You are right, I botched on the logistics. My bad.
The cost of processing fuel is, for a large part, incorporated into the cost of electricity as well. Granted, not all power plants run on oils, some run on gas, some coal, some nukes, some renewables. Despite this, the price of finished, processed fuel has a significant impact on the price of electricity. I will make this moot in a moment.
I think we agree on radiant heat. From experience, I will tell you that a compromise solution (baseboard heat) can sometimes do even better. A lot of it depends on the house.
Regarding resistance heat vs. fuel-powered heat, let's tackle this from a pure cost basis.
Assume a house located in upstate New York. I pick upstate New York because my house is just such a house. Assume that this house has a heating requirement of 80,000 BTU/hour. This is not constant, but rather the size of the furnace/other heating devices, taken in aggregate. These get cycled on and off by the thermostat.
Let us examine the cost of one hour of "on" time for the furnace. This may actually be over the course of more than one hour, given, as said before, that the thermostat cycles the heater on and off as needed. What we're looking at here is the cost of producing 80,000 BTU of heat, regardless of what time frame it takes place in.
Assume electric heat to be 100% efficient, ignoring the externalities of the power plant. You don't buy fuel for the power plant directly, you buy the finished product.
80,000 BTU of heat takes 23.446kWh of electricity. Since we are talking about upstate New York, electricity costs, after taxes and all, 15.6 cents/kWh, putting the price of this 80,000 BTU at $3.66.
Producing the same from oil, let's assume a 91% efficient furnace. Not the best, but very reasonable. (I use a 91% efficient gas furnace, BTW) To produce 80,000BTU, we will need 87,912 BTU of fuel. According to this page, a gallon of home heating oil (#2 distillate) contains 138,690 BTU. Therefore, to produce our 80,000 BTU, we will be using 0.63 gallons. According to this site, home heating oil costs between 2.069 and 2.699 per gallon, depending on bulk discount and purchase terms. Again, this is a post-tax, delivered price. This puts the price between $1.30 and $1.70 for our 80,000 BTU
...So the cost of electric heat to oil heat is, at best, 2.15:1. Tell me again why electric heat is a better choice?
Lastly, regarding on-site generation, yes, that does change the formula a lot, even if it is just a backup generator.... the cost of a $25kW backup generator is out of reach for most. I back up my home with a 5kW generator, though, and my gas-powered furnace continues to operate just fine, as would an oil-powered one.
A very simple solution with some safety built in would be this: Use two thermostats. Set one for the 'home' temerature and one for the 'away/sleep' temperature. Use a relay with SPDT contacts, controlled by the computer/timer/whatever, to select which thermostat is on-line.
This will not allow for remote re-setting of setpoints, but it will allow you to select which of two preset setpoints is active at any given time. Additionally, the failure mode will be to have one of the two thermostats on-line, causing this system never to take your furnace completely off-line, thus removing the risk of frozen plumbing.
If you're replacing the furnace and tearing the house apart as much as you say, why not switch to electric or radiant heating? The difference between the cost of electricity and heating oil will lower your heating costs more than a computer-controlled thermostate ever would.
Absolutely, 100% totally, completely incorrect.
Electricity costs more per BTU than oil, period. This is because electricity is, quite frequently, made from oil, gas and coal, usually at a 30-35% efficiency, never at better than 50% efficiency. Then there are the logistics issues of delivering the ultimate perishable good, invariably losing some of it on the way. All of these contribute to its cost. You WILL pay more per BTU for electricity than for any fuel.
A good, high-quality oil or gas furnace will start at 90% efficient and work up from there.
As for suggesting radiant heat as an alternative to oil, that is the same logical fallacy as suggesting a car instead of a Subaru. Radiant heat uses electricity, oil, gas, coal, or whatever else fuels your boiler.
I agree that it makes sense for the drive wheels and the steer wheels to be the same, but I always thought that they should be in the back (and put a rear engine in too, like in the Beetle). You can make tighter turns that way.
I disagree on rear steering, because you can't see where the steering end of the car is going. As a result, you strongly increase the likelihood of sideswiping someone or something.
hmm i belive electric locomotives often actually have regenerative breaking and re-inject the power into the supply system where other locomotives can use it (though i belive they also have resistive units to dump the power in case they can't re-inject it).
[diesel] locomotives can't really do this though because they don't have any way to store electricity.
Um, yes, this is actually a very good point. In my neck of the woods, there are no electrified tracks, so I was, of course, thinking of a diesel locomotive. Diesel locomotives are also more similar to hybrid cars than electric locomotives are, by virtue of using an IC engine as the ultimate source of the machine's power.
For several years, a hybrid locomotive has also been available that uses regenerative braking.
GE has recently introduced one as well. I'm not sure how wide the deployment is on these machines.
As with most locomotives, the final drive is all electric, so no combiner gearbox here either.
True. The Uniq hybrid prototype that I mentioned earlier was built that was, as well.
the current Prius gets better efficiency (60mpg city vs 51) than the current Civic - the Insight is much smaller than the Prius and thus isn't comparable.
Thank you. I stand humbly corrected (except that I am sitting down)
there is a way to make Honda's hybrid system work in pure-electric mode. Using an auto-clutch manual gearbox, put the engine and electric motor on opposite sides of the clutch. If you want to charge at idle, have the clutch engage and the engine spin the motor with the gearbox in neutral. If you want to run in pure electric mode, shut down the engine entirely and run using the electric motor only. There doesn't need to be a clutch between the electric motor and gearbox input since the motor armature is light and doesn't have enough inertia to damage the 'box's syncros while shifting.
Very clever. It's a much more involved process than modding a Prius to the same effect, which is unfortunate, but it is good to know that someone has given it some thought.
This all being said, I prefer the Prius' system since it's elegantly simple and has fewer parts to break - the transmission is a single planetary gearset.
Amen to that. Actually, its simplicity is probably how someone already thought of it in order to put this submarine patent in place.
However, it'd be nice if they mounted it in the rear of a sports car since front-wheel-drive cars suck to drive.
Why do people feel this? I actually do not understand this opinion, which seems to be a commonly held one.
The way I see it, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to put the driving wheels under the light end of the car, far from the engine, and not on the wheels that steer the car, so that the engine can't augment the steering, rather than fighting it. That goes double when driving on wet, slippery or snow-covered roads.
[Their] patent is pretty complete, but only filed in 1990.
Unfortunately, I think reclaiming [braking] energy with an electric motor was thought of, and used much earlier [than] that.
I seem to recall an article that was published in the late 1980s in Popular Science profiling a prototype hybrid car that was called the Uniq. It had regenerative braking.
Rail locomotives have had "Dynamic braking" for decades, in which energy is reclaimed from the wheels, but it is subsequently burned off in a huge resistor, but it is at least half of the formula.
So that takes regenerative braking itself off the table as far as prior art. That leaves the combiner gearbox.
The Uniq used no combiner gearbox, and neither do Honda's hybrids. Toyota has done a better job at marketing their hybrid drive, but Hondas are actually getting better MPG without the combiner gearbox (though a pure electric mode is not possible).
The bottom line is: There is some prior art; it is probably not enough to help Toyota with their immediate problem, but not all hybrids are affected.
The fate of HD-DVD is most definitely not up to Microsoft, it is up to the market. With any luck, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray both will be clobbered by the existing DVD market, thus taking DRM with them.
If your really worried about the tape falling off, just buy a bunch of those clear document pouches like they use for UPS, and stick the #10 envelope in there.
You really do work for the government, don't you? You are so close to a good idea here, but not quite there.
Get the clear pouches. Print the address (plus maybe your return address and your law firm's logo) on half of a 8½"x11" or A4 page. Fold the page in half and stick it in the pouch. Attach the pouch to the large envelope. Problem solved.
The only real solution: copy-protect the actual audio output from the speakers, say by adding a high-energy ultrasonic screech which instantly obliterates all recording devices within hearing range.
Won't work. Such a measure would only annoy those who have very sensitive hearing, and is easily defeated by placing a low-pass filter on the recording device, or better, using a recording device for which the screech is out of range (which would probably be most of them).
It's Information Systems. Different companies refer to the department by different mames, and networking should, generally, be a subset function of the [M]I{S|T} Department.
You must work in education. Only in acedemia have I heard such noise. This is the same mentality that refers to a "Soldering copper" because they're not made out of iron.
So if I go to Wikipedia and type the word "gibblefinch" a few thousand times into an article, I can reduce its error rate?
Only if that is what the article should say, and saying so is useful to someone looking up whatever topic it is you are looking up and finding the aforementioned gibblefinch storm. If, on the other hand, it is not useful or relevant, then not, it would tend to increase the error rate, or at lease lower the signal to noise ratio, rather greatly.
BMW has the ability to make Hydrogen-powered production cars, it is a shame that they have not caught on yet.
From where do you intend to get the hydrogen?
If you reform natural gas into hydrogen, you lose some of the energy that was in that natural gas. Further, you produce in the reformer the carbon dioxide that would otherwise be produced by burning the natural gas directly. You might better compress the natural gas and burn that in an engine.
If you use electricity to hydrolize water into hydrogen and oxygen, then instead, you lose a good chunk of the energy in hydrolysis. Burning the hydrogen in either an internal combustion engine or using it to power a fuel cell to power an electric motor introduces more losses.
If you intend to use electricity, you would be better off storing it in Lithium Ion or Nickel Metal Hydride batteries than converting it to hydrogen, at least until the efficiencies can be brought up a bit.
I support the idea of building Hydrogen-powered cars for research, because we should do the research. Unfortunately, the research thus far has not produced anything that would give us a net gain if put into production, ergo, going to production with it would be very premature.
Yeesh, some people think God invented war to teach Americans geography. I don't know why.
According to YOUR OWN SOURCE, it is both. Follow the link, and search for the string "Brasil" within the page. You will find yourself staring at the following text:
conventional long form: Federative Republic of Brazil
conventional short form: Brazil
local long form: Republica Federativa do Brasil
local short form: Brasil
I have no problem with people posting corrections, even being pedantic, but be right, and for the love of $diety, don't be stupid!
Say hello to your employees every morning, individually, greeting them by their name. Take fifteen minutes and walk the cube farm, stopping at each employee's cube. Say hello. Banter for a moment. Do not discuss work in these rounds unless it is an emergency; it will spoil the effect.
When an employee does well, recognise this. You don't have to give them anything physical, but a public "thank you" at the next departmental meeting can be very valueable, especially if your boss is there.
Don't do stupid shit. For example, if you've been providing broadband to people's homes to enable working remotely, don't cut it off while still spending $$$ on conference calls. It pisses people off. If you need to cut (hey, it happens), cut evenly.
Provide your employees with some space to socialise, and don't prevent them from doing so. It makes the workplace more bearable.
Offer to take employees to lunch once in a while. Don't make it a CLM if they decline.
Greet new employees with a welcome luncheon. Send off departing employees with a farewell luncheon. It gives everyone a chance to say hello and goodbye.
Don't hold meetings unless they are needed and productive. Nothing kills morale like wasting time in a meeting where nothing pertains to you.
Find a way to dispatch your employees' complaints efficiently, effectively, and reasonably. If it is something you can't do anything about, at least give the employee a sympathetic ear.
I went through three power supplies before I discovered the fact that I actually had a power cable that was going bad.
I used to work for a company that developed a very highly customized package for our customers, put it on the *NIX of their choice, and installed it in their data centers. Although based in the US, one customer, whose site I was working on, was in Basingstoke, England.
The client was (and probably still is) a hard-core Big Blue shop, so the *NIX of choice was AIX, running on a two-piece RS6K machine. One piece was the server itself, and the other piece was an 8-disc SSA drive tower.
The drive tower had three power supplies, allegedly for redundancy, but these, in turn, were connected together via a three-way IEC Y cable. This then plugged into a normal IEC cable that then had the monster 13A plug they use in the UK on the other end. (If you haven't seen one of these, they're huge. If we used these in the US, we'd probably rate them for 50A).
The plug had a fuse in it.
I'll say that again, because this is important, but not something that you typically see outside the UK: The plug had a fuse in it.
After we hardware guys left the customer site, and left it in the capable hands of our software guys, we got a frantic call from the software guys that the discs had "just disappeared from the system".
To make a long story short (if it's not too late for that), the fuse in the plug had blown, thus killing power to all three power supplies, in turn killing power to the discs. Once we figured that out, we had our software guys get the customer's IT guy on the phone, he got out two more IEC to 13A cords and a fuse, and the problem was fixed in ten minutes plus reboot time. The Y cable was relegated to the scrap heap.
You don't seem to have a very good grasp on how this system works. The money that you pay each month to the cable company goes to the cable company in return for offering the service--not to the stations. The stations, meanwhile, make (nearly) all their money on advertising. Thus the amount of ads has nothing to do with your cable bill.
The cable/satellite companies are selling advertising, also. There are certain ad slots that they are permitted to preempt and replace with their own ads. Sometimes this is subtle enough that you won't notice, but I would say I can't watch for an hour without seeing at least two ads for a pay-per-view event boldly emblazoned with my satellite provider's logo.
Interactive TV has added a new element to the provider selling ads. During some ads, some text appears on the screen saying, "Press Select now for more information" or something to that effect. The networks have got to love that, because when someone actually hits tha button, they are no longer watching whatever program they are watching, because they are now browsing through screens that lead up to them ordering whatever thing it was the ad was for, which, by the way, can be billed to your satellite account and delivered to your home, without you having to get your fat ass out of the grooves you've worn into the couch.
Okay, let me calm down a sec....
OTOH, premium movie channels (HBO, Cinemax, Shotime et al) work from the subscription fees, which is why it costs $14 to get 8 specific channels added (just shy of $2/channel), when you got the other 120 channels you get for $30 (averaging about 25 cents each). In exchange, you don't see ads during a movie or show, and you don't see flying network bugs. Any advertising is between shows.
I like the EPIAs, actually, quite a lot. I have been using an MII 12000 for some time now as a workstation, and it works quite well. It triple-boots Ubuntu, Slackware and XP, though I'm probably going to blow away the XP partitions very soon, as I finally got around to getting WINE installed and configured.
Anyway, it's a small board, 17cm x 17cm, fairly low profile, fits Mini-ITX, Flex-ATX, Micro-ATX and ATX cases, has a 1.2GHz processor (600MHz is available), has IDE, floppy, parallel, serial, USB, firewire, IR, audio, video, ethernet, CF and PCMCIA. The only downsides are: only 1 memory slot, and only one PCI slot. It draws about 35W, IIRC.
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Try resetting the circuit breaker on your "strips".
Only useful if it "trips." :-)
You are right, I botched on the logistics. My bad.
The cost of processing fuel is, for a large part, incorporated into the cost of electricity as well. Granted, not all power plants run on oils, some run on gas, some coal, some nukes, some renewables. Despite this, the price of finished, processed fuel has a significant impact on the price of electricity. I will make this moot in a moment.
I think we agree on radiant heat. From experience, I will tell you that a compromise solution (baseboard heat) can sometimes do even better. A lot of it depends on the house.
Regarding resistance heat vs. fuel-powered heat, let's tackle this from a pure cost basis.
Assume a house located in upstate New York. I pick upstate New York because my house is just such a house. Assume that this house has a heating requirement of 80,000 BTU/hour. This is not constant, but rather the size of the furnace/other heating devices, taken in aggregate. These get cycled on and off by the thermostat.
Let us examine the cost of one hour of "on" time for the furnace. This may actually be over the course of more than one hour, given, as said before, that the thermostat cycles the heater on and off as needed. What we're looking at here is the cost of producing 80,000 BTU of heat, regardless of what time frame it takes place in.
Assume electric heat to be 100% efficient, ignoring the externalities of the power plant. You don't buy fuel for the power plant directly, you buy the finished product.
80,000 BTU of heat takes 23.446kWh of electricity. Since we are talking about upstate New York, electricity costs, after taxes and all, 15.6 cents/kWh, putting the price of this 80,000 BTU at $3.66.
Producing the same from oil, let's assume a 91% efficient furnace. Not the best, but very reasonable. (I use a 91% efficient gas furnace, BTW) To produce 80,000BTU, we will need 87,912 BTU of fuel. According to this page, a gallon of home heating oil (#2 distillate) contains 138,690 BTU. Therefore, to produce our 80,000 BTU, we will be using 0.63 gallons. According to this site, home heating oil costs between 2.069 and 2.699 per gallon, depending on bulk discount and purchase terms. Again, this is a post-tax, delivered price. This puts the price between $1.30 and $1.70 for our 80,000 BTU
...So the cost of electric heat to oil heat is, at best, 2.15:1. Tell me again why electric heat is a better choice?
Lastly, regarding on-site generation, yes, that does change the formula a lot, even if it is just a backup generator.... the cost of a $25kW backup generator is out of reach for most. I back up my home with a 5kW generator, though, and my gas-powered furnace continues to operate just fine, as would an oil-powered one.
A very simple solution with some safety built in would be this: Use two thermostats. Set one for the 'home' temerature and one for the 'away/sleep' temperature. Use a relay with SPDT contacts, controlled by the computer/timer/whatever, to select which thermostat is on-line.
This will not allow for remote re-setting of setpoints, but it will allow you to select which of two preset setpoints is active at any given time. Additionally, the failure mode will be to have one of the two thermostats on-line, causing this system never to take your furnace completely off-line, thus removing the risk of frozen plumbing.
If you're replacing the furnace and tearing the house apart as much as you say, why not switch to electric or radiant heating? The difference between the cost of electricity and heating oil will lower your heating costs more than a computer-controlled thermostate ever would.
Absolutely, 100% totally, completely incorrect.
Electricity costs more per BTU than oil, period. This is because electricity is, quite frequently, made from oil, gas and coal, usually at a 30-35% efficiency, never at better than 50% efficiency. Then there are the logistics issues of delivering the ultimate perishable good, invariably losing some of it on the way. All of these contribute to its cost. You WILL pay more per BTU for electricity than for any fuel.
A good, high-quality oil or gas furnace will start at 90% efficient and work up from there.
As for suggesting radiant heat as an alternative to oil, that is the same logical fallacy as suggesting a car instead of a Subaru. Radiant heat uses electricity, oil, gas, coal, or whatever else fuels your boiler.
I agree that it makes sense for the drive wheels and the steer wheels to be the same, but I always thought that they should be in the back (and put a rear engine in too, like in the Beetle). You can make tighter turns that way.
I disagree on rear steering, because you can't see where the steering end of the car is going. As a result, you strongly increase the likelihood of sideswiping someone or something.
hmm i belive electric locomotives often actually have regenerative breaking and re-inject the power into the supply system where other locomotives can use it (though i belive they also have resistive units to dump the power in case they can't re-inject it).
[diesel] locomotives can't really do this though because they don't have any way to store electricity.
Um, yes, this is actually a very good point. In my neck of the woods, there are no electrified tracks, so I was, of course, thinking of a diesel locomotive. Diesel locomotives are also more similar to hybrid cars than electric locomotives are, by virtue of using an IC engine as the ultimate source of the machine's power.
For several years, a hybrid locomotive has also been available that uses regenerative braking.
GE has recently introduced one as well. I'm not sure how wide the deployment is on these machines.
As with most locomotives, the final drive is all electric, so no combiner gearbox here either.
True. The Uniq hybrid prototype that I mentioned earlier was built that was, as well.
the current Prius gets better efficiency (60mpg city vs 51) than the current Civic - the Insight is much smaller than the Prius and thus isn't comparable.
Thank you. I stand humbly corrected (except that I am sitting down)
there is a way to make Honda's hybrid system work in pure-electric mode. Using an auto-clutch manual gearbox, put the engine and electric motor on opposite sides of the clutch. If you want to charge at idle, have the clutch engage and the engine spin the motor with the gearbox in neutral. If you want to run in pure electric mode, shut down the engine entirely and run using the electric motor only. There doesn't need to be a clutch between the electric motor and gearbox input since the motor armature is light and doesn't have enough inertia to damage the 'box's syncros while shifting.
Very clever. It's a much more involved process than modding a Prius to the same effect, which is unfortunate, but it is good to know that someone has given it some thought.
This all being said, I prefer the Prius' system since it's elegantly simple and has fewer parts to break - the transmission is a single planetary gearset.
Amen to that. Actually, its simplicity is probably how someone already thought of it in order to put this submarine patent in place.
However, it'd be nice if they mounted it in the rear of a sports car since front-wheel-drive cars suck to drive.
Why do people feel this? I actually do not understand this opinion, which seems to be a commonly held one.
The way I see it, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to put the driving wheels under the light end of the car, far from the engine, and not on the wheels that steer the car, so that the engine can't augment the steering, rather than fighting it. That goes double when driving on wet, slippery or snow-covered roads.
[Their] patent is pretty complete, but only filed in 1990.
Unfortunately, I think reclaiming [braking] energy with an electric motor was thought of, and used much earlier [than] that.
I seem to recall an article that was published in the late 1980s in Popular Science profiling a prototype hybrid car that was called the Uniq. It had regenerative braking.
Rail locomotives have had "Dynamic braking" for decades, in which energy is reclaimed from the wheels, but it is subsequently burned off in a huge resistor, but it is at least half of the formula.
So that takes regenerative braking itself off the table as far as prior art. That leaves the combiner gearbox.
The Uniq used no combiner gearbox, and neither do Honda's hybrids. Toyota has done a better job at marketing their hybrid drive, but Hondas are actually getting better MPG without the combiner gearbox (though a pure electric mode is not possible).
The bottom line is: There is some prior art; it is probably not enough to help Toyota with their immediate problem, but not all hybrids are affected.
The fate of HD-DVD is most definitely not up to Microsoft, it is up to the market. With any luck, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray both will be clobbered by the existing DVD market, thus taking DRM with them.
If your really worried about the tape falling off, just buy a bunch of those clear document pouches like they use for UPS, and stick the #10 envelope in there.
You really do work for the government, don't you? You are so close to a good idea here, but not quite there.
Get the clear pouches. Print the address (plus maybe your return address and your law firm's logo) on half of a 8½"x11" or A4 page. Fold the page in half and stick it in the pouch. Attach the pouch to the large envelope. Problem solved.
It's the result of patent/trademark problems.
K-illustrator got renamed.
X11Amp got renamed.
There are others....
BTW, WinAmp is not exactly an obvious thing, either.
They could however end up regulating all traffic into or out of the United States like some smaller countries do.
Smaller countries like, say, China?
This would only occur if porn was controlled. It then wouldn't be the geeks revolting, it would be everyone. No, I'm not kidding.
You mean something like this?
Chop() belongs on the scrap heap of history with malloc(), as far as simple end-user-focused programs go.
...this is why it was replaced with chomp().
/me ducks
The only real solution: copy-protect the actual audio output from the speakers, say by adding a high-energy ultrasonic screech which instantly obliterates all recording devices within hearing range.
Won't work. Such a measure would only annoy those who have very sensitive hearing, and is easily defeated by placing a low-pass filter on the recording device, or better, using a recording device for which the screech is out of range (which would probably be most of them).
It's Information Systems. Different companies refer to the department by different mames, and networking should, generally, be a subset function of the [M]I{S|T} Department.
You must work in education. Only in acedemia have I heard such noise. This is the same mentality that refers to a "Soldering copper" because they're not made out of iron.
So if I go to Wikipedia and type the word "gibblefinch" a few thousand times into an article, I can reduce its error rate?
Only if that is what the article should say, and saying so is useful to someone looking up whatever topic it is you are looking up and finding the aforementioned gibblefinch storm. If, on the other hand, it is not useful or relevant, then not, it would tend to increase the error rate, or at lease lower the signal to noise ratio, rather greatly.
BMW has the ability to make Hydrogen-powered production cars, it is a shame that they have not caught on yet.
From where do you intend to get the hydrogen?
If you reform natural gas into hydrogen, you lose some of the energy that was in that natural gas. Further, you produce in the reformer the carbon dioxide that would otherwise be produced by burning the natural gas directly. You might better compress the natural gas and burn that in an engine.
If you use electricity to hydrolize water into hydrogen and oxygen, then instead, you lose a good chunk of the energy in hydrolysis. Burning the hydrogen in either an internal combustion engine or using it to power a fuel cell to power an electric motor introduces more losses.
If you intend to use electricity, you would be better off storing it in Lithium Ion or Nickel Metal Hydride batteries than converting it to hydrogen, at least until the efficiencies can be brought up a bit.
I support the idea of building Hydrogen-powered cars for research, because we should do the research. Unfortunately, the research thus far has not produced anything that would give us a net gain if put into production, ergo, going to production with it would be very premature.
It's Brazil not Brasil.
Yeesh, some people think God invented war to teach Americans geography. I don't know why.
According to YOUR OWN SOURCE , it is both. Follow the link, and search for the string "Brasil" within the page. You will find yourself staring at the following text:
I have no problem with people posting corrections, even being pedantic, but be right, and for the love of $diety, don't be stupid!
Say hello to your employees every morning, individually, greeting them by their name. Take fifteen minutes and walk the cube farm, stopping at each employee's cube. Say hello. Banter for a moment. Do not discuss work in these rounds unless it is an emergency; it will spoil the effect.
When an employee does well, recognise this. You don't have to give them anything physical, but a public "thank you" at the next departmental meeting can be very valueable, especially if your boss is there.
Don't do stupid shit. For example, if you've been providing broadband to people's homes to enable working remotely, don't cut it off while still spending $$$ on conference calls. It pisses people off. If you need to cut (hey, it happens), cut evenly.
Provide your employees with some space to socialise, and don't prevent them from doing so. It makes the workplace more bearable.
Offer to take employees to lunch once in a while. Don't make it a CLM if they decline.
Greet new employees with a welcome luncheon. Send off departing employees with a farewell luncheon. It gives everyone a chance to say hello and goodbye.
Don't hold meetings unless they are needed and productive. Nothing kills morale like wasting time in a meeting where nothing pertains to you.
Find a way to dispatch your employees' complaints efficiently, effectively, and reasonably. If it is something you can't do anything about, at least give the employee a sympathetic ear.
Go to bat for your people.
I went through three power supplies before I discovered the fact that I actually had a power cable that was going bad.
I used to work for a company that developed a very highly customized package for our customers, put it on the *NIX of their choice, and installed it in their data centers. Although based in the US, one customer, whose site I was working on, was in Basingstoke, England.
The client was (and probably still is) a hard-core Big Blue shop, so the *NIX of choice was AIX, running on a two-piece RS6K machine. One piece was the server itself, and the other piece was an 8-disc SSA drive tower.
The drive tower had three power supplies, allegedly for redundancy, but these, in turn, were connected together via a three-way IEC Y cable. This then plugged into a normal IEC cable that then had the monster 13A plug they use in the UK on the other end. (If you haven't seen one of these, they're huge. If we used these in the US, we'd probably rate them for 50A).
The plug had a fuse in it.
I'll say that again, because this is important, but not something that you typically see outside the UK: The plug had a fuse in it.
After we hardware guys left the customer site, and left it in the capable hands of our software guys, we got a frantic call from the software guys that the discs had "just disappeared from the system".
To make a long story short (if it's not too late for that), the fuse in the plug had blown, thus killing power to all three power supplies, in turn killing power to the discs. Once we figured that out, we had our software guys get the customer's IT guy on the phone, he got out two more IEC to 13A cords and a fuse, and the problem was fixed in ten minutes plus reboot time. The Y cable was relegated to the scrap heap.
You don't seem to have a very good grasp on how this system works. The money that you pay each month to the cable company goes to the cable company in return for offering the service--not to the stations. The stations, meanwhile, make (nearly) all their money on advertising. Thus the amount of ads has nothing to do with your cable bill.
The cable/satellite companies are selling advertising, also. There are certain ad slots that they are permitted to preempt and replace with their own ads. Sometimes this is subtle enough that you won't notice, but I would say I can't watch for an hour without seeing at least two ads for a pay-per-view event boldly emblazoned with my satellite provider's logo.
Interactive TV has added a new element to the provider selling ads. During some ads, some text appears on the screen saying, "Press Select now for more information" or something to that effect. The networks have got to love that, because when someone actually hits tha button, they are no longer watching whatever program they are watching, because they are now browsing through screens that lead up to them ordering whatever thing it was the ad was for, which, by the way, can be billed to your satellite account and delivered to your home, without you having to get your fat ass out of the grooves you've worn into the couch.
Okay, let me calm down a sec....
OTOH, premium movie channels (HBO, Cinemax, Shotime et al) work from the subscription fees, which is why it costs $14 to get 8 specific channels added (just shy of $2/channel), when you got the other 120 channels you get for $30 (averaging about 25 cents each). In exchange, you don't see ads during a movie or show, and you don't see flying network bugs. Any advertising is between shows.
How do you find X works with the onboard graphics?
Well enough under Slackware, though you need to do some tinkering. Very well under Ubuntu, no tinkering involved.
Okay, so it's not quite a dupe, but there is a hell of an overlap!
Look here for a similar discussion on ask slashdot.... one month ago to the day, even!
I like the EPIAs, actually, quite a lot. I have been using an MII 12000 for some time now as a workstation, and it works quite well. It triple-boots Ubuntu, Slackware and XP, though I'm probably going to blow away the XP partitions very soon, as I finally got around to getting WINE installed and configured.
Anyway, it's a small board, 17cm x 17cm, fairly low profile, fits Mini-ITX, Flex-ATX, Micro-ATX and ATX cases, has a 1.2GHz processor (600MHz is available), has IDE, floppy, parallel, serial, USB, firewire, IR, audio, video, ethernet, CF and PCMCIA. The only downsides are: only 1 memory slot, and only one PCI slot. It draws about 35W, IIRC.
What is the sound of one bit playing?
Mu.
Mu. It means "nothing", and that is exactly what has been patented here.