We have two 5-ton units covering a total of about 4000 sq ft. We're on the edge of a desert so we get up to 110F several days per year--so even if 10 tons is on the high side it isn't a ridiculous amount in context. The builder chose the provisioning (not me) and they made these decisions 25+ years ago before anyone really cared about carbon footprint or energy star or LEED.
I made an attempt to reduce the electric bill at my house a couple years ago, but the TV was the least of it.
My wife runs a rack of networking equipment 24/7 and a runs a 1/2hp stand mixer on weekends. Plus she likes to leave lights on in the kitchen and hallway at night.
The babysitter gets lonely during the day and turns on every light switch in the house then turns on the DVD player to play CDs and turns on (a different) TV to see the DVD player's "you're watching a CD so I have no video to show you" screen. The kid sleeps with a 20W CFL lamp on all night.
The cable box uses 20W whether it's on or off. There are idle loads from a garage door opener, doorbell circuit, burglar alarm, cheapo video surveillance system, several outdoor lights on motion IR, various clocks, a gas oven and a microwave with displays, 2 laptops and 10 (ten!) phones plugged into chargers.
If that's not enough, from June through September the wife likes to keep the house at 74F. So 10 tons of a/c capacity are engaged in a losing war moving entropy from inside to outside.
I'm willing to try to save money on electricity, in fact I'm highly motivated because I pay for it. But there are other people that I cannot simply yell at/browbeat/guilt trip into conservation at so in the interest of family harmony our carbon footprint is, well, gigantic really.
Someone explained to me once that the fundamental problem with healthcare is that the party benefiting from health care and the party paying for the health care were not the same--so the market fails and the resource is wasted to some large and inevitable degree. The same thing happens with electricity. So many people use electricity that someone else is paying for that there is a failure of the free market.
Regulation is inevitable unless each person gets their own ipod-sized electric meter to carry around. I'm serious.
Find out who is going to be creating the content that will be shown, talk to them about their needs as if you care, but really pay attention when they talk about what software they use to do the authoring. then research that and find out what formats it supports. Maybe it's all flash like you said, but if someone is expecting quicktime or silverlight, you'd better find that out now instead of six months from now after you've ordered 100 linux boxes.
The cd/dvd jukebox idea is terrible. Loading a DVD will take more time than anyone is willing to sit around and wait, furthermore what if five people at five different kiosks want to look at content located on 5 different DVDs? That level of DVD changer is way more expensive than management realizes. A big rack of sata disks under control of a NAS server is probably your best bet. Also, I would worry less about RAID and more about being able to quickly cold swap a failed NAS server.
A "would be nice" is a way for people to walk around and interact with the exhibits without having to repeatedly press the "English" or "Spanish" or "French" buttons on each and every touchscreen. I hate that. They should be able to just grab an rfid token out of a bucket and walk around...and the whole place seems to be in their native language. Hey, maybe have a mic and the kiosk listens for common words in each language and acts accordingly.
Museums swap exhibits in and out fairly often. Have some low-effort way for the curators to swap the kiosk content to match. Maybe the content is tied to an inventory number and the curators can just enter a (semi) admin password, then the inventory number and set the default content right there. the general idea is that the last thing you want is to have to spend the rest of your life assigning content to kiosks.
I'd look into something wireless for the floor sensors/big buttons, like hacking into a bluetooth mouse. Then the curators can move things around a bit, change batteries, even redo the pairing if they want to move buttons between exhibits.
If you're thinking 100 or more kiosks in the long run, I'd look into PXE booting or similar just to avoid any OS install/upgrade/patch labor being multiplied by 100.
Firewall! Last thing you want is some 2 y/o kid to type some random museum words like "nude" or "maplethorp" into a browser and get 20M pages of confusing things on google images while their prudish american parents have a little conservative republican freak out.
Best of luck with this. In spite of the tone of my comments I'm quite jealous. This sounds like one of the most fun projects anyone could ever get!
I think there are some hidden factors at play. Specifically, cars have become comfortable cocoons with a smooth ride, automatic and power everything, tons of safety features, and for SUV's an above-it-all stance. These make it easy to detach oneself from the driving experience. Also, there seems to be more enforcement of speed laws and more traffic in urban and suburban areas. So, basically, any visceral thrill from driving has been removed from the equation, and without that driving is just plain boring.
Combine that with a bloodstream full of caffeine from starbucks and people need *something* to occupy this dead time in their commute. Further, with the wide availability and low cost of in-car television, MP3 players, satellite radio, cellular phones, pagers, cupholders, screaming children, carpool mates, animated roadside LED billboards....people's attention naturally wanders to something, anything, more interesting than staring at the back of the car in front of them in case the brake lights go on.
aside from the weight issue, shouldn't the cable specifically be designed to be an insulator anyway? Shorting out the fair weather return current and/or tapping into particle storms in the upper atmosphere seems like it could lead to some nasty little electrical issues.
It's not unusual for electric trollies or subway cars to send their braking energy back into the rails or catenaries. So long as there are some other cars somewhere on the line that are accelerating or at least holding steady speed against friction and wind resistance the braking energy will be re-used nearby with very little loss, possibly less than you'd lose with a battery, capacitor, or flywheel setup.
it shouldn't use any power just sitting there. capacitors do slowly discharge of their own accord, but an hour in a traffic jam shouldn't be a problem. they will have to turn off the a/c though.
Maybe somebody already brough this up and I just missed the thread, but I work on software development evenings and weekends IN MY HEAD. I might be riding my bike, working in the yard, playing with my son, watching tv or just having dinner...but in the back of my mind, I'm thinking about the right way to solve a pogramming or software design issue, planning out a class hierarchy, imagining what utility functions I'll need, or worst-case, pondering the cause of a mysterious seg fault. By the time I get back into the office I've usually got a pretty solid plan worked out and I can just start coding.
If you're using numbers larger than 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 on a regular basis you might be more interested in floating point or a packed decimal library.
IMHO, it's more that pointers will be 128 bits. And knowning microsoft, they'll probably try to re-introduce the "far" keyword.
I would like to see a class-action suit against the PROVIDERS of the technologies that encourage distraction. Cell phones and text messaging are specifically designed with tower hand-offs in mind so that people can and will use phones while driving. This would not be possible without the complicity of these corporations and they should held as accountable as the individual drivers for their part in distracting drivers' attention.
2-way sat modems are very tricky to set up the dish. You can't just point them with a compass and azimuth guess like you do with DBS...you have to get feedback about how well the satellite is receiving your uplink. And if you do get it pointed correctly, every time you walk around the RV you'll move the dish a little bit and lose the uplink. Also, the "flat" dishes you see on top of escalades that work in motion are receive only. You cannot use a 2-way sat modem while in motion, period.
I think 3G is your best bet. I'd go with a cradlepoint and have a tetherable 3G phone (on a different network) as a backup. ( Possibly, you can plug two different providers' USB modems into the same cradlepoint and make handoffs seamless; you'd have to ask them to be sure.)
If you can park near someplace near civilization you'll probably spot an open wifi in about 30 seconds.
Final thing is if you're running a web-based business and can afford an RV and 3G phones and stuff, perhaps you can afford some employees to run the business for you while you go on an actual vacation.
One airline has proposed ripping out the seats and having passengers to stand during short flights.
Also it seems to me like on short flights the luggage compartment of an airbus might be underutilized. First class would be the lucky few who get to lie down.
Well said. About the only counterpoint is that a door which opens outward will tend to have hinges on the outside, making illegal entry easier.
Where I live, commercial establishments usually have outward opening doors for the safety of the large number of people that might need to exit in an emergency; whereas residential doors will have inward opening doors so that the hinges are not exposed.
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when I was a kid, we used to call them flux condensers, and gosh darn it was quite the challenge to get a studebaker up to 88 cubits per centon.
We have two 5-ton units covering a total of about 4000 sq ft. We're on the edge of a desert so we get up to 110F several days per year--so even if 10 tons is on the high side it isn't a ridiculous amount in context. The builder chose the provisioning (not me) and they made these decisions 25+ years ago before anyone really cared about carbon footprint or energy star or LEED.
I made an attempt to reduce the electric bill at my house a couple years ago, but the TV was the least of it.
My wife runs a rack of networking equipment 24/7 and a runs a 1/2hp stand mixer on weekends. Plus she likes to leave lights on in the kitchen and hallway at night.
The babysitter gets lonely during the day and turns on every light switch in the house then turns on the DVD player to play CDs and turns on (a different) TV to see the DVD player's "you're watching a CD so I have no video to show you" screen. The kid sleeps with a 20W CFL lamp on all night.
The cable box uses 20W whether it's on or off. There are idle loads from a garage door opener, doorbell circuit, burglar alarm, cheapo video surveillance system, several outdoor lights on motion IR, various clocks, a gas oven and a microwave with displays, 2 laptops and 10 (ten!) phones plugged into chargers.
If that's not enough, from June through September the wife likes to keep the house at 74F. So 10 tons of a/c capacity are engaged in a losing war moving entropy from inside to outside.
I'm willing to try to save money on electricity, in fact I'm highly motivated because I pay for it. But there are other people that I cannot simply yell at/browbeat/guilt trip into conservation at so in the interest of family harmony our carbon footprint is, well, gigantic really.
Someone explained to me once that the fundamental problem with healthcare is that the party benefiting from health care and the party paying for the health care were not the same--so the market fails and the resource is wasted to some large and inevitable degree. The same thing happens with electricity. So many people use electricity that someone else is paying for that there is a failure of the free market.
Regulation is inevitable unless each person gets their own ipod-sized electric meter to carry around. I'm serious.
it's called heterodyning and was implicated in one of the most devastating jet crashes in history. no search engine will make that connection for you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster
This terrible scourge of mimes is finally over!
Oh fudge, I misread the article.
>> You can't voluntarily leave the Google Index.
wrong.
http://www.robotstxt.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard
Find out who is going to be creating the content that will be shown, talk to them about their needs as if you care, but really pay attention when they talk about what software they use to do the authoring. then research that and find out what formats it supports. Maybe it's all flash like you said, but if someone is expecting quicktime or silverlight, you'd better find that out now instead of six months from now after you've ordered 100 linux boxes.
The cd/dvd jukebox idea is terrible. Loading a DVD will take more time than anyone is willing to sit around and wait, furthermore what if five people at five different kiosks want to look at content located on 5 different DVDs? That level of DVD changer is way more expensive than management realizes. A big rack of sata disks under control of a NAS server is probably your best bet. Also, I would worry less about RAID and more about being able to quickly cold swap a failed NAS server.
A "would be nice" is a way for people to walk around and interact with the exhibits without having to repeatedly press the "English" or "Spanish" or "French" buttons on each and every touchscreen. I hate that. They should be able to just grab an rfid token out of a bucket and walk around...and the whole place seems to be in their native language. Hey, maybe have a mic and the kiosk listens for common words in each language and acts accordingly.
Museums swap exhibits in and out fairly often. Have some low-effort way for the curators to swap the kiosk content to match. Maybe the content is tied to an inventory number and the curators can just enter a (semi) admin password, then the inventory number and set the default content right there. the general idea is that the last thing you want is to have to spend the rest of your life assigning content to kiosks.
I'd look into something wireless for the floor sensors/big buttons, like hacking into a bluetooth mouse. Then the curators can move things around a bit, change batteries, even redo the pairing if they want to move buttons between exhibits.
If you're thinking 100 or more kiosks in the long run, I'd look into PXE booting or similar just to avoid any OS install/upgrade/patch labor being multiplied by 100.
Firewall! Last thing you want is some 2 y/o kid to type some random museum words like "nude" or "maplethorp" into a browser and get 20M pages of confusing things on google images while their prudish american parents have a little conservative republican freak out.
Best of luck with this. In spite of the tone of my comments I'm quite jealous. This sounds like one of the most fun projects anyone could ever get!
I think there are some hidden factors at play. Specifically, cars have become comfortable cocoons with a smooth ride, automatic and power everything, tons of safety features, and for SUV's an above-it-all stance. These make it easy to detach oneself from the driving experience. Also, there seems to be more enforcement of speed laws and more traffic in urban and suburban areas. So, basically, any visceral thrill from driving has been removed from the equation, and without that driving is just plain boring.
Combine that with a bloodstream full of caffeine from starbucks and people need *something* to occupy this dead time in their commute. Further, with the wide availability and low cost of in-car television, MP3 players, satellite radio, cellular phones, pagers, cupholders, screaming children, carpool mates, animated roadside LED billboards....people's attention naturally wanders to something, anything, more interesting than staring at the back of the car in front of them in case the brake lights go on.
reminder, they put pets in the cargo compartment...
aside from the weight issue, shouldn't the cable specifically be designed to be an insulator anyway? Shorting out the fair weather return current and/or tapping into particle storms in the upper atmosphere seems like it could lead to some nasty little electrical issues.
It's not unusual for electric trollies or subway cars to send their braking energy back into the rails or catenaries. So long as there are some other cars somewhere on the line that are accelerating or at least holding steady speed against friction and wind resistance the braking energy will be re-used nearby with very little loss, possibly less than you'd lose with a battery, capacitor, or flywheel setup.
it shouldn't use any power just sitting there. capacitors do slowly discharge of their own accord, but an hour in a traffic jam shouldn't be a problem. they will have to turn off the a/c though.
It appears that I have confused OpenMP with MPI.
My apologies.
it seems like the ability to share work across machines, not just cores, would be a critical difference.
Maybe somebody already brough this up and I just missed the thread, but I work on software development evenings and weekends IN MY HEAD. I might be riding my bike, working in the yard, playing with my son, watching tv or just having dinner...but in the back of my mind, I'm thinking about the right way to solve a pogramming or software design issue, planning out a class hierarchy, imagining what utility functions I'll need, or worst-case, pondering the cause of a mysterious seg fault. By the time I get back into the office I've usually got a pretty solid plan worked out and I can just start coding.
If you're using numbers larger than 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 on a regular basis you might be more interested in floating point or a packed decimal library.
IMHO, it's more that pointers will be 128 bits. And knowning microsoft, they'll probably try to re-introduce the "far" keyword.
I would like to see a class-action suit against the PROVIDERS of the technologies that encourage distraction. Cell phones and text messaging are specifically designed with tower hand-offs in mind so that people can and will use phones while driving. This would not be possible without the complicity of these corporations and they should held as accountable as the individual drivers for their part in distracting drivers' attention.
2-way sat modems are very tricky to set up the dish. You can't just point them with a compass and azimuth guess like you do with DBS...you have to get feedback about how well the satellite is receiving your uplink. And if you do get it pointed correctly, every time you walk around the RV you'll move the dish a little bit and lose the uplink. Also, the "flat" dishes you see on top of escalades that work in motion are receive only. You cannot use a 2-way sat modem while in motion, period.
I think 3G is your best bet. I'd go with a cradlepoint and have a tetherable 3G phone (on a different network) as a backup. ( Possibly, you can plug two different providers' USB modems into the same cradlepoint and make handoffs seamless; you'd have to ask them to be sure.)
If you can park near someplace near civilization you'll probably spot an open wifi in about 30 seconds.
Final thing is if you're running a web-based business and can afford an RV and 3G phones and stuff, perhaps you can afford some employees to run the business for you while you go on an actual vacation.
whew, for a minute there I thought I was in gdb again.
That's nothing. I was watching star wars epiode 2 last night and had to fast foward through almost the whole thing.
Are we not supposed to talk about loudcloud?
50+ messages so far and no mention of it.
I suspect they aren't looking at the traffic lights, they're watching and/or listening for the starting and stopping of the traffic itself.
One airline has proposed ripping out the seats and having passengers to stand during short flights.
Also it seems to me like on short flights the luggage compartment of an airbus might be underutilized. First class would be the lucky few who get to lie down.
Yeah, but it was really cold that day, like 6 degrees or something.
Well said. About the only counterpoint is that a door which opens outward will tend to have hinges on the outside, making illegal entry easier.
Where I live, commercial establishments usually have outward opening doors for the safety of the large number of people that might need to exit in an emergency; whereas residential doors will have inward opening doors so that the hinges are not exposed.