In any discussion of a theme you should always allow some headroom. There is no absolute truth about climate! The earth has had a lot warmer as well as a lot colder climate than we have today. Even the oxygen level has been varying throughout the millenia.
When it comes down to the climate we are still running probabilities and it is known that the sun-spot cycle has a considerable effect as well as various gases. Some cools the climate down others makes it warmer.
The current winter is (at least here in northern Europe so far) the warmest and wettest for a long time, but last winter was a rather cold one. What we actually are missing is reliable detailed weather data for the last million years, which we would need if we are to make a detailed prognosis. Unfortunately we don't have that so we will need to go for the second best alternative by doing estimations of trends of various curves.
Some analysis even estimates that if it weren't for the greenhouse gas emissions that we have today we would have had a new ice age. If that's the truth or not - hard to tell but it's an interesting thought.
So many factors are involved that it's not easy, and there is a difference between short-time trends, long-time trends and threshold switches. For example the El Niño is a typical threshold switch effect with considerable results in weather change.
By all means, this doesn't mean that we shouldn't cut down our emissions - of course we should, even it it's only for the reason that we are working on finite resources of uranium, oil and coal.
So in the end - let meteorologists have different views, this will keep the general public alert. A single-headed view will just cause disinterest in a question. Or maybe that's what the actual idea is? Let the general public be so disinterested in a question so that the question will self-die.
"Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.", quote claimed to be by Mark Twain. - This is still true.
...by any means it can be circumvented at any point in the flow. All the security schemes assumes that software and hardware is "unhackable". Reality has shown that it isn't the case.
What the MPAA et al. fails to recognize is that the movie pirates that does it for money will get around any encoding technology as they like. It can be bribery, threats or industrial espionage. No holes barred, and the only persons that will suffer are the end users. Large-scale movie piracy gangs will be the Al Capone's of the 21:st century because they have the means and manners to get around anything. So the best idea is to actually find another way around how to resolve the copyright and fair use problem.
The modern problem is that copies of data doesn't degrade at each copy. If that was the problem (as old analog magnetic tapes like VHS and music cassettes) the copyright problem wouldn't be as big. Those who wanted the best quality bought the best thing and those who couldn't afford either used a copy or went to a friend. Today each copy is as good as the original. No degradation whatsoever. Only thing missing is the CD cover and inlays. This brings up the point that those who do movie piracy by filming in the movie theater will by default create a copy that is of a lower quality than the original thing, so calling for imprisonment there seems to be a great overkill. Just confiscate the equipment and let them go. Repeated felonies may be prosecuted, but overdoing that part seems to be a waste of money and resources - the big leaks are on digital media.
There will certainly be somebody that can take advantage of this too. The only thing that SSL actually tells you is that the traffic you have is encrypted. The only thing that this really does is to provide an incentment for the bad guys to crack the solution since it will mean that there may be more money to gain at the sites that relies on those SSL certificates.
in Nashua NH where some road signs actually also had kilometers as an alternate measurement for distance.
As I see it there are several approaches to take:
Use the metric system as the primary system throughout school all the way from first grade to university. The older measurements - well kids you can look them up in a conversion table!
Require all new vehicle models to use metric dimensions instead of the legacy measurements.
Let the weight indication "ton" always represent 1000kg and nothing else.
Require that all measurement shall be presented in metric values in addition to the imperial in an equal font and size.
Replace all yard measurements with meters as soon as possible - they are at least close to each other in size and only adds to confusion.
All temperature measurements in the weather reports shall be done in both Celsius and Fahrenheit.
All thermometers sold shall have a Celsius scale. Digital thermometers shall default to Celsius and the user has to manually change to Fahrenheit if needed.
Pressures should be given in Bar (atmospheres) not PSI.
Sell gasoline per liter instead of gallon. A British is 4,54609 liter and an American is 3,78541 liter and people tends to confuse them all the time...
Use the metric measurements for weight and abandon the confusion about grains, pounds, ounces and stones. (Pounds and ounces also comes in a variant called troy pound and troy ounces which makes things even worse...)
Trivia:
A Swedish mile according to the rules of 1665 was 10688.54 meters.
A Swedish mile after 1889 is 10000 meters. (not much difference from earlier. (Most swedes use the mile distance today meaning 10km, sometimes to amuse or confuse the people that thinks the British distance.)
Anders Celsius (English) used originally a reversed scale with 100 (positive value) representing the freezing point of water and zero for the boiling point. Later this was reversed to use the scale we know today.
An inch as we know it is 25.4 mm except for the US survey inch that is 25.40005 mm. Other countries have had inches too with other sizes.
And finally - let it be known that it's much easier to market the products for export if they use the metric system. Don't mind the "Freedom2Measure" extremists, there will always be conservationists for whatever reason.
And don't forget - standardization of measurements in our international world will decrease the risk of being ripped off.
From what I have seen, the metric is a standard in the US too, but it's just filed as an amendment to the other standards and not replacing anything.
but the reason for the failure of OS/2 was not really technical it was a failure in pricing and inability to be able to provide for many applications to run well. Remember that OS/2 came when there were still a large amount of DOS users running 80x25 text applications and they didn't see any reason to pick up the huge change it meant to upgrade.
It was a large step forward into the realm of a more stable environment, but at the time that step wasn't appreciated by the general public. Vista is said to be offering a new step in reliability and security, which is well, but there are already hacks around for Vista. The next few months will be more or less critical for the success of Vista in enterprise environments. A few bad happenings may render Vista to be a blind alley that is only accepted on home computers.
Remember also that the bleeding edge of hardware and software is now in the home and entertainment sector while companies in general are running a lot of their applications on hardware that mostly dates back a few years and therefore may not be able to run Vista. A general upgrade in a company isn't done until only a few machines are left that's aren't capable of the new software.
Last time I used the lighter was to check if there was any power in the outlet or if I had blown the fuse. Figured out that it was the cable from the lighter socket to my device that had blown the fuse...
And in general - the cigarette lighter outlet isn't a really good power outlet anyway - it's far to unreliable and often placed in a location that makes it inconvenient whenever a device is connected. A slightly better connector exists (at least here in Europe). It doesn't have the tendency to silently slowly crawl out of the jack, but it could have been better.
Anyway - standardizing the device connectors is generally a good idea. Same should be done with all connectors in use. Too many connectors exists that are either unsafe or unreliable or both. Standardizing on the USB connector seems to be a good idea, only catch is the current limit of the USB connector of 500mA but that's a minor problem. A lot of phone USB cables actually provides charging through the USB cable today - the only difference is the connector in the phone.
Another annoying detail is that there are too many variants of USB connectors already on the market. It started with two rather large connectors the A and B connector. Two different connectors for the same thing was a stupid idea already from the beginning, and then there are a large amount of high density USB connectors for cameras etc. just to make things worse for consumers.
I have tried both XP-64 and Linux in a 64-bit x86 distro and I can outright say that XP-64 seems to be more a special feature useful for those that really need the use of the 64-bit processing (larger memory available). This especially since the availability of drivers is a problem, but also that it lacks support regarding anti-virus and third-part firewalls. The built-in firewall is in my opinion not good enough.
On the other hand there is no reason to not use 64-bit Linux on a machine that is capable of 64-bit processing. Very few of the frequently used drivers are 32-bit only. The advantages is not only due to the fact that you are able to access large amount of memory, but you will have less problems with larger files (Above 2GB). If there are any real disadvantages I haven't seen them here.
If you plan for Vista - I don't see any reason to stick with 32-bit. This since it seems likely that the major focus on Vista development will be on the 64-bit variant. Remember that the recommended minimum RAM is 1GB and new applications are likely to use more RAM so the 4GB barrier present in 32-bit is not too far away.
is that Clinton mostly made an ass of himself. The rest of the world just got a good laugh at the whole affair.
On the other hand, Bush is more making an ass of the whole governmental situation for the US. And there is nothing about his actions that can actually draw a smile. All actions seems to be like going hunting for mosquitos with a hammer. You are rather sure that you get the mosquito when you hit it, but you will never get to the coordination center because there isn't any. Same thing with terrorists - get one cell and an another pops up behind your back.
Anyway - restricting the publications of data from agencies is outright counter-productive. You will cut into the effectiveness of the agencies and you will also lose any initiative by the employees. Assume that somebody at the USGS figures out that there is a risk of a landslide coming up in a large city, but since that may actually run the risk of being screened out the person in question tones down the report or fails to report it. Who is then responsible when the landslide occurs?
A thing that governments often fails to recognize is that they are actually the servants of the citizens not the other way around.
Their support for end-users when a problem arises; Standard answer: "Have you tried to reinstall?"
The idea of translating programming script language to the national language of choice. What - you expect that your spreadsheet written for the Swedish version is going to work in the US English version? - No way, just rewrite it!
"I know what it is named in English, but what have they called it in Swedish?" - Overheard from one person trying to read a Swedish reference manual.
Changing the license rules all the time.
The number of security problems showing up.
The pricing of their software.
Not following standards and releasing products that breaks existing standards. Just check the HTML code generated by M$ products.
Not killing Visual Basic and VBScript. They may be easy to use, but they are allowing users to write buggy scripts/programs that can take an eternity to debug.
The copy protection scheme of Vista. I can't really trust them to not disabling my OS whenever they like. (You MUST upgrade to "Vista 2" before December 31 2011 since we will revoke your license to use Vista after that date.)
The inability to provide a good command line interface and documentation for all command line functions. (What - isn't a GUI good enough to do what you want?)
isn't national ID cards but international ID cards.
Passports aren't convenient and they are also reasonable easy to forge. An ID card that contains an internationally recognizable unique ID with digital information in multiple security areas should be considered. The point behind using multiple security areas is that it should be reasonably tricky for forgers to forge the complete data.
Some areas that can be used:
Public service identification. (Library loans etc.)
Medical services identification and shorthand medical status. (known allergies, illnesses etc.)
Company identification - Used for access control within one or more companies, different keys for each company.
Commercial identification - good for shopping transactions.
Banking identification - good for personal bank account transactions.
General law enforcement identification.
Specialized law enforcement identification.
Border control identification.
National service identification. (can be military security identification only accessible by the home nation's security services)
Special services identification. (Diplomat, UN related etc.)
Note that the areas may overlap. There may also be multiple instances of some areas, useful when you are an employee of one company and is a consultant at another.
And ways to identify a person:
Obvious physical data; length, eye color etc.
Handwriting
Fingerprints
Iris/Retina scan
Dental record
DNA
Facial recognition data
Passcode phrases
And as stated in the article - the identity of a person and the intention of a person are two different issues. Mind reading equipment will be the next big thing at airports.
The primary cause of problems during cold weather is broken pipes with water damages as a result. By shutting off the incoming water and draining the pipes before leaving you will minimize the risk of damage. It's a good idea to finish it by blowing the pipes with some compressed air while having some water taps open otherwise you may have pockets of water in your pipes that can cause damage.
If anything, I would also recommend that if you have a gas heated boiler and you can't drain the boiler you should have an additional electrical heater on the water that kicks in at temperatures below 10 degrees C. This will keep the water warm enough for a rather long time to avoid freezing even during long power outages. It's even a good idea to turn of the gas since lowering the temperature of the house may expose minimal gas leaks and if there is a refrigerator or other thermostat it may cause a fire. (Personally I'm rather wary of gas, it's a perfect accelerant in fires).
A dehumidifier with a permanent drain is also a good idea, since the relative humidity tends to rise when the temperature goes down with increased risk of mold, mildew and bugs in the house.
If the incoming water pipe is in the basement it should be sufficient to cover it with some insulation. The ground under a house is normally sufficiently warm to avoid freezing the water. (unless you live in an area with permafrost). If you have the incoming water in the ground plane a heating by a lightbulb is sufficient to keep up the temperature well in a small closed compartment. (25 watts is good enough for several degrees, and a thermostat can be used to keep the cost down.)
One issue that you should be aware about is that if you have a basement and an insufficient draining around the walls of the basement you will have to make sure that the soil closest to the basement walls doesn't freeze since that will cause an immense pressure on the walls with subsequent foundation damages. In this case you have to check first what kind of soil that is on the outside of your basement walls. Sand and gravel is normally OK if you don't have a very water-rich environment, but older houses and houses where the costs of the foundation has been cut may have anything. Watch out for fine grained soil and clay since that kind of material tends to contain a large amount of water.
One detail that you will have to let your neighbors check out for is the amount of snow on the roof. Normally not a problem if it's up to the correct building standards for the area but extreme weather causes extreme loads and should be taken care of before a problem arises.
If everything checks out you will have a house that should stand against long period of sub-zero temperatures without major damage. Some minor effects may occur due to variations in temperature contraction/expansion like small paint cracks if the ground work hasn't been done properly in the joint between wall boards and similar things, but these effects is more a matter of time before they show up anyway.
And anyway - use your fantasy and take help of Murphy's Law.
to do precision shooting. You will always run the risk of jamming the wrong phone.
For movie theathres it may will actually be better to tempest-proof the salon. (OK, not military grade, but good enough to shut down most phones.)
For prisons and other areas where a control over the calls has to be issued a local phone service that takes precedence over other operators should do the trick. Just re-direct all calls except emergency calls to an answering service that just informs the user about limited service in the current area. Anyone that REALLY has to call out should go through a gateway service where the calls are monitored.
M$ is creating a scheme so complicated that it's impossible to be able to follow. Next step is probably to include in the EULA that no other operating system may co-exist on the same machine since it *MAY* be used to circumvent the security schemes in Windows.
And even if I indicate that I accept the EULA, what proves that I have understood it?
Anyway - Windows Vista cracks will appear sooner or later. There are always those who see it as a challenge.
What Microsoft seems to forget is that all these copy-protection schemes that they are running will make life harder for the IT departments. The scale may well be on it's way to tip over in favor of open-source solutions.
it that it is a "quick" baseline in one single kit.
Downloading a whole bucket of patches for each machine is a waste of network bandwidth, instead the SP can be downloaded once and applied to all machines.
But of course M$ wants everyone to switch to Vista instead and one way is to make life miserable for the users of earlier OS versions.
that the sysadmins aren't doing bad things with their access is to keep them happy.
And what does make a sysadmin happy? - Well that's a good question, but as long as you feed them and let them have toys to play with you will actually let them focus on things outside reading other peoples mail.
Another way is to keep them busy all the time with strange annoying calls of things that doesn't work. (buy a multitude of printers all different models and brands will ensure this for a looong time).
And don't forget that company reorganizations will normally affect every department except the IT department, but will keep the IT department busy for a while when they try to figure out how to organize other persons access rights and where they are located this week.
Oh - and don't forget - limit your actual amount of sensitive data to a minimum. Not many sysadmins are that fond of reading through the mailboxes with 200+ emails with customer correspondence co-worker complaints and the shopping lists from spouses plus a gazillion of well-known internet jokes.
Well... as a song goes "wherever I lay my hat, that's my home". And you may actually consider that even though the grass may look greener on the other side it may be due to the fact it's painted.
I'm the kind of user that wants a lot of punch (not the drinkable) in the computer and selected a "laptop" on those conditions. It's not convenient to use on an aircraft or on the train, but it is very useful when it comes to software development. I see it as a portable workstation. Most laptops suffers from severe lack of performance, which makes them unsuitable for programming, but if it's only necessary to do writing and drawing in PowerPoint then the ordinary laptops are sufficient.
There were of course reasons behind that change, but if they wanted to go Intel why not the Itanium range instead? The really bad side of all this is actually that we are now basically depending on one single CPU provider for all PC:s with a few competitors that are in the backwater. AMD is the biggest competitor to Intel but it's still x86. As it is now it is more a question of how long SUN will hold on to the Sparc processors and how long IBM will stay on the track with their PowerPC processors. Alpha-processors has already been killed as well as MIPS and even earlier Motorola. The HP PA-RISC processors lives on in a way in the Itanium processors, but for how long? (flamebait here) Some of the "dead" processors still lives on the fringe in embedded systems, probably more due to the fact that there have been a lot of people around actually familiar with the quirks of each on assembly level than on other merits.
In all, most hardware vendors seems to end up using the same building blocks (for good and bad) and has to distinguish themselves by allow the parts to play in concert and provide know-how and service to the customers.
what will happen then? A big pile of badwill for M$. OK, if it's overly complicated to hack it will also be overly complicated to administrate by IT departments and also very sensitive for businesses as a whole.
It seems to me that every step M$ takes to make sure that no illegal copies are around it will also create more work for the IT department. And what if there is an unexpected problem popping up causing all legitimate copies to be locked from the users due to a flaw in WGA? Who will be paying the standstill cost? Not M$ in the first turn.
It seems to me that alternative solutions like Linux and the BSD variants will benefit most from this. The latest versions of the Linux distros aren't really that complicated to install and use, even if there still are flaws. (most notably the X11 config, which can be a real pain to get right, even if Fedora Core 5 seems to work acceptable there). Another item that can cause severe dandruff is the SELinux package, but I assume that there are work in progress on that.
As if that was a new feature...:-) And IE7 still makes the worst rendering of the ACID2 test. Looks reeeeaaaalllly weird. (as if the correct rendering isn't weird by itself...)
will cause some drawbacks. The SIP protocol is unfortunately not very firewall-friendly and may not work well without some firewall hacking. The firewall problems are mostly due to the fact that it's relying on multiple UDP ports for the voice transmission. Skype on the other hand seems to be bypassing firewalls with ease.
A few downsides with Skype are that it may act as an intermediate for other callers and it is relatively CPU-hungry.
A better protocol than SIP is actually the IAX2 protocol (Inter-Asterisk protocol v2). At least it's better from the firewall point of view, but has the drawback of not being very widely supported outside of the Asterisk domain.
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When it comes down to the climate we are still running probabilities and it is known that the sun-spot cycle has a considerable effect as well as various gases. Some cools the climate down others makes it warmer.
The current winter is (at least here in northern Europe so far) the warmest and wettest for a long time, but last winter was a rather cold one. What we actually are missing is reliable detailed weather data for the last million years, which we would need if we are to make a detailed prognosis. Unfortunately we don't have that so we will need to go for the second best alternative by doing estimations of trends of various curves.
Some analysis even estimates that if it weren't for the greenhouse gas emissions that we have today we would have had a new ice age. If that's the truth or not - hard to tell but it's an interesting thought.
So many factors are involved that it's not easy, and there is a difference between short-time trends, long-time trends and threshold switches. For example the El Niño is a typical threshold switch effect with considerable results in weather change.
By all means, this doesn't mean that we shouldn't cut down our emissions - of course we should, even it it's only for the reason that we are working on finite resources of uranium, oil and coal.
So in the end - let meteorologists have different views, this will keep the general public alert. A single-headed view will just cause disinterest in a question. Or maybe that's what the actual idea is? Let the general public be so disinterested in a question so that the question will self-die.
"Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.", quote claimed to be by Mark Twain. - This is still true.
What the MPAA et al. fails to recognize is that the movie pirates that does it for money will get around any encoding technology as they like. It can be bribery, threats or industrial espionage. No holes barred, and the only persons that will suffer are the end users. Large-scale movie piracy gangs will be the Al Capone's of the 21:st century because they have the means and manners to get around anything. So the best idea is to actually find another way around how to resolve the copyright and fair use problem.
The modern problem is that copies of data doesn't degrade at each copy. If that was the problem (as old analog magnetic tapes like VHS and music cassettes) the copyright problem wouldn't be as big. Those who wanted the best quality bought the best thing and those who couldn't afford either used a copy or went to a friend. Today each copy is as good as the original. No degradation whatsoever. Only thing missing is the CD cover and inlays. This brings up the point that those who do movie piracy by filming in the movie theater will by default create a copy that is of a lower quality than the original thing, so calling for imprisonment there seems to be a great overkill. Just confiscate the equipment and let them go. Repeated felonies may be prosecuted, but overdoing that part seems to be a waste of money and resources - the big leaks are on digital media.
Don't trust anybody - not even yourself!
Don't forget kids - sex is used to create more kids!
Guns are used for keeping down the population...
And in seventh grade kids are beginning to take interest in the opposite gender.
As I see it there are several approaches to take:
Trivia:
- A Swedish mile according to the rules of 1665 was 10688.54 meters.
- A Swedish mile after 1889 is 10000 meters. (not much difference from earlier. (Most swedes use the mile distance today meaning 10km, sometimes to amuse or confuse the people that thinks the British distance.)
- Anders Celsius (English) used originally a reversed scale with 100 (positive value) representing the freezing point of water and zero for the boiling point. Later this was reversed to use the scale we know today.
- An inch as we know it is 25.4 mm except for the US survey inch that is 25.40005 mm. Other countries have had inches too with other sizes.
And finally - let it be known that it's much easier to market the products for export if they use the metric system. Don't mind the "Freedom2Measure" extremists, there will always be conservationists for whatever reason.And don't forget - standardization of measurements in our international world will decrease the risk of being ripped off.
From what I have seen, the metric is a standard in the US too, but it's just filed as an amendment to the other standards and not replacing anything.
It was a large step forward into the realm of a more stable environment, but at the time that step wasn't appreciated by the general public. Vista is said to be offering a new step in reliability and security, which is well, but there are already hacks around for Vista. The next few months will be more or less critical for the success of Vista in enterprise environments. A few bad happenings may render Vista to be a blind alley that is only accepted on home computers.
Remember also that the bleeding edge of hardware and software is now in the home and entertainment sector while companies in general are running a lot of their applications on hardware that mostly dates back a few years and therefore may not be able to run Vista. A general upgrade in a company isn't done until only a few machines are left that's aren't capable of the new software.
It does actually work, but it lacks some features still...
And in general - the cigarette lighter outlet isn't a really good power outlet anyway - it's far to unreliable and often placed in a location that makes it inconvenient whenever a device is connected. A slightly better connector exists (at least here in Europe). It doesn't have the tendency to silently slowly crawl out of the jack, but it could have been better.
Anyway - standardizing the device connectors is generally a good idea. Same should be done with all connectors in use. Too many connectors exists that are either unsafe or unreliable or both. Standardizing on the USB connector seems to be a good idea, only catch is the current limit of the USB connector of 500mA but that's a minor problem. A lot of phone USB cables actually provides charging through the USB cable today - the only difference is the connector in the phone.
Another annoying detail is that there are too many variants of USB connectors already on the market. It started with two rather large connectors the A and B connector. Two different connectors for the same thing was a stupid idea already from the beginning, and then there are a large amount of high density USB connectors for cameras etc. just to make things worse for consumers.
On the other hand there is no reason to not use 64-bit Linux on a machine that is capable of 64-bit processing. Very few of the frequently used drivers are 32-bit only. The advantages is not only due to the fact that you are able to access large amount of memory, but you will have less problems with larger files (Above 2GB). If there are any real disadvantages I haven't seen them here.
If you plan for Vista - I don't see any reason to stick with 32-bit. This since it seems likely that the major focus on Vista development will be on the 64-bit variant. Remember that the recommended minimum RAM is 1GB and new applications are likely to use more RAM so the 4GB barrier present in 32-bit is not too far away.
On the other hand, Bush is more making an ass of the whole governmental situation for the US. And there is nothing about his actions that can actually draw a smile. All actions seems to be like going hunting for mosquitos with a hammer. You are rather sure that you get the mosquito when you hit it, but you will never get to the coordination center because there isn't any. Same thing with terrorists - get one cell and an another pops up behind your back.
Anyway - restricting the publications of data from agencies is outright counter-productive. You will cut into the effectiveness of the agencies and you will also lose any initiative by the employees. Assume that somebody at the USGS figures out that there is a risk of a landslide coming up in a large city, but since that may actually run the risk of being screened out the person in question tones down the report or fails to report it. Who is then responsible when the landslide occurs?
A thing that governments often fails to recognize is that they are actually the servants of the citizens not the other way around.
Passports aren't convenient and they are also reasonable easy to forge. An ID card that contains an internationally recognizable unique ID with digital information in multiple security areas should be considered. The point behind using multiple security areas is that it should be reasonably tricky for forgers to forge the complete data.
Some areas that can be used:
- Public service identification. (Library loans etc.)
- Medical services identification and shorthand medical status. (known allergies, illnesses etc.)
- Company identification - Used for access control within one or more companies, different keys for each company.
- Commercial identification - good for shopping transactions.
- Banking identification - good for personal bank account transactions.
- General law enforcement identification.
- Specialized law enforcement identification.
- Border control identification.
- National service identification. (can be military security identification only accessible by the home nation's security services)
- Special services identification. (Diplomat, UN related etc.)
Note that the areas may overlap. There may also be multiple instances of some areas, useful when you are an employee of one company and is a consultant at another.And ways to identify a person:
And as stated in the article - the identity of a person and the intention of a person are two different issues. Mind reading equipment will be the next big thing at airports.
If anything, I would also recommend that if you have a gas heated boiler and you can't drain the boiler you should have an additional electrical heater on the water that kicks in at temperatures below 10 degrees C. This will keep the water warm enough for a rather long time to avoid freezing even during long power outages. It's even a good idea to turn of the gas since lowering the temperature of the house may expose minimal gas leaks and if there is a refrigerator or other thermostat it may cause a fire. (Personally I'm rather wary of gas, it's a perfect accelerant in fires).
A dehumidifier with a permanent drain is also a good idea, since the relative humidity tends to rise when the temperature goes down with increased risk of mold, mildew and bugs in the house.
If the incoming water pipe is in the basement it should be sufficient to cover it with some insulation. The ground under a house is normally sufficiently warm to avoid freezing the water. (unless you live in an area with permafrost). If you have the incoming water in the ground plane a heating by a lightbulb is sufficient to keep up the temperature well in a small closed compartment. (25 watts is good enough for several degrees, and a thermostat can be used to keep the cost down.)
One issue that you should be aware about is that if you have a basement and an insufficient draining around the walls of the basement you will have to make sure that the soil closest to the basement walls doesn't freeze since that will cause an immense pressure on the walls with subsequent foundation damages. In this case you have to check first what kind of soil that is on the outside of your basement walls. Sand and gravel is normally OK if you don't have a very water-rich environment, but older houses and houses where the costs of the foundation has been cut may have anything. Watch out for fine grained soil and clay since that kind of material tends to contain a large amount of water.
One detail that you will have to let your neighbors check out for is the amount of snow on the roof. Normally not a problem if it's up to the correct building standards for the area but extreme weather causes extreme loads and should be taken care of before a problem arises.
If everything checks out you will have a house that should stand against long period of sub-zero temperatures without major damage. Some minor effects may occur due to variations in temperature contraction/expansion like small paint cracks if the ground work hasn't been done properly in the joint between wall boards and similar things, but these effects is more a matter of time before they show up anyway.
And anyway - use your fantasy and take help of Murphy's Law.
Fairly simple and programmed in assembly language, but it did what I wanted it to do! I still have it on display at home!
For movie theathres it may will actually be better to tempest-proof the salon. (OK, not military grade, but good enough to shut down most phones.)
For prisons and other areas where a control over the calls has to be issued a local phone service that takes precedence over other operators should do the trick. Just re-direct all calls except emergency calls to an answering service that just informs the user about limited service in the current area. Anyone that REALLY has to call out should go through a gateway service where the calls are monitored.
And even if I indicate that I accept the EULA, what proves that I have understood it?
Anyway - Windows Vista cracks will appear sooner or later. There are always those who see it as a challenge.
What Microsoft seems to forget is that all these copy-protection schemes that they are running will make life harder for the IT departments. The scale may well be on it's way to tip over in favor of open-source solutions.
Yesterday's Science Fiction is today's reality.
Downloading a whole bucket of patches for each machine is a waste of network bandwidth, instead the SP can be downloaded once and applied to all machines.
But of course M$ wants everyone to switch to Vista instead and one way is to make life miserable for the users of earlier OS versions.
And what does make a sysadmin happy? - Well that's a good question, but as long as you feed them and let them have toys to play with you will actually let them focus on things outside reading other peoples mail.
Another way is to keep them busy all the time with strange annoying calls of things that doesn't work. (buy a multitude of printers all different models and brands will ensure this for a looong time).
And don't forget that company reorganizations will normally affect every department except the IT department, but will keep the IT department busy for a while when they try to figure out how to organize other persons access rights and where they are located this week.
Oh - and don't forget - limit your actual amount of sensitive data to a minimum. Not many sysadmins are that fond of reading through the mailboxes with 200+ emails with customer correspondence co-worker complaints and the shopping lists from spouses plus a gazillion of well-known internet jokes.
If anything - take an evening with The Notebooks of Lazarus Long and come back later.
And you may have to know the system well in order to also know how to circumvent it's flaws so moving to another country may not serve you.
I'm the kind of user that wants a lot of punch (not the drinkable) in the computer and selected a "laptop" on those conditions. It's not convenient to use on an aircraft or on the train, but it is very useful when it comes to software development. I see it as a portable workstation. Most laptops suffers from severe lack of performance, which makes them unsuitable for programming, but if it's only necessary to do writing and drawing in PowerPoint then the ordinary laptops are sufficient.
There were of course reasons behind that change, but if they wanted to go Intel why not the Itanium range instead? The really bad side of all this is actually that we are now basically depending on one single CPU provider for all PC:s with a few competitors that are in the backwater. AMD is the biggest competitor to Intel but it's still x86. As it is now it is more a question of how long SUN will hold on to the Sparc processors and how long IBM will stay on the track with their PowerPC processors. Alpha-processors has already been killed as well as MIPS and even earlier Motorola. The HP PA-RISC processors lives on in a way in the Itanium processors, but for how long? (flamebait here) Some of the "dead" processors still lives on the fringe in embedded systems, probably more due to the fact that there have been a lot of people around actually familiar with the quirks of each on assembly level than on other merits.
In all, most hardware vendors seems to end up using the same building blocks (for good and bad) and has to distinguish themselves by allow the parts to play in concert and provide know-how and service to the customers.
what will happen then? A big pile of badwill for M$. OK, if it's overly complicated to hack it will also be overly complicated to administrate by IT departments and also very sensitive for businesses as a whole.
It seems to me that every step M$ takes to make sure that no illegal copies are around it will also create more work for the IT department. And what if there is an unexpected problem popping up causing all legitimate copies to be locked from the users due to a flaw in WGA? Who will be paying the standstill cost? Not M$ in the first turn.
It seems to me that alternative solutions like Linux and the BSD variants will benefit most from this. The latest versions of the Linux distros aren't really that complicated to install and use, even if there still are flaws. (most notably the X11 config, which can be a real pain to get right, even if Fedora Core 5 seems to work acceptable there). Another item that can cause severe dandruff is the SELinux package, but I assume that there are work in progress on that.
As if that was a new feature... :-) And IE7 still makes the worst rendering of the ACID2 test. Looks reeeeaaaalllly weird.
(as if the correct rendering isn't weird by itself...)
A few downsides with Skype are that it may act as an intermediate for other callers and it is relatively CPU-hungry.
A better protocol than SIP is actually the IAX2 protocol (Inter-Asterisk protocol v2). At least it's better from the firewall point of view, but has the drawback of not being very widely supported outside of the Asterisk domain.