I recently dealt with the declining health of my grandmother and the repeated visits to specialists and general practitioners for her care. The #1 thing I did for her that extended and enhanced the quality of her life (and probably extended it for a year of fairly good quality time) was hustle medical records from one doctor to the next. If she saw a gastroenterologist I would immediately take all the notes taken and test results received over to her other doctors. This simple act (an extra hour of my time on top of any Dr's visit) identified and resolved 3 chronic health issues that she'd had to "live with" for nearly a decade. All because I had her paperwork and noticed that the 5 doctors she had kept running the same tests independently over and over but not equating all the results.
Without a paper trail, I'd never have figured it out. And before this experience, I just assumed all the doctors somehow used their secret handshake to share information.
BOFA at least processes transactions in a FIFO manner as of some date earlier this year. Depending on your account, deposits from verifiable sources are credited and available for payment backing immediately on receipt. I haven't had a deposit held for verification of funds in a couple years. Online bill payments are deducted when they are actually paid, not when you schedule the transaction, and I've had EXCELLENT service from them when bill payments have gone afoul, even when it wasn't BOFA's fault. they've even paid MY late fees on bills that didn't get processed by the payee on time.
This isn't to say BOFA doesn't have issues -- I've spent more time in a "banking center" than I'd care to -- but they have addressed a LOT of my issues with them over the last couple years.
If more than one sample has the median value, then less than half will be more and less than half less. By definition at most half of the values will be more and at most half of the values will be less.
I did not correctly denote that the first two sentences talk about the salary study as a whole where the third and fourth are talking about my specific example.
No, if the median salary was 60K roughly half of them would be making less than that. Roughly half would be making more as well. 3 sample salaries that still result in 60k average are 30K, 75K, and 75K. 1/3 of the sample is less than 60K, but 2/3 is greater than 60K.
FWIW, my starting salary in 2000 was $65K, but my salary has risen considerably since then.
Yeah, I looked up the manufacturer's projected MTBF before I posted, and saw the normal "ridiculously big number". I then went searching for real-world studies of drive MTBF. You can't really get any better than a study by Google of their actual drive failure rate.
At first glance it didn't look like they were using rails in the picture, but now that I really stare at it, it does seem possible they're hiding some rails in there.
So I take it back: the drives DO seem hot-swappable. That doesn't mean I'd want to (or be confident in) doing it:)
At 67T per chassis and 45 drives documented per chassis, they're using 1.5T drives. 1 petabyte would then be 667 drives.
The worst part of this design that I see (and there's a LOT of bad to see) is the lack of an easy way to get to a failed drive. When a drive fails you're going to have to pull the entire chassis offline. Google did a study in 2007 of drive failure rates (http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf) and found the following failure rates over drive age (ignoring manufacturer): 3mo: 3% = 20 drives 6mo: 2% = 13 drives 1yr: 2% = 13 drives 2yr: 8% = 53 drives
Their logic is probably along the lines of "we're already paying someone to answer the pager in the middle of the night," but jeez, you're going to have to take a node offline ever 2-3 days for the first year and then almost 2 a day after that!
Hold up there, Tex. The law specifies that driving over the posted speed limit is prima facie that you are driving in a manner that is not reasonable and prudent. This allows the cop to ticket you [Texas Transportation Code Sec 545.351-2]. If you went to trial for a speeding ticket it is possible that you could argue the common speed of vehicles under similar conditions was what you were driving, and you could MAYBE get out of the ticket that way (although speeding about 70 in most counties, 80 in some is likely an absolute that you couldn't get out of), but you'd be relying on the whim of a judge or jury in that case.
The Texas Administrative Code specifies the procedures for setting speed zones [Title 43, Part 1, Ch 25, SubCh B] specifies how speed zones are set. IANAL, but I found nothing that says, "if people speed, you have to change the speed limit." It does seem to imply that, at the discretion of certain regulatory bodies and after an engineering study, a speed limit can be raised.
This raises an interesting question: could I actually create an alternate communication method using A.C. postings alone? Using a cipher symbol alphabet consisting entirely of sensible words or sentences, I could hide inside of the more popular systems that allow anonymous posting and probably not even be noticed (I mean hell, how many people do more than scan the A.C. posting to see if it makes sense?).
It all depends on existing facilities. If you don't have transport available already or if the available transport needs to be qualified before install, it'll take longer.
As far back as 2001 I had circuits that would come up in hours and circuits that would come up in weeks, all from the same provider. The only difference was the availability of qualified circuits (or qualified people to turn the circuits up).
Try going to the site and _reading_ the search waiver. It includes a time limit on the search, location limitation, and specifically requires your presence for the inspection. Yes, some of these are for the convenience of the DPS (so they can arrest you), but the waiver is _not_ a waiver of all 4th amendment rights.
No doubt this is a stupid law, but it is level-headed and appropriate when compared with the vast majority of laws we manage to pass around here.
1) The permit costs nothing. 2) You consent to search. That doesn't mean they are _going_ to search. 3) Fry's sells lab equipment, both prepackaged and individual items (beakers and the like).
Pseudoephedrine is on this list, but I purchase it (in allowed amounts) periodically at the drug store. There is an in-store identification and declaration of use dance that has to be done. I would assume that lab equipment has something similar.
Texas has some crazy laws and an even crazier reputation, but reality isn't really THAT bad. Of course, I _do_ live in the "Silicon Hills," so my opinions are colored by this "Neo-Hippie" area.
While I'd agree that the "tape barely holding the box together" method of shipping isn't the greatest, it should be noted that often the most efficient packaging is not the CHEAPEST packaging to ship.
Surely enough people around here have gotten multiple shipments from amazon to note that other than actual physical minimums the size of the box you receive your shipment in (and the number of boxes it comes in) has absolutely no relation to the size of the item shipped.
Often there is a contract with a shipper that says "if I ship X number or Y pounds of product, I'll get a price break of Z%." Amazon (and presumably other companies) will ship items in odd configurations to maintain this discount. Amazon does it so well (and needs it for the bottom line so much) that they have an entire department dedicated to the development and maintenance of the program that decides packaging and shipping.
I haven't run FreeBSD since 6.0, but the problem with Dells, IIRC, is that the AT controller acts like there's a keyboard there even if there isn't one.
I had no problem using the clearly labeled "boot with USB keyboard" menu option.
It's a moot point -- with the at mux that came in I believe halfway through the 6-series, you can have as many keyboards as you feel like.
Who the hell is this end user that edits DVDs?
on
30 Days With Ubuntu Linux
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I switched my 80 year-old grandmother to Ubuntu 6 months ago. I won't pretend there were no problems, but they all revolved around user interface. Specifically, things didn't EXACTLY match Outlook/Internet Explorer's interface. Once I explained that and she used it for about 2 weeks, she has no problems whatsoever.
She DOESN'T do any DVD editing. She DOES use digital photography (in that I send her pictures of her great grandson and she views them). She's even managed to solve minor problems on her own. She writes documents, receives documents (both word and excel), and has had no issues to date that could not be solved in 10 minutes on the phone.
Her only major complaint? It's not the user interface. It's not the multifunction printer/copier/scanner. It's not the funky colors. It's not the email. It's that she can't make the computer wit more than 2 hours before hibernating.
Perhaps these "reviews" of "typical users" should evealuate what a real "typical user" actually is.
The biggest thing watch for is the / partition. In 4.x, it defaulted to a tiny partition. Unfortunately, it's nowhere near big enough for a 5.x/6.x/.
The other big gotcha -- and something that eventually caused me to drop FreeBSD -- is that large drives are not supported on many common controllers. They'll show up as available and you can certainly write to them, but at some point you'll start getting bogus DMA timeouts. The hardware that worked fine in 4.X began failing in 5.X/6.X. The response from soeren was "it ain't broke. Buy better hardware."
Ubuntu has been working fine with the same hardware for 6+ months now.
That said, I loved FreeBSD for the 15 years that I used it. I would still recommend it if you've got a bottomless budget to buy high-end hardware.
To your first reply: 1/3 of a meter is about 33cm. Oddly enough, 1/3 of a foot is exactly 4 inches.
1 Gallon of water? About 7 pounds.
Yards of cloth are a gross measure -- it's linear yards, and while the width of cloth is mostly standardised, you can't rely on a standard width. If you're measuring yards of cloth, you'll use s specialsed measuring tool with yards, half-yards, and possibly third and quarter yards. A piecer would be using a template for pieces, and so wouldn't be doing any measurement at all.
Once again, you're using different measurement scales. How many mL in 1/3 of a liter? I'm making pastry, so I can't have any of this "about 333mL" stuff. I've seldom needed tablespoon to teaspoon conversions, but it's 3 teaspoons to the tablespoon. However, I don't know the tablespoon to cup conversion. Something like 32 or so.
Recipes are converted to metric wholesale, so it's not really a big deal. You just don't use 1/3 of a liter. You convert the amounts to something with a common divisor.
Trivia: 1 cup of flour is 185g. Not so useful, but the more-common "2 cups is 270 grams" I use all the time.
But How big is a 3rd of a meter? A third of a foot is 4 inches.
In construction carpentry, it is routine to divide lengths of things by half, thirds, and quarters. All of these are simple calculations that can be done in tenths of a second in Imperial, but can be difficult in metric.
Of course, people get along just fine building things in metric, and a lot of our building materials are in metric anyway.
Have you spent any extended time in the US? Government touches you absolutely everywhere, all the time.
Compared to many US cities, Vienna is spotless. But judging a country by a single city is a particularly flawed method for chosing a country to live in. New York looks nothing like the rest of the US, as an example. Vienna really looks nothing like the rest of Austria.
My big reason for wanting to move to Austria? Every single place I've visited in Austria feels like home. Sure, my german is pitiful and I sound like Tarzan to the locals. But absolutely every single one of them welcomed me to their shop, home, or restaurant because I really try to speak with them. Nothing felt foreign there, even after my poor german-fatigued brain stopped trying to translate the signs. The only time I had a problem was when I couldn't manage to get my Golf to go up a hill from a stop (I wasn't a good stick driver at the time). The guy behind me came up and angrily asked if I could even drive. Of course, in hindsight, he was actually asking me if my car was broken.
To make a long-winded story short -- love the place you want to move to. I love Austria not because of the skiing, culture, or politics. Nor am I looking to escape my own government -- that's a handy side-effect. I love Austria because it feels like home, more so than where I've lived my entire life.
So how hard is it to move there and find a job? I've been contemplating moving there for wuite some time (not neccessarily Vienna). The big stopping factor is my pitiful german and a lack of understanding of the procedures. It seems a lot of people spend a lot of time discouraging people from moving there.
I have the prior generation of these earplug/headphones. A couple things I've learned:
1) You have to stick them WAY inside your ears to get the full effect. It feals like you're poking your brain stem. 2) They work incredibly well. 3) You'll suddenly discover how crappy your home and car speakers are, and how REALLY crappy normal headphones are.
If you're really serious, get a good set of musician ear-moldings. They'll fit the E2C earphones, IIRC, and they're much more comfortable from what I'm told.
Slashdot Mirror
I recently dealt with the declining health of my grandmother and the repeated visits to specialists and general practitioners for her care. The #1 thing I did for her that extended and enhanced the quality of her life (and probably extended it for a year of fairly good quality time) was hustle medical records from one doctor to the next. If she saw a gastroenterologist I would immediately take all the notes taken and test results received over to her other doctors. This simple act (an extra hour of my time on top of any Dr's visit) identified and resolved 3 chronic health issues that she'd had to "live with" for nearly a decade. All because I had her paperwork and noticed that the 5 doctors she had kept running the same tests independently over and over but not equating all the results.
Without a paper trail, I'd never have figured it out. And before this experience, I just assumed all the doctors somehow used their secret handshake to share information.
You mean they can remotely install apps over the air just like every other modern phone on every other carrier I've ever seen?
This is a non-story -- OTA install is pretty much required by every carrier out there so they can force you to upgrade your phone.
BOFA at least processes transactions in a FIFO manner as of some date earlier this year. Depending on your account, deposits from verifiable sources are credited and available for payment backing immediately on receipt. I haven't had a deposit held for verification of funds in a couple years. Online bill payments are deducted when they are actually paid, not when you schedule the transaction, and I've had EXCELLENT service from them when bill payments have gone afoul, even when it wasn't BOFA's fault. they've even paid MY late fees on bills that didn't get processed by the payee on time.
This isn't to say BOFA doesn't have issues -- I've spent more time in a "banking center" than I'd care to -- but they have addressed a LOT of my issues with them over the last couple years.
Wait, I did WHAT?
Sorry, I've been waiting something like 10 years for this moment...
If more than one sample has the median value, then less than half will be more and less than half less. By definition at most half of the values will be more and at most half of the values will be less.
I did not correctly denote that the first two sentences talk about the salary study as a whole where the third and fourth are talking about my specific example.
No, if the median salary was 60K roughly half of them would be making less than that. Roughly half would be making more as well. 3 sample salaries that still result in 60k average are 30K, 75K, and 75K. 1/3 of the sample is less than 60K, but 2/3 is greater than 60K.
FWIW, my starting salary in 2000 was $65K, but my salary has risen considerably since then.
Yeah, I looked up the manufacturer's projected MTBF before I posted, and saw the normal "ridiculously big number". I then went searching for real-world studies of drive MTBF. You can't really get any better than a study by Google of their actual drive failure rate.
At first glance it didn't look like they were using rails in the picture, but now that I really stare at it, it does seem possible they're hiding some rails in there.
So I take it back: the drives DO seem hot-swappable. That doesn't mean I'd want to (or be confident in) doing it :)
At 67T per chassis and 45 drives documented per chassis, they're using 1.5T drives. 1 petabyte would then be 667 drives.
The worst part of this design that I see (and there's a LOT of bad to see) is the lack of an easy way to get to a failed drive. When a drive fails you're going to have to pull the entire chassis offline. Google did a study in 2007 of drive failure rates (http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf) and found the following failure rates over drive age (ignoring manufacturer):
3mo: 3% = 20 drives
6mo: 2% = 13 drives
1yr: 2% = 13 drives
2yr: 8% = 53 drives
Their logic is probably along the lines of "we're already paying someone to answer the pager in the middle of the night," but jeez, you're going to have to take a node offline ever 2-3 days for the first year and then almost 2 a day after that!
Um, ok. That's good for people in California. The law in Texas is different than in California.
Hold up there, Tex. The law specifies that driving over the posted speed limit is prima facie that you are driving in a manner that is not reasonable and prudent. This allows the cop to ticket you [Texas Transportation Code Sec 545.351-2]. If you went to trial for a speeding ticket it is possible that you could argue the common speed of vehicles under similar conditions was what you were driving, and you could MAYBE get out of the ticket that way (although speeding about 70 in most counties, 80 in some is likely an absolute that you couldn't get out of), but you'd be relying on the whim of a judge or jury in that case.
The Texas Administrative Code specifies the procedures for setting speed zones [Title 43, Part 1, Ch 25, SubCh B] specifies how speed zones are set. IANAL, but I found nothing that says, "if people speed, you have to change the speed limit." It does seem to imply that, at the discretion of certain regulatory bodies and after an engineering study, a speed limit can be raised.
I'm also a lazy Texan, but Google works for me.
This raises an interesting question: could I actually create an alternate communication method using A.C. postings alone? Using a cipher symbol alphabet consisting entirely of sensible words or sentences, I could hide inside of the more popular systems that allow anonymous posting and probably not even be noticed (I mean hell, how many people do more than scan the A.C. posting to see if it makes sense?).
It all depends on existing facilities. If you don't have transport available already or if the available transport needs to be qualified before install, it'll take longer.
As far back as 2001 I had circuits that would come up in hours and circuits that would come up in weeks, all from the same provider. The only difference was the availability of qualified circuits (or qualified people to turn the circuits up).
Try going to the site and _reading_ the search waiver. It includes a time limit on the search, location limitation, and specifically requires your presence for the inspection. Yes, some of these are for the convenience of the DPS (so they can arrest you), but the waiver is _not_ a waiver of all 4th amendment rights.
No doubt this is a stupid law, but it is level-headed and appropriate when compared with the vast majority of laws we manage to pass around here.
Wow, inflammatory as all get-out. Notes:
1) The permit costs nothing.
2) You consent to search. That doesn't mean they are _going_ to search.
3) Fry's sells lab equipment, both prepackaged and individual items (beakers and the like).
Pseudoephedrine is on this list, but I purchase it (in allowed amounts) periodically at the drug store. There is an in-store identification and declaration of use dance that has to be done. I would assume that lab equipment has something similar.
Texas has some crazy laws and an even crazier reputation, but reality isn't really THAT bad. Of course, I _do_ live in the "Silicon Hills," so my opinions are colored by this "Neo-Hippie" area.
While I'd agree that the "tape barely holding the box together" method of shipping isn't the greatest, it should be noted that often the most efficient packaging is not the CHEAPEST packaging to ship.
Surely enough people around here have gotten multiple shipments from amazon to note that other than actual physical minimums the size of the box you receive your shipment in (and the number of boxes it comes in) has absolutely no relation to the size of the item shipped.
Often there is a contract with a shipper that says "if I ship X number or Y pounds of product, I'll get a price break of Z%." Amazon (and presumably other companies) will ship items in odd configurations to maintain this discount. Amazon does it so well (and needs it for the bottom line so much) that they have an entire department dedicated to the development and maintenance of the program that decides packaging and shipping.
I haven't run FreeBSD since 6.0, but the problem with Dells, IIRC, is that the AT controller acts like there's a keyboard there even if there isn't one.
I had no problem using the clearly labeled "boot with USB keyboard" menu option.
It's a moot point -- with the at mux that came in I believe halfway through the 6-series, you can have as many keyboards as you feel like.
I switched my 80 year-old grandmother to Ubuntu 6 months ago. I won't pretend there were no problems, but they all revolved around user interface. Specifically, things didn't EXACTLY match Outlook/Internet Explorer's interface. Once I explained that and she used it for about 2 weeks, she has no problems whatsoever.
She DOESN'T do any DVD editing. She DOES use digital photography (in that I send her pictures of her great grandson and she views them). She's even managed to solve minor problems on her own. She writes documents, receives documents (both word and excel), and has had no issues to date that could not be solved in 10 minutes on the phone.
Her only major complaint? It's not the user interface. It's not the multifunction printer/copier/scanner. It's not the funky colors. It's not the email. It's that she can't make the computer wit more than 2 hours before hibernating.
Perhaps these "reviews" of "typical users" should evealuate what a real "typical user" actually is.
The biggest thing watch for is the / partition. In 4.x, it defaulted to a tiny partition. Unfortunately, it's nowhere near big enough for a 5.x/6.x /.
The other big gotcha -- and something that eventually caused me to drop FreeBSD -- is that large drives are not supported on many common controllers. They'll show up as available and you can certainly write to them, but at some point you'll start getting bogus DMA timeouts. The hardware that worked fine in 4.X began failing in 5.X/6.X. The response from soeren was "it ain't broke. Buy better hardware."
Ubuntu has been working fine with the same hardware for 6+ months now.
That said, I loved FreeBSD for the 15 years that I used it. I would still recommend it if you've got a bottomless budget to buy high-end hardware.
To your first reply: 1/3 of a meter is about 33cm. Oddly enough, 1/3 of a foot is exactly 4 inches.
1 Gallon of water? About 7 pounds.
Yards of cloth are a gross measure -- it's linear yards, and while the width of cloth is mostly standardised, you can't rely on a standard width. If you're measuring yards of cloth, you'll use s specialsed measuring tool with yards, half-yards, and possibly third and quarter yards. A piecer would be using a template for pieces, and so wouldn't be doing any measurement at all.
Once again, you're using different measurement scales. How many mL in 1/3 of a liter? I'm making pastry, so I can't have any of this "about 333mL" stuff. I've seldom needed tablespoon to teaspoon conversions, but it's 3 teaspoons to the tablespoon. However, I don't know the tablespoon to cup conversion. Something like 32 or so.
Recipes are converted to metric wholesale, so it's not really a big deal. You just don't use 1/3 of a liter. You convert the amounts to something with a common divisor.
Trivia: 1 cup of flour is 185g. Not so useful, but the more-common "2 cups is 270 grams" I use all the time.
But How big is a 3rd of a meter? A third of a foot is 4 inches.
In construction carpentry, it is routine to divide lengths of things by half, thirds, and quarters. All of these are simple calculations that can be done in tenths of a second in Imperial, but can be difficult in metric.
Of course, people get along just fine building things in metric, and a lot of our building materials are in metric anyway.
He's giving a presentation. Would you rather see the back of an input device or the presenter?
Cut him some slack.
Have you spent any extended time in the US? Government touches you absolutely everywhere, all the time.
Compared to many US cities, Vienna is spotless. But judging a country by a single city is a particularly flawed method for chosing a country to live in. New York looks nothing like the rest of the US, as an example. Vienna really looks nothing like the rest of Austria.
My big reason for wanting to move to Austria? Every single place I've visited in Austria feels like home. Sure, my german is pitiful and I sound like Tarzan to the locals. But absolutely every single one of them welcomed me to their shop, home, or restaurant because I really try to speak with them. Nothing felt foreign there, even after my poor german-fatigued brain stopped trying to translate the signs. The only time I had a problem was when I couldn't manage to get my Golf to go up a hill from a stop (I wasn't a good stick driver at the time). The guy behind me came up and angrily asked if I could even drive. Of course, in hindsight, he was actually asking me if my car was broken.
To make a long-winded story short -- love the place you want to move to. I love Austria not because of the skiing, culture, or politics. Nor am I looking to escape my own government -- that's a handy side-effect. I love Austria because it feels like home, more so than where I've lived my entire life.
So how hard is it to move there and find a job? I've been contemplating moving there for wuite some time (not neccessarily Vienna). The big stopping factor is my pitiful german and a lack of understanding of the procedures. It seems a lot of people spend a lot of time discouraging people from moving there.
I have the prior generation of these earplug/headphones. A couple things I've learned:
1) You have to stick them WAY inside your ears to get the full effect. It feals like you're poking your brain stem.
2) They work incredibly well.
3) You'll suddenly discover how crappy your home and car speakers are, and how REALLY crappy normal headphones are.
If you're really serious, get a good set of musician ear-moldings. They'll fit the E2C earphones, IIRC, and they're much more comfortable from what I'm told.