This perception of fair based on a percent of income always amused me. Why not extend that to the retail sector to make it fair. too.
A car for the poor is $600. A car (same car) for the rich is $600,000. A laptop with the latest version of Windows, $200 for the poor and $200,000 for the rich. A sports car for the poor, $50,000 and one for the rich 150,000,000. (basically unaffordable to both).
Fair may be based on services used. Fire protection $25/year/acre. Food stamps, $2,000 per person using them. Car registration, $200/year per sedan.
What is really fair? A percent of income? A use fee the same for everyone?
The unfair is inheritance tax and inventory tax. This is both taxes on items already taxed.
Inventory tax basicaly emptied US warehouses of parts to repair older appliances and equipment. This has been a boost to manufacturing as repariable items are now disposable items.
The country has lost sight of productivity. You can't save your way out of a recession. Nobody makes the bread. You can't borrow your way out of a recession. Cheap loans raise the price of the bread and still nobody is making bread.
The way to get out of the recession is for everyone to make bread, or other itmes that can be traded for low cost. The US stopped being productive and imports from producers overseas with borrowed money. Expect the credit to become worthless soon.
A good amp has a typical output impedance of under 0.01 ohms to maintain the waveform to the speaker even though the impedance of the speaker varies. The damping factor is important to control of the speaker cone motion.
Here is a copper wire table. The resistance given is for a single conductor. Due to the entire length of a speaker wire being in series, a 50 foot speaker wire for example contains 100 feet of wire resistance.
Note that 12 gauge wire has resistance of 1.588 ohms/1000 feet. A 50 foot speaker wire would then contain 100 feet of conductor length for a resistance of 0.1588 ohms, or about 15 times the speaker damping factor.
On the other hand a 5 foot length of 18 awg wire is 0.06385 ohms.
The short cheap small gauge speaker wire outperforms the larger gauge longer wire. Short is best. Inductance is a function of length. Again short is best. Capacitance is a function of length, dielectric, conductor size, and spacing. Again short is best.
The resistance listed is for the conductor Resistance and does not factor dielectric losses, inductance or distributed capacitance. These factors are cumulative. Cutting the 50 foot 12 gauge wire down 5 feet now puts the wire on par with the amplifier impedance with a resistance of 0.01588 ohms. A comparison of the signal at both ends of the 100 foot speaker wire will provide measured differences in input verses output even when only resistance loss is accounted for. It is true most people won't even notice the difference in a blind test. As speaker wire runs become longer and smaller (cheaper) speaker wire such as 16 or 18 gauge, the difference becomes quite significant.
This shows the advantage of remote amps with a 200 ohm input resistive input impedance and a short speaker wire instead of a central amp and long speaker wires.
If all you play is modern top 100 compressed stuff destroyed by the loudness war, then yes the sound system improvements is wasted money. It's all rock and roll and a cheap set of speakers will do. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ You can't get back the sound engineered out of a recording.
When you make wire claims, please provide measurable factors. This is Slashdot. news for Geeks. Science is spoken here sometimes.
I did that because when I worked in repair I needed working copies (they get damaged) that would not lose the tape. You can buy disks without the notch so there is no protect to fall off. To prevent accidents, the switch I put in the drive was a reed switch. It required knowledge of the switch as well as the pocket screwdriver with the magnet in the end to turn on the hidden write switch while writing another working copy of the diagnostic floppy disks.
None of the floppies in the field service kit had a write enable notch. It makes no sense taking one customer's infection and giving it to someone else. The modern replacement is a burned DVD instead of a thumb drive. Use read only media for any of your service materials. No exceptions.
You made my day. I about fell out of my chair laughing.
Due to the complex current voltage impedance of any dynamic speaker system, there is no ideal speaker cable impedance. The best speaker cable quite literally is NONE.
For good bandwidth from my mixer to your speaker a transmission line terminated into it's impedance will give a flat response. This practice is used for everything from CAT5 cables terminated in 120 ohms to XLR cable terminated in about 200 ohms.
A very short wire between the amp and speaker is the best solution to the speaker wire issue. A powered studio monitor is the obvious solution. The next best solution is an amp with less than 6 feet of wire between the amp and speaker. The amp should be fed with a proper balanced low impedance cable. RCA cables don't cut it. There is no such thing as a consumer cable with an impedance of 47K ohms to properly match the input impedance of the consumer grade amp. 47K RCA is for short consumer grade patches only.
Using a high capacitance woven speaker cable is one trick used to add capacitance to a speaker wire so the cable impedance with the many twisted pairs has a lower total impedance much less than the typical 100-300 ohm impedance of most single twisted pair cables. Unfortunately due to the complex impedance of a speaker, this solution is not a proper match at most frequencies. I suppose it would be OK to use the wire, but only for short runs.
Do most people place an amp within a few feet of their speakers? Most do, so the speaker wire issue is trivial. With the proper equipment, the response of any cable can be measured with a complex impedance load. Unfortunately most high end cable is sold with nobody having any idea of how much the quantitative improvement really is.
Save money on the wire. Remote the amps and buy better speakers with the savings. The bang for the buck is measurable.
The i7 extreme is not a quad core. It has 6 cores. This is good if you are doing 3D rendering and simulation or other processor intensive tasks. It's wasted for just streaming Netflix and reading email. http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=52585
And "Pay for reliability, not mileage. On a car, you'll spend more of repairs and maintaince over its lifetime than you will on a difference in gas." needs to re-think that when faced with $6-$8 a gallon gas prices. At $6 a gallon, 20mpg is going to cost you $30,000.00 in gas over 100,000 miles. At 40mpg you save $15,000.00
This was the real reasons I bought my 02 Prius. I figured the gas costs at $2.00/gallon figuring the gas would probably rise over that price while I owned the car.
The maintenance was the other side of the coin. Fears at the time was the possible need to buy a new Hybrid battery pack at about $5,000. In doing research, I found the car had a 5 year track record in Japan before introduction in the USA. Based on the Japan trials, I bought one. I was looking to break even at about 100,000 miles.
Now a decade later and 150,000 miles later it is time to review my results. Gas did go over $2.00 per gallon. This alone was a good call and I broke even early.
I expected the regenerative braking to reduce some wear on the vehicle and the no friction parts in the transmission to pay off. This was a second win. Other than changing the tires a couple of times, and the 12 volt lead acid cabin battery a couple of times (4-5 year life like a regular car) and regular oil changes, the only other maintenance needed has been a change of spark plugs at 120,000 miles (supposed to be changed at 100,000 miles but I ran it to some cold weather starting issues to test it.) and replaced the dome light once. Other than that, no other maintenance was really needed. Due to regenerative braking, the brakes had 80% remaining at 80,000 miles. I'll check them again when I change tires again.
If you can get mileage and low maintenance in one package, it is the best of both worlds.
Between Netflix, VOIP, and tons of commercials, Cable TV has been taking a hit in the downturn in the economy. They need to keep their Internet subscribers. This is more important to keep their triple play customers. Between FIOS and other competition, their market is seriously eroding.
The last 7 of the 10 commandments are generally enforced by law books in most countries by thousands of laws. The first 3 are the ones that bear direct reference to a religion.
Quoting the last 2 should not have resulted in an attack on religion. They are basic commandments to stay out of the legal system. Violation of most of them even outside the church system is not a good idea.
I was thinking they may cut into the robotics market. The Basic stamp was killed by high price and the Arduino. The computer on a USB stck may add much more power to robotics at low cost. The Arduino may become a programmable IO for this. This is much smaller than using an iPhone or other computer in robotics.
In performance per watt, the efficiency is measured in how much computing you can do per watt of power consumed. A computer sitting idle all day is wasting power generating heat. A computer rendering the latest Pixar film may draw more power and generate more heat, but it is also providing the results of the computation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_per_watt
From the announcement, it looks like a product split. Long battery life for portables such as tablets and smart phones without using a really slow chip, and extreme computing for rendering 3 D movies, server farms, and supercomputing. This too will take advantage of the instructions per watt. Your data center can be half the size, use half the cooling, half the power and still run faster. Or as you pointed out, you could have double the data center in the same old room.
In short, for the same processing the power used is much less. How much power you need will scale. Now it will scale in a smaller space with less power.
Tom Tom does not need to submit any user ID. The police can build their own database from red light cameras and photo radar. Location, time, speed, database. Add in RFID in the tire pressure monitors and Tom Tom can make that claim with a clear conscience. This does not rule out the creation of a 3rd party database.
Ad one more step. Use another DNS server or put the Real Google HTTPS IP address in the hosts file so the ISP can't redirect it with a corrupt DNS server.
The explosion in #4 was minor compared to #3. In #3 the location where the dome should be is pretty much an empty space with steam rising from it. There is no sign of the lid.
If you watch videos of air fuel explosions, building implosions, and cannons and large artillary, then watch the videos of the 3 explosions at Fukushima, it doesn't take a physicist to know from basic physics that for every action there is an equal and oposite reaction. The main blast from #3 was highly directional. There was lots of heavy objects lifted very high. You can see them fall out of the top of the blast at the end of the video.
I can be called a conspiracy theory person for even suggesting the main blast in #3 was in a cannon barrel called the dry well. Due to the low radiaton from the blast, I suspect the lid is still on the reactor, but I can not confirm it.
One of the official reports did mention finding fuel rods on the ground between #3 and #4. Many of them were bulldozed under. From the NY times.
The document also suggests that fragments or particles of nuclear fuel from spent fuel pools above the reactors were blown âoeup to one mile from the units,â and that pieces of highly radioactive material fell between two units and had to be âoebulldozed over,â presumably to protect workers at the site. The ejection of nuclear material, which may have occurred during one of the earlier hydrogen explosions, may indicate more extensive damage to the extremely radioactive pools than previously disclosed./quote> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/06/world/asia/06nuclear.html?_r=4&pagewanted=1&hp
Since the pools are water coupled to the dry well by a gate so rods can be moved from the flooded dry well to the storage while maintained underwater, I'm taking a guess the dry well in #3 was involved in the removal of rods stored in the bottom of the pool.
I wonder if that will mean that the latest high resolution UAV photos will be removed. Sometimes the photos tell more than they are saying. It does not take any kind of internet crackpot to view the side view photo of the drywell lid in #4 and draw a proper conclusion that the containment may have been breeched.
Most employees won't have any problems with an IT rollout with the applications installed. It takes little effort to learn where the Ubuntu Start Button is. Using Firefox to launch the company's cloud computing is not difficult.
The year of Linux is slowly being ushered in. I'm seeing much more computer hardware being listed on the retail shelf as Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux compatible. I'm seeing this on mice, cameras, sound and video capture devices, headsets, etc. Linux is slowly making an appearance in the mainstream. I like seeing Tux on the boxes.
On the flip side of computing, the retired computers were fuel hogs by todays standards. Most reasonably modern desktop computers outperform the Cray 1 Supercomputer of the past. They have more memory, more disk storage, much faster processing, and don't need a refrigeration system to keep it cool.
It was a 64 bit machine with 8 megs of ram with a clock speed under 100 Megs. That is 0.1 Ghz for you young whippersnappers.
To replace the internet with a telephone system and library with as much information at our fingertips would be a feat that makes the true efficiency of the communications and data storage of the modern Internet look truly efficient.
Moving to more efficient access with netbooks, phones, pads, etc and more efficient hosting shows there is still improvement in energy cost savings as well as reduction in greenhouse gases.
Even the new Facebook datacenter in Oregon is an improvement.
Metric is easier. The big thing that put a big halt on the adoption was the gas crisis in the 1970's when gas creeped to $1.00 gallon. The difficulty was having to compare two standards against each other and the new standard was much more expensive for consumers. As gas pushed $1.00 per gallon. the display on many pumps could not display the higher prices. To prevent buying new pumps, some switched to Liters. Consumers soon found the cheap 35 cent / Liter gas was more expensive and later quit trying to compare prices as common knowledge was the metric gas was more expensive.
In products where we are not comparing metric and US, the metric standard has become the standard. Soda pop is only sold in metric sizes now. 12 and 16 oz are pretty much gone with 1 Liter 500 ml, 2 Liter etc sizes. Most bottled water is now in the 500 ml bottle. All hardware for mounting your flatscreen TV is all metric. Car engines are almost all metric. Serous, when was the last time you wanted to know how much your soda was in price per gallon? All comparison shopping is done is price per Liter for soft drinks except at the soda fountain where the cups are still 16, 32, 48, 64 oz.
The slow conversions is in entrenched measurements such as gasoline, kitchen recipes, temperature, etc where one is the standard and people still try to convert units. You tell them it is 24 degrees out and they want to know what that means in F. Having lived in another country I'm fine with metric as I was immersed in it and did not bother to convert. 21-24 is comfortable. 30 is really hot and 10 is time to grab a warmer coat.
If we started tearing down miles signs and mile markers and replacing them with Metric KM signs and changed the speed signs to 90, the country would soon adopt it. Most cars now can display either clicks or miles.
The high prices, the litigation, and very restricted license is what is keeping me from buying music anymore.
Want a background track for you online video?. Forbidden. Want to make a clip a ringtone? Forbidden. Want to convert it to play on your MP3 player? Forbidden. Want to use it for annimated christmas lights? Forbidden.
Basically anything other than private in home playing of the vinyl is forbidden.
If you want to sequence Christmas Lights you can buy an additional license for the public performance. The number of titles are extremely limited and it will cost you an extra bundle of cash for the privilage of making one of those few songs popular.
License rights for additional songs are currently under negotiation and they will be added to this page as contracts are signed.
TSO at least has been generous and provided a free license to use some tracks. Good job. You still need to buy the album though. That is fair enough. http://www.lightorama.com/FreeTSO.html
Slashdot Mirror
This perception of fair based on a percent of income always amused me. Why not extend that to the retail sector to make it fair. too.
A car for the poor is $600. A car (same car) for the rich is $600,000. A laptop with the latest version of Windows, $200 for the poor and $200,000 for the rich. A sports car for the poor, $50,000 and one for the rich 150,000,000. (basically unaffordable to both).
Fair may be based on services used. Fire protection $25/year/acre. Food stamps, $2,000 per person using them. Car registration, $200/year per sedan.
What is really fair? A percent of income? A use fee the same for everyone?
The unfair is inheritance tax and inventory tax. This is both taxes on items already taxed.
Inventory tax basicaly emptied US warehouses of parts to repair older appliances and equipment. This has been a boost to manufacturing as repariable items are now disposable items.
The country has lost sight of productivity. You can't save your way out of a recession. Nobody makes the bread. You can't borrow your way out of a recession. Cheap loans raise the price of the bread and still nobody is making bread.
The way to get out of the recession is for everyone to make bread, or other itmes that can be traded for low cost. The US stopped being productive and imports from producers overseas with borrowed money. Expect the credit to become worthless soon.
If you wish to either calculate or measure the impact of moderate to long speaker wire, here is a good place to start.
The inverse of the damping factor of an amplifier (measurable) is the output impedance.
http://www.transcendentsound.com/Transcendent/Amplifier_Output_Impedance.html
A good amp has a typical output impedance of under 0.01 ohms to maintain the waveform to the speaker even though the impedance of the speaker varies. The damping factor is important to control of the speaker cone motion.
Here is a copper wire table. The resistance given is for a single conductor. Due to the entire length of a speaker wire being in series, a 50 foot speaker wire for example contains 100 feet of wire resistance.
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/tables/wirega.html
Note that 12 gauge wire has resistance of 1.588 ohms/1000 feet. A 50 foot speaker wire would then contain 100 feet of conductor length for a resistance of 0.1588 ohms, or about 15 times the speaker damping factor.
On the other hand a 5 foot length of 18 awg wire is 0.06385 ohms.
The short cheap small gauge speaker wire outperforms the larger gauge longer wire. Short is best. Inductance is a function of length. Again short is best. Capacitance is a function of length, dielectric, conductor size, and spacing. Again short is best.
The resistance listed is for the conductor Resistance and does not factor dielectric losses, inductance or distributed capacitance. These factors are cumulative. Cutting the 50 foot 12 gauge wire down 5 feet now puts the wire on par with the amplifier impedance with a resistance of 0.01588 ohms. A comparison of the signal at both ends of the 100 foot speaker wire will provide measured differences in input verses output even when only resistance loss is accounted for. It is true most people won't even notice the difference in a blind test. As speaker wire runs become longer and smaller (cheaper) speaker wire such as 16 or 18 gauge, the difference becomes quite significant.
This shows the advantage of remote amps with a 200 ohm input resistive input impedance and a short speaker wire instead of a central amp and long speaker wires.
If all you play is modern top 100 compressed stuff destroyed by the loudness war, then yes the sound system improvements is wasted money. It's all rock and roll and a cheap set of speakers will do.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ
You can't get back the sound engineered out of a recording.
When you make wire claims, please provide measurable factors. This is Slashdot. news for Geeks. Science is spoken here sometimes.
I did that because when I worked in repair I needed working copies (they get damaged) that would not lose the tape. You can buy disks without the notch so there is no protect to fall off. To prevent accidents, the switch I put in the drive was a reed switch. It required knowledge of the switch as well as the pocket screwdriver with the magnet in the end to turn on the hidden write switch while writing another working copy of the diagnostic floppy disks.
None of the floppies in the field service kit had a write enable notch. It makes no sense taking one customer's infection and giving it to someone else. The modern replacement is a burned DVD instead of a thumb drive. Use read only media for any of your service materials. No exceptions.
You made my day. I about fell out of my chair laughing.
Due to the complex current voltage impedance of any dynamic speaker system, there is no ideal speaker cable impedance. The best speaker cable quite literally is NONE.
For good bandwidth from my mixer to your speaker a transmission line terminated into it's impedance will give a flat response. This practice is used for everything from CAT5 cables terminated in 120 ohms to XLR cable terminated in about 200 ohms.
A very short wire between the amp and speaker is the best solution to the speaker wire issue. A powered studio monitor is the obvious solution. The next best solution is an amp with less than 6 feet of wire between the amp and speaker. The amp should be fed with a proper balanced low impedance cable. RCA cables don't cut it. There is no such thing as a consumer cable with an impedance of 47K ohms to properly match the input impedance of the consumer grade amp. 47K RCA is for short consumer grade patches only.
Using a high capacitance woven speaker cable is one trick used to add capacitance to a speaker wire so the cable impedance with the many twisted pairs has a lower total impedance much less than the typical 100-300 ohm impedance of most single twisted pair cables. Unfortunately due to the complex impedance of a speaker, this solution is not a proper match at most frequencies. I suppose it would be OK to use the wire, but only for short runs.
Do most people place an amp within a few feet of their speakers? Most do, so the speaker wire issue is trivial. With the proper equipment, the response of any cable can be measured with a complex impedance load. Unfortunately most high end cable is sold with nobody having any idea of how much the quantitative improvement really is.
Save money on the wire. Remote the amps and buy better speakers with the savings. The bang for the buck is measurable.
The i7 extreme is not a quad core. It has 6 cores. This is good if you are doing 3D rendering and simulation or other processor intensive tasks. It's wasted for just streaming Netflix and reading email.
http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=52585
And "Pay for reliability, not mileage. On a car, you'll spend more of repairs and maintaince over its lifetime than you will on a difference in gas." needs to re-think that when faced with $6-$8 a gallon gas prices. At $6 a gallon, 20mpg is going to cost you $30,000.00 in gas over 100,000 miles. At 40mpg you save $15,000.00
This was the real reasons I bought my 02 Prius. I figured the gas costs at $2.00/gallon figuring the gas would probably rise over that price while I owned the car.
The maintenance was the other side of the coin. Fears at the time was the possible need to buy a new Hybrid battery pack at about $5,000. In doing research, I found the car had a 5 year track record in Japan before introduction in the USA. Based on the Japan trials, I bought one. I was looking to break even at about 100,000 miles.
Now a decade later and 150,000 miles later it is time to review my results. Gas did go over $2.00 per gallon. This alone was a good call and I broke even early.
I expected the regenerative braking to reduce some wear on the vehicle and the no friction parts in the transmission to pay off. This was a second win. Other than changing the tires a couple of times, and the 12 volt lead acid cabin battery a couple of times (4-5 year life like a regular car) and regular oil changes, the only other maintenance needed has been a change of spark plugs at 120,000 miles (supposed to be changed at 100,000 miles but I ran it to some cold weather starting issues to test it.) and replaced the dome light once. Other than that, no other maintenance was really needed. Due to regenerative braking, the brakes had 80% remaining at 80,000 miles. I'll check them again when I change tires again.
If you can get mileage and low maintenance in one package, it is the best of both worlds.
Do you have any idea what the stall speed of that wing is? If you live trying that, you will have made a new land speed record for roller skates.
Between Netflix, VOIP, and tons of commercials, Cable TV has been taking a hit in the downturn in the economy. They need to keep their Internet subscribers. This is more important to keep their triple play customers. Between FIOS and other competition, their market is seriously eroding.
Interesting, and this is just after I received my check for the class action lawsuit on throttling P-P traffic.
The actual settlement is a joke. The grand total is $16.00 sent C/O Rust Consulting Inc.
I'm no longer on Comcast now that an option has opened besides dial up.
The last 7 of the 10 commandments are generally enforced by law books in most countries by thousands of laws. The first 3 are the ones that bear direct reference to a religion.
Quoting the last 2 should not have resulted in an attack on religion. They are basic commandments to stay out of the legal system. Violation of most of them even outside the church system is not a good idea.
I was thinking they may cut into the robotics market. The Basic stamp was killed by high price and the Arduino. The computer on a USB stck may add much more power to robotics at low cost. The Arduino may become a programmable IO for this. This is much smaller than using an iPhone or other computer in robotics.
In performance per watt, the efficiency is measured in how much computing you can do per watt of power consumed. A computer sitting idle all day is wasting power generating heat. A computer rendering the latest Pixar film may draw more power and generate more heat, but it is also providing the results of the computation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_per_watt
From the announcement, it looks like a product split. Long battery life for portables such as tablets and smart phones without using a really slow chip, and extreme computing for rendering 3 D movies, server farms, and supercomputing. This too will take advantage of the instructions per watt. Your data center can be half the size, use half the cooling, half the power and still run faster. Or as you pointed out, you could have double the data center in the same old room.
In short, for the same processing the power used is much less. How much power you need will scale. Now it will scale in a smaller space with less power.
The Prius has eliminated the alternator belt too.
Tom Tom does not need to submit any user ID. The police can build their own database from red light cameras and photo radar. Location, time, speed, database. Add in RFID in the tire pressure monitors and Tom Tom can make that claim with a clear conscience. This does not rule out the creation of a 3rd party database.
The release looks very much like the desktop on the Ubuntu Netbook Remix distribution.
Ad one more step. Use another DNS server or put the Real Google HTTPS IP address in the hosts file so the ISP can't redirect it with a corrupt DNS server.
Does anyone know if dropping their ad server in the hosts file will fix the redirect?
Unfortunately the report the NY Times mentioned is not online that I could find. I wish I could source the original report the NY Times mentions.
The explosion in #4 was minor compared to #3. In #3 the location where the dome should be is pretty much an empty space with steam rising from it. There is no sign of the lid.
If you watch videos of air fuel explosions, building implosions, and cannons and large artillary, then watch the videos of the 3 explosions at Fukushima, it doesn't take a physicist to know from basic physics that for every action there is an equal and oposite reaction. The main blast from #3 was highly directional. There was lots of heavy objects lifted very high. You can see them fall out of the top of the blast at the end of the video.
I can be called a conspiracy theory person for even suggesting the main blast in #3 was in a cannon barrel called the dry well. Due to the low radiaton from the blast, I suspect the lid is still on the reactor, but I can not confirm it.
One of the official reports did mention finding fuel rods on the ground between #3 and #4. Many of them were bulldozed under.
From the NY times.
The document also suggests that fragments or particles of nuclear fuel from spent fuel pools above the reactors were blown âoeup to one mile from the units,â and that pieces of highly radioactive material fell between two units and had to be âoebulldozed over,â presumably to protect workers at the site. The ejection of nuclear material, which may have occurred during one of the earlier hydrogen explosions, may indicate more extensive damage to the extremely radioactive pools than previously disclosed. /quote>
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/06/world/asia/06nuclear.html?_r=4&pagewanted=1&hp
Since the pools are water coupled to the dry well by a gate so rods can be moved from the flooded dry well to the storage while maintained underwater, I'm taking a guess the dry well in #3 was involved in the removal of rods stored in the bottom of the pool.
I wonder if that will mean that the latest high resolution UAV photos will be removed. Sometimes the photos tell more than they are saying. It does not take any kind of internet crackpot to view the side view photo of the drywell lid in #4 and draw a proper conclusion that the containment may have been breeched.
http://www.japannewstoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/FukushimaUnit4-4.jpg
Care to explain what that lid is sitting on?
http://www.japannewstoday.com/?tag=fukushima-nuclear-plant-photos
Most employees won't have any problems with an IT rollout with the applications installed. It takes little effort to learn where the Ubuntu Start Button is. Using Firefox to launch the company's cloud computing is not difficult.
The year of Linux is slowly being ushered in. I'm seeing much more computer hardware being listed on the retail shelf as Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux compatible. I'm seeing this on mice, cameras, sound and video capture devices, headsets, etc. Linux is slowly making an appearance in the mainstream. I like seeing Tux on the boxes.
On the flip side of computing, the retired computers were fuel hogs by todays standards. Most reasonably modern desktop computers outperform the Cray 1 Supercomputer of the past. They have more memory, more disk storage, much faster processing, and don't need a refrigeration system to keep it cool.
It was a 64 bit machine with 8 megs of ram with a clock speed under 100 Megs. That is 0.1 Ghz for you young whippersnappers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-1
To replace the internet with a telephone system and library with as much information at our fingertips would be a feat that makes the true efficiency of the communications and data storage of the modern Internet look truly efficient.
Moving to more efficient access with netbooks, phones, pads, etc and more efficient hosting shows there is still improvement in energy cost savings as well as reduction in greenhouse gases.
Even the new Facebook datacenter in Oregon is an improvement.
Metric is easier. The big thing that put a big halt on the adoption was the gas crisis in the 1970's when gas creeped to $1.00 gallon. The difficulty was having to compare two standards against each other and the new standard was much more expensive for consumers. As gas pushed $1.00 per gallon. the display on many pumps could not display the higher prices. To prevent buying new pumps, some switched to Liters. Consumers soon found the cheap 35 cent / Liter gas was more expensive and later quit trying to compare prices as common knowledge was the metric gas was more expensive.
In products where we are not comparing metric and US, the metric standard has become the standard. Soda pop is only sold in metric sizes now. 12 and 16 oz are pretty much gone with 1 Liter 500 ml, 2 Liter etc sizes. Most bottled water is now in the 500 ml bottle. All hardware for mounting your flatscreen TV is all metric. Car engines are almost all metric. Serous, when was the last time you wanted to know how much your soda was in price per gallon? All comparison shopping is done is price per Liter for soft drinks except at the soda fountain where the cups are still 16, 32, 48, 64 oz.
The slow conversions is in entrenched measurements such as gasoline, kitchen recipes, temperature, etc where one is the standard and people still try to convert units. You tell them it is 24 degrees out and they want to know what that means in F. Having lived in another country I'm fine with metric as I was immersed in it and did not bother to convert. 21-24 is comfortable. 30 is really hot and 10 is time to grab a warmer coat.
If we started tearing down miles signs and mile markers and replacing them with Metric KM signs and changed the speed signs to 90, the country would soon adopt it. Most cars now can display either clicks or miles.
The high prices, the litigation, and very restricted license is what is keeping me from buying music anymore.
Want a background track for you online video?. Forbidden. Want to make a clip a ringtone? Forbidden. Want to convert it to play on your MP3 player? Forbidden. Want to use it for annimated christmas lights? Forbidden.
Basically anything other than private in home playing of the vinyl is forbidden.
If you want to sequence Christmas Lights you can buy an additional license for the public performance. The number of titles are extremely limited and it will cost you an extra bundle of cash for the privilage of making one of those few songs popular.
The legal licenses are listed here for about $30 per track.
http://store.lightorama.com/sequences.html
If you want to use another track, good luck..
License rights for additional songs are currently under negotiation and they will be added to this page as contracts are signed.
TSO at least has been generous and provided a free license to use some tracks. Good job. You still need to buy the album though. That is fair enough.
http://www.lightorama.com/FreeTSO.html