make an actual measurement before reading the power supply rating as the power consumption
If I did that, I would have said 450W, not 100W.
[buy] a VIA EPIA mini-ITX board If you have to go out and buy a new mobo, CPU and PSU (even a bargain basement one), you're completely defeating the premise of saving money by reusing obsolete hardware.
If you're setting this up to avoid buying a $500 Cisco router to run your office T3, I totally understand. However, the article claims this is a good idea for a home user on ADSL with just a few PCs.
I need more specs than just the cpu model and speed to eval why you get low power consumption. How much ram, what speed HD, what kind of 3D graphics? Does your OS halt the cpu when idle to save energy and do you spin down the HD aggressively?
My point was, even at 'only' 100W, and the bargain rate of 8c/kwh, a PC based router will use more than enough extra power to be cost prohibitive. If the PC you use only eats 90W, it's only a minor change to the math.
So lets say you happen to have an old PC laying around unused and two NICs to stick in it. Let's then say you downclock the FSB and CPU to conserve power so that the machine only uses about 100W average. And let's say that the reason you need this type of router is to have good throughput on gaming and websurfing and still maximize your throughput on P2P apps that are flooding your connextion.
So you're running a PC at 100W 24/7. At 8 cents per kwh, that comes to $5.76/month. Of course, your power probably costs 12-15 cents per kwh, and your old PC probably takes 150-200W power, so you're probably using more like $8+/month. Also add in extra air conditioning costs in the summer to offset heat from the extra PC you have running.
I built a PC based router back when basic standalone units cost $250. Once they hit the $50 mark (two years ago, I probably paid more like $30 AR), I decided I was long overdue to buy one. I recouped my entire cost in less than 6 months. Unless there's something a $50 (now) Linksys WRT54g can't be modified to do, you shouldn't be bothering with a PC based solution.
The only way the PC router solution makes any sense is if you also happen to be using it as a print and file server, or a PC jukebox or running ftp/http services.
The problem isn't honest sites that have the 'click here if you're over 18' and make an effort to stop people from wandering in by mistake. The problem is typosquatters and keyword spammers who use junk like pokemon, nsync, or yugioh to lure people (mostly kids) to their sites where they try to infect their computers with spyware. I was absolutely appalled when I was tutoring a 10 yo. who loved pokemon (a few years back). The hardcore popups were everywhere. There's truly some slimy people actively trying to show porn to kids.
Porn sites should be required to add a tag like {adult} or {xxx} to their pages indicating that they are for adults only, or move all the domains to a.xxx TLD. A foolproof system to mark the pages so that your computer can filter all compliant websites 100%. You could have a plugin for your browser that works like a popup blocker to prevent accidental exposure. The next level up would be password protection to stop your kids from hunting for the stuff. The top level would be ISP blocking that can't be overridden from home.
What this would do is to make it easy to block kids from accessing most adult material, while making it easy to show who is intentionally trying to make it accessible to kids by evading the law. It would also avoid the censorship issue of making adults identify themselves while viewing porn.
None of this changes the fact that unsupervised teens will find a way to get porn if they actually want it. E-mailing, trading burned DVDs or even making their own (I knew a 16 yo. guy who had several female classmates send him naked pics of themselves. It's a nasty legal liability for parents). Even way back when I was 16 (1991), I was able to walk into the bookstore at the nearby stripmall and buy whatever I wanted to off the shelf (not just playboy, hustler and penthouse), no ID check. All I had to do was go a few days without shaving.
If this was a simple easter egg that involved going into an unmarket house or talking to some random hooker in the middle of nowhere, I could see the problem. But if you have to go to the internet, download a piece of code, install it and then play the game, you're way outside just playing the game. Anyone who can do these things could more easily find animal porn if it weren't for the media and legislators bringing so much attention to it and making sure it's being mirrored everywhere.
Add in the fact that this is a M rated game with the name of a particular criminal act in the title. Any kid who is playing this game obviously has parents that either don't care and/or aren't the least bit involved.
Really though, it's not so much the sex that moral conservatives are railing against. The same thing happened when the game came out in the first place. Eventually people stopped caring and everything died down. This is just another way to get the media to provide some more exposure.
Remember the 2004 list of the top 10 most violent games? Three involved saving humanity from being massacred by aliens or demons. Two didn't come out until 2005. Three were crapfests that would've barely sold any copies except for the media exposure for being so violent. One was never even planned for release in north america. The most commonly cited one is named for a felony crime.
When Sonic and Mario get together for a drive-by or gang-banging some hos, let me know. In the meantime, Hillary and the rest of her group need to get back to doing their jobs in the senate.
SCAM when colleges buy bran spanking new computers every 2 years
A big reason colleges buy new computers instead of using acceptable donated machines is that having donated machines means they're all different. A lab full of random PCs is much more difficult to maintain.
With identical models, if a machine dies, you can use 90% of what's left over for replacement parts. You have guaranteed compatibility and the drivers are already installed and updated to your normal standards.
My uncle works for a tech firms that actually needs top end machines, and anytime that they actually need to do an upgrade, they just go ahead and order a dozen identical machines and upgrade a bunch of people who aren't really ready yet. They save a lot of time and money by not having to maintain a different model for each person. Just think of how much easier it is to have a mobo die and just swap the hard drive into broken down system that had the hard drive fail. As long as it's not an OS issue, or the HD doesn't fail, you can literally have a system (especially a laptop) back up and running in less than an hour. If it is an OS issue, you can essentially swap out the entire machine at once and rule out hardware failure in less than half an hour. The only downside is if the model has a common failure point, you'll be intimately familiar with it. It gives you leverage against the maker, though, to make sure they fix it in every machine. You also know what to look for before the machine actually fails.
When he buys laptops, he gets ones with quick swappable hard drives. He can tell you in five minutes if the problem is hardware or software. If it's hardware, he's already back up and running and the old unit is getting packed up and sent back to the manufacturer. If it's software, it's his problem anyway.
Why do service centers charge so much?
Most idiots who can't bother to wipe the drive and reinstall windows from scratch also can't bother to bring in the CD/DVD that came with the machine. Some places actually keep copies of every install CD for every computer they've ever sold. Your mom & pop places don't have that luxury.
I wish all PCs would have the CoA stickered to the inside of the case and the factory image CD/DVD sitting in a compartment secured with a few screws. That way MS can't claim you don't have the right to use the OS that came with the machine because you lost a CD or piece of paper.
Re:After having a Tivo for about five years now...
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Women Control the DVR
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my Tivo is filled with my wife's crap
I think 'your' tivo is now hers. Time to get your own. My wife and I each have our own Tivos, and now she can't possibly blame me for her shows not getting recorded. And I don't have to flip past pages of Leno, Queer Eye and Murder She Wrote episodes. Worth every penny.
PVR quite a lot more complex
You obviously don't have a Tivo. OMG it's so unmeasureably obvious that you don't have a Tivo.
I set my Tivo to record new episodes of Chappelle's show over a year ago. I entered 'chap', selected chappelle's show, and told it 'get a season pass'. I never have to set it again unless it changes to a new channel or name. It will record every new episode that ever comes out, season after season, no matter how often it changes time slots. No matter how much it gets delayed by production 'difficulties'. If there's something else on that I want to record, it will find another time slot of chappelle's show to record. The only show I watch on FX is The Shield. I don't have to keep track of when the new season starts; I'll know it when the new episodes start showing up on my Tivo. My Tivo will record every new episode of Battlestar Galactica that ever airs until the day it's over. I can effortlessly save up an entire season of 24, and then watch it in one long 'real time' marathon.
No keeping track of what shows on each tape I've seen. No more daily video tape shuffle. No having to run multiple VCRs to overcome the 8 hour time limit. No more replacing worn out tapes. No having to buy yet another VCR to watch programs while shows are recording. No more recording over unwatched shows by accident. No more watching whatever is on the tape next, just because it's a nightmare to do it any other way. No more recording re-reuns. No more missing the second half of the special hour long episode. I don't miss even a single show when I go on vacation for a week.
Does your VCR automatically record shows while you watch them so you can rewind during the show? Nascar is actually fun to watch, now that I can watch the crashes over and over, and then fast forward through the boring drive fast, slow down, turn left, repeat 500x.
The only time I've touched any of my VCRs since getting Tivo was to archive a show once and to give a friend a copy of something his vcr missed because the show got moved.
I'm betting he means a good unsubsidized phone. The mail-in rebates of ~$150 are for signing a service contract. I imagine he's saying this keyboard will cost in the $200-400 range.
I'd probably run out and buy one of these for $150. Any more than that and it would have to be an anniversary present.
Um, there's these things called Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS). Start at around $50 for a 5 minute supply to your desktop computer. As low as $20 on black friday. They've been on the store shelves at best buy for at least 7 years.
I have 4 in my house: 2 computers and 2 Tivos (you lose about 5 minutes of recording while the machine reboots and acquires the signal again). They're fantastic if the power lines coming into your house aren't so reliable. I also plug a compact flourescent light into one that stays on permanently. When the power went out for 12 hours last year, I had light for 6 hours before I switched to the second UPS.
Reformat the hard drive. AND re-install the operating system. AND the virus scanner. AND the applications. AND download the patches.
Every time I have to buy a machine off the shelf, I have to do the last 3 items anyway. Unfortunately, I also have remove all the garbage and crippleware as well. Doing a fresh windows install and updating drivers should only take you about 2 hours, mostly hitting the enter key every so often. That's how long it will take you to go to the store, pick out a machine, turn down the service plan 20 times and drive back home.
The only up-side to buying a new machine is that you still have the backup machine while you're setting up the new one and transferring data (assuming you're replacing with a similar model).
The thing I'm dying to know is, if your time is worth $50/hour to you, why the heck are you using a $400 PC? And why are you not protecting it properly in the first place?
The articles you link to rag about the US selling agricultural goods too cheaply. You're saying we should charge more to developing countries for the food they might want to buy from us? People are starving because we're underpricing our food exports? If they have food, they should use it to feed their citizens. If they have extra sugar, beets, cotton and rice, let them sell it at market prices, or grow something else. If your country has the capability to grow food, it's not someone else's fault if your people are starving. It's just bad leadership.
Americans import a lot of food too. Produce something seasonal that we need and find a way to get it to us. Just don't make foods that can sit in a warehouse for years because we have stockpiles of those items. Part of our national economic strategy is to overproduce and stockpile enough food to last us through several severe droughts or floods. That means we don't need to import anything that can sit in a warehouse for a year. Maybe you should try selling to China. They make lots of cheap goods, need lots more food than they can grow, and are much closer. Or open up your own factories and develop a self sustaining nation.
The problem with the UN is the same as the old welfare system in the US. It gives hand-outs, but never gives a hand-up. A government(s) run agency is at a severe disadvantage in creating or stimulating entire economies.
I think you just like complaining about the USA, don't you? I be you think we created AIDS too.
there are other basic necessities than food. You know, water and shelter
If you can grow crops, you obviously have water. Add dirt and grass or straw to make bricks. If you can grow tobacco, you have the resources for food, water and shelter.
The minority of africans (no pun intended) that may be farming cash crops aren't the starving ones, though.
US businesses are these days mostly exporting and selling GM manipulated seed that is TERMINATED
There are still many non-GM sources of seed. The USA doesn't have the patent on non-GM corn, wheat, rice or soybeans. The fact is that most sold seed is GM because most non-GM farmers don't need to purchase seed for next year because they have plenty from the previous crop. The only reason you ever have to buy seed is if your previous crop got wiped out, you're changing crops or you need a new variety to fight against a new disease. Go ask an Amish farmer how much seed he has to buy each year, and then tell me about his GM terminated seed woes.
Finding non-GM seed for africa isn't the problem. Getting that seed into african soil is the problem.
What does the aids drug business have to do with the african food shortage, aside from also being one of africa's major problems?
I think the people in my family who actually own or have lived on farms would be far more qualified for the job than myself. My agriculture skills would leave me starving here in america, nevermind africa.
Are they also intolerant of goat's milk (contains lactose?). The example also applies 100% with people eating productive hens.
If prevalent lactose intolerance were the only issue, all the lactose intolerant people would die and the people who can break down lactose properly would thrive. That's not the case.
Thank you for standing up for this. It's too bad you had to post anonymously because of the risk of being branded a troll.
The one thing I think you skipped over is that here in America, farmers either have college degrees or grew up on a farm and start their career with 15 years of experience. Usually both. American agriculture is a major science and certainly not something relegated to illiterates.
I seem to have pissed off a lot of people by being politically incorrect with the truth. I wasn't trying to assess blame, but the problem.
There was a nightline (I believe) program recently about a girl who was simply given a goat to help her earn money for her family. No other assistance. She was able to go to grade school in Africa with the milk money instead of working all day long. She eventually was able to come to the US to attend college. All because someone gave her a goat. A goat. A goat and a lot of hard work was what it took for her to become an educated, world traveled woman.
Now maybe I wasn't clear about who is ruining things. It's not necessarily the owner of the cow or hen who is eating it. In fact, it's usually someone stealing it for food. It's typically the local armies who steal next year's seed to eat now. Or a neighbor eats your goat because his only other alternative is to die, and your goat will keep his family alive for another month. These are desperate people who have to stay alive today before they can worry about next year.
Yes, my analysis of one of Africa's problems only looks at a single part of Africa's situation, but if I could analyze the totality of Africa's situation in a single/. post, I'd be working for Newsweek or Time, not posting about Africa on a 'tech news for nerds' site. The fact is though, we need to stop sending them fish, and start sending them hooks and nets, if I may get biblical on you. We keep air-dropping enough food to last to the end of the month and then we walk away. Six months later we wonder why they're starving again. We spend billions rebuilding the cities we bombed in Iraq, but can't build schools in southern Africa. We rebuild the oil pipelines Saddam sabotaged but can't build irrigation pipes to fields in southern Africa. We're training a fresh new Millitary in Iraq, but can't help set up an accountable police force in southern Africa. And what little we actually do send always seems to end up in the hands of the local warlords that we want to get rid of.
If you want to talk about trade laws keeping them down, then please inform the rest of us about what they actually have to trade. It's obviously not food. Is it the endangered lion skins, or the elepant tusks? Maybe it's the diamonds that have made DeBeers and everyone else involved rich, except for the people actually digging them up. Perhaps I'm uninformed about the fine automobiles they make that I can't buy because of unfair trade practices.
My personal analysis of Africa's situation is that they're mostly at the hunter-gatherer step zero, not step one. Before they build cell phone towers, airports, tourist traps, factories and hotels, they need to produce food. Agriculture is the first step of every civilization, not f$#@!%g universal internet access.
If the UN know what they're doing,
They obviously don't, because all they're sending now is actors and musicians. Maybe Madonna can do a rain dance for next year's harvest. They only talk about 'debt relief' for countries that have long since defaulted on the loans anyway. Nobody in the UN cared about millions getting killed until someone attached the word 'genocide' to it. They still don't care about half a continent of people starving to death. The UN is still busy patting itself on the back for ending apartheid(sp?).
And it's been more than 10 years since I was a teenager.
Or do we vote with money and guns - like we do now?
I prefer the money-n-guns method. Even if those 4 Chinese vote with us, there's 15 more people per american that we have to deal with. The day that every person on the planet gets an equal vote is the day we're screwed.
In the midwest, they're called John Deer. In California, they're called Mexicans.
We also have relatively abundant water sources and aerable land.
If they're starving, they're obviously not producing enough food for their own needs, and unlikely to care about their prospects for exporting it. Africa's real problem is that they ate the milk producing cows and goats. That's after they slaughtered the rest of the herd that was going to breed the next generation. This is because they got desperate and ate next year's seed instead of planting it. Everytime the rest of the world trys to kickstart their food production with breeding stock or seeds, they just eat it.
What Africa really needs are some educated, business-minded people to properly organize and run things there. There's tons of land and people just waiting around for something to do.
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make an actual measurement before reading the power supply rating as the power consumption
If I did that, I would have said 450W, not 100W.
[buy] a VIA EPIA mini-ITX board
If you have to go out and buy a new mobo, CPU and PSU (even a bargain basement one), you're completely defeating the premise of saving money by reusing obsolete hardware.
If you're setting this up to avoid buying a $500 Cisco router to run your office T3, I totally understand. However, the article claims this is a good idea for a home user on ADSL with just a few PCs.
I need more specs than just the cpu model and speed to eval why you get low power consumption. How much ram, what speed HD, what kind of 3D graphics? Does your OS halt the cpu when idle to save energy and do you spin down the HD aggressively?
My point was, even at 'only' 100W, and the bargain rate of 8c/kwh, a PC based router will use more than enough extra power to be cost prohibitive. If the PC you use only eats 90W, it's only a minor change to the math.
So lets say you happen to have an old PC laying around unused and two NICs to stick in it. Let's then say you downclock the FSB and CPU to conserve power so that the machine only uses about 100W average. And let's say that the reason you need this type of router is to have good throughput on gaming and websurfing and still maximize your throughput on P2P apps that are flooding your connextion.
So you're running a PC at 100W 24/7. At 8 cents per kwh, that comes to $5.76/month. Of course, your power probably costs 12-15 cents per kwh, and your old PC probably takes 150-200W power, so you're probably using more like $8+/month. Also add in extra air conditioning costs in the summer to offset heat from the extra PC you have running.
I built a PC based router back when basic standalone units cost $250. Once they hit the $50 mark (two years ago, I probably paid more like $30 AR), I decided I was long overdue to buy one. I recouped my entire cost in less than 6 months. Unless there's something a $50 (now) Linksys WRT54g can't be modified to do, you shouldn't be bothering with a PC based solution.
The only way the PC router solution makes any sense is if you also happen to be using it as a print and file server, or a PC jukebox or running ftp/http services.
The problem isn't honest sites that have the 'click here if you're over 18' and make an effort to stop people from wandering in by mistake. The problem is typosquatters and keyword spammers who use junk like pokemon, nsync, or yugioh to lure people (mostly kids) to their sites where they try to infect their computers with spyware. I was absolutely appalled when I was tutoring a 10 yo. who loved pokemon (a few years back). The hardcore popups were everywhere. There's truly some slimy people actively trying to show porn to kids.
.xxx TLD. A foolproof system to mark the pages so that your computer can filter all compliant websites 100%. You could have a plugin for your browser that works like a popup blocker to prevent accidental exposure. The next level up would be password protection to stop your kids from hunting for the stuff. The top level would be ISP blocking that can't be overridden from home.
Porn sites should be required to add a tag like {adult} or {xxx} to their pages indicating that they are for adults only, or move all the domains to a
What this would do is to make it easy to block kids from accessing most adult material, while making it easy to show who is intentionally trying to make it accessible to kids by evading the law. It would also avoid the censorship issue of making adults identify themselves while viewing porn.
None of this changes the fact that unsupervised teens will find a way to get porn if they actually want it. E-mailing, trading burned DVDs or even making their own (I knew a 16 yo. guy who had several female classmates send him naked pics of themselves. It's a nasty legal liability for parents). Even way back when I was 16 (1991), I was able to walk into the bookstore at the nearby stripmall and buy whatever I wanted to off the shelf (not just playboy, hustler and penthouse), no ID check. All I had to do was go a few days without shaving.
Forget them, try Vista Pro.
http://www.andromedasoftware.com/cd213.htm
Queue Lawyers in
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If this was a simple easter egg that involved going into an unmarket house or talking to some random hooker in the middle of nowhere, I could see the problem. But if you have to go to the internet, download a piece of code, install it and then play the game, you're way outside just playing the game. Anyone who can do these things could more easily find animal porn if it weren't for the media and legislators bringing so much attention to it and making sure it's being mirrored everywhere.
Add in the fact that this is a M rated game with the name of a particular criminal act in the title. Any kid who is playing this game obviously has parents that either don't care and/or aren't the least bit involved.
Really though, it's not so much the sex that moral conservatives are railing against. The same thing happened when the game came out in the first place. Eventually people stopped caring and everything died down. This is just another way to get the media to provide some more exposure.
Remember the 2004 list of the top 10 most violent games? Three involved saving humanity from being massacred by aliens or demons. Two didn't come out until 2005. Three were crapfests that would've barely sold any copies except for the media exposure for being so violent. One was never even planned for release in north america. The most commonly cited one is named for a felony crime.
When Sonic and Mario get together for a drive-by or gang-banging some hos, let me know. In the meantime, Hillary and the rest of her group need to get back to doing their jobs in the senate.
I hope that 5 minutes kicks in after the machine boots up. It can easily take that long just for a spyware ridden machine just to get to the desktop.
SCAM when colleges buy bran spanking new computers every 2 years
A big reason colleges buy new computers instead of using acceptable donated machines is that having donated machines means they're all different. A lab full of random PCs is much more difficult to maintain. With identical models, if a machine dies, you can use 90% of what's left over for replacement parts. You have guaranteed compatibility and the drivers are already installed and updated to your normal standards.
My uncle works for a tech firms that actually needs top end machines, and anytime that they actually need to do an upgrade, they just go ahead and order a dozen identical machines and upgrade a bunch of people who aren't really ready yet. They save a lot of time and money by not having to maintain a different model for each person. Just think of how much easier it is to have a mobo die and just swap the hard drive into broken down system that had the hard drive fail. As long as it's not an OS issue, or the HD doesn't fail, you can literally have a system (especially a laptop) back up and running in less than an hour. If it is an OS issue, you can essentially swap out the entire machine at once and rule out hardware failure in less than half an hour. The only downside is if the model has a common failure point, you'll be intimately familiar with it. It gives you leverage against the maker, though, to make sure they fix it in every machine. You also know what to look for before the machine actually fails.
When he buys laptops, he gets ones with quick swappable hard drives. He can tell you in five minutes if the problem is hardware or software. If it's hardware, he's already back up and running and the old unit is getting packed up and sent back to the manufacturer. If it's software, it's his problem anyway.
Why do service centers charge so much?
Most idiots who can't bother to wipe the drive and reinstall windows from scratch also can't bother to bring in the CD/DVD that came with the machine. Some places actually keep copies of every install CD for every computer they've ever sold. Your mom & pop places don't have that luxury.
I wish all PCs would have the CoA stickered to the inside of the case and the factory image CD/DVD sitting in a compartment secured with a few screws. That way MS can't claim you don't have the right to use the OS that came with the machine because you lost a CD or piece of paper.
my Tivo is filled with my wife's crap
I think 'your' tivo is now hers. Time to get your own. My wife and I each have our own Tivos, and now she can't possibly blame me for her shows not getting recorded. And I don't have to flip past pages of Leno, Queer Eye and Murder She Wrote episodes. Worth every penny.
PVR quite a lot more complex
You obviously don't have a Tivo. OMG it's so unmeasureably obvious that you don't have a Tivo.
I set my Tivo to record new episodes of Chappelle's show over a year ago. I entered 'chap', selected chappelle's show, and told it 'get a season pass'. I never have to set it again unless it changes to a new channel or name. It will record every new episode that ever comes out, season after season, no matter how often it changes time slots. No matter how much it gets delayed by production 'difficulties'. If there's something else on that I want to record, it will find another time slot of chappelle's show to record. The only show I watch on FX is The Shield. I don't have to keep track of when the new season starts; I'll know it when the new episodes start showing up on my Tivo. My Tivo will record every new episode of Battlestar Galactica that ever airs until the day it's over. I can effortlessly save up an entire season of 24, and then watch it in one long 'real time' marathon.
No keeping track of what shows on each tape I've seen. No more daily video tape shuffle. No having to run multiple VCRs to overcome the 8 hour time limit. No more replacing worn out tapes. No having to buy yet another VCR to watch programs while shows are recording. No more recording over unwatched shows by accident. No more watching whatever is on the tape next, just because it's a nightmare to do it any other way. No more recording re-reuns. No more missing the second half of the special hour long episode. I don't miss even a single show when I go on vacation for a week.
Does your VCR automatically record shows while you watch them so you can rewind during the show? Nascar is actually fun to watch, now that I can watch the crashes over and over, and then fast forward through the boring drive fast, slow down, turn left, repeat 500x.
The only time I've touched any of my VCRs since getting Tivo was to archive a show once and to give a friend a copy of something his vcr missed because the show got moved.
I'm betting he means a good unsubsidized phone. The mail-in rebates of ~$150 are for signing a service contract. I imagine he's saying this keyboard will cost in the $200-400 range.
I'd probably run out and buy one of these for $150. Any more than that and it would have to be an anniversary present.
So:
1. Faster
2. Bigger
3. Faster
4. Faster
5. Essentially free.
Looking at advances from 20 years ago, this isn't really much to ask for in the next 20.
He only asked about short power failures. Five minutes should be enough to ride out every power failure except for about one per year.
You can get UPSes that last 30 minutes for around $150. That's quite long enough to transfer the power cable to your gas powered generator.
Um, there's these things called Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS). Start at around $50 for a 5 minute supply to your desktop computer. As low as $20 on black friday. They've been on the store shelves at best buy for at least 7 years.
I have 4 in my house: 2 computers and 2 Tivos (you lose about 5 minutes of recording while the machine reboots and acquires the signal again). They're fantastic if the power lines coming into your house aren't so reliable. I also plug a compact flourescent light into one that stays on permanently. When the power went out for 12 hours last year, I had light for 6 hours before I switched to the second UPS.
Reformat the hard drive. AND re-install the operating system. AND the virus scanner. AND the applications. AND download the patches.
Every time I have to buy a machine off the shelf, I have to do the last 3 items anyway. Unfortunately, I also have remove all the garbage and crippleware as well. Doing a fresh windows install and updating drivers should only take you about 2 hours, mostly hitting the enter key every so often. That's how long it will take you to go to the store, pick out a machine, turn down the service plan 20 times and drive back home.
The only up-side to buying a new machine is that you still have the backup machine while you're setting up the new one and transferring data (assuming you're replacing with a similar model).
The thing I'm dying to know is, if your time is worth $50/hour to you, why the heck are you using a $400 PC? And why are you not protecting it properly in the first place?
The articles you link to rag about the US selling agricultural goods too cheaply. You're saying we should charge more to developing countries for the food they might want to buy from us? People are starving because we're underpricing our food exports? If they have food, they should use it to feed their citizens. If they have extra sugar, beets, cotton and rice, let them sell it at market prices, or grow something else. If your country has the capability to grow food, it's not someone else's fault if your people are starving. It's just bad leadership.
Americans import a lot of food too. Produce something seasonal that we need and find a way to get it to us. Just don't make foods that can sit in a warehouse for years because we have stockpiles of those items. Part of our national economic strategy is to overproduce and stockpile enough food to last us through several severe droughts or floods. That means we don't need to import anything that can sit in a warehouse for a year. Maybe you should try selling to China. They make lots of cheap goods, need lots more food than they can grow, and are much closer. Or open up your own factories and develop a self sustaining nation.
The problem with the UN is the same as the old welfare system in the US. It gives hand-outs, but never gives a hand-up. A government(s) run agency is at a severe disadvantage in creating or stimulating entire economies.
I think you just like complaining about the USA, don't you? I be you think we created AIDS too.
there are other basic necessities than food. You know, water and shelter
If you can grow crops, you obviously have water. Add dirt and grass or straw to make bricks. If you can grow tobacco, you have the resources for food, water and shelter.
The minority of africans (no pun intended) that may be farming cash crops aren't the starving ones, though.
US businesses are these days mostly exporting and selling GM manipulated seed that is TERMINATED
There are still many non-GM sources of seed. The USA doesn't have the patent on non-GM corn, wheat, rice or soybeans. The fact is that most sold seed is GM because most non-GM farmers don't need to purchase seed for next year because they have plenty from the previous crop. The only reason you ever have to buy seed is if your previous crop got wiped out, you're changing crops or you need a new variety to fight against a new disease. Go ask an Amish farmer how much seed he has to buy each year, and then tell me about his GM terminated seed woes.
Finding non-GM seed for africa isn't the problem. Getting that seed into african soil is the problem.
What does the aids drug business have to do with the african food shortage, aside from also being one of africa's major problems?
I think the people in my family who actually own or have lived on farms would be far more qualified for the job than myself. My agriculture skills would leave me starving here in america, nevermind africa.
Are they also intolerant of goat's milk (contains lactose?). The example also applies 100% with people eating productive hens.
If prevalent lactose intolerance were the only issue, all the lactose intolerant people would die and the people who can break down lactose properly would thrive. That's not the case.
Thank you for standing up for this. It's too bad you had to post anonymously because of the risk of being branded a troll.
The one thing I think you skipped over is that here in America, farmers either have college degrees or grew up on a farm and start their career with 15 years of experience. Usually both. American agriculture is a major science and certainly not something relegated to illiterates.
I seem to have pissed off a lot of people by being politically incorrect with the truth. I wasn't trying to assess blame, but the problem.
/. post, I'd be working for Newsweek or Time, not posting about Africa on a 'tech news for nerds' site. The fact is though, we need to stop sending them fish, and start sending them hooks and nets, if I may get biblical on you. We keep air-dropping enough food to last to the end of the month and then we walk away. Six months later we wonder why they're starving again. We spend billions rebuilding the cities we bombed in Iraq, but can't build schools in southern Africa. We rebuild the oil pipelines Saddam sabotaged but can't build irrigation pipes to fields in southern Africa. We're training a fresh new Millitary in Iraq, but can't help set up an accountable police force in southern Africa. And what little we actually do send always seems to end up in the hands of the local warlords that we want to get rid of.
There was a nightline (I believe) program recently about a girl who was simply given a goat to help her earn money for her family. No other assistance. She was able to go to grade school in Africa with the milk money instead of working all day long. She eventually was able to come to the US to attend college. All because someone gave her a goat. A goat. A goat and a lot of hard work was what it took for her to become an educated, world traveled woman.
Now maybe I wasn't clear about who is ruining things. It's not necessarily the owner of the cow or hen who is eating it. In fact, it's usually someone stealing it for food. It's typically the local armies who steal next year's seed to eat now. Or a neighbor eats your goat because his only other alternative is to die, and your goat will keep his family alive for another month. These are desperate people who have to stay alive today before they can worry about next year.
Yes, my analysis of one of Africa's problems only looks at a single part of Africa's situation, but if I could analyze the totality of Africa's situation in a single
If you want to talk about trade laws keeping them down, then please inform the rest of us about what they actually have to trade. It's obviously not food. Is it the endangered lion skins, or the elepant tusks? Maybe it's the diamonds that have made DeBeers and everyone else involved rich, except for the people actually digging them up. Perhaps I'm uninformed about the fine automobiles they make that I can't buy because of unfair trade practices. My personal analysis of Africa's situation is that they're mostly at the hunter-gatherer step zero, not step one. Before they build cell phone towers, airports, tourist traps, factories and hotels, they need to produce food. Agriculture is the first step of every civilization, not f$#@!%g universal internet access.
If the UN know what they're doing,
They obviously don't, because all they're sending now is actors and musicians. Maybe Madonna can do a rain dance for next year's harvest. They only talk about 'debt relief' for countries that have long since defaulted on the loans anyway. Nobody in the UN cared about millions getting killed until someone attached the word 'genocide' to it. They still don't care about half a continent of people starving to death. The UN is still busy patting itself on the back for ending apartheid(sp?).
And it's been more than 10 years since I was a teenager.
Or do we vote with money and guns - like we do now?
I prefer the money-n-guns method. Even if those 4 Chinese vote with us, there's 15 more people per american that we have to deal with. The day that every person on the planet gets an equal vote is the day we're screwed.
In the midwest, they're called John Deer. In California, they're called Mexicans. We also have relatively abundant water sources and aerable land.
If they're starving, they're obviously not producing enough food for their own needs, and unlikely to care about their prospects for exporting it. Africa's real problem is that they ate the milk producing cows and goats. That's after they slaughtered the rest of the herd that was going to breed the next generation. This is because they got desperate and ate next year's seed instead of planting it. Everytime the rest of the world trys to kickstart their food production with breeding stock or seeds, they just eat it.
What Africa really needs are some educated, business-minded people to properly organize and run things there. There's tons of land and people just waiting around for something to do.