WTF? Are you deploying 1996 versions of Linux distros? We use a local yum mirror and repository for CentOS. Works perfectly for installing and keeping up to date software packages. Installation of a new machine is more or less an exercise in turning the computer on, pressing F12 to make it PXE boot then accepting the defaults. Installation of a new software package over multiple machines is a matter of adding it to the repository, then running a script. It just ain't rocket science.
Microsoft keep going on about "user experience" and "experience" in general.
I don't want a fscking "experience" when I use an OS, I want it to be a non-experience. The OS should just blend into the background and become almost unnoticable. If the OS is giving me an "experience" it's getting in the way. This is what Microsoft don't get. In some operating systems, transparency is used subtly as a cue to the user. Microsoft uses it as bling where it just makes the UI harder to use.
The day Microsoft stop going on continuously about "user experience" is probably the day their UI will not get in the way or pester the user.
Electric showers are extremely common where I live. They are CE marked (that means they have to meet certain safety standards). There are literally tens of millions of these installed in the country. If they regularly shocked people, we'd be hearing (pun intended) shock horror stories in the press all the time about how unsafe these devices are. We don't because they are safe. I have one from here: http://www.gainsboroughshowers.co.uk/
The advantage of an electric shower is that they are almost instant on and are thermostatically regulated, so if someone turns on the cold tap downstairs you don't suddenly get scalded. They are popular here because in many older houses, the hot water system is gravity feed and the pressure is pathetic (not really a problem in newer houses with on demand "combi" boilers), but the cold water is under much greater pressure from the water company.
Actually, I do own a house, but I live in 240 volt land. This means we don't need huge amperage supplies to our houses. Where in the US you'd need 100A, we need only 50A. The main breaker in my house is 40A and it is entirely adequate.
Before flaming someone, please read their whole message. It'd be evident from my talk of 240 volts that I live in 240 volt land. Duh!
Galveston, Texas? $500K? But Galveston's a run-down dump! Sure it has a couple of pretty pyramids - but other than that, decaying housing, pot holed roads, a general shabbiness. Who in their right mind pays $500K to live in a shabby dump that's also a bullseye target for the next gulf hurricane?
Grrr. Interview questions like that really cheese me off, and I usually give a smart alec response. If you'd asked me to implement a random C library function you'd get it in Z80 asm I'm afraid, and as for the coffee maker, a smart alec response like "if it's drinkable, it works".
If you really want to give someone a problem solving ability check, let them have the resources they'd have while at work. The internet. Reference books. The lack of the usual stress of an interview. What we usually do here is set candidates a short assignment a week before they are due to come to their interview, and ask them to make a short presentation about the assignment. It's much more realistic to the real working environment, and it shows (which where I work is important) that they can present ideas to management in a convincing manner.
If it took an hour's worth of electricity to start a CFL (the old myth said 3 hours, but let's just call it an hour), you'd need 20 watt hours to flow in 2 seconds. Now let's do the sums:
20 watt hours is 20 * 3600 joules, i.e. 72kJ.
For 72kJ to flow in 2 seconds, you would need 36kW of power. 36 kilowatts. Your biggest appliance is probably your electric shower, a powerful one is 10kW.
To put 36kW into perspective, this is 150 amps at 240 volts.
Your entire supply from the power company is probably on a 40 amp breaker. Even if the 'kickstarting' myth was true for only 20 minutes power rather than the oft-quoted 3 hours, you're still going to blow your main breaker.
As you can see, the 'kickstarting' myth is implausable.
The reason why you might not use a CFL in a cupboard in which you only use the lights for a few seconds at a time is many of them take a couple of seconds to start, which is annoying for a light you only use for a few seconds at a time. But if you want high efficiency in that situation, you can always use an LED downlighter (available conveniently in a GU10 halogen downlighter form factor).
That's because you got a Daylight model. You can buy CFLs in incandescent orange if you want. I have one in the lamp across the room right now, and it's virtually indistinguishable from the incandescents I have (certainly a 'warmer' colour than halogen lights, that I have in the downlighter fixtures).
You can get CFLs in pretty much any colour you like.
I used to use OS/2 and preferred it to NT4. But that being said, the single threaded UI made a complete mockery of the supposed stability of the OS - OK, so when the UI froze, other programs might still have been able to run in the background, but you had to reboot the machine to make it usable again so that hardly mattered on a desktop system. The single UI thread was the provebial dead mouse in the bottom of the ice cream cone.
I think they did eventually fix it, but by then it was far too late. That was a critical flaw with OS/2 which should have been fixed before OS/2 2.0 was released.
The US hasn't yet threatened a nation with annihilation just for existing. Iran has.
Iran's regime is utterly repulsive. They execute teenagers merely for being gay - essentially strangle them by hauling them up on a crane by their necks. Is that the sort of place you want to have ICBMs?
Iran absolutely must not have access to missile launching technologies unless their regime moves to one more about life than death.
The _first_ time it was my fault, and I admitted as such. The second time was _their_ fault: they could have quite easily programmed their system to not withdraw fees if it made a customer overdrawn again. When you're not very wealthy, that can easily set up a cycle of debt that lasts years (if I was in the situation of living from paycheck to paycheck, that £1 mistake could have cost me thousands). That's hardly fair and equitable.
I can understand a charge for unarranged borrowing - but it needs to be proportionate, and not potentially set up an endless loop of charges that drives a customer who's only just keeping above the waterline into permanent debt.
The banks have it coming, they really do. Unfortunately, when this happened to me, HTTP was brand new and only geeks used it, and I was still a student.
I had to pay a deposit to my landlord for a new place I was going to rent. Unfortunately, due to a foul up which was entirely my fault, this put me something like £1 overdrawn (a trivial amount in anyone's book). So the bank sent me a letter that they were going to charge me (IIRC) £25 for unarranged borrowing and a further £3 per day for each day overdrawn! Then they took the £25 out just before my first pay day, making me overdrawn AGAIN, causing them to charge me £25 again for unarranged borrowing as a direct consequence of them charging me for the previous problem! You'd think before they charged you they would check that the charge wouldn't cause you to go overdrawn again and be charged again.
Of course they refused to refund it. Natwest - bastards. They used to like also withdrawing the funds on a cheque written the day it hit the payee's bank, but not add the funds on a cheque you were paying in for 3 to 5 days.
If my current bank tries that trick, I will move my account elsewhere - including my mortgage. I'll make sure it ends up costing them more than it does me.
The US is actually worse - merely being *arrested* for a drugs offence means you no longer are elegible for the visa waiver program. That is to say - the Police pick you up on suspicion of having marijuana, and it was just a case of mistaken identity, and they release you 30 minutes later with no charge after realising their mistake - you are now permanently banned from using the visa waiver program to enter the US and have to apply (via the mindnumbingly bureaucratic process) for a nonimmigrant visa. Even though you were guilty of nothing and mistakenly arrested because the police officer thought you were someone else.
Actually, the real WTF is that there isn't the free movement of both people AND goods between the US and Canada like there is between countries of the European Union.
Oh, most people under 40 can hear a TV. It's pretty common. The transformer runs at something like 15 kHz (and many people over 40 can still hear in that frequency range).
But 30-40KHz? If you can hear that then get yourself down to the Guinness Book Of Records. Seriously. You have considerably supernormal hearing. However, I'm extremely skeptical that you can hear frequencies that high.
Look at the paper a bit deeply. A more important observation, I think, is the comparative table. It showed that memory had a similar failure rate to hard disks! So much for no-moving-parts being more reliable.
I flew on Southwest from Houston to SLC in January this year, and on each leg of the flight (it was one of those 'train' flights where they stop at a few airports on the way, as the flight progresses across the country - Houston was its second stop, then ABQ, then SLC, then it went on to the Pacific North West) I got a bag of airplane crackers and a bag of roasted peanuts.
You can get a compact flourescent lamp in pretty much any colour temperature you like (and have been able to for at least 10 years where I live).
I'm surprised so many Slashdotters are ignorant of this. And the old chestnut that they flicker at 120Hz (they don't - the ballasts run at around 30kHz).
New lamps are likely to be RoHS compliant. Burning coal to make the electricity releases more mercury into the environment than a compact flourescent contains.
People with dimmers will just get dimmable compact flourescents.
That's not so. Even old fashioned flourescent strips (compact flourescents run at a frequency between 25 kilohertz and 40 kHz, and the flourescent coating has a long enough persistence that it won't flicker significantly anyway at that frequency) don't act as a strobe.
The characteristics of a strobe are a very short duration bright flash with a relatively long dark period between. Imagine a series of spikes on an oscilloscope, and you'll get an idea what the light intensity from a strobe is like.
An old flourescent on the other hand - the light output is closer to a sine wave than a set of spikes. So while an object spinning at 120 revolutions per second will show clearer during the maximum brightness of the flourescent, you will still see the blurred motion of the spinning object because the flourescent doesn't then go completely dark - rather, it dims over time, still providing some light, before starting to brighten again on the other half of the AC wave form.
Firstly, you can get a flourescent in practically any colour temperature you want.
Secondly, even old fashioned flourescent strips flicker at 120Hz in the US, not 60.
Thirdly, any flourescent (strip, compact, whatever) manufactured in the last 15 years will have an electronic ballast - so the flicker will be around 20kHz to 30kHz depending on the design, and imperceptible to any human.
Actually, human CO2 output is only about 3% of all CO2 output planet wide.
What's important is not the absolute percentage. This is why not. In the recent few hundred million years, the Earth has had (more or less) the same amount of carbon sink as source, so more or less - with a little variation as the balance changes, the carbon sinks soak up all the carbon sources, so on average the system stays in balance.
What do you think happens if you take away some of the carbon dioxide sinks, but add some extra sources? Bueller? Bueller?
Just to give you an idea, here's a simple analogy. Take a funnel, and start pouring water into it at a rate such that the funnel always remains half-full (because the rate of water being poured in matches the rate it leaves). Now increase the water flow by 3%. What happens to the water level? Now decrease the exit by a couple of percent. How does this affect the level of water in the funnel?
Just that 3% mismatch between water going in and water going out makes the water level accumulate *significantly*, and surprisingly rapidly. It happens even quicker if you close off part of the funnel's exit. Eventually, the funnel overflows.
So what happens when you have a system where CO2 sinks on average match CO2 sources - and then increase the CO2 sources by 3% and decrease the CO2 sinks by some amount? You get quite a rapid accumulation of CO2 over time.
Slashdot Mirror
WTF? Are you deploying 1996 versions of Linux distros? We use a local yum mirror and repository for CentOS. Works perfectly for installing and keeping up to date software packages. Installation of a new machine is more or less an exercise in turning the computer on, pressing F12 to make it PXE boot then accepting the defaults. Installation of a new software package over multiple machines is a matter of adding it to the repository, then running a script. It just ain't rocket science.
Microsoft keep going on about "user experience" and "experience" in general.
I don't want a fscking "experience" when I use an OS, I want it to be a non-experience. The OS should just blend into the background and become almost unnoticable. If the OS is giving me an "experience" it's getting in the way. This is what Microsoft don't get. In some operating systems, transparency is used subtly as a cue to the user. Microsoft uses it as bling where it just makes the UI harder to use.
The day Microsoft stop going on continuously about "user experience" is probably the day their UI will not get in the way or pester the user.
Oh for christ's sake.
Electric showers are extremely common where I live. They are CE marked (that means they have to meet certain safety standards). There are literally tens of millions of these installed in the country. If they regularly shocked people, we'd be hearing (pun intended) shock horror stories in the press all the time about how unsafe these devices are. We don't because they are safe. I have one from here: http://www.gainsboroughshowers.co.uk/
The advantage of an electric shower is that they are almost instant on and are thermostatically regulated, so if someone turns on the cold tap downstairs you don't suddenly get scalded. They are popular here because in many older houses, the hot water system is gravity feed and the pressure is pathetic (not really a problem in newer houses with on demand "combi" boilers), but the cold water is under much greater pressure from the water company.
Actually, I do own a house, but I live in 240 volt land. This means we don't need huge amperage supplies to our houses. Where in the US you'd need 100A, we need only 50A. The main breaker in my house is 40A and it is entirely adequate.
Before flaming someone, please read their whole message. It'd be evident from my talk of 240 volts that I live in 240 volt land. Duh!
Galveston, Texas? $500K? But Galveston's a run-down dump! Sure it has a couple of pretty pyramids - but other than that, decaying housing, pot holed roads, a general shabbiness. Who in their right mind pays $500K to live in a shabby dump that's also a bullseye target for the next gulf hurricane?
Grrr. Interview questions like that really cheese me off, and I usually give a smart alec response. If you'd asked me to implement a random C library function you'd get it in Z80 asm I'm afraid, and as for the coffee maker, a smart alec response like "if it's drinkable, it works".
If you really want to give someone a problem solving ability check, let them have the resources they'd have while at work. The internet. Reference books. The lack of the usual stress of an interview. What we usually do here is set candidates a short assignment a week before they are due to come to their interview, and ask them to make a short presentation about the assignment. It's much more realistic to the real working environment, and it shows (which where I work is important) that they can present ideas to management in a convincing manner.
That's a myth.
If it took an hour's worth of electricity to start a CFL (the old myth said 3 hours, but let's just call it an hour), you'd need 20 watt hours to flow in 2 seconds. Now let's do the sums:
20 watt hours is 20 * 3600 joules, i.e. 72kJ.
For 72kJ to flow in 2 seconds, you would need 36kW of power. 36 kilowatts. Your biggest appliance is probably your electric shower, a powerful one is 10kW.
To put 36kW into perspective, this is 150 amps at 240 volts.
Your entire supply from the power company is probably on a 40 amp breaker. Even if the 'kickstarting' myth was true for only 20 minutes power rather than the oft-quoted 3 hours, you're still going to blow your main breaker.
As you can see, the 'kickstarting' myth is implausable.
The reason why you might not use a CFL in a cupboard in which you only use the lights for a few seconds at a time is many of them take a couple of seconds to start, which is annoying for a light you only use for a few seconds at a time. But if you want high efficiency in that situation, you can always use an LED downlighter (available conveniently in a GU10 halogen downlighter form factor).
That's because you got a Daylight model. You can buy CFLs in incandescent orange if you want. I have one in the lamp across the room right now, and it's virtually indistinguishable from the incandescents I have (certainly a 'warmer' colour than halogen lights, that I have in the downlighter fixtures).
You can get CFLs in pretty much any colour you like.
I used to use OS/2 and preferred it to NT4. But that being said, the single threaded UI made a complete mockery of the supposed stability of the OS - OK, so when the UI froze, other programs might still have been able to run in the background, but you had to reboot the machine to make it usable again so that hardly mattered on a desktop system. The single UI thread was the provebial dead mouse in the bottom of the ice cream cone.
I think they did eventually fix it, but by then it was far too late. That was a critical flaw with OS/2 which should have been fixed before OS/2 2.0 was released.
The US hasn't yet threatened a nation with annihilation just for existing. Iran has.
Iran's regime is utterly repulsive. They execute teenagers merely for being gay - essentially strangle them by hauling them up on a crane by their necks. Is that the sort of place you want to have ICBMs?
Iran absolutely must not have access to missile launching technologies unless their regime moves to one more about life than death.
He is a lobbyist. "Vice President for Global Public Policy" means "lobbyist" in weaselease.
The _first_ time it was my fault, and I admitted as such. The second time was _their_ fault: they could have quite easily programmed their system to not withdraw fees if it made a customer overdrawn again. When you're not very wealthy, that can easily set up a cycle of debt that lasts years (if I was in the situation of living from paycheck to paycheck, that £1 mistake could have cost me thousands). That's hardly fair and equitable.
I can understand a charge for unarranged borrowing - but it needs to be proportionate, and not potentially set up an endless loop of charges that drives a customer who's only just keeping above the waterline into permanent debt.
The banks have it coming, they really do. Unfortunately, when this happened to me, HTTP was brand new and only geeks used it, and I was still a student.
I had to pay a deposit to my landlord for a new place I was going to rent. Unfortunately, due to a foul up which was entirely my fault, this put me something like £1 overdrawn (a trivial amount in anyone's book). So the bank sent me a letter that they were going to charge me (IIRC) £25 for unarranged borrowing and a further £3 per day for each day overdrawn! Then they took the £25 out just before my first pay day, making me overdrawn AGAIN, causing them to charge me £25 again for unarranged borrowing as a direct consequence of them charging me for the previous problem! You'd think before they charged you they would check that the charge wouldn't cause you to go overdrawn again and be charged again.
Of course they refused to refund it. Natwest - bastards. They used to like also withdrawing the funds on a cheque written the day it hit the payee's bank, but not add the funds on a cheque you were paying in for 3 to 5 days.
If my current bank tries that trick, I will move my account elsewhere - including my mortgage. I'll make sure it ends up costing them more than it does me.
The US is actually worse - merely being *arrested* for a drugs offence means you no longer are elegible for the visa waiver program. That is to say - the Police pick you up on suspicion of having marijuana, and it was just a case of mistaken identity, and they release you 30 minutes later with no charge after realising their mistake - you are now permanently banned from using the visa waiver program to enter the US and have to apply (via the mindnumbingly bureaucratic process) for a nonimmigrant visa. Even though you were guilty of nothing and mistakenly arrested because the police officer thought you were someone else.
Actually, the real WTF is that there isn't the free movement of both people AND goods between the US and Canada like there is between countries of the European Union.
Oh, most people under 40 can hear a TV. It's pretty common. The transformer runs at something like 15 kHz (and many people over 40 can still hear in that frequency range).
But 30-40KHz? If you can hear that then get yourself down to the Guinness Book Of Records. Seriously. You have considerably supernormal hearing. However, I'm extremely skeptical that you can hear frequencies that high.
Look at the paper a bit deeply. A more important observation, I think, is the comparative table. It showed that memory had a similar failure rate to hard disks! So much for no-moving-parts being more reliable.
I flew on Southwest from Houston to SLC in January this year, and on each leg of the flight (it was one of those 'train' flights where they stop at a few airports on the way, as the flight progresses across the country - Houston was its second stop, then ABQ, then SLC, then it went on to the Pacific North West) I got a bag of airplane crackers and a bag of roasted peanuts.
Well, for dimmer circuits buy dimmable compact flourescents. They exist.
You can get a compact flourescent lamp in pretty much any colour temperature you like (and have been able to for at least 10 years where I live).
I'm surprised so many Slashdotters are ignorant of this. And the old chestnut that they flicker at 120Hz (they don't - the ballasts run at around 30kHz).
http://www.maplin.co.uk/module.aspx?ModuleNo=46290 &doy=20m2
Fits a standard 240 volt halogen downlighter socket.
New lamps are likely to be RoHS compliant. Burning coal to make the electricity releases more mercury into the environment than a compact flourescent contains.
People with dimmers will just get dimmable compact flourescents.
That's not so. Even old fashioned flourescent strips (compact flourescents run at a frequency between 25 kilohertz and 40 kHz, and the flourescent coating has a long enough persistence that it won't flicker significantly anyway at that frequency) don't act as a strobe.
The characteristics of a strobe are a very short duration bright flash with a relatively long dark period between. Imagine a series of spikes on an oscilloscope, and you'll get an idea what the light intensity from a strobe is like.
An old flourescent on the other hand - the light output is closer to a sine wave than a set of spikes. So while an object spinning at 120 revolutions per second will show clearer during the maximum brightness of the flourescent, you will still see the blurred motion of the spinning object because the flourescent doesn't then go completely dark - rather, it dims over time, still providing some light, before starting to brighten again on the other half of the AC wave form.
Oh come on, get yourself out of the 1980s.
If you can hear the 30kHz or so of the electronic ballast - well, you need to contact the Guinness Book of Records.
You can get compact flourescents in pretty much any colour you desire.
Firstly, you can get a flourescent in practically any colour temperature you want.
Secondly, even old fashioned flourescent strips flicker at 120Hz in the US, not 60.
Thirdly, any flourescent (strip, compact, whatever) manufactured in the last 15 years will have an electronic ballast - so the flicker will be around 20kHz to 30kHz depending on the design, and imperceptible to any human.
Actually, human CO2 output is only about 3% of all CO2 output planet wide.
What's important is not the absolute percentage. This is why not. In the recent few hundred million years, the Earth has had (more or less) the same amount of carbon sink as source, so more or less - with a little variation as the balance changes, the carbon sinks soak up all the carbon sources, so on average the system stays in balance.
What do you think happens if you take away some of the carbon dioxide sinks, but add some extra sources? Bueller? Bueller?
Just to give you an idea, here's a simple analogy. Take a funnel, and start pouring water into it at a rate such that the funnel always remains half-full (because the rate of water being poured in matches the rate it leaves). Now increase the water flow by 3%. What happens to the water level? Now decrease the exit by a couple of percent. How does this affect the level of water in the funnel?
Just that 3% mismatch between water going in and water going out makes the water level accumulate *significantly*, and surprisingly rapidly. It happens even quicker if you close off part of the funnel's exit. Eventually, the funnel overflows.
So what happens when you have a system where CO2 sinks on average match CO2 sources - and then increase the CO2 sources by 3% and decrease the CO2 sinks by some amount? You get quite a rapid accumulation of CO2 over time.