If I found myself shipwrecked in the middle of frozen nowhere, would it be evil to kill a seal? You know, I'm pretty sure I'd choose the seal over the polar bear. Armed with a club, I can be fairly sure I'd win against a seal. I can't say so much about a polar bear. they look tough
You only need 4 scales. If you can find a local racer (dirt or paved oval track), they can give you some good advice. Basically, it's leverage and a little math.
I went hunting for a picture, but this is all I could find real quick.
Have a look at the first picture. He also explains how to do it. In his example, he draws marks one per foot, so the first mark is where the center of the tire goes. The fourth mark is where it contacts the scale. Use something fairly solid.
When I've seen it done in the past (looking at the first photo), the angle iron on the left was simply put on the ground. That gives you just two variables, one is where the tire is, and the other is where it contacts the scale. If you use the measurements he did, you'll simply multiply each by 4. The resolution depends on how good your scale is.
When weighing a race car, you generally do it as set up for racing. That is, the actual driver in the seat, wearing his helmet, and fueled up in race configuration.
In your case, you'll be parking it at night. The fuel will always be different. Coolant levels can change. Even wear on the tires will change the overall weight, slightly but enough to measure.
I don't know if you can get a digital scale that can hook to a computer for cheap. You may luck out and find some pressure pads that will do the job. If your car weighs 4,000 pounds, expect 1,000 pounds per wheel. You'll probably want something that can handle 2000 pounds per pad. Almost no street car is balanced perfectly. We'll use a 2009 ZR1 Corvette as an example (it was quick to find online). The balance is 52/48, and that is intentional, to assist in handling. A full tank of fuel (18 gallons @ 6.216 lbs/gal) is 111.888 pounds. Leaving a drink in the car could be equal to a tracking device, except position makes a huge difference. A pound on an extremity is different than a pound in the center. A common trick to fix balance in lower class oval track racers is to move the battery from the front of the car, to beside (or just in front of) the left rear tire. It actually makes a difference, but it has to be weighed out to do it right.
If you make it very difficult for them to install, you may find that you just get shadowed instead. If it's installed while you're out somewhere (grocery shopping, at work, etc), you probably won't notice the weight difference when you park at home. It could easily be attributable to changes in the fuel level.
You are also living with a logical fallacy. How can one judge security measures except by the lack of successful attacks? Why do you lock you car? Have you ever had your car stollen? I bet if you left it unlocked just once that nobody would steal it.
I've never been murdered either. Does that mean I should carry a concealed weapon, and be ready to draw at any moment? Oh ya, the answer is "no".
And yes, I do own firearms, and I was a holder of a concealed weapons permit (since expired, gotta get around to renewing it), and yes, I did carry at particular times when there was an increased danger to my health or life.
I don't see the deterrence value in such a vehicle. By buying and advertising such nonsense, it only shows the potential attackers where not to go. No, you don't drive through the security bottleneck, you go around it. So the next real terrorist attack won't happen by plane. It could happen on foot or public transportation (bus, train, subway, etc). The almost attempt in Times Square happened in a POV. Oddly enough, they didn't shut down all of NYC and start searching every POV for potential explosives. Then there's pleasure boats, cargo ships, private aircraft, blimps, balloons, etc.
Ok, the list may have started to sound silly with balloons, but lets not forget about the fusen bakudan (Fu-Go) experiment.
Dear god Helen, what can we do? Lock yourself in the basement, and pray nothing ever happens. (see the 1999 movie "Blast From the Past")
Determining that there is no way to measure deterrence, and deciding that the only way to remain successful is to increase the deterrence methodology, leaves itself open for an infinite growth, limited only by the tolerance of the people who's tax dollars are being wasted on them. It's all fun and games, until you are beaten down for not having the proper papers on your person, or are outside of your authorized zone without the appropriate travel papers. In many states right now, the law does read that you are to have a state issued photo ID on you at all times. That technically includes the shower, and when you're stumbling out to get the morning paper. Enforcement of that would be insane. But hey, we all have to give up our liberties sometime, right?
Vista could be a great example of that. It was originally expected to ship in 2003, which became 2005. It was finally released to OEM's and large volume customers in late 2006 and to end users in 2007.
But, if you go hunting for the blurb, eventually you'll find the oldest reference is this site which has this citation...
But as always with rumour and speculation Microsoft stays quiet about it all, that is until a official, less frequented site goes and says something about it. Today I saw a tweet which linked to a Microsoft Netherlands site which briefly mentions Windows 8 when talking about the future.
"Maar het zal nog zo'n twee jaar duren voordat 'Windows 8' op de markt komt."
But, the linked article does not actually have that quote. This isn't just speculation, it isn't even a news story because the only quote is fabricated. Not a mention of "Windows 8".
That's something I always loved about time travel. They never mention spatial teleportation. To accomplish time travel, there must be spatial teleportation to arrive in the same place on a planet. Say your time machine was in Times square, and for some reason you were spatially oriented on the center of the planet, and you attempted to travel 3 hours to the future, when you arrived, you'd arrive somewhere between Gerlach, NV to Ravendale, CA. If you aren't spatially centered on the planet, you'd find yourself about 201,000 miles behind the best place to land (like, something solid with a breathable atmosphere).
It makes you kind of wonder, how many basement geniuses have accomplished time travel, but were never heard from again?
Exactly. He takes visual queues from the opposition players and coaches. Do I keep going, or do I stop. The decision for all four bases can't be made as soon as he contacts the ball. He hits it, he runs for 1st. Is it safe to go for second? Continue on, but that decision is made at or near 1st base.
The only time a decision like that can be made is if he hits a home run, over the wall. Then speed isn't of the essence, he could walk it if he so desired.
Optimal speed lines are used in race car driving though. Generally you come into the turn on the outside, go towards the apex, and drift out to the outside again. Obvious exceptions apply. Is there another car in the way? What is the next turn after this one? Driving on a street-type course, there was a set of four turns in a snake pattern. Instead of taking each turn properly, I lined up with the center of the overall pattern. It left a little bumping as I nudged the curbs (slight angles, not hard curbs like a neighborhood street would have). Instead of doing 60mph through there, I could do over 90. Anyone behind me, even if they were in an equally powered car, would be far behind me by the time I left that part of the course.
Lots of planning goes into automobile racing, since I'm not waiting to see if the ball I hit is coming in from the outfield. My only concerns were the maximum speed I could take turns with no choices (like above), and other cars on the track. I can't do 90 through that pattern if there's a car doing 60 through it ahead of me, weaving through the whole thing "properly". With that in mind, I would try to be the first car of a group through it, just so I didn't have to slow down. In professional racing, all the drivers would have already known the best way through, so part of that would be eliminated, unless it was a car about to be lapped. In those cases, he'd be flagged over to allow the faster cars through, but you don't always get that luxury on street-track type courses.
Really, I'm right with you. I've using both sides for a long time. I've transfered huge amounts of data around. The only time the system slows down is if I start maxing out the IO. If he had shitty drivers (ancient distro/kernel, modern hardware), sure the performance is going to suck. I had a whole flock of servers, where when we booted to the install disk (using ISOLinux), it took seemingly forever to do a big file transfer. It was a 5 minute job that would take about 30 minutes. Once we booted into a real running environment, we could (and did) do similar transfers on the same hardware in the expected time (about 5 minutes).
Running terabyte transfers in the background shouldn't slow down the rest of the OS, unless it is reaching the IO capacity of the OS drive. Sure, transferring from sda1 to sda2 (booted to sda1) would be slow. Transferring from sdb1 to sdc1 should be fine.
The same applies to other OS's too, except sometimes there is extra overhead, where the OS does get slow. Those were non-*nix OS's though.
I have no problems with speed on USB 2.0 ports under Linux (current Slackware64). On the same hardware, I switch between Win7 and Slack64, and it's always faster under Slack64. Sometimes it's necessary to go in with Slack64 just to fix problems induced in Windows. The last one was a Cygwin install. There were things added in the directory, and I was housecleaning. Windows couldn't remove some files because of the filenames, and Cygwin couldn't even remove them. A quick boot into Linux, and then a 'rm -rf' did the trick.
That's one I don't run into a lot. My machine and VM's all update their time at a regular interval to a local time server. Time accuracy is usually very important to me, since I have a lot of precision time based things going in production. Well, precision to the minute, but being precise to the second is helpful.:) There's nothing like hoping on a foreign (not my) machine, and trying to evaluate the logs for an event, like an intrusion, and needing to remember that the server is 3 days 7 hours 38 minutes behind. My mental math calculations aren't the best, especially when reviewing logfiles.:) This has carried through with me to everything I work on, which is just plain helpful. I usually give a stern talking to anyone who doesn't care, since it makes my help harder.
"But it's just a standalone firewall machine, who cares if the clock is wrong?" Me. Me when you ask me to figure out who did the intrusion or attack.
Ya, I just wasn't sure because I've seen some headaches in using graphic intense applications under virtual machines. Even some applications that appeared to not be graphic intensive didn't work. Thinking about it though, that was in the early days of VMWare.
My biggest gripe with VMWare was the dependence on specific kernel versions, when I was upgrading to get features of new kernels. There were hacky solutions that sometimes worked, and frequently didn't. I haven't run into any of that with VirtualBox. That's why I've adopted it as my VM of choice.
At work, they have me on a Win7 box. I'm using "Virtual Dimension" so I have 4 desktops. Desktop 2 is a full screen Slackware64. It's been very nice, even though I'm limited on the memory and can't ask for more memory after making jokes about needing more memory for gaming at work.:) I considered reinstalling the OS, so Linux is the host, and Windows is the guest, but they're very production orientated, so I can't waste a day doing it, no matter how much it would help my productivity.
I made an image for someone on my Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit machine, so they could use it on their Mac. I exported it, they imported it, and everything ran flawlessly. They were delighted.
And yes, you can run a machine from the command line. I have OpenVPN Access Server in a virtual machine running on my Linux server. OpenVPN Access Server didn't want to run natively on one of my physical server, so I stuck it in a box.:) Xorg is not running on the server (for obvious reasons), so it just starts at boot time with:/opt/VirtualBox/VBoxHeadless -startvm OpenVPN
I've done the thing with using a physical partition in a VM. It's not the easiest thing in the world, but it's perfectly possible, and takes less than 5 minutes once you know what you're doing.:) I'd trust a physical disk over a virtual disk, but if the physical disk with the virtual disk on it fails, you're still stuck without it. I've only done it once, so I could boot a physical disk in a VM, but that didn't work as expected because the physical disk was already having problems. It let me diagnose it in the VM, rather than messing around with a machine that wouldn't boot and nothing else to do. I ended up remounting the physical disk under Linux and grabbing what I needed from it.:)
I agree, VirtualBox is a lot easier to set up and run, is easy to maintain, and easy to move images between machines. It's what I've been recommending to everyone for a while now.
He wants to run Photoshop and Lightroom in it though. I don't know how well that does with the virtualized video cards on any platform though. I know there are a lot of games I can't play in a virtualized environment, only for that reason. If I could, I wouldn't have a real Windows bootable partition at all.
Airports can be very flexible. The flying wing design should have a reduced wingspan, which has to be accounted for anyways. It's just radically different, which would cause problems, mostly with the airlines buying the planes. If they suspect passengers may refuse to fly in some radically different aircraft, their sales will go down. It's all business, not progress or efficiency.
Of course, that's not reflected in the employee's check. The benefits packages were huge (negotiated by the union), and there were pesky things like union dues. It may not matter to the guy working the line, but it's the figure that the auto manufacturer uses to decide how to operate.
The thing is, corporations have to work for the best interest of the company and stock holders. That means if the cost of the employee is $150k/yr, and they can get an employee in Canada, Mexico, or China to do the same work for a fraction of that, and there's still a reduction in per-employee cost, then that's what they have to go with. Even the top level positions can be changed by the board of directors, if they aren't working in the best interest of the company. That's why you see so much work sent overseas. If I get 10 widgets per hour from an employee in the US, and that employee costs the company $73.20/hr, then the man hour cost is $7.32 per unit. If I can outsource the same work at $200/mo ($1.15/hr), the man hour cost drops to $0.115 per unit. As long as the cost of shipping and importing does not exceed $6.16, the overall cost per unit drops. Oddly enough, they avoid reflecting that cost in the price to the consumer. The price point of the unit is based on "What is the consumer willing to pay?" If consumers are willing to pay $100/unit, the price will remain $100/unit, which shows an increased profit for the company. The board of directors are happy. The shareholders are happy. The guy who was getting paid $7.32/unit is... well... unemployed.
To adjust for this, the government could increase tariffs on imported items, to adjust for the cost difference to ensure that the jobs remained in the US.
Relations with China have been touchy at best for years. If the US Gov't raised the tariff substantially, every corporation in America who deals with them would pitch a fit. Well, their lobbyists would "encourage" the decision to keep the tariff at a reasonable rate, to keep the cost per unit low.
Detroit is still heavily populated by good hard working people, that will work long hard hours for good pay. Unfortunately, the unions made a mess of things.
Yeah; they demanded good pay for long hard hours.
...
If only the peons knew their place and worked for peanuts!
You're overstating it. The base salary + benefits made a single employee cost $135,200/yr. That's not working for peanuts. How many of those out unemployed autoworkers would now be pay working for $35k to $65k, like the rest of the "peons" working for "peanuts". While that won't compete with China, Mexico, or Canada, it would begin to bridge the gap. Consider the costs of importing a vehicle from a manufacturing plant in another country. Not only are there the raw costs of transportation, but there's the tariffs involved.
And lets not forget the turnaround time. If I ordered a custom vehicle, and it took 2 days to make it through assembly, I could have it in 1 to 5 days, depending on my proximity to the plant. Waiting for an international shipment could be weeks or months. Since we are a society who demands instant gratification, this would go a long way towards customer satisfaction.
I'm far from saying "pay them peanuts". I'm saying if they worked for a honest salary, most would be happy, rather than looking at unemployment, or a minimum wage job. I've known a few ex-union auto workers, and while they'd love to have their union job back, they're happy to at least be working.
I partially agree. The silicon valley was good at making tech, but it's definitely not an industry town.
Detroit is still heavily populated by good hard working people, that will work long hard hours for good pay. Unfortunately, the unions made a mess of things. It was advantageous for workers, but not good for the company. Workers received exceedingly high wages, and great benefits. This, along with the corporate greed raised the prices of the product. It became more cost effective to to move production away, which killed Detroit.
Manufacturing could move back to Detroit and be very successful, but only if payroll was not artificially inflated. Artificially inflated payroll is just as bad as artificially inflated real estate and artificially inflated stocks. We've seen them all fail with tragic results.
With the various national economies in the situation they are in, mass production will likely be offshored to a cheaper nation, than to the most tax advantageous city or state. It would be nice to think it will grow in the location it was innovated in. As we've seen with various auto manufacturers, and other industries.
Here's the lists of the "Big 3" auto companies. See how many are still in Detroit.
Our cars will continue to be built in the locations that have the cheapest labor, the cheapest materials, and the cheapest way to get them to the customers.
Well, there are a few problems. If you're federal government, you have to only use GAO approved vendors.
There's the build time. Back in the day I worked in a crappy computer store. Three of us could assemble 30 to 45 machines per day. The assembly part wasn't so bad. The OS install was. We had 4 work benches with monitors. 3 would be populated with machines doing OS installs while we worked in any leftover bench. By the end of the day, we'd have a nice queue of machines waiting for the OS. There are faster ways to do it now. If you did an OEM preinstall, you still have to get that thing up and working, so either you do it, or you defer the time off to the employee who's going to complain that their machine is doing "one last thing" before it boots for 1/2 hour.
Still, if you were able to work the same rate, 1000 machines would take your team of 3 23 days to prep.
I'm not a mass produced machine fan, so I'm not trying to persuade you to purchase any premanufactured machine. I'm just warning you. The bottom line may sound good, but by the time you're building your 300th machine, you may wish you had gone another route.
Be consistent in your building. That is buy parts and spares that are identical. Hard drives and CPU fans are the most likely to fail, so it's very important to keep those handy. Power supplies (or at least their fans) are next. CPU's, motherboards, memory don't go so often, but it can happen. Finally, unless someone does a gravity test or has a bad day on "bring your gun to work" day, you won't be replacing cases.
Use name brand parts. Trust me, white box motherboards from an unnamed vendor in China will never treat you right. I lean towards Asus and SuperMicro for motherboards, AMD for CPU(s), Crucial for memory, Western Digital for hard drives, and whoever's cheapest for CD/DVD drives (frequently LiteOn, which have proven to be good)
When you start building, do it in assembly line fashion. One person installs motherboards. One person installs drives, etc, etc. After a while, it's mindless work, but that helps. When mistakes are made, they'll likely be made the same way each time, so you know what to fix.
If you can just write an image with the OS and applications to the drive, that'll make things easier than doing individual installs. Write the image, boot it up, shut it down, and box it.
Since you're asking, I'm guessing you or your department already does the support. You'll probably be pleasantly pleased that you'll always know the answers for hardware faults, because you're never wondering what's inside, and you won't have to call the vendor with a blind problem just to waste time and finally get an RMA number. It's easier if you can take your kit/cart to the desk, swap out whatever you need, and they're up and running in a few minutes.
Oh, I agree totally that New York gets wilder climate changes.:) I was up there a few years ago in April. On the first day, it was chilly enough for me to wear a jacket open (it was probably 55F, and I grew up in Florida). As the day progressed, it was too warm to wear the jacket. The next day it was in the 20's and snowing all day.
I know people who lived in Palmdale and Lancaster (west of LA, in the high desert) who talked about highs in the 90's and 100's, and lows in the 20's with snow, in the same day. They warned friends coming over to visit "bring a jacket if you're staying after dark".
I've been lucky enough to have at least set foot in most of the US, and parts of 3 other countries. In one year, I was standing near Mt. McKinley when it was -4F (that was just November), and somewhere in Arizona, where the rooftop carrier on our car melted from the heat (+120F in August). I can attest to the fact that +80F feels cold, when you just drove from where it was +120F. Some people think I'm weird for keeping a winter wardrobe in Florida, but you never know when work will summon you to somewhere that it's god-awful cold. The last chilly trip was to Chicago, and it was -7F outside the datacenter.
I didn't mind LA so much, except for the dust, smog, and the first summer I was there it hit 105 for a month.
I know about those 3 days of rain. Well, except one year where it rained every day for two months. The mudslides made national news, and the house I was staying in was almost one of them. Between the earthquakes, mudslides, and wildfires, I was glad to move back to the land of hurricanes.:)
They have air leaks, but they're still pressurized. They use outlet of one of the stages of the jet engine(s) and valves to maintain enough inflow to replace the outflow and maintain a comfortable pressure (with restrictions per FAA guidelines).
Go out there sometime. You'll have people telling you that some areas and their "microclimates" are perfect year round, no matter what. Blue skies, perfect humidity, and the perfect temperature.
*average* highs are 62F to 74F.
*average* lows are 45F to 58F
peak highs reach 100F.
peak lows drop down to 28F.
So if you're having a perfectly average day, then all should be good. Things aren't just average all the time. I used to live 20 miles from there, and ended up going all over the area. Nope, it gets fucking hot in the summer, and fucking cold in the winter. So it's not as hot as Phoenix, AZ, and it's not as cold as Barrow, AK, but it's sure as hell not room temperature day and night, year round.
You haven't looked at housing prices out there, have you? I rented several houses out there, between 8 to 3 years ago (more or less), and the values on those houses ranged from $600,000 to over $1,000,000. They weren't amazing houses, nor were they on huge pieces of land.
[tappity] [tappity] [tappity]
Looking at realtor.com, the cheapest house in Malibu is an 830 sq/ft unfinished (like not completely built) house for $450,000.
You don't have to go very far down the list to get to houses over $1,000,000, and the most expensive one is a 9,000 sq/ft home on 37 acres for $65,000,000.
$2 million isn't anything spectacular for those who can afford it. For the rest of us, we won't even consider it.:)
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If I found myself shipwrecked in the middle of frozen nowhere, would it be evil to kill a seal? You know, I'm pretty sure I'd choose the seal over the polar bear. Armed with a club, I can be fairly sure I'd win against a seal. I can't say so much about a polar bear. they look tough
It's amazing what people will do for an imaginary controlling being(s).
You only need 4 scales. If you can find a local racer (dirt or paved oval track), they can give you some good advice. Basically, it's leverage and a little math.
I went hunting for a picture, but this is all I could find real quick.
http://forums.corral.net/forums/showthread.php?t=993701
Have a look at the first picture. He also explains how to do it. In his example, he draws marks one per foot, so the first mark is where the center of the tire goes. The fourth mark is where it contacts the scale. Use something fairly solid.
When I've seen it done in the past (looking at the first photo), the angle iron on the left was simply put on the ground. That gives you just two variables, one is where the tire is, and the other is where it contacts the scale. If you use the measurements he did, you'll simply multiply each by 4. The resolution depends on how good your scale is.
When weighing a race car, you generally do it as set up for racing. That is, the actual driver in the seat, wearing his helmet, and fueled up in race configuration.
In your case, you'll be parking it at night. The fuel will always be different. Coolant levels can change. Even wear on the tires will change the overall weight, slightly but enough to measure.
I don't know if you can get a digital scale that can hook to a computer for cheap. You may luck out and find some pressure pads that will do the job. If your car weighs 4,000 pounds, expect 1,000 pounds per wheel. You'll probably want something that can handle 2000 pounds per pad. Almost no street car is balanced perfectly. We'll use a 2009 ZR1 Corvette as an example (it was quick to find online). The balance is 52/48, and that is intentional, to assist in handling. A full tank of fuel (18 gallons @ 6.216 lbs/gal) is 111.888 pounds. Leaving a drink in the car could be equal to a tracking device, except position makes a huge difference. A pound on an extremity is different than a pound in the center. A common trick to fix balance in lower class oval track racers is to move the battery from the front of the car, to beside (or just in front of) the left rear tire. It actually makes a difference, but it has to be weighed out to do it right.
If you make it very difficult for them to install, you may find that you just get shadowed instead. If it's installed while you're out somewhere (grocery shopping, at work, etc), you probably won't notice the weight difference when you park at home. It could easily be attributable to changes in the fuel level.
errr... ummmm...
Yes, I'm sure you have a winning prospect there. :)
[sarcasm]
There was no problem with the Therac-25. The problem was that the targets being examined had too low of a tolerance to radiation.
[/sarcasm]
I've never been murdered either. Does that mean I should carry a concealed weapon, and be ready to draw at any moment? Oh ya, the answer is "no".
And yes, I do own firearms, and I was a holder of a concealed weapons permit (since expired, gotta get around to renewing it), and yes, I did carry at particular times when there was an increased danger to my health or life.
I don't see the deterrence value in such a vehicle. By buying and advertising such nonsense, it only shows the potential attackers where not to go. No, you don't drive through the security bottleneck, you go around it. So the next real terrorist attack won't happen by plane. It could happen on foot or public transportation (bus, train, subway, etc). The almost attempt in Times Square happened in a POV. Oddly enough, they didn't shut down all of NYC and start searching every POV for potential explosives. Then there's pleasure boats, cargo ships, private aircraft, blimps, balloons, etc.
Ok, the list may have started to sound silly with balloons, but lets not forget about the fusen bakudan (Fu-Go) experiment.
Dear god Helen, what can we do? Lock yourself in the basement, and pray nothing ever happens. (see the 1999 movie "Blast From the Past")
Determining that there is no way to measure deterrence, and deciding that the only way to remain successful is to increase the deterrence methodology, leaves itself open for an infinite growth, limited only by the tolerance of the people who's tax dollars are being wasted on them. It's all fun and games, until you are beaten down for not having the proper papers on your person, or are outside of your authorized zone without the appropriate travel papers. In many states right now, the law does read that you are to have a state issued photo ID on you at all times. That technically includes the shower, and when you're stumbling out to get the morning paper. Enforcement of that would be insane. But hey, we all have to give up our liberties sometime, right?
Vista could be a great example of that. It was originally expected to ship in 2003, which became 2005. It was finally released to OEM's and large volume customers in late 2006 and to end users in 2007.
But, if you go hunting for the blurb, eventually you'll find the oldest reference is this site which has this citation...
But, the linked article does not actually have that quote. This isn't just speculation, it isn't even a news story because the only quote is fabricated. Not a mention of "Windows 8".
That's something I always loved about time travel. They never mention spatial teleportation. To accomplish time travel, there must be spatial teleportation to arrive in the same place on a planet. Say your time machine was in Times square, and for some reason you were spatially oriented on the center of the planet, and you attempted to travel 3 hours to the future, when you arrived, you'd arrive somewhere between Gerlach, NV to Ravendale, CA. If you aren't spatially centered on the planet, you'd find yourself about 201,000 miles behind the best place to land (like, something solid with a breathable atmosphere).
It makes you kind of wonder, how many basement geniuses have accomplished time travel, but were never heard from again?
Exactly. He takes visual queues from the opposition players and coaches. Do I keep going, or do I stop. The decision for all four bases can't be made as soon as he contacts the ball. He hits it, he runs for 1st. Is it safe to go for second? Continue on, but that decision is made at or near 1st base.
The only time a decision like that can be made is if he hits a home run, over the wall. Then speed isn't of the essence, he could walk it if he so desired.
Optimal speed lines are used in race car driving though. Generally you come into the turn on the outside, go towards the apex, and drift out to the outside again. Obvious exceptions apply. Is there another car in the way? What is the next turn after this one? Driving on a street-type course, there was a set of four turns in a snake pattern. Instead of taking each turn properly, I lined up with the center of the overall pattern. It left a little bumping as I nudged the curbs (slight angles, not hard curbs like a neighborhood street would have). Instead of doing 60mph through there, I could do over 90. Anyone behind me, even if they were in an equally powered car, would be far behind me by the time I left that part of the course.
Lots of planning goes into automobile racing, since I'm not waiting to see if the ball I hit is coming in from the outfield. My only concerns were the maximum speed I could take turns with no choices (like above), and other cars on the track. I can't do 90 through that pattern if there's a car doing 60 through it ahead of me, weaving through the whole thing "properly". With that in mind, I would try to be the first car of a group through it, just so I didn't have to slow down. In professional racing, all the drivers would have already known the best way through, so part of that would be eliminated, unless it was a car about to be lapped. In those cases, he'd be flagged over to allow the faster cars through, but you don't always get that luxury on street-track type courses.
Really, I'm right with you. I've using both sides for a long time. I've transfered huge amounts of data around. The only time the system slows down is if I start maxing out the IO. If he had shitty drivers (ancient distro/kernel, modern hardware), sure the performance is going to suck. I had a whole flock of servers, where when we booted to the install disk (using ISOLinux), it took seemingly forever to do a big file transfer. It was a 5 minute job that would take about 30 minutes. Once we booted into a real running environment, we could (and did) do similar transfers on the same hardware in the expected time (about 5 minutes).
Running terabyte transfers in the background shouldn't slow down the rest of the OS, unless it is reaching the IO capacity of the OS drive. Sure, transferring from sda1 to sda2 (booted to sda1) would be slow. Transferring from sdb1 to sdc1 should be fine.
The same applies to other OS's too, except sometimes there is extra overhead, where the OS does get slow. Those were non-*nix OS's though.
I have no problems with speed on USB 2.0 ports under Linux (current Slackware64). On the same hardware, I switch between Win7 and Slack64, and it's always faster under Slack64. Sometimes it's necessary to go in with Slack64 just to fix problems induced in Windows. The last one was a Cygwin install. There were things added in the directory, and I was housecleaning. Windows couldn't remove some files because of the filenames, and Cygwin couldn't even remove them. A quick boot into Linux, and then a 'rm -rf' did the trick.
That's one I don't run into a lot. My machine and VM's all update their time at a regular interval to a local time server. Time accuracy is usually very important to me, since I have a lot of precision time based things going in production. Well, precision to the minute, but being precise to the second is helpful. :) There's nothing like hoping on a foreign (not my) machine, and trying to evaluate the logs for an event, like an intrusion, and needing to remember that the server is 3 days 7 hours 38 minutes behind. My mental math calculations aren't the best, especially when reviewing logfiles. :) This has carried through with me to everything I work on, which is just plain helpful. I usually give a stern talking to anyone who doesn't care, since it makes my help harder.
"But it's just a standalone firewall machine, who cares if the clock is wrong?" Me. Me when you ask me to figure out who did the intrusion or attack.
Ya, I just wasn't sure because I've seen some headaches in using graphic intense applications under virtual machines. Even some applications that appeared to not be graphic intensive didn't work. Thinking about it though, that was in the early days of VMWare.
My biggest gripe with VMWare was the dependence on specific kernel versions, when I was upgrading to get features of new kernels. There were hacky solutions that sometimes worked, and frequently didn't. I haven't run into any of that with VirtualBox. That's why I've adopted it as my VM of choice.
At work, they have me on a Win7 box. I'm using "Virtual Dimension" so I have 4 desktops. Desktop 2 is a full screen Slackware64. It's been very nice, even though I'm limited on the memory and can't ask for more memory after making jokes about needing more memory for gaming at work. :) I considered reinstalling the OS, so Linux is the host, and Windows is the guest, but they're very production orientated, so I can't waste a day doing it, no matter how much it would help my productivity.
Export then import. It's easy.
I made an image for someone on my Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit machine, so they could use it on their Mac. I exported it, they imported it, and everything ran flawlessly. They were delighted.
And yes, you can run a machine from the command line. I have OpenVPN Access Server in a virtual machine running on my Linux server. OpenVPN Access Server didn't want to run natively on one of my physical server, so I stuck it in a box. :) Xorg is not running on the server (for obvious reasons), so it just starts at boot time with: /opt/VirtualBox/VBoxHeadless -startvm OpenVPN
I've done the thing with using a physical partition in a VM. It's not the easiest thing in the world, but it's perfectly possible, and takes less than 5 minutes once you know what you're doing. :) I'd trust a physical disk over a virtual disk, but if the physical disk with the virtual disk on it fails, you're still stuck without it. I've only done it once, so I could boot a physical disk in a VM, but that didn't work as expected because the physical disk was already having problems. It let me diagnose it in the VM, rather than messing around with a machine that wouldn't boot and nothing else to do. I ended up remounting the physical disk under Linux and grabbing what I needed from it. :)
That's good to know. I know Win7 in a VirtualBox VM works well, I was concerned about the capability of the virtual video card.
I agree, VirtualBox is a lot easier to set up and run, is easy to maintain, and easy to move images between machines. It's what I've been recommending to everyone for a while now.
He wants to run Photoshop and Lightroom in it though. I don't know how well that does with the virtualized video cards on any platform though. I know there are a lot of games I can't play in a virtualized environment, only for that reason. If I could, I wouldn't have a real Windows bootable partition at all.
That's what SHE said.
Sorry, I couldn't resist. :)
Airports can be very flexible. The flying wing design should have a reduced wingspan, which has to be accounted for anyways. It's just radically different, which would cause problems, mostly with the airlines buying the planes. If they suspect passengers may refuse to fly in some radically different aircraft, their sales will go down. It's all business, not progress or efficiency.
Here's a reference. http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2008/11/should-we-really-bail-out-7320-per-hour.html. I know it's not as good as an official reference, but it is one. I can't find the link I used initially. 73.20 * 2080 = $151.840.
Of course, that's not reflected in the employee's check. The benefits packages were huge (negotiated by the union), and there were pesky things like union dues. It may not matter to the guy working the line, but it's the figure that the auto manufacturer uses to decide how to operate.
The thing is, corporations have to work for the best interest of the company and stock holders. That means if the cost of the employee is $150k/yr, and they can get an employee in Canada, Mexico, or China to do the same work for a fraction of that, and there's still a reduction in per-employee cost, then that's what they have to go with. Even the top level positions can be changed by the board of directors, if they aren't working in the best interest of the company. That's why you see so much work sent overseas. If I get 10 widgets per hour from an employee in the US, and that employee costs the company $73.20/hr, then the man hour cost is $7.32 per unit. If I can outsource the same work at $200/mo ($1.15/hr), the man hour cost drops to $0.115 per unit. As long as the cost of shipping and importing does not exceed $6.16, the overall cost per unit drops. Oddly enough, they avoid reflecting that cost in the price to the consumer. The price point of the unit is based on "What is the consumer willing to pay?" If consumers are willing to pay $100/unit, the price will remain $100/unit, which shows an increased profit for the company. The board of directors are happy. The shareholders are happy. The guy who was getting paid $7.32/unit is ... well ... unemployed.
To adjust for this, the government could increase tariffs on imported items, to adjust for the cost difference to ensure that the jobs remained in the US.
Relations with China have been touchy at best for years. If the US Gov't raised the tariff substantially, every corporation in America who deals with them would pitch a fit. Well, their lobbyists would "encourage" the decision to keep the tariff at a reasonable rate, to keep the cost per unit low.
You're overstating it. The base salary + benefits made a single employee cost $135,200/yr. That's not working for peanuts. How many of those out unemployed autoworkers would now be pay working for $35k to $65k, like the rest of the "peons" working for "peanuts". While that won't compete with China, Mexico, or Canada, it would begin to bridge the gap. Consider the costs of importing a vehicle from a manufacturing plant in another country. Not only are there the raw costs of transportation, but there's the tariffs involved.
And lets not forget the turnaround time. If I ordered a custom vehicle, and it took 2 days to make it through assembly, I could have it in 1 to 5 days, depending on my proximity to the plant. Waiting for an international shipment could be weeks or months. Since we are a society who demands instant gratification, this would go a long way towards customer satisfaction.
I'm far from saying "pay them peanuts". I'm saying if they worked for a honest salary, most would be happy, rather than looking at unemployment, or a minimum wage job. I've known a few ex-union auto workers, and while they'd love to have their union job back, they're happy to at least be working.
I partially agree. The silicon valley was good at making tech, but it's definitely not an industry town.
Detroit is still heavily populated by good hard working people, that will work long hard hours for good pay. Unfortunately, the unions made a mess of things. It was advantageous for workers, but not good for the company. Workers received exceedingly high wages, and great benefits. This, along with the corporate greed raised the prices of the product. It became more cost effective to to move production away, which killed Detroit.
Manufacturing could move back to Detroit and be very successful, but only if payroll was not artificially inflated. Artificially inflated payroll is just as bad as artificially inflated real estate and artificially inflated stocks. We've seen them all fail with tragic results.
With the various national economies in the situation they are in, mass production will likely be offshored to a cheaper nation, than to the most tax advantageous city or state. It would be nice to think it will grow in the location it was innovated in. As we've seen with various auto manufacturers, and other industries.
Here's the lists of the "Big 3" auto companies. See how many are still in Detroit.
GM manufacturing plants
Ford manufacturing plants
Chrysler manufacturing plants
Our cars will continue to be built in the locations that have the cheapest labor, the cheapest materials, and the cheapest way to get them to the customers.
Well, there are a few problems. If you're federal government, you have to only use GAO approved vendors.
There's the build time. Back in the day I worked in a crappy computer store. Three of us could assemble 30 to 45 machines per day. The assembly part wasn't so bad. The OS install was. We had 4 work benches with monitors. 3 would be populated with machines doing OS installs while we worked in any leftover bench. By the end of the day, we'd have a nice queue of machines waiting for the OS. There are faster ways to do it now. If you did an OEM preinstall, you still have to get that thing up and working, so either you do it, or you defer the time off to the employee who's going to complain that their machine is doing "one last thing" before it boots for 1/2 hour.
Still, if you were able to work the same rate, 1000 machines would take your team of 3 23 days to prep.
I'm not a mass produced machine fan, so I'm not trying to persuade you to purchase any premanufactured machine. I'm just warning you. The bottom line may sound good, but by the time you're building your 300th machine, you may wish you had gone another route.
Be consistent in your building. That is buy parts and spares that are identical. Hard drives and CPU fans are the most likely to fail, so it's very important to keep those handy. Power supplies (or at least their fans) are next. CPU's, motherboards, memory don't go so often, but it can happen. Finally, unless someone does a gravity test or has a bad day on "bring your gun to work" day, you won't be replacing cases.
Use name brand parts. Trust me, white box motherboards from an unnamed vendor in China will never treat you right. I lean towards Asus and SuperMicro for motherboards, AMD for CPU(s), Crucial for memory, Western Digital for hard drives, and whoever's cheapest for CD/DVD drives (frequently LiteOn, which have proven to be good)
When you start building, do it in assembly line fashion. One person installs motherboards. One person installs drives, etc, etc. After a while, it's mindless work, but that helps. When mistakes are made, they'll likely be made the same way each time, so you know what to fix.
If you can just write an image with the OS and applications to the drive, that'll make things easier than doing individual installs. Write the image, boot it up, shut it down, and box it.
Since you're asking, I'm guessing you or your department already does the support. You'll probably be pleasantly pleased that you'll always know the answers for hardware faults, because you're never wondering what's inside, and you won't have to call the vendor with a blind problem just to waste time and finally get an RMA number. It's easier if you can take your kit/cart to the desk, swap out whatever you need, and they're up and running in a few minutes.
Oh, I agree totally that New York gets wilder climate changes. :) I was up there a few years ago in April. On the first day, it was chilly enough for me to wear a jacket open (it was probably 55F, and I grew up in Florida). As the day progressed, it was too warm to wear the jacket. The next day it was in the 20's and snowing all day.
I know people who lived in Palmdale and Lancaster (west of LA, in the high desert) who talked about highs in the 90's and 100's, and lows in the 20's with snow, in the same day. They warned friends coming over to visit "bring a jacket if you're staying after dark".
I've been lucky enough to have at least set foot in most of the US, and parts of 3 other countries. In one year, I was standing near Mt. McKinley when it was -4F (that was just November), and somewhere in Arizona, where the rooftop carrier on our car melted from the heat (+120F in August). I can attest to the fact that +80F feels cold, when you just drove from where it was +120F. Some people think I'm weird for keeping a winter wardrobe in Florida, but you never know when work will summon you to somewhere that it's god-awful cold. The last chilly trip was to Chicago, and it was -7F outside the datacenter.
I didn't mind LA so much, except for the dust, smog, and the first summer I was there it hit 105 for a month.
I know about those 3 days of rain. Well, except one year where it rained every day for two months. The mudslides made national news, and the house I was staying in was almost one of them. Between the earthquakes, mudslides, and wildfires, I was glad to move back to the land of hurricanes. :)
They have air leaks, but they're still pressurized. They use outlet of one of the stages of the jet engine(s) and valves to maintain enough inflow to replace the outflow and maintain a comfortable pressure (with restrictions per FAA guidelines).
Shhh.. They don't like hearing that.
Go out there sometime. You'll have people telling you that some areas and their "microclimates" are perfect year round, no matter what. Blue skies, perfect humidity, and the perfect temperature.
*average* highs are 62F to 74F.
*average* lows are 45F to 58F
peak highs reach 100F.
peak lows drop down to 28F.
So if you're having a perfectly average day, then all should be good. Things aren't just average all the time. I used to live 20 miles from there, and ended up going all over the area. Nope, it gets fucking hot in the summer, and fucking cold in the winter. So it's not as hot as Phoenix, AZ, and it's not as cold as Barrow, AK, but it's sure as hell not room temperature day and night, year round.
You haven't looked at housing prices out there, have you? I rented several houses out there, between 8 to 3 years ago (more or less), and the values on those houses ranged from $600,000 to over $1,000,000. They weren't amazing houses, nor were they on huge pieces of land.
[tappity] [tappity] [tappity]
Looking at realtor.com, the cheapest house in Malibu is an 830 sq/ft unfinished (like not completely built) house for $450,000.
You don't have to go very far down the list to get to houses over $1,000,000, and the most expensive one is a 9,000 sq/ft home on 37 acres for $65,000,000.
$2 million isn't anything spectacular for those who can afford it. For the rest of us, we won't even consider it. :)