And believe it or not, the energy savings may or may not exist. It takes a lot of energy to raise the water temperature from cold to hot in just a few feet of pipe. A well-insulated standard water heater can use less energy by slowly heating the water, and then intermittently applying heat to maintain the temperature.
And there may be other expenses involved in installing one. Since the tankless heater uses more gas when in operation, you'll probably have to replace the exhaust vents. Because of this, we were quoted $2,000 (two thousand dollars) for just the installation of a tankless heater. This is on top of the $750 for the heater itself. I cry BS on this. After my old 90s era tank leaked (about 10 years old w/ 8 year warantee) we got a new tankless total cost of parts and installation about $2K. Would have been much cheaper if we hadn't relocated the heater and all its pipes across the basement to make space for future remodeling. The heater itself was in fact about $750 as he states.
Gas bill during the summer dropped more than half, and our only summertime gas appliance is the heater.
Fact is, we only used the old tank about an hour a day total, and the rest of the time it was just burning tons of gas (cubic feet of gas?) for no reason.
Think about it a second... It takes a huge amount of energy to heat water. Yet the side mounted exhaust is just a little 3 inch pipe thats only a little hotter than the water. If it was "so much less efficient" then there would have to be a giant flamethrower out the side of my house. Which would look cool, but doesn't happen. I can only conclude it's more efficient. Or I could read in the manual that it's about 85% efficient, which isn't much worse than the best tank.
Finally I question his payoff rate. Unlike a tank thats only guaranteed for 8 years, my tankless is for 25 years. And he must live in texas or something to only pay $15 a month. I'm saving about $20 per month, 12 months/year, and 25 year lifetime, thats $6000. Thats $4K of pure profit for me. And only a fool would think that gas prices will drop over the next couple decades, making it an even better deal.
- Solid state disk instead of rotating disk, much more shock proof.
- Doesn't run windows, so no viruses, no worms, no maintenance, already comes with 99% of the apps you'll ever need, etc. If you get windows you are treated to a couple hours of installing Firefox, oo.org, etc, then the eternal process of security patching begins. This "just works, right out of the box"
- Size and weight of a medium format paperback book instead of a concrete brick
- Silent
- Last but not least, it's $100 less. You and me we laugh at that puny of a difference. Some are not so fortunate. Even for rich folks like us, why pay more for an inferior product? I have other uses for that extra $100.
- Some find the eee to be stylish and trendy looking.
> Sorry to say it but any retard can stuff a paper ballot box. It takes an experienced hacker to hack an electronic election.
You seem to claim its more likely that one retard exists that can stuff a paper box, than that one hacker exists that can hack an electronic election. However, you don't understand scalability. It takes at least one retard in every paper voting site, or at least each paper voting site that matters, to stuff a ballot box. Probably there are far fewer box stuffing retards that there are polling sites. On the other hand, it only takes one hacker in the whole country (or world?) to hack any or all electronic elections.
Even weirder, think of multiple retards trying to stuff paper ballots at the same site. That result is at least defined, or perhaps comical. What happens when 20 individual hackers all try to simultaneously hack the same electronic system, which probably has no proper file locking, etc? That will be comedy indeed.
funny you should mention playgirl... They were an early "pioneer" in name based virtual hosting... A friend of mine left the company but left his vanity domain on our DNS server. So i resolve www.playboy.com and place the resulting IP address in my friends www entry for his domain. I verify the DNS is resolving to the correct address and never bother to see if my prank works.
Well, turns out instead of the relatively mild and innocent playgirl page, which was only about as shocking as a cosmo magazine front cover, the default page for the server hosting playgirl, when accessed with an unknown URL, was some horrifying goatse like thing instead. Not the actual goatse, but pretty bad.
I felt horrible, and he didn't talk to me for awhile, but looking back it was pretty funny.
Figure out how fast your actuators (rudder, sail, etc) can affect your ship, and scale your "real time" system appropriately. It's hilarious reading the comments describing exotic high speed high power real time systems more suited for hypersonic active airfoils and realtime audio DSP, when realistically, you only need to adjust the rudder and sails every couple seconds, at most. Besides, assuming you could miraculously swish the rudder back and forth at a 100 Hz rate, it would take too much power and cause too much drag and wear the actuators out very quickly.
A previous poster was complaining it is "too hard" to cross compile your app for a non-pc linux based controller. The solution is simple, use an interpreted language, whichever you're most comfortable with and has the best libraries, or use scripted apps, like octave to calculate your course based on your position and target and some perl or expect to interface it with your actuators.
Human boats have huge wide open interior volumes for bunks, passageways, food, storage, repair parts, etc. The average interior density of a human ship is probably about half that of water. You can fit a huge number of batteries in there (right above the keel, if not inside it). Then fill the rest of the ship with styrofoam. You'll have a lower center of gravity than a human ship, also who cares if the hull cracks from hitting a tree trunk, if less than 5% of the volume of the ship can be flooded? You only have to concern yourself with gross structural integrity, and again, no humans on board means you can put support beams everywhere in weird locations and use relatively small watertight compartments.
Install at least 3 compasses, 3 GPSs, 3 weather stations, and have some comparison routines toss out the outliers and average the remaining ones. A gyrocompass might be a good idea too.
A simple, reliable system that goes a little slow, will win against a fast and fancy system that breaks down.
You got the first part right. The design for both was continually downsized until the only purpose of both the shuttle and the station is to exist for each other, like some crazy love story.
You got the second part wrong. If you put the same managers whom ran the shuttle and station into the ground (literally) in charge of an unmanned probe, they'll "optimize" the probe to save money by removing all the scientific instruments, and launch in the wrong, yet more convenient, orbit, then remove funding to receive the signals if it gets there anyway. In fact the station and shuttle programs should be kept around to attract all the pointy haired bosses away from the useful scientific programs...
The station is nothing but a list of "could haves". Could have put it in a good orbit to use as a waystation for interplanetary flight, but that cost too much, so we got an awful orbit to appease the USSR. Could have had a large enough habitation module to staff large numbers of problem solvers rather than a tiny handful of robotic procedural astronauts, but that cost too much, so no scientists or engineers can fit onboard. Could have put useful scientific instruments on the station, but that cost too much, so all we got is a stethoscope and not a heck of a lot else. Could have put some fascinating communications stuff up there, but that cost too much, so we got nothing. Could have made it a continuing program of expansion and R&D and evolve the current station into something we currently can't imagine instead of a one shot stunt, but that cost too much. By the time everything that could be cut was cut, there was nothing left but pork contracts for subcontractors.
We need a "real" station and a "real" launcher program, but the folks currently in charge will not provide it, so don't throw more good money after bad, junk those programs while we're ahead.
Could someone clearly explain the difference between XEN and user mode linux beyond "red hat supports xen"? I've been a happy paying customer of a UML provider (linode.com) for like multiple years. The description of XEN "sounds like" a description of UML to me. So is XEN just a reinvention of UML or what?
Isn't it easier to just put it in a styrofoam box, run it for 5 minutes, see how much the thermometer increases, then cool it down, insert a 100 watt lightbulb and measure how much the temperature increases, then calculate based on the ratio?
It's a pain to shovel all that salt around. Why not use a nice convenient gas, like ammonia, which has different solubility in water at different temperatures.
What you're describing is basically the classic ammonia adsorption refrigeration cycle. Any chem eng thermodynamics textbook will have this in the refrigeration chapter. Its still used in major industrial sites but the ammonia is too toxic to be used in homes. It was used in home fridges until the invention of freon. I believe it's still possible to buy ammonia adsorption refigerators for RVs, because they work great on 12V, AC, or propane (any source of heat...)
It is not a terribly efficient cycle, would be better to use a freon or hydrocarbon based refrigerant. But it does work and has no moving parts (pumps etc). Beware that when the ammonia eventually corrodes out the pipes there will be a huge mess and asyphxiation danger.
Why does everyone recommend Linux distributions that are run by like one guy and updated every six months?
Wouldn't a normal Linux distribution like Debian be a much better choice?
1) Can use one OS on all machines, not one on the FW, one on the fileserver, one on the mythtv box, another on the desktop, etc. It's much easier to support "just another Debian box" that happens to have an elaborate iptables script.
2) Debian's got several hundred folks devoted to upgrading and bux fixing. Aren't most specialized fw distributions created and supported by about one person? I would think Debian would be much more secure, and much faster updating, on average, than any special purpose distribution could hope to be.
3) Same standardized software on all machines. The same syslog on them all, the same SNMP (for MRTG) the same Perl, the same awk, the same bash shell, etc.
4) Debian's packaged almost all free software that exists... If you need some obscure VPN client or some weird monitoring tool, you can rest easy that it's supported under Debian and can be quickly and correctly installed with a minimum of bugs.
I understand there are Linux distributions that install everything, and wide open too. But not all general purpose distributions are like that.
Remember to think about the perspective of the outsourcing provider. I've been the provider and I've occasionally been the customer, so I've seen alot of really bad scenes.
If a local admin is personally responsible for the operation of an email system at a non-IT company, if it's down for an extended time, it's time to update the resume. In other words, email is perceived to be worth a $75K job to someone, and hopefully the admin provides $75K of value to the company. Also during an outage the admin's entire "business social structure" is unhappy with the admin and the admin have to devote 100%, if not more, to fixing that one problem.
Now outsource to someone with a nice long contract for $50 per month. First of all, with a zillion other customers do they care if the company doesn't get perfect service, and if they don't, they're only worth $50 per month anyway and the contract won't be up for months or years. Finally if it's a bad problem, heck just hang up and work on someone elses nicer problem. In a "sales oriented" organization frankly no one cares if it works or not, just can you sell more.
Its like the difference between a T1 and a DSL line... You're not paying 10 times more on a T1 because the bits are "nicer". With a T1 you're paying for 2am on christmas dispatch thru a blizzard with 30 minute committment time vs the DSL where they might show up sometime in the next 3 business days if you're lucky and they're not otherwise busy.
Basically when you outsource think of the worst case scenario not only the best or only financial.
If a local admin can provide $75K of value to the company, then outsourcing that admin for $75K only works if the outsourcer provides less than $75K worth of value because they've got to make a profit. If you can't afford an integer number of admins, then outsourcing is a great idea because it opens options, otherwise its a disaster waiting to happen.
I upgraded to an Asus A8V-Deluxe with an AMD64-3000 processor last week. The AMD64 / true64 port of debian is not an official part of Debian (waiting until after the release to add it). It took a little googling to find an install.iso and to find a good amd64 mirror, but it was frankly boring in how easily it installed. It's just another Debian install nothing special, and because it's Debian you only need to install it once.
As for hardware, everything worked out of the box without fooling around including the USB, the onboard gig-ethernet, the onboard sound, etc. I haven't tried the firewire or the SATA but I assume it will work.
As for software, everything in i386 Debian seems to be in amd64 / true64 Debian with the exception of qemu and the openoffice.org suite. I haven't bothered to set up a chroot environment but they say that'll allow that stuff to work.
It's just another open source success story, and theres so many of those, that this one isn't even noteworthy.
Take advantage of the larger memory in the future? You can take advantage of it today for free if you use the openwrt.org distribution instead of Sveasoft
I use the openwrt, the S provides quite a bit more space for stuff.
going from 120 to 30 watts saves hundreds of dollars per year? I think not.
120-30 = 70 watts difference We'll assume you live in the topics so the AC is on all year and you've got the lowest performance AC you can buy. So multiply by 25% to run the AC on 70 watts, giving 87.5 watts
Now assume you literally never turn it off, it's actively displaying a picture 24x7x365.25 Thats 8766 hours per year.
Now 87.5 watts divided by 1000 to get KW, times 8766 hours, gives 767.025 KWh
I pay about 8 cents per KWh. We'll round up to 10 cents just for the heck of it.
That would be a whopping $76.70 per year.
Selecting LCD over CRT will therefore pay for itself in only about ten years on a purely energy basis.
However, the shuttle has done all it's going to do. If the Columbia hadn't flamed out it was going to be retired to the Smithsonian after the upcoming hubble mission. The only purpose left for the shuttles is to visit the station.
The station has done all it's going to do. To "save money" its been understaffed like a cheap I.S. department. There are almost enough people in the station to safely support the station. Not enough left to do any science or discovery. So the only purpose of the station is to be a destination for the shuttle.
Basically they're two pork barrel programs that exist to support each other.
I'd much rather seen the billions spent on something useful like x-prize part II or whatever.
BPL won't give anyone service. It's much more expensive and time consuming to install than DSL from the provider standpoint, making it more expensive. It's just a way for power companies to become the covad of the BPL industry.
Look, to go DSL you put a small dslam box in the SLC hut and frankly you're done.
To go BPL you have to put HV certified bidirectional repeaters across every transformer in the whole power network, and filter out all the noise present on the lines. It's staggeringly expensive. Then some CBer keys up under the power pole and knocks out a whole neighborhood.
So, after Enron, what power company has the money to waste on a guaranteed money loser?
No need for surgical strikes on four targets. Think about it....
If it takes one zillionth of a second to blind someone, and you can blast away continuously for perhaps five minutes as it flys overhead, statistically you will get them with no advanced systems.
You do need adaptive active tracking systems to transfer enough heat to a small enough area to burn a hole in the wing, at least currently.
Eventually lasers will make the whole world a battlefield condition. On the battlefield, now, if you can see it you can kill it. It's eventually going to be like that everywhere not just the battlefield.
So when my hamradio friend keys up his perfectly legal 1500 watt sideband station his signal will leak into the BPL system as much as their intereference leaks out... So not only does BPL ruin his hobby, his hobby will ruin BPL for the whole city (!).
Sure you can legislate ham radio into non-existance. One service down a hundred to go. Then you gotta get rid of all CB linear amps. Then all the power tools (ever fire up an old drill with sparky brushes while listening to AM radio?) Then all microwave ovens. Then the 50 kilo-watt AM radio station down the road. Don't forget to get rid of all the aircraft radios and aircraft naviagation beacons.
Sure if you get rid of every electrical device except incandescent light bulbs (without dimmers and no flourescents of course) then BPL works great.
No problem, four guys get together, one guy buys the books. Either share the single copy or photocopy sections as assigned in class. If only one chapter is assigned, fine photocopy that one chapter for your three buddies. This saves a bit less that 75%
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And there may be other expenses involved in installing one. Since the tankless heater uses more gas when in operation, you'll probably have to replace the exhaust vents. Because of this, we were quoted $2,000 (two thousand dollars) for just the installation of a tankless heater. This is on top of the $750 for the heater itself. I cry BS on this. After my old 90s era tank leaked (about 10 years old w/ 8 year warantee) we got a new tankless total cost of parts and installation about $2K. Would have been much cheaper if we hadn't relocated the heater and all its pipes across the basement to make space for future remodeling. The heater itself was in fact about $750 as he states.
Gas bill during the summer dropped more than half, and our only summertime gas appliance is the heater.
Fact is, we only used the old tank about an hour a day total, and the rest of the time it was just burning tons of gas (cubic feet of gas?) for no reason.
Think about it a second... It takes a huge amount of energy to heat water. Yet the side mounted exhaust is just a little 3 inch pipe thats only a little hotter than the water. If it was "so much less efficient" then there would have to be a giant flamethrower out the side of my house. Which would look cool, but doesn't happen. I can only conclude it's more efficient. Or I could read in the manual that it's about 85% efficient, which isn't much worse than the best tank.
Finally I question his payoff rate. Unlike a tank thats only guaranteed for 8 years, my tankless is for 25 years. And he must live in texas or something to only pay $15 a month. I'm saving about $20 per month, 12 months/year, and 25 year lifetime, thats $6000. Thats $4K of pure profit for me. And only a fool would think that gas prices will drop over the next couple decades, making it an even better deal.
- Solid state disk instead of rotating disk, much more shock proof.
- Doesn't run windows, so no viruses, no worms, no maintenance, already comes with 99% of the apps you'll ever need, etc. If you get windows you are treated to a couple hours of installing Firefox, oo.org, etc, then the eternal process of security patching begins. This "just works, right out of the box"
- Size and weight of a medium format paperback book instead of a concrete brick
- Silent
- Last but not least, it's $100 less. You and me we laugh at that puny of a difference. Some are not so fortunate. Even for rich folks like us, why pay more for an inferior product? I have other uses for that extra $100.
- Some find the eee to be stylish and trendy looking.
My wife is quite happy with her eee laptop.
> Sorry to say it but any retard can stuff a paper ballot box. It takes an experienced hacker to hack an electronic election.
You seem to claim its more likely that one retard exists that can stuff a paper box, than that one hacker exists that can hack an electronic election. However, you don't understand scalability. It takes at least one retard in every paper voting site, or at least each paper voting site that matters, to stuff a ballot box. Probably there are far fewer box stuffing retards that there are polling sites. On the other hand, it only takes one hacker in the whole country (or world?) to hack any or all electronic elections.
Even weirder, think of multiple retards trying to stuff paper ballots at the same site. That result is at least defined, or perhaps comical. What happens when 20 individual hackers all try to simultaneously hack the same electronic system, which probably has no proper file locking, etc? That will be comedy indeed.
North hemisphere summer or south hemisphere summer? How many subjects in the study, I'm guessing three?
funny you should mention playgirl... They were an early "pioneer" in name based virtual hosting...
A friend of mine left the company but left his vanity domain on our DNS server.
So i resolve www.playboy.com and place the resulting IP address in my friends www entry for his domain.
I verify the DNS is resolving to the correct address and never bother to see if my prank works.
Well, turns out instead of the relatively mild and innocent playgirl page, which was only about as shocking as a cosmo magazine front cover, the default page for the server hosting playgirl, when accessed with an unknown URL, was some horrifying goatse like thing instead. Not the actual goatse, but pretty bad.
I felt horrible, and he didn't talk to me for awhile, but looking back it was pretty funny.
Figure out how fast your actuators (rudder, sail, etc) can affect your ship, and scale your "real time" system appropriately. It's hilarious reading the comments describing exotic high speed high power real time systems more suited for hypersonic active airfoils and realtime audio DSP, when realistically, you only need to adjust the rudder and sails every couple seconds, at most. Besides, assuming you could miraculously swish the rudder back and forth at a 100 Hz rate, it would take too much power and cause too much drag and wear the actuators out very quickly.
A previous poster was complaining it is "too hard" to cross compile your app for a non-pc linux based controller. The solution is simple, use an interpreted language, whichever you're most comfortable with and has the best libraries, or use scripted apps, like octave to calculate your course based on your position and target and some perl or expect to interface it with your actuators.
Human boats have huge wide open interior volumes for bunks, passageways, food, storage, repair parts, etc. The average interior density of a human ship is probably about half that of water. You can fit a huge number of batteries in there (right above the keel, if not inside it). Then fill the rest of the ship with styrofoam. You'll have a lower center of gravity than a human ship, also who cares if the hull cracks from hitting a tree trunk, if less than 5% of the volume of the ship can be flooded? You only have to concern yourself with gross structural integrity, and again, no humans on board means you can put support beams everywhere in weird locations and use relatively small watertight compartments.
Install at least 3 compasses, 3 GPSs, 3 weather stations, and have some comparison routines toss out the outliers and average the remaining ones. A gyrocompass might be a good idea too.
A simple, reliable system that goes a little slow, will win against a fast and fancy system that breaks down.
You got the first part right. The design for both was continually downsized until the only purpose of both the shuttle and the station is to exist for each other, like some crazy love story.
You got the second part wrong. If you put the same managers whom ran the shuttle and station into the ground (literally) in charge of an unmanned probe, they'll "optimize" the probe to save money by removing all the scientific instruments, and launch in the wrong, yet more convenient, orbit, then remove funding to receive the signals if it gets there anyway. In fact the station and shuttle programs should be kept around to attract all the pointy haired bosses away from the useful scientific programs...
The station is nothing but a list of "could haves". Could have put it in a good orbit to use as a waystation for interplanetary flight, but that cost too much, so we got an awful orbit to appease the USSR. Could have had a large enough habitation module to staff large numbers of problem solvers rather than a tiny handful of robotic procedural astronauts, but that cost too much, so no scientists or engineers can fit onboard. Could have put useful scientific instruments on the station, but that cost too much, so all we got is a stethoscope and not a heck of a lot else. Could have put some fascinating communications stuff up there, but that cost too much, so we got nothing. Could have made it a continuing program of expansion and R&D and evolve the current station into something we currently can't imagine instead of a one shot stunt, but that cost too much. By the time everything that could be cut was cut, there was nothing left but pork contracts for subcontractors.
We need a "real" station and a "real" launcher program, but the folks currently in charge will not provide it, so don't throw more good money after bad, junk those programs while we're ahead.
There's something uniquely cool about customer service via slashdot
Would love to buy one if I didn't get the following error:
Credit Card Error - The bank did not seem to approve that transaction.
Also sets off noscript's cross site scripting error.
virgin mobile prepay $6 per month (actually, $20 every 3 months)
Could someone clearly explain the difference between XEN and user mode linux beyond "red hat supports xen"?
I've been a happy paying customer of a UML provider (linode.com) for like multiple years.
The description of XEN "sounds like" a description of UML to me.
So is XEN just a reinvention of UML or what?
Isn't it easier to just put it in a styrofoam box, run it for 5 minutes, see how much the thermometer increases, then cool it down, insert a 100 watt lightbulb and measure how much the temperature increases, then calculate based on the ratio?
It's a pain to shovel all that salt around. Why not use a nice convenient gas, like ammonia, which has different solubility in water at different temperatures.
What you're describing is basically the classic ammonia adsorption refrigeration cycle. Any chem eng thermodynamics textbook will have this in the refrigeration chapter. Its still used in major industrial sites but the ammonia is too toxic to be used in homes. It was used in home fridges until the invention of freon. I believe it's still possible to buy ammonia adsorption refigerators for RVs, because they work great on 12V, AC, or propane (any source of heat...)
It is not a terribly efficient cycle, would be better to use a freon or hydrocarbon based refrigerant. But it does work and has no moving parts (pumps etc). Beware that when the ammonia eventually corrodes out the pipes there will be a huge mess and asyphxiation danger.
Why does everyone recommend Linux distributions that are run by like one guy and updated every six months?
Wouldn't a normal Linux distribution like Debian be a much better choice?
1) Can use one OS on all machines, not one on the FW, one on the fileserver, one on the mythtv box, another on the desktop, etc. It's much easier to support "just another Debian box" that happens to have an elaborate iptables script.
2) Debian's got several hundred folks devoted to upgrading and bux fixing. Aren't most specialized fw distributions created and supported by about one person? I would think Debian would be much more secure, and much faster updating, on average, than any special purpose distribution could hope to be.
3) Same standardized software on all machines. The same syslog on them all, the same SNMP (for MRTG) the same Perl, the same awk, the same bash shell, etc.
4) Debian's packaged almost all free software that exists... If you need some obscure VPN client or some weird monitoring tool, you can rest easy that it's supported under Debian and can be quickly and correctly installed with a minimum of bugs.
I understand there are Linux distributions that install everything, and wide open too. But not all general purpose distributions are like that.
Remember to think about the perspective of the outsourcing provider. I've been the provider and I've occasionally been the customer, so I've seen alot of really bad scenes.
If a local admin is personally responsible for the operation of an email system at a non-IT company, if it's down for an extended time, it's time to update the resume. In other words, email is perceived to be worth a $75K job to someone, and hopefully the admin provides $75K of value to the company. Also during an outage the admin's entire "business social structure" is unhappy with the admin and the admin have to devote 100%, if not more, to fixing that one problem.
Now outsource to someone with a nice long contract for $50 per month. First of all, with a zillion other customers do they care if the company doesn't get perfect service, and if they don't, they're only worth $50 per month anyway and the contract won't be up for months or years. Finally if it's a bad problem, heck just hang up and work on someone elses nicer problem. In a "sales oriented" organization frankly no one cares if it works or not, just can you sell more.
Its like the difference between a T1 and a DSL line... You're not paying 10 times more on a T1 because the bits are "nicer". With a T1 you're paying for 2am on christmas dispatch thru a blizzard with 30 minute committment time vs the DSL where they might show up sometime in the next 3 business days if you're lucky and they're not otherwise busy.
Basically when you outsource think of the worst case scenario not only the best or only financial.
If a local admin can provide $75K of value to the company, then outsourcing that admin for $75K only works if the outsourcer provides less than $75K worth of value because they've got to make a profit. If you can't afford an integer number of admins, then outsourcing is a great idea because it opens options, otherwise its a disaster waiting to happen.
I upgraded to an Asus A8V-Deluxe with an AMD64-3000 processor last week. .iso and to find a good amd64 mirror, but it was frankly boring in how easily it installed. It's just another Debian install nothing special, and because it's Debian you only need to install it once.
The AMD64 / true64 port of debian is not an official part of Debian (waiting until after the release to add it).
It took a little googling to find an install
As for hardware, everything worked out of the box without fooling around including the USB, the onboard gig-ethernet, the onboard sound, etc. I haven't tried the firewire or the SATA but I assume it will work.
As for software, everything in i386 Debian seems to be in amd64 / true64 Debian with the exception of qemu and the openoffice.org suite. I haven't bothered to set up a chroot environment but they say that'll allow that stuff to work.
It's just another open source success story, and theres so many of those, that this one isn't even noteworthy.
Easy, buy a $500 card every couple years, not every time one comes out.
I don't buy a $25K car every time a new model is released, but I do OCCASIONALLY buy a $25K car...
I'm glad that when I do upgrade, probably in 07, that technology has continuously improved since 03.
Take advantage of the larger memory in the future?
You can take advantage of it today for free if you use the openwrt.org distribution instead of Sveasoft
I use the openwrt, the S provides quite a bit more space for stuff.
going from 120 to 30 watts saves hundreds of dollars per year? I think not.
120-30 = 70 watts difference
We'll assume you live in the topics so the AC is on all year and you've got the lowest performance AC you can buy. So multiply by 25% to run the AC on 70 watts, giving 87.5 watts
Now assume you literally never turn it off, it's actively displaying a picture 24x7x365.25 Thats 8766 hours per year.
Now 87.5 watts divided by 1000 to get KW, times 8766 hours, gives 767.025 KWh
I pay about 8 cents per KWh. We'll round up to 10 cents just for the heck of it.
That would be a whopping $76.70 per year.
Selecting LCD over CRT will therefore pay for itself in only about ten years on a purely energy basis.
Whats your backup plan for the raid card?
Five years after the hardware card is discontinued I'll still be able to run my software raid...
I like a viable healthy space program
However, the shuttle has done all it's going to do. If the Columbia hadn't flamed out it was going to be retired to the Smithsonian after the upcoming hubble mission. The only purpose left for the shuttles is to visit the station.
The station has done all it's going to do. To "save money" its been understaffed like a cheap I.S. department. There are almost enough people in the station to safely support the station. Not enough left to do any science or discovery. So the only purpose of the station is to be a destination for the shuttle.
Basically they're two pork barrel programs that exist to support each other.
I'd much rather seen the billions spent on something useful like x-prize part II or whatever.
BPL won't give anyone service. It's much more expensive and time consuming to install than DSL from the provider standpoint, making it more expensive. It's just a way for power companies to become the covad of the BPL industry.
Look, to go DSL you put a small dslam box in the SLC hut and frankly you're done.
To go BPL you have to put HV certified bidirectional repeaters across every transformer in the whole power network, and filter out all the noise present on the lines. It's staggeringly expensive. Then some CBer keys up under the power pole and knocks out a whole neighborhood.
So, after Enron, what power company has the money to waste on a guaranteed money loser?
No need for surgical strikes on four targets.
Think about it....
If it takes one zillionth of a second to blind someone, and you can blast away continuously for perhaps five minutes as it flys overhead, statistically you will get them with no advanced systems.
You do need adaptive active tracking systems to transfer enough heat to a small enough area to burn a hole in the wing, at least currently.
Eventually lasers will make the whole world a battlefield condition. On the battlefield, now, if you can see it you can kill it. It's eventually going to be like that everywhere not just the battlefield.
"Any wire can act as antenna."
You are forgetting, it works both ways.
So when my hamradio friend keys up his perfectly legal 1500 watt sideband station his signal will leak into the BPL system as much as their intereference leaks out... So not only does BPL ruin his hobby, his hobby will ruin BPL for the whole city (!).
Sure you can legislate ham radio into non-existance. One service down a hundred to go. Then you gotta get rid of all CB linear amps. Then all the power tools (ever fire up an old drill with sparky brushes while listening to AM radio?) Then all microwave ovens. Then the 50 kilo-watt AM radio station down the road. Don't forget to get rid of all the aircraft radios and aircraft naviagation beacons.
Sure if you get rid of every electrical device except incandescent light bulbs (without dimmers and no flourescents of course) then BPL works great.
No problem, four guys get together, one guy buys the books. Either share the single copy or photocopy sections as assigned in class. If only one chapter is assigned, fine photocopy that one chapter for your three buddies. This saves a bit less that 75%