I have an R-103 and it is about... 6 years old now. Been hiking with it in Hawaii, honeymoon in Jamaica and countless other places and is in perfect shape. The bag itself is pretty light for the padding and construction.
What I travel/keep in there most of the time. Canon Rebel XT (yes it is old but invested in my lenses), battery grip, 17-85f4, 50mm 1.4, 70-200 f4 IS, 580ex flash, plus spare batteries. All that is just in the inside compartment. There is still the oustide and inside zipper compartment. I tend to use those for my iPod, phone and small point and shoot. With everything in there it is tight, but manageable. I usually will take some things out of the bag if I am taking somewhere where I know I won't need that equipment.
Laptop - I don't use it much but when I do I have a Powerbook 12" I put in there. I just have many CF cards.
I have found the key is don't bring stuff you won't use, and if you do leave some in the hotel room and travel light. For example I didn't need my 70-200 IS on a nature hike so I locked it in the safe.
I have about 50 GB (yes GB) of photos. My solution isn't elegant, but it has saved my ass.
1) DL pictures to my primary HD (I do not delete from camera)
2) When I get a chance I backup to a second internal HD
3) Then after that I backup the secondary HD to an external HD
4) Then I will wipe the memory card in the camera
A few times a year I burn the whole collection off to DVD's and store them away. I would like to
have a permanent off-site backup at some point. I imagine it will be another HD in my work PC and dump stuff there.
Exactly. But most people I know who play "casual" stuff will only do so under party atmospheres and otherwise they "hate" video games. I think that is a more common attitude especially amongst 30-something women.
I am a gamer. I'd fall into the casual category. Problem is simply that I have a life that doesn't permit me to play more than 5-10 hours a week. And that is if I am lucky. I want and can handle complex games. Anything less and I will not be satisfied.
Now the people that are playing "casual" games would much prefer watching TV over gaming. Those people will never be able to be converted to a more involved type of game.
Look at all the people that play Farmville. My wife even got into it and she HATES video games. And after a short time she bailed on it. Why? because she doesn't want to invest time into a useless endeavor.
Give her something more complex that might not be a "waste of time" and she gets frustrated because she wants a zero learning curve. Zero learning curve tends to mean something less then advanced. It's an evil little circle that might be impossible to overcome.
The untapped market will more likely than not remain untapped.
One of the modules of the ISS is hardened against just this type of event. All of the modules have radiation protection, but this class of flare exceeds the safety limits of the those modules.
For me, I don't buy as many CD's because I am not willing to pay $20 for an album that could potentially suck ass. Yah yah, sales for "popular" stuff can be as low as $10, but that tends to the sucky stuff. I don't need the newest American Idol POS CD.
I'd be more willing take a chance on new music if it didn't cost me so much.
I do not need MORE features on a CD. I just want music and the ability to convert that music to a portable format of MY choosing.
From the article is seems to refer to online businesses. Yes, you can run an online company out of anywhere, but is it really cost effective if you sell physical items? Virtual items, no problem. Your only cost is bandwidth, which can be expensive in the boonies.
For a company as big as Amazon, having distribution points around the country works great, much like Netflix. But if you are a small time company trying to get started, getting your goods to your location which is 500 miles from the closest airport might not work very well. Your profits become less because it is all going to shipping.
With my company, getting our products cheaper means saving for us, better prices for the customer, and a better ability to survive. We wouldn't be able to do that if we weren't near a major port.
This mission has been planned for a long time. Lots of R&D. On and off funding. The building of this probe started the better part of a decade ago. When you build space fairing vehicles you build them on CURRENT tech, not what might be around in a few years. Ion engines are new technology in its infancy that wouldn't have been available to the designers then.
Not to mention this is a flyby mission, not an orbiting mission like Cassini or the MESSENGER mission. You do not want to zoom by and get less data.
These space probes are in for the long haul, not just a quicky.
I have NEVER seen a thermal label "overheated" and ruined. In my personal purchases I have seen credit card slips do it, but only one or two ever. We have been selling online for 6 years (this coming year) and have literally had packages with label sent back to us from UPS that were in a train crash and the packages were submerged in a river with ZERO problems. Same with USPS. (We use the UPS labels for USPS stuff, shhhhhh don't tell them)
The thermal labels have a coating on them that makes the almost waterproof. If you use some sort of laser rolled printer, you have to consider water damage to the paper if you use cheap labels. THAT is more likely to be a problem than the whole heating issue.
I checked around and there are different grades of thermal paper, temperature ranges, and coating types. But like I said before, in almost 6 years and over 100,000 orders we have never seen a thermal label do that.
There are gateways, merchant account providers/processor and then your bank account. The gateway is the mechanism that "authorizes" the transaction; the processor actually gets the money which then gets put into your banking account (usually a 2 day delay). Watch out for merchant accounts that can't do online processing, yes some don't.
The biggest issue to consider is the actual transaction volume. This will determine which way to go.
If you are only dealing with a few transactions a week, Paypal might be the best system to use. Most people shopping online know what it is, who owns it, and trust it. They have probably the highest fee's per transaction since they take a percentage of the sale (I know it used to be that way don't flame). Minimal setup cost, many shopping carts have support for it, and all you need is a bank account(doesn't matter what kind) to get the money.
For volumes of 5-10 a day, a merchant account and a bank account is a must if you are going to do any real business. This will let you at the very least do a simple credit card capture online (do not capture CCV codes, it's a no no) and process the cards by hand on a terminal. It will cost you money to setup the account and get a terminal (cheaper to get a virtual terminal) but you will make your shoppers happy. Why happy? Because they put in their CC number and checkout just like in a brick and mortar. No Paypal account to deal with.
When you get to 20+ a day, you will not want to manually charge all those orders. You will need to get a gateway provider and make sure your merchant account works with it. I know Verisign(which sold the payment division to Ebay) is a little evil(TM), but their PayFlowPro gateway is SOLID SOLID SOLID. I have used a few different gateways... all have had serious problems and blackouts. Verisign has had ONE unscheduled downtime in 2 years of using them, and it was for less than an hour. Plus they work with almost every merchant account. The downside with them is that they charge a monthly fee and a transaction fee per sale over 1000 a month. Another plus side is that you have flexibility to use almost any merchant account provider with them and negotiate merchant fees down as you volume grows.
We do minimally 150 transactions a day and the Payflow Pro works great for us. I know of companies doing 10 times that using the same system as us with zero problems. Plus Payflow Pro works with many backend accounting and order management systems.
RAID isn't a COMPLETE solution, but it is a start.
There should be two levels of file storage, a live copy, and a long term copy. EACH of these needs a backup. Once you need more room on the "live" server, you move it to long term storage. you want to keep as much "live" as possible to go back to.
Live Copy - I would get a RAID system with as much storage as you can afford or need. If price is no option, then you get a few XServes since they are on OSX. This is where you keep your files from today on backwards till the RAID is filled. You keep a backup of this RAID by tape, HD, optical whatever.
Long Term Copy - There are problems with EVERY type of long term storage. The most reliable would probably be hard drives. You use two(or more) NEW and different brand drives, copy the data to be archived to each, verify each. Store each drive in a static bag and some sort of case. Put one at your house, one in the bank or somewhere else. A bank's safe deposit box might be expensive, but it is climate controlled and "safe". Using tapes and optical disc are problematic because the mediums break down with age. The hard drives will last much, much longer. Yah, hard drives fail. But if you use different brands, you increase the chance of a mfg being better than another.
I have HD's that are 15 years old that still work fine after thousands of hours of use. These archive drive will only be used long enough to format, test to make sure they aren't DOA, and to write data to. They should outlast the drive interface technology that they use.
As time goes on, drive get bigger so more data can be live, and archiving becomes easier. You can always go back and re-archive the data to a "better" medium that holds more.
Back in the day, people would back up their 20MB HD's to floppy, then they bought a 100MB drive, used tape to back it up, then CD, now DVD. Times change, so your backup strategy must change too. What you do TODAY, will be easier in a few years.
Will arrests stop ALL spammers, no way. Much in the same way the death penalty will not stop a murderer.
But if you make it financially not worth doing, it will slow down. You arrest them for breaking spam laws, it will slow down.
I will say that yes, people have the right to send emails promoting products, as long as it is not deceptive. Now most spam is deceptive in some way, or multiple ways. The people using spam as an advertising means are just as deceptive and can't be trusted with you credit card.
The problem with the spam is that the targets have no clue what spam even is. For example my father gets emails and asks "Why did I get am email from "company name here"? I don't use them." But I trained him to not open stuff that does get through. But I know he has clicked spam and spyware stuff. But he didn't know he did. I find it later on when the PC act "funny" to him.
I stopped using non corp SAV last year. I found that when I installed it things started to crawl, even on an Athlon 3000+ nicely loaded. I tried it out on some other machines and had the same result. So for personal and friend use, I started using AVG.
At work we had a similar situation. We purchased new machines in the office (P4 3.0 Dells) which had McAffee on them and they even crawled. I wiped a test machine, installed SAV, and it seemed worse. Apps's crashed, errors opening Office and various docs. So I wiped again, but used AVG instead, and things didn't slow down. Office is happy. And no problems yet.
It seems as thought the big AV makers are trying to have all apps and file run through the AV system and the actual apps do not like that. The apps were writing to Windows API, not the AV API.
It was ESA's fault (no one is saying exactly whose fault in ESA). They created the command sequences for the Casssini/Huygens decent. They missed flipping the bit to turning on one of the two receivers. How can you forget something so important? NASA/JPL/ESA did this as a "joint" venture, so ESA had that responsibility for the Cassini programming at that point in the mission.
I was having dreams of those pointy headed guys running around my house... when I woke up and for about 5 seconds I thought I saw one... must have been that cheese steak I ate before bedtime.
I never saw that one before. I will have to check into it and it might turn into a birthday present for him.
Thanks!
BIG High Contrast Display Readout - Data Storage
on
Designing Diabetes Gear?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
My father has adult onset and uses the One Touch. His degraded vision was one of the major problems he developed as a result. I know he has trouble seeing the LCD. Another problem is the loading of the tiny strips. I imagine the multi strip would be better for him, but he resists change and having to pay for it.
If you are going for the cool stuff, a reader that store the results, timestamps them and can display graphs of the sugar levels would be a great tool for doctors. You can bring in the unit to the doctor and he/she can get all the information they need. Adding wireless or USB/Firewire connectivity would let the doctor download the data file directly.
I was looking on the MER site for the exact info, but it must be in one of the old daily updates which I can't find.
I remember reading that after the heat shield they are going to head south across the plains. There isn't really any a known objects of interest on the plains, but beyond there is a crater that makes Endurance Crater look like a pothole. It is like 4 km southeast I believe.
There still is plenty of science to do with the little rovers. Opportunity will get data on the heat shield for Lockheed Martin(and the soil the impact dug up), Spirit will keep climbing up the hills and see more rock layers. If they keep running, Opportunity will head south, and Spirit will keep exploring the hills. They will run these rovers until they stop rolling, or until the money runs out. And even both of those things happen, they will keep them active as weather stations until the batteries die.
This time of year isn't our busy time, but we have it other times of year.
We rely on monitoring the sites, and if there is a problem, switch from the processor to a simple CC capture. We would have to process the orders by hand, but we would only lose the sales that occur between the event of failure, and the switchover.
The key is knowing of a failure, and switching over.
As far as having two gateways/processors. This will be tough. You could have two of each, and just switch to the other one if the other goes down. Your store software should allow you to change this easily. Just disable one, activate the other. Problem with that is having a second gateway and processor which you don't use, then all of a sudden use, the will charge you out the ass.
Now you could get two gateways, and ONE processor. But if the processor goes down, you are completly screwed. But in my years of dealing with gateways and processors, it is 999/1000 the gateway's fault, not the processor.
Here is a good way to catch them all. Get a glass or anything like that. Fill it about 1/4 of the way with apple vinegar. Take a piece of plastic wrap and cover the top or the glass and rubber band it tight. Now take a knife and poke 3-4 little holes in it and leave it on a window sill.
Leaving it in the sun lets it warm up and the scent goes into the room. The flies are attracted to it over other food because of the smell. The fly in and get trapped with the food. Leave it sit for a week and dump it outside.
I felt the same way when I was at Rutgers. I see people being book zombies, but not really learning anything. I learned a lot from a few classes (CompSci/Physics), but some other classes seemed to have no point. Just review and spew courses, which I had trouble with. When I learn things, I remember for my whole life. When I have to give you copies of information, I will forget when I am done. And what does that get me?
Friends who graduated large universities do not remember 95% of what they went to school for. They did what they had to do to get the grades to graduate. They have good jobs since they did well in college. But are they any smarter for it? I see one of my boss's kids doing poorly in school because he wants to learn more than they can give him. But since he gets bored and can't pay attention, he receives poor grades. Now if he doesn't conform to the system, he will do poorly in high school, which means he can't get into good colleges, which means lower paying jobs. Now if he could learn on his own without the systems arcane rules, he might be the one getting us to the stars.
Caffeine Exercise and Doctor visit
on
Sleeping Problems?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I had the same problem for yeaaarssss. So I started working out. It helped a little bit. But I still would be up till at least 3am and not sleeping well. Changed my eating habits, helped me lose a few pounds. But helping me sleep better. I then cut back, then pretty much eliminated caffeine on a regular basis (no coffee or tea in the mornings, and no caffeine past 12PM). I still have it every now and then, especially the winter. That made a nice impact. I was able to fall asleep earlier, and sleep better. But not great. Then I finally went to the doctor, and found out I have a thyroid problem. And that was the main cause of me not sleeping. Damned chemical imbalance. But since I had already started to implement lifestyle changes, once I started the medication, I can fall asleep at a normal time, 1-1:30am at the latest.
1) Now if you don't exercise. Start. If you eat like crap, work you way out of it. Hey, I still eat bad at times, but little changes make a big difference. For example, I do not ever have pepperoni on my pizza anymore.
2) Reduce caffeine. Tough, but it make a difference, it takes time to wean off.
3) Visit your doctor. Blood work will find any problems.
Slashdot Mirror
I have an R-103 and it is about ... 6 years old now. Been hiking with it in Hawaii, honeymoon in Jamaica and countless other places and is in perfect shape. The bag itself is pretty light for the padding and construction.
What I travel/keep in there most of the time. Canon Rebel XT (yes it is old but invested in my lenses), battery grip, 17-85f4, 50mm 1.4, 70-200 f4 IS, 580ex flash, plus spare batteries. All that is just in the inside compartment. There is still the oustide and inside zipper compartment. I tend to use those for my iPod, phone and small point and shoot. With everything in there it is tight, but manageable. I usually will take some things out of the bag if I am taking somewhere where I know I won't need that equipment.
Laptop - I don't use it much but when I do I have a Powerbook 12" I put in there. I just have many CF cards.
I have found the key is don't bring stuff you won't use, and if you do leave some in the hotel room and travel light. For example I didn't need my 70-200 IS on a nature hike so I locked it in the safe.
I have about 50 GB (yes GB) of photos. My solution isn't elegant, but it has saved my ass. 1) DL pictures to my primary HD (I do not delete from camera) 2) When I get a chance I backup to a second internal HD 3) Then after that I backup the secondary HD to an external HD 4) Then I will wipe the memory card in the camera A few times a year I burn the whole collection off to DVD's and store them away. I would like to have a permanent off-site backup at some point. I imagine it will be another HD in my work PC and dump stuff there.
Excellent analogy!
The younger crowd is a little more open.
Now the people that are playing "casual" games would much prefer watching TV over gaming. Those people will never be able to be converted to a more involved type of game.
Look at all the people that play Farmville. My wife even got into it and she HATES video games. And after a short time she bailed on it. Why? because she doesn't want to invest time into a useless endeavor.
Give her something more complex that might not be a "waste of time" and she gets frustrated because she wants a zero learning curve. Zero learning curve tends to mean something less then advanced. It's an evil little circle that might be impossible to overcome.
The untapped market will more likely than not remain untapped.
Think of it as a storm cellar in space.
I'd be more willing take a chance on new music if it didn't cost me so much.
I do not need MORE features on a CD. I just want music and the ability to convert that music to a portable format of MY choosing.
For a company as big as Amazon, having distribution points around the country works great, much like Netflix. But if you are a small time company trying to get started, getting your goods to your location which is 500 miles from the closest airport might not work very well. Your profits become less because it is all going to shipping.
With my company, getting our products cheaper means saving for us, better prices for the customer, and a better ability to survive. We wouldn't be able to do that if we weren't near a major port.
Not to mention this is a flyby mission, not an orbiting mission like Cassini or the MESSENGER mission. You do not want to zoom by and get less data.
These space probes are in for the long haul, not just a quicky.
The thermal labels have a coating on them that makes the almost waterproof. If you use some sort of laser rolled printer, you have to consider water damage to the paper if you use cheap labels. THAT is more likely to be a problem than the whole heating issue.
I checked around and there are different grades of thermal paper, temperature ranges, and coating types. But like I said before, in almost 6 years and over 100,000 orders we have never seen a thermal label do that.
There are gateways, merchant account providers/processor and then your bank account. The gateway is the mechanism that "authorizes" the transaction; the processor actually gets the money which then gets put into your banking account (usually a 2 day delay). Watch out for merchant accounts that can't do online processing, yes some don't.
The biggest issue to consider is the actual transaction volume. This will determine which way to go.
If you are only dealing with a few transactions a week, Paypal might be the best system to use. Most people shopping online know what it is, who owns it, and trust it. They have probably the highest fee's per transaction since they take a percentage of the sale (I know it used to be that way don't flame). Minimal setup cost, many shopping carts have support for it, and all you need is a bank account(doesn't matter what kind) to get the money.
For volumes of 5-10 a day, a merchant account and a bank account is a must if you are going to do any real business. This will let you at the very least do a simple credit card capture online (do not capture CCV codes, it's a no no) and process the cards by hand on a terminal. It will cost you money to setup the account and get a terminal (cheaper to get a virtual terminal) but you will make your shoppers happy. Why happy? Because they put in their CC number and checkout just like in a brick and mortar. No Paypal account to deal with.
When you get to 20+ a day, you will not want to manually charge all those orders. You will need to get a gateway provider and make sure your merchant account works with it. I know Verisign(which sold the payment division to Ebay) is a little evil(TM), but their PayFlowPro gateway is SOLID SOLID SOLID. I have used a few different gateways ... all have had serious problems and blackouts. Verisign has had ONE unscheduled downtime in 2 years of using them, and it was for less than an hour. Plus they work with almost every merchant account. The downside with them is that they charge a monthly fee and a transaction fee per sale over 1000 a month. Another plus side is that you have flexibility to use almost any merchant account provider with them and negotiate merchant fees down as you volume grows.
We do minimally 150 transactions a day and the Payflow Pro works great for us. I know of companies doing 10 times that using the same system as us with zero problems. Plus Payflow Pro works with many backend accounting and order management systems.
There should be two levels of file storage, a live copy, and a long term copy. EACH of these needs a backup. Once you need more room on the "live" server, you move it to long term storage. you want to keep as much "live" as possible to go back to.
Live Copy - I would get a RAID system with as much storage as you can afford or need. If price is no option, then you get a few XServes since they are on OSX. This is where you keep your files from today on backwards till the RAID is filled. You keep a backup of this RAID by tape, HD, optical whatever.
Long Term Copy - There are problems with EVERY type of long term storage. The most reliable would probably be hard drives. You use two(or more) NEW and different brand drives, copy the data to be archived to each, verify each. Store each drive in a static bag and some sort of case. Put one at your house, one in the bank or somewhere else. A bank's safe deposit box might be expensive, but it is climate controlled and "safe". Using tapes and optical disc are problematic because the mediums break down with age. The hard drives will last much, much longer. Yah, hard drives fail. But if you use different brands, you increase the chance of a mfg being better than another.
I have HD's that are 15 years old that still work fine after thousands of hours of use. These archive drive will only be used long enough to format, test to make sure they aren't DOA, and to write data to. They should outlast the drive interface technology that they use.
As time goes on, drive get bigger so more data can be live, and archiving becomes easier. You can always go back and re-archive the data to a "better" medium that holds more.
Back in the day, people would back up their 20MB HD's to floppy, then they bought a 100MB drive, used tape to back it up, then CD, now DVD. Times change, so your backup strategy must change too. What you do TODAY, will be easier in a few years.
But if you make it financially not worth doing, it will slow down. You arrest them for breaking spam laws, it will slow down.
I will say that yes, people have the right to send emails promoting products, as long as it is not deceptive. Now most spam is deceptive in some way, or multiple ways. The people using spam as an advertising means are just as deceptive and can't be trusted with you credit card.
The problem with the spam is that the targets have no clue what spam even is. For example my father gets emails and asks "Why did I get am email from "company name here"? I don't use them." But I trained him to not open stuff that does get through. But I know he has clicked spam and spyware stuff. But he didn't know he did. I find it later on when the PC act "funny" to him.
http://www.grisoft.com/doc/Single/lng/us/tpl/tpl0
I tried out the personal so see how it ran... and then went over to the professional. No biggie.
I stopped using non corp SAV last year. I found that when I installed it things started to crawl, even on an Athlon 3000+ nicely loaded. I tried it out on some other machines and had the same result. So for personal and friend use, I started using AVG. At work we had a similar situation. We purchased new machines in the office (P4 3.0 Dells) which had McAffee on them and they even crawled. I wiped a test machine, installed SAV, and it seemed worse. Apps's crashed, errors opening Office and various docs. So I wiped again, but used AVG instead, and things didn't slow down. Office is happy. And no problems yet. It seems as thought the big AV makers are trying to have all apps and file run through the AV system and the actual apps do not like that. The apps were writing to Windows API, not the AV API.
Or you can jump right to their conclusions.
It was ESA's fault (no one is saying exactly whose fault in ESA). They created the command sequences for the Casssini/Huygens decent. They missed flipping the bit to turning on one of the two receivers. How can you forget something so important? NASA/JPL/ESA did this as a "joint" venture, so ESA had that responsibility for the Cassini programming at that point in the mission.
I was having dreams of those pointy headed guys running around my house... when I woke up and for about 5 seconds I thought I saw one... must have been that cheese steak I ate before bedtime.
Thanks!
If you are going for the cool stuff, a reader that store the results, timestamps them and can display graphs of the sugar levels would be a great tool for doctors. You can bring in the unit to the doctor and he/she can get all the information they need. Adding wireless or USB/Firewire connectivity would let the doctor download the data file directly.
I remember reading that after the heat shield they are going to head south across the plains. There isn't really any a known objects of interest on the plains, but beyond there is a crater that makes Endurance Crater look like a pothole. It is like 4 km southeast I believe.
There still is plenty of science to do with the little rovers. Opportunity will get data on the heat shield for Lockheed Martin(and the soil the impact dug up), Spirit will keep climbing up the hills and see more rock layers. If they keep running, Opportunity will head south, and Spirit will keep exploring the hills. They will run these rovers until they stop rolling, or until the money runs out. And even both of those things happen, they will keep them active as weather stations until the batteries die.
We rely on monitoring the sites, and if there is a problem, switch from the processor to a simple CC capture. We would have to process the orders by hand, but we would only lose the sales that occur between the event of failure, and the switchover.
The key is knowing of a failure, and switching over.
As far as having two gateways/processors. This will be tough. You could have two of each, and just switch to the other one if the other goes down. Your store software should allow you to change this easily. Just disable one, activate the other. Problem with that is having a second gateway and processor which you don't use, then all of a sudden use, the will charge you out the ass.
Now you could get two gateways, and ONE processor. But if the processor goes down, you are completly screwed. But in my years of dealing with gateways and processors, it is 999/1000 the gateway's fault, not the processor.
Leaving it in the sun lets it warm up and the scent goes into the room. The flies are attracted to it over other food because of the smell. The fly in and get trapped with the food. Leave it sit for a week and dump it outside.
Friends who graduated large universities do not remember 95% of what they went to school for. They did what they had to do to get the grades to graduate. They have good jobs since they did well in college. But are they any smarter for it? I see one of my boss's kids doing poorly in school because he wants to learn more than they can give him. But since he gets bored and can't pay attention, he receives poor grades. Now if he doesn't conform to the system, he will do poorly in high school, which means he can't get into good colleges, which means lower paying jobs. Now if he could learn on his own without the systems arcane rules, he might be the one getting us to the stars.
1) Now if you don't exercise. Start. If you eat like crap, work you way out of it. Hey, I still eat bad at times, but little changes make a big difference. For example, I do not ever have pepperoni on my pizza anymore.
2) Reduce caffeine. Tough, but it make a difference, it takes time to wean off.
3) Visit your doctor. Blood work will find any problems.