AWG is in even denominations for the most oft-used stuff, and is specified by cross-sectional area.
All wire is specified in cross sectional area, typically in either circular mils (thousandths of an inch) or, if using metric, mm^2. AWG is no different from any other wire gauge standard in this respect.
Metric stranded wire sizes, AFAICT, are specified too specifically: 7/0.2 means "7 strands of 0.2MM wire.
Metric sizes are usually just cross sectional area in MM^2. They're actually simpler in many ways. Double the metric number and you've doubled the cross sectional area. AWG sizes actually have three numbers if they are stranded. 22AWG 7/30 is 22 gauge circular mil with 7 strands of 30awg wire. Larger gauge stuff like you talk about below is specified a little strangely though.
Doubling is easy for AWG, too: It's a difference of about 3. Two 12AWG wires approximates a 9AWG wire
Doubling is even easier for metric if they are doing cross sectional area. (sometimes they specify metric diameters) Double the metric number and you double the cross sectional area. The formula for metric is a bit neater than the one for AWG. In practical terms it doesn't matter much but if I could throw everything out and start over I'd use metric. It's a little bit more sensible.
I could care less for how many strands are there for AC, DC, and most audio work, as long as it is stranded.
You probably care more than you think. More strands = more flexibility in the wire. A 7 strand wire will be relatively stiff. A 36 strand wire will be limp like a noodle. You may or may not care greatly for your specific application since you probably have a range of acceptable stiffness - maybe anything between 7 and 24 is fine for example. But at some level the number of strands usually matters.
But in Metric terms, even viewing these wires on a chart would have been difficult: One variation had a fifteen or so strands and was fairly stiff, one had a half-dozen or so and was very stiff, and one had seemingly hundreds and was quite flexible. Meh, and double-meh for trying to cross-reference the correct tool and die set to the wire I had on-hand today in metric terms: To me, in that application, they were all the same: 6 AWG stranded. Easy.
The number of strands is no simpler in AWG than in metric. If you work in the US pretty much all wire you can buy is AWG unless you specially purchase metric (which will come from overseas). If someone specifies a product in metric you use a conversion chart to work out the closest equivalent wire in AWG and use that. When you say "6 AWG stranded" you simply accepted a product with some number of strands but this is something you specified whether you know it or not. You can get 6 AWG solid wire or with strands and the number of strands tends to come in standard increments though you can have a custom wire built with an arbitrary number of strands. I have some 27 strand 6AWG wire sitting on my desk as I type this. There is no difference or advantage to metric or AWG here.
I will wonder for the rest of my life why it was that Ford bailed on Crown, who always did a fine job of making very safe, serviceable, well-supported, and well-documented harnesses for the previous Panther platform
AFAICT, American cars are metric and have been for some time.
I can assure you that many many drawings for automotive parts are NOT in metric. They might be specified that way from GM, Ford etc but that isn't the case all through the supply chain. My company makes wire harnesses, many of which are for automotive applications. Probably about 20% of the drawings I see (though the number is rising) are in metric. The rest are in inches. Wire gauges are not in metric either, they are usually American Wire Gauge. In fact I regularly see drawings where the lengths are in inches and the default tolerances are in metric, meaning the engineers are ignoring their own company standards. How's that for screwed up?
Assuming you're an American, how would the US switching to the metric system enhance your life?
Most of the benefits would be economic and mostly indirect. There would be less overhead for commerce and less need to buy redundant tooling, gauges, etc. Engineers could spend time doing useful work instead of pointless unit conversions. There is a very real and measurable cost which is in the billions of dollars annually. The economy is global and the US is incurring a pointless and unnecessary cost by not using metric which hurts our global competitiveness.
How would I notice? I wouldn't have to buy needless tooling for my company or for myself. I wouldn't have to waste time doing pointless and costly unit conversions. Virtually all our raw materials my company buys are produced outside the US so I would have to waste a lot less time making our engineering and production systems compatible. I wouldn't have to have two sets of gauges on my car's speedometer. I wouldn't have to have a measuring cup with 12 different arbitrary units to measure liquid. I wouldn't have to pay extra to have Fahrenheit on my thermometers unless I really needed it. I wouldn't need lookup tables in my cookbooks for units. I wouldn't have to wonder if the price of fuel is high when I visit Canada and the gasoline is sold in liters.
There obviously would be substantial up front costs to the switch and indirect benefits are hard to sell to anyone in the US. But we are paying huge amounts of money to use a system that is poorly compatible with 95% of the world's population.
There is one thing very special about the meter. What is special is that it is used by 95% of the world's population. That alone makes it special regardless of whatever other merits it might have.
Actually the US Customary Units are defined in terms of meters, liters, grams, etc so really we are just using an unnecessary abstraction layer because we can't be bothered to incur the (admittedly substantial) switching costs.
But I would say that the main problem with units like foot and inches is not the base per se, but the inconsistent bases across the spectrum.
I agree that is a very real problem. Base 2 or Base 16 or Base 8 is not inherently less logical than Base 10. But that is not the main problem with using feet and inches. The main problem is that it simply is not the same units used anywhere else in the world. This means there is a very real and significant cost to maintaining the tooling, signage, engineering time, documentation, conversions, mistakes etc between the two systems. It is a completely unnecessary and pointless cost. It means that we have to buy unnecessary tools, have engineers spend time on pointless unit conversions and rounding problems, we have to worry about unit conversion mistakes, we have to make extra gauges to measure the second measurement system. The real problem is needless cost, wasted labor, mistakes and confusion.
Now this could be solved by the rest of the world converting to the units used in the US but it makes a LOT more sense for those of us in the US to stop being a bunch of arrogant dickheads and switch to match the other 95% of the world population.
More likely it will just keep Thunderbolt from ever really taking off. SATA is pretty common and there are enough technical headaches with using USB instead that it is probably going to stick around. (though eSATA might be a different story since it is far less commonly used) But if USB is fast enough there really is limited need for Thunderbolt. I already can run a monitor via USB 2.0 through a docking station I use daily and that works fine.
I'm less interested in faster USB than I am in 100W USB. The ability to power a laptop or small PC with a single USB cable would be huge. Anything that reduces the number of different types of cables I have to deal with is a good thing.
A lot of problems could be solved by simply declaring that if a work can be copyrighted then it is not eligible for patent protection as well. Software is basically a written work and it is automatically protected under copyright law. Works should only be eligible to be covered under one or the other but not both. An important details is that if a work CAN be covered under copyright law then it MUST be covered under copyright law. As such, most software would be ineligible for patent protection under such a rule. While it might not solve all problems (such as business method patents) it would go a long way towards eliminating the problem of software patents.
If someone can stay up until 5 AM playing WoW and still end up doing well in school, what's the problem?
Because they won't. Human physiology doesn't work that way. Oh sure it might not matter for a single day but ongoing lack of sleep WILL result in someone under-performing. Part of being a responsible parent is making sure that your child does not hurt themselves and sleep deprivation is without question harmful. Speaking for myself, sleep problems caused by my own actions seriously affected how well I did in school. There is substantial research proving that lack of sleep is hugely detrimental to teenagers.
If they're tired in the morning and end up having a horrible day because of it, chances are they're going to go to bed earlier so they don't get tired.
I work with teenagers daily as a coach. It doesn't work that way in real life. Teenagers do all sorts of things that aren't in their best interests.
Quickbooks works fine in a WinXp virtual machine on Linux.
No point in running a virtual machine if it doesn't save us money. We would still have to buy the seat of Windows and maintain it. Might as well just run Windows - less complicated and better supported. Linux by itself isn't a sufficient advantage to justify switching from an already working system no matter how much I presonally dislike Windows.
QuickBOOKS not Quicken. Completely different software. Quicken is for personal finance. Quickbooks is accounting software to run a business. There is personal finance software for linux that, while it isn't quite as good as Quicken, is perfectly acceptable. There is NO software available for linux that is equivalent to Quickbooks. None. I'm a certified accountant and anyone who tells you there is an equivalent bit of software to Quickbooks (or Sage 50) available on linux has no idea what they are talking about. It simply does not exist.
You sir should be upmodded to a thousand, because this is something I've been trying to get the Linux advocates to understand for years...you HAVE to have Quickbook...
Thanks. Although you could accomplish the same end with a version of Sage 50 (formerly called Peachtree) which is the closest competitor to Quickbooks since they are functionally equivalent. They don't have a linux version either. There is nothing available on linux that can replace Quickbooks. Nothing. I'm a certified accountant and believe me, I've looked.
I don't know how many SMBs I have that have their entire company, from inventory to accounting to taxes, run by a "Quickbooks girl" (and for some reason its almost ALWAYS a girl, you'd think they had a union or something) that everybody just hands the paperwork to and she takes care of the entire company.
Most clerical jobs are handled by women, including bookkeeping. It's rare you find women in jobs like construction so I presume the clerical stuff is simply where the opportunity happens to be for many of them. Bookkeeping doesn't require a formal degree and is relatively easy to learn and often can be done part time which is compatible with raising a family. Among professional accountants the ratio of men to women is a lot closer to 50/50.
On the other hand, for shitty movies, its ridiculous to even contemplate watching them in a theater, no matter the price.
Speaking for myself, it isn't just "shitty" movies that I don't bother to see in a theater. I go to the theater to see movies where the visuals and special effects are enhanced by a big screen. Action movies, sci-fi, etc. I see little point in going to a theater for some chick-flick emo sob fest that could be equally enjoyed at home on my TV.
Honestly though, once I can afford a 70+ inch HDTV for home I doubt I'll go to the movies much after that...
Autocad to my knowledge is not and never has been available for linux and its the most popular CAD software out there. We also use some schematic packages that don't have linux versions at present though I'm hopeful that will change. I realize there is CAD available on linux but we simply don't have the manpower to incur the cost of transition.
I'm also a bit surprised by the MRP being Windows only, most ERP/MRP packages are fairly platform agnostic.
The stuff for big enterprises is more agnostic but for smaller companies, good accounting and MRP software is very rarely available for linux. MRP systems that work with Quickbooks or Sage products are typically Windows only though there are the occasional exceptions. Quickbooks is effectively Windows only (the Mac version is crippled) and that isn't likely to change and that is by far the most popular accounting software for small businesses. We use an old MRP system that is only available on Windows and the feasible alternatives for us are also Windows only at the moment.
What is the major difference between Windows 7/8 and XP or a Linux distro? Just the GUI
I truly wish that was the major difference. If that was all that was different I would have switched our company away from Windows years ago and so would many others. The major difference is the applications and that is the only difference that truly matters. If everything was written cross-platform, then you would have a credible argument.
For better or worse there are a LOT of applications (including games) that only run on Windows and it remains sadly true that there often are no acceptable replacements. Our accounting software, MRP software, CAD software and some others simply are not available on linux, nor is there any acceptable substitute. We use LibreOffice, GIMP, Scribus, Inkscape, Chrome, Thunderbird, VNC, and more but there simply is no way we could get rid of our Windows boxes in the near future because of the applications we need to use. The moment there is a linux version of Quickbooks Enterprise and a compatible MRP system, I'd dump windows that minute but that simply isn't going to happen in the foreseeable future.
In my industry (wire harnesses) engineers mostly do NOT work in SI here in the US if the drawings we receive are anything to go by. They will if the customer needs/demands metric (usually for Asian or European customers though sometimes for domestic customers) but mostly the engineers I've dealt with are an old fashioned lot that cannot be bothered to use metric. We have a few customers that use metric but most of the drawings we receive use inches - not even decimalized inches.
I don't think we have made a car in 30 years that wasn't mostly metric.
My company makes car parts and the supply chain for US car makers still commonly do not specify parts in metric. Drawings from Japanese or European auto parts suppliers are typically in metric but from US manufacturers we normally see some form of imperial units. Lengths are specified in inches, wire gauges in AWG instead of metric, etc. Most of our tooling is in fractions of an inch instead of millimeters. Not to say metric doesn't get used but it's not as much as it should be.
like the construction supplies industry, which benefits from using measures and sizes different to everyone else in the world.
Having to deal with multiple measurement systems is nothing but a cost with no benefit - which is why metric is not commonly used here in the US. There is a HUGE cost to switching which is why it hasn't been done but there is no actual advantage to having more than one measurement system to the construction industry or any other industry. Furthermore all the skilled trade workers are trained in imperial units and don't use metric much and there is a lot of resistance from them since they'd have to re-learn a lot of how they do things.
It effectively acts as a trade barrier against the Chinese.
I assure you it does not. All those commodity bolts, fasteners, etc are made in China. Construction companies are often Chinese.
A standard, whether it be gold, silver, titanium, of even wheat, bases your money on SOMETHING.
Except that it does not. The only thing that give currency value is the belief that it has value. You can base the currency on the value of something else but then guess what? Gold only has value because people believe it has value. So you are not changing ANYTHING but you are making it more difficult to deal with economic problems when they arise. You are pegging the value of one commodity (currency) to another (gold). This means that you have to transfer a bulky physical commodity to adjust your money supply which is a HUGE problem. (and no, keeping your money supply fixed is not actually a good idea especially during a recession)
If we weren't paying private banking for the privilege of using their fiat money, the government wouldn't be in debt.
Bankers are no different from you or me. I would not loan the government money for free and neither would you. You don't take a risk without some change of a commensurate return. Bankers simply facilitate doing the same thing you or I would do. No difference whatsoever except the bankers can do it more efficiently that you or me.
A gold standard has it's own strengths, one of which, you can remove some from your pocket, or your vault, and give it to a creditor, who can carry it home with him.
I can do the same thing with a dollar bill. No difference whatsoever.
Can the police (in some jurisdiction) subpoena the video when it may give evidence against me?
Most likely yes.
Can they punish me for destroying the evidence?
Before the subpoena? No. After the subpoena? Probably yes. If they find you destroyed evidence after it was subpoenaed, there are cases where they are allowed to presume that the evidence destroyed was incriminating. I'm not sure how far they can take it but if you destroy the evidence it is better that they don't find out it was you who did the destruction.
Can I hide the video unit so that they won't know I have it?
You are generally not required to provide evidence to incriminate yourself though if it is discovered later it may end up working against you worse than if they found it early on.
Does your chewing gum lose its flavor on the bedpost over night?
An MBA is a degree, not a person. Apparently to you going to school to learn about the techniques of managing a business somehow magically leads to a person becoming evil and stupid while clearly all engineers are paragons of honesty and competence by comparison. [/sarcasm] Grow up.
She has left a trail of destruction, except at e-bay
What "trail of destruction"? The only major company she has been in charge of prior to taking over the helm at HP is eBay which has pretty much been an unmitigated financial success. She came to eBay when it had 30 employees and $4 million in revenue and led it to having revenue of somewhere north of $4 billion by the time she left. That is a 1000X increase in revenue with net profits of over $1 billion. She has served on several board of directors (normal for a CEO of a major corporation) but there is no evidence of her actions causing a "trail of destruction" there. Perhaps you are confusing her with Carly Fiorina or Leo Apotheker both of whom clearly created serious problems for HP? I realize it is fashionable lately to bash the CEOs of HP (they often have deserved it) but let's lay the blame where it really is due, shall we?
HP is being brought down by her, similar to the way that IBM and others are going down.
While you can reasonably argue that Meg Whitman might not be the best person to fix the problems at HP or that her actions are not improving the situation for HP, virtually all the problems she is facing predate her tenure as CEO. She bears some responsibility as she was a board member during some of the most recent stupid moves but she only joined the board in January 2011 so even that responsibility doesn't go back very far. Put simply, she did not create most of this mess and your characterization of her is pretty much unsubstantiated by the facts.
As far as IBM goes, what on earth makes you think IBM is "going down"? IBM has been wildly profitable for the last 15 years and has profits of $15 billion on revenues of over $100 billion. IBM is performing fantastically well as a business, far better than HP, and is showing no signs of slowing down.
If you are in the building, aren't you already warming the building with your body heat, excess or otherwise?
Umm, yes. In this case you (along with a few thousand of your closest friends) are heating the building so much that the excess heat has to be removed. The point of the article is to put that excess heat that has to be removed to good use heating ANOTHER building.
Actually, most of the heat generated by lightbulbs is transmitted as infrared radiation rather than via conduction
Which is perfectly useless when you want heat but no light from a standard light bulb since a standard bulb cannot emit radiation without some of it being visible light. It also is of limited value outside the room the light is located within which matters fairly often. A bulb is also omni-directional so you need a reflector of some sort.
As it's only hot air that rises, and most heat loss is due to warm air escaping the house, this can actually be considerably more efficient since you can maintain a much lower air temperature while still being comfortable.
So I'm supposed to sit a few feet from a light bulb in my house to stay warm like a pet turtle? Thanks but no thanks. Nothing wrong with using infrared heaters but there is a reason they are mostly used as localized space heaters. While you are correct regarding the radiation, my comment stands that this is not a particularly useful means of distributing heat in most homes. I'm sure we could design a home to take maximal advantage of this type of heating but I'm equally sure that it would be less costly to simply use a more efficient heat source like a gas furnace. You'll also note that such a heating arrangement tends to only heat the side facing the heating element. This means that light bulbs up high will heat your head up considerably more than your feet. I had an IR heater in my garage a few years ago. Kept my heat roasting hot and my feet unpleasantly cold. If I walked to the other side of the garage, it was of essentially no value as a heat source.
Bear in mind that I'm responding to the rather ridiculous argument that we should keep incandescent light bulbs around because they generate heat as a byproduct. This is an absurd argument because A) light bulbs are not a particularly efficient means of generating heat and B) the need for heat and the need for light often does not overlap and C) for 3/4 of the year the heat light bulbs generate due to their use as a light source is waste heat that then has to pumped out of the house at additional expense. Light bulbs can be used for heat in some cases but most of the time it is a costly, inefficient and not particular effective means of heating a space.
Before you go all holier-than-thou on us you might want to consider the full implications of what you are saying. First off, "slave labor"? I think you do not know what real slavery is so your hyperbole is really a bit out of line. Foxconn might not treat their employees well but its hardly slavery. They do not own their employees even in a figurative sense. Slavery is something far, far worse. I've actually been in a sweatshop in Chengdu where they were making parts for Dell monitors. I've seen dozens of manufacturing plants in China with my own eyes. I've seen all of this stuff first hand. There is NO electronics manufacturer that is innocent here. You will find that there is no alternative that is any better if you really look into this situation. Anything you can say about Apple/Foxconn you HAVE to say about pretty much any other electronics manufacturer as well as those for countless other products. You are actually saying that you will not buy a wide variety of products.
If you want to not buy products made in substandard working conditions, I respect that stance. But you are going to find it is not as simple as you think. There aren't any innocent parties and in many cases what we consider horrible working conditions are actually a step up from the alternatives. The important thing is that conditions continue to improve. There is considerable evidence that conditions are improving even if progress is sometimes painfully slow. There are more effective ways to improve working conditions than a silent boycott by yourself. Get involved with organizations trying to make a difference. They're out there if you really actually give a damn and want to make a difference.
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AWG is in even denominations for the most oft-used stuff, and is specified by cross-sectional area.
All wire is specified in cross sectional area, typically in either circular mils (thousandths of an inch) or, if using metric, mm^2. AWG is no different from any other wire gauge standard in this respect.
Metric stranded wire sizes, AFAICT, are specified too specifically: 7/0.2 means "7 strands of 0.2MM wire.
Metric sizes are usually just cross sectional area in MM^2. They're actually simpler in many ways. Double the metric number and you've doubled the cross sectional area. AWG sizes actually have three numbers if they are stranded. 22AWG 7/30 is 22 gauge circular mil with 7 strands of 30awg wire. Larger gauge stuff like you talk about below is specified a little strangely though.
Doubling is easy for AWG, too: It's a difference of about 3. Two 12AWG wires approximates a 9AWG wire
Doubling is even easier for metric if they are doing cross sectional area. (sometimes they specify metric diameters) Double the metric number and you double the cross sectional area. The formula for metric is a bit neater than the one for AWG. In practical terms it doesn't matter much but if I could throw everything out and start over I'd use metric. It's a little bit more sensible.
I could care less for how many strands are there for AC, DC, and most audio work, as long as it is stranded.
You probably care more than you think. More strands = more flexibility in the wire. A 7 strand wire will be relatively stiff. A 36 strand wire will be limp like a noodle. You may or may not care greatly for your specific application since you probably have a range of acceptable stiffness - maybe anything between 7 and 24 is fine for example. But at some level the number of strands usually matters.
But in Metric terms, even viewing these wires on a chart would have been difficult: One variation had a fifteen or so strands and was fairly stiff, one had a half-dozen or so and was very stiff, and one had seemingly hundreds and was quite flexible. Meh, and double-meh for trying to cross-reference the correct tool and die set to the wire I had on-hand today in metric terms: To me, in that application, they were all the same: 6 AWG stranded. Easy.
The number of strands is no simpler in AWG than in metric. If you work in the US pretty much all wire you can buy is AWG unless you specially purchase metric (which will come from overseas). If someone specifies a product in metric you use a conversion chart to work out the closest equivalent wire in AWG and use that. When you say "6 AWG stranded" you simply accepted a product with some number of strands but this is something you specified whether you know it or not. You can get 6 AWG solid wire or with strands and the number of strands tends to come in standard increments though you can have a custom wire built with an arbitrary number of strands. I have some 27 strand 6AWG wire sitting on my desk as I type this. There is no difference or advantage to metric or AWG here.
I will wonder for the rest of my life why it was that Ford bailed on Crown, who always did a fine job of making very safe, serviceable, well-supported, and well-documented harnesses for the previous Panther platform
Price. End of story.
AFAICT, American cars are metric and have been for some time.
I can assure you that many many drawings for automotive parts are NOT in metric. They might be specified that way from GM, Ford etc but that isn't the case all through the supply chain. My company makes wire harnesses, many of which are for automotive applications. Probably about 20% of the drawings I see (though the number is rising) are in metric. The rest are in inches. Wire gauges are not in metric either, they are usually American Wire Gauge. In fact I regularly see drawings where the lengths are in inches and the default tolerances are in metric, meaning the engineers are ignoring their own company standards. How's that for screwed up?
Assuming you're an American, how would the US switching to the metric system enhance your life?
Most of the benefits would be economic and mostly indirect. There would be less overhead for commerce and less need to buy redundant tooling, gauges, etc. Engineers could spend time doing useful work instead of pointless unit conversions. There is a very real and measurable cost which is in the billions of dollars annually. The economy is global and the US is incurring a pointless and unnecessary cost by not using metric which hurts our global competitiveness.
How would I notice? I wouldn't have to buy needless tooling for my company or for myself. I wouldn't have to waste time doing pointless and costly unit conversions. Virtually all our raw materials my company buys are produced outside the US so I would have to waste a lot less time making our engineering and production systems compatible. I wouldn't have to have two sets of gauges on my car's speedometer. I wouldn't have to have a measuring cup with 12 different arbitrary units to measure liquid. I wouldn't have to pay extra to have Fahrenheit on my thermometers unless I really needed it. I wouldn't need lookup tables in my cookbooks for units. I wouldn't have to wonder if the price of fuel is high when I visit Canada and the gasoline is sold in liters.
There obviously would be substantial up front costs to the switch and indirect benefits are hard to sell to anyone in the US. But we are paying huge amounts of money to use a system that is poorly compatible with 95% of the world's population.
There's nothing special about the meter.
There is one thing very special about the meter. What is special is that it is used by 95% of the world's population. That alone makes it special regardless of whatever other merits it might have.
Actually the US Customary Units are defined in terms of meters, liters, grams, etc so really we are just using an unnecessary abstraction layer because we can't be bothered to incur the (admittedly substantial) switching costs.
But I would say that the main problem with units like foot and inches is not the base per se, but the inconsistent bases across the spectrum.
I agree that is a very real problem. Base 2 or Base 16 or Base 8 is not inherently less logical than Base 10. But that is not the main problem with using feet and inches. The main problem is that it simply is not the same units used anywhere else in the world. This means there is a very real and significant cost to maintaining the tooling, signage, engineering time, documentation, conversions, mistakes etc between the two systems. It is a completely unnecessary and pointless cost. It means that we have to buy unnecessary tools, have engineers spend time on pointless unit conversions and rounding problems, we have to worry about unit conversion mistakes, we have to make extra gauges to measure the second measurement system. The real problem is needless cost, wasted labor, mistakes and confusion.
Now this could be solved by the rest of the world converting to the units used in the US but it makes a LOT more sense for those of us in the US to stop being a bunch of arrogant dickheads and switch to match the other 95% of the world population.
So USB could replace SATA.
More likely it will just keep Thunderbolt from ever really taking off. SATA is pretty common and there are enough technical headaches with using USB instead that it is probably going to stick around. (though eSATA might be a different story since it is far less commonly used) But if USB is fast enough there really is limited need for Thunderbolt. I already can run a monitor via USB 2.0 through a docking station I use daily and that works fine.
I'm less interested in faster USB than I am in 100W USB. The ability to power a laptop or small PC with a single USB cable would be huge. Anything that reduces the number of different types of cables I have to deal with is a good thing.
A lot of problems could be solved by simply declaring that if a work can be copyrighted then it is not eligible for patent protection as well. Software is basically a written work and it is automatically protected under copyright law. Works should only be eligible to be covered under one or the other but not both. An important details is that if a work CAN be covered under copyright law then it MUST be covered under copyright law. As such, most software would be ineligible for patent protection under such a rule. While it might not solve all problems (such as business method patents) it would go a long way towards eliminating the problem of software patents.
Sure, but would you want to throw your kid into juvenile justice just because of some dumb stunt?
"Dumb stunt"? Drugging someone is assault. That is a felony. I agree it is stupid but this sort of thing is WAY beyond being a "stunt".
If someone can stay up until 5 AM playing WoW and still end up doing well in school, what's the problem?
Because they won't. Human physiology doesn't work that way. Oh sure it might not matter for a single day but ongoing lack of sleep WILL result in someone under-performing. Part of being a responsible parent is making sure that your child does not hurt themselves and sleep deprivation is without question harmful. Speaking for myself, sleep problems caused by my own actions seriously affected how well I did in school. There is substantial research proving that lack of sleep is hugely detrimental to teenagers.
If they're tired in the morning and end up having a horrible day because of it, chances are they're going to go to bed earlier so they don't get tired.
I work with teenagers daily as a coach. It doesn't work that way in real life. Teenagers do all sorts of things that aren't in their best interests.
Quickbooks works fine in a WinXp virtual machine on Linux.
No point in running a virtual machine if it doesn't save us money. We would still have to buy the seat of Windows and maintain it. Might as well just run Windows - less complicated and better supported. Linux by itself isn't a sufficient advantage to justify switching from an already working system no matter how much I presonally dislike Windows.
There are plenty of alternatives to Quicken
QuickBOOKS not Quicken. Completely different software. Quicken is for personal finance. Quickbooks is accounting software to run a business. There is personal finance software for linux that, while it isn't quite as good as Quicken, is perfectly acceptable. There is NO software available for linux that is equivalent to Quickbooks. None. I'm a certified accountant and anyone who tells you there is an equivalent bit of software to Quickbooks (or Sage 50) available on linux has no idea what they are talking about. It simply does not exist.
You sir should be upmodded to a thousand, because this is something I've been trying to get the Linux advocates to understand for years...you HAVE to have Quickbook...
Thanks. Although you could accomplish the same end with a version of Sage 50 (formerly called Peachtree) which is the closest competitor to Quickbooks since they are functionally equivalent. They don't have a linux version either. There is nothing available on linux that can replace Quickbooks. Nothing. I'm a certified accountant and believe me, I've looked.
I don't know how many SMBs I have that have their entire company, from inventory to accounting to taxes, run by a "Quickbooks girl" (and for some reason its almost ALWAYS a girl, you'd think they had a union or something) that everybody just hands the paperwork to and she takes care of the entire company.
Most clerical jobs are handled by women, including bookkeeping. It's rare you find women in jobs like construction so I presume the clerical stuff is simply where the opportunity happens to be for many of them. Bookkeeping doesn't require a formal degree and is relatively easy to learn and often can be done part time which is compatible with raising a family. Among professional accountants the ratio of men to women is a lot closer to 50/50.
On the other hand, for shitty movies, its ridiculous to even contemplate watching them in a theater, no matter the price.
Speaking for myself, it isn't just "shitty" movies that I don't bother to see in a theater. I go to the theater to see movies where the visuals and special effects are enhanced by a big screen. Action movies, sci-fi, etc. I see little point in going to a theater for some chick-flick emo sob fest that could be equally enjoyed at home on my TV.
Honestly though, once I can afford a 70+ inch HDTV for home I doubt I'll go to the movies much after that...
What CAD package isn't available for Linux?
Autocad to my knowledge is not and never has been available for linux and its the most popular CAD software out there. We also use some schematic packages that don't have linux versions at present though I'm hopeful that will change. I realize there is CAD available on linux but we simply don't have the manpower to incur the cost of transition.
I'm also a bit surprised by the MRP being Windows only, most ERP/MRP packages are fairly platform agnostic.
The stuff for big enterprises is more agnostic but for smaller companies, good accounting and MRP software is very rarely available for linux. MRP systems that work with Quickbooks or Sage products are typically Windows only though there are the occasional exceptions. Quickbooks is effectively Windows only (the Mac version is crippled) and that isn't likely to change and that is by far the most popular accounting software for small businesses. We use an old MRP system that is only available on Windows and the feasible alternatives for us are also Windows only at the moment.
What is the major difference between Windows 7/8 and XP or a Linux distro? Just the GUI
I truly wish that was the major difference. If that was all that was different I would have switched our company away from Windows years ago and so would many others. The major difference is the applications and that is the only difference that truly matters. If everything was written cross-platform, then you would have a credible argument.
For better or worse there are a LOT of applications (including games) that only run on Windows and it remains sadly true that there often are no acceptable replacements. Our accounting software, MRP software, CAD software and some others simply are not available on linux, nor is there any acceptable substitute. We use LibreOffice, GIMP, Scribus, Inkscape, Chrome, Thunderbird, VNC, and more but there simply is no way we could get rid of our Windows boxes in the near future because of the applications we need to use. The moment there is a linux version of Quickbooks Enterprise and a compatible MRP system, I'd dump windows that minute but that simply isn't going to happen in the foreseeable future.
Engineers already mostly work in SI
In my industry (wire harnesses) engineers mostly do NOT work in SI here in the US if the drawings we receive are anything to go by. They will if the customer needs/demands metric (usually for Asian or European customers though sometimes for domestic customers) but mostly the engineers I've dealt with are an old fashioned lot that cannot be bothered to use metric. We have a few customers that use metric but most of the drawings we receive use inches - not even decimalized inches.
I don't think we have made a car in 30 years that wasn't mostly metric.
My company makes car parts and the supply chain for US car makers still commonly do not specify parts in metric. Drawings from Japanese or European auto parts suppliers are typically in metric but from US manufacturers we normally see some form of imperial units. Lengths are specified in inches, wire gauges in AWG instead of metric, etc. Most of our tooling is in fractions of an inch instead of millimeters. Not to say metric doesn't get used but it's not as much as it should be.
like the construction supplies industry, which benefits from using measures and sizes different to everyone else in the world.
Having to deal with multiple measurement systems is nothing but a cost with no benefit - which is why metric is not commonly used here in the US. There is a HUGE cost to switching which is why it hasn't been done but there is no actual advantage to having more than one measurement system to the construction industry or any other industry. Furthermore all the skilled trade workers are trained in imperial units and don't use metric much and there is a lot of resistance from them since they'd have to re-learn a lot of how they do things.
It effectively acts as a trade barrier against the Chinese.
I assure you it does not. All those commodity bolts, fasteners, etc are made in China. Construction companies are often Chinese.
A standard, whether it be gold, silver, titanium, of even wheat, bases your money on SOMETHING.
Except that it does not. The only thing that give currency value is the belief that it has value. You can base the currency on the value of something else but then guess what? Gold only has value because people believe it has value. So you are not changing ANYTHING but you are making it more difficult to deal with economic problems when they arise. You are pegging the value of one commodity (currency) to another (gold). This means that you have to transfer a bulky physical commodity to adjust your money supply which is a HUGE problem. (and no, keeping your money supply fixed is not actually a good idea especially during a recession)
If we weren't paying private banking for the privilege of using their fiat money, the government wouldn't be in debt.
Bankers are no different from you or me. I would not loan the government money for free and neither would you. You don't take a risk without some change of a commensurate return. Bankers simply facilitate doing the same thing you or I would do. No difference whatsoever except the bankers can do it more efficiently that you or me.
A gold standard has it's own strengths, one of which, you can remove some from your pocket, or your vault, and give it to a creditor, who can carry it home with him.
I can do the same thing with a dollar bill. No difference whatsoever.
Disclaimer: IANAL...
Can the police (in some jurisdiction) subpoena the video when it may give evidence against me?
Most likely yes.
Can they punish me for destroying the evidence?
Before the subpoena? No. After the subpoena? Probably yes. If they find you destroyed evidence after it was subpoenaed, there are cases where they are allowed to presume that the evidence destroyed was incriminating. I'm not sure how far they can take it but if you destroy the evidence it is better that they don't find out it was you who did the destruction.
Can I hide the video unit so that they won't know I have it?
You are generally not required to provide evidence to incriminate yourself though if it is discovered later it may end up working against you worse than if they found it early on.
Does your chewing gum lose its flavor on the bedpost over night?
Depends on the flavor. :-)
The fact is, that Whitman is a worthless MBA.
An MBA is a degree, not a person. Apparently to you going to school to learn about the techniques of managing a business somehow magically leads to a person becoming evil and stupid while clearly all engineers are paragons of honesty and competence by comparison. [/sarcasm] Grow up.
She has left a trail of destruction, except at e-bay
What "trail of destruction"? The only major company she has been in charge of prior to taking over the helm at HP is eBay which has pretty much been an unmitigated financial success. She came to eBay when it had 30 employees and $4 million in revenue and led it to having revenue of somewhere north of $4 billion by the time she left. That is a 1000X increase in revenue with net profits of over $1 billion. She has served on several board of directors (normal for a CEO of a major corporation) but there is no evidence of her actions causing a "trail of destruction" there. Perhaps you are confusing her with Carly Fiorina or Leo Apotheker both of whom clearly created serious problems for HP? I realize it is fashionable lately to bash the CEOs of HP (they often have deserved it) but let's lay the blame where it really is due, shall we?
HP is being brought down by her, similar to the way that IBM and others are going down.
While you can reasonably argue that Meg Whitman might not be the best person to fix the problems at HP or that her actions are not improving the situation for HP, virtually all the problems she is facing predate her tenure as CEO. She bears some responsibility as she was a board member during some of the most recent stupid moves but she only joined the board in January 2011 so even that responsibility doesn't go back very far. Put simply, she did not create most of this mess and your characterization of her is pretty much unsubstantiated by the facts.
As far as IBM goes, what on earth makes you think IBM is "going down"? IBM has been wildly profitable for the last 15 years and has profits of $15 billion on revenues of over $100 billion. IBM is performing fantastically well as a business, far better than HP, and is showing no signs of slowing down.
If you are in the building, aren't you already warming the building with your body heat, excess or otherwise?
Umm, yes. In this case you (along with a few thousand of your closest friends) are heating the building so much that the excess heat has to be removed. The point of the article is to put that excess heat that has to be removed to good use heating ANOTHER building.
Actually, most of the heat generated by lightbulbs is transmitted as infrared radiation rather than via conduction
Which is perfectly useless when you want heat but no light from a standard light bulb since a standard bulb cannot emit radiation without some of it being visible light. It also is of limited value outside the room the light is located within which matters fairly often. A bulb is also omni-directional so you need a reflector of some sort.
As it's only hot air that rises, and most heat loss is due to warm air escaping the house, this can actually be considerably more efficient since you can maintain a much lower air temperature while still being comfortable.
So I'm supposed to sit a few feet from a light bulb in my house to stay warm like a pet turtle? Thanks but no thanks. Nothing wrong with using infrared heaters but there is a reason they are mostly used as localized space heaters. While you are correct regarding the radiation, my comment stands that this is not a particularly useful means of distributing heat in most homes. I'm sure we could design a home to take maximal advantage of this type of heating but I'm equally sure that it would be less costly to simply use a more efficient heat source like a gas furnace. You'll also note that such a heating arrangement tends to only heat the side facing the heating element. This means that light bulbs up high will heat your head up considerably more than your feet. I had an IR heater in my garage a few years ago. Kept my heat roasting hot and my feet unpleasantly cold. If I walked to the other side of the garage, it was of essentially no value as a heat source.
Bear in mind that I'm responding to the rather ridiculous argument that we should keep incandescent light bulbs around because they generate heat as a byproduct. This is an absurd argument because A) light bulbs are not a particularly efficient means of generating heat and B) the need for heat and the need for light often does not overlap and C) for 3/4 of the year the heat light bulbs generate due to their use as a light source is waste heat that then has to pumped out of the house at additional expense. Light bulbs can be used for heat in some cases but most of the time it is a costly, inefficient and not particular effective means of heating a space.
I wonder if they noticed that the pictures of the Macphone they show were taken with the product upside down.
I will never buy such product from slave labors.
Before you go all holier-than-thou on us you might want to consider the full implications of what you are saying. First off, "slave labor"? I think you do not know what real slavery is so your hyperbole is really a bit out of line. Foxconn might not treat their employees well but its hardly slavery. They do not own their employees even in a figurative sense. Slavery is something far, far worse. I've actually been in a sweatshop in Chengdu where they were making parts for Dell monitors. I've seen dozens of manufacturing plants in China with my own eyes. I've seen all of this stuff first hand. There is NO electronics manufacturer that is innocent here. You will find that there is no alternative that is any better if you really look into this situation. Anything you can say about Apple/Foxconn you HAVE to say about pretty much any other electronics manufacturer as well as those for countless other products. You are actually saying that you will not buy a wide variety of products.
If you want to not buy products made in substandard working conditions, I respect that stance. But you are going to find it is not as simple as you think. There aren't any innocent parties and in many cases what we consider horrible working conditions are actually a step up from the alternatives. The important thing is that conditions continue to improve. There is considerable evidence that conditions are improving even if progress is sometimes painfully slow. There are more effective ways to improve working conditions than a silent boycott by yourself. Get involved with organizations trying to make a difference. They're out there if you really actually give a damn and want to make a difference.