The $599 Mac Mini is a great bargain. For just $100 more than the base unit, you get double the HD space, WiFi, Bluetooth, and a faster processor, but you give up the 56K modem (not a problem for most people). The $699 upgrade only adds a DVD±RW/CD-RW SuperDrive instead of the Combo drive (DVD/CD-RW) if you need to burn DVDs.
Shouldn't be a problem for the cautious. You can use the range search feature to narrow the search to, say, the first 8 digits. i.e., "5398600600000000..5398600699999999". This will still protect your number.
Early waking, eh? Have you read Insomnia by Stephen King? The protagonist had the same problem. Careful, don't let the wrong Little Bald Doctor get you!
HowStuffWorks has got an interesting article on CART (not F1, but similar) cars at here. It mentions some of the sensing, telemetry, and computing technology used. There's even an explanation of the controls on that crazy steering wheel.
If you have a Nikon, Sony, or Canon digital camera, you can't beat the eBooks at this site. The author, Peter Inova, walks through all the fundaments of photography technique with specific reference to the specific features of your camera. It's the best $50 accessory I ever got for my Nikon 4500.
For a while now, you have been able to get a Segway tour of Walt Disney World's Epcot theme park. They weren't available the last time the family went to WDW, but next time we're going to give this a try.
We have a cloth shower curtain, and it goes in the laundry every week or so. They cost more, and washing is a hassle, but there's a lot less grunge to tolerate.
The forced quota system is especially bad in companies and industries where massive layoffs have been going on for the past few years.
Consider: when layoffs occur, for the most part (yes, I'm aware of politics and favortism) the ones who get laid off are the ones who would be 1's and 2's in a quota system. Obviously, that leaves behind all the 3's, 4's, and 5's who, even though they are doing the same job they have always been and possibly a lot more, will now be forced to be evaluated as 1's and 2's. A lot of folks with 4's and 5's will also be downgraded, despite the same superior quality of their work.
This system is unfair, de-motivating, and literally degrading.
By Kevin Poulsen, SecurityFocus Feb 11 2004 3:55PM
A previously-unknown software flaw in a widely-deployed General Electric energy management system contributed to the devastating scope of the August 14th northeastern U.S. blackout, industry officials revealed this week.
The bug in GE Energy's XA/21 system was discovered in an intensive code audit conducted by GE and a contractor in the weeks following the blackout, according to FirstEnergy Corp., the Ohio utility where investigators say the blackout began. "It had never evidenced itself until that day," said spokesman Ralph DiNicola. "This fault was so deeply embedded, it took them weeks of pouring through millions of lines of code and data to find it."
The flaw was responsible for the alarm system failure at FirstEnergy's Akron, Ohio control center that was noted in a November report from the U.S.-Canadian task force investigating the blackout. The report blamed the then-unexplained computer failure for retarding FirstEnergy's ability to respond to events that lead to the outage, when quick action might have limited the blackout's spread.
"Power system operators rely heavily on audible and on-screen alarms, plus alarm logs, to reveal any significant changes in their system's conditions," the report noted. FirstEnergy's operators "were working under a significant handicap without these tools. However, they were in further jeopardy because they did not know that they were operating without alarms, so that they did not realize that system conditions were changing."
The cascading blackout eventually cut off electricity to 50 million people in eight states and Canada.
The blackout occurred at a time when the Blaster computer worm was wreaking havoc across the Internet. The timing triggered some speculation that the virus may have played a role in the outage -- a theory that gained credence after SecurityFocus reported that two systems at a nuclear power plant operated by FirstEnergy had been impacted by the Slammer worm earlier in the year.
Instead, the XA/21 bug was triggered by a unique combination of events and alarm conditions on the equipment it was monitoring, DiNicola said. When a backup server kicked-in, it also failed, unable to handle the accumulation of unprocessed events that had queued up since the main system's failure. Because the system failed silently, FirstEnergy's operators were unaware for over an hour that they were looking at outdated information on the status of their portion of the power grid, according to the November report.
The root cause of the outage was linked to a variety of factors, including FirstEnergy's failure to trim back trees encroaching on high-voltage power lines. FirstEnergy says its problems were some of many issues destabilizing power flow in the northeast that day, and that its role in the outage is overstated in the interim report.
On Tuesday, the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC), the industry group responsible for preventing blackouts in the U.S. and Canada, approved a raft of directives to utility companies aimed at preventing a recurrence of the outage. One of them gives FirstEnergy a June 30th deadline to install any known patches for its XA/21 system.
FirstEnergy says it already patched the blackout bug last fall, when GE made a fix available, and is in the process of replacing the XA/21 with a competing system -- a changeover that was planned before the blackout.
NERC spokesperson Ellen Vancko said the organization would release a more comprehensive list of recommendations next month that would likely instruct all U.S. and Canadian electric companies using GE's XA/21 system to install the patch.
"That blackout report will go into much greater detail and will more broadly address the entire industry, whereas this particular report addressed the specific actors involved in the blackout, as well as some specific actions NERC had to take," Vancko said.
GE Energy declined repeated requests for comment on the bug.
I recently bought a copy of K-19. I went to play it the other day, and the disk inside was actually of K-9. Yikes, talk about your shock to the system! The store made it right without the slightest fuss.
Let's just hope that you don't have a HD problem at the same time you have a billing dispute. Unless you are scrupulous about doing backups, that HD failure could cost you a lot more than just the price of a replacement.
Correct - I just happened to be reading Dark Sun when I heard that Teller had died. It was a weird coincidence.
The book paints Teller as ideosyncratic and egomaniacal, but brilliant. That seems to apply to many of the atomic scientists (Oppenheimer, et al).
The book goes into a lot of great tech detail about the H-Bomb. Building it was an enormously complex engineering problem. The first H-bomb was a cylinder with hemispherical ends that was over 20 feet long and over 6 feet in diameter, and used an A-bomb at one end to start the fusion reaction.
Also, they could only do limited testing, so most of the predictions were purely theoretical. The book recounts one test of a Lithium-reaction H-Bomb that was expected to yield about a 6-Megaton blast that actually was over 15-Megatons. Caught the scientists off guard and caused some injuries and damage because the blast radius was so much larger than expected.
The book was rather dry and slow in places, but overall is a pretty good read.
Heat seems to be the enemy of some APs, both in terms of performance and of longevity. I speak from experience on the former, and have heard stories about the latter. Try setting up cooling fans and see if it doesn't make a difference.
I believe that the Siemens Speedstream is hardware equivalent of the SMC AWBR wireless router I have. Siemans runs their own version of firmware on it, and it's supposedly a lot more stable than SMC's firmware. The SMC firmware is so bad, in fact, that I gave up on the SMC as a router because it kept disconnecting my cable modem connection every few hours and required a reboot to reconnect. Not a Hardware problem, they swapped it out for me once. I got myself a Linksys (which runs perfectly) and I'm using the SMC as just a wireless access point. I just disable DHCP and assign it a static IP. Anyway...
The unit is very heat sensitive. When I first installed it, I had trouble getting a stable connection about 30 feet away through one floor and one wall. So, I set the unit up on styrofoam feet about one inch high and set up a 4" cooling fan to blow across the unit. Big difference! The signal in my kitchen is now five by five. I don't think you need to do any extreme cooling tricks to get the improvement.
1) Buy the G5 when you get to NY 2) Get a laptop instead
If you do decide to ship a desktop machine, you should be OK. I mean Dell, Gateway, and the rest ship them computers all over the place. Just make sure you lay your hands on a proper shipping container, and pad things extra well. Backup your data beforehand, and buy shipping insurance, too, just in case.
There seem to be a lot of geek and academic types among the jugglers I know. Anyway, juggling is great fun and a good challenge. Even the athletically inept can learn and become proficient with some practice. It's a great way to take a break and stay alert in the office - I juggle during long, boring conference calls (wearing a headset so my hands are free). Try it!
Slashdot Mirror
The $599 Mac Mini is a great bargain. For just $100 more than the base unit, you get double the HD space, WiFi, Bluetooth, and a faster processor, but you give up the 56K modem (not a problem for most people). The $699 upgrade only adds a DVD±RW/CD-RW SuperDrive instead of the Combo drive (DVD/CD-RW) if you need to burn DVDs.
Here is the auction. The bidding is up to nearly US$15K.
Shouldn't be a problem for the cautious. You can use the range search feature to narrow the search to, say, the first 8 digits. i.e., "5398600600000000..5398600699999999". This will still protect your number.
Early waking, eh? Have you read Insomnia by Stephen King? The protagonist had the same problem. Careful, don't let the wrong Little Bald Doctor get you!
HowStuffWorks has got an interesting article on CART (not F1, but similar) cars at here. It mentions some of the sensing, telemetry, and computing technology used. There's even an explanation of the controls on that crazy steering wheel.
If you have a Nikon, Sony, or Canon digital camera, you can't beat the eBooks at this site. The author, Peter Inova, walks through all the fundaments of photography technique with specific reference to the specific features of your camera. It's the best $50 accessory I ever got for my Nikon 4500.
For a while now, you have been able to get a Segway tour of Walt Disney World's Epcot theme park. They weren't available the last time the family went to WDW, but next time we're going to give this a try.
I'll believe that this stupid law is having a positive effect when I start getting less spam. Hasn't happened yet.
We have a cloth shower curtain, and it goes in the laundry every week or so. They cost more, and washing is a hassle, but there's a lot less grunge to tolerate.
Cleaning Instructions: How to clean a shower curtain to shine like new
Even How Stuff Works is getting in on the fun:
How Hydro-Ordnance Works
The forced quota system is especially bad in companies and industries where massive layoffs have been going on for the past few years.
Consider: when layoffs occur, for the most part (yes, I'm aware of politics and favortism) the ones who get laid off are the ones who would be 1's and 2's in a quota system. Obviously, that leaves behind all the 3's, 4's, and 5's who, even though they are doing the same job they have always been and possibly a lot more, will now be forced to be evaluated as 1's and 2's. A lot of folks with 4's and 5's will also be downgraded, despite the same superior quality of their work.
This system is unfair, de-motivating, and literally degrading.
...that one of the most expensive component of the project is the box itself.
Software Bug Contributed to Blackout
By Kevin Poulsen, SecurityFocus Feb 11 2004 3:55PM
A previously-unknown software flaw in a widely-deployed General Electric energy management system contributed to the devastating scope of the August 14th northeastern U.S. blackout, industry officials revealed this week.
The bug in GE Energy's XA/21 system was discovered in an intensive code audit conducted by GE and a contractor in the weeks following the blackout, according to FirstEnergy Corp., the Ohio utility where investigators say the blackout began. "It had never evidenced itself until that day," said spokesman Ralph DiNicola. "This fault was so deeply embedded, it took them weeks of pouring through millions of lines of code and data to find it."
The flaw was responsible for the alarm system failure at FirstEnergy's Akron, Ohio control center that was noted in a November report from the U.S.-Canadian task force investigating the blackout. The report blamed the then-unexplained computer failure for retarding FirstEnergy's ability to respond to events that lead to the outage, when quick action might have limited the blackout's spread.
"Power system operators rely heavily on audible and on-screen alarms, plus alarm logs, to reveal any significant changes in their system's conditions," the report noted. FirstEnergy's operators "were working under a significant handicap without these tools. However, they were in further jeopardy because they did not know that they were operating without alarms, so that they did not realize that system conditions were changing."
The cascading blackout eventually cut off electricity to 50 million people in eight states and Canada.
The blackout occurred at a time when the Blaster computer worm was wreaking havoc across the Internet. The timing triggered some speculation that the virus may have played a role in the outage -- a theory that gained credence after SecurityFocus reported that two systems at a nuclear power plant operated by FirstEnergy had been impacted by the Slammer worm earlier in the year.
Instead, the XA/21 bug was triggered by a unique combination of events and alarm conditions on the equipment it was monitoring, DiNicola said. When a backup server kicked-in, it also failed, unable to handle the accumulation of unprocessed events that had queued up since the main system's failure. Because the system failed silently, FirstEnergy's operators were unaware for over an hour that they were looking at outdated information on the status of their portion of the power grid, according to the November report.
The root cause of the outage was linked to a variety of factors, including FirstEnergy's failure to trim back trees encroaching on high-voltage power lines. FirstEnergy says its problems were some of many issues destabilizing power flow in the northeast that day, and that its role in the outage is overstated in the interim report.
On Tuesday, the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC), the industry group responsible for preventing blackouts in the U.S. and Canada, approved a raft of directives to utility companies aimed at preventing a recurrence of the outage. One of them gives FirstEnergy a June 30th deadline to install any known patches for its XA/21 system.
FirstEnergy says it already patched the blackout bug last fall, when GE made a fix available, and is in the process of replacing the XA/21 with a competing system -- a changeover that was planned before the blackout.
NERC spokesperson Ellen Vancko said the organization would release a more comprehensive list of recommendations next month that would likely instruct all U.S. and Canadian electric companies using GE's XA/21 system to install the patch.
"That blackout report will go into much greater detail and will more broadly address the entire industry, whereas this particular report addressed the specific actors involved in the blackout, as well as some specific actions NERC had to take," Vancko said.
GE Energy declined repeated requests for comment on the bug.
The SNR is actually very good if you click on "Print". Just a banner ad at the top.
I recently bought a copy of K-19. I went to play it the other day, and the disk inside was actually of K-9.
Yikes, talk about your shock to the system! The store made it right without the slightest fuss.
Let's just hope that you don't have a HD problem at the same time you have a billing dispute. Unless you are scrupulous about doing backups, that HD failure could cost you a lot more than just the price of a replacement.
Correct - I just happened to be reading Dark Sun when I heard that Teller had died. It was a weird coincidence.
The book paints Teller as ideosyncratic and egomaniacal, but brilliant. That seems to apply to many of the atomic scientists (Oppenheimer, et al).
The book goes into a lot of great tech detail about the H-Bomb. Building it was an enormously complex engineering problem. The first H-bomb was a cylinder with hemispherical ends that was over 20 feet long and over 6 feet in diameter, and used an A-bomb at one end to start the fusion reaction.
Also, they could only do limited testing, so most of the predictions were purely theoretical. The book recounts one test of a Lithium-reaction H-Bomb that was expected to yield about a 6-Megaton blast that actually was over 15-Megatons. Caught the scientists off guard and caused some injuries and damage because the blast radius was so much larger than expected.
The book was rather dry and slow in places, but overall is a pretty good read.
Heat seems to be the enemy of some APs, both in terms of performance and of longevity. I speak from experience on the former, and have heard stories about the latter. Try setting up cooling fans and see if it doesn't make a difference.
Ralph
I believe that the Siemens Speedstream is hardware equivalent of the SMC AWBR wireless router I have. Siemans runs their own version of firmware on it, and it's supposedly a lot more stable than SMC's firmware. The SMC firmware is so bad, in fact, that I gave up on the SMC as a router because it kept disconnecting my cable modem connection every few hours and required a reboot to reconnect. Not a Hardware problem, they swapped it out for me once. I got myself a Linksys (which runs perfectly) and I'm using the SMC as just a wireless access point. I just disable DHCP and assign it a static IP. Anyway...
The unit is very heat sensitive. When I first installed it, I had trouble getting a stable connection about 30 feet away through one floor and one wall. So, I set the unit up on styrofoam feet about one inch high and set up a 4" cooling fan to blow across the unit. Big difference! The signal in my kitchen is now five by five. I don't think you need to do any extreme cooling tricks to get the improvement.
Ralph
1) Buy the G5 when you get to NY
2) Get a laptop instead
If you do decide to ship a desktop machine, you should be OK. I mean Dell, Gateway, and the rest ship them computers all over the place. Just make sure you lay your hands on a proper shipping container, and pad things extra well. Backup your data beforehand, and buy shipping insurance, too, just in case.
There seem to be a lot of geek and academic types among the jugglers I know. Anyway, juggling is great fun and a good challenge. Even the athletically inept can learn and become proficient with some practice. It's a great way to take a break and stay alert in the office - I juggle during long, boring conference calls (wearing a headset so my hands are free). Try it!
Ralph
1) You can have it on time,
2) You can have it under budget,
3) You can have it be of high quality.
Pick any two.
NASA apparently have been going for 1) and 2) lately.
I use WestHost and I am very happy with them for the past 4 years.
They seem to meet all your requirements.
Ralph
This is all the more reason to routinely encrypt all your personal data. The seized HD is not going to do them much good if they can't read the data.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary online lists both "platypusses" and "platypi" as a valid plurals of "platypus".
platypus