I agree with most of what you are saying but I'm not sure I agree with your logic.
If you were to argue that it is impossible for an organization as large as the government to have 0% mistake rate in keeping secrets, I wouldn't disagree. Or the idea that not a single non-US government entity ever trained their RADAR on the Apollo missions is ridiculous, for example, I would not disagree.
But your argument that 1 person making a mistake in MS Office = teh government is incompetent... seems like you've traded one meme for another. I recall FEMA being extremely efficient handling hurricanes and even evacuating car-less people before major hurricanes in Florida. FEMA was so efficient at handling emergencies and natural disasters like the California earthquake that Japan based their earthquake response on FEMA, but this was before a certain administration took over. An administration from a party that insists big government doesn't work, and seems dead set to prove it every time they are in charge...
I am not surprised at all that when you soup up a Dell to have top-end Mac features it costs way more than a Mac. That's like buying a Ford Escort and then having the dealer replace the engine with a Corvette engine, customize the suspension, replace the interior, replace the wheels and tires, replace the stereo and speakers, etc. and then when the car costs $70,000 claim that Fords are more expensive than Acuras [or something, insert your own brand, I know crap about cars].
Besides, everyone knows that Dell makes all their profit from upgrades. Last time I checked it cost $300+ to upgrade from an AMD64 X2 4800 to a 6000, when you can buy the 6000 CPU online for $241. So of course they cost more when you buy a low end and turn it into a high end laptop.
Last year my supposed girlfriend wanted a laptop. I found some great deals on Dells at slickdeals.net for $599 or $699. She wanted the new mac laptops that were $1599 and $1799. When I compared them side by side, there was no major difference for the $1000. When I compared CPU, HDD, RAM, the basics, they were identical.
Yes, the Mac looked waaaaay sexier, and the screen was nicer and I think had slightly higher resolution, and the laptop was slimmer and I assume lighter, and it had some other minor, but slick, differences. All of which are worth maybe a few hundred more, but not $1000 IMHO. And all those things are important for power users. And the difference between good and great is in the details. And I do indeed drool over the Macs like I will never drool over a Dell.
But she wanted it to take notes in class and do some work at home from time to time. And for that, the Mac was almost 3x the price for the same basic hardware.
"Additionally, the hardware lock-in - a lock-in that is Apple's choice - makes it hard to get exactly what you need. The Mac Mini I purchased originally would have been fine to complete this test if it had come with more RAM, but replacing the RAM was so daunting a task due to the ultra-compact form factor, I didn't bother. The only non-compact form factor that Apple offers is the very expensive Mac Pro line. Not everyone needs BlueTooth and WiFi - and I would have rather had a computer I could use. Dual-booting on a Mac brings the Mac platform an ability to play the games that were once the sole province of Windows. This should have been a net bonus for Mac but the limited and underpowered graphics solutions coupled with the inability to upgrade them negate that advantage."
I like Macs. They are sexy, and come with some cool stuff, and supposedly are reliable, though that wasn't my experience in school, but that was a decade ago. I was recently at the Apple store checking out sexy computers with sexy 30" LCD screens, when I noticed, to my horror, that Macs which cost more than my car come with a video card I would never even consider putting in my 2-year-old PC. If I'm going to pay $4,000+ for a box it better come with something better than an obsolete, throw-away, budget graphics card. Though from this article it seems buying a modern card isn't even an option.
Personally, in my PCs I have upgraded my power supply, RAM, HDD, videocard, cpu, motherboard (though that was hairy while keeping the OS, but it worked, eventually), case, fans/cooling, sound card, and random other knobs and lights and trinkets. If I owned a mac I guess that list would be RAM (on some cases) and CPU, maybe.
"Neuroscience research, Greene said, is finally explaining a problem that has long troubled philosophers and moral teachers: Why is it that people who are willing to help someone in front of them will ignore abstract pleas for help from those who are distant, such as a request for a charitable contribution that could save the life of a child overseas?"
Or certain groups who work tirelessly on emotional issues like telling gays they are bad or saving the unborn but couldn't give a rat's ass about global warming sinking entire island countries of the already-born underwater...
Hey, wait, can I interpret this article to say they those who disagree with me are acting on animal instinct while I am using higher brain functions? It feels good, so it must be true.
Ignore these heathen scientist and their secular morality fantasies, everyone going to heaven knows that true morals come from [insert religion] and atheists are immoral swine. Oh, and don't judge others.
According to evolutionary theory: since society benefits the individual evolution ought to favor traits that help form and maintain societies. For instance: faith and altruism. I would imagine other animals that live in colonies or collectives have similar mechanisms. Perhaps not faith, but feel reward for performing whatever their limited role is before dying without the opportunity or even ability to reproduce.
What's most surprising is that scientists are still surprised by this, as if they have never heard of evolution or thought about it's affect on society. Perhaps these are the same scientists who agree that emotions are in primitive parts of our brain yet insist "primitive" animals don't have emotions.
Yeah, my door chime stopped working one day when the little button on the door wore out. I thought it was good, too, until one morning it was really stormy so I turned on my headlights on the way to work, where they remained on all day, and I got to jump the car, in the rain, in a huge puddle after work. Then I did it 3 more times. I can jump a car in 45 seconds now.
I turned down an offer to have the button fixed for $50 figuring I could do it myself faster and cheaper. I was wrong on both counts. I bought replacements for not much less, spent 3-5 hours in 80-90 degree 80% humidity weather losing parts inside my door, breaking grounding wires, debugging wiring harnesses with a volt meter, and basically losing my mind.
My microwave oven, and many like it, needs to be informed that it is a microwave oven before it will allow me to cook something. If you just walk up to it like some arrogant bastard and start pressing numbers it's like "wtf do you want me to do?" Then I remember that I have to tell it that it is an oven and that it's job is to cook thngs. After that it stops computing Fermat's last theorem or whatever the frak it is that microwaves do when they don't think they are microwaves and allows me to cook my food. That's not completely fair, my current microwave interprets buttons 1-5 as 1-5 minutes but still makes you press "start," while 6-9 and 0 do nothing. The work microwave ignores all numbers until you remind it of it's sole purpose for existing. The one next to it allows you to type in the time and hit start. My previous microwave, which I bought solely for it's interface, interpreted the numbers as minutes and started instantly. Insert meal, press 5, wait, eat. I miss that microwave.
My spell check just corrected my botched attempt at "interprets" into "interpenetrates."
My sprint phone had a "hands free" ear piece that had no mic, so you had to hold the phone up to your mouth while using the "hands free" feature. Often I put it in the charger and sat it on my desk in front of my mouth. Convenient. Not so much for car use.
My Treo 650 blinked all the time to let me know I wasn't roaming. Gotta love that indicator: "Look at me! Look at me! I have nothing to indicate! All is well! Look at meeeeeee!!!"
If I put a miss-burned CD in my car player it says "error 06" or something and wont let me eject it. I have to turn off and on the car and press eject before it reads the CD.
I bet I could list 50 things if I thought about it, and give myself an ulcer in the process.
Aluminum oxide takes an incredible amount of electricity to turn into aluminum. It's one of the most plentiful substances on earth but it wasn't until the hydroelectric plant was invented that it became at all practical to mass produce aluminum.
REI sells a light lexan french press for making coffee on the trail. Here's one: http://www.rei.com/product/629245 but I bought one with a insulation sleeve.
They also sell a ball the makes ice cream while you hike. I might have to get one of those.
Ah, yes, the typical "we are way smarter than you so we don't need to listen to your experience" reply. That was basically the line from all the admins. "I've never heard of your problem so you must be wrong and I know I am right so I will look down on you and not bother to look into it. You don't like it? Then you have a bad attitude." Some of them were techs, but most were admins.
Foolish me, wanting to do work...
Ooh ooh another story: at that first company where we were banned from going to computer security websites we kept looking for ways around it. One of us used google cache, I started adding/. to the end of the addresses and that worked, until I realized that I could turn off the proxy settings and still get out to the intertubes. Secure.
I'm sure they must do something important, but as far as helping the employees do work they are completely useless as far as I'm concerned. They come up with policies like "only use IE 5" at a computer security company and withhold privileges from people who know way more then they do, and block all security patches. Oh, and block all the dangerous hacker websites like redhat.com and secureinfo.com.
I once asked the sysadmins why we have 100 people on one printer that always breaks down, and could I be added to one of the many idle printers, and was basically told to go hack the servers and reconfigure the network myself. This was at a huge defense contractor. These were the same guys who backed up gigs of work on the F-22 onto obsolete tapes and then deleted the network drives and then threw away all of the tape readers. Yes, all of them. I was later assigned to reverse engineer what were basically sealed black boxes and re-do the VHDL. That begs the question: "why didn't the buy used readers on ebay?" Good question. Oh, and we had a 5 MB share drive to store all of our work, so obviously we stored almost everything locally. If we reported a problem with our PC they would reformat the machine. Once I told them I had a problem and to not format my machine unless they back up all the data. They said fine. Later I returned to find my machine formatted and my work gone. When I called they told me "we never back up data, it should be on your share drive." They decided something was wrong with my cubemate's computer and snuck in when he was at lunch and reformatted it without ever informing him. He lost years of email and all of his work. After that everyone put signs on their cases that said "do not format this machine." Oh, and our net of 50-100 people was on token ring and none of our apps were installed locally. If one person kicked the cable wrong we were all out of business.
At another defense contractor I reported problems where my machine would lock up for 300 seconds at specific intervals, and was told my problem was impossible and it didn't exist. I reported it many times before finding some lower guy, telling him about it, and he fixed the DNS server 5 minutes later. They never did fix the feature where if I set my clock to the correct time the server would change it to be off by 17 minutes. They also insisted that was impossible and never looked into it. It's not a bug, it's not a feature, it's a hallucination apparently.
Later at that company I requested a laptop with admin privs before leaving on 1-2 week trip, only to told after I got there that they don't give admin privs so that I basically lugged a boat anchor across the country for no reason as I couldn't install the compiler. You should have heard him whine when I said "So in order to use it I guess I just have to reformat it. No problem."
Maybe they can make their keyboard like the ones used my PCs, Macs, Linux, Unix, basically every other OS and networking device on Earth. That way I can type characters like "\" and "|" without having to have a separate monitor, keyboard and mouse for my Sun box while I have every other machine on one KVM switch.
Oh, and could they make solaris not suck sweaty donkey balls? That would be great.
From the summary: "Edison charges summer time-of-use rates that range from 29.7 to 35.9 cents per kilowatt-hour between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. on weekdays. It drops to a range of 16.3 to 18.6 cents per kilowatt-hour from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m."
1kWh during the day = up to 35.9 cents which at night = up to 35.9/16.3=2.2kWh.
Next time you want to be condescending make sure you aren't dead wrong about everything or else you look like a real jackass.
They don't "jack up" your rates, they change the way you get billed. Instead of paying a medium amount day and night, you pay a high amount during the day and a low amount at night.
If you go to work during the day and generate 1kWh to put into the grid, at night you use 2 or 3kWh from the grid and not pay a thing. So, for some people they've doubled or tripled the value of solar panels.
Now, if you stay home with the kids and use AC all day, you're screwed.
Obviously, someone didn't think this through. But I highly doubt it was intentional. I don't think anyone benefits from frequent blackouts during the summer.
You've never looked at real estate in the north east or west coast, have you?
My last company wanted me to move to San Jose, where a run-down condo is $600k and a tiny run-down house is $700k, and a house similar to what I bought in San Antonio for $167k was listed for $1.5 Mil. Even with a 40 yr mortgage I can't imagine being a homeowner and only earning 100k. I couldn't even get a realtor to give me a ballpark on what you need to earn to afford a house.
I did a search for a house at a reasonable price and found some that were 200 miles away, and some condos that were only a 90 mile commute each way. Of course the highways are gridlocked during most daylight hours. Apparently, some new employees bought houses that were 200 miles away and only went home on the weekend, and would crash at friend's places or rent a hotel during the week. Older employees bought their houses in the 80's. One lady saved for years and bought a dilapidated condo for 600-something.
My company offered me a 40% raise to move. I declined. Though now that summer is starting here in South Texas I'm starting to wonder if I made the wrong decision.
And about living a little further away to "save" money, lots of people do that. That's why there is so much gridlock and smog, and more taxes for more roads, not to mention they spend many times more money on gas and car maintenance than if they lived closer. Most of the time it's a wash or a loss to live further out.
Wow, whoever wrote that article sure does hate "environmentalists," who apparently all think with one mind and disagree on nothing and can be painted with a single brush.
I know my Grind-and-Brew turns off after an hour or so whether or not you drink all the coffee. It has a digital clock and can wake me up with the horrid sound of grinding and the pleasant smell of brewing. I think it's smart enough to not start with no water in it. My mom has a similar brewer but with no burner, just a thermos pot.
My 90's maker was just an analog clock and a big mechanical switch. No temp sensor, no time-out period that I know of. On TV they had time lapse footage of it getting hotter and hotter until it started to warp and bend over until the plastic brewer was touching the burner and then it burst into flames.
And what the author is doing is pretty smart, and not easy to do. I used to get 3 to 5 calls a day from robots offering me satellite TV. Yes, a day. I would typically have 2-4 voicemails when I got home form work and then receive several more calls. "Gee, I didn't want this the first 37 times you called, but your 38th call has won me over."
Anyway, they were all from fake numbers with fake names, they never mentioned what company they worked for, and there was no way off their list (and I think all robo calls are illegal, anyway). The few times I bothered to go through the menus and get to a human I was told off and hung up on. I even asked the phone company but they wouldn't even tell me who was calling.
Maybe I should have requested more info or something like the author did and then sued for $500 for each law broken for each call. Instead I canceled my land line.
Ah, yes, I remember watching Dateline or some such show in the 90's and thinking "Hey! That's my coffee maker on TV!"
As far as I know, it only activated the burst-into-flames feature if there was nothing left to absorb and dissipate the heat from the burner, i.e. no coffee or no pot. So it was perfectly safe if you remembered to turn it off after taking the last cup and then running outside to play lawn darts.
My old company had a firewall that blocked all the net security sites I needed for my job. However, you could get around this by adding a/. to the end of the URL. Of course, Google cache worked too, and later I found I could just turn off the proxy... It was a defense company.
Long ago I played Ultima 6. If you got on and off a boat two many times the game and your save file were irreversible corrupted. I accidentally discovered that pressing alt and typing characters would transport you around the map, and soon my friend and I had figured out the hex coordinates for everything important in the game. Thus, one bug was cured with another bug.
I had one dorm elevator that if you pressed two buttons at once it would cancel all floor selections. When we tried this in another elevator it would split the difference. So pressing 2 and 4 resulted in a trip to the 3rd floor, pressing 3 and 4 resulted in a trip to halfway between those floors. And yes, the door would open.
As an engineer who is occasionally forced to program in C, I'm less than amused that C will let me multiply 4 with 4.0 without complaint and then give me a result along the lines of 4235697896236984981. Call me crazy, but I'd rather spend 3 seconds on a compile error about mixing ints and floats than 3 hours tracking down a run-time error.
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I agree with most of what you are saying but I'm not sure I agree with your logic.
If you were to argue that it is impossible for an organization as large as the government to have 0% mistake rate in keeping secrets, I wouldn't disagree. Or the idea that not a single non-US government entity ever trained their RADAR on the Apollo missions is ridiculous, for example, I would not disagree.
But your argument that 1 person making a mistake in MS Office = teh government is incompetent... seems like you've traded one meme for another. I recall FEMA being extremely efficient handling hurricanes and even evacuating car-less people before major hurricanes in Florida. FEMA was so efficient at handling emergencies and natural disasters like the California earthquake that Japan based their earthquake response on FEMA, but this was before a certain administration took over. An administration from a party that insists big government doesn't work, and seems dead set to prove it every time they are in charge...
I am not surprised at all that when you soup up a Dell to have top-end Mac features it costs way more than a Mac. That's like buying a Ford Escort and then having the dealer replace the engine with a Corvette engine, customize the suspension, replace the interior, replace the wheels and tires, replace the stereo and speakers, etc. and then when the car costs $70,000 claim that Fords are more expensive than Acuras [or something, insert your own brand, I know crap about cars].
Besides, everyone knows that Dell makes all their profit from upgrades. Last time I checked it cost $300+ to upgrade from an AMD64 X2 4800 to a 6000, when you can buy the 6000 CPU online for $241. So of course they cost more when you buy a low end and turn it into a high end laptop.
Last year my supposed girlfriend wanted a laptop. I found some great deals on Dells at slickdeals.net for $599 or $699. She wanted the new mac laptops that were $1599 and $1799. When I compared them side by side, there was no major difference for the $1000. When I compared CPU, HDD, RAM, the basics, they were identical.
Yes, the Mac looked waaaaay sexier, and the screen was nicer and I think had slightly higher resolution, and the laptop was slimmer and I assume lighter, and it had some other minor, but slick, differences. All of which are worth maybe a few hundred more, but not $1000 IMHO. And all those things are important for power users. And the difference between good and great is in the details. And I do indeed drool over the Macs like I will never drool over a Dell.
But she wanted it to take notes in class and do some work at home from time to time. And for that, the Mac was almost 3x the price for the same basic hardware.
I knew Adam and Eve were white, just like Jesus, and all the other important people in, er, the Middle East.
Well, you could RTFA...
"Additionally, the hardware lock-in - a lock-in that is Apple's choice - makes it hard to get exactly what you need. The Mac Mini I purchased originally would have been fine to complete this test if it had come with more RAM, but replacing the RAM was so daunting a task due to the ultra-compact form factor, I didn't bother. The only non-compact form factor that Apple offers is the very expensive Mac Pro line. Not everyone needs BlueTooth and WiFi - and I would have rather had a computer I could use. Dual-booting on a Mac brings the Mac platform an ability to play the games that were once the sole province of Windows. This should have been a net bonus for Mac but the limited and underpowered graphics solutions coupled with the inability to upgrade them negate that advantage."
I like Macs. They are sexy, and come with some cool stuff, and supposedly are reliable, though that wasn't my experience in school, but that was a decade ago. I was recently at the Apple store checking out sexy computers with sexy 30" LCD screens, when I noticed, to my horror, that Macs which cost more than my car come with a video card I would never even consider putting in my 2-year-old PC. If I'm going to pay $4,000+ for a box it better come with something better than an obsolete, throw-away, budget graphics card. Though from this article it seems buying a modern card isn't even an option.
Personally, in my PCs I have upgraded my power supply, RAM, HDD, videocard, cpu, motherboard (though that was hairy while keeping the OS, but it worked, eventually), case, fans/cooling, sound card, and random other knobs and lights and trinkets. If I owned a mac I guess that list would be RAM (on some cases) and CPU, maybe.
"Neuroscience research, Greene said, is finally explaining a problem that has long troubled philosophers and moral teachers: Why is it that people who are willing to help someone in front of them will ignore abstract pleas for help from those who are distant, such as a request for a charitable contribution that could save the life of a child overseas?"
Or certain groups who work tirelessly on emotional issues like telling gays they are bad or saving the unborn but couldn't give a rat's ass about global warming sinking entire island countries of the already-born underwater...
Hey, wait, can I interpret this article to say they those who disagree with me are acting on animal instinct while I am using higher brain functions? It feels good, so it must be true.
Ignore these heathen scientist and their secular morality fantasies, everyone going to heaven knows that true morals come from [insert religion] and atheists are immoral swine. Oh, and don't judge others.
According to evolutionary theory: since society benefits the individual evolution ought to favor traits that help form and maintain societies. For instance: faith and altruism. I would imagine other animals that live in colonies or collectives have similar mechanisms. Perhaps not faith, but feel reward for performing whatever their limited role is before dying without the opportunity or even ability to reproduce.
What's most surprising is that scientists are still surprised by this, as if they have never heard of evolution or thought about it's affect on society. Perhaps these are the same scientists who agree that emotions are in primitive parts of our brain yet insist "primitive" animals don't have emotions.
Are more people movingto urban areas?
Is the birthrate higher in urban areas and less in rural areas?
Are more rural areas being classified as urban?
I keep hearing this little factoid and none of the facts.
Yeah, my door chime stopped working one day when the little button on the door wore out. I thought it was good, too, until one morning it was really stormy so I turned on my headlights on the way to work, where they remained on all day, and I got to jump the car, in the rain, in a huge puddle after work. Then I did it 3 more times. I can jump a car in 45 seconds now.
I turned down an offer to have the button fixed for $50 figuring I could do it myself faster and cheaper. I was wrong on both counts. I bought replacements for not much less, spent 3-5 hours in 80-90 degree 80% humidity weather losing parts inside my door, breaking grounding wires, debugging wiring harnesses with a volt meter, and basically losing my mind.
But it works, damnit.
My microwave oven, and many like it, needs to be informed that it is a microwave oven before it will allow me to cook something. If you just walk up to it like some arrogant bastard and start pressing numbers it's like "wtf do you want me to do?" Then I remember that I have to tell it that it is an oven and that it's job is to cook thngs. After that it stops computing Fermat's last theorem or whatever the frak it is that microwaves do when they don't think they are microwaves and allows me to cook my food. That's not completely fair, my current microwave interprets buttons 1-5 as 1-5 minutes but still makes you press "start," while 6-9 and 0 do nothing. The work microwave ignores all numbers until you remind it of it's sole purpose for existing. The one next to it allows you to type in the time and hit start. My previous microwave, which I bought solely for it's interface, interpreted the numbers as minutes and started instantly. Insert meal, press 5, wait, eat. I miss that microwave.
My spell check just corrected my botched attempt at "interprets" into "interpenetrates."
My sprint phone had a "hands free" ear piece that had no mic, so you had to hold the phone up to your mouth while using the "hands free" feature. Often I put it in the charger and sat it on my desk in front of my mouth. Convenient. Not so much for car use.
My Treo 650 blinked all the time to let me know I wasn't roaming. Gotta love that indicator: "Look at me! Look at me! I have nothing to indicate! All is well! Look at meeeeeee!!!"
If I put a miss-burned CD in my car player it says "error 06" or something and wont let me eject it. I have to turn off and on the car and press eject before it reads the CD.
I bet I could list 50 things if I thought about it, and give myself an ulcer in the process.
Aluminum oxide takes an incredible amount of electricity to turn into aluminum. It's one of the most plentiful substances on earth but it wasn't until the hydroelectric plant was invented that it became at all practical to mass produce aluminum.
REI sells a light lexan french press for making coffee on the trail.
Here's one: http://www.rei.com/product/629245
but I bought one with a insulation sleeve.
They also sell a ball the makes ice cream while you hike. I might have to get one of those.
Ah, yes, the typical "we are way smarter than you so we don't need to listen to your experience" reply. That was basically the line from all the admins. "I've never heard of your problem so you must be wrong and I know I am right so I will look down on you and not bother to look into it. You don't like it? Then you have a bad attitude." Some of them were techs, but most were admins.
/. to the end of the addresses and that worked, until I realized that I could turn off the proxy settings and still get out to the intertubes. Secure.
Foolish me, wanting to do work...
Ooh ooh another story: at that first company where we were banned from going to computer security websites we kept looking for ways around it. One of us used google cache, I started adding
I'm sure they must do something important, but as far as helping the employees do work they are completely useless as far as I'm concerned. They come up with policies like "only use IE 5" at a computer security company and withhold privileges from people who know way more then they do, and block all security patches. Oh, and block all the dangerous hacker websites like redhat.com and secureinfo.com.
I once asked the sysadmins why we have 100 people on one printer that always breaks down, and could I be added to one of the many idle printers, and was basically told to go hack the servers and reconfigure the network myself. This was at a huge defense contractor. These were the same guys who backed up gigs of work on the F-22 onto obsolete tapes and then deleted the network drives and then threw away all of the tape readers. Yes, all of them. I was later assigned to reverse engineer what were basically sealed black boxes and re-do the VHDL. That begs the question: "why didn't the buy used readers on ebay?" Good question. Oh, and we had a 5 MB share drive to store all of our work, so obviously we stored almost everything locally. If we reported a problem with our PC they would reformat the machine. Once I told them I had a problem and to not format my machine unless they back up all the data. They said fine. Later I returned to find my machine formatted and my work gone. When I called they told me "we never back up data, it should be on your share drive." They decided something was wrong with my cubemate's computer and snuck in when he was at lunch and reformatted it without ever informing him. He lost years of email and all of his work. After that everyone put signs on their cases that said "do not format this machine." Oh, and our net of 50-100 people was on token ring and none of our apps were installed locally. If one person kicked the cable wrong we were all out of business.
At another defense contractor I reported problems where my machine would lock up for 300 seconds at specific intervals, and was told my problem was impossible and it didn't exist. I reported it many times before finding some lower guy, telling him about it, and he fixed the DNS server 5 minutes later. They never did fix the feature where if I set my clock to the correct time the server would change it to be off by 17 minutes. They also insisted that was impossible and never looked into it. It's not a bug, it's not a feature, it's a hallucination apparently.
Later at that company I requested a laptop with admin privs before leaving on 1-2 week trip, only to told after I got there that they don't give admin privs so that I basically lugged a boat anchor across the country for no reason as I couldn't install the compiler. You should have heard him whine when I said "So in order to use it I guess I just have to reformat it. No problem."
Maybe they can make their keyboard like the ones used my PCs, Macs, Linux, Unix, basically every other OS and networking device on Earth. That way I can type characters like "\" and "|" without having to have a separate monitor, keyboard and mouse for my Sun box while I have every other machine on one KVM switch.
Oh, and could they make solaris not suck sweaty donkey balls? That would be great.
Your mass is bass ackwards
From the summary: "Edison charges summer time-of-use rates that range from 29.7 to 35.9 cents per kilowatt-hour between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. on weekdays. It drops to a range of 16.3 to 18.6 cents per kilowatt-hour from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m."
1kWh during the day = up to 35.9 cents which at night = up to 35.9/16.3=2.2kWh.
Next time you want to be condescending make sure you aren't dead wrong about everything or else you look like a real jackass.
They don't "jack up" your rates, they change the way you get billed. Instead of paying a medium amount day and night, you pay a high amount during the day and a low amount at night.
If you go to work during the day and generate 1kWh to put into the grid, at night you use 2 or 3kWh from the grid and not pay a thing. So, for some people they've doubled or tripled the value of solar panels.
Now, if you stay home with the kids and use AC all day, you're screwed.
Obviously, someone didn't think this through. But I highly doubt it was intentional. I don't think anyone benefits from frequent blackouts during the summer.
You've never looked at real estate in the north east or west coast, have you?
My last company wanted me to move to San Jose, where a run-down condo is $600k and a tiny run-down house is $700k, and a house similar to what I bought in San Antonio for $167k was listed for $1.5 Mil. Even with a 40 yr mortgage I can't imagine being a homeowner and only earning 100k. I couldn't even get a realtor to give me a ballpark on what you need to earn to afford a house.
I did a search for a house at a reasonable price and found some that were 200 miles away, and some condos that were only a 90 mile commute each way. Of course the highways are gridlocked during most daylight hours. Apparently, some new employees bought houses that were 200 miles away and only went home on the weekend, and would crash at friend's places or rent a hotel during the week. Older employees bought their houses in the 80's. One lady saved for years and bought a dilapidated condo for 600-something.
My company offered me a 40% raise to move. I declined. Though now that summer is starting here in South Texas I'm starting to wonder if I made the wrong decision.
And about living a little further away to "save" money, lots of people do that. That's why there is so much gridlock and smog, and more taxes for more roads, not to mention they spend many times more money on gas and car maintenance than if they lived closer. Most of the time it's a wash or a loss to live further out.
Wow, whoever wrote that article sure does hate "environmentalists," who apparently all think with one mind and disagree on nothing and can be painted with a single brush.
I know my Grind-and-Brew turns off after an hour or so whether or not you drink all the coffee. It has a digital clock and can wake me up with the horrid sound of grinding and the pleasant smell of brewing. I think it's smart enough to not start with no water in it. My mom has a similar brewer but with no burner, just a thermos pot.
My 90's maker was just an analog clock and a big mechanical switch. No temp sensor, no time-out period that I know of. On TV they had time lapse footage of it getting hotter and hotter until it started to warp and bend over until the plastic brewer was touching the burner and then it burst into flames.
My mom would not let me re-create the scene.
Agreed.
And what the author is doing is pretty smart, and not easy to do. I used to get 3 to 5 calls a day from robots offering me satellite TV. Yes, a day. I would typically have 2-4 voicemails when I got home form work and then receive several more calls. "Gee, I didn't want this the first 37 times you called, but your 38th call has won me over."
Anyway, they were all from fake numbers with fake names, they never mentioned what company they worked for, and there was no way off their list (and I think all robo calls are illegal, anyway). The few times I bothered to go through the menus and get to a human I was told off and hung up on. I even asked the phone company but they wouldn't even tell me who was calling.
Maybe I should have requested more info or something like the author did and then sued for $500 for each law broken for each call. Instead I canceled my land line.
Ah, yes, I remember watching Dateline or some such show in the 90's and thinking "Hey! That's my coffee maker on TV!"
As far as I know, it only activated the burst-into-flames feature if there was nothing left to absorb and dissipate the heat from the burner, i.e. no coffee or no pot. So it was perfectly safe if you remembered to turn it off after taking the last cup and then running outside to play lawn darts.
My old company had a firewall that blocked all the net security sites I needed for my job. However, you could get around this by adding a /. to the end of the URL. Of course, Google cache worked too, and later I found I could just turn off the proxy... It was a defense company.
Long ago I played Ultima 6. If you got on and off a boat two many times the game and your save file were irreversible corrupted. I accidentally discovered that pressing alt and typing characters would transport you around the map, and soon my friend and I had figured out the hex coordinates for everything important in the game. Thus, one bug was cured with another bug.
I had one dorm elevator that if you pressed two buttons at once it would cancel all floor selections. When we tried this in another elevator it would split the difference. So pressing 2 and 4 resulted in a trip to the 3rd floor, pressing 3 and 4 resulted in a trip to halfway between those floors. And yes, the door would open.
As an engineer who is occasionally forced to program in C, I'm less than amused that C will let me multiply 4 with 4.0 without complaint and then give me a result along the lines of 4235697896236984981. Call me crazy, but I'd rather spend 3 seconds on a compile error about mixing ints and floats than 3 hours tracking down a run-time error.