If they want to charge you differently based on the hour of the day, then yes they would need to know your hour by hour usage. If the supplier wishes to affect demand by charging higher prices during peak hours (thus lowering the peak usage), then they need to be able to collect usage data on an hourly basis. Utilities have to build to their peak demand. If the peak demand is twice the demand during other parts of the day, that means half your power plants are wasted except during that peak period.
The power company doesn't need to know your hour-by-hour usage to bill differently per hour, only your meter needs to know.
The utility can send current pricing to your smart meter for that hour and your meter can keep track of your charges and send it to the power company each month.
I feel sorry for you, being stuck in a house with a public thoroughfare literally right outside the window.
Really? In many urban areas, housing extends to the public sidewalk. In my house, there's a small window in the side of the house that looks into the meter in the garage, it's not like the meter is in my living room leading to the meter reader peering into the living room every time he reads the meter.
But there are also many houses here with living spaces on the first floor, so those houses really do have a public sidewalk just outside the window -- which means they usually keep the shades drawn.
But they have the right to enter you're property with any work dealing with their meter.
I'm not aware of any right to entry. My meter is locked inside my house, and unless I unlock the door and let them in, they aren't allowed to force their way in. I don't even think they are legally allowed to enter in an emergency (i.e. a gas leak). They have to wait for the police and/or fire department.
Of course, they are under no obligation to provide power to me if I don't let them service their meter, but they can't forcibly come in and change out my meter.
And most people the person enters their property.
Not true. In my state, most property the person people.
Of course. They are telling the power company how much electricity you are using. What business is that of theirs?
While it's definitely the power company's right to know how much power I'm using, and even to know in aggregate how much peak versus non-peak power I'm using, but they really shouldn't need to know hour by hour or minute by minute (or even day by day) how much power I'm using.
They already have instrumentation at the substations that tells them how much power my neighborhood is using so they know how much power to generate, they don't need to know when I'm doing laundry, when I go to work, when my house is vacant because I'm on vacation, etc.
I remember reading one news story where a property owner was saying he considered anyone coming onto his property to be a violation of his rights and might shoot someone from the power company if they tried to install a smart meter. I wish I could have asked him how the power company reads his meter right now?
Stupidest person ever.
My power company reads my (non-smart) meter from the public sidewalk through a small window in the side of my house that's there specifically for the gas and electric meters. No need to enter my property.
It's much more difficult if you want to run a router with modern features like Gig-E, wireless N, multiband, jumbo frames etc... I loved dd-wrt when I had a linksys 54g but that old beast was decommissioned from my home several years ago. Now I run a D-Link that supports all these things and was only $130 when I bought it... should be cheaper by now.
You can still use dd-wrt and get modern features like Gig-E, Wireless-N, multiband. not sure about Jumbo Frames, but then again, nothing I run at home needs jumbo frames. dd-wrt is supported on some of Netgear's WNDR* series. (like the WNDR3700)
Sometimes freedom is not cheap. Would you rather buy a cheap router with this onerous shit, or roll your own, paying a bit more in the process, to end up with a device that you fully control?
That's a false dichotomy. You don't need to use a 100W computer to have an open source router. Less than $200 buys you a 15W Soekris board (there are lots of other low power options, including buying an off the shelf wifi router and reflashing it with dd-wrt, openwrt, etc) , depending on where you live, the power savings can pay for it in less than 2 years.
Also that ridiculous 100 watts would cost me about $5/month. Well worth the staggering expense to avoid Cisco.
Few people live where electricity is that cheap. $5/month to run a 100 watt load means you're paying $5.00 / (0.1KW * 30 * 24) = 6.9 cents/KWh.
In California, I'd pay over twice that, or about $10/month. A year's worth of 100W power costs more than I paid for my Wifi router in the first place.
(I use a Linksys Wifi router, but I run dd-wrt on it. I use a low-power Atom based system running Ubuntu as my home fileserver / security camera DVR, the whole thing including UPS + Wifi + internet modem uses about 40W)
So this is the second time this month Amazons cloud has gone down, there should be serious questions being asked of the sustainability of this service given the extremely poor uptime record and extremely large customer base.
They would have spent millions of dollars installing diesel or gas generators and/or battery banks and who knows how much money maintaining and testing it, but when it comes time to actually use it in an emergency, the entire system fails.
You would think having redundant power would be a fundamental crucial thing to get right in owning and operating a data centre, yet Amazon seems unable to handle this relatively easy task.
Well, the entire system didn't fail, my servers in us-east-1a weren't affected at all.
Hardware fails, even well tested hardware... especially in extreme conditions - don't forget that this storm has left millions of people without power, killed at least 10, and caused 3 states to declare an emergency. Amazon may have priority maintenance contracts with their generator and UPS system vendors and fuel delivery contracts, but when a storm like this hits, they vendors are busy keeping government and medical customers online. Rather than spend millions more dollars building redundancy for their redundancy (which adds complexity that can cause a failure itself), Amazon isolates datacenters into availability zones, and has geographically disperse datacenters.
Customers are free to take advantage of availability zones and regions if they want to (which costs more money), but if they chose not to, they shouldn't blame Amazon.
It seems that recently, anything can take down the cloud, or at least cause a serious disruption for any of the major cloud providers. I wonder how many more of these it takes before the cloud-skeptics start winning the debates with management a lot more often.
I think it's more because a cloud outage affects thousands of customers, so it has more visibility. When Amazon has problems, the news is reported on Slashdot. When a smaller collocation center has an accidental fire suppression discharge taking hundreds of customers offline, it doesn't get any press coverage at all.
But the biggest takeaway from this is - never put all of your assets in one region. No matter how much redundancy Amazon builds into a region, a local disaster can still take out the datacenter. That's why they have Availability zones *and* regions. I have some servers in us-east-1a and they weren't affected at all. If they were down, I could bring up my servers in us-west within about an hour. (I could even automate it, but a few hours or even a day of downtime for these servers is no big deal)
I do, because I still run my own, as plenty of power-users do. Of course, the masses never ran their own e-mail servers, even before webmail, they just used POP3 or IMAP.
I run my own mail server, but I still dump most of my mail into a Gmail account since their spam filtering works better than any open source alternatives I've found. I spent a lot of time training Spamassassin's bayesian filter, and though it was pretty good, I finally figured out that Gmail is just easier. Thousands of other users are training their filters and I've found that few spams make it through, and few hams are flagged as spams.
But I have a few email addresses only known to family and close friends that I don't forward on to Gmail - I don't think Google needs to know *everything* about my life.
Look: I don't want to ride an inconvenient train to work (or have to pay for it through gas/road taxes being diverted to train maintenance). I had the option when I was working near D.C. and could have rode the train like my coworkers, but it took them 1.5 hours! My car did the same job in only 45 minutes.
The problem is that most urban areas don't have the space to accommodate more car traffic. in the SF Bay area, If the BART system shut down, CalTrans would need to build another multi billion dollar Bay Bridge just to accommodate the extra traffic from people that were riding the train. But the problem isn't just getting cars to the city - it's what happens to them once they get there. Bridges are (comparatively) easy to build, but adding additional traffic capacity to city streets is nearly impossible. As is adding enough parking spaces for all of the cars.
The reason you enjoyed your 45 minute car commute was because your coworkers were on the train. Without the train, you would have spent much more time in the car, and might not have had anywhere to park once you got to work.
The DC Metro system has pretty good coverage of the DC area, if you're commuting during normal business hours, I'm surprised that you found your driving commute to be twice as fast as the train. Google maps says that to go from the Shady Grove end of the red line to the Smithsonian (which requires a transfer) takes about an hour on transit, and an hour by car in current traffic.
Of course, the people building trains don't want you to have to ride an inconvenient train anywhere, they want you to ride a convenient train. But it would take decades for the USA to build up enough train and other public transit infrastructure to get to the point where it's convenient for most people. Part of the convenience means living in transit oriented development. Where I live now, I'm a 5 minute walk from the train, a grocery store, a Costco and several restaurants. I either bike or take the train to work, so my car is generally only used on weekends - driving to work is faster, except when I take into account the time to find parking and walk to the office.
I would apply the same process to this Train trip as I do to Airplane travel. How much time does it ACTUALLY cost, once you include (1) driving to the port/station (2) waiting upto 1 hour for your ride to arrive (3) the actual trip (4) waiting for your luggage at the conveyor belt (5) finding and paying-for a rental car on the opposite end (6) driving to your hotel.
I think this is why many Americans don't want rail - they think it's just a slower airplane.
What's not obvious is that rail is (often) closer to where you want to go. As an example, when I was in Tokyo and took the Shinkansen (high speed train) to a neighboring city, we left the hotel about 30 minutes before the train was scheduled to leave, took the subway to the Shinkansen station, bought tickets, walked aboard with our luggage, left our wheeled bag at the end of the car, then 10 minutes later, the train left. When we got to our destination 2 hours later, we just grabbed our bag on the way out the door, and a 10 minute walk later we were at our hotel in the center of the city. Flying would have taken at least an hour longer, cost more, and would have been less convenient since we would have had to plan ahead and bought our tickets ahead of time so we would have missed out on the chance to spend the morning with a friend from the 'states that we unexpectedly ran into the night before. With the Shinkansen we knew that even if the train we wanted to take was full, there was another one 45 minutes later (and several non high speed train options to choose from). Trains don't often run at 110% capacity like airlines do - they don't have to overbook to break even.
The HSR between SF and LA is supposed to take around 2:30 in travel time. Add 15 minutes to get to the train in SF and 15 minutes to get from the train station in LA to where ever you're going, so that's 3 hours.
To fly, you'd leave for the SFO airport at least an hour before the flight (travel time is around 30 minutes with normal traffic), spend 1:15 in the air, and then you've got at least 45 minutes to pick up luggage and travel from LAX to Union Station, so that's 3 hours.
Plus in the train, you have more comfortable seating, Wifi (many planes have that now too) and better meals with real silverware.
Granted, if you're not going from city center to city center, travel times could be higher by train, but if the majority of travelers are going to/from the city centers, those people will find the train to be more convenient. And getting to the city center from other areas is also convenient. I don't know about LA, but in the Bay Area, if you live in Marin, you can choose to take a bus or ferry to downtown SF to catch the train. Or from the East Bay you can take BART or Bus or Ferry. Or if you're on the Peninsula, you can go to the SFO or Palo Alto HSR station directly, no need to go to downtown SF.
Not all cable phone offerings are VOIP, some use a digital phone tech.
Do you have more details about this digital phone tech? I'm not aware of any cable company phone offerings that are not VOIP. They may not traverse the public internet (and may be able to take advantage of QoS routing for better performance), but as far as I know, they are all VOIP.
I had no problem finding an internet only package with Comcast and I was quite happy with their service.
I used Comcast for internet service for 3 years and it worked great. Consistent 15 mbit service, never hit any usage caps despite being a heavy Netflix user with no cable service (I used Comcast only for internet). Only one instance of downtime in 3 years, they had a truck there within 4 hours and re terminated the connection at the pole to get me back online (the tech said it was water damage - it had been rainy and exceptionally windy - many people lost power). I considered DSL, but the local Telco could only promise "up to" 1.5mbit of bandwidth and said that due to my CO distance it might be lower.
Now I have AT&T U-Verse (my only option) and after 2 missed install appointment (no call for either one - they just didn't show), it's been ok, but there have been 2 outages in 3 months. One lasted around 10 minutes, the other was 60 minutes but it was the middle of the night.
My provider likes to call me every few months and ask if i'd like their telephone service. I keep having to explain to them that me and my girlfriend are in our late twenties, we don't have a landline and we don't want one and even if my cell phone exploded in my pocket tomorrow, i'd probably just use Skype.
Perhaps they are confused because you're telling them your age as if it's somehow relevant to your phone choice. I know 18 year olds with landlines and I know 60 year olds that use a cell phone exclusively.
Though if it's your internet provider that keeps calling you (unless they also happen to be the phone company), they aren't really offering a "landline", they're just offering some VOIP service which is not nearly the same thing.
Being a locked down walled garden appliance kind of limits their usefulness.
The iPad is only a locked down walled garden to geeks. To a non-technical person, the iPad opens up much more possibility than is walled off. It would be hard for a teacher to find a useful application that's available on "open" Android, but not on "closed" iPad.
We arent defending the 'tablet'. We are pointing out that CHEAP mobile devices are going to be EVERYWHERE. We need to learn how to use them to teach with, not force a desktop paradigm because its familiar.
So instead of pushing a desktop paradigm because it's familiar, we should push a tablet paradigm because it's new and even though people haven't figured out how to most effectively use tablets, they better figure out how to use them because they are going to be EVERYWHERE whether they are better than the alternative or not?
If you cant see how incredibly powerful that combo can be when applied correctly then you are missing the entire point. Dismissing tablets as toys shows your serious lack of vision.
My biggest problem with a tablet is not its display or CPU capabilities, especially with a stable network connection to reach cloud resources. My problem is that I just don't find a touch screen to be that usable for entering large amounts of data. Keeping notes in a one hour meeting is tolerable, but typing any significant amount of data (or code) is much harder on a tablet (plus there's losing half the screen real estate to the on screen keyboard)
And while I could get a bluetooth keyboard and turn the tablet into a laptop, I prefer to just use a laptop in the first place. My asus zenbook isn't a whole lot bigger than a tablet, but I find it to be much more usable. Maybe this will change with Windows 8 when my tablet OS and laptop OS are the same, so I can switch seamlessly between them and leave my laptop on my desk, and take the tablet when I'm mobile but still have the same UI experience. Or maybe the Motorola Atrix style philosophy will win out and my tablet will be my only computer, I just plug it into a docking station with full size monitor and keyboard when I'm at my desk.
Given the number of obvious auto-correct mistakes from coworkers that email me from their tablet, I think they have the same problems with typing on a tablet as I do.
And what's wrong with strncpy, which I started using heavily after a couple of years of working in C?
But there is an attitude problem with a lot of coders. For example, I almost *never* use while - 90+% of the time, I use for/next, so I have known limits.
Too bad so many schools DON'T teach error handling, and so much of upper management demands that programmers write what they want, when they want it, in the time they could wave their hands....
mark
The problem with strncpy() is that it can leave you with a non-null terminated string which can cause problems later on if you're using a function that expects a null terminated string. So you end up having to manually check the size of the copied string to see if it was larger than your destination buffer minus 1 so you can warn someone that the whole string wasn't copied, or just you blindly terminate the last byte of the buffer to prevent problems later on.
Much safer to use strncpy_s() since it will null terminate the destination string automatically and you can check the return code to see if the entire string was copied or not.
The strncpy_s function copies not more than n successive characters (characters that follow a null character are not copied) from the array pointed to by s2 to the array pointed to by s1. If no null character was copied from s2, then s1[n] is set to a null character.
A zero return value implies that all of the requested characters from the string pointed to by s2 t within the array pointed to by s1 and that the result in s1 is null terminated.
When I interviewed at Google, I was struck by how my main interviewer had no work life balance after he moved to Google. He talked about all of the things he used to do - hiking, mountain biking, etc. When I talked to him in more detail about some of his favorite hikes and rides, it became apparent that they were all done before he went to Google and that he no longer has time. Then as I talked to the rest of the team members I found the same thing - their lives revolve around Google. And as I looked around I saw all of the great amenities that are geared toward keeping you on-campus - great food, free laundry, haircuts, oil changes, gym, swimming pool, etc. You could literally live at the office and have everything you need.
That's when I realized that I didn't want to work there. They wanted to bring me back for another interview for a team member that wasn't there for the first one, but I declined and took another job.
quality of life was better. Kids actually went outside and played on a regular basis. Physically playing, not 3DS or iPad games... or facebooking each other on the "information superhighway".
They rode bicycles without a helmet -- nanny state hadn't passed mandatory helmet laws for bicycles back then -- and didn't die! And no, 60% of kids weren't obese and didn't have diabetes back then.
Actually, one of my friends in the early 80's fell off his bike and hit his head, and while he didn't die, he ended up spending a few days in the hospital (he was trying to show us how long he could ride a wheelie). He hit his head hard and lost consciousness.... there was a bloody spot under his head. Fortunately this was when neighbors actually knew each other, so the rest of us ran to the nearest neighbor's house (leaving him laying alone on the road!) and she called for help (but not 911 since that predated 911 in our town, most people in town had a bright orange sticker with the EMS number on their phone - something like "257-0257"). And many people still had to literally "dial" the phone.
He suffered a serious concussion but escaped more serious injury. Had he been wearing a helmet it's likely that he would have just gotten back on his bike.
I think bike helmet laws for children are a good thing and as an adult, I always wear my helmet on my bicycle and my motorcycle.
The Ontario Science Centre in the mid-1970s was wicked cool. The glimpses into the future were all there for you to touch and play with. (The Philips Coffee Machine was one of my favorites). Sadly, science museums have devolved into environmentalism and global warming preaching which by comparison is about as much fun as watching the organic, free-range, fair-trade grass grow.
Check out the Miraikan in Tokyo, or the Exploratorium in San Francisco to see a Science Museum that doesn't hit you over the head with environmentalism. Just say away from the California Acadmy of Sciences in San Francisco since just about every exhibit in that museum talks about how whatever that exhibit is about is dying because of climate change.
Slashdot Mirror
If they want to charge you differently based on the hour of the day, then yes they would need to know your hour by hour usage. If the supplier wishes to affect demand by charging higher prices during peak hours (thus lowering the peak usage), then they need to be able to collect usage data on an hourly basis. Utilities have to build to their peak demand. If the peak demand is twice the demand during other parts of the day, that means half your power plants are wasted except during that peak period.
The power company doesn't need to know your hour-by-hour usage to bill differently per hour, only your meter needs to know.
The utility can send current pricing to your smart meter for that hour and your meter can keep track of your charges and send it to the power company each month.
I feel sorry for you, being stuck in a house with a public thoroughfare literally right outside the window.
Really? In many urban areas, housing extends to the public sidewalk. In my house, there's a small window in the side of the house that looks into the meter in the garage, it's not like the meter is in my living room leading to the meter reader peering into the living room every time he reads the meter.
But there are also many houses here with living spaces on the first floor, so those houses really do have a public sidewalk just outside the window -- which means they usually keep the shades drawn.
But they have the right to enter you're property with any work dealing with their meter.
I'm not aware of any right to entry. My meter is locked inside my house, and unless I unlock the door and let them in, they aren't allowed to force their way in. I don't even think they are legally allowed to enter in an emergency (i.e. a gas leak). They have to wait for the police and/or fire department.
Of course, they are under no obligation to provide power to me if I don't let them service their meter, but they can't forcibly come in and change out my meter.
And most people the person enters their property.
Not true. In my state, most property the person people.
> Are they an invasion of privacy?
Of course. They are telling the power company how much electricity you are using. What business is that of theirs?
While it's definitely the power company's right to know how much power I'm using, and even to know in aggregate how much peak versus non-peak power I'm using, but they really shouldn't need to know hour by hour or minute by minute (or even day by day) how much power I'm using.
They already have instrumentation at the substations that tells them how much power my neighborhood is using so they know how much power to generate, they don't need to know when I'm doing laundry, when I go to work, when my house is vacant because I'm on vacation, etc.
I remember reading one news story where a property owner was saying he considered anyone coming onto his property to be a violation of his rights and might shoot someone from the power company if they tried to install a smart meter. I wish I could have asked him how the power company reads his meter right now?
Stupidest person ever.
My power company reads my (non-smart) meter from the public sidewalk through a small window in the side of my house that's there specifically for the gas and electric meters. No need to enter my property.
It's much more difficult if you want to run a router with modern features like Gig-E, wireless N, multiband, jumbo frames etc... I loved dd-wrt when I had a linksys 54g but that old beast was decommissioned from my home several years ago. Now I run a D-Link that supports all these things and was only $130 when I bought it... should be cheaper by now.
You can still use dd-wrt and get modern features like Gig-E, Wireless-N, multiband. not sure about Jumbo Frames, but then again, nothing I run at home needs jumbo frames. dd-wrt is supported on some of Netgear's WNDR* series. (like the WNDR3700)
Sometimes freedom is not cheap. Would you rather buy a cheap router with this onerous shit, or roll your own, paying a bit more in the process, to end up with a device that you fully control?
That's a false dichotomy. You don't need to use a 100W computer to have an open source router. Less than $200 buys you a 15W Soekris board (there are lots of other low power options, including buying an off the shelf wifi router and reflashing it with dd-wrt, openwrt, etc) , depending on where you live, the power savings can pay for it in less than 2 years.
Also that ridiculous 100 watts would cost me about $5/month. Well worth the staggering expense to avoid Cisco.
Few people live where electricity is that cheap. $5/month to run a 100 watt load means you're paying $5.00 / (0.1KW * 30 * 24) = 6.9 cents/KWh.
In California, I'd pay over twice that, or about $10/month. A year's worth of 100W power costs more than I paid for my Wifi router in the first place.
(I use a Linksys Wifi router, but I run dd-wrt on it. I use a low-power Atom based system running Ubuntu as my home fileserver / security camera DVR, the whole thing including UPS + Wifi + internet modem uses about 40W)
So this is the second time this month Amazons cloud has gone down, there should be serious questions being asked of the sustainability of this service given the extremely poor uptime record and extremely large customer base.
They would have spent millions of dollars installing diesel or gas generators and/or battery banks and who knows how much money maintaining and testing it, but when it comes time to actually use it in an emergency, the entire system fails.
You would think having redundant power would be a fundamental crucial thing to get right in owning and operating a data centre, yet Amazon seems unable to handle this relatively easy task.
Well, the entire system didn't fail, my servers in us-east-1a weren't affected at all.
Hardware fails, even well tested hardware... especially in extreme conditions - don't forget that this storm has left millions of people without power, killed at least 10, and caused 3 states to declare an emergency. Amazon may have priority maintenance contracts with their generator and UPS system vendors and fuel delivery contracts, but when a storm like this hits, they vendors are busy keeping government and medical customers online. Rather than spend millions more dollars building redundancy for their redundancy (which adds complexity that can cause a failure itself), Amazon isolates datacenters into availability zones, and has geographically disperse datacenters.
Customers are free to take advantage of availability zones and regions if they want to (which costs more money), but if they chose not to, they shouldn't blame Amazon.
It seems that recently, anything can take down the cloud, or at least cause a serious disruption for any of the major cloud providers. I wonder how many more of these it takes before the cloud-skeptics start winning the debates with management a lot more often.
I think it's more because a cloud outage affects thousands of customers, so it has more visibility. When Amazon has problems, the news is reported on Slashdot. When a smaller collocation center has an accidental fire suppression discharge taking hundreds of customers offline, it doesn't get any press coverage at all.
But the biggest takeaway from this is - never put all of your assets in one region. No matter how much redundancy Amazon builds into a region, a local disaster can still take out the datacenter. That's why they have Availability zones *and* regions. I have some servers in us-east-1a and they weren't affected at all. If they were down, I could bring up my servers in us-west within about an hour. (I could even automate it, but a few hours or even a day of downtime for these servers is no big deal)
Remember when people ran their own mail servers?
I do, because I still run my own, as plenty of power-users do. Of course, the masses never ran their own e-mail servers, even before webmail, they just used POP3 or IMAP.
I run my own mail server, but I still dump most of my mail into a Gmail account since their spam filtering works better than any open source alternatives I've found. I spent a lot of time training Spamassassin's bayesian filter, and though it was pretty good, I finally figured out that Gmail is just easier. Thousands of other users are training their filters and I've found that few spams make it through, and few hams are flagged as spams.
But I have a few email addresses only known to family and close friends that I don't forward on to Gmail - I don't think Google needs to know *everything* about my life.
Look: I don't want to ride an inconvenient train to work (or have to pay for it through gas/road taxes being diverted to train maintenance). I had the option when I was working near D.C. and could have rode the train like my coworkers, but it took them 1.5 hours! My car did the same job in only 45 minutes.
The problem is that most urban areas don't have the space to accommodate more car traffic. in the SF Bay area, If the BART system shut down, CalTrans would need to build another multi billion dollar Bay Bridge just to accommodate the extra traffic from people that were riding the train. But the problem isn't just getting cars to the city - it's what happens to them once they get there. Bridges are (comparatively) easy to build, but adding additional traffic capacity to city streets is nearly impossible. As is adding enough parking spaces for all of the cars.
The reason you enjoyed your 45 minute car commute was because your coworkers were on the train. Without the train, you would have spent much more time in the car, and might not have had anywhere to park once you got to work.
The DC Metro system has pretty good coverage of the DC area, if you're commuting during normal business hours, I'm surprised that you found your driving commute to be twice as fast as the train. Google maps says that to go from the Shady Grove end of the red line to the Smithsonian (which requires a transfer) takes about an hour on transit, and an hour by car in current traffic.
Of course, the people building trains don't want you to have to ride an inconvenient train anywhere, they want you to ride a convenient train. But it would take decades for the USA to build up enough train and other public transit infrastructure to get to the point where it's convenient for most people. Part of the convenience means living in transit oriented development. Where I live now, I'm a 5 minute walk from the train, a grocery store, a Costco and several restaurants. I either bike or take the train to work, so my car is generally only used on weekends - driving to work is faster, except when I take into account the time to find parking and walk to the office.
I would apply the same process to this Train trip as I do to Airplane travel. How much time does it ACTUALLY cost, once you include (1) driving to the port/station (2) waiting upto 1 hour for your ride to arrive (3) the actual trip (4) waiting for your luggage at the conveyor belt (5) finding and paying-for a rental car on the opposite end (6) driving to your hotel.
I think this is why many Americans don't want rail - they think it's just a slower airplane.
What's not obvious is that rail is (often) closer to where you want to go. As an example, when I was in Tokyo and took the Shinkansen (high speed train) to a neighboring city, we left the hotel about 30 minutes before the train was scheduled to leave, took the subway to the Shinkansen station, bought tickets, walked aboard with our luggage, left our wheeled bag at the end of the car, then 10 minutes later, the train left. When we got to our destination 2 hours later, we just grabbed our bag on the way out the door, and a 10 minute walk later we were at our hotel in the center of the city. Flying would have taken at least an hour longer, cost more, and would have been less convenient since we would have had to plan ahead and bought our tickets ahead of time so we would have missed out on the chance to spend the morning with a friend from the 'states that we unexpectedly ran into the night before. With the Shinkansen we knew that even if the train we wanted to take was full, there was another one 45 minutes later (and several non high speed train options to choose from). Trains don't often run at 110% capacity like airlines do - they don't have to overbook to break even.
The HSR between SF and LA is supposed to take around 2:30 in travel time. Add 15 minutes to get to the train in SF and 15 minutes to get from the train station in LA to where ever you're going, so that's 3 hours.
To fly, you'd leave for the SFO airport at least an hour before the flight (travel time is around 30 minutes with normal traffic), spend 1:15 in the air, and then you've got at least 45 minutes to pick up luggage and travel from LAX to Union Station, so that's 3 hours.
Plus in the train, you have more comfortable seating, Wifi (many planes have that now too) and better meals with real silverware.
Granted, if you're not going from city center to city center, travel times could be higher by train, but if the majority of travelers are going to/from the city centers, those people will find the train to be more convenient. And getting to the city center from other areas is also convenient. I don't know about LA, but in the Bay Area, if you live in Marin, you can choose to take a bus or ferry to downtown SF to catch the train. Or from the East Bay you can take BART or Bus or Ferry. Or if you're on the Peninsula, you can go to the SFO or Palo Alto HSR station directly, no need to go to downtown SF.
Not all cable phone offerings are VOIP, some use a digital phone tech.
Do you have more details about this digital phone tech? I'm not aware of any cable company phone offerings that are not VOIP. They may not traverse the public internet (and may be able to take advantage of QoS routing for better performance), but as far as I know, they are all VOIP.
I had no problem finding an internet only package with Comcast and I was quite happy with their service.
I used Comcast for internet service for 3 years and it worked great. Consistent 15 mbit service, never hit any usage caps despite being a heavy Netflix user with no cable service (I used Comcast only for internet). Only one instance of downtime in 3 years, they had a truck there within 4 hours and re terminated the connection at the pole to get me back online (the tech said it was water damage - it had been rainy and exceptionally windy - many people lost power). I considered DSL, but the local Telco could only promise "up to" 1.5mbit of bandwidth and said that due to my CO distance it might be lower.
Now I have AT&T U-Verse (my only option) and after 2 missed install appointment (no call for either one - they just didn't show), it's been ok, but there have been 2 outages in 3 months. One lasted around 10 minutes, the other was 60 minutes but it was the middle of the night.
If I could use Comcast again, I would.
My provider likes to call me every few months and ask if i'd like their telephone service. I keep having to explain to them that me and my girlfriend are in our late twenties, we don't have a landline and we don't want one and even if my cell phone exploded in my pocket tomorrow, i'd probably just use Skype.
Perhaps they are confused because you're telling them your age as if it's somehow relevant to your phone choice. I know 18 year olds with landlines and I know 60 year olds that use a cell phone exclusively.
Though if it's your internet provider that keeps calling you (unless they also happen to be the phone company), they aren't really offering a "landline", they're just offering some VOIP service which is not nearly the same thing.
Being a locked down walled garden appliance kind of limits their usefulness.
The iPad is only a locked down walled garden to geeks. To a non-technical person, the iPad opens up much more possibility than is walled off. It would be hard for a teacher to find a useful application that's available on "open" Android, but not on "closed" iPad.
We arent defending the 'tablet'. We are pointing out that CHEAP mobile devices are going to be EVERYWHERE. We need to learn how to use them to teach with, not force a desktop paradigm because its familiar.
So instead of pushing a desktop paradigm because it's familiar, we should push a tablet paradigm because it's new and even though people haven't figured out how to most effectively use tablets, they better figure out how to use them because they are going to be EVERYWHERE whether they are better than the alternative or not?
If you cant see how incredibly powerful that combo can be when applied correctly then you are missing the entire point. Dismissing tablets as toys shows your serious lack of vision.
My biggest problem with a tablet is not its display or CPU capabilities, especially with a stable network connection to reach cloud resources. My problem is that I just don't find a touch screen to be that usable for entering large amounts of data. Keeping notes in a one hour meeting is tolerable, but typing any significant amount of data (or code) is much harder on a tablet (plus there's losing half the screen real estate to the on screen keyboard)
And while I could get a bluetooth keyboard and turn the tablet into a laptop, I prefer to just use a laptop in the first place. My asus zenbook isn't a whole lot bigger than a tablet, but I find it to be much more usable. Maybe this will change with Windows 8 when my tablet OS and laptop OS are the same, so I can switch seamlessly between them and leave my laptop on my desk, and take the tablet when I'm mobile but still have the same UI experience. Or maybe the Motorola Atrix style philosophy will win out and my tablet will be my only computer, I just plug it into a docking station with full size monitor and keyboard when I'm at my desk.
Given the number of obvious auto-correct mistakes from coworkers that email me from their tablet, I think they have the same problems with typing on a tablet as I do.
And what's wrong with strncpy, which I started using heavily after a couple of years of working in C?
But there is an attitude problem with a lot of coders. For example, I almost *never* use while - 90+% of the time, I use for/next, so I have known limits.
Too bad so many schools DON'T teach error handling, and so much of upper management demands that programmers write what they want, when they want it, in the time they could wave their hands....
mark
The problem with strncpy() is that it can leave you with a non-null terminated string which can cause problems later on if you're using a function that expects a null terminated string. So you end up having to manually check the size of the copied string to see if it was larger than your destination buffer minus 1 so you can warn someone that the whole string wasn't copied, or just you blindly terminate the last byte of the buffer to prevent problems later on.
Much safer to use strncpy_s() since it will null terminate the destination string automatically and you can check the return code to see if the entire string was copied or not.
http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n1570.pdf
errno_t strncpy_s(char * restrict s1, rsize_t s1max, const char * restrict s2, rsize_t n);
The strncpy_s function copies not more than n successive characters (characters that
follow a null character are not copied) from the array pointed to by s2 to the array
pointed to by s1. If no null character was copied from s2, then s1[n] is set to a null
character.
A zero return value implies that all of the requested characters from the string pointed to by s2 t
within the array pointed to by s1 and that the result in s1 is null terminated.
When I interviewed at Google, I was struck by how my main interviewer had no work life balance after he moved to Google. He talked about all of the things he used to do - hiking, mountain biking, etc. When I talked to him in more detail about some of his favorite hikes and rides, it became apparent that they were all done before he went to Google and that he no longer has time. Then as I talked to the rest of the team members I found the same thing - their lives revolve around Google. And as I looked around I saw all of the great amenities that are geared toward keeping you on-campus - great food, free laundry, haircuts, oil changes, gym, swimming pool, etc. You could literally live at the office and have everything you need.
That's when I realized that I didn't want to work there. They wanted to bring me back for another interview for a team member that wasn't there for the first one, but I declined and took another job.
The multi-threaded stuff sounds nice. But bounds checking, really? How difficult is it to check buffer size before copying?
Given the number of buffer overflow bugs that are found in C programs, apparently it's fairly difficult to do it consistently and correctly.
Anti-science much?
What's anti-science about pointing out two very cool science museums that don't make you feel guilty for living?
Well I know someone who rolled out of bed and hit their head, so I think that helmets should be compulsory in bed too.
How long did he spend in the hospital?
There's a big difference between an 18 inch drop to the bedroom floor and a 5 foot drop to pavement.
quality of life was better. Kids actually went outside and played on a regular basis. Physically playing, not 3DS or iPad games... or facebooking each other on the "information superhighway".
They rode bicycles without a helmet -- nanny state hadn't passed mandatory helmet laws for bicycles back then -- and didn't die! And no, 60% of kids weren't obese and didn't have diabetes back then.
Actually, one of my friends in the early 80's fell off his bike and hit his head, and while he didn't die, he ended up spending a few days in the hospital (he was trying to show us how long he could ride a wheelie). He hit his head hard and lost consciousness.... there was a bloody spot under his head. Fortunately this was when neighbors actually knew each other, so the rest of us ran to the nearest neighbor's house (leaving him laying alone on the road!) and she called for help (but not 911 since that predated 911 in our town, most people in town had a bright orange sticker with the EMS number on their phone - something like "257-0257"). And many people still had to literally "dial" the phone.
He suffered a serious concussion but escaped more serious injury. Had he been wearing a helmet it's likely that he would have just gotten back on his bike.
I think bike helmet laws for children are a good thing and as an adult, I always wear my helmet on my bicycle and my motorcycle.
The Ontario Science Centre in the mid-1970s was wicked cool. The glimpses into the future were all there for you to touch and play with. (The Philips Coffee Machine was one of my favorites). Sadly, science museums have devolved into environmentalism and global warming preaching which by comparison is about as much fun as watching the organic, free-range, fair-trade grass grow.
Check out the Miraikan in Tokyo, or the Exploratorium in San Francisco to see a Science Museum that doesn't hit you over the head with environmentalism. Just say away from the California Acadmy of Sciences in San Francisco since just about every exhibit in that museum talks about how whatever that exhibit is about is dying because of climate change.