One thing I never see mentioned in these discussions of bandwidth, especially cable Internet bandwidth, is that the DOCSIS standard quite clearly provides for cable Internet providers to utilize more than one cable channel slot for packet service. Do they do that? Not as far as I know, and definitely not in the Time Warner Houston service area where I first signed up. I've been paying a total of about $140 a month incl taxes for a static IP cable Internet feed. Having read the DOCSIS standard and the Cisco technical data I would have thought that people with business accounts, paying 3-4 times what residential subscribers pay, would be fed through a different channel. Nope. If some kiddies down the block get busy downloading MP3s or movies, my business bandwidth will go in the crapper. It's generally pretty good but I've measured it at times slower than a dialup. A bad dialup.
I once got to talk with the inner sanctum of technical support in the Houston area. The guy quite frankly confirmed that just one channel is in use for Internet. They deliver tons of channels of pure crap, but use only one for Internet.
So the next time you experience bandwidth clog on your cable segment, or want to formulate a position regarding cable bandwidth, just remember that just one of those junk channels like Home Shopping for Lesbian Dwarfs with HIV or Home Gardening for Locations between 35.5 and 35.6 degrees North Latitude or those pay-per-view channels that no one watches, could double the Internet bandwidth in every head-end segment.
But cable companies have never shown signs of intelligent life.
I don't know enough about hard drives to know why they don't have variable read speeds and why the head needs to be moved off of the platter when the disk spins down
The heads have to be moved off the platter(s) during spindown so they don't crash. The heads "fly" breathtakingly close to the platters only when the platters are spinning at speed.
I imagine variable speeds with heads loaded isn't done for the same reason: Probably a fairly tight range of RPM that will keep the heads flying properly.
Care to explain the actual difference between "County Police" and "Sheriff's Department"?
Here's the essential difference: Sheriffs are elected. In fact, the County Sheriff is the highest elected law enforcement official in the land, if we don't count Attorneys General that may be elected in some States.
Pretty much all other "police" are under appointed leadership. Appointed leadership is a cutout for the policitians, someone who can be blamed and discharged. A Sheriff who pisses people off probably won't be reelected, and there is no cutout on which he can place blame for a screwup.
Another possible difference is that all the Sheriff's "stuff" is his personal responsibility while he is in office. The jail is his jail. The deputies' cars are his cars. There is a level of personal responsibility not known in other law enforcement structures.
So what you're saying is if society as a whole broke the speed limits, then laws against speeding would be unjust?
Except when politicians meddle, the standard engineering approach to setting speed limits is to actually measure the speeds at which people drive on particular sections of road and then apply a standard forumula to derive what the posted speed limit should be.
So yes, society tends to set the speed limits by how people drive.
And ultimately, that aside, no law can be enforced which is considered unjust by a significant portion of society. If nothing else, the way the mathematics of the 12-person jury work, about 5% of the population can prevent convictions in about 50% of cases. Long before the government loses 50% of a given type of case, they will find an excuse to take the law off the books. The Runaway Slave Act and Prohibition both fell to growing reluctance of juries to convict.
Isn't it going to be a hell of a note if all the hardware companies get out of the hardware business and into something like services? Then the only people who will be making chips and boxes will be the Chinese, and their chips will be knock-offs of some retro CPU, such as happened with digital watch chips. The digital watch and clock chips at the low end are all the same, based on the coupla-button LED watches of (when? the 1970s?). Even my moderately expensive vehicle has one of those for a dashboard clock.
Maybe you should read IBM's Numa-Q paper that explains why ordinary CPUs don't scale to more than about 30 without the increasing demands of cache invalidations overcoming the advantages of more processors. I think IBM's whole point of starting to put two processors on a die with shared cache is aimed at scaling within that cache invalidation problem. Maybe for cache invalidation purposes the pair of processor (or four, say) can behave like one, and maybe the point of diminishing returns approaches 30 of the multi-CPU chips, as in 60 or 120 for dual and quad, respectively. If Sun tried to fly in the face of this rule, their 72-processor box must have creaked along doing little else but cache invalidations.
I currently live in Texas and have had a summer electricity bill of over $400 for one month, last year.
I, too, live in Texas, near Houston. My year-round balanced billing is $416 per month. A/C is the largest energy outlay we have in these parts. For those of us who live in the usual subdivisions there is no option to make a funny-looking house. Even putting up photovoltaic panels may run into a fight with the homeowner association, but I expect that over time the legislature will help us out there.
Many of us also have a space problem. My place is on about 1/8 acre. To make a dent in my electricity bill I'd have to fill the back yard with ground-standing collectors (not a problem -- we don't use the yard for anything) and put them on several sides of the house, garage and breezeway roofs. Even then I'm not sure how much of a dent it would make. The last quote I got from a website calculator operated by a supplier of photovoltaic systems was about $70K and wouldn't have even reduced my bill by half.
Oh, yeah... for those of you who think it's possible to live without A/C, you don't know Texas. Tract homes here become uninhabitable in summer within four hours of the A/C going out. No amount of fans can help when it's 100 degrees outside in blazing sun and the house becomes like a broiler.
I'd be very happy to put in a photovoltaic system if I had the money, regardless of whether it would save money in a full financial analysis. It would remove that part of my electricity usage from future rate hikes and give me the smug satisfaction of paying less to the utility. My dream is to make myself a Bacardi and Coke, stroll out back to the bidirectional electronic meter, and sip my drink and giggle as I watch it run backward.
It's going to take some breakthroughs. What happened to that company featured here in an article last year, the one that developed a holographic technology that promised to reduce the cost and price of photovoltaics by 30-70%? They said they hoped to get to market in early 2007.
No, that's not the way Net Metering works, and Net Metering is the law in 30-something States. With Net Metering, an updated meter runs forward and backward. If you generate more than you use during the day, you put the excess into the grid. You pull it out at night. At the end of the month you have a "net usage" that reflects what you used less what you put back in. You pay the standard rate on your net usage. If your net usage is negative (unlikely unless you have a huge photovoltaic farm), you don't get paid for the excess you put into the grid.
There have been other schemes, including paying the customer the "avoided cost" of generating the electricity he put back into the grid, but Net Metering seems to have displaced those schemes.
Net Metering allows you to use the grid as your battery. You pay for the net usage over the billing period. While it doesn't protect you against utility power outages, it saves a bundle on battery maintenance and replacement.
This is the same and only scandal in eve excluding players scamming other players. Its just someone else posting the same rehash of the same old information.
Wrong. You're confusing this with the previous scandal, in February. This one involves new allegations of new events, although the alleged incestuous relationship between CCP staff and a certain in-game alliance is similar.
If you'd like to protest, but don't want to flat-out quit yet, just cancel the autorenewal on your account. The "cancel account" link on the "my account" page will simply stop your account from autorenewing; it won't lock you out of the game until the end of the pay period. You can always change your mind before then and it still sends an effective message to CCP.
I'll go you one better: change from credit card billing, which automatically renews, to using GTC (Game Time Cards). There are several legitimate websites that sell them. The GTC doesn't automatically renew. You have to make a conscious decision to buy another one. Use 30-day GTCs. That way if CCP pisses you off, just delay buying your next GTC(s) a day, a week, or forever. Each day your account is inactive you're effectively fining CCP some money.
The expired account loses nothing. CCP has a diabolically clever way of luring you back into the game: they state that your character and skills, etc. will remain in the game for six months. Some people report that they have gone way more than six months and still found everything there when they returned. Why does CCP do this? Because if you lost everything you might not want to go back.
If you allow an account to expire, set a long training item first. The training is real time and will continue until that step has completed. This, too, works to CCP's benefit in most cases, as otherwise people who must leave the game temporarily would be discouraged at the loss of training and might not come back.
If you want to provide feedback, cancel your account before it expires, even if just five minutes before. All "cancel" does is suspend the account when your current time runs out, but it provides a feedback mechanism that lets you tell them why you're leaving. Since that is the moment of your action on the decision to leave and thus to affect their revenue, one has to think it has more weight than mere threats to leave in the forums or in petitions.
To those who say, "It's just a GAME," you have no idea what you're talking about. Nothing that involves the investment of significant time and effort is "just a game." Suppose we take away that nice new website you've built and say, "Hey, it's just some files!" Suppose you are a painter and we burn your paintings and say, "Hey, it's just canvas with paint on it!" Or we make your music collection disappear? EVE is not mere passive entertainment such as listening to music, watching a movie or watching a sporting event; it is an entertaining endeavor that requires significant learning, attention, time and effort. If it works the way it has been billed and the way we expect it to work, it is very good. If it's fraudulent, that destroys all or part of the value of the time and effort we put into it, and yes, we'll be pissed.
Email is essential to my busines. It's not a luxury; not an option. I run my own mail server, have a large, explicit IP block list, use the SpamHaus dynamic blocking, and use SpamBayes on my email client with whitelisting in the client. Almost no spam ever reaches my inbox.
aren't you better off letting those who designed the hardware write the software that talks to it?
No, because their orientation is hardware, not software. This has been evident in almost all specialty hardware from PBXs to RAID controllers to video cards. It seems that the engineers don't understand software and engineering management thinks so little of the necessary software that they give the tasks of writing drivers and utilities to the most junior engineers. The result is often an amateurish, incomplete, often buggy piece of software. Engineering organizations are also big on keeping what code they produce proprietary. It's a natural result of their secretive hardware orientation. They think in terms of patents and trade secrets. This comes from the culture of engineering. It's not going to change quickly or easily.
As has been pointed out here and there before, science is not about consensus. The consensus used to be that Earth was the center of the universe, the center of the solar system, that the Earth was flat, etc. Consensus has been at the center of the worst pseudoscientific fallacies and the suppression of real science.
That the global-warming-induced-by-humankind movement relies so heavily on alleged consensus to shut up its opposition is strong evidence that it is based on junk science.
Wow, that's some tech note. Just imagine having your grandmother read it so she can better understand how to cope with SP2. But call her doctor and an undertaker first.
Then we have the ubiquitous and stupid '20 year life' bullshit. Why 20 years? Does every wind turbine automatically self destruct after 20 years?
From what I've seen, the low end stuff falls apart or burns up long before 20 years.
Do the blades AND the alternator AND the control electronics ALL have to fall to pieces by that time?
Uh... yes. Some guy in North or South Dakota has (had?) a pretty neat website. He obviously had too much time and money on his hands and spent it putting up wind generators, some on masts as tall as 60 feet. His maintenance records are a real eye-opener. Blades erode, blades come off, rings burn up, alternators burn up, wires burn up, units just go dead, and most of what he has tried has had to go back to the factory at least once. One of his units came entirely off the mast and plunged to the ground. Most amazing to me, though, was the damage the blades suffer... erosion of the leading edge, delamination of the material, etc.
Never hear of REPAIR?
Did you ever think through the time, trouble and possibly money to take a wind generator down for service. Damn, it's difficult enough to work on one's own car, and that stays right there on the ground.
If a blade breaks, (highly unlikely) then put on another one.
If a blade breaks, there's a fair chance the unit is going to suffer more damage than just the blade. In any case the mast will have to be lowered and the unit serviced on the ground. Think money... lots of money.
Backyard wind power is utterly impractical unless you have no neighbors near your back yard and your back yard is acres large. In typical subdivisions it's entirely out of the question.
Microhydroelectric is similary impractical for most of us, although it doesn't present the danger to nearby humans and animals that wind generators seem to do. Moving parts are the killer. Cars work because of billions in engineering and 100 years of learning by making mistakes. Early automobiles on long trips had to have a mechanic along to work on the engine. Low-end wind power is about where automobiles were 100 years ago.
Photovoltaic is the only way to go. No moving parts and proven technology with typical maintenance-free periods of 10-20 years. And if repairs are necessary, they are mostly within reach. No sound is emitted, neighbors and animals are not in danger, insurance won't refuse to cover your property, etc.
Windmills in the back yard are almost exclusively suggested by people who have never seriously looked into them much less tried to use them.
But that's just becasue of Texas homestead laws, and probably doesn't apply to every state.
No, I don't think that has anything to do with Texas homestead laws -- it has to do with the basic notions of real property in the U.S., case law and the common law. No one can form a HOA around you and force you into it. There is a huge amount of ignorance in this discussion as many of the posters seem to think that an HOA can be formed around one and one be forced into it. The fact is that the kinds of neighborhoods of which they seem to be thinking, where there are other homeowners "around," are generally already subdivisions with a HOA.
OTOH... and it's a big OTOH... nothing prevents residents of an unincorporated county area from forming together to incorporate a city, town or village. Once they do that they can set up things like zoning ordinances and a zoning board. If anyone thinks HOAs suck rocks, try a zoning board. There are places, expecially in the NE U.S., where the zoning boards DO tell people what colors they can paint their houses, etc.
The bad rep of HOAs is justly earned entirely due to the apathy and inaction of the majority of their owner/voters. When no one wants to be on the Board or the committees, guess who are the only people with the time and inclination to run the HOA? HOA Nazis and busybodies, mostly people who have no power in their real lives. They are essentially the same mentalities as the people who stake out territories in USENET channels and other forum-like places on the Internetand on BBSs before the Internet and run everyone off who disagrees with them. If they had anything useful to do in their real lives they probably wouldn't have time to participate in the management of the HOA.
Of course it's entirely different in government... no, wait...
The laws of the state required them to inform me that there was a homeowner's association , but unfortunately, the homeowner's association rules required that you sign the document at closing, but that you weren't allowed to view the rules before closing.
I believe that is utter nonsense. Anyone can get the bylaws of the HOA corporation and the deed restrictions before making an offer on a house. There may be a nominal fee for the trouble of making and mailing the copies, but they are always available.
Can they really force you to join a homeowners association after you've bought a house? I've never heard of this kind of thing, but I imagine that you could fight it in court.
I don't know how it's done in other States (IDKHDOS) but in Texas the HOA is usually formed by the developer at the time of the subdivision of the land. Such developments are commonly referred to here as "subdivisions." The new deeds to the individual lots contain the provision for automatic, mandatory membership of the owner and any future owner in the HOA and the requirement to pay the annual membership dues. The deeds also contain restrictions on the uses of the lots and requirements to keep the grounds and building(s) well maintained. The system surrounding deed restrictions is so effective that Houston is often said to have no system of zoning. It does, but nothing as detailed as can be found in many places in the NE U.S. The closing documents include the HOA bylaws and deed restrictions and a separate statement of regulations and collection policy that the HOA can file with the State. Anyone considering purchase of a property in a deed-restricted community is free to examine the documents before making any offer but they will certainly possess the information when they close on the property.
After formation of the subdivision the developer occupies the HOA Director positions until minima of lot sales and time have been met, then the new owners elect their own Boards. I think the transfer of Board positions may be gradual in some or all cases. There may be a time specified by law, maybe 20 or 30 years, after which the HOA cannot enforce its continued existence. I've heard of that but have not confirmed it. The subdivision where I live is 28 years old and is surrounded by older and younger ones.
In Texas, at least, the HOAs have the power to take lot owners to court to enforce the deed restrictions and qualifying HOA regulations, including levying fines, and ultimately through foreclosing on the offending property and selling it at public auction. State law and the courts give the HOAs the advantage over the individual homeowner. One particularly nasty HOA to the NW of Houston got a lot of bad press a few years ago when they foreclosed on an 80-something-year-old lady who was $400-something behind in her HOA dues for her six-figure house. That stirred up such a shitstorm that the HOA backed down. The powers of HOAs do need to be curtailed. I think a recent study found that the worst abuses of the power to foreclose were perpetrated by HOAs -- more foreclosures than by banks and mortgage companies. Something like that.
In general, but not in all cases, the older the subdivision, the more relaxed the enforcement of deed restrictions and regulations. I live in one I used to hate but a palace coup of sorts put a better Board in place some 4-5 years ago and things have been a lot saner since. After being here over 15 years and putting up with nonsense from the HOA I finally began attending meetings and quickly found myself appointed to a vacant Board position. It happened a little late for me to have much to do to make the HOA a more neighbor-friendly entity, but I continue on anyway to reduce the chance of bad hats and busybodies getting in control again.
I have never personally heard of a HOA being formed around existing property owners. I can't imagine how that could be done, legally, without the foundation being in the deeds to begin with.
I have, however, heard of HOAs going defunct. The HOA is usually a corporation and can't take anyone to court to enforce its dues collection or its rules if its corporate standing with the State has lapsed. R/E agents list properties in such subdivisions as "unrestricted" even though the deed restrictions still exist, because nothing is enforceable except by individual action by other property owners, few of whom want to go to the expense. My company bought a residential property near here in a subdivision with a defunct HOA, making the property for most practical purposes restriction-free. We use it as an office and we like to think we're good neighbors and that we increase the security of the neighborhood.
Where do you buy these raid controllers that do not require drivers?
Various places. Host-independent RAID controllers don't live on the PCI bus -- they are connected by SCSI or Fibre Channel or FireWire. On that channel they present ordinary disk drive interfaces. The PC or server and its OS are happy as long as they can operate the I/O controller involved.
The reason many servers and highish-end raid controllers don't need drivers off a floppy drive is that their time-to-market is so long that Microsoft gets the driver onto the install CD before the hardware even gets to the mass market. If you're using anything newer than the OS install disk (this goes for Linux too) you need a seperate driver that knows the PCI ID of the card you're using.
That may be true as far as it goes, but it still presumes that special knowledge of the RAID is required by the OS, i.e. a driver. But low-end host-independent RAID doesn't look like RAID to the host; it looks like one or more ordinary disk drives. Even high-end RAID like the EMC Symmetrix enterprise RAID can look like ordinary drives to a host. So if the host can talk to drives, it can talk to RAID.
The RAID magic is done out of sight of the host. The RAID controller is configured through its own interface. It has another completely separate SCSI or FC or SATA channel or channels for the drives. The host can't see the drives, only the virtual drives configured for it to see. The RAID controller manages the drives as one or more RAID arrays... usually RAID1 (mirrored) or RAID5 (striped with distributed parity) and sometimes with combinations of one of those with RAID0 (just plain striped). The aggregate space yielded by an array can be partitioned, and the partitions mapped to IDs on the host channel for the host to see and use. Thus if it has multiple host ports, a host-independent RAID can serve more than one host with completely separate areas of its RAID space.
The RAID controller may also be able to map physical drives on its drive chain(s) to IDs on its host channels. This could allow one to massively back up the entire RAID in one operation with one backup tool even though the partitions in it might contain file space for completely different hosts and OSs. Of course if one does that, every bit of every drive has to be backed up, while backups done by each host and OS would usually back up only files that exist. The RAID itself doesn't know about files or file systems, though... only fault-tolerant RAID arrays and the raw "disk" space they present to the hosts on the host channels.
Other advantages of host-independent RAID include the fact that the entire RAID can be brought up and its arrays brought "online" without any host at all. This is useful if the RAID or a drive gets into trouble, by allowing one to separate the RAID from the rest of the system to check it out. Fault tolerant arrays can be verified offline in this manner. Also, the RAID can easily be connected to a known working host for further testing. As long as you don't write anything to it, it will remain in a stable condition for reconnection to its original host(s) after problem determination. Also, things like rebuild of a replaced drive can be done offline, since they don't involve the host anyway.
About six years ago I began buying Ultra-Wide (40 MB/sec) and then Ultra2-Wide (80 MB/sec) host-independent RAID units on eBay. They became available because the heavy users, many of them audio and video editing operations, were moving up to leading edge technology, first to Ultra2-Wide, then later to Ultra-160 and beyond. With each move in those industries a bunch of the older RAID units would come up for sale. All of that seems to have pretty well dried up in the last year or two. I picked up dozens of them over the years and later scoured the distributors and resellers and found some unsold stock and picked that up, too.
No additional drivers of any kind are required as long as the platform sees the RAID or JBOD drive(s) as regular drives. I use SCSI. External RAID is SCSI-SCSI and partitions are mapped to IDs on the host channel. I have no install issues with any OS and no need for diskette.
I use host-independent RAID and JBOD on a variety of systems. In all cases the host can't tell the difference between what I hook up and the internal drive it replaces. If the PC looks to the OS like it has a C: drive or an hda/sda drive, no floppy should be required. OTOH if you insist on using motherboard RAID or internal PCI RAID or software RAID, you deserve what happens to you.
Slashdot Mirror
Except for the titanic flaw that a core national defense computer is NOT going to have dial-in ports on the PSTN.
"We're in!"
In your dreams, hacker monkey.
One thing I never see mentioned in these discussions of bandwidth, especially cable Internet bandwidth, is that the DOCSIS standard quite clearly provides for cable Internet providers to utilize more than one cable channel slot for packet service. Do they do that? Not as far as I know, and definitely not in the Time Warner Houston service area where I first signed up. I've been paying a total of about $140 a month incl taxes for a static IP cable Internet feed. Having read the DOCSIS standard and the Cisco technical data I would have thought that people with business accounts, paying 3-4 times what residential subscribers pay, would be fed through a different channel. Nope. If some kiddies down the block get busy downloading MP3s or movies, my business bandwidth will go in the crapper. It's generally pretty good but I've measured it at times slower than a dialup. A bad dialup.
I once got to talk with the inner sanctum of technical support in the Houston area. The guy quite frankly confirmed that just one channel is in use for Internet. They deliver tons of channels of pure crap, but use only one for Internet.
So the next time you experience bandwidth clog on your cable segment, or want to formulate a position regarding cable bandwidth, just remember that just one of those junk channels like Home Shopping for Lesbian Dwarfs with HIV or Home Gardening for Locations between 35.5 and 35.6 degrees North Latitude or those pay-per-view channels that no one watches, could double the Internet bandwidth in every head-end segment.
But cable companies have never shown signs of intelligent life.
The heads have to be moved off the platter(s) during spindown so they don't crash. The heads "fly" breathtakingly close to the platters only when the platters are spinning at speed.
I imagine variable speeds with heads loaded isn't done for the same reason: Probably a fairly tight range of RPM that will keep the heads flying properly.
Here's the essential difference: Sheriffs are elected. In fact, the County Sheriff is the highest elected law enforcement official in the land, if we don't count Attorneys General that may be elected in some States.
Pretty much all other "police" are under appointed leadership. Appointed leadership is a cutout for the policitians, someone who can be blamed and discharged. A Sheriff who pisses people off probably won't be reelected, and there is no cutout on which he can place blame for a screwup. Another possible difference is that all the Sheriff's "stuff" is his personal responsibility while he is in office. The jail is his jail. The deputies' cars are his cars. There is a level of personal responsibility not known in other law enforcement structures.Yeah, to operate it and make it seamless and no pain in the ass whatsoever it would probably require the use of something like, oh, maybe a COMPUTER.
Except when politicians meddle, the standard engineering approach to setting speed limits is to actually measure the speeds at which people drive on particular sections of road and then apply a standard forumula to derive what the posted speed limit should be.
So yes, society tends to set the speed limits by how people drive.
And ultimately, that aside, no law can be enforced which is considered unjust by a significant portion of society. If nothing else, the way the mathematics of the 12-person jury work, about 5% of the population can prevent convictions in about 50% of cases. Long before the government loses 50% of a given type of case, they will find an excuse to take the law off the books. The Runaway Slave Act and Prohibition both fell to growing reluctance of juries to convict.
Isn't it going to be a hell of a note if all the hardware companies get out of the hardware business and into something like services? Then the only people who will be making chips and boxes will be the Chinese, and their chips will be knock-offs of some retro CPU, such as happened with digital watch chips. The digital watch and clock chips at the low end are all the same, based on the coupla-button LED watches of (when? the 1970s?). Even my moderately expensive vehicle has one of those for a dashboard clock.
Maybe you should read IBM's Numa-Q paper that explains why ordinary CPUs don't scale to more than about 30 without the increasing demands of cache invalidations overcoming the advantages of more processors. I think IBM's whole point of starting to put two processors on a die with shared cache is aimed at scaling within that cache invalidation problem. Maybe for cache invalidation purposes the pair of processor (or four, say) can behave like one, and maybe the point of diminishing returns approaches 30 of the multi-CPU chips, as in 60 or 120 for dual and quad, respectively. If Sun tried to fly in the face of this rule, their 72-processor box must have creaked along doing little else but cache invalidations.
You should have your head examined.
BTW, there is no such thing as federal property tax. Property taxes in the U.S. are levied under State authority, usually at the County level.
I, too, live in Texas, near Houston. My year-round balanced billing is $416 per month. A/C is the largest energy outlay we have in these parts. For those of us who live in the usual subdivisions there is no option to make a funny-looking house. Even putting up photovoltaic panels may run into a fight with the homeowner association, but I expect that over time the legislature will help us out there.
Many of us also have a space problem. My place is on about 1/8 acre. To make a dent in my electricity bill I'd have to fill the back yard with ground-standing collectors (not a problem -- we don't use the yard for anything) and put them on several sides of the house, garage and breezeway roofs. Even then I'm not sure how much of a dent it would make. The last quote I got from a website calculator operated by a supplier of photovoltaic systems was about $70K and wouldn't have even reduced my bill by half.
Oh, yeah... for those of you who think it's possible to live without A/C, you don't know Texas. Tract homes here become uninhabitable in summer within four hours of the A/C going out. No amount of fans can help when it's 100 degrees outside in blazing sun and the house becomes like a broiler.
I'd be very happy to put in a photovoltaic system if I had the money, regardless of whether it would save money in a full financial analysis. It would remove that part of my electricity usage from future rate hikes and give me the smug satisfaction of paying less to the utility. My dream is to make myself a Bacardi and Coke, stroll out back to the bidirectional electronic meter, and sip my drink and giggle as I watch it run backward.
It's going to take some breakthroughs. What happened to that company featured here in an article last year, the one that developed a holographic technology that promised to reduce the cost and price of photovoltaics by 30-70%? They said they hoped to get to market in early 2007.
No, that's not the way Net Metering works, and Net Metering is the law in 30-something States. With Net Metering, an updated meter runs forward and backward. If you generate more than you use during the day, you put the excess into the grid. You pull it out at night. At the end of the month you have a "net usage" that reflects what you used less what you put back in. You pay the standard rate on your net usage. If your net usage is negative (unlikely unless you have a huge photovoltaic farm), you don't get paid for the excess you put into the grid.
There have been other schemes, including paying the customer the "avoided cost" of generating the electricity he put back into the grid, but Net Metering seems to have displaced those schemes.
Net Metering allows you to use the grid as your battery. You pay for the net usage over the billing period. While it doesn't protect you against utility power outages, it saves a bundle on battery maintenance and replacement.
Wrong. You're confusing this with the previous scandal, in February. This one involves new allegations of new events, although the alleged incestuous relationship between CCP staff and a certain in-game alliance is similar.
I'll go you one better: change from credit card billing, which automatically renews, to using GTC (Game Time Cards). There are several legitimate websites that sell them. The GTC doesn't automatically renew. You have to make a conscious decision to buy another one. Use 30-day GTCs. That way if CCP pisses you off, just delay buying your next GTC(s) a day, a week, or forever. Each day your account is inactive you're effectively fining CCP some money.
The expired account loses nothing. CCP has a diabolically clever way of luring you back into the game: they state that your character and skills, etc. will remain in the game for six months. Some people report that they have gone way more than six months and still found everything there when they returned. Why does CCP do this? Because if you lost everything you might not want to go back.
If you allow an account to expire, set a long training item first. The training is real time and will continue until that step has completed. This, too, works to CCP's benefit in most cases, as otherwise people who must leave the game temporarily would be discouraged at the loss of training and might not come back.
If you want to provide feedback, cancel your account before it expires, even if just five minutes before. All "cancel" does is suspend the account when your current time runs out, but it provides a feedback mechanism that lets you tell them why you're leaving. Since that is the moment of your action on the decision to leave and thus to affect their revenue, one has to think it has more weight than mere threats to leave in the forums or in petitions.
To those who say, "It's just a GAME," you have no idea what you're talking about. Nothing that involves the investment of significant time and effort is "just a game." Suppose we take away that nice new website you've built and say, "Hey, it's just some files!" Suppose you are a painter and we burn your paintings and say, "Hey, it's just canvas with paint on it!" Or we make your music collection disappear? EVE is not mere passive entertainment such as listening to music, watching a movie or watching a sporting event; it is an entertaining endeavor that requires significant learning, attention, time and effort. If it works the way it has been billed and the way we expect it to work, it is very good. If it's fraudulent, that destroys all or part of the value of the time and effort we put into it, and yes, we'll be pissed.
Email is essential to my busines. It's not a luxury; not an option. I run my own mail server, have a large, explicit IP block list, use the SpamHaus dynamic blocking, and use SpamBayes on my email client with whitelisting in the client. Almost no spam ever reaches my inbox.
No, because their orientation is hardware, not software. This has been evident in almost all specialty hardware from PBXs to RAID controllers to video cards. It seems that the engineers don't understand software and engineering management thinks so little of the necessary software that they give the tasks of writing drivers and utilities to the most junior engineers. The result is often an amateurish, incomplete, often buggy piece of software. Engineering organizations are also big on keeping what code they produce proprietary. It's a natural result of their secretive hardware orientation. They think in terms of patents and trade secrets. This comes from the culture of engineering. It's not going to change quickly or easily.
As has been pointed out here and there before, science is not about consensus. The consensus used to be that Earth was the center of the universe, the center of the solar system, that the Earth was flat, etc. Consensus has been at the center of the worst pseudoscientific fallacies and the suppression of real science.
That the global-warming-induced-by-humankind movement relies so heavily on alleged consensus to shut up its opposition is strong evidence that it is based on junk science.
Wow, that's some tech note. Just imagine having your grandmother read it so she can better understand how to cope with SP2. But call her doctor and an undertaker first.
From what I've seen, the low end stuff falls apart or burns up long before 20 years.
Uh... yes. Some guy in North or South Dakota has (had?) a pretty neat website. He obviously had too much time and money on his hands and spent it putting up wind generators, some on masts as tall as 60 feet. His maintenance records are a real eye-opener. Blades erode, blades come off, rings burn up, alternators burn up, wires burn up, units just go dead, and most of what he has tried has had to go back to the factory at least once. One of his units came entirely off the mast and plunged to the ground. Most amazing to me, though, was the damage the blades suffer... erosion of the leading edge, delamination of the material, etc.
Did you ever think through the time, trouble and possibly money to take a wind generator down for service. Damn, it's difficult enough to work on one's own car, and that stays right there on the ground.
If a blade breaks, there's a fair chance the unit is going to suffer more damage than just the blade. In any case the mast will have to be lowered and the unit serviced on the ground. Think money... lots of money.
Backyard wind power is utterly impractical unless you have no neighbors near your back yard and your back yard is acres large. In typical subdivisions it's entirely out of the question.
Microhydroelectric is similary impractical for most of us, although it doesn't present the danger to nearby humans and animals that wind generators seem to do. Moving parts are the killer. Cars work because of billions in engineering and 100 years of learning by making mistakes. Early automobiles on long trips had to have a mechanic along to work on the engine. Low-end wind power is about where automobiles were 100 years ago.
Photovoltaic is the only way to go. No moving parts and proven technology with typical maintenance-free periods of 10-20 years. And if repairs are necessary, they are mostly within reach. No sound is emitted, neighbors and animals are not in danger, insurance won't refuse to cover your property, etc.
Windmills in the back yard are almost exclusively suggested by people who have never seriously looked into them much less tried to use them.
No, I don't think that has anything to do with Texas homestead laws -- it has to do with the basic notions of real property in the U.S., case law and the common law. No one can form a HOA around you and force you into it. There is a huge amount of ignorance in this discussion as many of the posters seem to think that an HOA can be formed around one and one be forced into it. The fact is that the kinds of neighborhoods of which they seem to be thinking, where there are other homeowners "around," are generally already subdivisions with a HOA.
OTOH... and it's a big OTOH... nothing prevents residents of an unincorporated county area from forming together to incorporate a city, town or village. Once they do that they can set up things like zoning ordinances and a zoning board. If anyone thinks HOAs suck rocks, try a zoning board. There are places, expecially in the NE U.S., where the zoning boards DO tell people what colors they can paint their houses, etc.
The bad rep of HOAs is justly earned entirely due to the apathy and inaction of the majority of their owner/voters. When no one wants to be on the Board or the committees, guess who are the only people with the time and inclination to run the HOA? HOA Nazis and busybodies, mostly people who have no power in their real lives. They are essentially the same mentalities as the people who stake out territories in USENET channels and other forum-like places on the Internetand on BBSs before the Internet and run everyone off who disagrees with them. If they had anything useful to do in their real lives they probably wouldn't have time to participate in the management of the HOA.
Of course it's entirely different in government... no, wait...
I believe that is utter nonsense. Anyone can get the bylaws of the HOA corporation and the deed restrictions before making an offer on a house. There may be a nominal fee for the trouble of making and mailing the copies, but they are always available.
I don't know how it's done in other States (IDKHDOS) but in Texas the HOA is usually formed by the developer at the time of the subdivision of the land. Such developments are commonly referred to here as "subdivisions." The new deeds to the individual lots contain the provision for automatic, mandatory membership of the owner and any future owner in the HOA and the requirement to pay the annual membership dues. The deeds also contain restrictions on the uses of the lots and requirements to keep the grounds and building(s) well maintained. The system surrounding deed restrictions is so effective that Houston is often said to have no system of zoning. It does, but nothing as detailed as can be found in many places in the NE U.S. The closing documents include the HOA bylaws and deed restrictions and a separate statement of regulations and collection policy that the HOA can file with the State. Anyone considering purchase of a property in a deed-restricted community is free to examine the documents before making any offer but they will certainly possess the information when they close on the property.
After formation of the subdivision the developer occupies the HOA Director positions until minima of lot sales and time have been met, then the new owners elect their own Boards. I think the transfer of Board positions may be gradual in some or all cases. There may be a time specified by law, maybe 20 or 30 years, after which the HOA cannot enforce its continued existence. I've heard of that but have not confirmed it. The subdivision where I live is 28 years old and is surrounded by older and younger ones.
In Texas, at least, the HOAs have the power to take lot owners to court to enforce the deed restrictions and qualifying HOA regulations, including levying fines, and ultimately through foreclosing on the offending property and selling it at public auction. State law and the courts give the HOAs the advantage over the individual homeowner. One particularly nasty HOA to the NW of Houston got a lot of bad press a few years ago when they foreclosed on an 80-something-year-old lady who was $400-something behind in her HOA dues for her six-figure house. That stirred up such a shitstorm that the HOA backed down. The powers of HOAs do need to be curtailed. I think a recent study found that the worst abuses of the power to foreclose were perpetrated by HOAs -- more foreclosures than by banks and mortgage companies. Something like that.
In general, but not in all cases, the older the subdivision, the more relaxed the enforcement of deed restrictions and regulations. I live in one I used to hate but a palace coup of sorts put a better Board in place some 4-5 years ago and things have been a lot saner since. After being here over 15 years and putting up with nonsense from the HOA I finally began attending meetings and quickly found myself appointed to a vacant Board position. It happened a little late for me to have much to do to make the HOA a more neighbor-friendly entity, but I continue on anyway to reduce the chance of bad hats and busybodies getting in control again.
I have never personally heard of a HOA being formed around existing property owners. I can't imagine how that could be done, legally, without the foundation being in the deeds to begin with.
I have, however, heard of HOAs going defunct. The HOA is usually a corporation and can't take anyone to court to enforce its dues collection or its rules if its corporate standing with the State has lapsed. R/E agents list properties in such subdivisions as "unrestricted" even though the deed restrictions still exist, because nothing is enforceable except by individual action by other property owners, few of whom want to go to the expense. My company bought a residential property near here in a subdivision with a defunct HOA, making the property for most practical purposes restriction-free. We use it as an office and we like to think we're good neighbors and that we increase the security of the neighborhood.
Various places. Host-independent RAID controllers don't live on the PCI bus -- they are connected by SCSI or Fibre Channel or FireWire. On that channel they present ordinary disk drive interfaces. The PC or server and its OS are happy as long as they can operate the I/O controller involved.
That may be true as far as it goes, but it still presumes that special knowledge of the RAID is required by the OS, i.e. a driver. But low-end host-independent RAID doesn't look like RAID to the host; it looks like one or more ordinary disk drives. Even high-end RAID like the EMC Symmetrix enterprise RAID can look like ordinary drives to a host. So if the host can talk to drives, it can talk to RAID.
The RAID magic is done out of sight of the host. The RAID controller is configured through its own interface. It has another completely separate SCSI or FC or SATA channel or channels for the drives. The host can't see the drives, only the virtual drives configured for it to see. The RAID controller manages the drives as one or more RAID arrays... usually RAID1 (mirrored) or RAID5 (striped with distributed parity) and sometimes with combinations of one of those with RAID0 (just plain striped). The aggregate space yielded by an array can be partitioned, and the partitions mapped to IDs on the host channel for the host to see and use. Thus if it has multiple host ports, a host-independent RAID can serve more than one host with completely separate areas of its RAID space.
The RAID controller may also be able to map physical drives on its drive chain(s) to IDs on its host channels. This could allow one to massively back up the entire RAID in one operation with one backup tool even though the partitions in it might contain file space for completely different hosts and OSs. Of course if one does that, every bit of every drive has to be backed up, while backups done by each host and OS would usually back up only files that exist. The RAID itself doesn't know about files or file systems, though... only fault-tolerant RAID arrays and the raw "disk" space they present to the hosts on the host channels.
Other advantages of host-independent RAID include the fact that the entire RAID can be brought up and its arrays brought "online" without any host at all. This is useful if the RAID or a drive gets into trouble, by allowing one to separate the RAID from the rest of the system to check it out. Fault tolerant arrays can be verified offline in this manner. Also, the RAID can easily be connected to a known working host for further testing. As long as you don't write anything to it, it will remain in a stable condition for reconnection to its original host(s) after problem determination. Also, things like rebuild of a replaced drive can be done offline, since they don't involve the host anyway.
About six years ago I began buying Ultra-Wide (40 MB/sec) and then Ultra2-Wide (80 MB/sec) host-independent RAID units on eBay. They became available because the heavy users, many of them audio and video editing operations, were moving up to leading edge technology, first to Ultra2-Wide, then later to Ultra-160 and beyond. With each move in those industries a bunch of the older RAID units would come up for sale. All of that seems to have pretty well dried up in the last year or two. I picked up dozens of them over the years and later scoured the distributors and resellers and found some unsold stock and picked that up, too.
The types of RAID to whi
No additional drivers of any kind are required as long as the platform sees the RAID or JBOD drive(s) as regular drives. I use SCSI. External RAID is SCSI-SCSI and partitions are mapped to IDs on the host channel. I have no install issues with any OS and no need for diskette.
I use host-independent RAID and JBOD on a variety of systems. In all cases the host can't tell the difference between what I hook up and the internal drive it replaces. If the PC looks to the OS like it has a C: drive or an hda/sda drive, no floppy should be required. OTOH if you insist on using motherboard RAID or internal PCI RAID or software RAID, you deserve what happens to you.
Except, of course, blind pilots.