Repainting roads is a lot of effort and, unless they do it at low to zero traffic times (not here they don't), causes hassle for everybody. So it only gets done about once in ten years.
Solar powered signs are low maintenance. There are hundreds on UK roads attached to speed radar sensors to annoy you as you approach (most seem to be set to go off even if you aren't speeding). Putting a SIM in them means they can call home so you know when one has failed. This stuff is *cheap* and just needs one guy in a van that needn't block anybody with a toolkit and some spare parts.
In my area they already paint lines on the road, so having another truck (or the same truck) paint the temperature sensitive snowflakes at the same time as they stripe the rest of the road doesn't sound like a whole lot more work for the government or inconvenience to other drivers.
The road around here where I think this could be useful is about 50 km long up a mountain pass, heavily used by out-of-area skiers who have little winter driving experience - if they put these solar powered sensors every 10 meters (since the snowflakes are painted every few meters), they'd have to maintain 5000 of them. I'm finding it hard to believe that 5000 solar powered sensors (especially if they are cellular enabled with SIM cards, which wouldn't even work on most of the road due to poor cell phone coverage) is "cheap" or easier to maintain than some snowflakes that get repainted periodically when they restripe the road.
If you're talking about putting in the sensors every km or so, then it might be more affordable, while also being less useful than the painted indicators since microclimates, shade from the sun, underroad culverts, etc) can make a big difference in road temperature even across short distances.
There's baby food which contains an image which gets visible when its surface becomes slippery? WTFBBQ.
I think a better example is the beer bottle labels that change color to tell you when the beer is at optimal drinking temperature. No need to actually touch the bottle to see if the beer is cold enough to drink.
Though I suppose with some beers, this label actually is useful to make sure the beer is ice cold before drinking to make it more palatable.
You know, the improvements in blood circulation, increased sexual prowess, better sports performance, and all of the other benefits that you get from magnetic bracelets.
The first few hundred meters of glow in the dark, weather-indicating road will be installed in the province of Brabant in mid-2013
They do realize.. you had to be outside to either get in the car or at least to pull out of the garage, right? Might notice things like "shit it's below freezing" or "shit it's snowy, roads might be slick". Just sayin'.
I don't know if you've ever driving in winter conditions... but you do realize that road surface temperature differs from air temperature, and varies over time and distance? It might be 5 degrees when you leave your office, but by the time you reach your home outside of the city, it may have dropped to below freezing.
I'm one of those weird guys who believes in fixing a problem at the source of the problem.
Anyone who doesn't understand that and think it's bleedin' obvious is not qualified to drive a car and should never receive a license until they get a clue.
Unlike this proposal, it would SAVE money, not cost money.
How do you know it would SAVE money to not have freeze warning indicators painted on the roads? They didn't give any price for the indicators in the article, nor did they give any estimate of how many accidents it could prevent.
If it costs $1000/mile to paint the indicators on the roads, and prevents one $10,000 accident per 10 miles, then it would break even.
I don't know about the drivers in the Netherlands, but I can say with some certainty that many of the licensed drivers in the USA indeed do not have a clue. This is especially evident when driving to the mountains on ski weekends and seeing the reckless driving and accidents from out-of-area drivers that really have no clue about how to drive safely in winter conditions since they only drive in snow 3 weekends a year in a rented SUV. I think drivers like this would definitely benefit from freeze warning indicators.
Then have sensors on the road. At the side, obviously, so they don't get smashed. The information is relayed to solar powered signs.
Because that negates the "no maintenace" part that the previous poster was talking about?
The linked to article shows these snowflakes painted every meter or so along the road. A single kilometer would have hundreds of them. Maintaining a network of hundreds of solar powered temperature sensors sounds a lot more labor intensive that repainting the temperature indicating snowflakes periodically when they restripe the roads.
The first few hundred meters of glow in the dark, weather-indicating road will be installed in the province of Brabant in mid-2013
They do realize.. you had to be outside to either get in the car or at least to pull out of the garage, right? Might notice things like "shit it's below freezing" or "shit it's snowy, roads might be slick". Just sayin'.
I don't know if you've ever driving in winter conditions... but you do realize that road surface temperature differs from air temperature, and varies over time and distance? It might be 5 degrees when you leave your office, but by the time you reach your home outside of the city, it may have dropped to below freezing.
What are the "priority induction lanes for electric vehicles"? Do they inductively charge electric vehicles? Are they toll lanes to pay for the electricity?
High friction surface which requires constant work and they want to paint it in temperature sensitive markings which will get covered in sot and worn down in a heartbeat? Prolonging any and all road maintenance.
Why not just have a sign painted in the same material which does the same job, except you can actually see it a lot easier?
I do like the idea of glow in the dark roads for increased visibility, but not for reading the temperature.
Because the sign 2 meters above the road surface is not at the same temperature as the road?
If knowing the ambient temperature were sufficient, then it would be easier to have cars do the warning -- some cars already warn you when the outside temperature approaches freezing, but that still doesn't really tell you the temperature of the road surface.
The one thing you could do to save on fuel is possibly power the non-essential technology from solar. The tv's, sound system, charging stations, satellite phones, and the like. You probably wouldn't see huge tonnages of fuel saved per flight. But over the course of a year, with all of their planes, it would probably add up to a noticeable savings for airlines and pay for itself in relatively little time.
Assuming, of course, that the solar panels, inverters, etc can be added without increasing drag or weight of the plane.
It would make more sense to me to build tehse large solar panels to the airports themselves, since they use up quite a lot of surface area already. Produce H2 from the electricity and use it as a fuel to power the planes. Burning it will produce only water.
Well, water and nitrogen oxides. To get pure water from burning Hydrogen, it can't be burnt with air, it requires pure oxygen (which you'll be able to capture when you crack the water into Hydrogen, but it's another hazardous gas you'll need to carry adding weight to the plane.
"it seems to me that if I were running an airline the size of United or American, eliminating the need for jet fuel as a cost would be highly appealing. " it is the opposite, without the need for fuel there would be no war, no profit to military corporations and oil companies...
But why does United Airlines or American Airlines care about profit to military corporations and oil companies?
A typical trans-country flight in a Boeing 767 uses around 50,000 lbs of fuel or around 7500 gallons.
Each gallon of jet fuel contains 34 KWh of energy, so the 5 hour flight uses 255KWh worth of fuel.
A jet engine is only around 35% efficient, so 89,250kWh of energy is needed to power the plane for the 5 hour trip
Assuming your electrical drivetrain is 100% efficient, you need "only" an average of 18,000kW to power the plane. In full sun, during the peak of the day, you'll get around 1300W/m^2 of solar power, let's use 75% efficient solar cells (which do not exist) and assume 1kW/m^2 of usable power.
So, your mythical solar powered jetliner will need 18,000 m^2 of surface area as long as you don't mind flying only in peak sun.
A B747 is around 80m long with a 70m wingspan. If you constructed a huge rectangular solar array above the plane that's as long and as wide as the plane, you'd have 5600 square meters, you'd need at least 3 of these giant solar arrays to power the plane (ignoring the extra drag caused by the huge solar array).
This only looks at average power and ignores the huge amount of power used in takeoff to get up to cruising altitude, for that you'll need some pretty serious batteries or other power source (fuel cells?). I'd like to see what the numbers look like if you use conventional jet engines (or even something more like one-time-use JATO rockets) to take off and get up to cruising altitude and wanted to rely on solar for the rest of the trip.
I read the summary twice, and skimmed the (long) article it links to, but couldn't figure out what went so horribly wrong. Did 007 capture the SPECTRE bad guys?
If you're doing a down-to-studs remodel of a 3,000 square foot house, what kind of house are you planning for your "much, much nicer house down the road"?
I live in a 65 year old house that's less than half the size that went through a similar remodel - including completely rewiring and replumbing the house to get rid of the old knob-and-tube wiring and galvanized steel plumbing, and I can't imagine what else I'd want in a house, so I'm curious what someone sees as a "much, much nicer" house than a completely remodeled house. Wouldn't it be more cost effective to pay a bit more now to do a nicer remodel and get the house you want?
Oh, and we did wire for data: coax + cat6 to the livingroom and master bedroom, cat6 to each bedroom (2 boxes on opposite walls) and to kitchen/dining room... all pulled back to the second bedroom closet where the patch panel, and ethernet switch live. Conduit from each outlet box runs to the crawlspace so I can easily fish in new cables as needed.) A pair of PoE powered Wifi nodes in the attic provide good coverage throughout the house and the back deck.
It turns out that except for the livingroom for the cable, most of the wiring goes unused - too annoying to plug/unplug the laptop from the ethernet jack everytime I want to move to another room, so I almost always use Wifi. The full-sized computer in the den is hardwired, but it's rarely used. My Wifi network speed is faster than my internet connection, so Wifi bandwidth doesn't matter except for when the laptops run backups, which are scheduled to run at night.
Bad Luck Google: Sends a guy to pick up a lost phone. Gets screwed around by the people who found it. Still offers a free phone to the guy. Gets called evil by the Internet.
And the police in riot gear weren't there for the phone, as implied in the summary, from TFA:
On nearby 14th Street, undercover cops had just gunned down a gang suspect in the road after he produced an illegal TEC-9 semi-automatic pistol and appeared to point it at one of them. The neighborhood erupted in outrage, and dozens of people attacked and vandalized the Mission precinct station while Katz was still inside.
“It was the night of the riot,” says Ragi Dindial, a lawyer Barton knew through the music scene. “I met Katz there and they hustled us out the back door, past riot police in full riot gear and automatic weapons.”
I'm partial to HP gear, and I always claimed that it has quite decent TCO even in very small scale deployments (we have 5k worth of gear, not 40M). People who buy Cisco must be getting a lot of free pussy or something.
Yes, in a small deployment, HP is very cost effective and works well. Even Netgear works well if your budget is $5K.
But in my experience, Cisco does win in manageability and scalability of larger networks. And if things stop working, you can get a knowledgable engineer on the line quickly. We're a pretty small customer (~200 switches), and when we ran into a weird problem with some switches in our environment caused by an IOS bug, we got a custom patch for the problem, which Cisco rolled into the next IOS release.
the big guys spec out their products and use an oem provider and cut out the "middleman", in this case Cisco. Some of the same stuff from the "white boxish" stuff is made on the same lines as Cisco, et al. This is coming much more popular among the large data center corps.
Unless you're talking about Cisco consumer gear (i.e. Linksys).... which isn't really "Cisco", I'm having a hard time believing that the same technology Cisco is putting into a 6509 switch is also sold as a whitebox unbranded switch.
I've been using Linode for the last 8 months or so, and have been pretty happy with it.
$20 per month gets you 1 static ip address, 512 MB of ram, 20 GB of disk space, 200 GB of upload bandwidth, unlimited download bandwidth, and up to 4 cpu cores.
If you don't need much bandwidth or CPU, check out an Amazon Micro instances. If you buy a reserved instance, a Micro instance ends up costing around $7/month plus $0.10/GB for disk and $0.10/GB for outbound bandwidth.
They are cheap enough to run multiple instances - I have my public website on one instance and use the other one for my mail server, and other things I don't want on the public server giving me complete separation between the two. If the webserver ever gets hacked, I can just restore it from an S3 snapshot. I had started looking at chroot'ing Apache or running it in a VM for better isolation, but spinning up a second micro instance was much easier.
If you need to use significant CPU, a micro instance is probably not going to be a good choice, as I've heard that Amazon throttles back CPU to Micro instances that use a lot of sustained CPU. But it runs my PHP based photo gallery software pretty well (shared only to family/friends, so it's not super busy).
The bandwidth costs could get expensive quickly at 10 cents/GB if you have a busy website. I run a script that checks my bandwidth utilization and if I hit more than 10GB in one day it shuts down Apache and notifies me so I don't end up with a huge bandwidth bill if my site ever slashdotted.
Even with multiple S3 snapshots, my total hosting bill is always less than $20/month, less than I was paying for a single VPS server (that was having performance issues due to being oversubscribed so heavily by the ISP)
Again, same reason -- smallish generator, but enough to cover the absolute basics. And, really, lamp oil is cheap, and if you're rationing your emergency power, why waste it on batteries? He collects antiques, so he already had the hurricane lamps, which also have the benefit of throwing heat.
Power used by LED lighting shouldn't be a concern - oil lamps still seem like a lot of fire risk for little gain. Especially if he has small children (his, or neighbors that have come to share his power) or extra pets in the house. If you're using the generator to run the furnace, you don't really need heat from the oil lamps.
A Honda 2000i generator is rated to burn.11 gallons/hour @ 500W output, which equates to 1 KWh for.23 gallons
each 2000mAh AA NiMH battery holds 2.4Wh, figure 3Wh to account for charging inefficiencies.
So, if you go through 8 AA batteries each day, that's around 25Wh, which would use.005 gallons of fuel, or a bit more than a tablespoon of fuel. Or, another way to look at it, if you traded a gallon of lamp oil in storage with another gallon of gasoline for the generator, it would provide enough power to recharge the 8 AA batteries 173 times.
Maryland here, not too far from DC. I have a 2kW generator with a transfer switch I wired into my breaker box on my furnace's circuit. I always keep a couple of months of food and four 5 gallon cans of gasoline around.
What fuel stabilizer do you use, how long do you keep the gas, and what do you do when it expires? Just curious since I've thought about getting an emergency generator, but want to know how to keep fuel ready for it. The only gasoline burning machine I have at home is my car - do you just burn the fuel in your car before it gets too old?
I have plenty of oil lamps and fuel.
I asked this above, but why use oil lamps? Alkaline batteries are cheap (or NiMH's can be recharged from your generator), LEDs last forever, and oil is a big fire hazard if you knock a lamp off the table. the last thing I'd want during a hurricane disaster when power and phones is out is a fire in my house and no way to call the fire department.
I might loser power, internet, and some perishable items but honestly I'm more concerned about potential property damage than a few days off of work catching up on reading and housecleaning. I'm sure we're not talking about roving gangs of marauders here or anything. The only thing I really need to stock up on is beer. I'll be fine.
My father now has a generator wired into the house, and set up so they can run the furnace, and a couple of outlets (run the fridge for a while to keep it cold), with enough gas to run it for most of a week. They already have a bunch of oil-lamps, and make sure to keep them fueled. They keep several gallons of water in the bathroom to flush with (they're on a well, no electricity means no water to flush the toilets, which is pretty nasty).
Since they have a hardwired generator, why not put the well pump on the generator? My parents have a 5KVA generator that has enough power to run the well pump as long as no other big loads are powered on (the startup current on the well pump is apparently too much current draw when combined with other loads). Once the well pump fills the pressure tank, he can turn it off and has 15 - 20 gallons of usable water before the pressure drops too low.
If I had a generator, I'd never use oil lamps - rechargable batteries and LED flashlights are much safer, you can get a fast charger to recharge AA's in 30 minutes or so, which is less time than you'll need to run the fridge. Or get a D cell LED lantern - it'll run for 48 hours or so on a set of non-rechargable alkalines. Or use your rechargable AA's in a D-cell adapter and you can still get a few hours of lifetime from it before you need to recharge.
I saw someone knock over an oil lamp once in a garage - the wick holder came off and oil seeped out onto the plywood it fell onto, it created a sizeable fire before someone brought in a fire extinguisher to douse it. Not something I'd want to have happen in the living room during a hurricane disaster.
Pretty sure that the Chinese know how to make just as good a router as Americans. Heck, they've copied from Americans in the beginning and they are fully capable of advancing the state-of-the-art by themselves now.
Slashdot Mirror
What health impact?
....says the idiot who gets cancer from excessive wireless signals 5 years from now.
You know what they say about discoveries...someone actually has to discover them.
Oh, and you know what they say about greedy corporations and the executives that represent them...no one can seem to tell the truth.
Cell phones have been around for decades, and used to put out much higher signal levels, yet people are not dropping dead from them.
The inductive chargers don't even use radio waves, they use magnetic fields, which you're exposed to every day from your home appliances and wiring.
Repainting roads is a lot of effort and, unless they do it at low to zero traffic times (not here they don't), causes hassle for everybody. So it only gets done about once in ten years.
Solar powered signs are low maintenance. There are hundreds on UK roads attached to speed radar sensors to annoy you as you approach (most seem to be set to go off even if you aren't speeding). Putting a SIM in them means they can call home so you know when one has failed. This stuff is *cheap* and just needs one guy in a van that needn't block anybody with a toolkit and some spare parts.
In my area they already paint lines on the road, so having another truck (or the same truck) paint the temperature sensitive snowflakes at the same time as they stripe the rest of the road doesn't sound like a whole lot more work for the government or inconvenience to other drivers.
The road around here where I think this could be useful is about 50 km long up a mountain pass, heavily used by out-of-area skiers who have little winter driving experience - if they put these solar powered sensors every 10 meters (since the snowflakes are painted every few meters), they'd have to maintain 5000 of them. I'm finding it hard to believe that 5000 solar powered sensors (especially if they are cellular enabled with SIM cards, which wouldn't even work on most of the road due to poor cell phone coverage) is "cheap" or easier to maintain than some snowflakes that get repainted periodically when they restripe the road.
If you're talking about putting in the sensors every km or so, then it might be more affordable, while also being less useful than the painted indicators since microclimates, shade from the sun, underroad culverts, etc) can make a big difference in road temperature even across short distances.
I drive in massive snow, and a "glow in the dark" road will be useless as it will be under 1 foot of snow.
If you can't tell from the 12 inches of snow on the road that the road may be slippery, perhaps you're not cut out for driving.
But if you're in an area that doesn't get a lot of permanent snow, yet temperatures hover around freezing, you might find this more useful.
There's baby food which contains an image which gets visible when its surface becomes slippery? WTFBBQ.
I think a better example is the beer bottle labels that change color to tell you when the beer is at optimal drinking temperature. No need to actually touch the bottle to see if the beer is cold enough to drink.
Though I suppose with some beers, this label actually is useful to make sure the beer is ice cold before drinking to make it more palatable.
What health impact?
You know, the improvements in blood circulation, increased sexual prowess, better sports performance, and all of the other benefits that you get from magnetic bracelets.
The first few hundred meters of glow in the dark, weather-indicating road will be installed in the province of Brabant in mid-2013
They do realize .. you had to be outside to either get in the car or at least to pull out of the garage, right? Might notice things like "shit it's below freezing" or "shit it's snowy, roads might be slick". Just sayin'.
I don't know if you've ever driving in winter conditions... but you do realize that road surface temperature differs from air temperature, and varies over time and distance? It might be 5 degrees when you leave your office, but by the time you reach your home outside of the city, it may have dropped to below freezing.
I'm one of those weird guys who believes in fixing a problem at the source of the problem.
Anyone who doesn't understand that and think it's bleedin' obvious is not qualified to drive a car and should never receive a license until they get a clue.
Unlike this proposal, it would SAVE money, not cost money.
How do you know it would SAVE money to not have freeze warning indicators painted on the roads? They didn't give any price for the indicators in the article, nor did they give any estimate of how many accidents it could prevent.
If it costs $1000/mile to paint the indicators on the roads, and prevents one $10,000 accident per 10 miles, then it would break even.
I don't know about the drivers in the Netherlands, but I can say with some certainty that many of the licensed drivers in the USA indeed do not have a clue. This is especially evident when driving to the mountains on ski weekends and seeing the reckless driving and accidents from out-of-area drivers that really have no clue about how to drive safely in winter conditions since they only drive in snow 3 weekends a year in a rented SUV. I think drivers like this would definitely benefit from freeze warning indicators.
Then have sensors on the road. At the side, obviously, so they don't get smashed. The information is relayed to solar powered signs.
Because that negates the "no maintenace" part that the previous poster was talking about?
The linked to article shows these snowflakes painted every meter or so along the road. A single kilometer would have hundreds of them. Maintaining a network of hundreds of solar powered temperature sensors sounds a lot more labor intensive that repainting the temperature indicating snowflakes periodically when they restripe the roads.
The first few hundred meters of glow in the dark, weather-indicating road will be installed in the province of Brabant in mid-2013
They do realize .. you had to be outside to either get in the car or at least to pull out of the garage, right? Might notice things like "shit it's below freezing" or "shit it's snowy, roads might be slick". Just sayin'.
I don't know if you've ever driving in winter conditions... but you do realize that road surface temperature differs from air temperature, and varies over time and distance? It might be 5 degrees when you leave your office, but by the time you reach your home outside of the city, it may have dropped to below freezing.
What are the "priority induction lanes for electric vehicles"? Do they inductively charge electric vehicles? Are they toll lanes to pay for the electricity?
High friction surface which requires constant work and they want to paint it in temperature sensitive markings which will get covered in sot and worn down in a heartbeat? Prolonging any and all road maintenance.
Why not just have a sign painted in the same material which does the same job, except you can actually see it a lot easier?
I do like the idea of glow in the dark roads for increased visibility, but not for reading the temperature.
Because the sign 2 meters above the road surface is not at the same temperature as the road?
If knowing the ambient temperature were sufficient, then it would be easier to have cars do the warning -- some cars already warn you when the outside temperature approaches freezing, but that still doesn't really tell you the temperature of the road surface.
The one thing you could do to save on fuel is possibly power the non-essential technology from solar. The tv's, sound system, charging stations, satellite phones, and the like. You probably wouldn't see huge tonnages of fuel saved per flight. But over the course of a year, with all of their planes, it would probably add up to a noticeable savings for airlines and pay for itself in relatively little time.
Assuming, of course, that the solar panels, inverters, etc can be added without increasing drag or weight of the plane.
It would make more sense to me to build tehse large solar panels to the airports themselves, since they use up quite a lot of surface area already.
Produce H2 from the electricity and use it as a fuel to power the planes. Burning it will produce only water.
Well, water and nitrogen oxides. To get pure water from burning Hydrogen, it can't be burnt with air, it requires pure oxygen (which you'll be able to capture when you crack the water into Hydrogen, but it's another hazardous gas you'll need to carry adding weight to the plane.
"it seems to me that if I were running an airline the size of United or American, eliminating the need for jet fuel as a cost would be highly appealing. " it is the opposite, without the need for fuel there would be no war, no profit to military corporations and oil companies...
But why does United Airlines or American Airlines care about profit to military corporations and oil companies?
A typical trans-country flight in a Boeing 767 uses around 50,000 lbs of fuel or around 7500 gallons.
Each gallon of jet fuel contains 34 KWh of energy, so the 5 hour flight uses 255KWh worth of fuel.
A jet engine is only around 35% efficient, so 89,250kWh of energy is needed to power the plane for the 5 hour trip
Assuming your electrical drivetrain is 100% efficient, you need "only" an average of 18,000kW to power the plane. In full sun, during the peak of the day, you'll get around 1300W/m^2 of solar power, let's use 75% efficient solar cells (which do not exist) and assume 1kW/m^2 of usable power.
So, your mythical solar powered jetliner will need 18,000 m^2 of surface area as long as you don't mind flying only in peak sun.
A B747 is around 80m long with a 70m wingspan. If you constructed a huge rectangular solar array above the plane that's as long and as wide as the plane, you'd have 5600 square meters, you'd need at least 3 of these giant solar arrays to power the plane (ignoring the extra drag caused by the huge solar array).
This only looks at average power and ignores the huge amount of power used in takeoff to get up to cruising altitude, for that you'll need some pretty serious batteries or other power source (fuel cells?). I'd like to see what the numbers look like if you use conventional jet engines (or even something more like one-time-use JATO rockets) to take off and get up to cruising altitude and wanted to rely on solar for the rest of the trip.
I read the summary twice, and skimmed the (long) article it links to, but couldn't figure out what went so horribly wrong. Did 007 capture the SPECTRE bad guys?
If you're doing a down-to-studs remodel of a 3,000 square foot house, what kind of house are you planning for your "much, much nicer house down the road"?
I live in a 65 year old house that's less than half the size that went through a similar remodel - including completely rewiring and replumbing the house to get rid of the old knob-and-tube wiring and galvanized steel plumbing, and I can't imagine what else I'd want in a house, so I'm curious what someone sees as a "much, much nicer" house than a completely remodeled house. Wouldn't it be more cost effective to pay a bit more now to do a nicer remodel and get the house you want?
Oh, and we did wire for data: coax + cat6 to the livingroom and master bedroom, cat6 to each bedroom (2 boxes on opposite walls) and to kitchen/dining room... all pulled back to the second bedroom closet where the patch panel, and ethernet switch live. Conduit from each outlet box runs to the crawlspace so I can easily fish in new cables as needed.) A pair of PoE powered Wifi nodes in the attic provide good coverage throughout the house and the back deck.
It turns out that except for the livingroom for the cable, most of the wiring goes unused - too annoying to plug/unplug the laptop from the ethernet jack everytime I want to move to another room, so I almost always use Wifi. The full-sized computer in the den is hardwired, but it's rarely used. My Wifi network speed is faster than my internet connection, so Wifi bandwidth doesn't matter except for when the laptops run backups, which are scheduled to run at night.
Bad Luck Google: Sends a guy to pick up a lost phone. Gets screwed around by the people who found it. Still offers a free phone to the guy. Gets called evil by the Internet.
And the police in riot gear weren't there for the phone, as implied in the summary, from TFA:
On nearby 14th Street, undercover cops had just gunned down a gang suspect in the road after he produced an illegal TEC-9 semi-automatic pistol and appeared to point it at one of them. The neighborhood erupted in outrage, and dozens of people attacked and vandalized the Mission precinct station while Katz was still inside.
“It was the night of the riot,” says Ragi Dindial, a lawyer Barton knew through the music scene. “I met Katz there and they hustled us out the back door, past riot police in full riot gear and automatic weapons.”
I'm partial to HP gear, and I always claimed that it has quite decent TCO even in very small scale deployments (we have 5k worth of gear, not 40M). People who buy Cisco must be getting a lot of free pussy or something.
Yes, in a small deployment, HP is very cost effective and works well. Even Netgear works well if your budget is $5K.
But in my experience, Cisco does win in manageability and scalability of larger networks. And if things stop working, you can get a knowledgable engineer on the line quickly. We're a pretty small customer (~200 switches), and when we ran into a weird problem with some switches in our environment caused by an IOS bug, we got a custom patch for the problem, which Cisco rolled into the next IOS release.
the big guys spec out their products and use an oem provider and cut out the "middleman", in this case Cisco. Some of the same stuff from the "white boxish" stuff is made on the same lines as Cisco, et al. This is coming much more popular among the large data center corps.
Unless you're talking about Cisco consumer gear (i.e. Linksys).... which isn't really "Cisco", I'm having a hard time believing that the same technology Cisco is putting into a 6509 switch is also sold as a whitebox unbranded switch.
Do you have a reference for this?
I wanna see the final cost after the project is done and everything is working.
$22M sounds low for a project this of this size, so I wonder if Lucent is planning to make up the difference with consulting fees.
Or maybe I'm just jaded from paying Cisco prices for so long... and also from seeing low-ball bids costing a lot more in the end.
I've been using Linode for the last 8 months or so, and have been pretty happy with it.
$20 per month gets you 1 static ip address, 512 MB of ram, 20 GB of disk space, 200 GB of upload bandwidth, unlimited download bandwidth, and up to 4 cpu cores.
If you don't need much bandwidth or CPU, check out an Amazon Micro instances. If you buy a reserved instance, a Micro instance ends up costing around $7/month plus $0.10/GB for disk and $0.10/GB for outbound bandwidth.
They are cheap enough to run multiple instances - I have my public website on one instance and use the other one for my mail server, and other things I don't want on the public server giving me complete separation between the two. If the webserver ever gets hacked, I can just restore it from an S3 snapshot. I had started looking at chroot'ing Apache or running it in a VM for better isolation, but spinning up a second micro instance was much easier.
If you need to use significant CPU, a micro instance is probably not going to be a good choice, as I've heard that Amazon throttles back CPU to Micro instances that use a lot of sustained CPU. But it runs my PHP based photo gallery software pretty well (shared only to family/friends, so it's not super busy).
The bandwidth costs could get expensive quickly at 10 cents/GB if you have a busy website. I run a script that checks my bandwidth utilization and if I hit more than 10GB in one day it shuts down Apache and notifies me so I don't end up with a huge bandwidth bill if my site ever slashdotted.
Even with multiple S3 snapshots, my total hosting bill is always less than $20/month, less than I was paying for a single VPS server (that was having performance issues due to being oversubscribed so heavily by the ISP)
If I had a generator, I'd never use oil lamps
Again, same reason -- smallish generator, but enough to cover the absolute basics. And, really, lamp oil is cheap, and if you're rationing your emergency power, why waste it on batteries? He collects antiques, so he already had the hurricane lamps, which also have the benefit of throwing heat.
Power used by LED lighting shouldn't be a concern - oil lamps still seem like a lot of fire risk for little gain. Especially if he has small children (his, or neighbors that have come to share his power) or extra pets in the house. If you're using the generator to run the furnace, you don't really need heat from the oil lamps.
A Honda 2000i generator is rated to burn .11 gallons/hour @ 500W output, which equates to 1 KWh for .23 gallons
each 2000mAh AA NiMH battery holds 2.4Wh, figure 3Wh to account for charging inefficiencies.
So, if you go through 8 AA batteries each day, that's around 25Wh, which would use .005 gallons of fuel, or a bit more than a tablespoon of fuel. Or, another way to look at it, if you traded a gallon of lamp oil in storage with another gallon of gasoline for the generator, it would provide enough power to recharge the 8 AA batteries 173 times.
Lot of well educated folks right here will only be good for physical labor.
That's a good thing since there will be lots of need for physical labor.
Maryland here, not too far from DC. I have a 2kW generator with a transfer switch I wired into my breaker box on my furnace's circuit. I always keep a couple of months of food and four 5 gallon cans of gasoline around.
What fuel stabilizer do you use, how long do you keep the gas, and what do you do when it expires? Just curious since I've thought about getting an emergency generator, but want to know how to keep fuel ready for it. The only gasoline burning machine I have at home is my car - do you just burn the fuel in your car before it gets too old?
I have plenty of oil lamps and fuel.
I asked this above, but why use oil lamps? Alkaline batteries are cheap (or NiMH's can be recharged from your generator), LEDs last forever, and oil is a big fire hazard if you knock a lamp off the table. the last thing I'd want during a hurricane disaster when power and phones is out is a fire in my house and no way to call the fire department.
I might loser power, internet, and some perishable items but honestly I'm more concerned about potential property damage than a few days off of work catching up on reading and housecleaning. I'm sure we're not talking about roving gangs of marauders here or anything. The only thing I really need to stock up on is beer. I'll be fine.
Charge the Kindle now!
My father now has a generator wired into the house, and set up so they can run the furnace, and a couple of outlets (run the fridge for a while to keep it cold), with enough gas to run it for most of a week. They already have a bunch of oil-lamps, and make sure to keep them fueled. They keep several gallons of water in the bathroom to flush with (they're on a well, no electricity means no water to flush the toilets, which is pretty nasty).
Since they have a hardwired generator, why not put the well pump on the generator? My parents have a 5KVA generator that has enough power to run the well pump as long as no other big loads are powered on (the startup current on the well pump is apparently too much current draw when combined with other loads). Once the well pump fills the pressure tank, he can turn it off and has 15 - 20 gallons of usable water before the pressure drops too low.
If I had a generator, I'd never use oil lamps - rechargable batteries and LED flashlights are much safer, you can get a fast charger to recharge AA's in 30 minutes or so, which is less time than you'll need to run the fridge. Or get a D cell LED lantern - it'll run for 48 hours or so on a set of non-rechargable alkalines. Or use your rechargable AA's in a D-cell adapter and you can still get a few hours of lifetime from it before you need to recharge.
I saw someone knock over an oil lamp once in a garage - the wick holder came off and oil seeped out onto the plywood it fell onto, it created a sizeable fire before someone brought in a fire extinguisher to douse it. Not something I'd want to have happen in the living room during a hurricane disaster.
Pretty sure that the Chinese know how to make just as good a router as Americans. Heck, they've copied from Americans in the beginning and they are fully capable of advancing the state-of-the-art by themselves now.
FTFY