Steel buildings
on
Pre-Fab Homes?
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· Score: 2, Informative
He very much likes pre-fab houses for quite a few reasons (detailed below). He's also a big fan of steel framed houses, since they're strong and easy to put up. And don't burn. Wires are also very easy to fish through them. They also have extremely strong points under the supporting I beams, good for hanging unlikely things like water beds.
There are some major advantages of steel studs. Yes, the punchouts make it very easy to fish lines through, as you punch a little circle out, add a grommit, and you pass the wire through -- You don't have to deal with drilling in between 16"OC studs, and then making sure they all line up, so you can fish easily.
But once the wall's up, they're both a pain in the ass to deal with. [I'm a big proponent of unfinished basements to run wires through, or unfinished attics.]
As for the fire issue, I'd say that metal houses are less fire-safe than wood structures. The best wood built structures, in my opinion, are built from large structural timbers, rather than today's balloon framing. Balloon framing isn't all that bad in a fire, as the drywall does act as a fire retardant. And wood itself needs to come to temperature to burn -- metal, however, will slowly lose strength as it is warmed up.
If you're looking for fireproof buildings, I'd go with concrete. [there are styrofoam forms that are stacked in like legos, the rebar's put into place, and the concrete poured in -- the foam can then be routed out for a cable chase]
I don't want it to seem that I'm not a fan of metal -- I am, but it just has to be used in the correct applications, like anything else. The one major advantage to metal is how it fails -- it doesn't tend to fail in spectacular fashion as often as other materials, as it'll noticably deflect under load, and under slight deflections, behaves elasticly. [As opposed to concrete, which will just fail outright... which is why you don't want to put too much rebar into concrete, or then the concrete fails before the metal does]
Oh-- and to keep this on topic. Although I have no experience with them, I like what some of the Swedish companies have done with pre-fab. [It's like a really large Ikea flat-pack]:
I got my degree in civil engineering. Although when I went to get a transcript when applying for a federal job, I found my university claims I never graduated, so not only have I never used my coursework for a professional purpose, but I can't even claim I have a degree and still pass vetting.
I also shelled out at the time for the Palette software (version 2.0, I think it was, which got me by, which was a version back at the time I got it).
Now, my reasons were a little different from yours -- I was fed up with the dress code changes at work, and they wouldn't accept my explaination that a T-shirt qualified as a "Shirt with a collar" as it had a crew-neck collar, so I embroidered 'A COLLAR' on the back of a shirt.
I was personally rather frustrated with the software, as it made no sense to me, after doing computer graphics for over a decade -- there were two main formats used. One defined all of the stitches to be laid down, and the other defined the regions that you were going to be working on.
Someone who's been doing this for a while would know that if you're going to be defining regions, it's best to use line art -- something like PICT or EPS. Unfortunately, the program could only import from bitmapped images. So, I'd have to convert the image in photoshop, then use the program to define region edges. [It did a horrible job, too, for most of my work, so I'd have to retool the edges by hand]. I then had to use a seperate program to define the stitching patterns.
I admit, version 2.0 is intended for Windows 95, and they're up to version 5.5, but I just can't justify shelling out that amount of money so that I can get not only more software, but also a whole 'nother card and card reader, when I already have one. [well, I might have to move to a USB card writer, one of these days, but I can't justify it right now, when the latest versions of software are up to $2k, and I paid $500 for my embroidery machine second hand.]
Anyway, my suggestion is to find a sewing machine store in your area (and I don't mean a fabric store, a real sewing store, that specializes in this sort of thing), and ask them if you can try out the software. You can also find some shareware software on-line. [Embird rings a bell...I don't know if it's gotten better since I used it, but it seemed to have some of the same issues as the old version of Palette I had]
You'd most likely be better off going and finding an embroidery website, and ask a computer question there, than asking an embroidery question on a computer website. I know I found quite a few when I was looking for better software after getting my machine.
[oh...and for those interested, my work wasn't happy with the shirt, and to get it back to your LARP comment, they didn't like when I wore in a steel gorget, either. Well, I assume they didn't like the gorget.... or it might have been the ring mail vest or plate mail legs]
Some of my friends thought I was crazy for complaining about R2's jets. I mean, hell, he's a repair droid -- if they were to break later, couldn't he just fix them?
[yeah, yeah, I know, it's hard to operate on yourself, but well, he also hangs out with other R2 units, so he could get one of them to fix him]
And don't try to tell me that he took them out to make room for the cupcake.
You're right that it won't make $990 million in revenue, as they've already stated that they're just preparing for 1billion songs, but they don't think they'll all be used. You're wrong in your assumption that the price is in the $0.30-0.40 range.
For Apple to make an agreement of that sort, it would mean that they'd have to have $0.59-0.69 in profits. Unfortunately, the RIAA doesn't just give them the songs for free-- they still have to pay for them like any other reseller.
Earlier rumors had the labels getting as much as $0.65 per song (and the artists getting their money from that amount). That would leave Apple with about $0.34 per song, and of course, they would have some operating expenses (bandwidth, servers, etc), so their actual profit margin would be less than that.
And well, unless Apple has some sort of plans of becoming a loss leader, and just eating the costs out of their own pocket (which isn't their style), I doubt they'd be willing to go that low. They might be willing to lose 1/2 their profit on single sales for the bulk aspect, and the possibility of future sales to the individuals that are introduced to the service, but well, only Apple would know what their real profit is. I doubt it's more than $0.20 per song, and most others have estimated it to be closer to $0.10.
If you buy a billion songs, you probably get a significant discount, but still, how much is Micky D's give to Apple? Even half a billion dollars would be a huge deal for Apple. Good thing I have that stock...
I read the article before it was posted to this website, as well, and so, I knew there was an answer to your question in there. If you had known that as well, you would be wise to state what you didn't believe in the article, so that it doesn't look as if you read the summary, without the article. Let's try this slight rewrite to your message:
'Sources say'? If you buy a billion songs, you probably get a significant discount, but still, how much is Micky D's give to Apple? Even half a billion dollars would be a huge deal for Apple. Good thing I have that stock...
Oh...and Apple doesn't make that money in profit. They make it in sales.
Personally, here's how I'd have phrased your question:
They're paying full price for the songs? Why do anonymous sources always make me think that they're just pulling numbers out of their ass? I'd think they get at least some sort of deal for that sort of volume.
There always seems to be Disney related promotions on Happy Meals, and McDonalds advertised heavily on ABC's "The Wonderful World of Disney", and isn't ABC owned by Disney?
And as the WB's been doing the whole TV / music advertising (with their whole 'this episode featured songs from...' bit at the end of shows), it was only a natural progression.
But I think that you're thinking too small -- I don't think McDonalds would get involved with something as small as a single band....maybe a whole record label, but they'd have to find a band that would have a strong enough appeal to interest a significant number of their established audience.
If you had read the article, you'd have seen that it stated:
Both Pepsi and McDonald's are paying Apple's retail price of 99 cents per song, sources say.... But because not all customers will take advantage of the offer, McDonald's actual spending on the campaign will probably be in the hundreds of millions of dollars
Why is there this extreme rush to get a first post?
[Yeah, yeah, I know, just moderate me down as a troll or flamebait already, I don't care, and it still doesn't change the fact that people want to see their names in print that they're willing to post things that show they're being lazy and/or ignorant]
Most likely the 120 character limit is a technical issue.
When you store information in a database, you want to set a maximum size, so that you can plan for the size of records, and so you can make it more efficient to retrieve records.
So, even if it's not seen, it's a character of text, and would still take up the same space in the database as a character that is seen.
Although I recognize your intent, I once recieved a 'donation form' in our office mail, and it suggested that the organization had a donation plan where you could get a few dollars taken out every paycheck.
Unfortunately, as the charitable organization was the one in which I was employed, it came across to most of us as 'we're paying you too much, will you please give some of it back?'
If you're interested in a charity, make a donation in the name of the company, and be done with it. Or perhaps offer to match anyone's donations to an organization [perhaps set a cap on matching, just incase someone has some savings they decide to dump that you weren't aware of]
Speaking as someone with a degree in civil engineering, who has been doing system administration for the last 8 years, I'd say that first, you should be informed about what all of the issues and variables you're not even thinking about. [eg, chilled air and warm air return issues, proper sizing of power systems, etc]. So, pick up a copy of Enterprise Data Center Design and Methodology, and read it.
Then, once you know what you need to be looking for, hire a professional -- odds are, there's stuff they'll know that's not in the book, and with years of practice, they'll have experience to fall back on that might fit your needs. [But with the info from the book, you'll at least be able to talk to them about your issues, and make sure that they're not trying to pull one over on you about your qualifications].
But let's look at this like sizing for a UPS... you have to determine what the cost of the system is, and what the consequences are if you didn't have it. Then you have to compare the costs to the benefits, and see if it makes sense in your environment. [eg, if your SLAs for a system make no provisions about down time, then there's no reason to have them on a UPS or generator, as there would be cost without benefit. [you don't save money in the time of a power outage]]
The problem is that there are not systems out there, that I know of, that provide information about quality, and that accept input from the user community to correct and adjust their data.
It's been one of my complaints for years, after a road trip to Texas from Kentucky -- on the way down, I found out just how bad the Arkansas interstates were [pot holes like DC, but it's a 70mph zone]. So I detoured on the way back, and found a 40mph single lane construction zone on the east side of Louisianna.
Although a road may 'work' in that it allows you to get from point A to point B, there are so many variables that you don't know about -- eg, when is their rush hour? [especially around DC, where things become impassible]. What construction is planned? How are the surfaces of the road? Are there reflectors? [for night-blind people].
For interstate construction info, most (possibly all) states have information on a website, but there needs to be ways to share that and work that into a GIS systems. For rush hour issues, the time that you start your trip (and your prefered top speed), would be an issue, which makes the calculations more difficult, I would assume.
So, your suggestion would require not only having the walking route data, but also the extra functionality for subjective information about the routes. [Oh...and you'd also want to list which ones are handicap accessible, or that might be an issue for someone walking]
I know that we used to use some old bellows for stoking the fire at home. [A little hand held version, as opposed to the giant ones that you'd find in a blacksmith's shop]
But yes, air makes fire hotter. That's why you close the vents to slow cook on a charcoal grill, and why they force air into blast furnaces for smelting.
Although part of the issue is oxygen being fed in, it also helps to blow off the layer of ash that forms over the coals, allowing them to get enough oxygen for them to burn, and to keep it from smothering itself out.
[as the three necessary components of fire are heat, oxygen and fuel, to put out a fire you have to deplete the fuel, choke it, or cool it off. [amount of heat necessary depends on the fuel, as some fuels will flash below room temperature]]
Fridges are like airconditioners -- you want to size them correctly, or they become less efficient. [as it's better to run constantly, than to start/stop the motor and compressor repeatedly.... sort of like a hard drive]
As two people have already pointed out, there's air space in fridges, and every time you open the door, that air falls out, and is replaced with room-temp air. [normally near 70F, as opposed to the 40F needed to keep food out of the infamous 'danger zone'.]
After the recent hurricane, a spokesperson from Giant Foods stated that food in a 1/2 full freezer will stay good for 24 hours without power.... a full freezer will keep for 48 hours. And that most fridges/freezers take some time to get down to temperature, so not to stock them until the power's been back on for 24 hours.
Anyway, my suggestion to you if you have a mostly empty fridge -- fill it. It doesn't have to be with food. A few jugs of water will help you in the long run, as water has a relatively high specific heat. [I think alcohol is higher though, so there's a legitimate reason for keeping a fridge full of beer]
Also, 'A' 'B' 'C' doesn't mean crap to us humans...you want to keep your fridge near 38F for most food stuffs. Buy a fridge thermometer...it's cheaper than a trip to the emergency room.
Hell, I didn't even think of power cords, but I do have a half dozen or so of the old IBM power cables that I 'rescued' from a college computer lab that they were gutting of 386s in the summer of 1995.
[I know I'm not the only one who keeps a box of misc. power cables -- 12Ga, 16 footers, 14Ga extenders, the old IBM ones, 'Y' cables, converters to turn 'em back to a socket, etc... there have to be some other pack-rat geeks out there]
However, even older than those, and the three IBM Model M keyboards that I have (which I got in trade for doing work for someone.... and amazingly came from another university that auctioned off their stuff in the summer of 1999)
But the power cords reminded me of something else that I have -- a surge supressor that I picked up at a computer store that was cleaning out their old inventory in...um....I'd say about 1991 ? 1992. It's a 4-plug, but has a surpressor for 'ArcLAN', whatever that is.
Other than that, a pair of Bose 101 speakers that I picked up in 1991, I believe [the stereo's changed out a few times, but the speakers have stayed].
Oldest computer is a P100 [needed the ISA slot], oldest computer part is a pair of WaveLAN cards [2mbps, ISA], or maybe some old 9" VGA 4-grey monitors. Looking at non-computer stuff, my mom's hand-me down 11cup Cuisinart. Oldest computer that's not in use is a Vic-20, and oldest hardware that's not in use in an Intellivision... or maybe a top-loading VCR....
The same one that has a 30 day return policy, and so, when I attempted to return a christmas gift that someone had given me, they wouldn't take it back, as I had the receipt, which showed it was bought in November, so I would've had 2 days from Christmas to have returned it within the 30 days.
It was still in the wrapper, still had the 'Best Buy' price tag on it, I had the receipt, and I was just trying to get store credit. I think what pissed me off more was that I had to drive about 25 miles to the nearest Best Buy (Annapolis, MD) in the first place, and then stood in line for a good 45 minutes, and they just blew me off.
I graduated in 1997, and was told by the director of the department I worked for that they would be creating a full time position for me, but that it would take some time... So I stayed through the summer, and when the job finally got posted, I was told by my manager that the director had told her that she was not to even interview me for the job.
Who did they hire instead? Someone who kept asking to copy off of me in class. Hell, one of the projects that he cited in his portfolio was actually based on a webpage that a former employee and I had done, and he took the basic content, and added a few pictures to the top of it.
What's he doing now? He's now a director. [Although the IT department is no longer headed by a director, there's now an Executive Director and CIO above that]
And the most insulting part of this whole story? We had one week overlap between his first day, and my last day... and I was told to train him. If you're going to put someone in a job that was supposedly created for me, you'd think they'd have known more than me, not the opposite, wouldn't you?
Managers and the like go very far in taking credit for other people's work and ideas.
Engines impart motion by the conversion of chemical energy. (ie, fuel).
For instance, although most of us refer to the thing inside our car as an 'engine' (internal combustion engine, to be more precise), if you watch NASCAR, they commonly refer to them as a 'motor'.
I'm glad they finally shut down this annoying person, as I was one of the people who kept getting his rants. [So if 100,000 messages bounced back, how many of them went through?]
Here's a sample of one of his rants...
Date: Sun, 09 Jun 2002 15:01:44 -0800
From: Pissed Off Phan <Walker_Lundy[at]philly.com>
Subject: The Scam Shifts into High Gear
Message-id: <0GXG00CWZL761J@mtaout06.icomcast.net>
This morning the "news"papers inform us "little people" that our hero at 3B
is now out of here. They will soon shift into a mode of self proclaimed
innocence as they shift the blame for this to Ed Wade. That isn't
completely without merit since Wade would resign before trading Rolen if he
had any character. Heck, if he had any smarts he would see that trading
Rolen is going to be one of his last moves as GM, so does he really want to
be fingered as he must know that he will, as the guy who traded both Curt
Schilling and Scott Rolen?
Wade should think about that for a long time. I would not want to be in
those shoes if I was going to be in the Philly area in the future. Those
"passionate Phans" may "tip their caps" to the guys at the "news"papers,
but they are often violent toward someone like Wade.
Just ask Terry Francona.
However, I digress. Does anyone find it a bit strange that "The Fatman"
has clammed up about Scottie? He has been the front man laying in the
punches since last year when he kicked it off by altering Bowa's "quote"
about the middle-of-the-order to finger Rolen instead. He's back writing
again, but nothing about you-know-who. Somehow I think that's about to
change though, and I get the feeling that this week is when that change
will occur.
Don't ever let it slip from your mind that it was "The Fatman" who wrote
Curt Schilling out of town. He actually sold that to us as an
"opportunity". He didn't mention in any of those columns that it would be
an opportunity for us Phans to watch Curt pitch in another World Series
though.
Part of that opportunity is still with us at 1B. Let's take a look at this
"opportunity" a little more closely. This "opportunity" is 27yrs old and
has been a big leaguer (if not a "player") for four plus seasons and in
this time he has risen to the heights of a career.744 OPS that is near
equal parts OBP and Slugging. Imagine, a 1B with a career.402 SLG mark.
Wow, what an opportunity!
Those who sold us this line of garbage will shamelessly point to Padilla,
but he qualifies as one of the biggest surprises of the last decade. He
came here as a relief pitcher of unknown origin or age, and then failed
miserably in that role. If Padilla came into a game with a runner on 1B and
one out everyone came to know that the guy at 1B would cross the plate
before that inning was over.
Now "The Fatman" and his posse have dogged Rolen since early last year,
using every "opportunity" that they could create to strongly suggest that
Rolen should be traded while knowing that no one in the Phan base (what's
left of it) wanted this. It has gotten so bad that Sam Donnellon recently
suggested that Rolen was responsible for the low attendance figures!
Hey, did you expect him to blame Jim Buck Jr? This pansy has never written
"Jim Buck Jr." in any of his columns, not one.
The crew at the "news"papers are clearly nervous. I've not seen such a
shuffling of names on articles about the Phillies before. Still, no matter
what the name attached to the article the line is still the same. Not one
of them has ever heard of Jim Buck Jr. and it's Wade and the players who
are to blame. Ownership is always absent and innocent as far as the
Inquirer and Daily News are concerned. Heck, Rich Hoffman is even willing
to go on TV and shout at "the little people" about how poor Jim Buck Jr.
(excuse me "The Buck Brothers") has no money. Of course, he never explains
how a billionaire could not have money.
It's taken a rather long time for Married With Children to come out on DVD, and who knows when it'll all be available?
How about Bullshit (the Penn & Teller show that was on Showtime)... or even Penn & Teller's Sin City Spectacular?
Buying on DVD works great when it actually comes out on DVD, even if you might have to wait a few years, and you tend to get special features, commentary tracks, etc, but not all of 'em get released. How much of a market is there for Mad Jack the Pirate? Highwayman? Any one of the other thousand shows listed on TV Shows on DVD?
Yes, buying it on DVD is a rather convenient way to handle everything, and you get nice organization, but well, some of us just aren't willing to wait a decade or more until the shows that we want to collect are determined to be economically feasible to release on DVD for sale.
of course, there's the question of when you refer to PCMCIA if you're refering to the group, or the original memory card standard.
Now, as memory, yes, there are plenty of other standards, but there's the question of which one a computer manufacturer should standardize on -- portables put out by a company that also makes flash memory has a bias (ie, sony), but with an intermediary connection type, you can easily add additional capabilities to your computer, so that it can read the old legacy format that you're using in your digital camera.
And that's the key point -- adding additional capabilities. Not many people used PCMCIA [which as we all remember, means 'People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms'] for memory, but for modems, ethernet cards, SCSI connections, etc -- the sorts of things that a computer manufacturer decided the general public didn't need, but that you decided that you wanted.
With built-in modems commonplace, and there not being the whole X2/kFlex/kFlex/v.90 issues anymore, and no one's upgrading their internal 9600 baud modem, or getting a hardware based modem to replace their softmodem, modems aren't the key. And you don't need a 10bT or 100bT card to get on your LAN, as I haven't seen any new systems out there that didn't have 100 or better built in these days. Even wireless is starting to move to built in, and it's standardized, so most of 'em work together, or as reasonably as can be expected.
But that's the magic thing about PCMCIA, or whatever they want to call the slots this week -- we don't have to know what it's for. It's like the cigarette lighter in your car -- you can plug whatever the hell you want into it -- cell phone charger, power inverter, portable CD player, laptop, radar detector, hell, even a cigarette lighter. It's something that computer manufacturers can place into their systems to enable the consumer to have a choice of flexability.
There were two main types of cybersquatting, as I saw it --
buying up random names, and hoping someone would buy it from you (aka. domain speculation)
buying up specific company names, and charging them obnoxious amounts if they want it (which would end up in court, etc)
In this case, Verisign didn't pay for anything-- they're claiming everything that hasn't been bought. Not only that, but if someone had a domain, but didn't have a host in the domain, they're claiming that as theirs, too.
[Not that I'm surprised...the first sign that things like this were going to happen was when IE started replacing webserver error messages with their own if they decided your error message wasn't big enough, and replacing 'server not found' with links to their search engine]
So well, your 40 acres comparison falls through as it's more the equivalent of someone saying 'all this is mine until someone else buys it' and then, after you buy your plot, they still claim the area that you haven't built on yet, even though you have the deed to it.
Availability is one of the basic issues when sizing your system. [ie, can you have it down at night for a cold backup, or does it have to be available 24x7? Can you even get a maintenance window once a month?]
As with sizing your UPS and/or generators, you need to determine what the cost to your business is for downtime.
Now, yes, you might have some issues in SLAs that spell out how much it'll cost you, if you have to refund customers's money [for service based orgs]-- or how much profit you'd lose if your customers couldn't purchase items [for sales based orgs]. But unfortunately, you have to also consider the recovery costs, the costs of damage to your reputation, etc.
If it's not worth your purchasing an Oracle or other, more expensive database, there's good odds that it's not worth the headaches of maintaining a high availability cluster with automatic failover. Instead, you can mirror the data, and keep transaction logs that you can replay.
You can have a spare system on standby, that you can keep updated on a regular basis (again, your cost of downtime, and the necessary time to recover the system will affect your choices), and when your main system should fail, you can push the most recent diffs to your standby, reconfigure the application servers to recognize the new server as the old one, and you're back in business.
It requires a bit of planning, and making sure that the necessary manual steps are well documented [so that anyone can do it, should the server outage be caused by something serious enough to take out your administrator, too], but it's easier and cheaper to build and maintain than a true cluster.
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But once the wall's up, they're both a pain in the ass to deal with. [I'm a big proponent of unfinished basements to run wires through, or unfinished attics.]
As for the fire issue, I'd say that metal houses are less fire-safe than wood structures. The best wood built structures, in my opinion, are built from large structural timbers, rather than today's balloon framing. Balloon framing isn't all that bad in a fire, as the drywall does act as a fire retardant. And wood itself needs to come to temperature to burn -- metal, however, will slowly lose strength as it is warmed up.
If you're looking for fireproof buildings, I'd go with concrete. [there are styrofoam forms that are stacked in like legos, the rebar's put into place, and the concrete poured in -- the foam can then be routed out for a cable chase]
I don't want it to seem that I'm not a fan of metal -- I am, but it just has to be used in the correct applications, like anything else. The one major advantage to metal is how it fails -- it doesn't tend to fail in spectacular fashion as often as other materials, as it'll noticably deflect under load, and under slight deflections, behaves elasticly. [As opposed to concrete, which will just fail outright... which is why you don't want to put too much rebar into concrete, or then the concrete fails before the metal does]
Oh-- and to keep this on topic. Although I have no experience with them, I like what some of the Swedish companies have done with pre-fab. [It's like a really large Ikea flat-pack]:
- Skarne
- Svenska Hus
I'd rather buy locally, if I can (shipping isn't cheap, after all), but I really like the concepts.I got my degree in civil engineering. Although when I went to get a transcript when applying for a federal job, I found my university claims I never graduated, so not only have I never used my coursework for a professional purpose, but I can't even claim I have a degree and still pass vetting.
I also shelled out at the time for the Palette software (version 2.0, I think it was, which got me by, which was a version back at the time I got it).
Now, my reasons were a little different from yours -- I was fed up with the dress code changes at work, and they wouldn't accept my explaination that a T-shirt qualified as a "Shirt with a collar" as it had a crew-neck collar, so I embroidered 'A COLLAR' on the back of a shirt.
I was personally rather frustrated with the software, as it made no sense to me, after doing computer graphics for over a decade -- there were two main formats used. One defined all of the stitches to be laid down, and the other defined the regions that you were going to be working on.
Someone who's been doing this for a while would know that if you're going to be defining regions, it's best to use line art -- something like PICT or EPS. Unfortunately, the program could only import from bitmapped images. So, I'd have to convert the image in photoshop, then use the program to define region edges. [It did a horrible job, too, for most of my work, so I'd have to retool the edges by hand]. I then had to use a seperate program to define the stitching patterns.
I admit, version 2.0 is intended for Windows 95, and they're up to version 5.5, but I just can't justify shelling out that amount of money so that I can get not only more software, but also a whole 'nother card and card reader, when I already have one. [well, I might have to move to a USB card writer, one of these days, but I can't justify it right now, when the latest versions of software are up to $2k, and I paid $500 for my embroidery machine second hand.]
Anyway, my suggestion is to find a sewing machine store in your area (and I don't mean a fabric store, a real sewing store, that specializes in this sort of thing), and ask them if you can try out the software. You can also find some shareware software on-line. [Embird rings a bell...I don't know if it's gotten better since I used it, but it seemed to have some of the same issues as the old version of Palette I had]
You'd most likely be better off going and finding an embroidery website, and ask a computer question there, than asking an embroidery question on a computer website. I know I found quite a few when I was looking for better software after getting my machine.
[oh...and for those interested, my work wasn't happy with the shirt, and to get it back to your LARP comment, they didn't like when I wore in a steel gorget, either. Well, I assume they didn't like the gorget.... or it might have been the ring mail vest or plate mail legs]
Some of my friends thought I was crazy for complaining about R2's jets. I mean, hell, he's a repair droid -- if they were to break later, couldn't he just fix them?
[yeah, yeah, I know, it's hard to operate on yourself, but well, he also hangs out with other R2 units, so he could get one of them to fix him]
And don't try to tell me that he took them out to make room for the cupcake.
You're right that it won't make $990 million in revenue, as they've already stated that they're just preparing for 1billion songs, but they don't think they'll all be used. You're wrong in your assumption that the price is in the $0.30-0.40 range.
For Apple to make an agreement of that sort, it would mean that they'd have to have $0.59-0.69 in profits. Unfortunately, the RIAA doesn't just give them the songs for free-- they still have to pay for them like any other reseller.
Earlier rumors had the labels getting as much as $0.65 per song (and the artists getting their money from that amount). That would leave Apple with about $0.34 per song, and of course, they would have some operating expenses (bandwidth, servers, etc), so their actual profit margin would be less than that.
And well, unless Apple has some sort of plans of becoming a loss leader, and just eating the costs out of their own pocket (which isn't their style), I doubt they'd be willing to go that low. They might be willing to lose 1/2 their profit on single sales for the bulk aspect, and the possibility of future sales to the individuals that are introduced to the service, but well, only Apple would know what their real profit is. I doubt it's more than $0.20 per song, and most others have estimated it to be closer to $0.10.
Personally, here's how I'd have phrased your question:
There always seems to be Disney related promotions on Happy Meals, and McDonalds advertised heavily on ABC's "The Wonderful World of Disney", and isn't ABC owned by Disney?
And as the WB's been doing the whole TV / music advertising (with their whole 'this episode featured songs from...' bit at the end of shows), it was only a natural progression.
But I think that you're thinking too small -- I don't think McDonalds would get involved with something as small as a single band....maybe a whole record label, but they'd have to find a band that would have a strong enough appeal to interest a significant number of their established audience.
[Yeah, yeah, I know, just moderate me down as a troll or flamebait already, I don't care, and it still doesn't change the fact that people want to see their names in print that they're willing to post things that show they're being lazy and/or ignorant]
Most likely the 120 character limit is a technical issue.
When you store information in a database, you want to set a maximum size, so that you can plan for the size of records, and so you can make it more efficient to retrieve records.
So, even if it's not seen, it's a character of text, and would still take up the same space in the database as a character that is seen.
Isn't the doctors office issue handled in HIPPA?
[to allow to the standardized exchange of information]
HIPPA covers more than just privacy of information.
Although I recognize your intent, I once recieved a 'donation form' in our office mail, and it suggested that the organization had a donation plan where you could get a few dollars taken out every paycheck.
Unfortunately, as the charitable organization was the one in which I was employed, it came across to most of us as 'we're paying you too much, will you please give some of it back?'
If you're interested in a charity, make a donation in the name of the company, and be done with it. Or perhaps offer to match anyone's donations to an organization [perhaps set a cap on matching, just incase someone has some savings they decide to dump that you weren't aware of]
Speaking as someone with a degree in civil engineering, who has been doing system administration for the last 8 years, I'd say that first, you should be informed about what all of the issues and variables you're not even thinking about. [eg, chilled air and warm air return issues, proper sizing of power systems, etc]. So, pick up a copy of Enterprise Data Center Design and Methodology, and read it.
... you have to determine what the cost of the system is, and what the consequences are if you didn't have it. Then you have to compare the costs to the benefits, and see if it makes sense in your environment. [eg, if your SLAs for a system make no provisions about down time, then there's no reason to have them on a UPS or generator, as there would be cost without benefit. [you don't save money in the time of a power outage]]
Then, once you know what you need to be looking for, hire a professional -- odds are, there's stuff they'll know that's not in the book, and with years of practice, they'll have experience to fall back on that might fit your needs. [But with the info from the book, you'll at least be able to talk to them about your issues, and make sure that they're not trying to pull one over on you about your qualifications].
But let's look at this like sizing for a UPS
Oh...and if you're completely cheap, read the first chapter online -- Data Center Design Philosophy
The problem is that there are not systems out there, that I know of, that provide information about quality, and that accept input from the user community to correct and adjust their data.
It's been one of my complaints for years, after a road trip to Texas from Kentucky -- on the way down, I found out just how bad the Arkansas interstates were [pot holes like DC, but it's a 70mph zone]. So I detoured on the way back, and found a 40mph single lane construction zone on the east side of Louisianna.
Although a road may 'work' in that it allows you to get from point A to point B, there are so many variables that you don't know about -- eg, when is their rush hour? [especially around DC, where things become impassible]. What construction is planned? How are the surfaces of the road? Are there reflectors? [for night-blind people].
For interstate construction info, most (possibly all) states have information on a website, but there needs to be ways to share that and work that into a GIS systems. For rush hour issues, the time that you start
your trip (and your prefered top speed), would be an issue, which makes the calculations more difficult, I would assume.
So, your suggestion would require not only having the walking route data, but also the extra functionality for subjective information about the routes. [Oh...and you'd also want to list which ones are handicap accessible, or that might be an issue for someone walking]
I know that we used to use some old bellows for stoking the fire at home. [A little hand held version, as opposed to the giant ones that you'd find in a blacksmith's shop]
But yes, air makes fire hotter. That's why you close the vents to slow cook on a charcoal grill, and why they force air into blast furnaces for smelting.
Although part of the issue is oxygen being fed in, it also helps to blow off the layer of ash that forms over the coals, allowing them to get enough oxygen for them to burn, and to keep it from smothering itself out.
[as the three necessary components of fire are heat, oxygen and fuel, to put out a fire you have to deplete the fuel, choke it, or cool it off. [amount of heat necessary depends on the fuel, as some fuels will flash below room temperature]]
Fridges are like airconditioners -- you want to size them correctly, or they become less efficient. [as it's better to run constantly, than to start/stop the motor and compressor repeatedly.... sort of like a hard drive]
As two people have already pointed out, there's air space in fridges, and every time you open the door, that air falls out, and is replaced with room-temp air. [normally near 70F, as opposed to the 40F needed to keep food out of the infamous 'danger zone'.]
After the recent hurricane, a spokesperson from Giant Foods stated that food in a 1/2 full freezer will stay good for 24 hours without power.... a full freezer will keep for 48 hours. And that most fridges/freezers take some time to get down to temperature, so not to stock them until the power's been back on for 24 hours.
Anyway, my suggestion to you if you have a mostly empty fridge -- fill it. It doesn't have to be with food. A few jugs of water will help you in the long run, as water has a relatively high specific heat. [I think alcohol is higher though, so there's a legitimate reason for keeping a fridge full of beer]
Also, 'A' 'B' 'C' doesn't mean crap to us humans...you want to keep your fridge near 38F for most food stuffs. Buy a fridge thermometer...it's cheaper than a trip to the emergency room.
Hell, I didn't even think of power cords, but I do have a half dozen or so of the old IBM power cables that I 'rescued' from a college computer lab that they were gutting of 386s in the summer of 1995.
... there have to be some other pack-rat geeks out there]
[I know I'm not the only one who keeps a box of misc. power cables -- 12Ga, 16 footers, 14Ga extenders, the old IBM ones, 'Y' cables, converters to turn 'em back to a socket, etc
However, even older than those, and the three IBM Model M keyboards that I have (which I got in trade for doing work for someone.... and amazingly came from another university that auctioned off their stuff in the summer of 1999)
But the power cords reminded me of something else that I have -- a surge supressor that I picked up at a computer store that was cleaning out their old inventory in...um....I'd say about 1991 ? 1992. It's a 4-plug, but has a surpressor for 'ArcLAN', whatever that is.
Other than that, a pair of Bose 101 speakers that I picked up in 1991, I believe [the stereo's changed out a few times, but the speakers have stayed].
Oldest computer is a P100 [needed the ISA slot], oldest computer part is a pair of WaveLAN cards [2mbps, ISA], or maybe some old 9" VGA 4-grey monitors. Looking at non-computer stuff, my mom's hand-me down 11cup Cuisinart. Oldest computer that's not in use is a Vic-20, and oldest hardware that's not in use in an Intellivision... or maybe
a top-loading VCR....
The same one that has a 30 day return policy, and so,
when I attempted to return a christmas gift that someone had given me, they wouldn't take it back, as I had the receipt, which showed it was bought in November, so I would've had 2 days from Christmas to have returned it within the 30 days.
It was still in the wrapper, still had the 'Best Buy' price tag on it, I had the receipt, and I was just trying to get store credit. I think what pissed me off more was that I had to drive about 25 miles to the nearest Best Buy (Annapolis, MD) in the first place, and then stood in line for a good 45 minutes, and they just blew me off.
I haven't purchased anything from Best Buy since.
I graduated in 1997, and was told by the director of the department I worked for that they would be creating a full time position for me, but that it would take some time... So I stayed through the summer, and when the job finally got posted, I was told by my manager that the director had told her that she was not to even interview me for the job.
Who did they hire instead? Someone who kept asking to copy off of me in class. Hell, one of the projects that he cited in his portfolio was actually based on a webpage that a former employee and I had done, and he took the basic content, and added a few pictures to the top of it.
What's he doing now? He's now a director. [Although the IT department is no longer headed by a director, there's now an Executive Director and CIO above that]
And the most insulting part of this whole story? We had one week overlap between his first day, and my last day... and I was told to train him. If you're going to put someone in a job that was supposedly created for me, you'd think they'd have known more than me, not the opposite, wouldn't you?
Managers and the like go very far in taking credit for other people's work and ideas.
Engines impart motion by the conversion of chemical energy. (ie, fuel).
For instance, although most of us refer to the thing inside our car as an 'engine' (internal combustion engine, to be more precise), if you watch NASCAR, they commonly refer to them as a 'motor'.
Your argument is basicallyor, for those Simpson fans:
I'm glad they finally shut down this annoying person, as I was one of the people who kept getting his rants. [So if 100,000 messages bounced back, how many of them went through?]
Here's a sample of one of his rants ...
It's taken a rather long time for Married With Children to come out on DVD, and who knows when it'll all be available?
How about Bullshit (the Penn & Teller show that was on Showtime)... or even Penn & Teller's Sin City Spectacular?
Buying on DVD works great when it actually comes out on DVD, even if you might have to wait a few years, and you tend to get special features, commentary tracks, etc, but not all of 'em get released. How much of a market is there for Mad Jack the Pirate? Highwayman? Any one of the other thousand shows listed on TV Shows on DVD?
Yes, buying it on DVD is a rather convenient way to handle everything, and you get nice organization, but well, some of us just aren't willing to wait a decade or more until the shows that we want to collect are determined to be economically feasible to release on DVD for sale.
of course, there's the question of when you refer to PCMCIA if you're refering to the group, or the original memory card standard.
Now, as memory, yes, there are plenty of other standards, but there's the question of which one a computer manufacturer should standardize on -- portables put out by a company that also makes flash memory has a bias (ie, sony), but with an intermediary connection type, you can easily add additional capabilities to your computer, so that it can read the old legacy format that you're using in your digital camera.
And that's the key point -- adding additional capabilities. Not many people used PCMCIA [which as we all remember, means 'People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms'] for memory, but for modems, ethernet cards, SCSI connections, etc -- the sorts of things that a computer manufacturer decided the general public didn't need, but that you decided that you wanted.
With built-in modems commonplace, and there not being the whole X2/kFlex/kFlex/v.90 issues anymore, and no one's upgrading their internal 9600 baud modem, or getting a hardware based modem to replace their softmodem, modems aren't the key. And you don't need a 10bT or 100bT card to get on your LAN, as I haven't seen any new systems out there that didn't have 100 or better built in these days. Even wireless is starting to move to built in, and it's standardized, so most of 'em work together, or as reasonably as can be expected.
But that's the magic thing about PCMCIA, or whatever they want to call the slots this week -- we don't have to know what it's for. It's like the cigarette lighter in your car -- you can plug whatever the hell you want into it -- cell phone charger, power inverter, portable CD player, laptop, radar detector, hell, even a cigarette lighter. It's something that computer manufacturers can place into their systems to enable the consumer to have a choice of flexability.
- buying up random names, and hoping someone would buy it from you (aka. domain speculation)
- buying up specific company names, and charging them obnoxious amounts if they want it (which would end up in court, etc)
In this case, Verisign didn't pay for anything-- they're claiming everything that hasn't been bought. Not only that, but if someone had a domain, but didn't have a host in the domain, they're claiming that as theirs, too.[Not that I'm surprised...the first sign that things like this were going to happen was when IE started replacing webserver error messages with their own if they decided your error message wasn't big enough, and replacing 'server not found' with links to their search engine]
So well, your 40 acres comparison falls through as it's more the equivalent of someone saying 'all this is mine until someone else buys it' and then, after you buy your plot, they still claim the area that you haven't built on yet, even though you have the deed to it.
Availability is one of the basic issues when sizing your system. [ie, can you have it down at night for a cold backup, or does it have to be available 24x7? Can you even get a maintenance window once a month?]
As with sizing your UPS and/or generators, you need to determine what the cost to your business is for downtime.
Now, yes, you might have some issues in SLAs that spell out how much it'll cost you, if you have to refund customers's money [for service based orgs]-- or how much profit you'd lose if your customers couldn't purchase items [for sales based orgs]. But unfortunately, you have to also consider the recovery costs, the costs of damage to your reputation, etc.
If it's not worth your purchasing an Oracle or other, more expensive database, there's good odds that it's not worth the headaches of maintaining a high availability cluster with automatic failover. Instead, you can mirror the data, and keep transaction logs that you can replay.
You can have a spare system on standby, that you can keep updated on a regular basis (again, your cost of downtime, and the necessary time to recover the system will affect your choices), and when your main system should fail, you can push the most recent diffs to your standby, reconfigure the application servers to recognize the new server as the old one, and you're back in business.
It requires a bit of planning, and making sure that the necessary manual steps are well documented [so that anyone can do it, should the server outage be caused by something serious enough to take out your administrator, too], but it's easier and cheaper to build and maintain than a true cluster.