Working in and around Baltimore and DC, I see the advantages and disadvantages of both spread out development (suburban sprawl) and a centralized business district linked to the surrounding area by a growing metro rail system. Part of my job is servicing equipment in the poorer sections of Washington, DC, where people apply for public assistance, and invariably those offices are at about the furthest populated point from a Metro stop you can find in the district. On the corridors that Metro serves, the city has an air of vibrancy and prosperity, they are advertising million dollar townhomes in Bethesda, near a Metro stop. The areas poorly served are areas where you want to be out of there after dark. Even in these areas, parking is at a premium,
DC has some of the worst traffic in the nation despite this, due to centralized business districts, and the necessity for cars and trucks to drive around delivering goods and provide services to people and businesses in the center of town and in the edge cities as well. Out in the edge cities, major employers often have campuses which have no metro stops, large parking garages, and if they are lucky, a shuttle that runs occasionally to a Metro stop. Throw in DC's status as a major tourist destination, and you have a Beltway and major radiating arteries that can be clogged at any hour of night or day.
My thinking is that there is an optimal size for a city, if it gets too large the infrastructure needed to move all those goods and people around increases exponentially, which is why it costs so much more to live a certain standard of living in places like NYC/DC/LAX/CHI/SF than it does in places like Cincinnati or Omaha. That optimal size is affected by the opportunities available in a given area, versus the cost of providing adequate infrastructure to serve an area. Basic Econ 101.
Homebrewing stores (the malt kind that is) have made a successful business model of teaching people how to brew beer in a 3 hour class charging a nominal fee, Afterwards they are lined up buying all sorts of brewing ingredients and paraphernalia..
Seriously, International shipping was how the foul little critters got here in the first place, along with the other with nemesis to my grapes, roses, and hops, the Japanese Beetle. Zebra Mussels, which clog the intakes of hydroelectric and municipal water supply dams hitchhiked their way here in the bilge water of ships coming from the far east. It is not much of a stretch of imagination to see the population reseeded by produce trucks carrying their eggs and juveniles coming from areas not as hard hit by a cold winter such as Georgia and the Carolinas in loads of Watermelons and Strawberries headed for the Northeast and Midwest.
If you watch an episode or two of Antiques Roadshow or Pawn Stars, the first thing an appraiser does is inspect the item not only for flaws but evidence of repaired flaws in the past, and knocks the price down accordingly. A perfectly preserved original is the gold standard and flaws, refinishing, and non-original modifications only. reduce its potential value to a serious collector. Painstakingly restoring an item with as close to original materials as possible can add value to a flawed item, but it will never match an untouched and well-preserved original.
These days there are all sorts of electronic goodies to emulate tube sound. Behringer makes a nice setup I have played with tinkering with old AM Ham gear. . For line level audio, they work well, and if you are working with solid state finals, they are the way to go.
When you get into obsolete parts, they generally fall into 3 categories. With the example of radio and TV tubes, there is a large percentage of the stock that is essentially worthless, everybody has them and nobody wants them. Compactron tubes in 1960s TVs are all over the place, but few people collect old TVs, and most have been junked. Second category is tubes which have a steady demand, but were made in large numbers, such as some of the tubes in the "All American Five" radios, and vintage ham and audio gear. The third category is tubes and parts for highly collectible gear, especially where specialized tubes were made for only a few models of equipment for a few years and are classified as Unobtainium. Some of the tubes in my Zenith Transoceanic radio fall into this category, a good used 1L6 goes for about $50 on Ebay, while I have a half a dozen perfectly good 5U4 rectifier tubes in my junk box. After a while, if a certain model of audio or radio gear has lasting appeal, the supply will eventually dry up. 6146 tubes are starting to fall into this category, commonly used as final amplifier tubes in many popular ham rigs, despite wide use in many applications.
This phenomenon happens with all types of vintage collectibles, because most examples of a particular item will have the same part that tends to fail or deteriorate.
I normally sit on Weather Underground during major weather events, normally Weather Underground holds up pretty well. Today, a couple of hours ago, they disabled a few features due to high server load, and a few minutes ago I got an internal server error.
At that age, teaching basic life skills is top priority, the 3 Rs, plus teaching kids about the way real things work. Learning how a bicycle or a lawn mower works, how to do basic car, electrical, and plumbing repairs are also life skills, as well as cooking. Computers are part of this as well, but at that age While age 7 is a little early to expect kids to fix a broken flapper valve, replace a light switch, or sweat soldering copper plumbing, employing them as a gofer, and explaining the how and why of things as they look over your shoulder primes them for later on. Same with computers, let them help you when you repair or attempt to repair all kinds of different things. Let them take apart that broken electric drill to let them see how it works, and what caused it to fail. Keep a bunch of how-to books, first aid manuals, Army Field Manuals. Kids are easily bored, but their brains soak up information like a sponge at that age.
As they get older, let them or in the case when they break it themselves make them (with appropriate supervision) do the work themselves. My first big bike was built up from a bone pile of junked bicycles by my Dad and I when I was about 7. A couple of years later, I got a new 3 speed model for Christmas, and was constantly tinkering with it, and by the time I was 10 I was able to do just about anything it needed from adjusting the brakes to repairing a bent rim.
For pure ease of use back in the days when it was legal to use a cell phone while driving, the best phone I ever had in that regard was the old style Nokia 82 series. You could dial blindly with one hand and be accurate most of the time. Things went downhill, first the tactile feedback went to hell with subsequent LG and Motorola phones, then got worse with the tiny buttons on the alphanumeric keyboard on a Blackberry style Samsung phone, which was just about unusable behind the wheel. Don't even get me started about my current phone, a basic touchscreen model with Android. Trying to use the voice command is a joke, I am not the only one who feels this way, when I ride with others when they attempt to voice dial, and as often as not become exasperated after multiple failed attempts or wrong numbers.
. If you don't want to burn out, build firebreaks, build stuff that doesn't burn (clay tile roofs, brick walls, etc) and don't landscape with flammable stuff. At least two people have to do something really stupid to burn down a house, the guy who started the fire and the guy who built in a tinderbox. "I know its the opening day of deer gun hunting season but I should have the right to walk thru the wilderness wearing my furry deer costume without evil hunters shooting at me, we should ban all guns so only criminals are armed". Dumbassery all around.
Before mankind invaded the west, either from Asia or North America, dry lightning caused fires were nature's way of dealing with the buildup of dry brush. When lightning did strike, the fires would burn until they ran out of fuel. Since the lightning strikes tend to be somewhat random (local topography does have an influence) every so often lightning would strike a given area, and if that area hadn't been struck in a while, a fire would clean out the old brush, so the amount of brush buildup in a given area was limited.
Pre-Columbian Americans had to deal with this issue. They didn't have the resources to even try to fight these naturally occurring fires, so they learned not to make large investments in settlements in fire prone areas, and learned to even use wildfires to their advantage to herd game, clear land, and so on. Starting around the beginning of the 20th century, it became possible for European settlers to fight these fires using mechanized equipment to at least temporarily protect their settlements built in fire prone areas. The only problem is that instead of relatively small but frequent fires burning off a few year's accumulation of brush, you end up with one great big fire burning decades of tinder dry brush when conditions were right. Massive wildfires in Yellowstone back in 1988 underscored the folly of trying to put out all fires, and led to fundamental changes in philosophy of managing wildfires.
Even if you can't afford to buy that new car, the people who make that car still want to make you think it is a good car. After all, if you can't afford a brand new Lexus (or Camry for that matter), you might still consider buying one used, and that supports the market for the guy who is considering trading his 4 year old Lexus for a newer one. On another level, continued advertising to current customers, (like the guy who just brought the new Lexus) reassures them that they made a good decision, and makes it more likely the customer will present a positive image of the brand to those around him. That kind of word of mouth advertising is the most valuable form of advertising there is, the loss of positive word of mouth advertising in a competitive marketplace can be the kiss of death in some cases.
Advertising is not only about getting you to buy more stuff, it can also be about getting you to buy them as well. A lot of the PR and advertising related to Tech Companies is about burnishing a corporate image to impress potential investors to make new or continued investments into a company. Many of the big defense contractors, agribusinesses like ADM, oil companies, and even large consumer product companies like Coca-Cola and Proctor and Gamble advertise in this way to look attractive to investors, or to lobby for legislation favorable to their company's interests.
I really wish this discussion would take a more serious tone than boning sheep!
I was involved in a serious car accident last May (I was the front seat passenger and the other driver was at fault), and which resulted in a compound fracture of my Tibia and Fibula. I spent 2 weeks in a trauma center followed by 3 weeks in a rehabilitation hospital, followed by months of physical therapy, and now wound care (the force of the impact ripped the front of my leg open). My most recent X-rays show incomplete healing of the Fibula, even after 8 months. While poor circulation in my legs is part of the reason I am slow to heal, even under the best of circumstances a fracture like this will result in several months of disability. Electrical stimulation is probably the next step, but orthopedic medicine in its current state doesn't have much more to offer me, and I certainly don't want to go back under the knife again if I can avoid it. Here is hoping they can bring it into the mainstream soon!!
IDK, 50 million downloads at a buck apiece is quite a chunk of change, and will more than pay for the development costs and bandwidth to distribute it. The rest is gravy.
I wouldn't say that Electric Car development was at a standstill for oh those many decades between the end of the 19th century and the 1990s. Development of the Technology for electric cars has continued, the power electronics that goes into today's electric cars is closely related to that used in forklifts, golf carts, and other industrial vehicles that have been widely deployed for decades. Batteries have always been the limiting factor for developing an electric car that can compete with the range and duty cycle of an ICE powered vehicle. The development of Lithium batteries for electronic devices with several times the power density of previous Lead-Acid, Nickel-Cadmium, and Nickel-Metal Hydride batteries has brought us closer to a practical electric vehicle, but we are not quite there yet. Yes you can go a hundred miles or so with your 800 pound battery pack (if you go easy on the lights and A/C or heater) instead of 25-40 in the EV1 days, but the hard facts are that 110 pounds, or about 15 gallons of medium chain liquid hydrocarbon fuel (gasoline) in the fuel tank of my Accord will take me about 450 miles on the open highway, and 375 miles in rush hour traffic, with the headlights on, and the heater, wipers, and the stereo all going full blast. I don't want to have to worry about running the battery down if I have to take an extra service call, or have to buck a 30 mph headwind on the way home. If the electrics can deliver even a 250 mile range, that would go a long way toward making them a viable alternative to the ICE.
There is sort of a standard, and you can buy a "universal" remote at the local Wal-Mart or even CVS. The problem with Universal remotes is that they only support a limited number of features on each device. I'm with you bro, I have 4 remotes to control my patchwork home theater. My remote for the Cable Box has functions for the TV, but not my newer Blu-Ray player, and only limited functionality on the TV. I can manage to get a few functions to work on my 5.1 receiver. My TV remote has no functions for the cable box or receiver, never mind the new Blu-Ray player, and the Blu-Ray remote can control part of the TV, but not the receiver or cable box, and so on and so on....
I just gave up and dedicated a side table next to my recliner for the remotes.
As a typical worker bee who maintains such labor saving machinery in a large metropolitan area, I don't believe that increasing leisure time by having shorter work days is the best answer. As a typical worker bee, I get up, and typically spend an hour each way commuting on overcrowded roads to get to my worksite, so if I work 8 hours a day/5 days a week I am devoting 50 hours a week to my job. If my workday was cut to 3 hours, I would still devote 25 hours a week to the job, just half of the time as I originally spent. Now if I worked the same 15 hours over 2- 7.5 hour days, I would only have to devote 19 hours a week to my job. Of course, customers would still often demand full-time availability, but that could create an opportunity for someone else to work the other shift or shifts. Unfortunately, with the cost of payroll taxes, unemployment insurance, healthcare, and so on, its a safe bet that most employers would still rather have just one guy working that 40 hour week.
Another consideration of the human factor is productivity over the course of the day. Unless you are a line worker, cashier, or the like, it takes a while to get oriented to the day's tasks and gather the information, tools, parts, or supplies to efficiently do what needs to be done, and at the end of the day to put things away, finish administrative tasks, and get ready to leave. 8 hours a day seems to offer the largest sweet spot of peak productivity, much less you spend too much time commuting, setting up work, and cleaning up afterwards. Think about shop class in junior high, (I may be showing my age talking about shop class) you had a 50 minute period to try to get something accomplished, and you spent 5 or 10 minutes listening to the teacher explain the task for the day, another 5 or 10 minutes gathering the stuff you'll need for the job, and the last 10 minutes to clean up. You'll be lucky to actually spend more than 20 minutes working on the project.
On a seasonal basis, this automatically happens in most homes and small businesses anyway. Heat generated by the servers helps contribute to keeping things toasty in the winter. It is not a reason in itself to not increase their efficiency though. Fuel, such as natural gas or oil burned in an onsite furnace results in 85-95 percent usable heat. The typical electricity generation cycle using a coal, oil, or natural gas boiler is about 33 percent efficient , Since this heat would be generated anyway, you might as well use it if you can, but furnaces or heat pumps are more efficient ways of providing heat.
In the summer the situation is reversed. All of that waste heat needs to be removed, meaning you pay for electricity to run the server, and the air conditioning to remove the excess heat. Same goes for lighting and all appliances that generate heat. The strategy is to find a way to circulate that heat in the winter, and maximize efficiency of all of the electrical devices year round. That's about as simple as I can make it.
I had the Farmville virus for a few months last winter, until the program got impossible to load. Fast forward 6 months, I decided to try again just for the heck of it. I had something like 30 neighbors at my peak, but when I looked around about 80% of the farms were withered, fallow, or plowed with nothing planted. Same with Mafia Wars, which I had also given up on and not really looked back. Got tired of all the stupid stuff the games put up on your wall if you want the game to help you. The messages sent to friends that have already quit the game are an annoyance to them as well.
I still check in daily, mostly for a few characters that tend to put up entertaining links or posts. Mostly I am a lurker, but I occasionally comment on someone else's post, but 90 percent of the stuff in my Top News is trashable.
I live near a little village that is in the outer fringes of the Baltimore Metropolitan Area, on part of what used to be my grandparent's dairy farm, so I have a bit of historical perspective on the area. These days I, like many others around here and even further out hop in their cars every morning and endure a grinding commute to their jobs in and around Baltimore, Columbia, and even DC. Local employment opportunities in nearby towns are limited, so unless you are employed in local agriculture, or are of the Landed Gentry, a grinding commute is the price you pay to live out here. Not having a car out in these parts is equivalent to being under house arrest.
About 25 years ago, the opening of I-795 put this bucolic backwater within feasible commuting reach of much of the rapidly growing business centers surrounding Baltimore, and down the I-95 corridor. Until the housing collapse a few years ago, it was common for giant new houses to be built wherever chinks in the RC2 zoning, which required ridiculously large lot sizes to build were found and exploited, and for many of the existing, and mostly modest homes in the area to either be torn down to make way for McMansions, or additions larger than the original house added onto them. A combination of the housing collapse and the congestion that development up the 795 corridor created has put the brakes on new construction, and existing homes for sale in the area seem to linger on the market, sometimes for years.
Total dependence on the automobile wasn't always the case, there was a time I could live where I am now and be able to walk to the local general store, catch a train, and commute downtown with relative ease, since the trained stopped in all the little hamlets, from Owings Mills to Glyndon, on up to Woodensburg, Boring, Upperco, Hampstead, and so on up to Hanover PA. Back during WWI, my grandmother told me as a teenager she took the train into Baltimore every day and worked in a munitions plant before she settled down to life as a farmer's wife. Even in the '40s, my dad was able to take the train downtown to his job. Sometime after WW2, the trains didn't stop in the little hamlets anymore, and only freight travels on the rail lines these days.
Have you ever paid for short-term parking on Manhattan, or for that matter any other major city? The cost of parking IS the congestion surcharge. Seriously, in Downtown Baltimore it costs a minimum of $10-$15 to park for more than an hour in an off-street garage, as the supply of on-street metered parking is totally inadequate to meet the demand. I have paid $35 to park for the day in DC while working a trade show. A monthly space in a garage near a skyscraper on Manhattan cost about $600 a month 15 years ago, today it is probably pushing $900-$1,000 a month now.
Point is, that if you want to do business downtown and are driving in, you have to park somewhere, and whatever entity has the parking spaces will charge what the traffic will bear.
Antenna performance (in this case a parabolic dish) depends on several factors. The old C-Band dishes needed to be 10 feet across due to relatively low power on the downlink, and because the gain of a dish depends on its size relative to the wavelength of the signal. C-Band used a 4.7 Ghz signal, which has a wavelength of about 6.3 cm, or about an 2.5 inches. Later dishes received Ku band signals, where were about 11 Ghz, which have a wavelength of 2.7cm, or a little bit more than an inch. Proportionately, a 4 foot Ku band dish has about the same theoretical gain as a 10 C-Band dish. The newer satellites are also more powerful, and preamp performance is improved as well, which is why a 2 foot "hubcap" dish can pretty much do the same thing as the old 10 foot C-band dishes.
Too much gain can have drawbacks as well. If you can aim one of the old 10 foot dishes adequately, you will get EXCELLENT performance on Ku band, but with increased gain comes a narrower beamwidth, which makes the dish harder to aim at the desired satellite. The smaller dishes are a much more rugged, stable, and less expensive platform than the 10 footers of old, which needed massive foundations and supports to maintain stability, particularly in high winds.
Slashdot Mirror
Working in and around Baltimore and DC, I see the advantages and disadvantages of both spread out development (suburban sprawl) and a centralized business district linked to the surrounding area by a growing metro rail system. Part of my job is servicing equipment in the poorer sections of Washington, DC, where people apply for public assistance, and invariably those offices are at about the furthest populated point from a Metro stop you can find in the district. On the corridors that Metro serves, the city has an air of vibrancy and prosperity, they are advertising million dollar townhomes in Bethesda, near a Metro stop. The areas poorly served are areas where you want to be out of there after dark. Even in these areas, parking is at a premium,
DC has some of the worst traffic in the nation despite this, due to centralized business districts, and the necessity for cars and trucks to drive around delivering goods and provide services to people and businesses in the center of town and in the edge cities as well. Out in the edge cities, major employers often have campuses which have no metro stops, large parking garages, and if they are lucky, a shuttle that runs occasionally to a Metro stop. Throw in DC's status as a major tourist destination, and you have a Beltway and major radiating arteries that can be clogged at any hour of night or day.
My thinking is that there is an optimal size for a city, if it gets too large the infrastructure needed to move all those goods and people around increases exponentially, which is why it costs so much more to live a certain standard of living in places like NYC/DC/LAX/CHI/SF than it does in places like Cincinnati or Omaha. That optimal size is affected by the opportunities available in a given area, versus the cost of providing adequate infrastructure to serve an area. Basic Econ 101.
Homebrewing stores (the malt kind that is) have made a successful business model of teaching people how to brew beer in a 3 hour class charging a nominal fee, Afterwards they are lined up buying all sorts of brewing ingredients and paraphernalia..
Seriously, International shipping was how the foul little critters got here in the first place, along with the other with nemesis to my grapes, roses, and hops, the Japanese Beetle. Zebra Mussels, which clog the intakes of hydroelectric and municipal water supply dams hitchhiked their way here in the bilge water of ships coming from the far east. It is not much of a stretch of imagination to see the population reseeded by produce trucks carrying their eggs and juveniles coming from areas not as hard hit by a cold winter such as Georgia and the Carolinas in loads of Watermelons and Strawberries headed for the Northeast and Midwest.
There is no democracy I can see here. Welcome to the People's Republic of Maryland.
If you watch an episode or two of Antiques Roadshow or Pawn Stars, the first thing an appraiser does is inspect the item not only for flaws but evidence of repaired flaws in the past, and knocks the price down accordingly. A perfectly preserved original is the gold standard and flaws, refinishing, and non-original modifications only. reduce its potential value to a serious collector. Painstakingly restoring an item with as close to original materials as possible can add value to a flawed item, but it will never match an untouched and well-preserved original.
These days there are all sorts of electronic goodies to emulate tube sound. Behringer makes a nice setup I have played with tinkering with old AM Ham gear. . For line level audio, they work well, and if you are working with solid state finals, they are the way to go.
If you need basic weather radar try this site.
National Radar, plus just about every major. City. Updates every 5 minutes. Its in javascript so it loads super fast.
http://web2.wright-weather.com/cgi-bin2/loopradar.cgi?type=mosaic/us_mosaic-&type2=12&type3=cities
Thanks, it looks suspiciously like the format that WUnderground uses, but with composite images.
When you get into obsolete parts, they generally fall into 3 categories. With the example of radio and TV tubes, there is a large percentage of the stock that is essentially worthless, everybody has them and nobody wants them. Compactron tubes in 1960s TVs are all over the place, but few people collect old TVs, and most have been junked. Second category is tubes which have a steady demand, but were made in large numbers, such as some of the tubes in the "All American Five" radios, and vintage ham and audio gear. The third category is tubes and parts for highly collectible gear, especially where specialized tubes were made for only a few models of equipment for a few years and are classified as Unobtainium. Some of the tubes in my Zenith Transoceanic radio fall into this category, a good used 1L6 goes for about $50 on Ebay, while I have a half a dozen perfectly good 5U4 rectifier tubes in my junk box. After a while, if a certain model of audio or radio gear has lasting appeal, the supply will eventually dry up. 6146 tubes are starting to fall into this category, commonly used as final amplifier tubes in many popular ham rigs, despite wide use in many applications.
This phenomenon happens with all types of vintage collectibles, because most examples of a particular item will have the same part that tends to fail or deteriorate.
I normally sit on Weather Underground during major weather events, normally Weather Underground holds up pretty well. Today, a couple of hours ago, they disabled a few features due to high server load, and a few minutes ago I got an internal server error.
At that age, teaching basic life skills is top priority, the 3 Rs, plus teaching kids about the way real things work. Learning how a bicycle or a lawn mower works, how to do basic car, electrical, and plumbing repairs are also life skills, as well as cooking. Computers are part of this as well, but at that age While age 7 is a little early to expect kids to fix a broken flapper valve, replace a light switch, or sweat soldering copper plumbing, employing them as a gofer, and explaining the how and why of things as they look over your shoulder primes them for later on. Same with computers, let them help you when you repair or attempt to repair all kinds of different things. Let them take apart that broken electric drill to let them see how it works, and what caused it to fail. Keep a bunch of how-to books, first aid manuals, Army Field Manuals. Kids are easily bored, but their brains soak up information like a sponge at that age.
As they get older, let them or in the case when they break it themselves make them (with appropriate supervision) do the work themselves. My first big bike was built up from a bone pile of junked bicycles by my Dad and I when I was about 7. A couple of years later, I got a new 3 speed model for Christmas, and was constantly tinkering with it, and by the time I was 10 I was able to do just about anything it needed from adjusting the brakes to repairing a bent rim.
For pure ease of use back in the days when it was legal to use a cell phone while driving, the best phone I ever had in that regard was the old style Nokia 82 series. You could dial blindly with one hand and be accurate most of the time. Things went downhill, first the tactile feedback went to hell with subsequent LG and Motorola phones, then got worse with the tiny buttons on the alphanumeric keyboard on a Blackberry style Samsung phone, which was just about unusable behind the wheel. Don't even get me started about my current phone, a basic touchscreen model with Android. Trying to use the voice command is a joke, I am not the only one who feels this way, when I ride with others when they attempt to voice dial, and as often as not become exasperated after multiple failed attempts or wrong numbers.
. If you don't want to burn out, build firebreaks, build stuff that doesn't burn (clay tile roofs, brick walls, etc) and don't landscape with flammable stuff. At least two people have to do something really stupid to burn down a house, the guy who started the fire and the guy who built in a tinderbox. "I know its the opening day of deer gun hunting season but I should have the right to walk thru the wilderness wearing my furry deer costume without evil hunters shooting at me, we should ban all guns so only criminals are armed". Dumbassery all around.
Before mankind invaded the west, either from Asia or North America, dry lightning caused fires were nature's way of dealing with the buildup of dry brush. When lightning did strike, the fires would burn until they ran out of fuel. Since the lightning strikes tend to be somewhat random (local topography does have an influence) every so often lightning would strike a given area, and if that area hadn't been struck in a while, a fire would clean out the old brush, so the amount of brush buildup in a given area was limited.
Pre-Columbian Americans had to deal with this issue. They didn't have the resources to even try to fight these naturally occurring fires, so they learned not to make large investments in settlements in fire prone areas, and learned to even use wildfires to their advantage to herd game, clear land, and so on. Starting around the beginning of the 20th century, it became possible for European settlers to fight these fires using mechanized equipment to at least temporarily protect their settlements built in fire prone areas. The only problem is that instead of relatively small but frequent fires burning off a few year's accumulation of brush, you end up with one great big fire burning decades of tinder dry brush when conditions were right. Massive wildfires in Yellowstone back in 1988 underscored the folly of trying to put out all fires, and led to fundamental changes in philosophy of managing wildfires.
Even if you can't afford to buy that new car, the people who make that car still want to make you think it is a good car. After all, if you can't afford a brand new Lexus (or Camry for that matter), you might still consider buying one used, and that supports the market for the guy who is considering trading his 4 year old Lexus for a newer one. On another level, continued advertising to current customers, (like the guy who just brought the new Lexus) reassures them that they made a good decision, and makes it more likely the customer will present a positive image of the brand to those around him. That kind of word of mouth advertising is the most valuable form of advertising there is, the loss of positive word of mouth advertising in a competitive marketplace can be the kiss of death in some cases.
Advertising is not only about getting you to buy more stuff, it can also be about getting you to buy them as well. A lot of the PR and advertising related to Tech Companies is about burnishing a corporate image to impress potential investors to make new or continued investments into a company. Many of the big defense contractors, agribusinesses like ADM, oil companies, and even large consumer product companies like Coca-Cola and Proctor and Gamble advertise in this way to look attractive to investors, or to lobby for legislation favorable to their company's interests.
Amen Brother!!
I really wish this discussion would take a more serious tone than boning sheep!
I was involved in a serious car accident last May (I was the front seat passenger and the other driver was at fault), and which resulted in a compound fracture of my Tibia and Fibula. I spent 2 weeks in a trauma center followed by 3 weeks in a rehabilitation hospital, followed by months of physical therapy, and now wound care (the force of the impact ripped the front of my leg open). My most recent X-rays show incomplete healing of the Fibula, even after 8 months. While poor circulation in my legs is part of the reason I am slow to heal, even under the best of circumstances a fracture like this will result in several months of disability. Electrical stimulation is probably the next step, but orthopedic medicine in its current state doesn't have much more to offer me, and I certainly don't want to go back under the knife again if I can avoid it. Here is hoping they can bring it into the mainstream soon!!
That is, hit Play on your music source when the lion roars for the third time.
When the Lion roars for the third time.
NASA needs to do a story about Jupiter and monoliths now.
IDK, 50 million downloads at a buck apiece is quite a chunk of change, and will more than pay for the development costs and bandwidth to distribute it. The rest is gravy.
I wouldn't say that Electric Car development was at a standstill for oh those many decades between the end of the 19th century and the 1990s. Development of the Technology for electric cars has continued, the power electronics that goes into today's electric cars is closely related to that used in forklifts, golf carts, and other industrial vehicles that have been widely deployed for decades. Batteries have always been the limiting factor for developing an electric car that can compete with the range and duty cycle of an ICE powered vehicle. The development of Lithium batteries for electronic devices with several times the power density of previous Lead-Acid, Nickel-Cadmium, and Nickel-Metal Hydride batteries has brought us closer to a practical electric vehicle, but we are not quite there yet. Yes you can go a hundred miles or so with your 800 pound battery pack (if you go easy on the lights and A/C or heater) instead of 25-40 in the EV1 days, but the hard facts are that 110 pounds, or about 15 gallons of medium chain liquid hydrocarbon fuel (gasoline) in the fuel tank of my Accord will take me about 450 miles on the open highway, and 375 miles in rush hour traffic, with the headlights on, and the heater, wipers, and the stereo all going full blast. I don't want to have to worry about running the battery down if I have to take an extra service call, or have to buck a 30 mph headwind on the way home. If the electrics can deliver even a 250 mile range, that would go a long way toward making them a viable alternative to the ICE.
There is sort of a standard, and you can buy a "universal" remote at the local Wal-Mart or even CVS. The problem with Universal remotes is that they only support a limited number of features on each device. I'm with you bro, I have 4 remotes to control my patchwork home theater. My remote for the Cable Box has functions for the TV, but not my newer Blu-Ray player, and only limited functionality on the TV. I can manage to get a few functions to work on my 5.1 receiver. My TV remote has no functions for the cable box or receiver, never mind the new Blu-Ray player, and the Blu-Ray remote can control part of the TV, but not the receiver or cable box, and so on and so on....
I just gave up and dedicated a side table next to my recliner for the remotes.
As a typical worker bee who maintains such labor saving machinery in a large metropolitan area, I don't believe that increasing leisure time by having shorter work days is the best answer. As a typical worker bee, I get up, and typically spend an hour each way commuting on overcrowded roads to get to my worksite, so if I work 8 hours a day/5 days a week I am devoting 50 hours a week to my job. If my workday was cut to 3 hours, I would still devote 25 hours a week to the job, just half of the time as I originally spent. Now if I worked the same 15 hours over 2- 7.5 hour days, I would only have to devote 19 hours a week to my job. Of course, customers would still often demand full-time availability, but that could create an opportunity for someone else to work the other shift or shifts. Unfortunately, with the cost of payroll taxes, unemployment insurance, healthcare, and so on, its a safe bet that most employers would still rather have just one guy working that 40 hour week.
Another consideration of the human factor is productivity over the course of the day. Unless you are a line worker, cashier, or the like, it takes a while to get oriented to the day's tasks and gather the information, tools, parts, or supplies to efficiently do what needs to be done, and at the end of the day to put things away, finish administrative tasks, and get ready to leave. 8 hours a day seems to offer the largest sweet spot of peak productivity, much less you spend too much time commuting, setting up work, and cleaning up afterwards. Think about shop class in junior high, (I may be showing my age talking about shop class) you had a 50 minute period to try to get something accomplished, and you spent 5 or 10 minutes listening to the teacher explain the task for the day, another 5 or 10 minutes gathering the stuff you'll need for the job, and the last 10 minutes to clean up. You'll be lucky to actually spend more than 20 minutes working on the project.
On a seasonal basis, this automatically happens in most homes and small businesses anyway. Heat generated by the servers helps contribute to keeping things toasty in the winter. It is not a reason in itself to not increase their efficiency though. Fuel, such as natural gas or oil burned in an onsite furnace results in 85-95 percent usable heat. The typical electricity generation cycle using a coal, oil, or natural gas boiler is about 33 percent efficient , Since this heat would be generated anyway, you might as well use it if you can, but furnaces or heat pumps are more efficient ways of providing heat.
In the summer the situation is reversed. All of that waste heat needs to be removed, meaning you pay for electricity to run the server, and the air conditioning to remove the excess heat. Same goes for lighting and all appliances that generate heat. The strategy is to find a way to circulate that heat in the winter, and maximize efficiency of all of the electrical devices year round. That's about as simple as I can make it.
An inexpensive wet tile saw with a with a blade that contains diamond abrasives can be found at most home centers for as little as $100.00
I had the Farmville virus for a few months last winter, until the program got impossible to load. Fast forward 6 months, I decided to try again just for the heck of it. I had something like 30 neighbors at my peak, but when I looked around about 80% of the farms were withered, fallow, or plowed with nothing planted. Same with Mafia Wars, which I had also given up on and not really looked back. Got tired of all the stupid stuff the games put up on your wall if you want the game to help you. The messages sent to friends that have already quit the game are an annoyance to them as well.
I still check in daily, mostly for a few characters that tend to put up entertaining links or posts. Mostly I am a lurker, but I occasionally comment on someone else's post, but 90 percent of the stuff in my Top News is trashable.
I live near a little village that is in the outer fringes of the Baltimore Metropolitan Area, on part of what used to be my grandparent's dairy farm, so I have a bit of historical perspective on the area. These days I, like many others around here and even further out hop in their cars every morning and endure a grinding commute to their jobs in and around Baltimore, Columbia, and even DC. Local employment opportunities in nearby towns are limited, so unless you are employed in local agriculture, or are of the Landed Gentry, a grinding commute is the price you pay to live out here. Not having a car out in these parts is equivalent to being under house arrest.
About 25 years ago, the opening of I-795 put this bucolic backwater within feasible commuting reach of much of the rapidly growing business centers surrounding Baltimore, and down the I-95 corridor. Until the housing collapse a few years ago, it was common for giant new houses to be built wherever chinks in the RC2 zoning, which required ridiculously large lot sizes to build were found and exploited, and for many of the existing, and mostly modest homes in the area to either be torn down to make way for McMansions, or additions larger than the original house added onto them. A combination of the housing collapse and the congestion that development up the 795 corridor created has put the brakes on new construction, and existing homes for sale in the area seem to linger on the market, sometimes for years.
Total dependence on the automobile wasn't always the case, there was a time I could live where I am now and be able to walk to the local general store, catch a train, and commute downtown with relative ease, since the trained stopped in all the little hamlets, from Owings Mills to Glyndon, on up to Woodensburg, Boring, Upperco, Hampstead, and so on up to Hanover PA. Back during WWI, my grandmother told me as a teenager she took the train into Baltimore every day and worked in a munitions plant before she settled down to life as a farmer's wife. Even in the '40s, my dad was able to take the train downtown to his job. Sometime after WW2, the trains didn't stop in the little hamlets anymore, and only freight travels on the rail lines these days.
Have you ever paid for short-term parking on Manhattan, or for that matter any other major city? The cost of parking IS the congestion surcharge. Seriously, in Downtown Baltimore it costs a minimum of $10-$15 to park for more than an hour in an off-street garage, as the supply of on-street metered parking is totally inadequate to meet the demand. I have paid $35 to park for the day in DC while working a trade show. A monthly space in a garage near a skyscraper on Manhattan cost about $600 a month 15 years ago, today it is probably pushing $900-$1,000 a month now.
Point is, that if you want to do business downtown and are driving in, you have to park somewhere, and whatever entity has the parking spaces will charge what the traffic will bear.
Antenna performance (in this case a parabolic dish) depends on several factors. The old C-Band dishes needed to be 10 feet across due to relatively low power on the downlink, and because the gain of a dish depends on its size relative to the wavelength of the signal. C-Band used a 4.7 Ghz signal, which has a wavelength of about 6.3 cm, or about an 2.5 inches. Later dishes received Ku band signals, where were about 11 Ghz, which have a wavelength of 2.7cm, or a little bit more than an inch. Proportionately, a 4 foot Ku band dish has about the same theoretical gain as a 10 C-Band dish. The newer satellites are also more powerful, and preamp performance is improved as well, which is why a 2 foot "hubcap" dish can pretty much do the same thing as the old 10 foot C-band dishes.
Too much gain can have drawbacks as well. If you can aim one of the old 10 foot dishes adequately, you will get EXCELLENT performance on Ku band, but with increased gain comes a narrower beamwidth, which makes the dish harder to aim at the desired satellite. The smaller dishes are a much more rugged, stable, and less expensive platform than the 10 footers of old, which needed massive foundations and supports to maintain stability, particularly in high winds.