In my business I always purchase the HP extended warranties on the laptops. Never on desktops as I consider them disposable. HP's service has always been very good. Next day onsite replacement of any faulty parts with no questions asked.
I never purchased them in the past. However in the last five years I bought two that have been worth their weight in gold. The first was a high end refrigerator that I got from Lowes. The extended warranty was less than 4% of the total cost. One month out of the factory 1 yr warranty the refrigerator stopped working. Service came out on a holiday weekend and swapped out all the electronics. It ended up not fixing the problem and the following week I got a brand new replacement. Even better was they reset the warranty to start over again. My Dad has a little lower end refrigerator like mine and had a simple repair that ran him $800. Definitely money well spent.
The other was I purchased a car that was just coming off lease. For 2k I was able to extend the bumper to bumper warranty for 7 more years. About two years later, which was just over the 5 year factory warranty, I had a major transmission problem. Not a penny out of pocket for the tow or repairs. No doubt the total repair cost was more than I paid for the warranty. If anything else goes wrong it's just more money in my pocket.
I think on low end electronics or where the warranty is in excess of 5% of the original purchase price you are better off passing.
I have to tell you that this argument is getting really old. Not all teachers make nothing. As a matter of fact I think many people would be happy bringing in 50k as starting pay these days. Not to mention the jobs are pretty secure in comparison to the general business environment and get the summers off.
I make this statement because these days I do a lot of work for a local non profit. A few years ago they sent out their annual solicitation to the teachers. There was a husband and wife team that had been in this city's school system for a long time and didn't donate anything. Of course we knew they had the means as they both made over 100k. We knew this as it was published in the newspaper a few months before when the city announced the top paid employees. Upon asking them why they did not donate they said they were teachers and could not afford to donate. I was quite annoyed at this response and mentioned that I had seen their names on the list. The woman then fired back that well that may be true but they had struggled as underpaid teachers for a long time. Of course this argument makes no sense and I didn't want to aggravate them so I just let it go.
I do agree that teachers are very important and should be compensated appropriately but the old blanket argument that they are very underpaid just doesn't hold water anymore...
I think a larger portion of readers understood than you think. If you haven't heard of the Xen hypervisor or this type of virtualization then you probably have nothing to do with managing a server farm. If someone in that business has not heard of Xen then maybe they should be in another line of work.
I agree that keeping up with all tech would be a full time job. However this is pretty main stream stuff.
I guess it depends on your school and instructor. I also assume you are using Karate as a generic name for all similar martial arts. I study TKD and we do lots of self defense in our class. Just a week ago we did a drill where you stand up against a wall and one person squeezed your windpipe (standing from the side) while another came at you with a blocking pad. You had to fight through the discomfort of being choked and fight off the attacker with the pad. Prior to that we did a drill where your partner two hand choked you and you had to get out of it. Of course prior to doing the drill we went through 5 or 6 ways to get out of the choke. Just the other night we did a self defense drill where your partner got a piece of kids sidewalk chalk and used it as a knife. It was really easy to see who did a good job defending themselves and who didn't via their white uniforms at the end of the night!
In addition to these type of drills we have basic self defense moves such as getting out of wrist grabs or headlocks which must be mastered for belt testing.
If that's not enough there is an additional class called Masters which deals with street fighting scenarios such as knife or gun attacks. The class is entirely devoted to how to deal with these situations and trains a lot with rubber weapons. Finally there is also a MMA (mixed martial arts) course where you can really get into the grappling type fighting you see on UFC. So all schools are not created equal and I'd hate to run into most of my instructors in an alley.
What about residential driveways? I know that it would not apply to everyone but if that tech existed, my driveway is long enough that it might just power my entire house. They don't get the traffic or the weight that a major highway receives which would aid in their longevity.
The parent is absolutely correct! I configured a very similar system a year ago for a non-profit.
I purchased two quad Xeon processor HP boxes with 20 GB of RAM each and run Xen just as suggested above. Two virtual web servers on each machine. In this case there is also a third virtual server on each that runs mySQL. The two mySQL instances are set up with replication. For the load balancing I picked up an old Alteon AD3. This setup has worked flawlessly since installation. Not one second of downtime.
I also threw together a script so that when you update the 'master' web server it automatically rsync's the html across the other three web servers.
The best part, the whole project cost under $1000. Since I was so under budget I picked up a third server for development and a second AD3 as a hot swap backup and still had lots of money to spare.
This assumes you have cell service at your home. Unfortunately even in this day and age there is still no service at my place from any of the cell companies. It ceases to amaze me but with the 'not in my backyard' mentality of the residents regarding towers it's just never going to happen. Not to mention that you also have to have a phone that can be tethered to your computer in addition to actually having service.
Your joking right? I live in New England and my winter bills are usually between $600 and $800/mo. Granted the house is electric and just over 3k s.q ft. But it is 2x6 construction, I have replaced all the exterior windows & doors, put cfl's in most rooms, put set back thermostats in all the rooms and we only heat the rooms we are in and using. This has cut our consumption by about 40%. The real issue is our wonderful state decided to deregulate power generation to save us money. Yea right! All that has happened is we have had rate increases upon increases. Our monthly expenditure year over year is almost exactly the same because the rate increases have eaten up all the savings from our improvements.
The real kicker here is that I averaged my annual expenditure against our next door neighbor who has a similar sized house with oil heat. If I total his annual electric and oil vs. my electric we come out about $100 apart. Had oil not come down like it did I would probably have done much better than him.
Not really hard to come by. Go to a motorcycle shop and ask for flexible exhaust tubing. My generator is in my garage and vented to the outside by about 15 ft of this kind of exhaust tubing. I also have a CO2 sensor hanging right off the generator just in case there is any leakage. In 10 years it has worked flawlessly.
Great post. I have a similar setup but I have my living room instead of a bed room. This is because I have gas logs in the fireplace which will heat that room. I also hook my well pump up as I have no furnace (electric heat).
One thing to note is no matter what make sure you maintain your gas generator at least twice a year. I made the mistake of not doing it last year and a month ago I was in the dark with a small flashlight trying to take of the carb bowl and clean it out. Not a pretty sight! Don't make the same mistake.
I'm in my 40's and still can walk into a house and tell if someone left a tube monitor on (w/ computer off). Drives me crazy.
Generally SATA nor IDE drives bother me but SCSI drive make an enormous racket!
My wife and I are going through the in vitro process now. I agree that there is nothing wrong with selecting the healthiest embryo(s) for implantation. However, it was strongly recommended that unless there was a specific health issue within our families, a genetic biopsy on the embryos should not be done. The explanation was that while there is no evidence (due to lack of data) that the biopsy could damage the embryo the risks out weighed the gains for doing the procedure. It was refreshing to see a doctor take the high road and suggest against invasive tests even though our insurance would have covered the cost.
The biggest problem is that if the person is going to a competitor it is already too late. They most certainly have copied everything they could possibly need before giving notice.
So other than preventing sabotage (which would be a stupid thing to do) there is little point in locking them down.
I have 32 channels of Lightorama gear. Pretty good bang for the buck. You can buy plug and play units all the way down to kits that you have to solder yourself. There are both AC and DC controllers and they connect to each other via RS-485 over standard CAT5 cable.
There are also a couple of other vendors of similar gear:
animatedlighting.com - very similar equipment but a little more expensive
d-light.us - basically a knock off of lightorama and the cheapest way to get started
While I have Lightorama controllers I don't sync my display to music. I just use them to make my display less boring. For instance I have both red and green spots (six of each) on the house. I can cross fade in and out the colors and completely change the look of the house. I use 12 channels alone on my pine tree. I have 6 strings each of red, blue, green and white rope lights on the tree. They are broken up into three zones: top, middle and bottom. I've got a number of sequences that that change the color of the tree, mix and match zones as well as twinkle, shimmer, etc.
These controllers also make for great Halloween displays. I'm also going to try to use it this summer to sequence a fireworks display to music for the 4th of July.
Give me a break! So someone wants to have some fun for a couple of weeks around the holidays. My guess is that he has kids and/or is still a kid at heart. While I don't have a display like his I do put some lights up as the kids love it. Every night they can't wait till we turn them on.
So drive your Prius back to your tiny CFL lit apartment and ignore the holidays. Let the rest of us actually enjoy our lives.
Both you and the parent are obviously single geeks in large cities. All you need space for is your bed and computers. Try living in a condo/apartment with three children under the age of 6 and a packrat wife. Hopefully your apartment is on a high enough floor so when you jump out the window your receive a quick death.
In response to your comments:
Smaller place - covered. I'd rather be dead than crammed into a tiny living area
more time for yourself - depending on which office I go to, my commute is 10 - 30 minutes, how long is your commute? Please make sure to include all the time waiting for mass transit, etc. I'm probably home swimming in my pool before you walk in the door. Oh, and I prefer my own pool to the super chlorinated pool of kiddy piss that is available to the public.
you don't need to mow the lawn - I like mowing the lawn and other physical activity. I wouldn't dream of taking away the memories of making a huge pile of leaves and having the kids jumping around in it. In your world it sounds like things like grass and trees are better off being replaced by concrete.
you might actually get to know some of your neighbors - even though I live in a 2 acre min. zoned area, the neighborhood gets together every summer for a 'block' party so everyone can meet each other. Most neighbors have friendships where they have things in common (kids of similar ages, retired folk, etc). Some want to be left alone and that is fine. As a geek I'm curious as to exactly how many of your neighbors you know and what you have in common (or not) with them.
This is FUD. First the opener is a receiver. By changing the logic board (and frequency) then it will not work at all as the remotes are transmitting on the old 390 MHz freq. Second it is highly unlikely you get better range from 420 MHz. The lower the freq the better the range. There (execpt in this instance) is also less or no interference in the military band vs. the 420 band.
Also look into the Nortel BCM 50. It is Linux based and can do both VOIP as well as regular hard wired phones. I just installed one of these systems and it was a breeze.
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In my business I always purchase the HP extended warranties on the laptops. Never on desktops as I consider them disposable. HP's service has always been very good. Next day onsite replacement of any faulty parts with no questions asked.
I never purchased them in the past. However in the last five years I bought two that have been worth their weight in gold. The first was a high end refrigerator that I got from Lowes. The extended warranty was less than 4% of the total cost. One month out of the factory 1 yr warranty the refrigerator stopped working. Service came out on a holiday weekend and swapped out all the electronics. It ended up not fixing the problem and the following week I got a brand new replacement. Even better was they reset the warranty to start over again. My Dad has a little lower end refrigerator like mine and had a simple repair that ran him $800. Definitely money well spent.
The other was I purchased a car that was just coming off lease. For 2k I was able to extend the bumper to bumper warranty for 7 more years. About two years later, which was just over the 5 year factory warranty, I had a major transmission problem. Not a penny out of pocket for the tow or repairs. No doubt the total repair cost was more than I paid for the warranty. If anything else goes wrong it's just more money in my pocket.
I think on low end electronics or where the warranty is in excess of 5% of the original purchase price you are better off passing.
I have to tell you that this argument is getting really old. Not all teachers make nothing. As a matter of fact I think many people would be happy bringing in 50k as starting pay these days. Not to mention the jobs are pretty secure in comparison to the general business environment and get the summers off.
I make this statement because these days I do a lot of work for a local non profit. A few years ago they sent out their annual solicitation to the teachers. There was a husband and wife team that had been in this city's school system for a long time and didn't donate anything. Of course we knew they had the means as they both made over 100k. We knew this as it was published in the newspaper a few months before when the city announced the top paid employees. Upon asking them why they did not donate they said they were teachers and could not afford to donate. I was quite annoyed at this response and mentioned that I had seen their names on the list. The woman then fired back that well that may be true but they had struggled as underpaid teachers for a long time. Of course this argument makes no sense and I didn't want to aggravate them so I just let it go.
I do agree that teachers are very important and should be compensated appropriately but the old blanket argument that they are very underpaid just doesn't hold water anymore...
I think a larger portion of readers understood than you think. If you haven't heard of the Xen hypervisor or this type of virtualization then you probably have nothing to do with managing a server farm. If someone in that business has not heard of Xen then maybe they should be in another line of work.
I agree that keeping up with all tech would be a full time job. However this is pretty main stream stuff.
S.
I guess it depends on your school and instructor. I also assume you are using Karate as a generic name for all similar martial arts. I study TKD and we do lots of self defense in our class. Just a week ago we did a drill where you stand up against a wall and one person squeezed your windpipe (standing from the side) while another came at you with a blocking pad. You had to fight through the discomfort of being choked and fight off the attacker with the pad. Prior to that we did a drill where your partner two hand choked you and you had to get out of it. Of course prior to doing the drill we went through 5 or 6 ways to get out of the choke. Just the other night we did a self defense drill where your partner got a piece of kids sidewalk chalk and used it as a knife. It was really easy to see who did a good job defending themselves and who didn't via their white uniforms at the end of the night!
In addition to these type of drills we have basic self defense moves such as getting out of wrist grabs or headlocks which must be mastered for belt testing.
If that's not enough there is an additional class called Masters which deals with street fighting scenarios such as knife or gun attacks. The class is entirely devoted to how to deal with these situations and trains a lot with rubber weapons. Finally there is also a MMA (mixed martial arts) course where you can really get into the grappling type fighting you see on UFC. So all schools are not created equal and I'd hate to run into most of my instructors in an alley.
What about residential driveways? I know that it would not apply to everyone but if that tech existed, my driveway is long enough that it might just power my entire house. They don't get the traffic or the weight that a major highway receives which would aid in their longevity.
The parent is absolutely correct! I configured a very similar system a year ago for a non-profit.
I purchased two quad Xeon processor HP boxes with 20 GB of RAM each and run Xen just as suggested above. Two virtual web servers on each machine. In this case there is also a third virtual server on each that runs mySQL. The two mySQL instances are set up with replication. For the load balancing I picked up an old Alteon AD3. This setup has worked flawlessly since installation. Not one second of downtime.
I also threw together a script so that when you update the 'master' web server it automatically rsync's the html across the other three web servers.
The best part, the whole project cost under $1000. Since I was so under budget I picked up a third server for development and a second AD3 as a hot swap backup and still had lots of money to spare.
This assumes you have cell service at your home. Unfortunately even in this day and age there is still no service at my place from any of the cell companies. It ceases to amaze me but with the 'not in my backyard' mentality of the residents regarding towers it's just never going to happen. Not to mention that you also have to have a phone that can be tethered to your computer in addition to actually having service.
Your joking right? I live in New England and my winter bills are usually between $600 and $800/mo. Granted the house is electric and just over 3k s.q ft. But it is 2x6 construction, I have replaced all the exterior windows & doors, put cfl's in most rooms, put set back thermostats in all the rooms and we only heat the rooms we are in and using. This has cut our consumption by about 40%. The real issue is our wonderful state decided to deregulate power generation to save us money. Yea right! All that has happened is we have had rate increases upon increases. Our monthly expenditure year over year is almost exactly the same because the rate increases have eaten up all the savings from our improvements.
The real kicker here is that I averaged my annual expenditure against our next door neighbor who has a similar sized house with oil heat. If I total his annual electric and oil vs. my electric we come out about $100 apart. Had oil not come down like it did I would probably have done much better than him.
Not really hard to come by. Go to a motorcycle shop and ask for flexible exhaust tubing. My generator is in my garage and vented to the outside by about 15 ft of this kind of exhaust tubing. I also have a CO2 sensor hanging right off the generator just in case there is any leakage. In 10 years it has worked flawlessly.
The table is a bad idea though...
Great post. I have a similar setup but I have my living room instead of a bed room. This is because I have gas logs in the fireplace which will heat that room. I also hook my well pump up as I have no furnace (electric heat).
One thing to note is no matter what make sure you maintain your gas generator at least twice a year. I made the mistake of not doing it last year and a month ago I was in the dark with a small flashlight trying to take of the carb bowl and clean it out. Not a pretty sight! Don't make the same mistake.
Don't forget to add lawyers. I don't think there is anything immoral about doing medical experiments on attorneys.
I'm in my 40's and still can walk into a house and tell if someone left a tube monitor on (w/ computer off). Drives me crazy. Generally SATA nor IDE drives bother me but SCSI drive make an enormous racket!
That's because the url in the article is wrong. AMSAT is http://www.amsat.org/
My wife and I are going through the in vitro process now. I agree that there is nothing wrong with selecting the healthiest embryo(s) for implantation. However, it was strongly recommended that unless there was a specific health issue within our families, a genetic biopsy on the embryos should not be done. The explanation was that while there is no evidence (due to lack of data) that the biopsy could damage the embryo the risks out weighed the gains for doing the procedure. It was refreshing to see a doctor take the high road and suggest against invasive tests even though our insurance would have covered the cost.
The biggest problem is that if the person is going to a competitor it is already too late. They most certainly have copied everything they could possibly need before giving notice.
So other than preventing sabotage (which would be a stupid thing to do) there is little point in locking them down.
I have 32 channels of Lightorama gear. Pretty good bang for the buck. You can buy plug and play units all the way down to kits that you have to solder yourself. There are both AC and DC controllers and they connect to each other via RS-485 over standard CAT5 cable.
There are also a couple of other vendors of similar gear:
animatedlighting.com - very similar equipment but a little more expensive
d-light.us - basically a knock off of lightorama and the cheapest way to get started
While I have Lightorama controllers I don't sync my display to music. I just use them to make my display less boring. For instance I have both red and green spots (six of each) on the house. I can cross fade in and out the colors and completely change the look of the house. I use 12 channels alone on my pine tree. I have 6 strings each of red, blue, green and white rope lights on the tree. They are broken up into three zones: top, middle and bottom. I've got a number of sequences that that change the color of the tree, mix and match zones as well as twinkle, shimmer, etc.
These controllers also make for great Halloween displays. I'm also going to try to use it this summer to sequence a fireworks display to music for the 4th of July.
Give me a break! So someone wants to have some fun for a couple of weeks around the holidays. My guess is that he has kids and/or is still a kid at heart. While I don't have a display like his I do put some lights up as the kids love it. Every night they can't wait till we turn them on.
So drive your Prius back to your tiny CFL lit apartment and ignore the holidays. Let the rest of us actually enjoy our lives.
>Now excuse me while I go smash my bike lock into some Hummer's tail-light. Do it to my Hummer and I'll squish your 'green' head.
Both you and the parent are obviously single geeks in large cities. All you need space for is your bed and computers. Try living in a condo/apartment with three children under the age of 6 and a packrat wife. Hopefully your apartment is on a high enough floor so when you jump out the window your receive a quick death.
In response to your comments:
Smaller place - covered. I'd rather be dead than crammed into a tiny living area
more time for yourself - depending on which office I go to, my commute is 10 - 30 minutes, how long is your commute? Please make sure to include all the time waiting for mass transit, etc. I'm probably home swimming in my pool before you walk in the door. Oh, and I prefer my own pool to the super chlorinated pool of kiddy piss that is available to the public.
you don't need to mow the lawn - I like mowing the lawn and other physical activity. I wouldn't dream of taking away the memories of making a huge pile of leaves and having the kids jumping around in it. In your world it sounds like things like grass and trees are better off being replaced by concrete.
you might actually get to know some of your neighbors - even though I live in a 2 acre min. zoned area, the neighborhood gets together every summer for a 'block' party so everyone can meet each other. Most neighbors have friendships where they have things in common (kids of similar ages, retired folk, etc). Some want to be left alone and that is fine. As a geek I'm curious as to exactly how many of your neighbors you know and what you have in common (or not) with them.
This is FUD. First the opener is a receiver. By changing the logic board (and frequency) then it will not work at all as the remotes are transmitting on the old 390 MHz freq. Second it is highly unlikely you get better range from 420 MHz. The lower the freq the better the range. There (execpt in this instance) is also less or no interference in the military band vs. the 420 band.
Also look into the Nortel BCM 50. It is Linux based and can do both VOIP as well as regular hard wired phones. I just installed one of these systems and it was a breeze.
No accent, please ask 10 people to say: I need to wash the laundry
If 9 out of 10 people don't say "warsh" I'll believe you!
I also liked Utopia but never took to the Sims. Now I have to dig up an emulator to play all these great old games on my laptop.
I'm with you on the first couple. My list:
1. Quake I
2. Unreal Tournament
3. Wizardry (whole series)
4. Tron Deadly Discs
5. Lode Runner
Hon. mention: Splinter Cell , B-17 Bomber and Tomb Raider, Castle Wolfenstein (new and original), Ultima series and Dig Dug
Now I have to go boot up my Aple ][+ and Intellivision!