Why not download music samples from the band's own sites? A LOT Of bands these days have music samples, and videos on their websites, they let you sample the music on the CD's all you want, without violating their copyright and downloading the entire CD.
There's no guarantee that the band is posting a representative sample of their work. They may just have samples of their only two songs that sound decent. The benefit of grabbing a rip off P2P is that no one is cherry-picking the songs you sample.
It could have been something as simple as an interlock being left on accidentally, or the auto-start switch being turned off, or some equivilent bit of user error / ignorance.
But that would only explain why they didn't come on automatically. Something had to be wrong enough with all three generators that they couldn't just flip the switch on the generator panel to "manual" and press "start".
Microsoft's Bernard envisaged a scenario where the owner of a Portable Media Center gadget would be able to store hours of their favorite music and movies on the device. They could then download from a news-oriented Web site a round-up of the day's news to watch on the train.
When will these guys get it through their thick skulls that people don't want to watch pre-recorded news programs on TV. They have to stop trying to get it to be a "TV newspaper".
Large generators require constant maintenance. There are many points of failure. Batteries may be a bank of nicads, which last 10 years, or a bank of lead acid, good for 3. Diesel fuel is easily contaminated by water over the years and can cause blockage or leaks in the tanks and line. The large shafts from the engine to generator can break. Valves can pop out of the head. They often use turbos to maximize use. And these failures happened to a backup generator. The backup backup generator often had problems as well.
All good points, but they had all three generators go down after only five months. Before that, the engineers who're on strike were still working. But maybe water leaked into the fuel tankbecause of poor drainage system maintenance. Yeah, it's hard to say.
even if the generators were sabotaged, the damage should have been detected at the next test.
Good point. The fact that they had three backup power units go bad in a not-immediately-repairable way in the same time frame looks like sabotage, but the fact that such non-functionality was overlooked indicates ineptitude as well. Personally, having seen a LOT of backup generator systems working as an electrician in Las Vegas hotels, I suspect the one-two combo of sabotage-stupidity. There's not much of those generators that building engineering has access to. Fuel tanks, starter panel, and switch gear, mostly. Can't imagine what could've been done to them through "bad maintenance" that could keep them offline.
Considering the amount of interference in a hospital, I can't see GPS working.
Interference in a hospital? How about interference ANYWHERE? It's not exactly like GPS works all that well indoors...
Heh. It never ceases to amaze me how many people forget that one tiny fact about GPS when they propose it as a location tracking solution: if it can't see the sky, it don't work.
Never underestimate the destructive potential of an incompetent maintenance engineer.
Heh. Good point. I've seen a building engineer replace a 30A fuse on one leg of a 277V panel with a cut off length of metal conduit because he ran out of fuses (they were blowing every couple days). When we saw that and asked him what his freakin' damage was, he said "well, I figured it would be OK for a little while until you guys got here". Fortunately for him it was a short in the AC chiller unit and it was early in the morning and not hot yet.
You made a good point. Too bad you made yourself sound like a total ass at the end with that comment. Then again I guess your not old enough to understand why all Unions aren't evil.
Didn't say all unions are evil. I've been a dues paying member of the IBEW (electrician) and the CWA (telecom tech). I know what aspects of unionization are good and which are bad. In this case, I'm referring to a specific type of union person. Anyone who's ever worked in a union building trade knows this type of union person. He's the guy who works half as hard as everyone else and complains that he doesn't get paid enough. He's the guy who shows up to work high as a kite or drunk as a skunk, but he'll always make more than you and get laid off after you because he has seniority. He's the [cousin/brother/friend] of the president of the Local who somehow always gets named foreman despite his incompetence. He's the guy incharge of apprenticeship at the Local who decides that they're only going to accept eight apprentices a year (despite the extreme shortage of union electricians in the area), and fills those eight positions with slackjaw [children/nephews/friend's kids] of his good ol' buddies in the union, rather than the competent unindentured guys with twenty recommendations from journeyman they've worked under. He's the guy who sees his employer as an enemy that needs to be cheated and exploited because "they're rich and they owe me". He's the guy who thinks sabotage is a reasonable tactic for encouraging employer concessions at the bargaining table. I got nothing against non-filthy, non-bastard union members. I just hate the guys who see the union as some sort of free ride/meal card. Those guys are filthy union bastards.
Hospitals have backup generators. Why not have them there for the essential life-or-death systems?
They have 3 separate generators. Somehow, all three were happened to fail simultaneously during an engineer's strike. Looks like sabotage by disgruntled workers to me.
You don't, the lab has three backup generators, which were not running for unexplained reasons.
Only slightly unexplained, I'd say. Maintenance engineers go on strike and suddenly all three generators don't work? The striking engineers blame it on "bad maintenance" by scab workers, but it's quite difficult to accidentally disable a generator, much less three of them. They don't really require any maintenance, other than checking fuel levels and starting them up once a month. Anything beyond that is handled by contracted outside maintenance companies that specialize in generators and backup power systems. I smell sabotage by a filthy union bastard.
One day, we will all have a big fat fucking fiber pipe (fffp technology) right up to the door, and all this silly old technology for media delivery will die out, as it should.
Dang straight. I was talking to a Verizon field technician today and he says he and about a hundred and forty other techs are being trained to install fiber. Verizon is trying to push fiber out to the last mile to compete with cable companies. He said they already have one "test neighborhood" in Cerritos where they've been stringing fiber from the pole to the POD on every house they service. It is Verizon, though, so for internet connectivity they'll probably still only give you the option of $50/mo for a 1500/256 async, or $300/mo for a 3000/3000, offering absolutely nothing in between, the way they do with DSL. I can see them spending a crapload putting in fiber, then selling it like it's cable TV and DSL. "Yeah, we have the bandwidth to offer you a 10GBps connection, but since we charge $300 for 3MBps, that'll cost you $10,000 per month".
That said, since he did slow the fastest theoretical speed, you can't argue that he didn't cripple his layout to slow people down. He did, at least theoretically, slow them down.
The fastest theoretical speed is determined by the mechanical limitations of the machine. Since his reordering of the keys allowed letters to be struck in quicker succession, the fastest theoretical speed increased. People were slowed down at first by their unfamiliarity with the layout, but they were able to type faster once they learned it. You certainly can argue that he didn't change the layout to slow people down, as that was never his stated goal nor the end result. When you get right down to it, his old alphabetical layout was no more conducive to fast typing than the QWERTY layout anyway.
I haven't RTFA yet, but this odd 2500W/kg metric sticks out to me as, well, odd.
Aha. I RTFA and they're being paid to develop and deliver 2.5kW/kg solar panels. Their current designs put out 600W/kg, which sounds more reasonable. Hopefully they can come up with those 2500 things. That'd be pretty impressive.
The thin-film solar technology, although low in peak conversion efficiency, can potentially deliver a whopping 2500 watts/kilogram.
What's missing from this glowing pronouncement is the weight and size of the usable product. It's nice that you can pull 2.5kW/kg, but how much does a square meter of this stuff in usable form weigh? Does 1kg of TFS material need to be laid on a substrate weighing 4kg in order to provide support and electrical connections (4:1)? Or does it maybe take only 10 grams of TFS material to make a single square meter of panel (100:1)? And how about surface area? Is a 2.5kW panel 100 square meters in area? I haven't RTFA yet, but this odd 2500W/kg metric sticks out to me as, well, odd.
How much do you want to bet that those 'clients' are his in only the loosest sense - someone that works for the USAF bought a PC, so now the whole USAF is a client.
You're probably right. I was particularly amused by a quote in his FAQ praising his waranty service, attributed to the US Navy. Not a rep of the Navy, but the Navy itself. Must have been a good warranty for the whole Navy to say it liked it. Of course, even if we assume it was quote from a Navy person working in procurement, it's clearly bogus:
"...I only choose Michael's Computers over any other company because it's far better to know the maker and someone you can trust and is a Christian."
Someone representing the US Navy is about as likely to say they chose a vendor because he's christian as they are likely to say they chose a vendor because they're "trustworthy white folk, not scheming negroes or devious chinamen".
Mr. Soto says he has made very little money on these spam-inspired business ventures. "I wish I did," he says, adding that he doesn't have time to design all the Web sites required to resell stuff. "I buy it and then three weeks later it sits there," he concedes. "I do a lot of impulse buys."
He buys all that crap intending to resell it, but never gets around to it.
For years, popular writers have accused Sholes of deliberately arranging his keyboard to slow down fast typists who would otherwise jam up his sluggish machine. In fact, his motives were just the opposite.
When Sholes built his first model in 1868, the keys were arranged alphabetically in two rows. At the time, Milwaukee was a backwoods town. The crude machine shop tools available there could hardly produce a finely-honed instrument that worked with precision. Yes, the first typewriter was sluggish. Yes, it did clash and jam when someone tried to type with it. But Sholes was able to figure out a way around the problem simply by rearranging the letters. Looking inside his early machine, we can see how he did it.
The first typewriter had its letters on the end of rods called "typebars." The typebars hung in a circle. The roller which held the paper sat over this circle, and when a key was pressed, a typebar would swing up to hit the paper from underneath. If two typebars were near each other in the circle, they would tend to clash into each other when typed in succession. So, Sholes figured he had to take the most common letter pairs such as "TH" and make sure their typebars hung at safe distances.
He did this using a study of letter-pair frequency prepared by educator Amos Densmore, brother of James Densmore, who was Sholes' chief financial backer. The QWERTY keyboard itself was determined by the existing mechanical linkages of the typebars inside the machine to the keys on the outside. Sholes' solution did not eliminate the problem completely, but it was greatly reduced.
The keyboard arrangement was considered important enough to be included on Sholes' patent granted in 1878 (see drawing), some years after the machine was into production. QWERTY's effect, by reducing those annoying clashes, was to speed up typing rather than slow it down.
I csn't believe people still think Sholes crippled his layout to slow people down.
Yes, I've seen several comments in this thread bringing up the example of the QWERTY keyboard as a strange interface that allows you input information fast. What people don't remember though is that QWERTY was designed to slow people down because they kept jamming typewriters with the more efficient layout.
It wasn't designed to slow typists down, it was designed to let them type faster. Sholes used statistical analyses of english words to find the most common digraphs (two-letter sequences) and then laid out the keyboard so the striker bars to which those letter were attached were separtated enough so they'd be less likely to jam.
Or maybe you were just some shmuck trapped in a cargo hold who couldn't work the UI to get out so you were forced to just go along for this Crack-induced joy ride of a hallicination because after all it is only a friggin TV show!
Reminds me of when I lost my keys and found it would close to $500 to get a new set made and the little transmitter. Found keylessride.com online and got it for around $100. The cool thing was how you had to program the car to accept the new key. It was this funny pattern of lock the door and unlock the door insert key into ignition. lock and unlock doors then roll down windows. Went on for about 5 minutes and then the headlights flashed and key would start the car. How keylessride.com figured out the codes is a mystery.
Pretty much all dealers release transponder programming instructions for the use of automotive locksmiths and such. My boss (a locksmith) quit doing automotive lock work because he was tired of, as he called it, "doing the hokey-pokey" just to get a key to work. That and if you make a mistake while cutting a transponder key, you've just thrown $15-$20 in the trash. Programming those keys is a real pain, particularly if the car is one of those models that requires you to have a key that already works in order to program another key and the customer has lost all his key! The song and dance you have to go through to reset the system and program a new key from scratch is even worse.
Wrong, wrong, wrong! While I agree that physical co-ordination is something some people are good at, and some people are bad at, I cannot go along with your crazed idea that education is something that happens to someone given enough time.
I absolutely agree. I spoke poorly. My wording did sound like I was saying "stick a potato in class and it'll learn". I should have said "stick anyone with a willingness to learn in school and they'll learn eventually".
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There's no guarantee that the band is posting a representative sample of their work. They may just have samples of their only two songs that sound decent. The benefit of grabbing a rip off P2P is that no one is cherry-picking the songs you sample.
"Collect call from Cthulu, do you accept the charges?"
But that would only explain why they didn't come on automatically. Something had to be wrong enough with all three generators that they couldn't just flip the switch on the generator panel to "manual" and press "start".
"No other object has been misidentified as a flying saucer more often than the planet Venus."
When will these guys get it through their thick skulls that people don't want to watch pre-recorded news programs on TV. They have to stop trying to get it to be a "TV newspaper".
All good points, but they had all three generators go down after only five months. Before that, the engineers who're on strike were still working. But maybe water leaked into the fuel tankbecause of poor drainage system maintenance. Yeah, it's hard to say.
Good point. The fact that they had three backup power units go bad in a not-immediately-repairable way in the same time frame looks like sabotage, but the fact that such non-functionality was overlooked indicates ineptitude as well. Personally, having seen a LOT of backup generator systems working as an electrician in Las Vegas hotels, I suspect the one-two combo of sabotage-stupidity. There's not much of those generators that building engineering has access to. Fuel tanks, starter panel, and switch gear, mostly. Can't imagine what could've been done to them through "bad maintenance" that could keep them offline.
Interference in a hospital? How about interference ANYWHERE? It's not exactly like GPS works all that well indoors...
Heh. It never ceases to amaze me how many people forget that one tiny fact about GPS when they propose it as a location tracking solution: if it can't see the sky, it don't work.
Heh. Good point. I've seen a building engineer replace a 30A fuse on one leg of a 277V panel with a cut off length of metal conduit because he ran out of fuses (they were blowing every couple days). When we saw that and asked him what his freakin' damage was, he said "well, I figured it would be OK for a little while until you guys got here". Fortunately for him it was a short in the AC chiller unit and it was early in the morning and not hot yet.
You made a good point. Too bad you made yourself sound like a total ass at the end with that comment. Then again I guess your not old enough to understand why all Unions aren't evil.
Didn't say all unions are evil. I've been a dues paying member of the IBEW (electrician) and the CWA (telecom tech). I know what aspects of unionization are good and which are bad. In this case, I'm referring to a specific type of union person. Anyone who's ever worked in a union building trade knows this type of union person. He's the guy who works half as hard as everyone else and complains that he doesn't get paid enough. He's the guy who shows up to work high as a kite or drunk as a skunk, but he'll always make more than you and get laid off after you because he has seniority. He's the [cousin/brother/friend] of the president of the Local who somehow always gets named foreman despite his incompetence. He's the guy incharge of apprenticeship at the Local who decides that they're only going to accept eight apprentices a year (despite the extreme shortage of union electricians in the area), and fills those eight positions with slackjaw [children/nephews/friend's kids] of his good ol' buddies in the union, rather than the competent unindentured guys with twenty recommendations from journeyman they've worked under. He's the guy who sees his employer as an enemy that needs to be cheated and exploited because "they're rich and they owe me". He's the guy who thinks sabotage is a reasonable tactic for encouraging employer concessions at the bargaining table. I got nothing against non-filthy, non-bastard union members. I just hate the guys who see the union as some sort of free ride/meal card. Those guys are filthy union bastards.
They have 3 separate generators. Somehow, all three were happened to fail simultaneously during an engineer's strike. Looks like sabotage by disgruntled workers to me.
Only slightly unexplained, I'd say. Maintenance engineers go on strike and suddenly all three generators don't work? The striking engineers blame it on "bad maintenance" by scab workers, but it's quite difficult to accidentally disable a generator, much less three of them. They don't really require any maintenance, other than checking fuel levels and starting them up once a month. Anything beyond that is handled by contracted outside maintenance companies that specialize in generators and backup power systems. I smell sabotage by a filthy union bastard.
Dang straight. I was talking to a Verizon field technician today and he says he and about a hundred and forty other techs are being trained to install fiber. Verizon is trying to push fiber out to the last mile to compete with cable companies. He said they already have one "test neighborhood" in Cerritos where they've been stringing fiber from the pole to the POD on every house they service. It is Verizon, though, so for internet connectivity they'll probably still only give you the option of $50/mo for a 1500/256 async, or $300/mo for a 3000/3000, offering absolutely nothing in between, the way they do with DSL. I can see them spending a crapload putting in fiber, then selling it like it's cable TV and DSL. "Yeah, we have the bandwidth to offer you a 10GBps connection, but since we charge $300 for 3MBps, that'll cost you $10,000 per month".
The fastest theoretical speed is determined by the mechanical limitations of the machine. Since his reordering of the keys allowed letters to be struck in quicker succession, the fastest theoretical speed increased. People were slowed down at first by their unfamiliarity with the layout, but they were able to type faster once they learned it. You certainly can argue that he didn't change the layout to slow people down, as that was never his stated goal nor the end result. When you get right down to it, his old alphabetical layout was no more conducive to fast typing than the QWERTY layout anyway.
Aha. I RTFA and they're being paid to develop and deliver 2.5kW/kg solar panels. Their current designs put out 600W/kg, which sounds more reasonable. Hopefully they can come up with those 2500 things. That'd be pretty impressive.
stupid preview button. It's too close to the submit button.
What's missing from this glowing pronouncement is the weight and size of the usable product. It's nice that you can pull 2.5kW/kg, but how much does a square meter of this stuff in usable form weigh? Does 1kg of TFS material need to be laid on a substrate weighing 4kg in order to provide support and electrical connections (4:1)? Or does it maybe take only 10 grams of TFS material to make a single square meter of panel (100:1)? And how about surface area? Is a 2.5kW panel 100 square meters in area? I haven't RTFA yet, but this odd 2500W/kg metric sticks out to me as, well, odd.
You're probably right. I was particularly amused by a quote in his FAQ praising his waranty service, attributed to the US Navy. Not a rep of the Navy, but the Navy itself. Must have been a good warranty for the whole Navy to say it liked it. Of course, even if we assume it was quote from a Navy person working in procurement, it's clearly bogus:
Someone representing the US Navy is about as likely to say they chose a vendor because he's christian as they are likely to say they chose a vendor because they're "trustworthy white folk, not scheming negroes or devious chinamen".
He buys all that crap intending to resell it, but never gets around to it.
It wasn't designed to slow typists down, it was designed to let them type faster. Sholes used statistical analyses of english words to find the most common digraphs (two-letter sequences) and then laid out the keyboard so the striker bars to which those letter were attached were separtated enough so they'd be less likely to jam.
How DARE you call my TV friends a hallucination.
Or like saying they've invented a vehicle that goes faster than a NASCAR racetrack.
Pretty much all dealers release transponder programming instructions for the use of automotive locksmiths and such. My boss (a locksmith) quit doing automotive lock work because he was tired of, as he called it, "doing the hokey-pokey" just to get a key to work. That and if you make a mistake while cutting a transponder key, you've just thrown $15-$20 in the trash. Programming those keys is a real pain, particularly if the car is one of those models that requires you to have a key that already works in order to program another key and the customer has lost all his key! The song and dance you have to go through to reset the system and program a new key from scratch is even worse.
I absolutely agree. I spoke poorly. My wording did sound like I was saying "stick a potato in class and it'll learn". I should have said "stick anyone with a willingness to learn in school and they'll learn eventually".