After you have your copy on the gridded paper, you can make little cardboard cutouts of your furniture, to scale, and then slide those around to see how they work on the plan.
Like the parent says: Sometimes a low-tech solution just works better. Of course, the geek quotient is pretty low, unless you use your computer guided cutting tool to make the cardboard furniture profiles.
That works here, too: I have a big pile of old COM port Microsoft mice, because I had to buy "hardware" in order to get the OEM Windows or Office disk.
Star Raiders was so ahead of its time. I remember trying to get other kids to play it, and they couldn't ever figure it out, because it had too many steps.
In the couple of casinos I worked at, they wanted you to take the chips home with you - it's close to 100% profit. And the silvers and clays are made by companies with almost as much rigor as the US Mints, so someone would have to go to a lot of trouble to bring in fake chips.
But if people would do without cable, and do without a new car every 3 years, and eat out less, and spend money more wisely, then they would be able to survive on a single middle class income.
If everyone is going to play "Keep Up With the Joneses", then they will find it difficult to maintain that lifestyle.
I have a few of these on Windows desktops, which I modified as described here.. It is a hack, but then, if you don't want external firewire, fibre, USB, or SCSI, there's not really any other choice. I haven't found anything cheaper than this, and while it certainly would be an aesthetically non-pleasing solution, it is a solution that seems to fit what the OP requested.
Meanwhile, one click at the macgurus website gave me this:
"International orders are shipped Fedex International Priority or UPS Worldwide Express..."
We have recently purchased some hardware like this to expand both network attached storage, and desktop solutions. We have a GIS department that regularly fills up 400GB drives and were not well backed up, so we needed to get them a terabyte or so of raw storage (500GB mirrored) for their desktops, and multiple terabytes on the network for archiving.
We ended up with a server like these rackmounts, with 24 hot swap drive bays, Windows 200 server license, 4 hot swap power supplies (3 live, one redundant), two 3Ware SATA 12 port cards (so no redundancy in controllers), no drives, for about $6,200. We purchased from biz.tigerdirect.com, who were very competitive, and beat any other price I could find to throw at them, and then threw in a 3 year 24x7 warranty. We got 12 250GB drives from newegg.com, because their drive prices just can't be beat. We went with RAID 5 with one drive as a hot spare, so we have 2.5 TB of storage.
Now, this isn't the fastest horse on the block by any means, but we aren't serving databases or working directly with this data, we just needed gobs of reliable storage. I'm happy with this so far.
For desktop solutions, we ended up with a modification to MacGuru's roll your own SATA RAID. We added the internal enclosure from Addonics so that we could have hot swap drive bays. This also means extra bays, since the enclosure reduces the space the drives take up. Also, it's easier to install these bays than it is to screw rails on every drive. O.k., so screwing rails isn't a big deal, but at work, my time is money, so there it is. We used the Addonics RAID cards, which seem to perform nicely, and these 8 port SATA port adapter (scroll down) let's you connect the external array to your main desktop with minimal fuss.
We're very happy with these desktop RAIDS that operate at a very respectable speed - Our GIS folks need desktop access to terabytes of data for their processing, and we're too cheap to buy them workstations. This has been a very cost-effective alternative for us.
Hope this helps.
It's not that the Europeans are having fewer children that is the problem, it's the fact that they are surrounded by backward people who still believe that having ten to twelve children is the best way get ahead in the world.
On the other hand, if you look at their economic incentives, it actually is not backward to have fewer children. The likliehood that they one or more of their children will not reach adulthood is pretty darned high, and so in order to guarantee a child remaining around to care for you in old age, you need to have more than 1.6 children.
Some of these backward nations are also low tech agrarian, and again, it makes more sense to have larger families.
The Palestinian example that you give actuall does support your viewpoint, but if you look at many of the other nations surrounding Europe, the examples for the opposite opinion are greater.
I am thinking about this with the biased opinion of a math major (only a BS degree, so I don't call myself a mathematician), but:
If all they want to do is get answers, by all means, they should use the programs to do the work for them. This seemed to be the attitude of the engineers at Va Tech where I went to school, and it seems like the right thing for someone who is using math as a tool, simply to produce an answer.
But if you do want to understand why the answer is what the program says it is, pencil and paper and thought are the best way to go about it.
And now, to argue against myself, I have to admit that I wrote a graphing program when I was in school so I could get fast images of polynomials. Eventually I modified it so that it would do stuff in polar coordinates, too, but ultimately, to advance through the classes and do the tests quickly enough, you pretty much had to be able to visualize all of that upon seeing an equation for the first time.
That, and being able to work through a problem in your head first is a great way to test your final answer, even if you do use a calculator. I was able to do better on most physics tests than the other folks because I ran through the problem quickly doing all of the math in my head, and then putting down my estimated answer next to the question. If my calculated answer was not within an order of magnitude, then I checked all of it again, and usully found an error, typically mis-keying something in the calculator. That helps a lot for making sure the answer the machine gives you is something like what you ought to be seeing.
So, I guess I back away from my original opinion, but I do think that the computer programs ought to be augmented with a reasonable amount of pencil and paper work to gain an appreciation of what's going on.
That, and the original poster did say, "applied math", so that is a totally different animal than pure math.
I agree that Long equations can be simnplefied, you don't have to write so much, and you can concentrate in the mathematics, instead of in the often tedious mechanics. , but for a student learning math at the level that the poster seems to be implying, those "tedious mechancs" are what they are supposed to be learning.
Perhaps they haven't done very well previously, but they are a heck of a lot better than parents that just give up and stop caring what's going on.
That's a good point - At least they're trying to fix things now.
But I have to wonder what's going on. Are these just bad kids? I mean, growing up in my house, I always knew who was in charge. I'm not saying I never did anything wrong, but I knew that if I did, there were consequences.
I dunno, it just seems weird to think that these kids can't do the right thing. It's one thing to have a messy room, but to spill something in the kitchen and not clean it up? That's bent!
What happened to talking and communicating to kids, teaching them right from wrong and then trusting them to do the right thing.
Dude, that is SO 20th Century!
Actually, I agree with you completely. I was listening to a thing on the radio about some woman who moved into a tent in her yard because her kids wouldn't take out the garbage, or pick up when they spilled something. And I thought to myself, "Self, WTF? What happened to, 'No TV.'? What happened to, 'You're grounded.'?"
I mean, holy crap, she's living in a tent! Because her _children_ apparently control her household!
If this is the answer to that objection, why bother with HashCash at all? Why not just use an "accepted sender" (white-list) to block out all of your spam?
Interestingly, my wife and I pay more taxes than we would if we were single. So, at least in Virginia, USA, you should be advocating gay marriage, since then the buggers will pay more taxes.
When I was working in casinos in South Dakota, back in around 1997, doing numbers for a management company, some freak of a tech support guy in Montana claimed that he hadn't rebooted his Windows 95 machine in over a year. "In fact," he says, "I'm downloading [CD-ROM worth of data] right now."
Now Montana had no broadband back then, or not much, so I thought I had him dead to rights when I said, "Mister, there's no way in hell you're downloading [CD-ROM worth of data], that'd take days over dialup..."
But he was ready for me, and he said, "Yeah, it's been going for about a week, and it's one of the reasons I never reboot."
I laughed, of course, chuckling along with him. To this day I have no idea if he was for real or not.
I Have a Theory About This: I've been thinking about this far too much, and I have no idea why, but clearly these folks aren't doing most of these things to make their cars faster, because a lot of the stuff you see them doing doesn't gain them speed or horsepower.
I think they are doing it as a sort of courtship display. Like Bower birds (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/bowerbird/amorous. html) They are displaying to the opposite sex that they have so much disposable income that they can spend it on frivolous things.
It's like a giant rack of antlers. I mean, what fricking good does that do anyone? Well, basically, it looks cool, at least to the people that you are trying to impress.
Obviously, these ricer dudes are not doing this for us.
I'm not sure what country this is referring to, but here in the United States, when an employer says you are required to do something, then they are required to compensate you.
Cue the folks who will say, "It's a free market, if you don't want to do what they tell you to do, just get another job!"
Then cue the folks saying, "You keep saying that word, 'free market', but I do not think it means what you think it means."
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Like the parent says: Sometimes a low-tech solution just works better. Of course, the geek quotient is pretty low, unless you use your computer guided cutting tool to make the cardboard furniture profiles.
But what occupation of Russian do I hire to make sure my Russian lawyer isn't messing with me?
And then what occupation of Russian do I hire to protect me from the one who is protecting me from the lawyer?
This is starting to sound expensive...
That works here, too: I have a big pile of old COM port Microsoft mice, because I had to buy "hardware" in order to get the OEM Windows or Office disk.
Which is almost as weird as having to pay for internet access by the minute or by the byte...
Star Raiders was so ahead of its time. I remember trying to get other kids to play it, and they couldn't ever figure it out, because it had too many steps.
In the couple of casinos I worked at, they wanted you to take the chips home with you - it's close to 100% profit. And the silvers and clays are made by companies with almost as much rigor as the US Mints, so someone would have to go to a lot of trouble to bring in fake chips.
Mmmmmmmmmmmm.... Uni.
But if people would do without cable, and do without a new car every 3 years, and eat out less, and spend money more wisely, then they would be able to survive on a single middle class income.
If everyone is going to play "Keep Up With the Joneses", then they will find it difficult to maintain that lifestyle.
Meanwhile, one click at the macgurus website gave me this:
"International orders are shipped Fedex International Priority or UPS Worldwide Express..."
So maybe you can get it in the EU. :->
Check out macgurus.com. They have some good solutions that seem pretty inexpensive.
We ended up with a server like these rackmounts, with 24 hot swap drive bays, Windows 200 server license, 4 hot swap power supplies (3 live, one redundant), two 3Ware SATA 12 port cards (so no redundancy in controllers), no drives, for about $6,200. We purchased from biz.tigerdirect.com, who were very competitive, and beat any other price I could find to throw at them, and then threw in a 3 year 24x7 warranty. We got 12 250GB drives from newegg.com, because their drive prices just can't be beat. We went with RAID 5 with one drive as a hot spare, so we have 2.5 TB of storage.
Now, this isn't the fastest horse on the block by any means, but we aren't serving databases or working directly with this data, we just needed gobs of reliable storage. I'm happy with this so far.
For desktop solutions, we ended up with a modification to MacGuru's roll your own SATA RAID. We added the internal enclosure from Addonics so that we could have hot swap drive bays. This also means extra bays, since the enclosure reduces the space the drives take up. Also, it's easier to install these bays than it is to screw rails on every drive. O.k., so screwing rails isn't a big deal, but at work, my time is money, so there it is. We used the Addonics RAID cards, which seem to perform nicely, and these 8 port SATA port adapter (scroll down) let's you connect the external array to your main desktop with minimal fuss.
We're very happy with these desktop RAIDS that operate at a very respectable speed - Our GIS folks need desktop access to terabytes of data for their processing, and we're too cheap to buy them workstations. This has been a very cost-effective alternative for us. Hope this helps.
There is a second good reason: You need multiple terabytes of storage and don'w want to have double that many drives lying around.
On the other hand, if you look at their economic incentives, it actually is not backward to have fewer children. The likliehood that they one or more of their children will not reach adulthood is pretty darned high, and so in order to guarantee a child remaining around to care for you in old age, you need to have more than 1.6 children.
Some of these backward nations are also low tech agrarian, and again, it makes more sense to have larger families.
The Palestinian example that you give actuall does support your viewpoint, but if you look at many of the other nations surrounding Europe, the examples for the opposite opinion are greater.
If all they want to do is get answers, by all means, they should use the programs to do the work for them. This seemed to be the attitude of the engineers at Va Tech where I went to school, and it seems like the right thing for someone who is using math as a tool, simply to produce an answer.
But if you do want to understand why the answer is what the program says it is, pencil and paper and thought are the best way to go about it.
And now, to argue against myself, I have to admit that I wrote a graphing program when I was in school so I could get fast images of polynomials. Eventually I modified it so that it would do stuff in polar coordinates, too, but ultimately, to advance through the classes and do the tests quickly enough, you pretty much had to be able to visualize all of that upon seeing an equation for the first time.
That, and being able to work through a problem in your head first is a great way to test your final answer, even if you do use a calculator. I was able to do better on most physics tests than the other folks because I ran through the problem quickly doing all of the math in my head, and then putting down my estimated answer next to the question. If my calculated answer was not within an order of magnitude, then I checked all of it again, and usully found an error, typically mis-keying something in the calculator. That helps a lot for making sure the answer the machine gives you is something like what you ought to be seeing.
So, I guess I back away from my original opinion, but I do think that the computer programs ought to be augmented with a reasonable amount of pencil and paper work to gain an appreciation of what's going on.
That, and the original poster did say, "applied math", so that is a totally different animal than pure math.
But dammit, abstract algebra is cool!
I agree that Long equations can be simnplefied, you don't have to write so much, and you can concentrate in the mathematics, instead of in the often tedious mechanics. , but for a student learning math at the level that the poster seems to be implying, those "tedious mechancs" are what they are supposed to be learning.
That's a good point - At least they're trying to fix things now.
But I have to wonder what's going on. Are these just bad kids? I mean, growing up in my house, I always knew who was in charge. I'm not saying I never did anything wrong, but I knew that if I did, there were consequences.
I dunno, it just seems weird to think that these kids can't do the right thing. It's one thing to have a messy room, but to spill something in the kitchen and not clean it up? That's bent!
Dude, that is SO 20th Century!
Actually, I agree with you completely. I was listening to a thing on the radio about some woman who moved into a tent in her yard because her kids wouldn't take out the garbage, or pick up when they spilled something. And I thought to myself, "Self, WTF? What happened to, 'No TV.'? What happened to, 'You're grounded.'?"
I mean, holy crap, she's living in a tent! Because her _children_ apparently control her household!
Of course, it is in Florida...
I thought the telemarketers already had the do not call list.
Otherwise, how would they know you were on it?
They get a copy of the list to use to scrub their lists, and the reason this is not a problem is because if they call you anyway, they get fined.
Of course, this new proposal kind of screws all of that up...
If this is the answer to that objection, why bother with HashCash at all? Why not just use an "accepted sender" (white-list) to block out all of your spam?
Interestingly, my wife and I pay more taxes than we would if we were single. So, at least in Virginia, USA, you should be advocating gay marriage, since then the buggers will pay more taxes.
Now Montana had no broadband back then, or not much, so I thought I had him dead to rights when I said, "Mister, there's no way in hell you're downloading [CD-ROM worth of data], that'd take days over dialup..."
But he was ready for me, and he said, "Yeah, it's been going for about a week, and it's one of the reasons I never reboot."
I laughed, of course, chuckling along with him. To this day I have no idea if he was for real or not.
I think they are doing it as a sort of courtship display. Like Bower birds (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/bowerbird/amorous. html) They are displaying to the opposite sex that they have so much disposable income that they can spend it on frivolous things.
It's like a giant rack of antlers. I mean, what fricking good does that do anyone? Well, basically, it looks cool, at least to the people that you are trying to impress.
Obviously, these ricer dudes are not doing this for us.
Who are Christopher Lee Heather Graham?
I think you spotted the flaw in my reasoning.
I was thinking back to my days as a line cook, when I was very much an hourly wage slave, and made sure that my employers knew that I knew my rights.
Fortunately, my employers since I've been salaried have made no such ridiculous demands on my time.
I'd be interested if anyone had any thoughts on how this concept affects salaried employees, too.
Cue the folks who will say, "It's a free market, if you don't want to do what they tell you to do, just get another job!"
Then cue the folks saying, "You keep saying that word, 'free market', but I do not think it means what you think it means."