Seriously, with a bluetooth keyboard I am able to easily SSH into servers or RDP/VNC into an office machine if something goes wrong. I don't even use my Powerbook anymore for checking Email. The only thing I do use it for is light coding and surfing the web.
I don't have the A/V adapters but I've seen them out there already.
You aren't going to be playing Duke Nukem Forever anytime soon, but the iPhone has already come in handy a couple times and I've only had it a month.
not where you were born. When I was an American living and working in Germany, I was subject to the laws of Germany. I couldn't download a browser with more than 40-bit encryption at the time due to export regulations. Yes I was an American citizen, but I wasn't in the united states. Now, if you are working on behalf of the US government at a diplomatic consulate/mission or in the military, then you may have a gripe, and I believe Apple should do something to work with you. Especially if your billing is to an APO address.
Just because I'm american and we are allowed the freedom of speech inside the US doesn't mean I can have a copy of Mein Kampf in Germany.
Its true. I have a couple friends who have finished LPN and had hospitals fighting over them while they were working on their RN's. No matter where they go, they'll get their BSN or Nurse Practitioner schooling paid for by the hospital (with a 3 year work agreement after they finish). But getting paid to finish your education and have a job guaranteed at the end of it...
But Television is today's form of circuses. It keeps the general unwashed masses happy, entertained, and more worried about what happened on Idol as apposed to people worrying or taking an interest in health care, the economy, energy, torture, "the terrorists", North Korea, Putin, Russia, global warming et. al.
Because his phone company was worse. He was paying $40 for a DSL connection that was slower than the 3G service on my iPhone. Seriously, it was no better than the dial up that he left about 2 years ago. At first it seemed fast, but kept getting slower and slower everytime I visited him (about every 6 months).
Finally he had enough and switched to a Charter Bundle and the speed difference was amazing. His videos no longer took 20 minutes to load, instead they took less than 60 seconds.
If you talk with most people, 5/MBs down and even 768k up is plenty for what most people do. And no, slashdot is not most people.
This is what I've found. The casual user that buys a MacBook* for general computer use love the glossy screen. They think it looks sharper, brighter, and clearer. And they maybe right. But anyone that is using a MacBook* for professional use, programming or photo/video, hates glossy screens myself included. It's the secondary reason I keep holding onto this 12.1 PowerBook. (Primary reason being it's 12.1" and fits perfectly on an airplane tray table, even on Southwest's economy class).
Maybe MacMall has a left over 15" from the previous model that still has a matte screen.
If you take away the people's circuses, they may actual do something...like sit around, take a look at the world, and decide some kind of action needs to be taken.
OpenSuSE/SLES/SLED are our preferred distros around here for our POS and ERP systems just because it was a fluke that it was the first distro to install correctly on the test/development machines without having to hunt down drivers or getting a kernel panic. But this will make creating a disc image for our Point of Sales systems extremely easy and I'm glad to see it.
We just started using reCAPTCHA on our submit forms for non-logged in users and on the registration page after finally getting some korean or japanese spam. It was extremely easy to integrate, I think it took about 10 minutes from signup until it was in the code and worked. After a couple days on the development machine for testing, it was in production and no more false submissions.
It may not be perfect, but it was easy to integrate and simple to use.
It's not green economy, it's just economics coupled with things they don't teach you at business school. (I hold degrees in German and International Business). What holds most people up is that the rate of return and ROI calculations aren't quite that good from an accounting stand point. It still takes about 7-12 years to pay for itself ceteris paribus. That is if you just calculate the cost savings off the utilities. Then you can add some future present value if you were to invest the money in the analysis if you want to get complicated. But in this market, where do you want to invest? Now it maybe true that for, say an average home owner, solar has not come down to the point where it can be declared feasible. But there are some other intangibles that are hard to put a number to down on paper. i.e., if we use the extra cash flow and spend it on marketing, or another developer, etc., what are the potential payoffs?
What we do know is that utility prices are unlikely to go down and the new developer is already paying dividends. We have a new product release ready to ship at the end of the month. Without him, it would have been March or April. If all goes well, then the cost of the solar panels could be recovered in as little as 18 months and we're getting started on the next phase of the project 2 months ahead of schedule and we can do so with little or no change in exiting net cash flow.
I wish I could say they taught me this at college, which taking 4 semesters of Econ did help, but I learned about sunk costs and how to factor risk into ROI considerations from our family farms when I took a year off from work before I started graduate school to learn how to run them with my Dad. (We rent the farms, but take an active role in managing the business side of things like selling on the futures market, etc..) An example was putting up grain storage bins. It was taking over 3 weeks to harvest the rice when we had to take it to the dryer, they could manage to unload 2, maybe 3 truck loads a day. That's 3 weeks where $500k worth of crops were sitting out in the field. All it takes is a hail storm or high winds, and you can cut that number by 30% or more. (It happened this year, Hurricane Ike knocked the yields down by about 30 - 40 bushels per acre, and at $5.50 a bushel it adds up). For $50k we could put up storage on the farm. It now takes 3 days (or 2 long days) to harvest all the farms. So a ready crop is now sitting out in the field a very short period of time. How long is it going to take to recoup the ROI there? Well if you look at the raw numbers, about 15 years. But if you get your crop in once before a hurricane Ike comes around, suddenly they've just paid for themselves. Now granted, my Dad is a retired executive that spent his entire career on the finance side of things at a large company. So I've grown up around looking at things...differently than my peers.
On the farms, we hedge. In a sense, that is what we are doing here. We are hedging that utility prices in our area will continue to rise over the next 15 - 20 years. But more over, we think we an invest the savings into other projects that will in turn pay off more than the cost of the solar panels. So it made sense in our case.
We're not a datacenter, just a development company. We had money left over last year that was either going to be taxed and some tax credits expired in december. So we needed to be reinvested into the business some how. We put in solar panels on the office roof that meets about 60 - 70% of our power needs. This has lowered our power bills by over half. That's freed up enough cash flow to pay for another developer. We viewed the investment as a sunk cost that freed up enough to hire an additional Jr. programmer that we were really needing.
Please mod parent up. I have mod points, but posted elsewhere. Having just gone through PCI compliance (which is frankly a joke), there needs to be a better system out there.
Because they are the ones processing the transactions. We don't use heartland, but when take online orders through our website, we don't store the credit card information, our CC Processor does. The processors are the one that actually run the transactions, take money from the customers account, take a percentage, then deposit to the merchants account. And they have to keep records of all that.
In order for CC payment to work someone has to store that data somewhere.
From everything I've head read or heard, going with a DX system makes a lot of sense if you are building new construction. It is easier to install without having to worry about the before mentioned problems of hitting existing pipes and landscaping. But for existing home construction, it's questionable.
Some day when I do build a house, the two things I want are a DX heating/cooling system and solar panels. Lump those costs in the home and use the extra money from what would have been spent on utilities to pay down the mortgage faster. Of course, if you're married, it may go towards the Mrs. shoe and purse fund instead....grumble, grumble...
It can't hurt. As much of pain as it is to operate in mixed environments, we deploy a mix of lighttpd and apache web server for the very reason that even if a major bug or exploit is found in one, about half our front end systems would still be available while the others are being patched.
And that's in the winter. It's a lot more in the summer because of AC. Granted our building faces south and in the winter time gets a lot of solar time when the sun is out. Granted we're a business and we run several servers in house 24x7 for development, testing, and backup and about 25 PC's.
We put up as much solar as we could given our amount of roof space last October. We've seen our electric bill go down to around $700 - $900 per month. It's basically cut our bill in half. Now we had the cash on hand to invest in the technology, plus there were some tax write offs that made it advantageous to do so before December of 2008.
But we viewed it as a wise investment that freed up over $1000 a month in cash flow. That's about a $1000 per month we can spend on additional development. It doesn't sound like much, but it was enough to offer 2 paid internships this spring semester at the local university.
Will the investment still take 5 - 7 years to pay for itself? In raw dollars, yes. But there are intangibles as far as I'm concerned. We've found two really good interns for this spring semester. Just over winter break they were able to take a piece of one project and get it to a working beta. It was the final piece of the puzzle to finishing that product that is now on the market and we've already got 20 installs lined up totaling about 1/3rd the cost of the solar panels.
Granted, we knew what our limits were. We did it not to be green and save money. The cash was either going to be given out as dividends (we are employee owned) and taxed or retained as earnings and taxed.
We didn't even bother to consider it because we didn't do it to be "Green". We did it because we had the cash on hand, the tax write off for the investment expired in December, and by switching to solar we freed up enough money to pay for another developers salary.
I'm not sure about carbon neutral, but we've seen a our power bill go down by 90%. Still, it will take about 4 - 5 years to recoup the investment, but if you view it as a sunk cost, it's freed up a lot of cash flow.
...was more to do with lack of physical infrastructure than anything else. They had the means to produce a lot of food, but a lot of it rotted out in the fields. They didn't have the roads and rail to get it from point A (field) to point B (processing plants) to point C (supermarket shelf).
Giving 350 people $1M each = $350M. Now you could give 350M people $1 each, for $350m but that won't even buy something on the value menu at a fast food joint after sales taxes.
Slashdot Mirror
I think his old pal Steve is already on top that one:
http://www.apple.com/iphone/
Seriously, with a bluetooth keyboard I am able to easily SSH into servers or RDP/VNC into an office machine if something goes wrong. I don't even use my Powerbook anymore for checking Email. The only thing I do use it for is light coding and surfing the web.
I don't have the A/V adapters but I've seen them out there already.
You aren't going to be playing Duke Nukem Forever anytime soon, but the iPhone has already come in handy a couple times and I've only had it a month.
And be compatible with the phantom console!
Meh, let them keep it. It half full of French anyway....
not where you were born. When I was an American living and working in Germany, I was subject to the laws of Germany. I couldn't download a browser with more than 40-bit encryption at the time due to export regulations. Yes I was an American citizen, but I wasn't in the united states.
Now, if you are working on behalf of the US government at a diplomatic consulate/mission or in the military, then you may have a gripe, and I believe Apple should do something to work with you. Especially if your billing is to an APO address.
Just because I'm american and we are allowed the freedom of speech inside the US doesn't mean I can have a copy of Mein Kampf in Germany.
Well then I can see that your diving and hang up with a line of, "When you're in a more responsible position we can do business."
If they are reckless enough to video chat and drive. I really don't need to be talking to them for a business deal.
Its true. I have a couple friends who have finished LPN and had hospitals fighting over them while they were working on their RN's. No matter where they go, they'll get their BSN or Nurse Practitioner schooling paid for by the hospital (with a 3 year work agreement after they finish). But getting paid to finish your education and have a job guaranteed at the end of it...
But Television is today's form of circuses. It keeps the general unwashed masses happy, entertained, and more worried about what happened on Idol as apposed to people worrying or taking an interest in health care, the economy, energy, torture, "the terrorists", North Korea, Putin, Russia, global warming et. al.
Because his phone company was worse. He was paying $40 for a DSL connection that was slower than the 3G service on my iPhone. Seriously, it was no better than the dial up that he left about 2 years ago. At first it seemed fast, but kept getting slower and slower everytime I visited him (about every 6 months).
Finally he had enough and switched to a Charter Bundle and the speed difference was amazing. His videos no longer took 20 minutes to load, instead they took less than 60 seconds.
If you talk with most people, 5/MBs down and even 768k up is plenty for what most people do. And no, slashdot is not most people.
This is what I've found. The casual user that buys a MacBook* for general computer use love the glossy screen. They think it looks sharper, brighter, and clearer. And they maybe right. But anyone that is using a MacBook* for professional use, programming or photo/video, hates glossy screens myself included. It's the secondary reason I keep holding onto this 12.1 PowerBook. (Primary reason being it's 12.1" and fits perfectly on an airplane tray table, even on Southwest's economy class).
Maybe MacMall has a left over 15" from the previous model that still has a matte screen.
If you take away the people's circuses, they may actual do something...like sit around, take a look at the world, and decide some kind of action needs to be taken.
Did we not learn anything by watching Rome?
OpenSuSE/SLES/SLED are our preferred distros around here for our POS and ERP systems just because it was a fluke that it was the first distro to install correctly on the test/development machines without having to hunt down drivers or getting a kernel panic. But this will make creating a disc image for our Point of Sales systems extremely easy and I'm glad to see it.
We just started using reCAPTCHA on our submit forms for non-logged in users and on the registration page after finally getting some korean or japanese spam. It was extremely easy to integrate, I think it took about 10 minutes from signup until it was in the code and worked. After a couple days on the development machine for testing, it was in production and no more false submissions.
It may not be perfect, but it was easy to integrate and simple to use.
It's not green economy, it's just economics coupled with things they don't teach you at business school. (I hold degrees in German and International Business). What holds most people up is that the rate of return and ROI calculations aren't quite that good from an accounting stand point. It still takes about 7-12 years to pay for itself ceteris paribus. That is if you just calculate the cost savings off the utilities. Then you can add some future present value if you were to invest the money in the analysis if you want to get complicated. But in this market, where do you want to invest? Now it maybe true that for, say an average home owner, solar has not come down to the point where it can be declared feasible. But there are some other intangibles that are hard to put a number to down on paper. i.e., if we use the extra cash flow and spend it on marketing, or another developer, etc., what are the potential payoffs?
What we do know is that utility prices are unlikely to go down and the new developer is already paying dividends. We have a new product release ready to ship at the end of the month. Without him, it would have been March or April. If all goes well, then the cost of the solar panels could be recovered in as little as 18 months and we're getting started on the next phase of the project 2 months ahead of schedule and we can do so with little or no change in exiting net cash flow.
I wish I could say they taught me this at college, which taking 4 semesters of Econ did help, but I learned about sunk costs and how to factor risk into ROI considerations from our family farms when I took a year off from work before I started graduate school to learn how to run them with my Dad. (We rent the farms, but take an active role in managing the business side of things like selling on the futures market, etc..) An example was putting up grain storage bins. It was taking over 3 weeks to harvest the rice when we had to take it to the dryer, they could manage to unload 2, maybe 3 truck loads a day. That's 3 weeks where $500k worth of crops were sitting out in the field. All it takes is a hail storm or high winds, and you can cut that number by 30% or more. (It happened this year, Hurricane Ike knocked the yields down by about 30 - 40 bushels per acre, and at $5.50 a bushel it adds up). For $50k we could put up storage on the farm. It now takes 3 days (or 2 long days) to harvest all the farms. So a ready crop is now sitting out in the field a very short period of time. How long is it going to take to recoup the ROI there? Well if you look at the raw numbers, about 15 years. But if you get your crop in once before a hurricane Ike comes around, suddenly they've just paid for themselves. Now granted, my Dad is a retired executive that spent his entire career on the finance side of things at a large company. So I've grown up around looking at things...differently than my peers.
On the farms, we hedge. In a sense, that is what we are doing here. We are hedging that utility prices in our area will continue to rise over the next 15 - 20 years. But more over, we think we an invest the savings into other projects that will in turn pay off more than the cost of the solar panels. So it made sense in our case.
We're not a datacenter, just a development company. We had money left over last year that was either going to be taxed and some tax credits expired in december. So we needed to be reinvested into the business some how. We put in solar panels on the office roof that meets about 60 - 70% of our power needs. This has lowered our power bills by over half. That's freed up enough cash flow to pay for another developer. We viewed the investment as a sunk cost that freed up enough to hire an additional Jr. programmer that we were really needing.
Please mod parent up. I have mod points, but posted elsewhere. Having just gone through PCI compliance (which is frankly a joke), there needs to be a better system out there.
Because they are the ones processing the transactions. We don't use heartland, but when take online orders through our website, we don't store the credit card information, our CC Processor does. The processors are the one that actually run the transactions, take money from the customers account, take a percentage, then deposit to the merchants account. And they have to keep records of all that.
In order for CC payment to work someone has to store that data somewhere.
In Loco Parentis is the legal definition you are looking for.
Here is a nice Wiki for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_loco_parentis
If you're in school, under 18, the school administrators have a legal right to act as guardian with the same rights as a parent in their home.
From everything I've head read or heard, going with a DX system makes a lot of sense if you are building new construction. It is easier to install without having to worry about the before mentioned problems of hitting existing pipes and landscaping. But for existing home construction, it's questionable.
Some day when I do build a house, the two things I want are a DX heating/cooling system and solar panels. Lump those costs in the home and use the extra money from what would have been spent on utilities to pay down the mortgage faster. Of course, if you're married, it may go towards the Mrs. shoe and purse fund instead....grumble, grumble...
It can't hurt. As much of pain as it is to operate in mixed environments, we deploy a mix of lighttpd and apache web server for the very reason that even if a major bug or exploit is found in one, about half our front end systems would still be available while the others are being patched.
The more options the better in my book.
I would go back and look at who own Alienware....I think it starts with D and ends with ELL.
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/pcs/dell-buys-alienware-162317.php
And that's in the winter. It's a lot more in the summer because of AC. Granted our building faces south and in the winter time gets a lot of solar time when the sun is out.
Granted we're a business and we run several servers in house 24x7 for development, testing, and backup and about 25 PC's.
We put up as much solar as we could given our amount of roof space last October. We've seen our electric bill go down to around $700 - $900 per month. It's basically cut our bill in half. Now we had the cash on hand to invest in the technology, plus there were some tax write offs that made it advantageous to do so before December of 2008.
But we viewed it as a wise investment that freed up over $1000 a month in cash flow. That's about a $1000 per month we can spend on additional development. It doesn't sound like much, but it was enough to offer 2 paid internships this spring semester at the local university.
Will the investment still take 5 - 7 years to pay for itself? In raw dollars, yes. But there are intangibles as far as I'm concerned. We've found two really good interns for this spring semester. Just over winter break they were able to take a piece of one project and get it to a working beta. It was the final piece of the puzzle to finishing that product that is now on the market and we've already got 20 installs lined up totaling about 1/3rd the cost of the solar panels.
Granted, we knew what our limits were. We did it not to be green and save money. The cash was either going to be given out as dividends (we are employee owned) and taxed or retained as earnings and taxed.
We didn't even bother to consider it because we didn't do it to be "Green". We did it because we had the cash on hand, the tax write off for the investment expired in December, and by switching to solar we freed up enough money to pay for another developers salary.
I'm not sure about carbon neutral, but we've seen a our power bill go down by 90%. Still, it will take about 4 - 5 years to recoup the investment, but if you view it as a sunk cost, it's freed up a lot of cash flow.
...was more to do with lack of physical infrastructure than anything else. They had the means to produce a lot of food, but a lot of it rotted out in the fields. They didn't have the roads and rail to get it from point A (field) to point B (processing plants) to point C (supermarket shelf).
Giving 350 people $1M each = $350M. Now you could give 350M people $1 each, for $350m but that won't even buy something on the value menu at a fast food joint after sales taxes.