaky $70 shipping charge. After you add that, you are looking at $150.
A fair point, but there are many, many, MANY others without the ridiculous shipping charges:
Condition: New: A brand-new, unused, unopened, undamaged item in its original packaging (where packaging is applicable). Packaging should be the same as what is found in a retail store, unless the item is handmade or was packaged by the manufacturer in non-retail packaging, such as an unprinted box or plastic bag.
On the other hand, with a $35 Raspberry Pi, that's in the range of something a kid these days can actually save up for from their allowance, and if they screw up and destroy it, que sera, sera.
The Pi is only $35 for the bare-bones (actually $40 on Amazon). Throw in power supply, case, SD card, etc., and the price more than doubles. You can absolutely pick up a complete PC, off-lease or refurbished, for less money.
This project would be nothing if not for the clever marketing of linking this to the Raspberry Pi. Otherwise, it's just an overpriced, under-spec'd and under-featured monitor. With the switch to HDTV, every cheap little TV out there has HDMI inputs, and can incidentally also work as a TV:
You're right, it isn't that cheap, gets expensive fast, and even then makes a lousy PC.
An important part of its vision is to bring back the spirit of hacking, both software and hardware, that used to be possible in the old computers of the 1980s.
Software hacking can be done on any system, and equipment with higher performance and open drivers are better platforms. The only reason the RPI brought back hardware hacking was because it was misdesigned, so everybody ends up swapping USB port resistors. Other than that... You can learn a lot more about hardware with a full-fledged PC, with swapable CPUs, memory, video, etc.
A few GPIO pins is ALL you can point to, and you can get BETTER I/O hardware, CHEAPER for a PC, or just buying a less expenive Arduino.
Connect a USB hard drive, enable mass storage, and SSH access. Use sdparm to set it to spin-down after 30 minutes of inactivity. Install rsync. Give it a free dyndns address (or some other service that screws free customers less).
Stick this contraption in a datacenter, under your desk in your office, in a friends/neighbor's house, etc. If you can't get them to open a port on their firewall, then you'll need to do "reverse SSH" tunneling, but it'll still work just a bit slower.
Hell, if you can find a location to put it that's under a KM from your home, you could even skip the internet requirement, and use WiFi for connectivity. You could even do without the power grid, setting up a modest solar panel to charge a 12V battery... My USB HDD enclosure runs on 12V directly, and a $5 car cell phone charger can provide the 5V@2A the listed router needs:
In any case, you'd just need to figure out the rsync command-line options to run on your home computers to copy the differences over the wire with the minimal overhead.
Slashdot Mirror
The one I was specifically references was JUST removed between yesterday and today, so it probably just went into escrow.
If you would have taken a few seconds to look, you would have seen that already I posted a follow-up with a list of several properties:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4410885&cid=45338157
That's true of ANY house for sale. If more than one person wants it, the price will go up. Banks are notorious for listing properties at low prices, but refusing to sell if they aren't exceeded. It's a terrible system, but that's the one we've got, and the only easy source of prices.
If you'd like to search through all the homes sold in the past 6 months to find a similar one and give us the price it went for, THAT would be useful information.
Just saying "Nope" without any numbers or figures really doesn't advance the discussion any.
Homes in the USA also have windows...
When I see every new laser printer coming out with bluetooth included, I'll agree with you. Until then, no.
IrDA didn't have a lot of practical uses, but back in college, I was God-like for being able to write-up documents with full formatting, embedded charts, graphs, and images on my pocket-sized Psion PDA, and just use IrDA to print it out, right there in class, the lab, or at the library. The time saved was tremendous versus scribbling notes, going home to type it up and print it out.
Only a few could afford laptops, and they:
1) Didn't carry them around much because of size/weight and expense. Being too big to carry every time someone got up (e.g. to grab a book), several got stolen.
2) Took too long to pull out and start-up to use for quickly scribbling notes. Suspend/Hibernate didn't exist yet, and Standby was inconsistent and used lots of power.
3) Were big, taking up most of a desk. And were distractingly noisy.
4) Couldn't directly print on-campus. Instead had to find a PC without many restrictions on it, use a floppy (or e-mail) to copy the file over, and print from there.
Cell phones are vastly more powerful than my old PDA, but phones don't have touch-type keyboards, battery life is poor, and direct IrDA printing is a thing of the past. WiFi printing might be an option these days, but it is far more complex to setup.
Let me know when bluetooth hits "3.5 Gbps"...
And bluetooth really needs MORE power, because something like this can use your already-on LED lights in your house.
Something like this could make sense for any high-speed and mostly one-way communications. Streaming video to your TVs (or tablets, phones, etc.) around the house is an obvious use that WiFi does very, very poorly.
Nope, not at all. California is just a huge state, with TONS of cheap vacant land wide open once you get some distance away from the big cities.
In fact, last time I checked: "BLM California manages 15.2 million acres of public lands, nearly 15% of the state's land area." http://www.blm.gov/ca/st/en.html
$12,500 - level lot:
MLS# SK13219448
$23,000 - larger lot, small house
MLS# 41325545
$25,500 - nice house, 1/4 acre
MLS# 21479131
$27,500 - needs work
MLS# DC12107035
$28,000 - large house - 1/3rd acre
MLS# 21481501
$29,900 - Good condition
MLS# DC13046621
"California" is NOT just the SF Bay area, and your extreme myopia is showing...
Guess where you can buy a 1,500sq.ft. house on half an acre for $30,000?
Answer: California
How far from the edge of cellular coverage are you? The limiting factor tends to be ground-level obstacles, so I'd try climbing up to the roof, and putting a cell phone on a pole, walking it around to seeing if I could get 1-bar. If so, a cell signal booster (or a MiFi device) on such a pole would give you access to much cheaper and lower-latency access. Just make sure the signal booster you buy is specifically designed for 4G/LTE frequencies of whatever carrier as well...
I think we all have one big question:
With that kind of thrust, can we just add-on an extra oxygen tank, and convert it into the space-plane we've been promised for so long?
Perhaps this could be the proving grounds for a space shuttle replacement, powered by ramjets instead of solid rocket boosters?
But hydrogen is not easy for average folks to source, and not cheap... Meanwhile, natural gas is also lighter than air, and is cheap and very widely available. My cheap stove with detachable burners has an ideal orifice that makes it trivially easy to inflate balloons...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrhlRIvNjTc
Actually, Apple imagined them back in the 80s, and nobody cared. See the Newton.
And the EXACT SAME THING could happen with the natural gas utilities just as easily.
Major consumers are NOT at the mercy of the power grid. Many, MANY companies have built their own generators on-site. There's no reason Google, Facebook, Microsoft, the NSA, or others, couldn't build a power plant next to their data centers, and get electricity at COST. And they can get good prices for dumping any excess power into the grid. Just ask Alcoa about all that... In fact several of them HAVE installed large PV solar arrays on-site to cut down on their electrical costs already, so they're quite familiar with the concept.
The real problem is that they're comparing hypothetical fuel cells, with real-world electrical prices.
Fuel cells absolutely have the potential to greatly increase the efficiency of converting natural gas into electricity, but there's no reason at all for them not to just be tied to the grid as soon as they become practical, getting maximum utilization, and driving down wholesale electricity prices.
They're also foolishly pretending that fuel cells would be 100% reliable, and would allow complete elimination of battery banks and on-site backup generators, which is laughable.
And even if you did need low-power, a tablet or an old netBook would be cheaper and lower power... Even a NEW Acer ChromeBook is pretty inexpensive and low powered, while having far superior specs, including the screen.
No, YOU just knocked down a straw man. You are the one claiming you can only get a 300MHz PII for quite a bit more than a Pi, which is idiotic.
In fact cheap used 2GHz+ P4s are quite plentiful, and have plenty of storage, RAM, fast graphics, etc.
And who the hell doesn't have tons of old computers lying around?
See, just like you, I can spout crap and make mine hypothetically FREE, too.
A fair point, but there are many, many, MANY others without the ridiculous shipping charges:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Car-9-Digital-Stand-alone-Headrest-Monitor-Screen-HDMI-VGA-Port-Touch-Button-HD-/171098185346
Oh yeah?
Condition: New: A brand-new, unused, unopened, undamaged item in its original packaging (where packaging is applicable). Packaging should be the same as what is found in a retail store, unless the item is handmade or was packaged by the manufacturer in non-retail packaging, such as an unprinted box or plastic bag.
The Pi is only $35 for the bare-bones (actually $40 on Amazon). Throw in power supply, case, SD card, etc., and the price more than doubles. You can absolutely pick up a complete PC, off-lease or refurbished, for less money.
Everything I've seen indicates an ARM tablet is the cheaper, smaller, lighter, lower-power option once you factor in a screen.
If you've got anything to offer, other than baseless assertions, let's hear it.
Only if you don't want a monitor with it.
Gee... what's the topic of this story and thread, again?
This project would be nothing if not for the clever marketing of linking this to the Raspberry Pi. Otherwise, it's just an overpriced, under-spec'd and under-featured monitor. With the switch to HDTV, every cheap little TV out there has HDMI inputs, and can incidentally also work as a TV:
19" HDTV under $100:
http://www.walmart.com/ip/Seiki-SE19HY10-19-720p-60Hz-LED-HDTV/28379383
7" HDMI touch, under $100:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=161137962772
Just as many as you plug-in to the USB port...
http://numato.com/8-channel-usb-gpio-module
You're right, it isn't that cheap, gets expensive fast, and even then makes a lousy PC.
Software hacking can be done on any system, and equipment with higher performance and open drivers are better platforms. The only reason the RPI brought back hardware hacking was because it was misdesigned, so everybody ends up swapping USB port resistors. Other than that... You can learn a lot more about hardware with a full-fledged PC, with swapable CPUs, memory, video, etc.
A few GPIO pins is ALL you can point to, and you can get BETTER I/O hardware, CHEAPER for a PC, or just buying a less expenive Arduino.
Where's the challenge? What's the piece you can't figure out?
A DD-WRT compatible WiFi router with USB port goes for $30, and draws all of 2W of power.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B009AO64E8
Connect a USB hard drive, enable mass storage, and SSH access. Use sdparm to set it to spin-down after 30 minutes of inactivity. Install rsync. Give it a free dyndns address (or some other service that screws free customers less).
Stick this contraption in a datacenter, under your desk in your office, in a friends/neighbor's house, etc. If you can't get them to open a port on their firewall, then you'll need to do "reverse SSH" tunneling, but it'll still work just a bit slower.
Hell, if you can find a location to put it that's under a KM from your home, you could even skip the internet requirement, and use WiFi for connectivity. You could even do without the power grid, setting up a modest solar panel to charge a 12V battery... My USB HDD enclosure runs on 12V directly, and a $5 car cell phone charger can provide the 5V@2A the listed router needs:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0079BLTPS
In any case, you'd just need to figure out the rsync command-line options to run on your home computers to copy the differences over the wire with the minimal overhead.
It'll be part of the firmware... I.E. taking up space you can't access/use for anything, anyhow.
Kingsoft Office is also free and handles Microsoft Office formats, too.
Murdered with a Glock you say?
http://images.esellerpro.com/2225/I/254/2/lrgscaleTDP4030_3.jpg
A man could easily injure more than 6 people with a simple chef's knife, baseball bat, large flashlight, sharpened pencils, etc.
There are innumerable other "target-rich environments" elsewhere, that don't have police and armed guards swarming all over the place.
Shopping malls, movie theatres, ANY stores on Black Friday, or a few days before Christmas, restaurants during diner, the DMV, etc.
Despite earlier reports, he was NOT a TSA employee, but just a ticketed passenger.
Flying out of LAX always makes me want to shoot someone, too. (Too soon?)