Yeah, I do kind of like the Volt, but it's still a hybrid. I have to wonder how much better the range and acceleration would be if the battery wasn't burdened by hauling around the gasoline powertrain as well?
I think a pure-electric vehicle with a 100 or 200-mile range and an optional gasoline-powered towed generator for longer trips would be really interesting.
The printers marketed for the home are cheap pieces of crap, pretty much regardless of manufacturer. The problem with office-class printers is that they're much more expensive.
My solution is to buy a used office-class "workgroup" printer. Find one that's extremely common so you won't have to worry about toner availability.
My current laser printer is a mid-90's era HP LaserJet 4 Plus. The thing is a tank. I got it five years ago for $10 (+ $20 shipping) and I've put over 20,000 pages through it. 8000-page toner cartridges are $25 on eBay even today. My plan is to keep it for a few more years and then start looking for an office printer made around 2000 and put out to pasture because the case is yellowed with age.
The only real downside to these printers is that they tend to be a little power-hungry, especially when just sitting. Mine costs $2 per month in electricity to leave running 24x7. So, I turn it off when it's not being used, which is most of the time.
There were a lot of vehicles from that era and earlier where the vehicles would have survived an accident intact - but the passengers would not, having been thrown around in the vehicle upon impact. Typically stronger steels were used, and designs were such that the vehicles were like tanks - but without passenger restraints it killed the passengers any way.
Another issue is that in those older vehicles, no special attention was paid to reinforcing the passenger compartment. The whole vehicle was stronger, but if enough force was applied to start crumpling the frame, it was more likely to crumple the passenger compartment than the engine compartment.
In contrast, modern vehicles provide a strong protective cage around the passenger compartment. Even that cage may not be as strong as a 1959 vehicle's frame, but it is quite strong, and outside of that cage the modern vehicle is designed to collapse, dissipating the force of the collision so that the cage stays intact, as seen in the video.
Add to that the fact that the crumple zones allow a more gradual deceleration of the passenger compartment, reducing the forces applied to the passengers, plus safety belts to keep the passengers inside that protective cage and reduce their collisions with the steering wheel/dash/seats in front of them, plus air bags to further cushion those collisions. Yes, 50 years of research into automotive safety has made collisions much more survivable.
Now if only we'd made similar improvements in the safety of *drivers*...
If you want to stop an attacker quickly, you need to stop the brain from working. There are two ways to do that: Directly disable the central nervous system, or interrupt blood flow to the brain. The easiest way to do that is by causing rapid blood loss so that the blood pressure drops dramatically, and to do that you need to open a major blood vessel. Now, there are a few exposed large vessels (jugular, carotid, femoral, brachial), but the maximum odds are achieved by hitting the torso and penetrating deeply, because there are a whole bunch of huge blood vessels there. Birdshot to the chest will make a nasty surface wound that looks ugly and does a lot of tissue/muscle damage, but it won't significantly lower the blood pressure.
So, per FBI recommendations, what you need is something with 12-18 inches of penetration. Buckshot achieves that, as do all decent self-defense handgun calibers. But anything that is going to penetrate 12 inches through human flesh is ALSO going to go through several walls. There's no magic caliber, or ammunition, that can can distinguish between drywall and skin and muscle, stopping instantly when it hits the former, but tearing right through the latter.
And the simple answer is that you're obviously sticking your nose in other people's (your son in this case) business.
LOL.
I'd love to hear your perspective on this when you have teenage children. If it doesn't change, I'd give your kids a 50/50 chance of having really screwed up their lives by the time they reach adulthood. Maybe you'll get lucky and have kids whose judgment matures before their bodies do, but then again maybe you won't. With your attitude, your kids better hope that you get lucky.
I'd probably start tons of projects that I'd never get around to finishing.
Me too... but if I had that much money, when I got a project to the point that I didn't want to finish it, I'd hire a team to finish and polish it for me, diving in whenever it looked interesting. I'd probably annoy the hell out of the team:-)
Oh, and everything I and my teams produced would be Free Software.
I've been seriously burnt by a on-motherboard RAID on a client's machine that went south
A big part of the reason why I only use software RAID on low-end hardware. Decent HW RAID equipment is great, but the low-end stuff you find on motherboards is lousy. Linux MD-RAID is fast and extremely reliable.
You could be in an RV with an AP less than 20 t, with a 10+ db radio and get 1 bar of signal, but move to a window and it'll go to 4-5 bars?
Note: being inside an RV is similar to being inside a Faraday Cage.
Depends on the RV. Most of them these days have done away with the aluminum skins in favor of fiberglass. Older ones, like mine, are very good faraday cages.
I got Smartsuite bundled with a PC in the 90s and have to agree it sucked - it was OK for basic letters, but not much more than that...
That was the response from a lot of people who didn't understand how to use it. In fact, Word Pro (and it's predecessor, Ami Pro) were far more powerful than WordPerfect or MS Word, and were actually easier to use once you understood why all formatting had to be done through styles. As for not being good for more than letters, I know several people who published beautifully laid-out, high-quality manuals for years using these tools. They argued that they Ami Pro and Word Pro were almost as powerful as desktop publishing systems, but far easier to use and much less expensive. MS Word and WordPerfect weren't even in the same ballpark.
I haven't tried Lotus Symphony myself, but if it's anything like OpenOffice 3, I doubt that most IBM'ers will be raring to convert all of their documents over in a timely manner.
From my perspective, this mostly just means that I no longer have to provide MS Office versions of my work to my colleagues. Because Linux is my platform of choice, I use OO.o, and it's been annoying me for years that I have to save to.xsl,.doc and.ppt before I can send my documents to my co-workers. No longer. I'll send ODF files and anyone who complains will get a polite referral to the new policy (probably along with an MS Office version of that particular file, just because I'm a nice guy).
I like e-books and e-book readers, but one thing I definitely wouldn't want is dual screens. One of the biggest advantages of reading an electronic book with a nice handheld device vs a paper book is that it's compact and a single, non-hinged piece. It doesn't take two hands to hold it and it doesn't flop around.
I've been in lots of areas where my cell service wasn't good enough to support a voice call, but texting worked (albeit slowly -- sometimes it takes minutes to get the message out). I don't know that that was the case in this storm drain, but it could have been. Perhaps these girls were clever, rather than stupid. Given that the emergency services is not reachable via text messaging, they could have tried texting all their friends/parents/etc. to get someone else to get them help, but sending the message to facebook or twitter would reach a whole bunch of those people at once.
The core idea here is quite clever, it's kind of a Prisoner's Dilemma situation, where if you decide to be non-cooperative with whoever gave you a piece of media content, you can gain exclusive control over it... but if everyone decides to be cooperative, then everyone has shared access to it. This would provide a strong incentive for people to limit the sharing of their purchased content to people they trust, which would prevent unlimited sharing.
Very clever.
However, it ultimately suffers from the same fundamental problem as any other DRM scheme: Bits are too easy to replicate. While the idea specifically allows for unlimited replication of the content, it still requires strong DRMish control over the "playkey". Effectively, it just replaces the problem of controlling access/ownership of a large pile of very-copyable bits (the content) with the problem of controlling access/ownership of a small pile of very-copyable bits (the playkey).
While reducing the scale of a problem does sometimes make it more tractable, I don't think it really helps in this case. You still end up with some bits that must somehow be moved and shared, but without the possibility that they may be copied. How do you do that? No one knows. You can try to lock it up in secure hardware (effectively a dongle), but even if you succeed, you've just created a major hassle for end-users -- which is exactly what this scheme is supposed to fix. And, of course, really securing that key is very hard, and doing it cost-effectively darned near impossible.
And I don't see any possible way this could work without some sort of on-line interaction. When I "take ownership" of a playkey that I've been given access to, how is it that everyone else loses the ability to use that key? Obviously there must be some sort of central system involved, if not for each usage of the key, at least periodically, to check in to see if the possessor should still have access to it.
Perhaps there's another even more brilliant technical idea underlying the rather clever social hack, but I doubt it.
Yes, having all of the world's literature available for instant full text
search sounds
disastrous for scholars.
It certainly is, if the text is sometimes right, sometimes wrong...
I see no hint, in any of the linked discussion, that any of the text is wrong. Some metadata is wrong, but that can be checked against the scanned frontmatter quite easily.
And the metadata will get fixed. This is a massive undertaking and it will take time to get it right.
You need a citation to prove that you need to pass certain criteria to get in?
No, I need a citation to prove that "many" homeschooling parents have gotten a surprise that their children were unable to meet the criteria, as the GP implied, particularly in his first sentence, which I didn't quote. I suppose it depends what you mean by "many", but in my experience the vast majority of homeschoolers are much better-equipped to meet those requirements than public school graduates.
What you will discover, and many homeschooling parents have already found out... Your reading comprehension, writing, and math skills had better be up to spec or you are sent packing.
Got a citation to support this? From what I see, homeschooled kids tend to be better-prepared academically than their public-schooled counterparts.
So much cheaper that you can employ a team of people to maintain the "homebrew" solution and still save money.
...as long as your data is worthless......and since it's their customers' data, that's probably true, as far as they're concerned (ToS and all).
Nah. You just use redundancy to ensure reliability. Lots and lots of redundancy. MD-RAID and LVM offer all that's needed to make this work -- though doing it on a large scale requires lots of elbow grease.
I agree that "Just plug in another drive" is a far cry from what you have to do with these tools, but you can make it work.
Thanks to Wikipedia for setting me straight. There is relatively recent major innovation. I no longer have to spend a couple thousand dollars on a massive set of mostly correct encyclopedia's that will only get more incorrect over time, as science leaves them behind.
That's a really good point, and one that bears emphasizing and expansion.
We are partway into a technological revolution that, IMO, is far larger than we currently see: ubiquitous, instantaneous electronic communications. The invention of the intelligent-edged, packet-switched communication network (the Internet being the biggest and most important example) has made all sorts of new approaches to human interaction possible. Collaborative encyclopedia creation and open source software are just two examples. People are starting to work on open source textbooks.
e-Bay and craigslist have revolutionized the markets in secondhand goods.
Monster.com, etc., are changing how we find jobs, and on-line contract intermediation services are making it feasible for larger groups of people to forgo the traditional sort of job entirely. "Freelancing" used to be a way for writers and photographers to work, but now many sorts of jobs can be done that way. Ubiquitous high-speed Internet and good voice/video communications means that many people can work remotely, eliminating the need for large office spaces and, in some cases, giving rise to "virtual" companies that have no physical structure at all.
Business to business communications is facilitating a new wave of "just in time" operations processes even for organizations whose business isn't manufacturing.
This ubiquitous, transparent communications technology is even significantly changing our social interactions. One example that is now so thoroughly integrated into our habits that we don't even think about it is how to organize a rendezvous. We no longer plan in detail exactly where to meet at the mall or wherever, we just say "You have your phone? Fine, me too." Much of our socialization is now on-line, enabling us to keep closer tabs on the activities of friends and family (facebook, twitter, blogs), and connecting us to groups of like-minded people we may never meet (slashdot), or maybe allowing us to meet them (flash mobs).
It's revolutionizing politics as well. Watchdog groups now have easy, instantaneous links to large groups of interested citizens. Sites like Opencongress provide unprecedented visibility into the workings of the legislative process. Whistleblowers can publish information more easily and anonymously than ever.
Culture is changing rapidly, too. Mashups are somewhat constrained by copyright law, but happen anyway. Traditional media industries are being destroyed, while new approaches are evaluated.
This is all due to one cluster of technologies, but IMO it's at *least* as significant to our society as the automobile and airplane were. Perhaps it's a little less visible because so much of the innovation it engenders is changes in social structure, rather than new gadgets, but it's huge and moving very, very rapidly.
personally, I have a linux box at home running jfs and raid5 with hotswap drive trays. but I don't fool myself into thinking its BETTER than sun, hp, ibm and so on.
I don't these folks guy believe their solution is better -- just cheaper. MUCH cheaper. So much cheaper that you can employ a team of people to maintain the "homebrew" solution and still save money.
Do you have any choice whatsoever in the gear you are issued?
No. In some cases you might be able to scrounge a piece of older gear, or if it was issued to you because you were in before the new gear came out you might have been able to hold onto it (sometimes they want to collect all the old stuff). But even in those cases, if the new stuff is sufficiently different in appearance, you might get in trouble for being "out of uniform". How likely that is depends on how much time your leaders have to fuss about such things, and their time or interest in such crap tends to decrease rapidly as you get closer to active combat operations.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I do kind of like the Volt, but it's still a hybrid. I have to wonder how much better the range and acceleration would be if the battery wasn't burdened by hauling around the gasoline powertrain as well?
I think a pure-electric vehicle with a 100 or 200-mile range and an optional gasoline-powered towed generator for longer trips would be really interesting.
The printers marketed for the home are cheap pieces of crap, pretty much regardless of manufacturer. The problem with office-class printers is that they're much more expensive.
My solution is to buy a used office-class "workgroup" printer. Find one that's extremely common so you won't have to worry about toner availability.
My current laser printer is a mid-90's era HP LaserJet 4 Plus. The thing is a tank. I got it five years ago for $10 (+ $20 shipping) and I've put over 20,000 pages through it. 8000-page toner cartridges are $25 on eBay even today. My plan is to keep it for a few more years and then start looking for an office printer made around 2000 and put out to pasture because the case is yellowed with age.
The only real downside to these printers is that they tend to be a little power-hungry, especially when just sitting. Mine costs $2 per month in electricity to leave running 24x7. So, I turn it off when it's not being used, which is most of the time.
112589990684262400 (100 petabits)
Actually, 100 petabits is 1000000000000000 bits. Communications technology uses traditional power-of-10 SI units, not the power-of-2 units.
I think you also made another mistake, not sure where. Because I get:
100 * 10^15 / 10 / 365.25 / 24 / 60 / 60 / 10^6 = 316 Mbps.
So, this new line transfers the equivalent of one decade of more than 13 fully-saturated ADSL2 lines' traffic every second.
(Calculated by typing "2k100 10 15^*10/365.25/24/60/60/10 6^/p" into 'dc')
There were a lot of vehicles from that era and earlier where the vehicles would have survived an accident intact - but the passengers would not, having been thrown around in the vehicle upon impact. Typically stronger steels were used, and designs were such that the vehicles were like tanks - but without passenger restraints it killed the passengers any way.
Another issue is that in those older vehicles, no special attention was paid to reinforcing the passenger compartment. The whole vehicle was stronger, but if enough force was applied to start crumpling the frame, it was more likely to crumple the passenger compartment than the engine compartment.
In contrast, modern vehicles provide a strong protective cage around the passenger compartment. Even that cage may not be as strong as a 1959 vehicle's frame, but it is quite strong, and outside of that cage the modern vehicle is designed to collapse, dissipating the force of the collision so that the cage stays intact, as seen in the video.
Add to that the fact that the crumple zones allow a more gradual deceleration of the passenger compartment, reducing the forces applied to the passengers, plus safety belts to keep the passengers inside that protective cage and reduce their collisions with the steering wheel/dash/seats in front of them, plus air bags to further cushion those collisions. Yes, 50 years of research into automotive safety has made collisions much more survivable.
Now if only we'd made similar improvements in the safety of *drivers*...
Exactly
If you want to stop an attacker quickly, you need to stop the brain from working. There are two ways to do that: Directly disable the central nervous system, or interrupt blood flow to the brain. The easiest way to do that is by causing rapid blood loss so that the blood pressure drops dramatically, and to do that you need to open a major blood vessel. Now, there are a few exposed large vessels (jugular, carotid, femoral, brachial), but the maximum odds are achieved by hitting the torso and penetrating deeply, because there are a whole bunch of huge blood vessels there. Birdshot to the chest will make a nasty surface wound that looks ugly and does a lot of tissue/muscle damage, but it won't significantly lower the blood pressure.
So, per FBI recommendations, what you need is something with 12-18 inches of penetration. Buckshot achieves that, as do all decent self-defense handgun calibers. But anything that is going to penetrate 12 inches through human flesh is ALSO going to go through several walls. There's no magic caliber, or ammunition, that can can distinguish between drywall and skin and muscle, stopping instantly when it hits the former, but tearing right through the latter.
And the simple answer is that you're obviously sticking your nose in other people's (your son in this case) business.
LOL.
I'd love to hear your perspective on this when you have teenage children. If it doesn't change, I'd give your kids a 50/50 chance of having really screwed up their lives by the time they reach adulthood. Maybe you'll get lucky and have kids whose judgment matures before their bodies do, but then again maybe you won't. With your attitude, your kids better hope that you get lucky.
I'd probably start tons of projects that I'd never get around to finishing.
Me too... but if I had that much money, when I got a project to the point that I didn't want to finish it, I'd hire a team to finish and polish it for me, diving in whenever it looked interesting. I'd probably annoy the hell out of the team :-)
Oh, and everything I and my teams produced would be Free Software.
I've been seriously burnt by a on-motherboard RAID on a client's machine that went south
A big part of the reason why I only use software RAID on low-end hardware. Decent HW RAID equipment is great, but the low-end stuff you find on motherboards is lousy. Linux MD-RAID is fast and extremely reliable.
Old greek proverb: anything worth knowing is difficult to learn.
That proverb would only be worth knowing in Greek.
You could be in an RV with an AP less than 20 t, with a 10+ db radio and get 1 bar of signal, but move to a window and it'll go to 4-5 bars?
Note: being inside an RV is similar to being inside a Faraday Cage.
Depends on the RV. Most of them these days have done away with the aluminum skins in favor of fiberglass. Older ones, like mine, are very good faraday cages.
I got Smartsuite bundled with a PC in the 90s and have to agree it sucked - it was OK for basic letters, but not much more than that...
That was the response from a lot of people who didn't understand how to use it. In fact, Word Pro (and it's predecessor, Ami Pro) were far more powerful than WordPerfect or MS Word, and were actually easier to use once you understood why all formatting had to be done through styles. As for not being good for more than letters, I know several people who published beautifully laid-out, high-quality manuals for years using these tools. They argued that they Ami Pro and Word Pro were almost as powerful as desktop publishing systems, but far easier to use and much less expensive. MS Word and WordPerfect weren't even in the same ballpark.
I haven't tried Lotus Symphony myself, but if it's anything like OpenOffice 3, I doubt that most IBM'ers will be raring to convert all of their documents over in a timely manner.
From my perspective, this mostly just means that I no longer have to provide MS Office versions of my work to my colleagues. Because Linux is my platform of choice, I use OO.o, and it's been annoying me for years that I have to save to .xsl, .doc and .ppt before I can send my documents to my co-workers. No longer. I'll send ODF files and anyone who complains will get a polite referral to the new policy (probably along with an MS Office version of that particular file, just because I'm a nice guy).
You're being forced to work under unreasonable and dangerous conditions.
s/being forced/choosing/
I don't think the GP is being forced to do anything.
Yes, I did fail spectacularly at reading. I also failed at funny.
I was hoping to exploit your failure to achieve funny myself. Guess the mods didn't agree :-)
Don't you mean negative air pressure, you fucking retard?
An excellent example of what's more common: A jerk who's always wrong.
I like e-books and e-book readers, but one thing I definitely wouldn't want is dual screens. One of the biggest advantages of reading an electronic book with a nice handheld device vs a paper book is that it's compact and a single, non-hinged piece. It doesn't take two hands to hold it and it doesn't flop around.
I've been in lots of areas where my cell service wasn't good enough to support a voice call, but texting worked (albeit slowly -- sometimes it takes minutes to get the message out). I don't know that that was the case in this storm drain, but it could have been. Perhaps these girls were clever, rather than stupid. Given that the emergency services is not reachable via text messaging, they could have tried texting all their friends/parents/etc. to get someone else to get them help, but sending the message to facebook or twitter would reach a whole bunch of those people at once.
The core idea here is quite clever, it's kind of a Prisoner's Dilemma situation, where if you decide to be non-cooperative with whoever gave you a piece of media content, you can gain exclusive control over it... but if everyone decides to be cooperative, then everyone has shared access to it. This would provide a strong incentive for people to limit the sharing of their purchased content to people they trust, which would prevent unlimited sharing.
Very clever.
However, it ultimately suffers from the same fundamental problem as any other DRM scheme: Bits are too easy to replicate. While the idea specifically allows for unlimited replication of the content, it still requires strong DRMish control over the "playkey". Effectively, it just replaces the problem of controlling access/ownership of a large pile of very-copyable bits (the content) with the problem of controlling access/ownership of a small pile of very-copyable bits (the playkey).
While reducing the scale of a problem does sometimes make it more tractable, I don't think it really helps in this case. You still end up with some bits that must somehow be moved and shared, but without the possibility that they may be copied. How do you do that? No one knows. You can try to lock it up in secure hardware (effectively a dongle), but even if you succeed, you've just created a major hassle for end-users -- which is exactly what this scheme is supposed to fix. And, of course, really securing that key is very hard, and doing it cost-effectively darned near impossible.
And I don't see any possible way this could work without some sort of on-line interaction. When I "take ownership" of a playkey that I've been given access to, how is it that everyone else loses the ability to use that key? Obviously there must be some sort of central system involved, if not for each usage of the key, at least periodically, to check in to see if the possessor should still have access to it.
Perhaps there's another even more brilliant technical idea underlying the rather clever social hack, but I doubt it.
It certainly is, if the text is sometimes right, sometimes wrong...
I see no hint, in any of the linked discussion, that any of the text is wrong. Some metadata is wrong, but that can be checked against the scanned frontmatter quite easily.
And the metadata will get fixed. This is a massive undertaking and it will take time to get it right.
You need a citation to prove that you need to pass certain criteria to get in?
No, I need a citation to prove that "many" homeschooling parents have gotten a surprise that their children were unable to meet the criteria, as the GP implied, particularly in his first sentence, which I didn't quote. I suppose it depends what you mean by "many", but in my experience the vast majority of homeschoolers are much better-equipped to meet those requirements than public school graduates.
What you will discover, and many homeschooling parents have already found out... Your reading comprehension, writing, and math skills had better be up to spec or you are sent packing.
Got a citation to support this? From what I see, homeschooled kids tend to be better-prepared academically than their public-schooled counterparts.
Nah. You just use redundancy to ensure reliability. Lots and lots of redundancy. MD-RAID and LVM offer all that's needed to make this work -- though doing it on a large scale requires lots of elbow grease.
I agree that "Just plug in another drive" is a far cry from what you have to do with these tools, but you can make it work.
Thanks to Wikipedia for setting me straight. There is relatively recent major innovation. I no longer have to spend a couple thousand dollars on a massive set of mostly correct encyclopedia's that will only get more incorrect over time, as science leaves them behind.
That's a really good point, and one that bears emphasizing and expansion.
We are partway into a technological revolution that, IMO, is far larger than we currently see: ubiquitous, instantaneous electronic communications. The invention of the intelligent-edged, packet-switched communication network (the Internet being the biggest and most important example) has made all sorts of new approaches to human interaction possible. Collaborative encyclopedia creation and open source software are just two examples. People are starting to work on open source textbooks.
e-Bay and craigslist have revolutionized the markets in secondhand goods.
Monster.com, etc., are changing how we find jobs, and on-line contract intermediation services are making it feasible for larger groups of people to forgo the traditional sort of job entirely. "Freelancing" used to be a way for writers and photographers to work, but now many sorts of jobs can be done that way. Ubiquitous high-speed Internet and good voice/video communications means that many people can work remotely, eliminating the need for large office spaces and, in some cases, giving rise to "virtual" companies that have no physical structure at all.
Business to business communications is facilitating a new wave of "just in time" operations processes even for organizations whose business isn't manufacturing.
This ubiquitous, transparent communications technology is even significantly changing our social interactions. One example that is now so thoroughly integrated into our habits that we don't even think about it is how to organize a rendezvous. We no longer plan in detail exactly where to meet at the mall or wherever, we just say "You have your phone? Fine, me too." Much of our socialization is now on-line, enabling us to keep closer tabs on the activities of friends and family (facebook, twitter, blogs), and connecting us to groups of like-minded people we may never meet (slashdot), or maybe allowing us to meet them (flash mobs).
It's revolutionizing politics as well. Watchdog groups now have easy, instantaneous links to large groups of interested citizens. Sites like Opencongress provide unprecedented visibility into the workings of the legislative process. Whistleblowers can publish information more easily and anonymously than ever.
Culture is changing rapidly, too. Mashups are somewhat constrained by copyright law, but happen anyway. Traditional media industries are being destroyed, while new approaches are evaluated.
This is all due to one cluster of technologies, but IMO it's at *least* as significant to our society as the automobile and airplane were. Perhaps it's a little less visible because so much of the innovation it engenders is changes in social structure, rather than new gadgets, but it's huge and moving very, very rapidly.
personally, I have a linux box at home running jfs and raid5 with hotswap drive trays. but I don't fool myself into thinking its BETTER than sun, hp, ibm and so on.
I don't these folks guy believe their solution is better -- just cheaper. MUCH cheaper. So much cheaper that you can employ a team of people to maintain the "homebrew" solution and still save money.
Do you have any choice whatsoever in the gear you are issued?
No. In some cases you might be able to scrounge a piece of older gear, or if it was issued to you because you were in before the new gear came out you might have been able to hold onto it (sometimes they want to collect all the old stuff). But even in those cases, if the new stuff is sufficiently different in appearance, you might get in trouble for being "out of uniform". How likely that is depends on how much time your leaders have to fuss about such things, and their time or interest in such crap tends to decrease rapidly as you get closer to active combat operations.