Ever have to get some data off your mobile but couldn't turn it on because you've been talking all day and run it down?
Well, no, but I have wished that I had the juice to make a phone call after having the GPS and golfcaddy software running for a miserably slow 5 hour golf round. Short of needing to check something on the phone, in the middle of nowhere, though, you scenario doesn't come up much as either (a) I pop out the uSD card and put it in a reader* or (b) I dock the phone with a pc and download the information I need. Of course, there's always my preferred method of extra capacity, which involves slipping an extra 40g battery* in my pocket if I'm going to be using the phone heavily all day and there's no charging opportunity in sight. Since my dock charges the internal and extra battery simultaneously, I'm always ready to carry the extra few hours around with me when I'm going to need it.
Besides, you don't you think it would suck to have half the phone or PDA life? Would you really prefer to lose a call to a dead phone just so that you could check your contacts or email at the end of the day?
What I want to know is how to get employees to work this much. If he (or she) looked at porn 331 days out of the year, then we got quite a high attendance from this particular executive. By the time you hit these levels, most civil servants will have 26 days of annual leave, 10 holidays, and 13.5 days of sick leave a year. There are only 260.875 weekdays in a year(look it up - civil servants get paid an hourly rate based on their annual salary divided by 2087...a trick Reagan used to save a bunch of money vs the "standard" 2080 hour workyear). Presuming our executive is in perfect health, he spent a lot of non-work days at the office if he was there 331 instead of 225. In fact, we got him into the office an extra 106 days, and I would hope that he got something else done than polish the ol' helmet during the time he was there.
I like the platform, but I'm with you on the finger v stylus modes. It was, after all, built for pocketPCs, which everyone expected to have a stylus for. Nowadays, though, fingers are the way to go, and WinMo just hasn't gotten with the program, despite a full revision (6) since anyone has really used a pocketPC. Make the clickable status icons bigger and make it easier to navigate to programs and settings. There are lots of things we're asking winmo phones to do that the OS just wasn't made for, and MS can't seem to get it in gear to fix them. The amazing thing is that the developer community does seem to push out layer upon layer of things that the UI should do natively, and MS never seems to notice. Make you wonder if everyone at MS really doesn't use their software, or if they're just lazy.
I fear switching to the ribbon on Office. I do a lot of reports, and tend to need to cut/paste without formatting and to insert pictures and special characters. I've gotten to use the menu shortcuts alt-i-p-f to insert a picture, alt-e-s for pasting without formatting and alt-i-s for inserting a symbol using the character map dialog (yes, I should probably memorize the alt-num pad sequence for all the special characters I use). I suspect that will all change. And I'm not happy about the prospect.
If it's going to take me a month to untrain and retrain on the new UI, it's going to have to be unbelievably more efficient to ever pay back. If hunting down commands takes twice as long for a month, and the new UI is 5% faster once I master it (and let me just say that alt-i-p-f is faster than mousing and clicking on a single button) it will take nearly 2 years just to get back to even on my time.
I've never understood those claims, or perhaps you've just managed to get a computer that has no background processes running. My Dell Precision M70 is about 4-5 minutes from cold boot to usable, and Bios is maybe 10 seconds of that, at most. Resume from hibernation (with 2GB of RAM and a 5400RPM IDE drive) is between 25 and 30 seconds.
Interesting. My only experience with a ribbon-style interface is in a technical program that just upgraded to it (I'm still in XP and office 03). So far, it's been utterly confusing and ridiculously unproductive. Commands which were second nature now require direct attention to find. I've resorted, in some cases, to looking up the keyboard shortcuts in the manual so that I can avoid having to hunt through the ever-shifting menus.
I can see how the interface might be useful to someone who has never run the program before - it limits your selections to the immediate, common tasks. For the experienced user, though, it slows down the process. If time is money, it's a very costly interface.
Do you really think news images are unaltered? EVERY news picture is altered. It was the case when I worked with film, and it's the case with everyone today working with digital realm. No photo is perfect, and photographers regularly alter exposure - in film using dodge/burn (yes, those are actual actions, not just funny names for photoshop widgets) to change the appearance of subjects, make forgrounds standout, bring details out of shadows, suppress (or enhance) unflattering areas, limit the tonal range for repro, and on and on.
Beautiful naked women aren't bought - they are leased. Finding them is relatively easy - they will seek out the cash. Lease and operations rates are typically high, but very manageable if your bank account balance looks like a phone number. Since you can only lease BNW, they are always deductible provided sufficient accounting creativity.
If the founders are looking for men, the same applies, however overall costs tends to be greater.
Many years ago I played horn (French, for the old school types), and the difference between instruments is just crazy. The amazing thing is that none of them play in tune, despite having (typically) 9 tuning slides. But you know which notes on _your_ horn are out of tune, and how to shift your embouchure to correct. It's true that great players can make almost any piece of junk sing, but it does take quite a bit of work.
Please learn the background on the health care debate before you make yourself sound silly again. None of the current proposals have the $3800 number, and the reason for the "fine" is a simple, statistical necessity for a working system. (For reference, the "fine" is typically the actuarial value of a benficiary; i.e. - the cost to insure a member of a nominally infinite pool without maintenance costs).
It's simple - if a proprietary package will save me an hour of time in the next year, it's worth $100. That's a pretty small amount of time. Sure I could use gimp to resize my images for my reports, but I found a $30, closed source program to do it in the explorer interface, on everything in the folder, with a custom save-to folder, and it remembers the last resize. That means it takes me about 12-15 seconds to resize 30-40 images to just he right size to drop into my editor.
Sure, I could do it one by one - or even write a batch script - but it would take close to a minute in the best scenerio. I write 50-60 reports a year, so $30 is a bargain.
Actually, while the 16:9 displays are all the rage, they're the wrong format for technical papers. the old 4:3 is almost perfect for letter-2" (or A4-5cm for the euro crowd). If you will grant that most papers have a 1" margin, and a screen does not need one (notes may be pop-up style, or overlayed if you need to scan for them), then an 11.1" screen in a 1.4:1 format is very close to what you're looking for. The bezel can form your "missing" border. Thin as possible would be nice, but I admit I'd love a slide out keyboard like my HTC touch pro, or maybe even something closer to "normal".
Make it auto-sync with a computer and give it a couple of weeks of battery life and it'd be worth a solid $500 for me. I've got (easily) 10,000+ pages of building codes, technical manuals, and product literature I'd love to have in the field. Not to mention syncing all of my library of building drawings - even if I have to pan and zoom - would be killer to take to a job site. I take it back...it would probably be worth closer to $800-$1000 for me.
So don't fill it out. There's no Facebook law saying you have to give them that information - you fill in as little or as much as you want. This is for the diminishingly rare case where you want to post "sensitive" information you want your select friends (with whom you share your crypto key outside of facebook) but which you don't want facebook to know about and you don't want searchable in their database by other users (i.e. where you went to high school so your old buddies can find you).
I can't really find a useful reason for this - something I want to post on facebook that I want kept a secret except amongst people with whom I would share a private key. That's not really what facebook is for.
If they support Macs, then they probably do not require the use of IE to access their websites. It seems that practically all services which use IT at universities are served through a web gateway. If they truly support macs, then they're probably not using IE only pages. At that point, you're probably okay if you're daughter is competent running linux. If she needs a Linux help desk, see if there's a good LUG on campus, or make sure you can provide the remote support yourself (or pay for it).
I presume that most real applications which might actually require win/mac would be either runable under Wine, or she might just have to break down and dual boot or run win in a VM. There are fairly few classes which require specialized software - those that do are normally using the most common commercial applications, so she may as well get used to the native OS for those apps, or risk being hopelessly undertrained for a job when she gets out of school.
Yes, put can you put 45 of them into a 4U space? For these guys - and most multi-PB operations I suspect - floor space is at a significant premium. I think the purpose behind skipping the hot swap (which is nice if you can afford it) was to maximize density. I've got an unRaid array somewhat similar to yours, and I also used all on-board controller slots. Then again, I've only got 4TB of space, and don't expect to need to expand soon (my whole DVD collection is on it, and now that I've populated my back catalog I only buy 12-15 discs a year).
Even at $100 for 4 drives - and not enterprise quality at that - that's a 20% cost increase over the basic. Not a tripling as the GP suggested, but a pretty high number. With dual redundancy (R6), good monitoring software, and sliding rails the maintenance won't be that bad. Probably worth $20k/PB in savings given actual HD failure rates.
I worked there (NASA). No engineers were hired (actually, simply "very few"). The budget increased because we did more stuff, and we paid more accountants and contract staff to administer outside contractors who paid higher wages (with lower benefits, generally, I must add) and added profit on top of it all.
I don't have a cite, but if you look at the civil service: contractor ratio you'll see the shift. Hell, JPL is only contract administrators - there are effectively no working civil service engineers doing engineering. It's all CalTech and outside contractors.
Yeah, this only works if your the geeks building the hardware to begin with. The real cost is in setup and maintenance. Plus, if the shit hits the fan, the CxO is going to want to find some big butts to kick. 67TB of data is a lot to lose (though it's only about 35 disks at max cap these days).
These guys, however, happen to be both the geeks, the maintainers, and the people-whos-butts-get-kicked-anyway. This is not a project for a one or two man IT group that has to build a storage array for their 100-200 person firm. These guys are storage professionals with the hardware and software know how to pull it off. Kudos to them for making it and sharing their project. It's a nice, compact system. It's a little bit of a shame that there isn't OTS software, but at this level you're going to be doing grunt work on it with experts anyway.
FWIW, Lime Technology (lime-technology.com) will sell you a case, drive trays, and software for a quasi-RAID system that will hold 28TB for under $1500 (not including the 15 2TB drives - another $3k on the open market). This is only one fault tolerant, though failure is more graceful than a traditional RAID). I don't know if they've implemented hot spares or automatic failover yet (which would put them up to 2 fault tolerant on the drives, like RAID6).
Here's the problem - good program managers come from good engineers. And NASA has very, very few engineers anymore. They've got principal investigators (scientists) and contract managers. Most anybody who was left at the end of the 70s was fired by Reagan and the jobs subbed out to contractors. That way they could manage cash flow by simply increasing or decreasing manpower by manipulating the contract. Which sounds great if you're a business major, and is just death for any sort of continuity and corporate knowledge. The best and brightest go on to find steady work, the good stay around, and the dregs come on and off jobs as the contract tide rises and falls. Which, by the way, happens very little. With the contractor employees being so entwined with the remaining personnel, there's pressure to find work for everyone when the money gets tight. That's just human nature - but it foils the MBA's plans to save money, and it prevents NASA from having the in-house expertise (since it was all farmed out).
And it really does get to the crux of the matter. The content delivery companies have blocked TiVo (and others) from actually implementing the best features and providing the most usable product. Cable card? DTV smart cards? They're so fucking paranoid about theft of service that they are ruining the consumer experience.
3" cover is most certainly not required. Most commercial floor slabs are 2.5" concrete on 1/2" form deck (9/16 for the pedantic). A 4" slab will have two layers of rebar in it - either as WWR (gauge wire on a 6x6 grid) or as actual rebar up to 1/2" in diameter. That means as little as 1-1/2" of cover over the steel.
The 3" you may be thinking about is clear cover for steel reinforcement when slabs are cast against earth. In that case, it's to minimize water infiltration and protect the steel from corrosion.
Freezing of the slab is theoretically possible in a very, very cold environment, but not unless the house is left unheated for an extended time as subzero temps and the typical ground temp is below freezing (an ice lens would have to be able to extend from the exterior of the slab all the way to where the embedded pipes are). In that case the whole house would have to be "winterized" with all lines drained.
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Ever have to get some data off your mobile but couldn't turn it on because you've been talking all day and run it down?
Well, no, but I have wished that I had the juice to make a phone call after having the GPS and golfcaddy software running for a miserably slow 5 hour golf round. Short of needing to check something on the phone, in the middle of nowhere, though, you scenario doesn't come up much as either (a) I pop out the uSD card and put it in a reader* or (b) I dock the phone with a pc and download the information I need. Of course, there's always my preferred method of extra capacity, which involves slipping an extra 40g battery* in my pocket if I'm going to be using the phone heavily all day and there's no charging opportunity in sight. Since my dock charges the internal and extra battery simultaneously, I'm always ready to carry the extra few hours around with me when I'm going to need it.
Besides, you don't you think it would suck to have half the phone or PDA life? Would you really prefer to lose a call to a dead phone just so that you could check your contacts or email at the end of the day?
*iPhones need not apply
What I want to know is how to get employees to work this much. If he (or she) looked at porn 331 days out of the year, then we got quite a high attendance from this particular executive. By the time you hit these levels, most civil servants will have 26 days of annual leave, 10 holidays, and 13.5 days of sick leave a year. There are only 260.875 weekdays in a year(look it up - civil servants get paid an hourly rate based on their annual salary divided by 2087...a trick Reagan used to save a bunch of money vs the "standard" 2080 hour workyear). Presuming our executive is in perfect health, he spent a lot of non-work days at the office if he was there 331 instead of 225. In fact, we got him into the office an extra 106 days, and I would hope that he got something else done than polish the ol' helmet during the time he was there.
I like the platform, but I'm with you on the finger v stylus modes. It was, after all, built for pocketPCs, which everyone expected to have a stylus for. Nowadays, though, fingers are the way to go, and WinMo just hasn't gotten with the program, despite a full revision (6) since anyone has really used a pocketPC. Make the clickable status icons bigger and make it easier to navigate to programs and settings. There are lots of things we're asking winmo phones to do that the OS just wasn't made for, and MS can't seem to get it in gear to fix them. The amazing thing is that the developer community does seem to push out layer upon layer of things that the UI should do natively, and MS never seems to notice. Make you wonder if everyone at MS really doesn't use their software, or if they're just lazy.
I fear switching to the ribbon on Office. I do a lot of reports, and tend to need to cut/paste without formatting and to insert pictures and special characters. I've gotten to use the menu shortcuts alt-i-p-f to insert a picture, alt-e-s for pasting without formatting and alt-i-s for inserting a symbol using the character map dialog (yes, I should probably memorize the alt-num pad sequence for all the special characters I use). I suspect that will all change. And I'm not happy about the prospect.
If it's going to take me a month to untrain and retrain on the new UI, it's going to have to be unbelievably more efficient to ever pay back. If hunting down commands takes twice as long for a month, and the new UI is 5% faster once I master it (and let me just say that alt-i-p-f is faster than mousing and clicking on a single button) it will take nearly 2 years just to get back to even on my time.
I've never understood those claims, or perhaps you've just managed to get a computer that has no background processes running. My Dell Precision M70 is about 4-5 minutes from cold boot to usable, and Bios is maybe 10 seconds of that, at most. Resume from hibernation (with 2GB of RAM and a 5400RPM IDE drive) is between 25 and 30 seconds.
Interesting. My only experience with a ribbon-style interface is in a technical program that just upgraded to it (I'm still in XP and office 03). So far, it's been utterly confusing and ridiculously unproductive. Commands which were second nature now require direct attention to find. I've resorted, in some cases, to looking up the keyboard shortcuts in the manual so that I can avoid having to hunt through the ever-shifting menus.
I can see how the interface might be useful to someone who has never run the program before - it limits your selections to the immediate, common tasks. For the experienced user, though, it slows down the process. If time is money, it's a very costly interface.
I wonder how much text you have to add to avoid the filters...
Do you really think news images are unaltered? EVERY news picture is altered. It was the case when I worked with film, and it's the case with everyone today working with digital realm. No photo is perfect, and photographers regularly alter exposure - in film using dodge/burn (yes, those are actual actions, not just funny names for photoshop widgets) to change the appearance of subjects, make forgrounds standout, bring details out of shadows, suppress (or enhance) unflattering areas, limit the tonal range for repro, and on and on.
Fiber is cheap. Rights of way are amazingly expensive, sometimes even if you happen to have eminent domain powers.
Beautiful naked women aren't bought - they are leased. Finding them is relatively easy - they will seek out the cash. Lease and operations rates are typically high, but very manageable if your bank account balance looks like a phone number. Since you can only lease BNW, they are always deductible provided sufficient accounting creativity.
If the founders are looking for men, the same applies, however overall costs tends to be greater.
One of them has some legal business, the other is purely illegal and harmful.
Choose the lesser evil.
Yeah, but I still have a hard time supporting the malware vendors.
Many years ago I played horn (French, for the old school types), and the difference between instruments is just crazy. The amazing thing is that none of them play in tune, despite having (typically) 9 tuning slides. But you know which notes on _your_ horn are out of tune, and how to shift your embouchure to correct. It's true that great players can make almost any piece of junk sing, but it does take quite a bit of work.
Please learn the background on the health care debate before you make yourself sound silly again. None of the current proposals have the $3800 number, and the reason for the "fine" is a simple, statistical necessity for a working system. (For reference, the "fine" is typically the actuarial value of a benficiary; i.e. - the cost to insure a member of a nominally infinite pool without maintenance costs).
If I took your advice, and my wife found out, my condition would be pretty far from "healthy"
It's simple - if a proprietary package will save me an hour of time in the next year, it's worth $100. That's a pretty small amount of time. Sure I could use gimp to resize my images for my reports, but I found a $30, closed source program to do it in the explorer interface, on everything in the folder, with a custom save-to folder, and it remembers the last resize. That means it takes me about 12-15 seconds to resize 30-40 images to just he right size to drop into my editor.
Sure, I could do it one by one - or even write a batch script - but it would take close to a minute in the best scenerio. I write 50-60 reports a year, so $30 is a bargain.
Actually, while the 16:9 displays are all the rage, they're the wrong format for technical papers. the old 4:3 is almost perfect for letter-2" (or A4-5cm for the euro crowd). If you will grant that most papers have a 1" margin, and a screen does not need one (notes may be pop-up style, or overlayed if you need to scan for them), then an 11.1" screen in a 1.4:1 format is very close to what you're looking for. The bezel can form your "missing" border. Thin as possible would be nice, but I admit I'd love a slide out keyboard like my HTC touch pro, or maybe even something closer to "normal".
Make it auto-sync with a computer and give it a couple of weeks of battery life and it'd be worth a solid $500 for me. I've got (easily) 10,000+ pages of building codes, technical manuals, and product literature I'd love to have in the field. Not to mention syncing all of my library of building drawings - even if I have to pan and zoom - would be killer to take to a job site. I take it back...it would probably be worth closer to $800-$1000 for me.
So don't fill it out. There's no Facebook law saying you have to give them that information - you fill in as little or as much as you want. This is for the diminishingly rare case where you want to post "sensitive" information you want your select friends (with whom you share your crypto key outside of facebook) but which you don't want facebook to know about and you don't want searchable in their database by other users (i.e. where you went to high school so your old buddies can find you).
I can't really find a useful reason for this - something I want to post on facebook that I want kept a secret except amongst people with whom I would share a private key. That's not really what facebook is for.
If they support Macs, then they probably do not require the use of IE to access their websites. It seems that practically all services which use IT at universities are served through a web gateway. If they truly support macs, then they're probably not using IE only pages. At that point, you're probably okay if you're daughter is competent running linux. If she needs a Linux help desk, see if there's a good LUG on campus, or make sure you can provide the remote support yourself (or pay for it).
I presume that most real applications which might actually require win/mac would be either runable under Wine, or she might just have to break down and dual boot or run win in a VM. There are fairly few classes which require specialized software - those that do are normally using the most common commercial applications, so she may as well get used to the native OS for those apps, or risk being hopelessly undertrained for a job when she gets out of school.
Yes, put can you put 45 of them into a 4U space? For these guys - and most multi-PB operations I suspect - floor space is at a significant premium. I think the purpose behind skipping the hot swap (which is nice if you can afford it) was to maximize density. I've got an unRaid array somewhat similar to yours, and I also used all on-board controller slots. Then again, I've only got 4TB of space, and don't expect to need to expand soon (my whole DVD collection is on it, and now that I've populated my back catalog I only buy 12-15 discs a year).
Even at $100 for 4 drives - and not enterprise quality at that - that's a 20% cost increase over the basic. Not a tripling as the GP suggested, but a pretty high number. With dual redundancy (R6), good monitoring software, and sliding rails the maintenance won't be that bad. Probably worth $20k/PB in savings given actual HD failure rates.
I worked there (NASA). No engineers were hired (actually, simply "very few"). The budget increased because we did more stuff, and we paid more accountants and contract staff to administer outside contractors who paid higher wages (with lower benefits, generally, I must add) and added profit on top of it all.
I don't have a cite, but if you look at the civil service: contractor ratio you'll see the shift. Hell, JPL is only contract administrators - there are effectively no working civil service engineers doing engineering. It's all CalTech and outside contractors.
Yeah, this only works if your the geeks building the hardware to begin with. The real cost is in setup and maintenance. Plus, if the shit hits the fan, the CxO is going to want to find some big butts to kick. 67TB of data is a lot to lose (though it's only about 35 disks at max cap these days).
These guys, however, happen to be both the geeks, the maintainers, and the people-whos-butts-get-kicked-anyway. This is not a project for a one or two man IT group that has to build a storage array for their 100-200 person firm. These guys are storage professionals with the hardware and software know how to pull it off. Kudos to them for making it and sharing their project. It's a nice, compact system. It's a little bit of a shame that there isn't OTS software, but at this level you're going to be doing grunt work on it with experts anyway.
FWIW, Lime Technology (lime-technology.com) will sell you a case, drive trays, and software for a quasi-RAID system that will hold 28TB for under $1500 (not including the 15 2TB drives - another $3k on the open market). This is only one fault tolerant, though failure is more graceful than a traditional RAID). I don't know if they've implemented hot spares or automatic failover yet (which would put them up to 2 fault tolerant on the drives, like RAID6).
Here's the problem - good program managers come from good engineers. And NASA has very, very few engineers anymore. They've got principal investigators (scientists) and contract managers. Most anybody who was left at the end of the 70s was fired by Reagan and the jobs subbed out to contractors. That way they could manage cash flow by simply increasing or decreasing manpower by manipulating the contract. Which sounds great if you're a business major, and is just death for any sort of continuity and corporate knowledge. The best and brightest go on to find steady work, the good stay around, and the dregs come on and off jobs as the contract tide rises and falls. Which, by the way, happens very little. With the contractor employees being so entwined with the remaining personnel, there's pressure to find work for everyone when the money gets tight. That's just human nature - but it foils the MBA's plans to save money, and it prevents NASA from having the in-house expertise (since it was all farmed out).
Don't hold your breath.
And it really does get to the crux of the matter. The content delivery companies have blocked TiVo (and others) from actually implementing the best features and providing the most usable product. Cable card? DTV smart cards? They're so fucking paranoid about theft of service that they are ruining the consumer experience.
I say fuck 'em all.
3" cover is most certainly not required. Most commercial floor slabs are 2.5" concrete on 1/2" form deck (9/16 for the pedantic). A 4" slab will have two layers of rebar in it - either as WWR (gauge wire on a 6x6 grid) or as actual rebar up to 1/2" in diameter. That means as little as 1-1/2" of cover over the steel.
The 3" you may be thinking about is clear cover for steel reinforcement when slabs are cast against earth. In that case, it's to minimize water infiltration and protect the steel from corrosion.
Freezing of the slab is theoretically possible in a very, very cold environment, but not unless the house is left unheated for an extended time as subzero temps and the typical ground temp is below freezing (an ice lens would have to be able to extend from the exterior of the slab all the way to where the embedded pipes are). In that case the whole house would have to be "winterized" with all lines drained.
IAASE (structural engineer), BTW.