Not possible currently since the amount of memory that would take would be obvious and very visible
A quick search with Google returned this little beauty. Is 20GB enough storage for you? Printers (some models, not all) have had hard drives inside them for quite a while now.
The ISP I work for would be happy to sell you a 30 megabits/sec link, but it'll probably cost you around $60000/month.
That's pretty steep. I have two 30Mbit Internet circuits under my purview at work and we are paying under $3000 each for those circuits. They are 30-up/30-down.
We can "consume" 30Mbit/sec using those pipes due to the way things are set up (inbound traffic travels on only one pipe). On the outbound side, I have a little round-robin going between two default gateways so we can actually use both pipes and push 60Mbit/sec toward the Internet. This comes in handy for remote sites that are connected to us (the "mother ship") via VPN.
So our 30 Megabit pipes are about 1/10th the cost you quoted. These are not DS-3 but are delivered via fiber. This is in Milwaukee, WI, USA.
Tell us, how have you contributed to bringing a faster, more reliable internet?
I smiled when I read this part of your post. You may want to research who Dave Schroeder is and what he's contributed to network monitoring/network management before you start taking jabs at him.
Intel® 3945 802.11a/g Mini-card ...and has a better WiFi card.
I take it that you've never had to support the Intel ProSet software in a large business environment. I would never use "Intel" and "better" in the same sentence when describing Intel's wireless NICs. Yes, it's baby-and-the-bathwater time: I hate Intel wireless NICs because their ProSet software is so sucky. We are going to be taking a serious look at the Juniper (used to be Funk) Odyssey Access Client to replace the crappy ProSet software on all of our laptops. It's worth $30 a seat to have wireless management software that works consistently.
5) It has a limited ammo supply. After that, you can just walk right up to it and destroy it.
Unless you had access to inside info, how would you know how many rounds of ammo are loaded in the sentry bot? Maybe it will be designed to fire thousands of rounds, make a click-click-click sound like a gun dry-firing and sit silently like it has run out of ammo. Then when you and your friends shout "It's out of ammo. Let's get it!", the sentry bot waits until you are within ten yards and then it opens fire again.
Most computer equipment specifies 0-x% humidity. So lowering it doesn't adversely effect the equipment.
Ok, you go ahead and run your data center with 10% relative humidity. Don't be surprised when static electricity becomes a big issue for you. Also, I doubt that you find that "most computer equipment specifies 0-x% humidity" when the equipment is running (you might be able to *store* the equipment at 10 percent relative humidity). There is a reason that most data centers are kept at 40-45% relative humidity year-round.
Also, very low relative humidity is hard on the respiratory systems of humans working in that environment. I speak from first-hand knowledge. Even if you could keep your machines running at 10% relative humidity, people would not want to spend long periods of time in your mega-sized food dehydrator.
because for a typical 300W desktop 24/7 system you probably would be paying $100/month, more than a thousand a year.
Um, I think you will want to check your math (unless you live somewhere that has verrry expensive electricity).
I ran the numbers on a Core 2 Duo E6600 box that I built a few months ago to run the Folding@Home client 24 x 7. My Killawatt says the box is consuming 155 watts when the Folding SMP client for Linux is running. The CPU is running at nearly 100%, 24 hours a day (the Linux Folding SMP client does not consume 100% of the CPU time on my Core 2 Duo - it's a software issue that the Stanford folks are working on). I should mention that the E6600 is not running at stock speed but rather is overclocked to 3.1GHz. If I went back to the factory 2.4GHz, the power consumption would decrease.
With the box running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, I calculated that it costs me $2.50 per week or $10 per month to have that machine running. Over 52 weeks, that's $130 per year to run an overclocked Core 2 Duo that is running at nearly 100% (this system does nothing but Fold all day).
So your figure of $1000 per year is a little high compared to my $130 per year. I plan to buy a Quad Core for this box next month when the Quad Core prices come down to $266. I will measure with the Killawatt again to see what the total system power consumption is with the new chip. I expect it to go up a little but it's still not going to be in the neighborhood of $1000 per year.
I don't understand why we AC them instead of just pumping as much outside air as possible through the room.
What do you do on the days when the temp outside the building is below 32F? How about when the temp does not go above zero degrees F for a couple of a weeks in the middle of winter? Do you know what happens to the relative humidity of air that is heated from zero degrees F to 70 degrees F? Are you going to spend a lot of money for equipment and power to humidify that air as you pull it into the data center and then shoot that nice humid air back outside?
There is some advantage to grabbing outside air, using it once, and then venting it up a chiminey. Modern computers don't need to be all that cold; for the drives it is even bad to be really cold. (see Google results) Cooling the air is expensive. Of course, some places have extreme variation in outside air temperature that must be considered.
The flaw in that plan (pulling cold air from outside the building) is that when you bring 20 degree F air into a data center that is at 70 degrees F, you'll find the humidity in the data center getting very, very low very quickly. How much money and energy do you want to spend constantly adding humidity to the air in the data center (that nice moist air would then be exhausted to the outdoors)?
I work with a guy who likes to use that word (nonsensical) to sound important or more intelligent than the rest of our group. We all have a good chuckle after he walks away.
Assuming for a moment that "nonsensical" was a word that was okay to use without making the speaker sound like a pompous ass, what is it about using the CLI on a network device that to you is "silly or without sense"? For every piece of hardware that I've worked with, the CLI makes sense once I learn the "rules of the road" for that particular manufacturer.
Everybody do the Michigan Rag
Everybody likes the Michigan Rag
Every Mame and Jane and Ruth
From Weehawken to Duluth
Slide, ride, glide the Michigan
Stomp, romp, pomp the Michigan
Jump, clump, pump the Michigan Rag
That lovin' rag!
[Interesting bit of Michigan J Frog trivia:
Fans often wonder if all the songs in One Froggy Evening are authentic tunes or whether they were written just for the cartoon. As it turns out, only one song was written especially for the film: The Michigan Rag. The writer and director (Michael Maltese and Chuck Jones) tried to pick real ragtime or Tin Pan Alley tunes for the frog, but they couldn't find the right piece to use during one section. The result was a creation of their own, meant to sound like an authentic 1890s ragtime tune. Maltese supplied most of the lyrics but Jones and film composer Milt Franklyn helped create it. And as it turns out, this song helped provide a name for the frog years later when Chuck Jones gave in to years of fans asking "what is that frog called?".]
Actually, that section of the article sounds a LOT like the solution from Mobile Access:
Plans for hotels include a distributed antenna system with a converged voice and data network, having all access points located in the telecom closet, up to four antennas used for coverage, and up to four access points used for bandwidth.
The wireless access points live in the wiring closet and then Mobile Access' antenna infrastructure is used to get the signal out closer to the wireless clients. The wireless access points and their associated antenna and not directly connected to each other. Instead, there is a long "extension cord" between the AP and the antenna.
Can anyone please explain what this means? I presume these antenna's are fixed to the access points, so of course there are four of both. And then there are four access points all in the same closet? What's the use of *that*? Or are there four locations, each with its own antenna, with four access points each? Is that even possible?
Instead of the "classic" model where the antenna and the wireless access point are separated by a few feet of coax and the pair are installed in the ceiling near the clients, there is another option where the wireless access points are all installed in a central wiring closet and then a special cable infrastructure is used to carry the 802.11 signal out to where the clients sit. Here is one company that offers such a solution:
Why would someone want to use this? Imagine a hospital environment where the wireless access points where all of the APs are installed in the wiring closet for each floor (instead of having the APs living above the ceiling). This makes troubleshooting and replacing the access points easier since they are in a wiring closet, not near patient rooms or in an operating suite. The only hardware close to the wireless clients is the antenna. This same antenna infrastructure can also be used to carry cellular phone traffic, two-way radios and emergency communications.
As another poster said, this setup is not the $2.99 access points that you would see at Best Buy.:^)
Placing all access points in a single telecom closet for what are generally rather spacious properties requires that 2.4 GHz signals be carried through coaxial cable that is very lossy at that frequency - it might be fair to expect up to 90% of the signal to be lost in the wire. There is an FCC limit on the transmitted power, and even if you manage to boost that at the antenna you will be boosting noise as well. And this attenuation and noise will of course hurt receiving too. This is in general going to result in lower wireless quality than desired, much lower than possible.
Bruce, there is a company called Mobile Access that uses the "APs in a closet" approach that you mentioned but they use a different style of antenna to get the signal out to where the clients are. They don't use leaky coax. You may want to check out their solution:
When you said "zero-managment access points", were you referring to Cisco's LWAPP architecture or did you have another product in mind? LWAPP takes all of the "smarts" out of the access points and moves that processing back to the wireless controllers in the closets.
And it's launched off the back of a pedal-driven biplane??
The shuttle isn't launched off the back of anything. You're not thinking that there is a huge plane that gives the shuttle a piggy-back ride to a really high altitude and then the shuttle zooms away from there, are you? The videos that you've seen of the shuttle riding on top of a larger jet are when the shuttle is ferried from one site to another. It's like using a trailer to get your funny car to the track on race day. (How's that for a Slashdot car analogy?)
I bought a Cable Card-ready Sony TV a few years ago with the idea that I would rent a Cable Card from Time Warner Cable so I could watch HD channels. Once the Time Warner Cable installation tech got the Cable Card working in my TV, he bolted out the door. About six hours later, the picture turned black and I could no longer receive encrypted channels. When I called Time Warner Cable's support, the support person first sent a "reset" to my TV but that didn't work. Then I was advised to turn the TV off and then unplug the set from the power outlet for ten minutes. That didn't fix the problem.
I had Time Warner Cables techs come to my house a few more times with replacement Cable Cards but they could never resolve the problem. They gave up and blamed the problem on my TV. They said the TV needed a firmware upgrade (I didn't even know my TV had upgradeable firmware!). I contacted a local home theater company and they sent one of their techs to my house to upgrade my TV's firmware.
After that upgrade, Time Warner Cable tried again but could not get the Cable Card to work. The TWC person at my house was on the phone with someone at the "head end" trying to get advice on how to fix this problem. Despite digging through some very cool diagnostic screens on my TV and trying every option available, Time Warner Cable never did the Cable Card to work in my TV.
I gave up and called TWC to let them know I would be bringing their card back.
For all of its hype, Cable Card definitely sucked donkey balls. I have a very nice Sony HD set that is supposedly "Cable Card ready" but the Cable Card just didn't work reliably. It's too bad. The time that I did get to watch channels like Discovery HD was very cool.
That was a couple of summers ago. I haven't had the time to see if TWC here in Milwaukee has figured-out the mysteries of the Cable Card.
15-20K in a summer!? What the hell were you doing as a teenager. I have 9-5 doing as a sysadmin/ the tech support for a manufacturing company and will make just a little more than that in a year.
You, my friend, are getting the short end of the stick. I put $15k into my 401(k) last year. Combining my retirement contribution with other deductions, I have more deducted from my paychecks in a year than you make in a year. You need to work on your negotiating skills when you interview for your next job. You shouldn't be making $15k - 20k in any technical position (I am assuming that you are in the U.S.)
There is no need to extract the files from the ISO. Just put the iso file on your network drive and tell the boot cd where to find it. The installer is smart enough to look inside of the ISO and extract everything it needs all by itself.
The UV water purifier isn't needed here in New Orleans. Our tap water has been and continues to be some of the cleanest and best tasting in the country. Our tap water comes from the Mississippi and as such is treated and filtered more that just about any other city. The Mississippi has a lot of chemicals that are deposited in it from the more Northern states that we have to filter out. I would say a Brita filter would be sufficient.
I wouldn't brag too much about having the cleanest water in the country if your city is drawing its water from the Mississippi river. When residents of the cities that are upstream from you flush their toilets, some of that "liquid" eventually becomes your drinking water. Here is an article that discusses how sewage treatment plants are having problems filtering certain medications out of the waste water. The old advice to "flush unused medications down the toilet" now seems like a bad idea.
I seem to recall a story from a few years back about how much caffeine was detected in the southern end of the Mississippi river as the result of cities dumping their sewage into the river. Caffeine is excreted by humans in the same "form" as when the caffeine was ingested (medical experts or chemists, please feel free to correct me if I have recalled the caffeine story incorrectly).
Slashdot Mirror
Remember, these are universities, so they get access to the Internet2 pipes.
It doesn't matter how fat the pipes are, the speed-of-light will still bite you in the ass when you are replicating data from one coast to the other.
Not possible currently since the amount of memory that would take would be obvious and very visible
/ J6073A/p/432874
A quick search with Google returned this little beauty. Is 20GB enough storage for you? Printers (some models, not all) have had hard drives inside them for quite a while now.
http://www.superwarehouse.com/HP_20_GB_Hard_Drive
The ISP I work for would be happy to sell you a 30 megabits/sec link, but it'll probably cost you around $60000/month.
That's pretty steep. I have two 30Mbit Internet circuits under my purview at work and we are paying under $3000 each for those circuits. They are 30-up/30-down.
We can "consume" 30Mbit/sec using those pipes due to the way things are set up (inbound traffic travels on only one pipe). On the outbound side, I have a little round-robin going between two default gateways so we can actually use both pipes and push 60Mbit/sec toward the Internet. This comes in handy for remote sites that are connected to us (the "mother ship") via VPN.
So our 30 Megabit pipes are about 1/10th the cost you quoted. These are not DS-3 but are delivered via fiber. This is in Milwaukee, WI, USA.
technology that will keep an eye out for spam like activity (e.g. Port 23 monitoring)
If you are talking about spam, I think you probably meant to say TCP port 25.
Tell us, how have you contributed to bringing a faster, more reliable internet?
I smiled when I read this part of your post. You may want to research who Dave Schroeder is and what he's contributed to network monitoring/network management before you start taking jabs at him.
-Scott, Fellow Cheesehead
Intel® 3945 802.11a/g Mini-card
...and has a better WiFi card.
I take it that you've never had to support the Intel ProSet software in a large business environment. I would never use "Intel" and "better" in the same sentence when describing Intel's wireless NICs. Yes, it's baby-and-the-bathwater time: I hate Intel wireless NICs because their ProSet software is so sucky. We are going to be taking a serious look at the Juniper (used to be Funk) Odyssey Access Client to replace the crappy ProSet software on all of our laptops. It's worth $30 a seat to have wireless management software that works consistently.
5) It has a limited ammo supply. After that, you can just walk right up to it and destroy it.
Unless you had access to inside info, how would you know how many rounds of ammo are loaded in the sentry bot? Maybe it will be designed to fire thousands of rounds, make a click-click-click sound like a gun dry-firing and sit silently like it has run out of ammo. Then when you and your friends shout "It's out of ammo. Let's get it!", the sentry bot waits until you are within ten yards and then it opens fire again.
Most computer equipment specifies 0-x% humidity. So lowering it doesn't adversely effect the equipment.
Ok, you go ahead and run your data center with 10% relative humidity. Don't be surprised when static electricity becomes a big issue for you. Also, I doubt that you find that "most computer equipment specifies 0-x% humidity" when the equipment is running (you might be able to *store* the equipment at 10 percent relative humidity). There is a reason that most data centers are kept at 40-45% relative humidity year-round.
Also, very low relative humidity is hard on the respiratory systems of humans working in that environment. I speak from first-hand knowledge. Even if you could keep your machines running at 10% relative humidity, people would not want to spend long periods of time in your mega-sized food dehydrator.
because for a typical 300W desktop 24/7 system you probably would be paying $100/month, more than a thousand a year.
Um, I think you will want to check your math (unless you live somewhere that has verrry expensive electricity).
I ran the numbers on a Core 2 Duo E6600 box that I built a few months ago to run the Folding@Home client 24 x 7. My Killawatt says the box is consuming 155 watts when the Folding SMP client for Linux is running. The CPU is running at nearly 100%, 24 hours a day (the Linux Folding SMP client does not consume 100% of the CPU time on my Core 2 Duo - it's a software issue that the Stanford folks are working on). I should mention that the E6600 is not running at stock speed but rather is overclocked to 3.1GHz. If I went back to the factory 2.4GHz, the power consumption would decrease.
With the box running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, I calculated that it costs me $2.50 per week or $10 per month to have that machine running. Over 52 weeks, that's $130 per year to run an overclocked Core 2 Duo that is running at nearly 100% (this system does nothing but Fold all day).
So your figure of $1000 per year is a little high compared to my $130 per year. I plan to buy a Quad Core for this box next month when the Quad Core prices come down to $266. I will measure with the Killawatt again to see what the total system power consumption is with the new chip. I expect it to go up a little but it's still not going to be in the neighborhood of $1000 per year.
I don't understand why we AC them instead of just pumping as much outside air as possible through the room.
What do you do on the days when the temp outside the building is below 32F? How about when the temp does not go above zero degrees F for a couple of a weeks in the middle of winter? Do you know what happens to the relative humidity of air that is heated from zero degrees F to 70 degrees F? Are you going to spend a lot of money for equipment and power to humidify that air as you pull it into the data center and then shoot that nice humid air back outside?
There is some advantage to grabbing outside air, using it once, and then venting it up a chiminey. Modern computers don't need to be all that cold; for the drives it is even bad to be really cold. (see Google results) Cooling the air is expensive. Of course, some places have extreme variation in outside air temperature that must be considered.
The flaw in that plan (pulling cold air from outside the building) is that when you bring 20 degree F air into a data center that is at 70 degrees F, you'll find the humidity in the data center getting very, very low very quickly. How much money and energy do you want to spend constantly adding humidity to the air in the data center (that nice moist air would then be exhausted to the outdoors)?
(he went into an example about electron flow going backwards under certain circumstances but I forgot the details).
. htm
Did he mention the part about reversing the polarity on the EPS relays on Deck 7?
http://www.star-trek-voyager.net/ship4/eps_system
It's not mechanization until I get my own Valkyrie that I can drive to work.
/. readers on the far side of the planet don't feel left out?)
That request shouldn't be too difficult to fill:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_Valkyrie
Unfortunately, you'll have to settle for "pre-owned" as Honda does not produce them any more.
(Or am I supposed to say "Honda do not produce them any more." so the
What if you created multiple clones of your wife.
Would you go by "Harcourt" or would you tell people your first name is "Harry"?
using nonsensical command-line instructions
I work with a guy who likes to use that word (nonsensical) to sound important or more intelligent than the rest of our group. We all have a good chuckle after he walks away.
Assuming for a moment that "nonsensical" was a word that was okay to use without making the speaker sound like a pompous ass, what is it about using the CLI on a network device that to you is "silly or without sense"? For every piece of hardware that I've worked with, the CLI makes sense once I learn the "rules of the road" for that particular manufacturer.
Did they find a talking frog?
Actually, they found a singing frog. News footage is below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saU-Bl0feSs
Everybody do the Michigan Rag
Everybody likes the Michigan Rag
Every Mame and Jane and Ruth
From Weehawken to Duluth
Slide, ride, glide the Michigan
Stomp, romp, pomp the Michigan
Jump, clump, pump the Michigan Rag
That lovin' rag!
[Interesting bit of Michigan J Frog trivia:
Fans often wonder if all the songs in One Froggy Evening are authentic tunes or whether they were written just for the cartoon. As it turns out, only one song was written especially for the film: The Michigan Rag. The writer and director (Michael Maltese and Chuck Jones) tried to pick real ragtime or Tin Pan Alley tunes for the frog, but they couldn't find the right piece to use during one section. The result was a creation of their own, meant to sound like an authentic 1890s ragtime tune. Maltese supplied most of the lyrics but Jones and film composer Milt Franklyn helped create it. And as it turns out, this song helped provide a name for the frog years later when Chuck Jones gave in to years of fans asking "what is that frog called?".]
Do I seriously have to do all the work around here?
Yeah, Jeffrey...I'm gonna have to ask you to go ahead and come in on Saturday...yeahhhh
Actually, that section of the article sounds a LOT like the solution from Mobile Access:
Plans for hotels include a distributed antenna system with a converged voice and data network, having all access points located in the telecom closet, up to four antennas used for coverage, and up to four access points used for bandwidth.
The wireless access points live in the wiring closet and then Mobile Access' antenna infrastructure is used to get the signal out closer to the wireless clients. The wireless access points and their associated antenna and not directly connected to each other. Instead, there is a long "extension cord" between the AP and the antenna.
http://www.mobileaccess.com/
Can anyone please explain what this means? I presume these antenna's are fixed to the access points, so of course there are four of both. And then there are four access points all in the same closet? What's the use of *that*? Or are there four locations, each with its own antenna, with four access points each? Is that even possible?
:^)
Instead of the "classic" model where the antenna and the wireless access point are separated by a few feet of coax and the pair are installed in the ceiling near the clients, there is another option where the wireless access points are all installed in a central wiring closet and then a special cable infrastructure is used to carry the 802.11 signal out to where the clients sit. Here is one company that offers such a solution:
http://www.mobileaccess.com/
Why would someone want to use this? Imagine a hospital environment where the wireless access points where all of the APs are installed in the wiring closet for each floor (instead of having the APs living above the ceiling). This makes troubleshooting and replacing the access points easier since they are in a wiring closet, not near patient rooms or in an operating suite. The only hardware close to the wireless clients is the antenna. This same antenna infrastructure can also be used to carry cellular phone traffic, two-way radios and emergency communications.
As another poster said, this setup is not the $2.99 access points that you would see at Best Buy.
Placing all access points in a single telecom closet for what are generally rather spacious properties requires that 2.4 GHz signals be carried through coaxial cable that is very lossy at that frequency - it might be fair to expect up to 90% of the signal to be lost in the wire. There is an FCC limit on the transmitted power, and even if you manage to boost that at the antenna you will be boosting noise as well. And this attenuation and noise will of course hurt receiving too. This is in general going to result in lower wireless quality than desired, much lower than possible.
Bruce, there is a company called Mobile Access that uses the "APs in a closet" approach that you mentioned but they use a different style of antenna to get the signal out to where the clients are. They don't use leaky coax. You may want to check out their solution:
http://www.mobileaccess.com/
When you said "zero-managment access points", were you referring to Cisco's LWAPP architecture or did you have another product in mind? LWAPP takes all of the "smarts" out of the access points and moves that processing back to the wireless controllers in the closets.
And it's launched off the back of a pedal-driven biplane??
The shuttle isn't launched off the back of anything. You're not thinking that there is a huge plane that gives the shuttle a piggy-back ride to a really high altitude and then the shuttle zooms away from there, are you? The videos that you've seen of the shuttle riding on top of a larger jet are when the shuttle is ferried from one site to another. It's like using a trailer to get your funny car to the track on race day. (How's that for a Slashdot car analogy?)
I bought a Cable Card-ready Sony TV a few years ago with the idea that I would rent a Cable Card from Time Warner Cable so I could watch HD channels. Once the Time Warner Cable installation tech got the Cable Card working in my TV, he bolted out the door. About six hours later, the picture turned black and I could no longer receive encrypted channels. When I called Time Warner Cable's support, the support person first sent a "reset" to my TV but that didn't work. Then I was advised to turn the TV off and then unplug the set from the power outlet for ten minutes. That didn't fix the problem.
I had Time Warner Cables techs come to my house a few more times with replacement Cable Cards but they could never resolve the problem. They gave up and blamed the problem on my TV. They said the TV needed a firmware upgrade (I didn't even know my TV had upgradeable firmware!). I contacted a local home theater company and they sent one of their techs to my house to upgrade my TV's firmware.
After that upgrade, Time Warner Cable tried again but could not get the Cable Card to work. The TWC person at my house was on the phone with someone at the "head end" trying to get advice on how to fix this problem. Despite digging through some very cool diagnostic screens on my TV and trying every option available, Time Warner Cable never did the Cable Card to work in my TV.
I gave up and called TWC to let them know I would be bringing their card back.
For all of its hype, Cable Card definitely sucked donkey balls. I have a very nice Sony HD set that is supposedly "Cable Card ready" but the Cable Card just didn't work reliably. It's too bad. The time that I did get to watch channels like Discovery HD was very cool.
That was a couple of summers ago. I haven't had the time to see if TWC here in Milwaukee has figured-out the mysteries of the Cable Card.
15-20K in a summer!? What the hell were you doing as a teenager. I have 9-5 doing as a sysadmin/ the tech support for a manufacturing company and will make just a little more than that in a year.
You, my friend, are getting the short end of the stick. I put $15k into my 401(k) last year. Combining my retirement contribution with other deductions, I have more deducted from my paychecks in a year than you make in a year. You need to work on your negotiating skills when you interview for your next job. You shouldn't be making $15k - 20k in any technical position (I am assuming that you are in the U.S.)
There is no need to extract the files from the ISO. Just put the iso file on your network drive and tell the boot cd where to find it. The installer is smart enough to look inside of the ISO and extract everything it needs all by itself.
Thanks for the tip, white lamb.
The UV water purifier isn't needed here in New Orleans. Our tap water has been and continues to be some of the cleanest and best tasting in the country. Our tap water comes from the Mississippi and as such is treated and filtered more that just about any other city. The Mississippi has a lot of chemicals that are deposited in it from the more Northern states that we have to filter out. I would say a Brita filter would be sufficient.
5
I wouldn't brag too much about having the cleanest water in the country if your city is drawing its water from the Mississippi river. When residents of the cities that are upstream from you flush their toilets, some of that "liquid" eventually becomes your drinking water. Here is an article that discusses how sewage treatment plants are having problems filtering certain medications out of the waste water. The old advice to "flush unused medications down the toilet" now seems like a bad idea.
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=61391
I seem to recall a story from a few years back about how much caffeine was detected in the southern end of the Mississippi river as the result of cities dumping their sewage into the river. Caffeine is excreted by humans in the same "form" as when the caffeine was ingested (medical experts or chemists, please feel free to correct me if I have recalled the caffeine story incorrectly).