If it can't be fixed by rebooting it or by blowing onto it or some combination of the two, it should probably be replaced. Or cleaned. Or returned for a free rental.
Aside from startup price (about double), why not use Optima batteries in the tractor? They require no maintenance and they can survive overcharging, vibration, and produce very little corrosion. Energy density might be lower.
Oh, and on the topic of corrosion, a coating of petroleum jelly over the terminals and cable ends will block corrosion, but not electrical current.
I live in a 1960's ranch house. I used LED motion lights in my back yard and LED rope lights under the eaves of my house up front. The City of Las Vegas recently replaced the HPS lights with LED, so the amount of light pollution hitting my yard is now negligible. By hiding the LED's behind the eaves, they are not visible from most viewing angles. The soft yellow glow from my walls is enough to light up my yard, but not enough to attract bugs. The light washing down onto the windows of the house is enough to produce a pleasing night light inside, and the glowing walls outside make it harder to tell which rooms have lights on inside. I had to run about 150' of the lights. Very satisfied. I got them at Costco.
I also purchased LED motion lights. These were a little obnoxious and directional, so I pointed them up into the eaves to bounce and soften the light. Much less annoying for the neighbor who's bedroom window my lights hit.
Solar Energy Storage
on
Is E85 Dead Now?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
E85 will make perfect sense once petroleum is removed from the distilling process. Ethanol will be one of many methods to "store" solar energy. It's still going to continue to be important in the internal combustion field. Current marketplace E85 doesn't make much sense, but it is a stepping stone. It's not a dead end technology, it's just one that requires a good amount of energy to to expended on its manufacture. Eventually, the price of this energy will decrease.
Unmanned taxi cabs piloted remotely by a human assisted by in-vehicle AI Navigation. This will be the private sector job market for Air Force drone pilots.
I've been pondering this very thing, but I'm opting to wait for the iPad 2 since I don't already have a netbook sitting around.
If I did, I'd keep it really simple: 1. Cloud Antivirus or something else lightweight and adequate 2. Chrome 3. Skype for video chat with the grandparents, if applicable. Plus, it promotes pan-generational computer literacy
Mostly, I'm just going to use it to play movies/hulu/netflix on the go. I spend a lot of time in the car with my 3 year old, and it's the most productive use of her time in that scenario. Since your nephew can read, there's a lot of other interesting potential. Someone mentioned Edubuntu. I'd say just get him Oregon Trail. Or Craigslist the netbook and get him an iPod Touch.
People get too excited about product recalls. It just means the manufacturer has to eliminate or at least mitigate the failure. In this case, Dell will issue Firmware A.02 or whatever and the problem will vanish. Not a big deal.
I've had a lot of product recalls in my life because I drive a car and I have a baby. Apart from a few rare instances from Kodak and Honda, this doesn't mean the consumer gets a full refund and all of the products wind up in a landfill.
A few years ago, I applied to work for a shopping mall kiosk where people could get hands-on with Dells and purchase them as well.
Costco has been selling Dells for years.
I buy 20 or so Dells each year and I've always done it through their website. I'd never go to the store and buy a pre-configured computer unless it was really well configured and/or really cheap.
My PC actually seems to take longer to boot and especially to shut down using hibernation, than it does to choose shut-down. I've got my system at it's max of 2gb ram, and I'd guess that's the main impediment. I've had problems with a sense of sluggishness after booting (revitalizing?) the machine too. As with everything, individual results will vary. Mine haven't been great though.
Back in 2000, Intel made an effort to investigate the boot cycle for a PC contrasted with how people actually used their computers. By eliminating things like floppy seeks and redundancies. By streamlining the BIOS, they enabled a POST time of 25 seconds, down from their 60 second benchmark. http://www.intel.com/technology/magazine/computing /it08001.pdf
Although I can't find any articles right now, I do remember the term "Zero Boot Time PC" from an article, or maybe it was a Comdex buzzword. Bottom line is that PCs still take time to get to the OS, but it's a hell of a lot faster than it used to be. Hibernation doesn't get me up and running any faster, since I'm running 2gb of ram and XP seems to take forever to save/restore this data. The other downside of XP's hibernation is that when you boot the PC, you have to use it within a certain amount of time, or it shuts off again.
As to the reason that the article's poster might have such a long bootup time, I'd chalk it up to SATA, RAM counting/testing and the BIOS in general. After googling "zero boot time" I didn't get any hits for AMD, or off brand chipset makers. That leads me to believe that Intel is probably leading the pack, in terms of making PCs POST/Boot faster.
My problem with scissors is that when opening a largeish box, it's hard to have enough room to cut away the plastic. Box cutters tend to slip, or go too deep, damaging the work surface. Also, the hardness of the plastic makes cutting through it pretty difficult, at times. I guess that's the main point of the article. I've noticed that with some stuff, the clamshells aren't 'welded' (for lack of a better term) together as well as others. Some stuff can be ripped apart by hand. Memory Cards never seem to be in this latter category though.
Good point. I forgot about the importance of medical bills to building a case. Maybe if someone were a hand model, or required healthy fingers for their job. Programmers maybe?
I've wondered how this fairly hazardous method of packaging made it past the worry warts of the world without getting a safety tag stuck to it. I've given myself some pretty substantial cuts on my fingers from the ragged edges of the plastic. Rather than calling a lawyer, I chose to learn a lesson and figure out a better way of dealing with the packs.
Then, some genius came out with a specialized tool for deconstructing the dreaded bubble packs with ease: the OpenX (http://www.myopenx.com/). It's somewhat of a Catch 22 though, as the tool comes packaged within the very packaging one needs the tool to open. I don't own one, but it'd probably be a good stocking stuffer.
I just don't understand how spilling hot coffee on oneself is grounds for a lawsuit, but shredded fingers is not. Especially in America.
How can the computer illiterate buy things online with this technologically discriminatory system? It's such a shame that the sisabled get laws to protect them while the masses of unabled citizens are left out in the cold.
I'm in the US, so I checked out the http://en.fon.com/ page like someone else suggested. I signed right up. The router is $5 plus tax and shipping ($14.10 total) until Nov 8, then it's going to $30, supposedly. It's got Linksys guts in it, so I expect it to be a fairly decent consumer-level piece.
I'm not interested in hacking the device or anything, but I am interested in using it and promoting the service. The more of these there are in the wild, the more opportunities there are for me, as a registered user, to get online with them for free. Alternatively, I could just get the 50% of the $3 day fee, if I actually lived somewhere urban. Throwing one of these onto a separate subnet in an urban office would probably generate at least a little revenue, plus provide a limited source of advertising through the customizable log-in page.
In general, hacking direct access to the serial port takes a pretty high level of user to accomplish, and in the end it saves an outlay of what? $30-$50? Even with the CGI backdoor, how many people outside of the geek community even know what to do when presented with a shell interface? I think it's very cool to reverse engineer things, but I don't think it's a threat to the business model at all. I'd compare it to the amount of WRT54G's in place globally vs. the ones that actually run DD-WRT. And that's an easy/useful hack. The bonus of hacking is that it gets press. If not for this article, I'd have never heard of Fon.com.
They also provide a firmware for your existing WRT54G/GS so you can start up with them for free. Buffalo routers are supported too. https://en.fon.com/downloads/
Color temperature is different with every type of bulb. LEDs are also highly directional, making them only good for certain installations. I.e. lighting art and for use as accent lighting would be perfect for an LED, replacing normal room lighting might not. No matter if it's a tungsten, halogen, CG, or LED, there's certain applications that are incompatible with the quality of light and color temp.
I look forward to LEDs coming down in price and reaching some sort of market saturation, so that they are available at more than just specialty catalog shops.
I was walking down the street in Barcelona, ES, when I saw a fully nude man being questioned by the police in the middle of the square. I pulled out my camera and took a picture of the scene while my girlfriend told me not to. Fortunately, a group of girls did the same thing at the same time, so the cops went up to them and made them erase the photo.
I wasn't really sure whether they were protecting the rights of the naked guy or themselves. In the end, they didn't arrest him and he carried on with his nude stroll.
Of course standards and fidelity change over time. There's already Music DVDs and SACDs on the market, which would seem to indicate a move away from stereo in favor of surround with discrete channels. I have yet to buy any of the new equipment. I've yet to see anyone using MP3Pro, or MP3Surround. In fact, the only major change I've seen in digital audio in the last 6 years or so (when I first got started with MP3's) is a shift from 128kbps encoding to 192kbps or high bitrate VBRs being more common on the P2P networks. I've also seen some Flac stuff floating around, but I've yet to encounter any Oggs. Perhaps that illustrates my lack of sophistication. Perhaps it's just that MP3 is common and easy to understand and in almost all cases provides an acceptably good sounding track that anyone with a computer is able to make use of.
I've downloaded a total of 7 songs from iTunes, using free download promo coupons. When my MP3 drive went kaput a couple weeks ago, I checked to see if I could re-download the stuff I'd gotten from iTunes. The standard canned answer was "no," but when I explained to them (again) what had happened, they were kind enough to re-queue my purchased music so that I could get it again. eMusic, on the other hand, doesn't even carry any of the 200-ish songs that I'd gotten from them, so those are lost to memory now. The moral of this story is that Apple provides good customer support, even for someone like me who only spent $7 in coupon bucks with them. The fact that their music is AAC with DRM is a problem easily solved with a right-click using their own software (convert to MP3). There's a reason they hit a billion downloads, and I don't think it's just marketing. Their product is convenient, fairly priced and backed up by decent support.
I think the real issue is how much music out there has an expiration date that is inferior to that of their encoding.
Didn't someone call into Howard Stern a couple years ago (2002) to name a newly discovered beaver after Gary? I can't remember the names they came up with, but I do recall it being an extinct creature. Ta Ta Toothicus? I can't find any links, but I thought someone else might remember.
Consensus suggests that the Tunguska event was the result of a comet or meteor, but there is some doubt. Some of the physical evidence suggests something like a nuclear blast occurring, but there is a lack of radioactive materials on the site. Still, it would be interesting if this lightning thing somehow tied in with the event in Siberia almost a century ago.
Slashdot Mirror
If it can't be fixed by rebooting it or by blowing onto it or some combination of the two, it should probably be replaced. Or cleaned. Or returned for a free rental.
Aside from startup price (about double), why not use Optima batteries in the tractor? They require no maintenance and they can survive overcharging, vibration, and produce very little corrosion. Energy density might be lower.
Oh, and on the topic of corrosion, a coating of petroleum jelly over the terminals and cable ends will block corrosion, but not electrical current.
I live in a 1960's ranch house. I used LED motion lights in my back yard and LED rope lights under the eaves of my house up front. The City of Las Vegas recently replaced the HPS lights with LED, so the amount of light pollution hitting my yard is now negligible. By hiding the LED's behind the eaves, they are not visible from most viewing angles. The soft yellow glow from my walls is enough to light up my yard, but not enough to attract bugs. The light washing down onto the windows of the house is enough to produce a pleasing night light inside, and the glowing walls outside make it harder to tell which rooms have lights on inside. I had to run about 150' of the lights. Very satisfied. I got them at Costco.
I also purchased LED motion lights. These were a little obnoxious and directional, so I pointed them up into the eaves to bounce and soften the light. Much less annoying for the neighbor who's bedroom window my lights hit.
E85 will make perfect sense once petroleum is removed from the distilling process. Ethanol will be one of many methods to "store" solar energy. It's still going to continue to be important in the internal combustion field. Current marketplace E85 doesn't make much sense, but it is a stepping stone. It's not a dead end technology, it's just one that requires a good amount of energy to to expended on its manufacture. Eventually, the price of this energy will decrease.
Unmanned taxi cabs piloted remotely by a human assisted by in-vehicle AI Navigation. This will be the private sector job market for Air Force drone pilots.
I've been pondering this very thing, but I'm opting to wait for the iPad 2 since I don't already have a netbook sitting around.
If I did, I'd keep it really simple:
1. Cloud Antivirus or something else lightweight and adequate
2. Chrome
3. Skype for video chat with the grandparents, if applicable. Plus, it promotes pan-generational computer literacy
Mostly, I'm just going to use it to play movies/hulu/netflix on the go. I spend a lot of time in the car with my 3 year old, and it's the most productive use of her time in that scenario. Since your nephew can read, there's a lot of other interesting potential. Someone mentioned Edubuntu. I'd say just get him Oregon Trail. Or Craigslist the netbook and get him an iPod Touch.
People get too excited about product recalls. It just means the manufacturer has to eliminate or at least mitigate the failure. In this case, Dell will issue Firmware A.02 or whatever and the problem will vanish. Not a big deal.
I've had a lot of product recalls in my life because I drive a car and I have a baby. Apart from a few rare instances from Kodak and Honda, this doesn't mean the consumer gets a full refund and all of the products wind up in a landfill.
Something else interesting happened in 1973: Roe v. Wade
There's a theory that with a decline in unwanted children, there are less adults who had crappy childhoods and grew up to be criminals.
Yeah, it's empty now, but it seemed like a good place for people to post pics of their annoying LED's:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/billoflights
A few years ago, I applied to work for a shopping mall kiosk where people could get hands-on with Dells and purchase them as well.
Costco has been selling Dells for years.
I buy 20 or so Dells each year and I've always done it through their website. I'd never go to the store and buy a pre-configured computer unless it was really well configured and/or really cheap.
Can't they just replace them with Hollywood CGI facsimiles? I mean, those ones rap and sing and dance and so forth.
Case in point: March of the Penguins vs. Happy Feet.
My PC actually seems to take longer to boot and especially to shut down using hibernation, than it does to choose shut-down. I've got my system at it's max of 2gb ram, and I'd guess that's the main impediment. I've had problems with a sense of sluggishness after booting (revitalizing?) the machine too. As with everything, individual results will vary. Mine haven't been great though.
Back in 2000, Intel made an effort to investigate the boot cycle for a PC contrasted with how people actually used their computers. By eliminating things like floppy seeks and redundancies. By streamlining the BIOS, they enabled a POST time of 25 seconds, down from their 60 second benchmark.g /it08001.pdf
1 041_3-5897993.html
http://www.intel.com/technology/magazine/computin
Although I can't find any articles right now, I do remember the term "Zero Boot Time PC" from an article, or maybe it was a Comdex buzzword. Bottom line is that PCs still take time to get to the OS, but it's a hell of a lot faster than it used to be. Hibernation doesn't get me up and running any faster, since I'm running 2gb of ram and XP seems to take forever to save/restore this data. The other downside of XP's hibernation is that when you boot the PC, you have to use it within a certain amount of time, or it shuts off again.
Intel's got a Flash RAM solution in the pipes, it seems: http://news.com.com/Intel+cuts+PC+boot+time/2100-
As to the reason that the article's poster might have such a long bootup time, I'd chalk it up to SATA, RAM counting/testing and the BIOS in general. After googling "zero boot time" I didn't get any hits for AMD, or off brand chipset makers. That leads me to believe that Intel is probably leading the pack, in terms of making PCs POST/Boot faster.
My problem with scissors is that when opening a largeish box, it's hard to have enough room to cut away the plastic. Box cutters tend to slip, or go too deep, damaging the work surface. Also, the hardness of the plastic makes cutting through it pretty difficult, at times. I guess that's the main point of the article. I've noticed that with some stuff, the clamshells aren't 'welded' (for lack of a better term) together as well as others. Some stuff can be ripped apart by hand. Memory Cards never seem to be in this latter category though.
I believe that it's fairly equal at zero fault outside of one's own stupidity.
That hasn't ever stopped people from filing lawsuits though, has it?
Good point. I forgot about the importance of medical bills to building a case. Maybe if someone were a hand model, or required healthy fingers for their job. Programmers maybe?
I've wondered how this fairly hazardous method of packaging made it past the worry warts of the world without getting a safety tag stuck to it. I've given myself some pretty substantial cuts on my fingers from the ragged edges of the plastic. Rather than calling a lawyer, I chose to learn a lesson and figure out a better way of dealing with the packs.
Then, some genius came out with a specialized tool for deconstructing the dreaded bubble packs with ease: the OpenX (http://www.myopenx.com/). It's somewhat of a Catch 22 though, as the tool comes packaged within the very packaging one needs the tool to open. I don't own one, but it'd probably be a good stocking stuffer.
I just don't understand how spilling hot coffee on oneself is grounds for a lawsuit, but shredded fingers is not. Especially in America.
How can the computer illiterate buy things online with this technologically discriminatory system? It's such a shame that the sisabled get laws to protect them while the masses of unabled citizens are left out in the cold.
Actually, the device is $5. Shipping to Las Vegas was another $8, and tax was $1.10.
Free = $14.10 in America
I'm in the US, so I checked out the http://en.fon.com/ page like someone else suggested. I signed right up. The router is $5 plus tax and shipping ($14.10 total) until Nov 8, then it's going to $30, supposedly. It's got Linksys guts in it, so I expect it to be a fairly decent consumer-level piece.
I'm not interested in hacking the device or anything, but I am interested in using it and promoting the service. The more of these there are in the wild, the more opportunities there are for me, as a registered user, to get online with them for free. Alternatively, I could just get the 50% of the $3 day fee, if I actually lived somewhere urban. Throwing one of these onto a separate subnet in an urban office would probably generate at least a little revenue, plus provide a limited source of advertising through the customizable log-in page.
In general, hacking direct access to the serial port takes a pretty high level of user to accomplish, and in the end it saves an outlay of what? $30-$50? Even with the CGI backdoor, how many people outside of the geek community even know what to do when presented with a shell interface? I think it's very cool to reverse engineer things, but I don't think it's a threat to the business model at all. I'd compare it to the amount of WRT54G's in place globally vs. the ones that actually run DD-WRT. And that's an easy/useful hack. The bonus of hacking is that it gets press. If not for this article, I'd have never heard of Fon.com.
They also provide a firmware for your existing WRT54G/GS so you can start up with them for free. Buffalo routers are supported too. https://en.fon.com/downloads/
What's FON?: http://en.fon.com/info/whats_fon.php
Color temperature is different with every type of bulb. LEDs are also highly directional, making them only good for certain installations. I.e. lighting art and for use as accent lighting would be perfect for an LED, replacing normal room lighting might not. No matter if it's a tungsten, halogen, CG, or LED, there's certain applications that are incompatible with the quality of light and color temp.
I look forward to LEDs coming down in price and reaching some sort of market saturation, so that they are available at more than just specialty catalog shops.
I was walking down the street in Barcelona, ES, when I saw a fully nude man being questioned by the police in the middle of the square. I pulled out my camera and took a picture of the scene while my girlfriend told me not to. Fortunately, a group of girls did the same thing at the same time, so the cops went up to them and made them erase the photo.
I wasn't really sure whether they were protecting the rights of the naked guy or themselves. In the end, they didn't arrest him and he carried on with his nude stroll.
Of course standards and fidelity change over time. There's already Music DVDs and SACDs on the market, which would seem to indicate a move away from stereo in favor of surround with discrete channels. I have yet to buy any of the new equipment. I've yet to see anyone using MP3Pro, or MP3Surround. In fact, the only major change I've seen in digital audio in the last 6 years or so (when I first got started with MP3's) is a shift from 128kbps encoding to 192kbps or high bitrate VBRs being more common on the P2P networks. I've also seen some Flac stuff floating around, but I've yet to encounter any Oggs. Perhaps that illustrates my lack of sophistication. Perhaps it's just that MP3 is common and easy to understand and in almost all cases provides an acceptably good sounding track that anyone with a computer is able to make use of.
I've downloaded a total of 7 songs from iTunes, using free download promo coupons. When my MP3 drive went kaput a couple weeks ago, I checked to see if I could re-download the stuff I'd gotten from iTunes. The standard canned answer was "no," but when I explained to them (again) what had happened, they were kind enough to re-queue my purchased music so that I could get it again. eMusic, on the other hand, doesn't even carry any of the 200-ish songs that I'd gotten from them, so those are lost to memory now. The moral of this story is that Apple provides good customer support, even for someone like me who only spent $7 in coupon bucks with them. The fact that their music is AAC with DRM is a problem easily solved with a right-click using their own software (convert to MP3). There's a reason they hit a billion downloads, and I don't think it's just marketing. Their product is convenient, fairly priced and backed up by decent support.
I think the real issue is how much music out there has an expiration date that is inferior to that of their encoding.
Didn't someone call into Howard Stern a couple years ago (2002) to name a newly discovered beaver after Gary? I can't remember the names they came up with, but I do recall it being an extinct creature.
Ta Ta Toothicus? I can't find any links, but I thought someone else might remember.
Consensus suggests that the Tunguska event was the result of a comet or meteor, but there is some doubt. Some of the physical evidence suggests something like a nuclear blast occurring, but there is a lack of radioactive materials on the site. Still, it would be interesting if this lightning thing somehow tied in with the event in Siberia almost a century ago.