Do not pay extra on your mortgage. While you will feel better watching your balance drop, your bank will not care. Miss a payment and watch all those extra dollars and equity disappear. Better: place the money in a savings account. When the balances equal, pay off the house. In the meantime, you will have the money in the bank in case of job loss, medical emergency, or home improvement. Being able to pay the mortgage in a crisis is more important than the balance.
This is incredibly important and very few people seem to know it. Keep your cash. The closer you are to paying off your mortgage, the better it will be for the bank to repossess your house. If you owe a lot relative to the value, or better yet are underwater, the bank doesn't want your house.
Keeping the extra cash yourself is excellent insurance, but you MUST KEEP THE CASH, DON'T SPEND IT!
To get a better return you can lock up your cash in CDs (Ally Bank used to have the shortest interest penalty if you have to access early a 5yr CD) or iBonds (no access at all for the first year, 3 month penalty the next 4 years, no state income taxes, other possible tax advantages). Some people keep the extra cash in a high yield checking account, but that doesn't work for me.
I doubt Florida has tree regulations that affect every tree anywhere on private property.
Lots of cities in lots of states have regulations affecting trees on private property. The most frequently controlled are trees along the public street and sometimes any tree in the front of the house.
Innumerable housing developments have covenants or deed restrictions that put requirements on trees. Anywhere from how many you can or cannot have, to what type, to what size, to requiring professional arborists to care for them, etc.
Well you could do it on your own just as you described. Make it as fancy or as simple as you like. Hook up some cells in various places on your roof to an arduino's analog inputs, write some arduino code to read the output and send it up to the PC, write some code on the PC to read and store the readings. Write some more PC code to analyze the readings, or simply pull them directly into a spreadsheet. Then wait a year or more to get comprehensive readings, and hope your sample is truly representative of what a full install will experience.
Or you could it on your own in a much shorter time using (expensive) tools like the Solar Pathfinder or cheaper (more cumbersome) home-made equivalents to evaluate your solar potential.
Or you could call a local installer (or multiple) to come out and do a site survey using similar tools, and to give you a bid. The site survey should include all the info re. solar potential and the bid will let you know the capital cost, both of which you will need to know to make a decision.
As part of your analysis, consider whether you can take advantage of net metering and time of day billing to minimize the amount of solar needed to offset your bill. Consider whether you can carry over excess solar credit from month to month (annual zeroing) or if your utility does monthly zeroing, or if (very rare) you can get paid cash at retail prices for your excess production. Consider whether you are doing this for economic, environmental or "just for fun" reasons (or a combination).
An opinion, by nature, cannot be "correct". It can either agree or disagree with the opinions of others.
That opinion presumes no impartial standard of truth. Counter example: an opinion about a provable fact. It doesn't matter how much I announce my opinion that gravity does not exist or that the world is planar. Those opinions are incorrect. Whereas if it is my opinion (and it is) that gravity does exist and that the world is an oblate spheroid then my opinions agree with the facts and are thus correct.
Unless of course your opinion is that facts are simply widely shared opinions. In that case there is no "correct" and you are, of course, entitled to your opinion.
How long before you decide to rail against the cafeteria for not offering you the foods you want, prepared how you want, and for a subsidized price too?
As soon as they act with similar stupidity as locking out the internet. Say for example, telling me I have to be there for lunch promptly at 1:50pm, and the only thing they'll be serving at that time is peanut butter. Only peanut butter.
Oh, and some schools living on campus IS a requirement.
Proxy your traffic. If there is any connection thru the firewall to a system you control, you can proxy thru it. The tighter the firewall the more annoying and performance impact it will be, but it will work.
Do they blacklist or whitelist? Blacklist means you have a good chance. With a whitelist, aka they lock it down so you can only connect to a few specific internet sites, you may be SOL.
Some places firewall to protect from legal liability, "we have a firewall and we block that site/content but the offender bypassed our firewall." If you bypass the firewall, you take the blame and responsiblity squarely on yourself.
Some places firewall to protect from problems caused by the clueless, so if you bypass the firewall, do try not to cause problems for other network users.
Some places firewall because they themselves are clueless and/or frightened. Not much help for that, I'm afraid.
Remember the correct pattern of thought... Think of the firewall as your ultimate university exam. Pass it. Quietly. This means you first need to learn about the subject -- networking, protocols, tunneling and firewalls in general, and your university firewall specifically. It will be very educational, and isn't that why you are in school?
I used to work with 14 gauge wire, 12 gauge wire, and 10 gauge wire. It is significantly harder to route 10 gauge wire. Even more so if you already have insulation and drywall up.
That is total nonsense.
The only part "significantly harder" with a 10ga run is the termination in the boxes at the ends. Yes, thicker, stiffer wire does make it harder to attach the device and fold the working length nicely to fit back into the box. My 4ga and 6ga runs were significantly harder than 12ga and 10ga. 10ga compared to 12ga or 14ga? Any difference in wire is totally insignificant compared to the job itself.
Well, that and carrying a 500ft+ spool of one vs the other...
No matter what, as the boss you are going to be the bad guy at least once in a while.
No matter what, you are going to be less familiar with the technical details of the work being done and the issues involved than the guys in the trenches.
With that said, you can avoid the worst behaviors of the PHB. With your technical background, if you keep it up, you will be able to know which developers are BS'ing you and which give advice and information you can trust. Cultivate those whom you can trust and respect their judgment. Using your own knowledge and what you learn from your team, represent your team to your superiors and peers and protect your team from the political turmoil as much as possible.
I have found it impossible to keep a printed password list up to date.
1) Keep passwords in an encrypted file. Change them whenever you want.
2) Distribute encrypted file as needed for backup and authorized access. (e.g. wife knows where to access the current encrypted file, and on any password change push the encrypted file to each family member/trustee in order 1) to have a current offsite backup, 2) so they have the file.)
3) The final step is to keep the encryption key for that file on paper, in a sealed envelope, where it is accessible, and access is detectable. If you change the encryption key, create a new sealed envelope. If an envelope is compromised, change all passwords and the encryption key. For example, you might keep redundant envelopes in a safe at home, in a joint safe deposit box (beware: a single-owner safe deposit box is sealed upon death of the owner pending probate), and with your will at your attorney.
By replicating the above steps as desired you can partition your password storage however you desire in order to accommodate different levels of trust among your trustees.
By using a loosely structured plain-text file I can also keep other important information there -- list of financial accounts/assets, important serial numbers, key contacts,...
You might want to include in your envelope(s) a page of instructions on how to access and decrypt the file. Tailor the instructions to the level of your audience, or at the very least such that a person reasonably skilled could follow them to decrypt your passwords.
When you have a hardware interrupt and a stack to save registers and a stack pointer to switch to a client stack then preemptive multitasking works great. There is nothing "not well" about it and to prove it we have multiple decades of systems doing preemptive multitasking very well with even less capability than a Z80. Just because Apple and Microsoft (and evidently RISCOS) avoided it does not mean it could not have been done well.
Oh, and don't bring up an MMU and/or memory protection or even priviledged instructions. Those have nothing to do with doing premptive multitasking "well" even if many people do confuse them.
"the hardware permitted it" ? What, it didn't even have interrupts? It was no challenge to do pre-emptive multitasking on a 8080 or a Z80 circa 1979. It's hard to believe it couldn't have been done on ARM 8-10 years later.
And stupid things like "you cannot port forward to non DHCP addresses" and all of its similarly stupid friends are why openwrt or ddwrt is a requirement for me (and probably the OP).
I literally gave away several routers and went back to my old stuff that runs openwrt, or ddwrt, or tomato because "logic [that] defies description" has no place in my environment.
Because that cable only works for devices which output analog thru the hdmi connector, and not a typical computer. And judging by the interview answer, it stands 0 chance of working with the Rasberry Pi.
NOTE: this cable don't support signal from VCR, COMPUTER or LAPTOP output.
If you get a wrong fax it will send you a different CSID and then you know that something is not right.
LOL, tell it to the mortgage broker who sent me 30 copies of loan documents one weekend instead of sending them to his underwriter!
He sent them to my voice line. Ever had a voice line ring every couple of minutes with a fax tone? Finally I hooked up a fax modem and sucked in the data. I faxed back a note that they had messed up. I tried to call all the numbers I could find to let them know they were screwed. The documents kept coming the rest of the day.
Don't really need an existing copy of windows. Just something you can use to partition and format the usb drive, copy over the windows files, then boot the Windows stuff.
Usually if you partition and format with Windows, it puts enough code in the MBR and boot sector to boot windows. There are multiple ways to get that or replace it with free equivalents.
If you don't control it, you don't own it. If you don't own it, you cannot rely on it.
Anything less than full control (i.e. you have the source and you can do with it what you will) means your usage is subject to the whims of those who do control it.
In other words, control it or lose it.
Buying service in the 'cloud'? Good luck with that. If you don't control it, your service provider controls you.
Relying on some closed source product provided by a big-name or no-name tech company? Good luck with that. That product might be discontinued tomorrow. This is why companies will often require source code for mission critical business apps, if not hands on access at least held in escrow, "just in case."
the VHF TV band ( 87.5-87.9 MHz ) has shadowing problems just like FM radio which operates at 88 to 108 MHZ ( nominal ).
Minor correction...
The VHF TV band is from 54-88MHz (VHF-Lo, channels 2-6) and from 174-216MHz (VHF-Hi, channels 7-13). The gap between Lo and Hi has FM broadcast (88-108MHz) and a multitude of other services. You'll notice that TV-6 overlaps the bottom of the FM broadcast band, hence the ability to pick up TV-6 audio on FM broadcast receivers.
And yes, while the line-of-sight restriction and shadowing is not near as bad as at microwave frequencies, it is noticeable throughout the VHF bands.
Slashdot Mirror
Do not pay extra on your mortgage. While you will feel better watching your balance drop, your bank will not care. Miss a payment and watch all those extra dollars and equity disappear. Better: place the money in a savings account. When the balances equal, pay off the house. In the meantime, you will have the money in the bank in case of job loss, medical emergency, or home improvement. Being able to pay the mortgage in a crisis is more important than the balance.
This is incredibly important and very few people seem to know it. Keep your cash. The closer you are to paying off your mortgage, the better it will be for the bank to repossess your house. If you owe a lot relative to the value, or better yet are underwater, the bank doesn't want your house.
Keeping the extra cash yourself is excellent insurance, but you MUST KEEP THE CASH, DON'T SPEND IT!
To get a better return you can lock up your cash in CDs (Ally Bank used to have the shortest interest penalty if you have to access early a 5yr CD) or iBonds (no access at all for the first year, 3 month penalty the next 4 years, no state income taxes, other possible tax advantages). Some people keep the extra cash in a high yield checking account, but that doesn't work for me.
Choose a few key items, placed carefully.
Then learn trompe l'oeil.
sdb
I doubt Florida has tree regulations that affect every tree anywhere on private property.
Lots of cities in lots of states have regulations affecting trees on private property. The most frequently controlled are trees along the public street and sometimes any tree in the front of the house.
Innumerable housing developments have covenants or deed restrictions that put requirements on trees. Anywhere from how many you can or cannot have, to what type, to what size, to requiring professional arborists to care for them, etc.
Well you could do it on your own just as you described. Make it as fancy or as simple as you like. Hook up some cells in various places on your roof to an arduino's analog inputs, write some arduino code to read the output and send it up to the PC, write some code on the PC to read and store the readings. Write some more PC code to analyze the readings, or simply pull them directly into a spreadsheet. Then wait a year or more to get comprehensive readings, and hope your sample is truly representative of what a full install will experience.
Or you could it on your own in a much shorter time using (expensive) tools like the Solar Pathfinder or cheaper (more cumbersome) home-made equivalents to evaluate your solar potential.
Or you could call a local installer (or multiple) to come out and do a site survey using similar tools, and to give you a bid. The site survey should include all the info re. solar potential and the bid will let you know the capital cost, both of which you will need to know to make a decision.
As part of your analysis, consider whether you can take advantage of net metering and time of day billing to minimize the amount of solar needed to offset your bill. Consider whether you can carry over excess solar credit from month to month (annual zeroing) or if your utility does monthly zeroing, or if (very rare) you can get paid cash at retail prices for your excess production. Consider whether you are doing this for economic, environmental or "just for fun" reasons (or a combination).
An opinion, by nature, cannot be "correct". It can either agree or disagree with the opinions of others.
That opinion presumes no impartial standard of truth. Counter example: an opinion about a provable fact. It doesn't matter how much I announce my opinion that gravity does not exist or that the world is planar. Those opinions are incorrect. Whereas if it is my opinion (and it is) that gravity does exist and that the world is an oblate spheroid then my opinions agree with the facts and are thus correct.
Unless of course your opinion is that facts are simply widely shared opinions. In that case there is no "correct" and you are, of course, entitled to your opinion.
How long before you decide to rail against the cafeteria for not offering you the foods you want, prepared how you want, and for a subsidized price too?
As soon as they act with similar stupidity as locking out the internet. Say for example, telling me I have to be there for lunch promptly at 1:50pm, and the only thing they'll be serving at that time is peanut butter. Only peanut butter.
Oh, and some schools living on campus IS a requirement.
Proxy your traffic. If there is any connection thru the firewall to a system you control, you can proxy thru it. The tighter the firewall the more annoying and performance impact it will be, but it will work.
Do they blacklist or whitelist? Blacklist means you have a good chance. With a whitelist, aka they lock it down so you can only connect to a few specific internet sites, you may be SOL.
Some places firewall to protect from legal liability, "we have a firewall and we block that site/content but the offender bypassed our firewall." If you bypass the firewall, you take the blame and responsiblity squarely on yourself.
Some places firewall to protect from problems caused by the clueless, so if you bypass the firewall, do try not to cause problems for other network users.
Some places firewall because they themselves are clueless and/or frightened. Not much help for that, I'm afraid.
Remember the correct pattern of thought... Think of the firewall as your ultimate university exam. Pass it. Quietly. This means you first need to learn about the subject -- networking, protocols, tunneling and firewalls in general, and your university firewall specifically. It will be very educational, and isn't that why you are in school?
Enjoy learning.
Oh yes, powering from the lights works great.
Until they want to watch a video during class.
http://pjradcliffe.wordpress.com/open-usb-io/
It's a cool board.
The R-Pi is cheaper (by design).
I used to work with 14 gauge wire, 12 gauge wire, and 10 gauge wire. It is significantly harder to route 10 gauge wire. Even more so if you already have insulation and drywall up.
That is total nonsense.
The only part "significantly harder" with a 10ga run is the termination in the boxes at the ends. Yes, thicker, stiffer wire does make it harder to attach the device and fold the working length nicely to fit back into the box. My 4ga and 6ga runs were significantly harder than 12ga and 10ga. 10ga compared to 12ga or 14ga? Any difference in wire is totally insignificant compared to the job itself.
Well, that and carrying a 500ft+ spool of one vs the other...
Avoid pointy hair? LOL, ain't no way! You're already 1/2 there...
No matter what, as the boss you are going to be the bad guy at least once in a while.
No matter what, you are going to be less familiar with the technical details of the work being done and the issues involved than the guys in the trenches.
With that said, you can avoid the worst behaviors of the PHB. With your technical background, if you keep it up, you will be able to know which developers are BS'ing you and which give advice and information you can trust. Cultivate those whom you can trust and respect their judgment. Using your own knowledge and what you learn from your team, represent your team to your superiors and peers and protect your team from the political turmoil as much as possible.
Good luck.
Do they have IE9 for XP? Not last I checked...
I have found it impossible to keep a printed password list up to date.
1) Keep passwords in an encrypted file. Change them whenever you want.
2) Distribute encrypted file as needed for backup and authorized access. (e.g. wife knows where to access the current encrypted file, and on any password change push the encrypted file to each family member/trustee in order 1) to have a current offsite backup, 2) so they have the file.)
3) The final step is to keep the encryption key for that file on paper, in a sealed envelope, where it is accessible, and access is detectable. If you change the encryption key, create a new sealed envelope. If an envelope is compromised, change all passwords and the encryption key. For example, you might keep redundant envelopes in a safe at home, in a joint safe deposit box (beware: a single-owner safe deposit box is sealed upon death of the owner pending probate), and with your will at your attorney.
By replicating the above steps as desired you can partition your password storage however you desire in order to accommodate different levels of trust among your trustees.
By using a loosely structured plain-text file I can also keep other important information there -- list of financial accounts/assets, important serial numbers, key contacts, ...
You might want to include in your envelope(s) a page of instructions on how to access and decrypt the file. Tailor the instructions to the level of your audience, or at the very least such that a person reasonably skilled could follow them to decrypt your passwords.
Sounds like military research discovered 5150 ...
What is "doing it well" supposed to mean?
When you have a hardware interrupt and a stack to save registers and a stack pointer to switch to a client stack then preemptive multitasking works great. There is nothing "not well" about it and to prove it we have multiple decades of systems doing preemptive multitasking very well with even less capability than a Z80. Just because Apple and Microsoft (and evidently RISCOS) avoided it does not mean it could not have been done well.
Oh, and don't bring up an MMU and/or memory protection or even priviledged instructions. Those have nothing to do with doing premptive multitasking "well" even if many people do confuse them.
"the hardware permitted it" ? What, it didn't even have interrupts? It was no challenge to do pre-emptive multitasking on a 8080 or a Z80 circa 1979. It's hard to believe it couldn't have been done on ARM 8-10 years later.
And stupid things like "you cannot port forward to non DHCP addresses" and all of its similarly stupid friends are why openwrt or ddwrt is a requirement for me (and probably the OP).
I literally gave away several routers and went back to my old stuff that runs openwrt, or ddwrt, or tomato because "logic [that] defies description" has no place in my environment.
Because that cable only works for devices which output analog thru the hdmi connector, and not a typical computer. And judging by the interview answer, it stands 0 chance of working with the Rasberry Pi.
NOTE: this cable don't support signal from VCR, COMPUTER or LAPTOP output.
If you get a wrong fax it will send you a different CSID and then you know that something is not right.
LOL, tell it to the mortgage broker who sent me 30 copies of loan documents one weekend instead of sending them to his underwriter!
He sent them to my voice line. Ever had a voice line ring every couple of minutes with a fax tone? Finally I hooked up a fax modem and sucked in the data. I faxed back a note that they had messed up. I tried to call all the numbers I could find to let them know they were screwed. The documents kept coming the rest of the day.
Don't really need an existing copy of windows. Just something you can use to partition and format the usb drive, copy over the windows files, then boot the Windows stuff.
Usually if you partition and format with Windows, it puts enough code in the MBR and boot sector to boot windows. There are multiple ways to get that or replace it with free equivalents.
no doubt
If you don't control it, you don't own it. If you don't own it, you cannot rely on it.
Anything less than full control (i.e. you have the source and you can do with it what you will) means your usage is subject to the whims of those who do control it.
In other words, control it or lose it.
Buying service in the 'cloud'? Good luck with that. If you don't control it, your service provider controls you.
Relying on some closed source product provided by a big-name or no-name tech company? Good luck with that. That product might be discontinued tomorrow. This is why companies will often require source code for mission critical business apps, if not hands on access at least held in escrow, "just in case."
Yeah, I'm a control freak.
Now you know why.
the VHF TV band ( 87.5-87.9 MHz ) has shadowing problems just like FM radio which operates at 88 to 108 MHZ ( nominal ).
Minor correction...
The VHF TV band is from 54-88MHz (VHF-Lo, channels 2-6) and from 174-216MHz (VHF-Hi, channels 7-13). The gap between Lo and Hi has FM broadcast (88-108MHz) and a multitude of other services. You'll notice that TV-6 overlaps the bottom of the FM broadcast band, hence the ability to pick up TV-6 audio on FM broadcast receivers.
And yes, while the line-of-sight restriction and shadowing is not near as bad as at microwave frequencies, it is noticeable throughout the VHF bands.
Who does these headlines? When something is lost, you do not have it any more.
Did the DoD really lose the files?
Or did they simply let some unauthorized someone(s) get a copy of said files?
We hunted them to the brink of extinction once, we can do it again.
Whales: The biofuel before fossil fuel was cool!