Well, since you started the wood vs. steel idea, here's 2 cents from this Civil Engineer:
Tips for good timber construction: Don't use a residential contractor. Use a comercial building contractor. They are used to having people check their quality, and do better work. However, you're going to pay for it.
Insist on good lumber.#2 spruce-fir is good for sawhorses and houses that only last a few decades.
Make sure the Engineer uses Cd =.9 (permanent) instead of the more common Cd = 1.0 (10 years)
Glulam and other laminate beams are good. beleive the hype. The problem with most solid sawn timber is the quality since we've used all the old growth. Glulam is a step back towards that quality.
The big problem with steel studs will be corrosion. They come electroplated or zinc dipped. some are punched and formed _after_ plating, leaving unprotected edges. You then go and poke holes in them with screws, and leave corrosion points. If you go with steel, use bolts in pre-primed holes and paint over the bolt heads.
If you go with concrete, use galvanized rebar. You'll shit a kidney when you see the cost, but it's the best thing since, well, rebar. Bar corrosion and the ensuing spalling is what will eventually weaken your foundation.
Personally, I've been doing some thinking about the house I want to build/ have built when I retire: concrete foundation, doweled stone walls, glulam and bolt trusses (damn near no structural walls or columns in the envelope), Granite roof.
In response to the backseat engineering (i.e., "something that rots")
So, what do you think your house is made of? Wood probably. As for rotting, trees do pretty well when maintiained (think orchards). They don't have paint, they have bark. At any rate, the NDS (wood design spec) has a Cm factor for unprotected wet wood - (IIRC, my manuals are at work...) it's an 85% reduction factor to the allowable stresses. Not too shabby.
Besides, did you go to the site? they had an entire section on the tree stability and stress analysis by a bunch of PE's. Sounds OK to me.
Couple of points - It's not real mud. It's bentonite, aka drilling mud. Keeps the hole open and lubes the tool.
This has _real_ applications for laying fiber / powerlines, etc. Currently, when someone wants to put fiber under a road, they have two options: 1) dig it up. Not real popualar with the people who live there. 2) directional drill. Basically a baby oil directional drill. The key is 'directional,' in that it can change directions. The operator on these things is guided by instinct and a soil profile (educated guess - first five feet are brown dirt, then some rocks, and maybe some black dirt.) If he can _know_ what the tool is doing, he can drill faster. Directional drilling is a must for retrofiting urban areas for fiber, and costs about two orders of magnitude higher than trenching, on a per mile basis.
So, what does this mean for you, the computer guy that could care less about oil drills? Possibly cheaper and more available broadband in urban areas.
How could such supposedly smart people make such big mistakes?
Mainly, it's a value thing. Most of the companies had very little actual value, yet the stock market told them otherwise. It's like the old tulip market crash.
These things happen more than you think; it's happening right now in the Boston housing market. The mortage companies are issuing loans to people that can't pay them off. I had believed this for a while, but got it confirmed on NPR last week. This results in inflated prices (increase in demand rapdly outstripping increase in supply). Sometime in the near future, it's all going to come back to reality, and people will lose lots of money on their houses.
Also, there's a lot of satisfaction in making a tangible product. I work for a construction company as an engineer; in my field assigments, the work is much more rewarding - I made that block of concrete possible, kind of feeling. On the other side, in my current office position, I make paper. Not so rewarding. The field position involves 50% longer hours, more stress, being outside in the hot and cold, but I'd chose it in a minuite.
Re:Obvious complete solution: Don't wipe, wash.
on
Toilet Paper Algorithms
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
So, do they have a UPS on the toilet so they can drop a deuce while the power is out?
Paper always works. Besides, it's good for starting fires.:)
if you think the logging machine is cool, check out the Spiderplow http://www.spiderplow.com
I worked on a crew that used one of these, installing fiber optic cable down the median of an interstate. The frickin' thing can go through the legs of highway signs, climb off of an 18-wheeler trailer SIDEWAYS, and stand on 1 leg while it's ripping.
The controls seem to be a little more involved than the logger, though. It's got a panel of about 30 two-way levers to control all of the motions. each leg can extend/retract, swivel forward/back, raise/lower, rotate each wheel right/left independently, plus about a dozen controls for the fiber burying blade.
Spiderplow = more bandwidth. John Deere Forester = toilet paper.
It's ovious which one is the high-tech toy for the nerds:)
Yeah, they did. Actually, it makes sense for them (a bunch of KDE developers) to write stuff for the Zarus, since it runs QT/Embedded. Easy way to branch into a new market, it seems.
"Just Works", at least in this case, is partially dependent on distro. I run SuSE, and installed ReiserFS (version 7.1? 7.2? Sometime around there.) and it "Just Works." I don't know if it is faster, I've never noticed the difference on my P2-400 home machine. Got to test it out the other day when the cat sat on the surge protector switch - rebooted like nothing happened. sweeeet.
Yeah, GNOME does come with antialiased fonts. However, to back the man up, so does KDE3, which comes with SUSE 8.0 (his last distro of choice, and mine too).
His beef seemed to be with the fonts themselves, most of which are frickin' ugly. antialiasing is like putting new paint on an old ford pinto - still ugly, just harder to pick out the rusty bits.
I bought Crossover Office, which lets me install TrueType fonts from MS and other places. Didn't think that was going to be a big plus, but wow, what a difference. Yeah, I know about the installmsttf (sp?) script thing, but never was able to get it to work. That too, proves his point a little more.
My dad got one of those, and a big HP flatpanel scanner for old (about 100 yr) photos. The Nikon works great. The batch saves to directories thing is great; it just numbers and saves and makes sorting easy. His broke, and Nikon sent him a new one right away, even a newer, much better one since the old one was no longer being made.
Not scared of the big bad command line, like so many of my concrete and steel civil engineering bretheren.
So, yes, you should heed the advice: be open to new things (use linux, not microsoft) follow through, don't just try new things and stop when it doesn't work right.
OK, so when you get out in the real world, remember this handy phrase:
sucks to be you.
Unlike school and other such places, most people don't give a crap. Now, if you licence your software so that people can sell binaries, expect people without your best interest to sell the binaries. If you don't want that, don't licence it.
I can't speak for other places, but... Texas. Yep, odds are somebody else owns the water/mineral rights under your house. They can come in and take them. You can, i beleive, get some compensation for their use of your land (ie, the surface.)
Oh, also penselvania (sp?) -- coal mines collapsing houses, that sort of thing.
I am a field engineer on a bridge construction project. I do concrete and overlays.
In most areas of bridges near water epoxy coated or galvanized rebar is used instead of black (bare) steel. The problem is that when steel rusts, it expands, popping the concrete around it. When you build reinforced concrete the term 'cover' refers to the minimum distance the rebar must be from the outside faces of the concrete - basically the distance between the steel and the corrosion. This 'cover' is typically between 2 - 5 inches. Overlay concrete (of which this conductive concrete is a type) is the riding course, or the top layer you actually ride on. It is poured seperately due in part to the large effort required to get the nice arched surface that rides so well. Overlays are typically 1 1/2 to 3 inches thick. So, a "thin" layer, thiner than the typical cover, with metal particles spread uniformely enough to conduct electricity is bound to corrode like a bastard.
There are ways that you could combat this, though. Galvanize the parts, imbed a wire mesh that is plastic coated and electrficy that, apply one hell of a sealant, or put an ungodly amount of DCI (corrosion inhibiter) in the mix. DCI has a number of side effects that make it hard to place, displaces a fair amount of water, and it is really hard to finish smoothly.
This is entirely the wrong attitude to take.
Equivalent example:
I work for a construction company. We're a union company, which means that the men have protections, and get fair wages and pensions. Now, we compete against 'scab' companies that pay half of our wages and give no benifits in low-bid government contracts. How do we win and stay in business? You have to be smarter. You have to engineer out the problems. A carpenter is a carpenter, and a helpdesk person is a helpdesk person. If your management can't find a way to work around your higher wages, you're on a doomed ship. Find someone who can.
Back in 2000, I was still in college. I am a Civil Engineer and work for a construction company. I build bridges for a living.
One of my interdisciplinary project partners was a MIS (management of Information Science) major, and did some part time work for EMC. Now, to his credit, he was pretty good with computers as far as I could tell, but used to brag about his $100/hr "consulting" job, working for a buddy as a sysadmin. He, like so many people who couldn't see the tech forest burning for the trees, never really tried to push himself or actually develop any work ethic skills.
All of us civils were goaded by the CS and MIS people, our starting salaries avaraged 10-15K less, at the time. Well, every one of us still has a job. All of the civils graduating now can find jobs.
Our companies, which became artifically devalued due to the.com inflation, are still chugging along, looking stronger now that the market's internet honeymoon is over.
There are a couple of old maxims that are appropiate, and a couple of common sense statements that apply:
-slow and steady wins the race.
-never risk what you can't loose.
-things that seem too good to be true, are.
-the key to riding the big waves is to get off before the crash.
There are better ways to affect change if you don't like the way things are going, and they're built into the Constitution!
Like the second ammendment. The NRA has it all wrong; the second ammentment is meant to back up these ways. Remember; in the days of the Revolution, there were hand arms and cannons. That was it. The people were allowed to own guns, and the towns -in addition to the government- had cannons. The second ammendment, coupled with this equality in technology, made it possible for citizens to violently overthrow the government if necessary. Jefferson and Washington would have wanted you and me to have F18's and M-1A Abrams tanks, not just pistols and antique rifles.
Now, I do not agree with this guy's opinons one bit, but that is what makes the system great, and a shame that he got shut down.
I am a field engineer for a construction company in Boston. We are a union shop, so the labor fights back. It nice since I can feel good about not screwing the people that work for me. If you can't get this in your field, shame on you, beause you've been outsmarted by people who can't read well and use hammers and shovels.
I love my job, because ever since I was little, I wanted to build shit. Something like that should motivate your job choice.
Amen. the 'running linux' book really helped me. The other one that did was the manual that came with my SuSE boxed set, some 300 pages (bigger than the O'Reilly book).
The SuSE book teaches all of the distro-specific tricks that make the little things easy (installing / removing software, network configuration, hardware configuration) using their tools (yast and yast2).
If you read the comments over at the Dot, Simon (they guy that wrote the thing) basically just make it work, the next step is to make it look PDA-good.
So, considering that, it's pretty good.
You're right about the single client part, but you've missed the bigger point: Outlook (for better or worse) is a hell of a lot more than just an email client. It's that proverbial 'other stuff' the PHB's want, and outlook is they only way they know to do it.
That only works if everyone involved lives on campus, and has their box hooked up to the LAN. A majority of the people at my school live off campus, and can't access the LAN from home.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, since you started the wood vs. steel idea, here's 2 cents from this Civil Engineer:
.9 (permanent) instead of the more common Cd = 1.0 (10 years)
Tips for good timber construction:
Don't use a residential contractor. Use a comercial building contractor. They are used to having people check their quality, and do better work. However, you're going to pay for it.
Insist on good lumber.#2 spruce-fir is good for sawhorses and houses that only last a few decades.
Make sure the Engineer uses Cd =
Glulam and other laminate beams are good. beleive the hype. The problem with most solid sawn timber is the quality since we've used all the old growth. Glulam is a step back towards that quality.
The big problem with steel studs will be corrosion.
They come electroplated or zinc dipped. some are punched and formed _after_ plating, leaving unprotected edges. You then go and poke holes in them with screws, and leave corrosion points. If you go with steel, use bolts in pre-primed holes and paint over the bolt heads.
If you go with concrete, use galvanized rebar. You'll shit a kidney when you see the cost, but it's the best thing since, well, rebar. Bar corrosion and the ensuing spalling is what will eventually weaken your foundation.
Personally, I've been doing some thinking about the house I want to build/ have built when I retire:
concrete foundation, doweled stone walls, glulam and bolt trusses (damn near no structural walls or columns in the envelope), Granite roof.
In response to the backseat engineering (i.e., "something that rots")
So, what do you think your house is made of? Wood probably. As for rotting, trees do pretty well when maintiained (think orchards). They don't have paint, they have bark. At any rate, the NDS (wood design spec) has a Cm factor for unprotected wet wood - (IIRC, my manuals are at work...) it's an 85% reduction factor to the allowable stresses. Not too shabby.
Besides, did you go to the site? they had an entire section on the tree stability and stress analysis by a bunch of PE's. Sounds OK to me.
Couple of points -
It's not real mud. It's bentonite, aka drilling mud. Keeps the hole open and lubes the tool.
This has _real_ applications for laying fiber / powerlines, etc. Currently, when someone wants to put fiber under a road, they have two options:
1) dig it up. Not real popualar with the people who live there.
2) directional drill. Basically a baby oil directional drill. The key is 'directional,' in that it can change directions. The operator on these things is guided by instinct and a soil profile (educated guess - first five feet are brown dirt, then some rocks, and maybe some black dirt.) If he can _know_ what the tool is doing, he can drill faster. Directional drilling is a must for retrofiting urban areas for fiber, and costs about two orders of magnitude higher than trenching, on a per mile basis.
So, what does this mean for you, the computer guy that could care less about oil drills? Possibly cheaper and more available broadband in urban areas.
How could such supposedly smart people make such big mistakes?
Mainly, it's a value thing. Most of the companies had very little actual value, yet the stock market told them otherwise. It's like the old tulip market crash.
These things happen more than you think; it's happening right now in the Boston housing market. The mortage companies are issuing loans to people that can't pay them off. I had believed this for a while, but got it confirmed on NPR last week. This results in inflated prices (increase in demand rapdly outstripping increase in supply). Sometime in the near future, it's all going to come back to reality, and people will lose lots of money on their houses.
Also, there's a lot of satisfaction in making a tangible product. I work for a construction company as an engineer; in my field assigments, the work is much more rewarding - I made that block of concrete possible, kind of feeling. On the other side, in my current office position, I make paper. Not so rewarding. The field position involves 50% longer hours, more stress, being outside in the hot and cold, but I'd chose it in a minuite.
So, do they have a UPS on the toilet so they can drop a deuce while the power is out?
:)
Paper always works. Besides, it's good for starting fires.
if you think the logging machine is cool, check out the Spiderplow http://www.spiderplow.com
/left independently, plus about a dozen controls for the fiber burying blade.
:)
I worked on a crew that used one of these, installing fiber optic cable down the median of an interstate. The frickin' thing can go through the legs of highway signs, climb off of an 18-wheeler trailer SIDEWAYS, and stand on 1 leg while it's ripping.
The controls seem to be a little more involved than the logger, though. It's got a panel of about 30 two-way levers to control all of the motions. each leg can extend/retract, swivel forward/back, raise/lower, rotate each wheel right
Spiderplow = more bandwidth.
John Deere Forester = toilet paper.
It's ovious which one is the high-tech toy for the nerds
Yeah, they did.
Actually, it makes sense for them (a bunch of KDE developers) to write stuff for the Zarus, since it runs QT/Embedded.
Easy way to branch into a new market, it seems.
"Just Works", at least in this case, is partially dependent on distro.
I run SuSE, and installed ReiserFS (version 7.1? 7.2? Sometime around there.) and it "Just Works."
I don't know if it is faster, I've never noticed the difference on my P2-400 home machine.
Got to test it out the other day when the cat sat on the surge protector switch - rebooted like nothing happened. sweeeet.
Yeah, GNOME does come with antialiased fonts.
However, to back the man up, so does KDE3, which comes with SUSE 8.0 (his last distro of choice, and mine too).
His beef seemed to be with the fonts themselves, most of which are frickin' ugly. antialiasing is like putting new paint on an old ford pinto - still ugly, just harder to pick out the rusty bits.
I bought Crossover Office, which lets me install TrueType fonts from MS and other places. Didn't think that was going to be a big plus, but wow, what a difference.
Yeah, I know about the installmsttf (sp?) script thing, but never was able to get it to work. That too, proves his point a little more.
I'm going to have to second that.
My dad got one of those, and a big HP flatpanel scanner for old (about 100 yr) photos. The Nikon works great.
The batch saves to directories thing is great; it just numbers and saves and makes sorting easy.
His broke, and Nikon sent him a new one right away, even a newer, much better one since the old one was no longer being made.
Not so much "can't", it's more "don't need to".
Not scared of the big bad command line, like so many of my concrete and steel civil engineering bretheren.
So, yes, you should heed the advice:
be open to new things (use linux, not microsoft)
follow through, don't just try new things and stop when it doesn't work right.
OK, so when you get out in the real world, remember this handy phrase:
sucks to be you.
Unlike school and other such places, most people don't give a crap. Now, if you licence your software so that people can sell binaries, expect people without your best interest to sell the binaries. If you don't want that, don't licence it.
I can't speak for other places, but... Texas.
Yep, odds are somebody else owns the water/mineral rights under your house. They can come in and take them. You can, i beleive, get some compensation for their use of your land (ie, the surface.)
Oh, also penselvania (sp?) -- coal mines collapsing houses, that sort of thing.
Harder.
I am a field engineer on a bridge construction project. I do concrete and overlays.
In most areas of bridges near water epoxy coated or galvanized rebar is used instead of black (bare) steel. The problem is that when steel rusts, it expands, popping the concrete around it.
When you build reinforced concrete the term 'cover' refers to the minimum distance the rebar must be from the outside faces of the concrete - basically the distance between the steel and the corrosion. This 'cover' is typically between 2 - 5 inches.
Overlay concrete (of which this conductive concrete is a type) is the riding course, or the top layer you actually ride on. It is poured seperately due in part to the large effort required to get the nice arched surface that rides so well. Overlays are typically 1 1/2 to 3 inches thick.
So, a "thin" layer, thiner than the typical cover, with metal particles spread uniformely enough to conduct electricity is bound to corrode like a bastard.
There are ways that you could combat this, though. Galvanize the parts, imbed a wire mesh that is plastic coated and electrficy that, apply one hell of a sealant, or put an ungodly amount of DCI (corrosion inhibiter) in the mix. DCI has a number of side effects that make it hard to place, displaces a fair amount of water, and it is really hard to finish smoothly.
This is entirely the wrong attitude to take.
Equivalent example:
I work for a construction company. We're a union company, which means that the men have protections, and get fair wages and pensions. Now, we compete against 'scab' companies that pay half of our wages and give no benifits in low-bid government contracts. How do we win and stay in business? You have to be smarter. You have to engineer out the problems. A carpenter is a carpenter, and a helpdesk person is a helpdesk person. If your management can't find a way to work around your higher wages, you're on a doomed ship. Find someone who can.
Back in 2000, I was still in college. I am a Civil Engineer and work for a construction company. I build bridges for a living. .com inflation, are still chugging along, looking stronger now that the market's internet honeymoon is over.
One of my interdisciplinary project partners was a MIS (management of Information Science) major, and did some part time work for EMC. Now, to his credit, he was pretty good with computers as far as I could tell, but used to brag about his $100/hr "consulting" job, working for a buddy as a sysadmin. He, like so many people who couldn't see the tech forest burning for the trees, never really tried to push himself or actually develop any work ethic skills.
All of us civils were goaded by the CS and MIS people, our starting salaries avaraged 10-15K less, at the time. Well, every one of us still has a job. All of the civils graduating now can find jobs.
Our companies, which became artifically devalued due to the
There are a couple of old maxims that are appropiate, and a couple of common sense statements that apply:
-slow and steady wins the race.
-never risk what you can't loose.
-things that seem too good to be true, are.
-the key to riding the big waves is to get off before the crash.
There are better ways to affect change if you don't like the way things are going, and they're built into the Constitution!
Like the second ammendment. The NRA has it all wrong; the second ammentment is meant to back up these ways. Remember; in the days of the Revolution, there were hand arms and cannons. That was it. The people were allowed to own guns, and the towns -in addition to the government- had cannons. The second ammendment, coupled with this equality in technology, made it possible for citizens to violently overthrow the government if necessary. Jefferson and Washington would have wanted you and me to have F18's and M-1A Abrams tanks, not just pistols and antique rifles.
Now, I do not agree with this guy's opinons one bit, but that is what makes the system great, and a shame that he got shut down.
To the truly enlightened, "Ogg" is for Nanny Ogg, who kicks ass. Hence the appropiate name.
..declared war on their labor.
I am a field engineer for a construction company in Boston. We are a union shop, so the labor fights back. It nice since I can feel good about not screwing the people that work for me. If you can't get this in your field, shame on you, beause you've been outsmarted by people who can't read well and use hammers and shovels.
I love my job, because ever since I was little, I wanted to build shit. Something like that should motivate your job choice.
Amen. the 'running linux' book really helped me. The other one that did was the manual that came with my SuSE boxed set, some 300 pages (bigger than the O'Reilly book).
The SuSE book teaches all of the distro-specific tricks that make the little things easy (installing / removing software, network configuration, hardware configuration) using their tools (yast and yast2).
If you read the comments over at the Dot, Simon (they guy that wrote the thing) basically just make it work, the next step is to make it look PDA-good.
So, considering that, it's pretty good.
You're right about the single client part, but you've missed the bigger point: Outlook (for better or worse) is a hell of a lot more than just an email client. It's that proverbial 'other stuff' the PHB's want, and outlook is they only way they know to do it.
That only works if everyone involved lives on campus, and has their box hooked up to the LAN. A majority of the people at my school live off campus, and can't access the LAN from home.