Well, given the current cost of a system able to handle hard freezes I would say they either take too much energy to make or have too much R&D behind too few units because the payoff time is ~17 years which is about the optimistic lifetime of the systems, and this is exclusive of installation costs as well! This means you lose out on the ~200% interest you would get by investing that money for that period of time. Solar water heaters have to come WAY down in cost before they make sense for anyone living on the grid (electric and/or natural gas, heck even if you have propane delivery service they still probably don't make sense).
From the GP: you made the decision for a variety of reasons(nice safe suburbs, better schools, etc.) stop bleating when your chickens come home to roost.
I guess you didn't receive the gift of a good education yourself =)
Nah, meter maids have been chalking tires with a zone color since forever. Basically they check meters but also mark each car as being in that zone during a specific part of the day, if you are still in that zone during the next time block then you get a ticket for exceeding the posted limit. This catches many people by surprise as they will move spots and think they are in the clear not knowing about the zone system. The modern version of chalking is reading your license plate with a GPS enabled scanner.
Wow, it's been a generation since you had to worry about crime in the three major mass transit areas in the US (Chicago, NY, Washington DC). During the early to mid 80's you might have had similar concerns but for the last two decades I can honestly say I would ride the trains in any of those cities at 1am with zero worry (perhaps a bit of worry after exiting at certain stops, but no worries while on the train).
How the fuck is a good education for you kids a luxury? I would say it's a necessity of the highest order. It's the only chance they have at having as good of a life as their parents, and the only future this country has. Oh, and if you think throwing more money at inner city schools to improve them is the solution, think again. The Cleveland city schools spend significantly more per student than either the suburb I grew up in or the one I am raising my kids in, yet they barely afford even the best students any real education and those suburbs turn out 80-90% college bound graduates.
As far as taking tax dollars then outsourcing, if they were dumb enough not to include a contractual obligation for jobs to remain in the US, there isn't a lot that can be done with it. Basically, market forces are stronger than governments.
Well, if Nielson is chartered in Florida then the government could always pull the ultimate one-upmanship and apply the corporate death penalty. Most charters require that the company operate for the public good, if it can be determined that Nielson is no longer doing so then the state of Florida may be able to revoke the charter and have the company dissolved and the assets returned to the investors. I would LOVE to see this happen just once to one of these companies, it might make CxO's think long and hard about screwing over everyone else around them so they can make their millions in quarterly bonuses.
Huge engineering problem nothing. They freaking pump water uphill to bring it from the north and diverted the Colorado river 242 miles to bring water into the central valley, I don't think it's at all undoable to bring a superconducting line a similar distance.
The magic words are "please add me to your do not call list". I have a friend who works in IT for a very large telemarketing firm and he has worked in political and now works with charities, they do a LOT of work to not call you, or more specifically to call those people most likely to donate. It costs the client for every call made, so the clients make sure that only the people with the greatest likelyhood of giving are called. The first step in their process is to eliminate every number from the national, state, and internal do not call lists. They also eliminate all known cellphone blocks and the list of numbers that have been ported by cellphone carriers. These are huge jobs that run into hundreds of GB's. Deleting your number from that job would do very little as they get numbers from their clients or paid list compilers for almost every job, getting added to their do not call list is much better (the national list is best because ALL legitimate telemarketers use it).
If they want high quality they would use an XLR input box connected to firewire (or at least USB2 with a buffer). Trying to record using an unbalanced stereo input in a noisy RF environment just doesn't work well, I've tried.
Except it's not free, I may not give my employer an itemized bill, but they pay me quite well. My employer was very up front about the job requirements and I was very up front about my salary requirements. My employer doesn't abuse my time (in general I work 162 hours per month, much less than I have in any other position I have ever had) but in the rare event something breaks I am expected to respond when my monitoring systems notify me of a problem.
Hmm, I think most of these products would probably run fine on eCommStation, the new name for OS/2. It is still sold and supported, the vendor is used to dealing with the embedded market, it has a small footprint, and it has full MS code for Win16 so unless it requires system level drivers it should work out of the box. Though thinking about it this is one really good reason to go Linux, long term support. I've supported some interesting things running Windows, from a CNC lathe to an oscilloscope (running 3.11 and 95 respectively) and eventually the manufacturers will have to switch things around because they legally can't sell the product as designed. Why should you have to train people on two different lathe programs (possibly for the same exact hardware) just because MS doesn't want to allow anyone to buy licenses to an old OS.
You don't use an integrated workflow app like Lightroom/Aperture because you want to rename each file, you use it because you want to batch process the photos that come out of your camera. The app should be doing the name mangling in its own repository automatically!
If you don't know why RAW is needed then don't comment on it please. There's nothing like being able to simply reshoot a photo by changing the WB from the raw, adjusting layers in a JPG/TIFF doesn't accomplish anywhere near the same thing. I have a picture of my nephew blowing out his birthday candles that came out very overexposed (sun suddenly came out from behind a cloud), manipulating the JPG output was worthless because it made things too dark while trying to darken the overexposed area, throw the NEF into Lightroom, drop down two EV and adjust some levels and suddenly a white blurry mess becomes an ok shot of my nephew at his birthday.
Dude, RawShooter sucks horribly by comparison to Lightroom. I tried the last free version of RawShooter and it put me off so badly I almost didn't try Lightroom thinking it would be a slightly upgraded version. It was like night and day, the workflow in Lightroom just makes sense and doing slightly more complicated than simple conversion is a breeze. There's a guy out there that edited 2,000 wedding photos in three hours using Lightroom and a custom macro package, try doing that in RawShooter!
If you're in college you probably don't have a lot of spending money anyways so you should be buying your favorite beverage of choice by the case at your local warehouse club. Paying $1+ for a cola when you can get it for ~$.25 when buying in bulk is just a poor choice for someone living on limited means.
The level of suck and shooting yourself in the foot I have run into in this environment from the previous staff definitely leads me to believe that giving them Unix would have been *bad*. If they repeatedly found the worst option when presented a relatively few choices they could have found an unbelievable level of suck to a Unix environment. A good Unix admin is more efficient than a good Windows admin, but a bad Windows admin is at least mostly saved from himself whereas a bad Unix admin is just screwed.
I guess I'm sorry if you're underpaid, most people in IT are not, especially those who have risen to the level where they are responsible for infrastructure. I make plenty of money and have come to expect that with that comes some responsibility. After leaving my last employer a former coworker received the salary list for the entire company as part of discovery in a lawsuit, I was one of the top 10 paid employees in a 150 person company which mostly consisted of accountants, many with the CPA's. I don't say that to brag as according to the salary surveys I was slightly underpaid at that company. I merely use it to illustrate my point that many IT workers have no idea how well they are compensated for the simple job of keeping everyone else working efficiently. I have worked as an hourly employee, a consultant, and as a salaried employee, and other than a two month period a year and a half ago I can honestly say that being salaried is the LEAST I have ever worked so if that means carrying a BB and having it turned on for SMS once every 4 weeks, so be it.
$9T is NOTHING compared to the looming problem they have coming with their aging population. It's about 2 years of GDP, unless they find a way to relax their xenophobic ways and allow in a young foreign workforce they have real problems coming. That's why I laugh every time I hear people yell about the illegals, it's the illegals that will save the boomers. Without the immigrants there wouldn't be nearly enough people to fill all the unskilled labor positions that will be needed to take care of the boomers as they age.
LNG works fine for transportation, most of the around town buses in Cleveland run on it and it makes a HUGE difference to not have them spewing particulates every time they stop and go. I think the ultimate re: electric cars is something like the Prius but split the motor out into a trailer or detachable pod, if you're going on a long trip then attach the trailer/pod and you now have an x gallon tank and a motor strong enough to keep the batteries topped off. Your electric mode becomes more efficient most of the time because you aren't dragging the weight of fuel and a motor around, but you retain the ability to use the current distribution system. This is even a good long term solution since you can go with a diesel generator and use any of dozens of renewable sources to fuel it.
I've also been a Linux, Solaris, Open Unix, and Novell admin in the past, use the right tool for the job and the environment. We're slowly selling Unix here, but they grew up from a shop that had one Novell box on someones desk and then migrated to Windows when the writing was on the wall. The current IT staff is the first one they've ever had that has had the skillset and mentality to handle Unix (and I'm definitely not just talking about me, but the entire technical side of the IT staff)
Uh, wow. Seriously it's people like you who make PHB's look at IT as a cost center instead of a strategic asset. The only reason companies have an IT department is to make the other employees more efficient, if you let a server stay down until the morning when everyone else comes in then take a couple hours to half a day to fix it (typical repair times for anything non-trivial regardless of OS) then you've just cost the business.25-.5x the number of employees on that server in man-days. Sure you might be able to sell that as the reason to go with clustering or other HA solutions, but often the wallet just doesn't open that far. On the other hand if you get off your lazy butt and fix it when your monitoring systems tell you it's broke you've just cost the company a total of say 1 man day, your comp day. I seriously don't understand the "it's someone elses problem, if they really want it fixed they can call me" attitude.
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Well, given the current cost of a system able to handle hard freezes I would say they either take too much energy to make or have too much R&D behind too few units because the payoff time is ~17 years which is about the optimistic lifetime of the systems, and this is exclusive of installation costs as well! This means you lose out on the ~200% interest you would get by investing that money for that period of time. Solar water heaters have to come WAY down in cost before they make sense for anyone living on the grid (electric and/or natural gas, heck even if you have propane delivery service they still probably don't make sense).
Eh, that $69 drive is a Seagate 7200.10 with a 5 year warranty, other than their SCSI/SAS line it doesn't get better than that wrt reliability.
From the GP:
you made the decision for a variety of reasons(nice safe suburbs, better schools, etc.) stop bleating when your chickens come home to roost.
I guess you didn't receive the gift of a good education yourself =)
When I can get a 500GB drive for $69 and the 'upgrade' to a 120GB external drive costs $180, you know they're making a killing on capacity.
Nah, meter maids have been chalking tires with a zone color since forever. Basically they check meters but also mark each car as being in that zone during a specific part of the day, if you are still in that zone during the next time block then you get a ticket for exceeding the posted limit. This catches many people by surprise as they will move spots and think they are in the clear not knowing about the zone system. The modern version of chalking is reading your license plate with a GPS enabled scanner.
Wow, it's been a generation since you had to worry about crime in the three major mass transit areas in the US (Chicago, NY, Washington DC). During the early to mid 80's you might have had similar concerns but for the last two decades I can honestly say I would ride the trains in any of those cities at 1am with zero worry (perhaps a bit of worry after exiting at certain stops, but no worries while on the train).
How the fuck is a good education for you kids a luxury? I would say it's a necessity of the highest order. It's the only chance they have at having as good of a life as their parents, and the only future this country has. Oh, and if you think throwing more money at inner city schools to improve them is the solution, think again. The Cleveland city schools spend significantly more per student than either the suburb I grew up in or the one I am raising my kids in, yet they barely afford even the best students any real education and those suburbs turn out 80-90% college bound graduates.
As far as taking tax dollars then outsourcing, if they were dumb enough not to include a contractual obligation for jobs to remain in the US, there isn't a lot that can be done with it. Basically, market forces are stronger than governments.
Well, if Nielson is chartered in Florida then the government could always pull the ultimate one-upmanship and apply the corporate death penalty. Most charters require that the company operate for the public good, if it can be determined that Nielson is no longer doing so then the state of Florida may be able to revoke the charter and have the company dissolved and the assets returned to the investors. I would LOVE to see this happen just once to one of these companies, it might make CxO's think long and hard about screwing over everyone else around them so they can make their millions in quarterly bonuses.
Huge engineering problem nothing. They freaking pump water uphill to bring it from the north and diverted the Colorado river 242 miles to bring water into the central valley, I don't think it's at all undoable to bring a superconducting line a similar distance.
The magic words are "please add me to your do not call list". I have a friend who works in IT for a very large telemarketing firm and he has worked in political and now works with charities, they do a LOT of work to not call you, or more specifically to call those people most likely to donate. It costs the client for every call made, so the clients make sure that only the people with the greatest likelyhood of giving are called. The first step in their process is to eliminate every number from the national, state, and internal do not call lists. They also eliminate all known cellphone blocks and the list of numbers that have been ported by cellphone carriers. These are huge jobs that run into hundreds of GB's. Deleting your number from that job would do very little as they get numbers from their clients or paid list compilers for almost every job, getting added to their do not call list is much better (the national list is best because ALL legitimate telemarketers use it).
You probably set it to use custom ringtones only and just never assigned a ringtone to 'unknown', just a guess.
If they want high quality they would use an XLR input box connected to firewire (or at least USB2 with a buffer). Trying to record using an unbalanced stereo input in a noisy RF environment just doesn't work well, I've tried.
Except it's not free, I may not give my employer an itemized bill, but they pay me quite well. My employer was very up front about the job requirements and I was very up front about my salary requirements. My employer doesn't abuse my time (in general I work 162 hours per month, much less than I have in any other position I have ever had) but in the rare event something breaks I am expected to respond when my monitoring systems notify me of a problem.
Hmm, I think most of these products would probably run fine on eCommStation, the new name for OS/2. It is still sold and supported, the vendor is used to dealing with the embedded market, it has a small footprint, and it has full MS code for Win16 so unless it requires system level drivers it should work out of the box. Though thinking about it this is one really good reason to go Linux, long term support. I've supported some interesting things running Windows, from a CNC lathe to an oscilloscope (running 3.11 and 95 respectively) and eventually the manufacturers will have to switch things around because they legally can't sell the product as designed. Why should you have to train people on two different lathe programs (possibly for the same exact hardware) just because MS doesn't want to allow anyone to buy licenses to an old OS.
You don't use an integrated workflow app like Lightroom/Aperture because you want to rename each file, you use it because you want to batch process the photos that come out of your camera. The app should be doing the name mangling in its own repository automatically!
If you don't know why RAW is needed then don't comment on it please. There's nothing like being able to simply reshoot a photo by changing the WB from the raw, adjusting layers in a JPG/TIFF doesn't accomplish anywhere near the same thing. I have a picture of my nephew blowing out his birthday candles that came out very overexposed (sun suddenly came out from behind a cloud), manipulating the JPG output was worthless because it made things too dark while trying to darken the overexposed area, throw the NEF into Lightroom, drop down two EV and adjust some levels and suddenly a white blurry mess becomes an ok shot of my nephew at his birthday.
Dude, RawShooter sucks horribly by comparison to Lightroom. I tried the last free version of RawShooter and it put me off so badly I almost didn't try Lightroom thinking it would be a slightly upgraded version. It was like night and day, the workflow in Lightroom just makes sense and doing slightly more complicated than simple conversion is a breeze. There's a guy out there that edited 2,000 wedding photos in three hours using Lightroom and a custom macro package, try doing that in RawShooter!
I don't know, this doesn't seem so bad to me.
If you're in college you probably don't have a lot of spending money anyways so you should be buying your favorite beverage of choice by the case at your local warehouse club. Paying $1+ for a cola when you can get it for ~$.25 when buying in bulk is just a poor choice for someone living on limited means.
The level of suck and shooting yourself in the foot I have run into in this environment from the previous staff definitely leads me to believe that giving them Unix would have been *bad*. If they repeatedly found the worst option when presented a relatively few choices they could have found an unbelievable level of suck to a Unix environment. A good Unix admin is more efficient than a good Windows admin, but a bad Windows admin is at least mostly saved from himself whereas a bad Unix admin is just screwed.
I guess I'm sorry if you're underpaid, most people in IT are not, especially those who have risen to the level where they are responsible for infrastructure. I make plenty of money and have come to expect that with that comes some responsibility. After leaving my last employer a former coworker received the salary list for the entire company as part of discovery in a lawsuit, I was one of the top 10 paid employees in a 150 person company which mostly consisted of accountants, many with the CPA's. I don't say that to brag as according to the salary surveys I was slightly underpaid at that company. I merely use it to illustrate my point that many IT workers have no idea how well they are compensated for the simple job of keeping everyone else working efficiently. I have worked as an hourly employee, a consultant, and as a salaried employee, and other than a two month period a year and a half ago I can honestly say that being salaried is the LEAST I have ever worked so if that means carrying a BB and having it turned on for SMS once every 4 weeks, so be it.
$9T is NOTHING compared to the looming problem they have coming with their aging population. It's about 2 years of GDP, unless they find a way to relax their xenophobic ways and allow in a young foreign workforce they have real problems coming. That's why I laugh every time I hear people yell about the illegals, it's the illegals that will save the boomers. Without the immigrants there wouldn't be nearly enough people to fill all the unskilled labor positions that will be needed to take care of the boomers as they age.
LNG works fine for transportation, most of the around town buses in Cleveland run on it and it makes a HUGE difference to not have them spewing particulates every time they stop and go. I think the ultimate re: electric cars is something like the Prius but split the motor out into a trailer or detachable pod, if you're going on a long trip then attach the trailer/pod and you now have an x gallon tank and a motor strong enough to keep the batteries topped off. Your electric mode becomes more efficient most of the time because you aren't dragging the weight of fuel and a motor around, but you retain the ability to use the current distribution system. This is even a good long term solution since you can go with a diesel generator and use any of dozens of renewable sources to fuel it.
I've also been a Linux, Solaris, Open Unix, and Novell admin in the past, use the right tool for the job and the environment. We're slowly selling Unix here, but they grew up from a shop that had one Novell box on someones desk and then migrated to Windows when the writing was on the wall. The current IT staff is the first one they've ever had that has had the skillset and mentality to handle Unix (and I'm definitely not just talking about me, but the entire technical side of the IT staff)
Uh, wow. Seriously it's people like you who make PHB's look at IT as a cost center instead of a strategic asset. The only reason companies have an IT department is to make the other employees more efficient, if you let a server stay down until the morning when everyone else comes in then take a couple hours to half a day to fix it (typical repair times for anything non-trivial regardless of OS) then you've just cost the business .25-.5x the number of employees on that server in man-days. Sure you might be able to sell that as the reason to go with clustering or other HA solutions, but often the wallet just doesn't open that far. On the other hand if you get off your lazy butt and fix it when your monitoring systems tell you it's broke you've just cost the company a total of say 1 man day, your comp day. I seriously don't understand the "it's someone elses problem, if they really want it fixed they can call me" attitude.