A Bluetooth keyboard is an order of magnitude cheaper than a laptop, and in combination with an iPad is more portable too.
And the iPad is twice the cost of a decent laptop. Your point is? Based on your incessant touting of the iPad as a real development tool, I can only conclude that you are trying to convince someone that $500 spent on a toy was somehow an investment in something other than your personal amusement.
So, IMHO, your statements show a mindset stuck in somewhat dated concepts about what constitutes a useful device or not. The iPad/Android etc are no less powerful that a web browser with access to the Net (where the millions of Google's Linux boxen will crunch all sorts of stuff for you; search; map, translate etc).
I have to agree with the GP for the most part. I have paid for apps for the iphone which perform many of the functions he was talking about. Although I can technically do the work, it can hardly be described as functional. I would be just as well off trying to use my PS2 to write software. Its just not the right tool for the job. Anyone who deliberately uses the wrong tool for a job, just to say they can, strikes me as something of a tool themselves...
500 amp mains? The heck do you plan to do that draws 120 kilowatts? Run 1200 incandescent bulbs?
50 years ago, I would have been looked at funny for wanting 100 Amp mains. 50 was the common amount. Today, most new installations are done with 200 amp mains. 500 isn't that abnormal, and will not cost much more than 200. If you already have 200, then good enough. If you've got 100's or god forbid, 50s then you might as well go for 500 if you're doing the work anyway.
Plumbing is hard because you need to use a $150 wrench, once, to install some weird gasket that you can't buy at a big box store. Hire that out along with drywall.
Do not: I repeat: Do not hire out your plumbing. The vast majority of plumbers are doing one of three things:
(1) Installing old school copper: This is extremely expensive and time consuming. Plumbers will charge 4 to 5 times what the installation should cost, in materials costs alone. In addition, copper takes about 10 times as long to install as modern PEX, even for a professional.
(2) Installing everything with Sharkbite (tm), or similar connections using home depot quality PEX. This will work just fine, but the contractor will charge you for the connectors +50% markup, and those connectors are unreasonably expensive as it is.
(3) Install everything with crimp style (as seen at home depot) connections. The trouble with these connections is that they eventually fail. It may take 20 years, but what does the plumber care, in 20 years he wont be around to have to fix it.
The best way to get the job done these days is to use "expansion style" PEX connectors. These connectors will last longer than the building, and are very inexpensive compared to the Sharkbite (tm) variety. The biggest issue with expansion style connectors is the tool needed to make the connections. The cheapest route will cost about $150, and requires a fair amount of upper body strength. For a single install, this is probably your best bet. Even including the cost of the tool, it will still be much cheaper than a plumber, and will only cost you about 16 hours to finish the rough plumb-in of two bathrooms and a kitchen. (I can do it in 8 to 10 hours, but I do this all the time.) For the more hard-core, you can get an electric version of the expansion tool for about $450. This will cut your install time by 40%, and save your arms. If you plan on doing this to more than one house, the tool may be worth the money. Using the motorized tool, you can do the install in about 10 hours (I can do it in 6). Lastly, just having the tool is not the end of it. Do your homework. There is a right way and a wrong way to use the tools. If you do it right, you will have connections that will outlive you by a wide margin. Doing it the wrong way, and your connections will leak from day one. Ask your local plumbing supply warehouse for more information.
As a former builder I can tell you, we don't do that. Telling someone it will take longer is a great way to lose a bid... and thus never get a chance to even start the job.
The "Scotty Principle" works only if you have a nice safe government paycheck.
I have to second that. Home owners never believe contractors who tell them a realistic (much less padded) estimate for how long a project will take. For some reason most homeowners think you can Drywall, Spackle and sand 2000 Square feet in a day...
I just finished a 2000 square foot renovation project. Complete teardown (to the frame, and in some instances even that had to go). The project took two of us working on it part time: 5 years to complete. The original budget for the project was $75,000. Final expenses ended up around $180,000. We definitely went overkill. Individual thermostat control for each room, Radiant floor heating, and Silent Valance cooling. Whole house Gbit Ether, CATV / phone to every room. Satellite hookup on the roof (even though we don't use it, the box is there and properly wired). 15 New skylights with motorized remote controls. Heat Pump heat and cool with Natural Gas backup. I skipped the Geothermal, but I highly recommend it for the long run. I can still switch the heat pump for a geothermal unit, and will probably do so when the heat pump eventually dies.
Additional items that are definitely worth the money, but don't have any geek shininess to them: Spray foam insulation. If you have the walls open anyway, put in spray foam. at 7.5 inches thick (exterior wall), the stuff has an R value of around 50, and unlike all other forms of insulation, it wont degrade over time. I have several rooms in my house that you can heat with a candle. My total heating bill is less than the cost of running the household appliances, even in the dead of winter.
You'll also want to make sure you have 500 AMP mains. This will ensure you have adequate power for everything in the future. Along with this, run at least two separate strings of 20 Amp outlets to every room. You never appreciate how much power modern equipment can draw until you try to run your mini-fridge, microwave, and 1000 watt stereo, only to discover that all the outlets in the house share a single 15 amp breaker... I have 2 20 amp circuits for every room. I can run most of a normal persons household on the power handling ability of half my living room, but I'm pretty sure My house is ready to handle tomorrows do-hickeys. I would also recommend getting some LED accent lighting for common areas like kitchens and baths. This stuff can be very dim, but provide enough light to act as a night light. Very cool to have instead of turning on bright lights to go the bathroom in the middle of the night and waking up the whole house.
Yeah. call me when you have one of those this small...
These are almost exactly the same dimensions, and can support two 12 pin PMods, or five 6 pin PMods. You could hook up the OLED display PMod to one of these things without any wiring necessary at all, plug and play. Instant 128 X 32 pixel display. Try doing that with an Arduino and let me know how that turns out for you.
I'll tell you 'why arduino': its the community, the examples, the help, the web blogs that have snippets you need to integrate and get a product working, fast.
THAT's why.
its not about the chip. there were always better chips.
the abstraction, community support is what makes the system a winner.
Funny, but I always thought those were the things that made the Arduino platform the weakest.
My sister is an artist. She is involved with Film/Video, and as such has high exposure to Information technology. She recently undertook a project involving a low end video switcher, and an Arduino board. The project was relatively simple, but involved more I/O than a stock Arduino is capable of. She had two halves of the project working by virtue of being able to get the code from two other projects, but had no idea how to integrate the whole. Worse, because the Arduino board she got has very limited I/O, there was no way she could use it without some kind of add-on board to break out more I/O. She got frustrated because it was nowhere near as easy as she was told it would be (Not having basic understanding of circuits is a critical limitation). Several of her artist friends had heard about the Arduino and had her convinced that the whole thing would take her a day or two of tinkering at the most. At the end of three weeks, and many hundreds of dollars in books and parts invested, she came to me with her tail between her legs asking for help. The "community support", you are so fond of just told her that her project was too big for her to handle. The reality was that the Arduino board was simply too limited for what she wanted to do. The Digilent line I listed above was just the ticket. One Digilent u board, with three PMods, and she was off and running. The sample code was enough to get her moving, and I taught her the circuitry basics she no longer needed just in case she wanted to try some advanced stuff. In all, she could have saved three weeks and several hundred dollars if she hadn't been lied to by the Arduino community who told her that embedded design is easy enough for anyone to handle without any kind of formal training. The reality is that most people without any kind of programming grounding do not have the foundation they need to be able to handle anything more complicated than making the Arduino behave as a glorified light switch. Sure there are lots of cool programs out there, but putting two or more of them together is not practical because of the boards limitations. Using any one of them by itself, it would be cheaper to buy a commercial product to do just that one function (No tinkering necessary). That's why the PMods are so great. The bigger boards can handle many of them at once, allowing your to build your project lego style. Integrating it all will still require some programming skill, but the Digilent line collapses the problems almost entirely into the software domain.
We were playing back 44.1KHz WAV files using a 68HC11 a big PROM chip and a DAC, probably before you were born....
Now get off my lawn!
I can remember trying to get near and far calls working with the GCC cross compiler back when the B32 version of the HC12 came out. Damn that was obnoxious. It was that or write custom calling routines in 68HC12 assembler. God help you if your project wouldn't fit in the low 64K... The alternative was to cough up $500 for a green hills license.
All I can say is that Arduino was ok for its time, but there are plenty of other better alternatives out there. Take the Digilent line of uController boards For example. the MX3CK is basically the Arduino Due with a whole ton better IO. If you want really advanced, jump to the MX7CK and kick the crap out of that Arduino. For additional fun take a look at their Pmods. Point being, there are plenty of better alternatives to the Arduino out there already; alternatives that compete and defeat on features and cost.
So what you're really saying is that you wouldn't want him leaving evidence of all the illegal shit you do at your company.
Now I get it.
Every college party I ever heard of was a massively illegal act. That didn't stop people, since kids will be kids, but it doesn't change the facts. Law enforcement just looks the other way, by and large. When you leave a permanent record that you are doing illegal things, you open up Pandora's box. I will submit that most people don't obey posted speed limits, but its another thing to make a video of you demonstrably exceeding the speed limit by 30 MPH, and post it on YouTube. The first act is common enough and with low enough risk to be somewhat tolerable. The second is a deliberate flaunting of the law that is both extraordinary and dangerous. Or did you think that anyone should be able to do monumentally stupid things, brag about it, and walk away without consequences?
Furthermore, if you can't tell a candidate is an asshat long before you decide to google them, then your hiring practices need some work.
You missed the point: Long before the applicant gets the chance to say anything, their background check has already been completed. The only reason the guy I mentioned even got a phone call was because he was recommended by a current employee. Otherwise the background check would have been done first, and the interview would never have taken place. Normally inside recommendations move an applicant into the interview pile even if they do not meet 100% of the qualifications (saves us a bunch of effort if we can pass along a guy who the team is willing to take without having to wade through the resume pile. We can just interview the one candidate; If they pass, we skip the rest of the applicants altogether. The background check is a formality, but it still gets done for this very reason.)
I'm not sure anybody would ever want to work for you if you summarily dismiss people for things you find questionable. Was he a Nazi, having sex with goats, or attending a Klan meeting? If not, why in the hell would you care? Do you want everyone to be a clone of you or your corporation? Do you not value individualism and the inherent strengths of hiring a diverse pool of employees? I'm pretty sure I can find something somebody will find questionable about you, but that's their hangup. Smart companies understand this and don't go on social media witch hunts when hiring candidates.
People do stupid things. Young people do lots of stupid things. We all know that, but as a corporate officer, our job is to protect the company from risk as best we can. An employee with a demonstrated history of publicly bad judgement is a risk. No company will willingly take on risk if it doesn't have to, unless its officers are derelict in their duties. If an applicant is the only one who can do what is needed, the company might choose to take them, but these days, you get many times the number of applicants you used to. You show me a company that doesn't do a thorough background check as part of its hiring practices, and I'll show you a company that hasn't been burned yet. Everything an employee does has the potential to reflect negatively on a company. Just ask the secret service about their agents behavior in south America. Those people did, the things they did, on their own time, but it still reflected negatively on their employer. Funny how that works.
I bet those agents were dynamite fun to be around though.
You don't think somebody wouldn't mention to friends, relatives, etc that the company they work for uses it? That a disgruntled ex employee of Facebook or a company that uses it wouldn't mention it?
It would become common knowledge very quickly and open up a shitstorm of trouble for FB.
You don't think its common practice for HR to do a simple Google search for every applicants public profile? So what if HR is looking at Facebook postings as well. Its not like people are compelled to post on Facebook. With a global economy, there are thousands of applicants for every position. Of the ones that are qualified, there can often be little to differentiate, so HR will use whatever means at their disposal to whittle the selection down to just a manageable number. Why else do you think job listings are so damn specific these days. They're not trying to get just that one guy out of a million, they're trying to weed out the other 999,000 applicants, and get down to a number they can work with. They are looking for any reason at all to disqualify, and thereby simplify the task of sorting through the remaining applicants. Facebook wont care because the vast majority of their users wont care. Slashdot != normal society.
So you declined an interview to a qualified applicant because they partied in college?
No where in that post did I say it was a party. In point of fact, it looked to be some kind of hazing ritual. It wasn't even the candidates involvement in the ritual that put the nails in the coffin. If it had been hearsay, we would have dismissed it. The part that got him permanently removed from consideration was that he was stupid enough to allow evidence of a crime to be permanently recorded. That kind of lapse in judgement we can do without. The posting of the pictures were obviously thought to have been private, but through one stupidity or another, the pictures were made publicly available. The moral of the story, is never trust any repository of legally admissible evidence that you, yourself, cannot legally set fire to and destroy.
"Anything you tweeted six months ago can and will be twisted to portray you in whatever light suits the prosecutor's agenda."
It amazes me that so few people understand how truly dangerous social media is. Everyone who uses it is creating a permanent record of things that used to be hearsay. Even the most innocuous posts can come back to haunt you. Like any corporation, people need to be exceptionally careful about the image they present, even if they believe it to be private. Failing to so so could easily affect ones entire life.
For example, Take a fellow we just received a resume for. The gentleman had all of the qualifications we were looking for, and did quite well on a phone interview. Googling for this guy produced some pictures of what we presumed to be college gatherings that demonstrated extremely poor judgement on this guys part. Final result: no in person interview, they guy is on our block list, and he will never even know why he didn't get an in person interview. How many different opportunities is he going to miss out on that he will never know he missed because of those photos. Same thing goes for all social media postings. How long before Facebook decides to start "enhancing their revenue" by providing this kind of damning information to HR services for a fee. The company I work for wouldn't hesitate for a second to pay for such a "search", and neither would a lot of places. Facebook has almost no real risk of exposure because no HR department would want to publicize this kind of research, and people would have no way of finding out they had been the "victim" of such a search.
We are not talking about 1997 Apple here. This is 2012 Apple with more money than God. Well, than Microsoft at least.
Followed by Apple deftly driving the price up, and letting M$ pay through the nose for a soon to be obsolete database. If there is one thing that history has proved its that Balmer can't resist paying twice what something is worth. He believes his customers should pay more than the products are worth, and likes to lead by example.
There is a lot of debate over that issue. China has, in many ways, a more capitalistic economy than the united states. State controlled industries are far more common in China, but regulation of non-state controlled commerce is much more lax than in the U.S. Unlike soviet Russia, The Chinese government is not the sole employer, and only strongly dominates industries which relate to what the ruling class perceives as its interests. It is an interesting political landscape, as the government has no direct accountability to its citizens, but is also free to take necessary but unpopular action for the greatest public good. Kind of like playing sim-city on a much larger scale. It is no accident that China is primarily ruled by engineers.
Well then, why doesn't the article suggest performing such tests and checks, but immediately jumps to conclusion that they are all bad? Maybe they should just get certified and have the offending logos removed instead?
Because the offending air bags were just dummy mock ups. No incendiary, no detonator, just a chunk of plastic with the logo on it. We're not talking about pirate copies, we're talking outright fraud...
Apple's lawyers might have been a little selective in how they presented some of this evidence to the court, by picking little parts of it that offered a different shade of nuance.
Thats not at all shocking. The problem is that Judge Koh (pronounced "Doh") failed to do her job, and keep the trial fair. She was a walking disaster on this trial. She pushed the trail far faster than it should have been, she failed to keep her personal feelings out of it, and apparently didn't even take the time to read the un-redacted documents she was presented with. The whole thing is going to appeal (of course), and will be turned over just on the failure of process alone. If there's any justice at all, Koh will be out on her ass for costing a fortune in legal expenses for all parties involved (including the tax payers), and producing nothing but fertilizer.
The real question is going to be what that does to the electric grid. No way we are ready for even 10% of the cars to be EV today - we simply do not have the generation capacity. Oh, and such cars are going to charge at home at night, so any solar PV system is useless. I do not see suburbs putting up wind turbines between houses, so we are going to have a real electric supply problem.
Electric vehicles do not use as much power off the grid as people think. To put it in perspective, a 20 mile per day commute uses the same electricity monthly as leaving four CRT monitors on all the time. They use only 25% of the consumption of a 4-TON AC unit during June, July and August (typical household AC) They use the same power monthly as a single 8000 BTU window air conditioner... Converting all of the private commuter vehicles to EVs today would only increase electricity consumption by 20%. While this would require some increase in infrastructure, it is not the end-of-the-world scenario that everyone keeps claiming. It is well within what we could achieve within the scope of normal market supply and demand. The introduction of the television had a much more profound impact on our electricity consumption...
You speak with a certain amount of sarcasm, but the laws actually have an interesting effect, and do affect the gas mileage.
The way it works is this. Each company must keeps its CAFE above the legal limit. To do this, they may not (by law) sell cars that are below the CAFE if their corporate average is currently below the CAFE. So, that means that Ford cant sell trucks because they are below the limit, but can sell Fusions and Focus'. Then when they sell enough of the little jobs, and their average comes up a little, then they can sell a few SUVs. The end result is that law of supply and demand will drive the cost of those SUVs through he roof, but the little econ o-box will get cheaper and cheaper. In fact, car companies may be willing to take a small loss on the econ o-box just so it can sell one high margin SUV. For the average citizen, it will make the gas-guzzlers financially out of reach, which is the way it should be.
I know a guy who bought a pickup truck (16 MPG), and drives it 40 miles a day commute because he can only afford the one vehicle. He got the truck because twice a year he uses it to haul yard materials home from the garden store... I suggested he could just rent a u haul, but he said he didn't want to spend the $100 bucks for a u haul... Just goes to show that most Americans have the financial savvy of a 10 year old.
Right now it's a comparison of industrial strength electric motors with consumer gas engines. As the electric car will become more popular, the same trade-offs will be made (weight, durability, price) as for consumer gas engines.
Umm, what? Lets take this whole thing point by point. You're clearly suffering from a lack of actual knowledge. Let me help you with that. To put this in perspective, I work for an industrial transportation company. We have a large commercial fleet of vehicles, some of them EVs, most conventional. We also have a large warehousing and freight forwarding operation which makes use of vast quantities of industrial electric motors. So, we can be described as having a pretty good perspective on all of the various technologies involved, as well as what would be described as expert knowledge of the operational profiles of the most industrial equipment available.
Window wiper motors, window motors, fan motors all die multiple times before the engine fails. Most cars are wrecked with a capable engine. Most engines are not economic viable once difficult-to-reach seals need be replaced. Nevertheless, gasoline engines have a huge tolerance for maluse and neglect (excessive play, valve problems, etc.), electric tends to be more of the ON/OFF type.
Without regular maintenance (weekly oil and water, Three month PMI, yearly state inspection and daily pre-trip inspection of our vehicles, they would quickly become dangerously non-functional. Engine problems are the usual trouble and engine failure is frequent enough that our vehicle specifications require easy engine replacement procedures compared to passenger vehicles. We typically go through 2 to three engines in a vehicles operational life of fifteen years. Typical mileage on the vehicles at retirement is between 300k and 600k miles. 400k is considered quite good for one of our engines (They are rated for 10,000 hours or 300k miles). By contrast, most of our vehicles are taken out of service with the original wiper motors, fan motors (only a small percentage of the fleet has electric fan motors) or water pumps. Even more telling, we can use the stats for the belt drive motors in use in our local warehousing facility. The drives are rated at 18kW continuous with peak load handling of 30kW for 10 seconds. We have around seventy five of them in our warehouse. I have been stationed in this building for ten years, and in that time, we have had one drive motor fail after a new variable speed controller was installed wrong and overloaded the motor (and itself). The MTBF on our motors from the manufacturer are 100,000 hours continuous operation, and 75,000 hours for 50% rapid duty cycle operation, but in our operation we have many motors that are well past the 200,000 mark, and none that have failed in service. The manufacturers don't even list MTBF information because its pretty meaningless. I had to go digging to even find Baldors specs on it, and they have a disclaimer that they really don't know what the expected life span is because almost all of their motors are decommissioned long before they fail. Whenever you hear about motor failures, its always because they're being overloaded / pushed beyond spec.
When both applications are compared in the same industrial environment, large freighters, heavy machinery, I've seen electrical (sub)engines always need be replaced multiple times, under far less demanding conditions. wartsila.
Yeah, whatever. Making electric motors last is a matter of correctly sizing the motor for the application. If you're constantly frying motors, its because you used a motor that is not large enough for the application. Going to the next size up will fix most of that problem for you. A sufficiently sized and maintained electric motor can and will last decades. We have several 275kW Baldors in our building that have been in service since the 50's. They are never run past 25% capacity which keeps them nice and cool. B
I own one EV (Miev)
I own four computers, my wifes laptop, many multitudes of gadgets, 5 Ton AC unit, Electric heat.
Average Monthly power usage 1400 kwh.
Car is used for daily 30 mile commute.
Daily car power usage: 13 kwh
Monthly car power usage: 273 kwh.
This is roughly a 20% increase over my existing power usage. I have, however, offset this by turning off two of my computers when I'm not using them. (120 watts each x 650 hours x 2 computers = 156 kwh. So just by implementing my own little power saving program, I have offset over half of the power usage of my car. My point is that we will have power supply problems without EVs all over the place, and simple power conservation can more than offset the usage if we so choose. If we're going to have a supply problem, it will happen with or without EVs, just from all the gadgets we have these days.
Slashdot Mirror
A Bluetooth keyboard is an order of magnitude cheaper than a laptop, and in combination with an iPad is more portable too.
And the iPad is twice the cost of a decent laptop. Your point is? Based on your incessant touting of the iPad as a real development tool, I can only conclude that you are trying to convince someone that $500 spent on a toy was somehow an investment in something other than your personal amusement.
-=Geoskd
So, IMHO, your statements show a mindset stuck in somewhat dated concepts about what constitutes a useful device or not. The iPad/Android etc are no less powerful that a web browser with access to the Net (where the millions of Google's Linux boxen will crunch all sorts of stuff for you; search; map, translate etc).
I have to agree with the GP for the most part. I have paid for apps for the iphone which perform many of the functions he was talking about. Although I can technically do the work, it can hardly be described as functional. I would be just as well off trying to use my PS2 to write software. Its just not the right tool for the job. Anyone who deliberately uses the wrong tool for a job, just to say they can, strikes me as something of a tool themselves...
-=Geoskd
500 amp mains? The heck do you plan to do that draws 120 kilowatts? Run 1200 incandescent bulbs?
50 years ago, I would have been looked at funny for wanting 100 Amp mains. 50 was the common amount. Today, most new installations are done with 200 amp mains. 500 isn't that abnormal, and will not cost much more than 200. If you already have 200, then good enough. If you've got 100's or god forbid, 50s then you might as well go for 500 if you're doing the work anyway.
-=Geoskd
countertops and cabinets alone is going to run you between 10-20k
FTFY.
-=Geoskd
Plumbing is hard because you need to use a $150 wrench, once, to install some weird gasket that you can't buy at a big box store. Hire that out along with drywall.
Do not: I repeat: Do not hire out your plumbing. The vast majority of plumbers are doing one of three things:
(1) Installing old school copper: This is extremely expensive and time consuming. Plumbers will charge 4 to 5 times what the installation should cost, in materials costs alone. In addition, copper takes about 10 times as long to install as modern PEX, even for a professional.
(2) Installing everything with Sharkbite (tm), or similar connections using home depot quality PEX. This will work just fine, but the contractor will charge you for the connectors +50% markup, and those connectors are unreasonably expensive as it is.
(3) Install everything with crimp style (as seen at home depot) connections. The trouble with these connections is that they eventually fail. It may take 20 years, but what does the plumber care, in 20 years he wont be around to have to fix it.
The best way to get the job done these days is to use "expansion style" PEX connectors. These connectors will last longer than the building, and are very inexpensive compared to the Sharkbite (tm) variety. The biggest issue with expansion style connectors is the tool needed to make the connections. The cheapest route will cost about $150, and requires a fair amount of upper body strength. For a single install, this is probably your best bet. Even including the cost of the tool, it will still be much cheaper than a plumber, and will only cost you about 16 hours to finish the rough plumb-in of two bathrooms and a kitchen. (I can do it in 8 to 10 hours, but I do this all the time.) For the more hard-core, you can get an electric version of the expansion tool for about $450. This will cut your install time by 40%, and save your arms. If you plan on doing this to more than one house, the tool may be worth the money. Using the motorized tool, you can do the install in about 10 hours (I can do it in 6). Lastly, just having the tool is not the end of it. Do your homework. There is a right way and a wrong way to use the tools. If you do it right, you will have connections that will outlive you by a wide margin. Doing it the wrong way, and your connections will leak from day one. Ask your local plumbing supply warehouse for more information.
-=Geoskd
As a former builder I can tell you, we don't do that. Telling someone it will take longer is a great way to lose a bid... and thus never get a chance to even start the job. The "Scotty Principle" works only if you have a nice safe government paycheck.
I have to second that. Home owners never believe contractors who tell them a realistic (much less padded) estimate for how long a project will take. For some reason most homeowners think you can Drywall, Spackle and sand 2000 Square feet in a day...
I just finished a 2000 square foot renovation project. Complete teardown (to the frame, and in some instances even that had to go). The project took two of us working on it part time: 5 years to complete. The original budget for the project was $75,000. Final expenses ended up around $180,000. We definitely went overkill. Individual thermostat control for each room, Radiant floor heating, and Silent Valance cooling. Whole house Gbit Ether, CATV / phone to every room. Satellite hookup on the roof (even though we don't use it, the box is there and properly wired). 15 New skylights with motorized remote controls. Heat Pump heat and cool with Natural Gas backup. I skipped the Geothermal, but I highly recommend it for the long run. I can still switch the heat pump for a geothermal unit, and will probably do so when the heat pump eventually dies.
Additional items that are definitely worth the money, but don't have any geek shininess to them: Spray foam insulation. If you have the walls open anyway, put in spray foam. at 7.5 inches thick (exterior wall), the stuff has an R value of around 50, and unlike all other forms of insulation, it wont degrade over time. I have several rooms in my house that you can heat with a candle. My total heating bill is less than the cost of running the household appliances, even in the dead of winter.
You'll also want to make sure you have 500 AMP mains. This will ensure you have adequate power for everything in the future. Along with this, run at least two separate strings of 20 Amp outlets to every room. You never appreciate how much power modern equipment can draw until you try to run your mini-fridge, microwave, and 1000 watt stereo, only to discover that all the outlets in the house share a single 15 amp breaker... I have 2 20 amp circuits for every room. I can run most of a normal persons household on the power handling ability of half my living room, but I'm pretty sure My house is ready to handle tomorrows do-hickeys. I would also recommend getting some LED accent lighting for common areas like kitchens and baths. This stuff can be very dim, but provide enough light to act as a night light. Very cool to have instead of turning on bright lights to go the bathroom in the middle of the night and waking up the whole house.
-=Geoskd
Yeah. call me when you have one of those this small...
These are almost exactly the same dimensions, and can support two 12 pin PMods, or five 6 pin PMods. You could hook up the OLED display PMod to one of these things without any wiring necessary at all, plug and play. Instant 128 X 32 pixel display. Try doing that with an Arduino and let me know how that turns out for you.
-=Geoskd
I'll tell you 'why arduino': its the community, the examples, the help, the web blogs that have snippets you need to integrate and get a product working, fast.
THAT's why.
its not about the chip. there were always better chips.
the abstraction, community support is what makes the system a winner.
Funny, but I always thought those were the things that made the Arduino platform the weakest.
My sister is an artist. She is involved with Film/Video, and as such has high exposure to Information technology. She recently undertook a project involving a low end video switcher, and an Arduino board. The project was relatively simple, but involved more I/O than a stock Arduino is capable of. She had two halves of the project working by virtue of being able to get the code from two other projects, but had no idea how to integrate the whole. Worse, because the Arduino board she got has very limited I/O, there was no way she could use it without some kind of add-on board to break out more I/O. She got frustrated because it was nowhere near as easy as she was told it would be (Not having basic understanding of circuits is a critical limitation). Several of her artist friends had heard about the Arduino and had her convinced that the whole thing would take her a day or two of tinkering at the most. At the end of three weeks, and many hundreds of dollars in books and parts invested, she came to me with her tail between her legs asking for help. The "community support", you are so fond of just told her that her project was too big for her to handle. The reality was that the Arduino board was simply too limited for what she wanted to do. The Digilent line I listed above was just the ticket. One Digilent u board, with three PMods, and she was off and running. The sample code was enough to get her moving, and I taught her the circuitry basics she no longer needed just in case she wanted to try some advanced stuff. In all, she could have saved three weeks and several hundred dollars if she hadn't been lied to by the Arduino community who told her that embedded design is easy enough for anyone to handle without any kind of formal training. The reality is that most people without any kind of programming grounding do not have the foundation they need to be able to handle anything more complicated than making the Arduino behave as a glorified light switch. Sure there are lots of cool programs out there, but putting two or more of them together is not practical because of the boards limitations. Using any one of them by itself, it would be cheaper to buy a commercial product to do just that one function (No tinkering necessary). That's why the PMods are so great. The bigger boards can handle many of them at once, allowing your to build your project lego style. Integrating it all will still require some programming skill, but the Digilent line collapses the problems almost entirely into the software domain.
-=Geoskd
We were playing back 44.1KHz WAV files using a 68HC11 a big PROM chip and a DAC, probably before you were born.... Now get off my lawn!
I can remember trying to get near and far calls working with the GCC cross compiler back when the B32 version of the HC12 came out. Damn that was obnoxious. It was that or write custom calling routines in 68HC12 assembler. God help you if your project wouldn't fit in the low 64K... The alternative was to cough up $500 for a green hills license.
-=Geoskd
All I can say is that Arduino was ok for its time, but there are plenty of other better alternatives out there. Take the Digilent line of uController boards For example. the MX3CK is basically the Arduino Due with a whole ton better IO. If you want really advanced, jump to the MX7CK and kick the crap out of that Arduino. For additional fun take a look at their Pmods. Point being, there are plenty of better alternatives to the Arduino out there already; alternatives that compete and defeat on features and cost.
-=Geoskd
So what you're really saying is that you wouldn't want him leaving evidence of all the illegal shit you do at your company. Now I get it.
Every college party I ever heard of was a massively illegal act. That didn't stop people, since kids will be kids, but it doesn't change the facts. Law enforcement just looks the other way, by and large. When you leave a permanent record that you are doing illegal things, you open up Pandora's box. I will submit that most people don't obey posted speed limits, but its another thing to make a video of you demonstrably exceeding the speed limit by 30 MPH, and post it on YouTube. The first act is common enough and with low enough risk to be somewhat tolerable. The second is a deliberate flaunting of the law that is both extraordinary and dangerous. Or did you think that anyone should be able to do monumentally stupid things, brag about it, and walk away without consequences?
-=Geoskd
Furthermore, if you can't tell a candidate is an asshat long before you decide to google them, then your hiring practices need some work.
You missed the point: Long before the applicant gets the chance to say anything, their background check has already been completed. The only reason the guy I mentioned even got a phone call was because he was recommended by a current employee. Otherwise the background check would have been done first, and the interview would never have taken place. Normally inside recommendations move an applicant into the interview pile even if they do not meet 100% of the qualifications (saves us a bunch of effort if we can pass along a guy who the team is willing to take without having to wade through the resume pile. We can just interview the one candidate; If they pass, we skip the rest of the applicants altogether. The background check is a formality, but it still gets done for this very reason.)
-=Geoskd
I'm not sure anybody would ever want to work for you if you summarily dismiss people for things you find questionable. Was he a Nazi, having sex with goats, or attending a Klan meeting? If not, why in the hell would you care? Do you want everyone to be a clone of you or your corporation? Do you not value individualism and the inherent strengths of hiring a diverse pool of employees? I'm pretty sure I can find something somebody will find questionable about you, but that's their hangup. Smart companies understand this and don't go on social media witch hunts when hiring candidates.
People do stupid things. Young people do lots of stupid things. We all know that, but as a corporate officer, our job is to protect the company from risk as best we can. An employee with a demonstrated history of publicly bad judgement is a risk. No company will willingly take on risk if it doesn't have to, unless its officers are derelict in their duties. If an applicant is the only one who can do what is needed, the company might choose to take them, but these days, you get many times the number of applicants you used to. You show me a company that doesn't do a thorough background check as part of its hiring practices, and I'll show you a company that hasn't been burned yet. Everything an employee does has the potential to reflect negatively on a company. Just ask the secret service about their agents behavior in south America. Those people did, the things they did, on their own time, but it still reflected negatively on their employer. Funny how that works.
I bet those agents were dynamite fun to be around though.
-=Geoskd
You don't think somebody wouldn't mention to friends, relatives, etc that the company they work for uses it? That a disgruntled ex employee of Facebook or a company that uses it wouldn't mention it?
It would become common knowledge very quickly and open up a shitstorm of trouble for FB.
You don't think its common practice for HR to do a simple Google search for every applicants public profile? So what if HR is looking at Facebook postings as well. Its not like people are compelled to post on Facebook. With a global economy, there are thousands of applicants for every position. Of the ones that are qualified, there can often be little to differentiate, so HR will use whatever means at their disposal to whittle the selection down to just a manageable number. Why else do you think job listings are so damn specific these days. They're not trying to get just that one guy out of a million, they're trying to weed out the other 999,000 applicants, and get down to a number they can work with. They are looking for any reason at all to disqualify, and thereby simplify the task of sorting through the remaining applicants. Facebook wont care because the vast majority of their users wont care. Slashdot != normal society.
-=Geoskd
So you declined an interview to a qualified applicant because they partied in college?
No where in that post did I say it was a party. In point of fact, it looked to be some kind of hazing ritual. It wasn't even the candidates involvement in the ritual that put the nails in the coffin. If it had been hearsay, we would have dismissed it. The part that got him permanently removed from consideration was that he was stupid enough to allow evidence of a crime to be permanently recorded. That kind of lapse in judgement we can do without. The posting of the pictures were obviously thought to have been private, but through one stupidity or another, the pictures were made publicly available. The moral of the story, is never trust any repository of legally admissible evidence that you, yourself, cannot legally set fire to and destroy.
-=Geoskd
"Anything you tweeted six months ago can and will be twisted to portray you in whatever light suits the prosecutor's agenda."
It amazes me that so few people understand how truly dangerous social media is. Everyone who uses it is creating a permanent record of things that used to be hearsay. Even the most innocuous posts can come back to haunt you. Like any corporation, people need to be exceptionally careful about the image they present, even if they believe it to be private. Failing to so so could easily affect ones entire life.
For example, Take a fellow we just received a resume for. The gentleman had all of the qualifications we were looking for, and did quite well on a phone interview. Googling for this guy produced some pictures of what we presumed to be college gatherings that demonstrated extremely poor judgement on this guys part. Final result: no in person interview, they guy is on our block list, and he will never even know why he didn't get an in person interview. How many different opportunities is he going to miss out on that he will never know he missed because of those photos. Same thing goes for all social media postings. How long before Facebook decides to start "enhancing their revenue" by providing this kind of damning information to HR services for a fee. The company I work for wouldn't hesitate for a second to pay for such a "search", and neither would a lot of places. Facebook has almost no real risk of exposure because no HR department would want to publicize this kind of research, and people would have no way of finding out they had been the "victim" of such a search.
-=Geoskd
Response from Apple to MSFT. Bring it on!
We are not talking about 1997 Apple here. This is 2012 Apple with more money than God. Well, than Microsoft at least.
Followed by Apple deftly driving the price up, and letting M$ pay through the nose for a soon to be obsolete database. If there is one thing that history has proved its that Balmer can't resist paying twice what something is worth. He believes his customers should pay more than the products are worth, and likes to lead by example.
-=Geoskd
.. They just aren't making PROFIT.
Companies live and die by profit. You can have all the market share in the world, but you will die just the same if you are loosing money.
-=Geoskd
Except China is communist.
There is a lot of debate over that issue. China has, in many ways, a more capitalistic economy than the united states. State controlled industries are far more common in China, but regulation of non-state controlled commerce is much more lax than in the U.S. Unlike soviet Russia, The Chinese government is not the sole employer, and only strongly dominates industries which relate to what the ruling class perceives as its interests. It is an interesting political landscape, as the government has no direct accountability to its citizens, but is also free to take necessary but unpopular action for the greatest public good. Kind of like playing sim-city on a much larger scale. It is no accident that China is primarily ruled by engineers.
-=Geoskd
Well then, why doesn't the article suggest performing such tests and checks, but immediately jumps to conclusion that they are all bad? Maybe they should just get certified and have the offending logos removed instead?
Because the offending air bags were just dummy mock ups. No incendiary, no detonator, just a chunk of plastic with the logo on it. We're not talking about pirate copies, we're talking outright fraud...
-=Geoskd
Apple's lawyers might have been a little selective in how they presented some of this evidence to the court, by picking little parts of it that offered a different shade of nuance.
Thats not at all shocking. The problem is that Judge Koh (pronounced "Doh") failed to do her job, and keep the trial fair. She was a walking disaster on this trial. She pushed the trail far faster than it should have been, she failed to keep her personal feelings out of it, and apparently didn't even take the time to read the un-redacted documents she was presented with. The whole thing is going to appeal (of course), and will be turned over just on the failure of process alone. If there's any justice at all, Koh will be out on her ass for costing a fortune in legal expenses for all parties involved (including the tax payers), and producing nothing but fertilizer.
-=Geoskd
The real question is going to be what that does to the electric grid. No way we are ready for even 10% of the cars to be EV today - we simply do not have the generation capacity. Oh, and such cars are going to charge at home at night, so any solar PV system is useless. I do not see suburbs putting up wind turbines between houses, so we are going to have a real electric supply problem.
Electric vehicles do not use as much power off the grid as people think. To put it in perspective, a 20 mile per day commute uses the same electricity monthly as leaving four CRT monitors on all the time. They use only 25% of the consumption of a 4-TON AC unit during June, July and August (typical household AC) They use the same power monthly as a single 8000 BTU window air conditioner... Converting all of the private commuter vehicles to EVs today would only increase electricity consumption by 20%. While this would require some increase in infrastructure, it is not the end-of-the-world scenario that everyone keeps claiming. It is well within what we could achieve within the scope of normal market supply and demand. The introduction of the television had a much more profound impact on our electricity consumption...
-=Geoskd
You speak with a certain amount of sarcasm, but the laws actually have an interesting effect, and do affect the gas mileage.
The way it works is this. Each company must keeps its CAFE above the legal limit. To do this, they may not (by law) sell cars that are below the CAFE if their corporate average is currently below the CAFE. So, that means that Ford cant sell trucks because they are below the limit, but can sell Fusions and Focus'. Then when they sell enough of the little jobs, and their average comes up a little, then they can sell a few SUVs. The end result is that law of supply and demand will drive the cost of those SUVs through he roof, but the little econ o-box will get cheaper and cheaper. In fact, car companies may be willing to take a small loss on the econ o-box just so it can sell one high margin SUV. For the average citizen, it will make the gas-guzzlers financially out of reach, which is the way it should be.
I know a guy who bought a pickup truck (16 MPG), and drives it 40 miles a day commute because he can only afford the one vehicle. He got the truck because twice a year he uses it to haul yard materials home from the garden store... I suggested he could just rent a u haul, but he said he didn't want to spend the $100 bucks for a u haul... Just goes to show that most Americans have the financial savvy of a 10 year old.
-=Geoskd
Right now it's a comparison of industrial strength electric motors with consumer gas engines. As the electric car will become more popular, the same trade-offs will be made (weight, durability, price) as for consumer gas engines.
Umm, what? Lets take this whole thing point by point. You're clearly suffering from a lack of actual knowledge. Let me help you with that. To put this in perspective, I work for an industrial transportation company. We have a large commercial fleet of vehicles, some of them EVs, most conventional. We also have a large warehousing and freight forwarding operation which makes use of vast quantities of industrial electric motors. So, we can be described as having a pretty good perspective on all of the various technologies involved, as well as what would be described as expert knowledge of the operational profiles of the most industrial equipment available.
Window wiper motors, window motors, fan motors all die multiple times before the engine fails. Most cars are wrecked with a capable engine. Most engines are not economic viable once difficult-to-reach seals need be replaced. Nevertheless, gasoline engines have a huge tolerance for maluse and neglect (excessive play, valve problems, etc.), electric tends to be more of the ON/OFF type.
Without regular maintenance (weekly oil and water, Three month PMI, yearly state inspection and daily pre-trip inspection of our vehicles, they would quickly become dangerously non-functional. Engine problems are the usual trouble and engine failure is frequent enough that our vehicle specifications require easy engine replacement procedures compared to passenger vehicles. We typically go through 2 to three engines in a vehicles operational life of fifteen years. Typical mileage on the vehicles at retirement is between 300k and 600k miles. 400k is considered quite good for one of our engines (They are rated for 10,000 hours or 300k miles). By contrast, most of our vehicles are taken out of service with the original wiper motors, fan motors (only a small percentage of the fleet has electric fan motors) or water pumps. Even more telling, we can use the stats for the belt drive motors in use in our local warehousing facility. The drives are rated at 18kW continuous with peak load handling of 30kW for 10 seconds. We have around seventy five of them in our warehouse. I have been stationed in this building for ten years, and in that time, we have had one drive motor fail after a new variable speed controller was installed wrong and overloaded the motor (and itself). The MTBF on our motors from the manufacturer are 100,000 hours continuous operation, and 75,000 hours for 50% rapid duty cycle operation, but in our operation we have many motors that are well past the 200,000 mark, and none that have failed in service. The manufacturers don't even list MTBF information because its pretty meaningless. I had to go digging to even find Baldors specs on it, and they have a disclaimer that they really don't know what the expected life span is because almost all of their motors are decommissioned long before they fail. Whenever you hear about motor failures, its always because they're being overloaded / pushed beyond spec.
When both applications are compared in the same industrial environment, large freighters, heavy machinery, I've seen electrical (sub)engines always need be replaced multiple times, under far less demanding conditions. wartsila.
Yeah, whatever. Making electric motors last is a matter of correctly sizing the motor for the application. If you're constantly frying motors, its because you used a motor that is not large enough for the application. Going to the next size up will fix most of that problem for you. A sufficiently sized and maintained electric motor can and will last decades. We have several 275kW Baldors in our building that have been in service since the 50's. They are never run past 25% capacity which keeps them nice and cool. B
Sure, where you going to get the power for them?
Lets do a little math:
I own one EV (Miev)
I own four computers, my wifes laptop, many multitudes of gadgets, 5 Ton AC unit, Electric heat.
Average Monthly power usage 1400 kwh.
Car is used for daily 30 mile commute.
Daily car power usage: 13 kwh
Monthly car power usage: 273 kwh.
This is roughly a 20% increase over my existing power usage. I have, however, offset this by turning off two of my computers when I'm not using them. (120 watts each x 650 hours x 2 computers = 156 kwh. So just by implementing my own little power saving program, I have offset over half of the power usage of my car. My point is that we will have power supply problems without EVs all over the place, and simple power conservation can more than offset the usage if we so choose. If we're going to have a supply problem, it will happen with or without EVs, just from all the gadgets we have these days.
-=Geoskd