When Windows 2000 came along we were no longer trusted to erase everything properly and we had to send the disk drives to a centralized location where they were wiped before being sold.
Interesting. I would rather trust a utility like Darik's Boot & Nuke than trust UPS or FedEx to actually get the drive to the centralized location. If UPS or FedEx fails, somebody might end up with a drive with NOTHING erased.
The electric motors act as a transmission for the locomotive. By connecting them in series, they can greatly increase the torque available at 0 RPM, and then switch to parallel and provide more HP at higher wheel RPMs. (The electrics also run in either direction with the same efficiency, eliminating the need for a reverse gear.) Finally, the electrics can provide brake-saving regenerative braking, where the electric motors convert motive power into heat, which is released through resistor grids along the top of the locomotive.
Thanks for the advice. I use WaMu strictly for my Paypal stuff; money gets deposited, and I withdraw the next day. Guess I won't be applying for that credit card from them.:-)
True, and you can also convert one to run on CNG or LPG as well, but except for a few flex-fuel vehicles that can burn gasoline and another fuel at the same time, you don't have the flexibility of, say, natural gas, biomass, solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, coal and oil, either purchased from the power company or produced yourself, without having to make any modifications to the car.
"Since diesel engines lack a throttle valve on the intake manifold, there is no intake vacuum when the engine is not fueling. The intake vacuum creates the slowing effect felt in gasoline engines when they are going down a hill with the foot off the gas. Many different strategies are used on diesels, the least expensive (and also one of the least powerful) of which is the exhaust brake."
So, basically, most trucks must be equipped with at least an exhaust brake, which could be removed for hybrid use. Every Ryder, U-Haul and Budget diesel I've ever rented had very little or no engine braking, even when downshifted, and, when equipped with an automatic, they even dropped to idle while still moving at in-town speeds. (The exception was a recent Enterprise Isuzu NPR-based truck, which had an exhaust brake that could be switched on from the console. Even that didn't provide much braking.)
Agreed about the container, though it's a cool idea that you could carry an emergency container of veggie in your trunk without any of the dangers of carrying gasoline.
And it's 38 degrees right now and we have the last remnants of several inches of snow melting on the ground, so we get weather here too.:-) A hybrid could help here too--run on electric power for the first couple of minutes while simultaneously heating up a small inline fuel preheating chamber.
Toyota will have a full hybrid (with plug-in charger) car in a couple of years, and reliable aftermarket full-hybrid retrofit kits will be available and well-proven about the time the factory battery packs finally start wearing out.
Interesting. My experience is limited to large truck diesels, which essentially have no compression braking at all. If there is a change in the throttle design in the cars which allows compression braking, it could probably be defeated fairly easily and replaced with a regenerative braking system.
How about straight veggie oil? Requires a bit more work on the engine side, but doesn't require the chemicals that biodiesel production requires. Last time I priced out the 5-gallon drums of veggie at Costco, it came out to somewhere around $2.50 a gallon, which is about in line with what diesel costs in Southern California nowadays.
Two reasons:
1. Diesels could not be made clean enough with the formulations used in the U.S. California (and possibly other states) now requires a cleaner diesel fuel, which allows diesels to be as clean as gasoline cars.
2. The diesels that were available in the U.S. in the 80's were unreliable and underpowered, and pretty much turned a lot of people off to diesels. (Thanks, Olds.)
Did they test with an accurate method, such as a fuel flow meter, or did they just put in 5 gallons and drive until empty? They just recently started testing with a flow meter, which is the only accurate way to go. (The drive-until-empty method had too many differing factors, such as driving style, location of the fuel pickup in the tank, and steepness of the turns in their circular course.)
The difference is that you have a variety of sources to choose from when "fueling" an electric. Electricity can come from sources as dirty as coal, to sources as clean as wind or solar. (My father will be putting a wind generator on his property this summer, so his fuel source is as clean as can be.) With a gasoline car, you can choose gasoline, or... gasoline.
(dare I speculate about diesel electric hybrids in 2009?).
Go ahead. Diesels have less compression braking, which allows for better regenerative braking for a hybrid over gasoline/electrics. When the prices come way down for hybrid components (as they have for airbags, EFI systems and ABS controllers over the past couple of decades), expect to see hybrid diesels bring together city efficiency and freeway efficiency.
Exactly. I download the "Go Digital" podcast for free here in the US from the BBC website. I'm sure that the initial seeding for a show can't take much more bandwidth that weekly podcast downloads from all over the world.
Our business would not be drastically affected by the loss of 5 days' worth of data (otherwise, I'd be taking tapes out nightly if nothing else.) But if you're gathering disheartened employees in a rented temporary warehouse to work on Costco folding tables with new computers and none of the 'comforts of home', it'd be nice to not have to have them also start catching up from 5 days ago.
That said, we're opening up a second business office in another county in a few months, and I'm already putting together the hardware for a mirror as you suggested.
Thanks.
Yes, some users are probably are stupid - about computers. That's why you have a sysadmin.
Depends. When the job description specifically says, "experience with Windows and Office", and some moron newhire doesn't know how to use a mouse, much less Excel, they can expect a little derision.
Depends on how many hours of work would be lost as well. I take tapes offsite every Monday, which means that I stand to lose at most 5 business days of work. But if I had a few minutes and could grab the RAID out of the rack and take it out with me, (very possible, since it's a 2U box and not particularly heavy), I can save the time to reconstruct that week's worth of financial transactions, received emails and other work where the originals may have been lost (in the case of the entire building burning.) And, if nothing else, it's $3,000 less equipment I'd have to buy and reconfigure, and I can have a replacement server couriered from my vendor and hooked up to the RAID, and people up and working within 12 hours.
A certain large US mobile phone company still has 15,000+ machines on Windows 2000. The only compelling reason for them to upgrade to XP is built-in WiFi support, and they don't allow WiFi anyway.
They probably won't move to XP until 2000 is EOL'd.
I had the opportunity to bring home an Alphaserver before my employer donated it. I thought it would be cool to have, but then realizing that I had far more powerful systems at home that didn't draw 500 watts, I decided to let it be donated instead.
No one's forcing you to listen, and I hardly think that occasional unsolicited phone calls touting candidates for office during the couple of weeks prior to national elections is a serious problem threatening our society.
Occasional? Try 16 phone calls just this past Saturday, starting at 7:00am and lasting until 9:30pm. And last election, we got wonderful calls that started with, "Your daughter could be having an abortion RIGHT NOW!"
I heard an interesting broadcast about Visa's fraud protection. Apparently the best way to get a call is to do two gas station fill-ups, one right after the other, and then go try to buy something else. The alert happens because whenever a kid steals a credit card, the first thing he does is go to the gas station with his buddies and fill up all their cars.
DEC had an electronic ordering system at least as far back as August, 1989. Full VT-100 menus and everything. You could dial in with your modem to an 800 number.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting. I would rather trust a utility like Darik's Boot & Nuke than trust UPS or FedEx to actually get the drive to the centralized location. If UPS or FedEx fails, somebody might end up with a drive with NOTHING erased.
The electric motors act as a transmission for the locomotive. By connecting them in series, they can greatly increase the torque available at 0 RPM, and then switch to parallel and provide more HP at higher wheel RPMs. (The electrics also run in either direction with the same efficiency, eliminating the need for a reverse gear.) Finally, the electrics can provide brake-saving regenerative braking, where the electric motors convert motive power into heat, which is released through resistor grids along the top of the locomotive.
Thanks for the advice. I use WaMu strictly for my Paypal stuff; money gets deposited, and I withdraw the next day. Guess I won't be applying for that credit card from them. :-)
Exactly. A nice no-monthly-fee account at WaMu or a credit union is just the ticket for PayPal users.
True, and you can also convert one to run on CNG or LPG as well, but except for a few flex-fuel vehicles that can burn gasoline and another fuel at the same time, you don't have the flexibility of, say, natural gas, biomass, solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, coal and oil, either purchased from the power company or produced yourself, without having to make any modifications to the car.
"Since diesel engines lack a throttle valve on the intake manifold, there is no intake vacuum when the engine is not fueling. The intake vacuum creates the slowing effect felt in gasoline engines when they are going down a hill with the foot off the gas. Many different strategies are used on diesels, the least expensive (and also one of the least powerful) of which is the exhaust brake."
So, basically, most trucks must be equipped with at least an exhaust brake, which could be removed for hybrid use. Every Ryder, U-Haul and Budget diesel I've ever rented had very little or no engine braking, even when downshifted, and, when equipped with an automatic, they even dropped to idle while still moving at in-town speeds. (The exception was a recent Enterprise Isuzu NPR-based truck, which had an exhaust brake that could be switched on from the console. Even that didn't provide much braking.)
And it's 38 degrees right now and we have the last remnants of several inches of snow melting on the ground, so we get weather here too. :-) A hybrid could help here too--run on electric power for the first couple of minutes while simultaneously heating up a small inline fuel preheating chamber.
Toyota will have a full hybrid (with plug-in charger) car in a couple of years, and reliable aftermarket full-hybrid retrofit kits will be available and well-proven about the time the factory battery packs finally start wearing out.
Interesting. My experience is limited to large truck diesels, which essentially have no compression braking at all. If there is a change in the throttle design in the cars which allows compression braking, it could probably be defeated fairly easily and replaced with a regenerative braking system.
How about straight veggie oil? Requires a bit more work on the engine side, but doesn't require the chemicals that biodiesel production requires. Last time I priced out the 5-gallon drums of veggie at Costco, it came out to somewhere around $2.50 a gallon, which is about in line with what diesel costs in Southern California nowadays.
Two reasons: 1. Diesels could not be made clean enough with the formulations used in the U.S. California (and possibly other states) now requires a cleaner diesel fuel, which allows diesels to be as clean as gasoline cars. 2. The diesels that were available in the U.S. in the 80's were unreliable and underpowered, and pretty much turned a lot of people off to diesels. (Thanks, Olds.)
Did they test with an accurate method, such as a fuel flow meter, or did they just put in 5 gallons and drive until empty? They just recently started testing with a flow meter, which is the only accurate way to go. (The drive-until-empty method had too many differing factors, such as driving style, location of the fuel pickup in the tank, and steepness of the turns in their circular course.)
The difference is that you have a variety of sources to choose from when "fueling" an electric. Electricity can come from sources as dirty as coal, to sources as clean as wind or solar. (My father will be putting a wind generator on his property this summer, so his fuel source is as clean as can be.) With a gasoline car, you can choose gasoline, or... gasoline.
Go ahead. Diesels have less compression braking, which allows for better regenerative braking for a hybrid over gasoline/electrics. When the prices come way down for hybrid components (as they have for airbags, EFI systems and ABS controllers over the past couple of decades), expect to see hybrid diesels bring together city efficiency and freeway efficiency.
Exactly. I download the "Go Digital" podcast for free here in the US from the BBC website. I'm sure that the initial seeding for a show can't take much more bandwidth that weekly podcast downloads from all over the world.
Our business would not be drastically affected by the loss of 5 days' worth of data (otherwise, I'd be taking tapes out nightly if nothing else.) But if you're gathering disheartened employees in a rented temporary warehouse to work on Costco folding tables with new computers and none of the 'comforts of home', it'd be nice to not have to have them also start catching up from 5 days ago. That said, we're opening up a second business office in another county in a few months, and I'm already putting together the hardware for a mirror as you suggested. Thanks.
Depends. When the job description specifically says, "experience with Windows and Office", and some moron newhire doesn't know how to use a mouse, much less Excel, they can expect a little derision.
Depends on how many hours of work would be lost as well. I take tapes offsite every Monday, which means that I stand to lose at most 5 business days of work. But if I had a few minutes and could grab the RAID out of the rack and take it out with me, (very possible, since it's a 2U box and not particularly heavy), I can save the time to reconstruct that week's worth of financial transactions, received emails and other work where the originals may have been lost (in the case of the entire building burning.) And, if nothing else, it's $3,000 less equipment I'd have to buy and reconfigure, and I can have a replacement server couriered from my vendor and hooked up to the RAID, and people up and working within 12 hours.
A certain large US mobile phone company still has 15,000+ machines on Windows 2000. The only compelling reason for them to upgrade to XP is built-in WiFi support, and they don't allow WiFi anyway. They probably won't move to XP until 2000 is EOL'd.
The only people we hate more than the Romans are the fucking Judean People's Front.
I had the opportunity to bring home an Alphaserver before my employer donated it. I thought it would be cool to have, but then realizing that I had far more powerful systems at home that didn't draw 500 watts, I decided to let it be donated instead.
Occasional? Try 16 phone calls just this past Saturday, starting at 7:00am and lasting until 9:30pm. And last election, we got wonderful calls that started with, "Your daughter could be having an abortion RIGHT NOW!"
Good point. Think of laptop drives. They spin up so much faster than desktop drives that they can be spun down a lot more often.
I heard an interesting broadcast about Visa's fraud protection. Apparently the best way to get a call is to do two gas station fill-ups, one right after the other, and then go try to buy something else. The alert happens because whenever a kid steals a credit card, the first thing he does is go to the gas station with his buddies and fill up all their cars.
DEC had an electronic ordering system at least as far back as August, 1989. Full VT-100 menus and everything. You could dial in with your modem to an 800 number.