Kind of tangentially on-topic (wink-wink), but... I am planning to upgrade my home server machine, which has been humming not so quietly since 2003. Sadly, I have not much dabbed in PC hardware since then -- do you guys know any online references with example configuration for decent, quiet machines to use as a starting point? My basic requirements are ecc registered ram, a terabyte or so of some kind of raid, a quad CPU and a well-supported video running Linux and, very occasionally, an odd windows instance in VirtualBox. TIA for any opinions.
Well, since you chose to advertise here, you can perhaps answer several questions.
How do you define the "sustainable" word that appears on your page? What does it mean, technically, in monetary terms? Minimum wage? X% over minimum wage? "Enough to sustain a person at poverty line +X% if he works 8 hours a day for us"? Or something else? Since you brag about it, you owe us some explanation. Without it your website looks like so much buzzword-compliant PR.
Are you considered an employer to the people who are "crowdsourcing" behind your API? By their government? Are you taxed on par with everyone else over there? Are you paying any kind of benefits on behalf of your "sustainably" employed workers, or do you free ride on whatever the local taxes are covering?
You mention you employ "engineers" and "medical students". If your project is indeed "sustainable", you should ensure not only that the people you hire can live "sustainable" lives (which, in the absence of other definitions basically means not starve to death), but pay enough so that their society as a whole can recoup the marginal expense for education, etc. on every dollar of revenue that you're paying them. When you say "sustainable" and claim "social mission", how do you factor those social costs into the wages that you pay?
How you determine what is "fair"? Do you just put a "task" and a "wage" and let people hire themselves? How do you manage shortage or excess of labor?
Your site mentions that your service helps people "develop" skills. From reading the page, which is rather thin on detail, it seems you claim to do so because you "keep the workforce happy". Excuse me, but that sounds like so much bullshit and PR. Can you give specific examples beside the "trickle-down" logic that you assume?
Without knowing the circumstances, your argument doesn't make sense at all. "Cheap" and "expensive" are relative concepts, and both are quite orthogonal to availability of resources. If an area does not have available the resources to build a comprehensive grid, or does not have the size to achieve economies of scale that would justify a grid, or having the grid in the area creates more problems than benefits, a piecemeal solution like may still provide a useful service, even if the unit costs would be higher than the average unit costs would be in a (different) area where grid is available. Also, why so angry?
Do you really think that... disaster recovery efforts give a flying f about being green
Some of them do. I watched recently a documentary about a Japanese soap company who was helping a fire department in Kyushu to develop "green" extinguisher foam. They managed to make biodegradable, non-polluting foam that has the properties of the stuff used to extinguish industrial fires with (which is apparently quite bad for the environment), and they now can make it just as cheaply. I can't see a downside.
Now, if the Japanese companies could learn to market their products effectively abroad...
I'm sorry, you should have read this as "I don't understand how can I use analogies to explain unrelated phenomena". Try education, it may or may not help.
The right answer is that climatology as a physics discipline has nothing at all to do with quantum mechanics, it is a purely "classical" physics field. But I admire how you use big words.
Good question. Can you enlighten us in sufficient detail, starting with satisfactory models of the two unexplained systems the weather is sandwiched between -- that would be the Sun and the warm Earth core?
There's a slight difference between Newton's theory and the theory of global warming, though.
Newton's theory was proven to describe natural events correctly within the attainable margins of error at the time. It helped explain very precisely a ton of hitherto unexplained events like tides, movements of planets, stars, galaxies, galaxy clusters, it explained how stars form, etc. It gave us the first indication that light had a finite speed, and a first estimate of that speed.
You may not have felt it, but a large body was found beyond Uranus purely by calculations, based on the predictions that Newton's theory made.
When that theory was eventually found to be wrong in some circumstances, the new theory that came to replace it was still identical where the differences in the assumptions of the two didn't matter. That is quite different from the state of climatology today, where we have not just problems, but fundamental science problems -- i.e. the kind of problems that a discipline like climatology cannot solve.
If you need a working theory of climate, you don't need to put more money into "climatology" or similar witchcraft, except for the collection of more and more precise data. What you need is to do more research of the hard, unsolved fundamental problems that prevent us from building working climate models. That would be another physics field where Newton dabbed, less successfully though -- fluid mechanics. Without good theory of fluid motion, you cannot have a working model of the Sun, and you cannot have a working model of the climate, or of the weather.
And until we have the kind of understanding of how fluids move that Newton gave us of gravity, "climatology" will remain a "science" in the same way history, politics or economics are, with similar levels of precision.
If a very smart guy gets you involved, involvement is much better than isolationism. Consider the case of one Franklin Roosevelt, and his masterful steering of world politics into and out of WWII, which moved the US from a backwater to a superpower, and ruined or bankrupted several colonial empires in the process. The plunder and the influence gained in the 30s and the 40s lasted for nearly 40 years.
But Bush was fighting very effectively in Iraq. Was Saddam killed in the first hours of the war, or was he executed by a kangaroo court years down the road?
a freaking [congressional] revolution... could change government views
I am not sure why you think the government would be opposing itself. What would be the motivation of Congress to revolt? Most of the views of the government on the effects of internet communication platforms are formed within the Congress (and the legislative branch elsewhere). Sometimes the executive government nudges the legislative, sometimes it is the other way around, but overall the two branches are pretty much sharing the same views.
No, I don't blog and I do not distribute videos, most of them are too... unsuitable for distribution. If you want schematics, etc. we can work something out. It wasn't rocket science thing, really, just two buzzers on the pwm outputs and some electronics to measure distance and direction. And it wasn't a "new sense", ever since the dog got deaf and nearly blind it relied mostly on smell and touch to get around anyway.
Basically, a controller (I used an atmega chip with an arduino bootloader) that sends pings and moves the motors stronger as the obstacle is closer. Mounted it on the head of the dog, and had the two vibration motors on two sides of the chest. The dog had it figured out in less than a day.
The only "hard" part is that if you go DIY all the way, you'll need an oscilloscope to build the ultrasonic sensor thing, otherwise it is rather simple.
Google seems to agree with GP: the query sewage drug use returns a lot of hits to research that looks legit on the surface and seems to confirm that drugs are indeed found in sewage. Nothing specifically about DC in the first few results, but it is not impossible that you find something relevant if you dig in.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks, guys, for the hints, but I was just looking for pointers to sites with sample configurations.
Kind of tangentially on-topic (wink-wink), but ... I am planning to upgrade my home server machine, which has been humming not so quietly since 2003. Sadly, I have not much dabbed in PC hardware since then -- do you guys know any online references with example configuration for decent, quiet machines to use as a starting point? My basic requirements are ecc registered ram, a terabyte or so of some kind of raid, a quad CPU and a well-supported video running Linux and, very occasionally, an odd windows instance in VirtualBox. TIA for any opinions.
Only those that communicate through Pakistani ISPs.
Well, since you chose to advertise here, you can perhaps answer several questions.
How do you define the "sustainable" word that appears on your page? What does it mean, technically, in monetary terms? Minimum wage? X% over minimum wage? "Enough to sustain a person at poverty line +X% if he works 8 hours a day for us"? Or something else? Since you brag about it, you owe us some explanation. Without it your website looks like so much buzzword-compliant PR.
Are you considered an employer to the people who are "crowdsourcing" behind your API? By their government? Are you taxed on par with everyone else over there? Are you paying any kind of benefits on behalf of your "sustainably" employed workers, or do you free ride on whatever the local taxes are covering?
You mention you employ "engineers" and "medical students". If your project is indeed "sustainable", you should ensure not only that the people you hire can live "sustainable" lives (which, in the absence of other definitions basically means not starve to death), but pay enough so that their society as a whole can recoup the marginal expense for education, etc. on every dollar of revenue that you're paying them. When you say "sustainable" and claim "social mission", how do you factor those social costs into the wages that you pay?
How you determine what is "fair"? Do you just put a "task" and a "wage" and let people hire themselves? How do you manage shortage or excess of labor?
Your site mentions that your service helps people "develop" skills. From reading the page, which is rather thin on detail, it seems you claim to do so because you "keep the workforce happy". Excuse me, but that sounds like so much bullshit and PR. Can you give specific examples beside the "trickle-down" logic that you assume?
Without knowing the circumstances, your argument doesn't make sense at all. "Cheap" and "expensive" are relative concepts, and both are quite orthogonal to availability of resources. If an area does not have available the resources to build a comprehensive grid, or does not have the size to achieve economies of scale that would justify a grid, or having the grid in the area creates more problems than benefits, a piecemeal solution like may still provide a useful service, even if the unit costs would be higher than the average unit costs would be in a (different) area where grid is available. Also, why so angry?
Do you really think that ... disaster recovery efforts give a flying f about being green
Some of them do. I watched recently a documentary about a Japanese soap company who was helping a fire department in Kyushu to develop "green" extinguisher foam. They managed to make biodegradable, non-polluting foam that has the properties of the stuff used to extinguish industrial fires with (which is apparently quite bad for the environment), and they now can make it just as cheaply. I can't see a downside.
Now, if the Japanese companies could learn to market their products effectively abroad ...
I'm sorry, you should have read this as "I don't understand how can I use analogies to explain unrelated phenomena". Try education, it may or may not help.
The right answer is that climatology as a physics discipline has nothing at all to do with quantum mechanics, it is a purely "classical" physics field. But I admire how you use big words.
Fucking climate change, how does it work?
Good question. Can you enlighten us in sufficient detail, starting with satisfactory models of the two unexplained systems the weather is sandwiched between -- that would be the Sun and the warm Earth core?
There's a slight difference between Newton's theory and the theory of global warming, though.
Newton's theory was proven to describe natural events correctly within the attainable margins of error at the time. It helped explain very precisely a ton of hitherto unexplained events like tides, movements of planets, stars, galaxies, galaxy clusters, it explained how stars form, etc. It gave us the first indication that light had a finite speed, and a first estimate of that speed.
You may not have felt it, but a large body was found beyond Uranus purely by calculations, based on the predictions that Newton's theory made.
When that theory was eventually found to be wrong in some circumstances, the new theory that came to replace it was still identical where the differences in the assumptions of the two didn't matter. That is quite different from the state of climatology today, where we have not just problems, but fundamental science problems -- i.e. the kind of problems that a discipline like climatology cannot solve.
If you need a working theory of climate, you don't need to put more money into "climatology" or similar witchcraft, except for the collection of more and more precise data. What you need is to do more research of the hard, unsolved fundamental problems that prevent us from building working climate models. That would be another physics field where Newton dabbed, less successfully though -- fluid mechanics. Without good theory of fluid motion, you cannot have a working model of the Sun, and you cannot have a working model of the climate, or of the weather.
And until we have the kind of understanding of how fluids move that Newton gave us of gravity, "climatology" will remain a "science" in the same way history, politics or economics are, with similar levels of precision.
If a very smart guy gets you involved, involvement is much better than isolationism. Consider the case of one Franklin Roosevelt, and his masterful steering of world politics into and out of WWII, which moved the US from a backwater to a superpower, and ruined or bankrupted several colonial empires in the process. The plunder and the influence gained in the 30s and the 40s lasted for nearly 40 years.
You honestly can't tell the difference between people making money and getting free money? Like this? http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-21/wall-street-aristocracy-got-1-2-trillion-in-fed-s-secret-loans.html. You're cute.
But Bush was fighting very effectively in Iraq. Was Saddam killed in the first hours of the war, or was he executed by a kangaroo court years down the road?
Childish or not, I am still too sad about the dog dying, and I am not really comfortable watching, editing, uploading stuff about it.
You should read the FA. For now, it is restored, as in "available where it was not until recently".
I agree, they are totally disgusting.
The keyboard is mightier than the flick knife, eh?
a freaking [congressional] revolution ... could change government views
I am not sure why you think the government would be opposing itself. What would be the motivation of Congress to revolt? Most of the views of the government on the effects of internet communication platforms are formed within the Congress (and the legislative branch elsewhere). Sometimes the executive government nudges the legislative, sometimes it is the other way around, but overall the two branches are pretty much sharing the same views.
Dogs tend go deaf when they get old. Mine went completely deaf at 14, about 5 years ago.
No, I don't blog and I do not distribute videos, most of them are too ... unsuitable for distribution. If you want schematics, etc. we can work something out. It wasn't rocket science thing, really, just two buzzers on the pwm outputs and some electronics to measure distance and direction. And it wasn't a "new sense", ever since the dog got deaf and nearly blind it relied mostly on smell and touch to get around anyway.
I a circuit like this one
Doh ... I ACCIDENTALY a circuit like this one. The whole thing. Used, I mean.
I did something similar for my blind dog, which it used for a year before it died earlier this year. I a circuit like this one as starting point: http://www.kerrywong.com/2011/01/22/a-sensitive-diy-ultrasonic-range-sensor, and a cheap vibration motor like this one: https://www.dealextreme.com/p/repair-parts-vibration-motor-for-iphone-4-73348, but you can use a parallax PING module or something similar.
Basically, a controller (I used an atmega chip with an arduino bootloader) that sends pings and moves the motors stronger as the obstacle is closer. Mounted it on the head of the dog, and had the two vibration motors on two sides of the chest. The dog had it figured out in less than a day.
The only "hard" part is that if you go DIY all the way, you'll need an oscilloscope to build the ultrasonic sensor thing, otherwise it is rather simple.
Google seems to agree with GP: the query sewage drug use returns a lot of hits to research that looks legit on the surface and seems to confirm that drugs are indeed found in sewage. Nothing specifically about DC in the first few results, but it is not impossible that you find something relevant if you dig in.
Confirmation bias .
I remember they pushed them up when the Shuttle retirement was announced.