Did you slip a decimal point? The average cost per kilowatt hour in the US based on 2006 YTD data ia 10.15 cents/KWH up sharply from 9.08 cents in 2005.
Where I live, we are paying about 6.5 cents and get our electricity from a non-profit municipal utility. I consider us very lucky to have this low cost electricity.
If you really have those electricity rates, then the pay back for you is pretty far down the road, but for most people, if they can afford the initial investment and have a suitable location, it's looking pretty good. You condo and apartment dwellers are probably SOL as are you lucky folks who live in neighborhoods with restrictive covenants that don't even allow an outside antenna.
My wife and I share a home office. Each of us has a Windows XP machine. (I also have a Mac and a couple Linux boxes on a KVM switch) We have a wired network. There is an old Celeron machine in our "backroom" that runs XP Pro and has a 160 Gig HD. Attached to that machine via USB is an external 160 Gig hard drive.
Each of us runs a program called SmartSynch. On my machine it does a back up of files that have changed each night at Midnight. One hers, since she's a writer and does a large volume of work during the day, it does hourly similar backups to the backroom machine. At 2 am, the backroom machine backs up changed files to the USB drive. Recently I added an additional online backup using Carbonite.com. I'm impressed with that so far.
We've been using this system for about 2 years now and it's worked just fine. Restoring files is easy since they are stored as actual non-compressed copies of the files on our desktops. It's not fancy, but it's not expensive either. The key to any backup system is that you MUST do the backups. In our case, it's automatic, a big plus.
It's about herpes simplex. The forum operates at several levels and, in my opinion, is not replaced by a wiki in any significant way. People find us for two main reasons. One is that they are looking for information and the other is that they are looking for support. The result is a true virtual community with a few current members dating back to 1995 or early 1996 when the forum went "on the air". People confronting a health issue like this often feel alone due to the extremely unfair stigma attached to this most common virus. IMO the single most valuable service we provide is that a new person discovers that they are not alone and that there are lots of people out there, just like them, that are dealing with the same situation. For the record, the infection rate for the virus "below the belt" is about 25%. Overall, including cold sores, the same virus, the percentage rises to around 80% by adulthood.
To answer the questions, "Can forums exist on a purely social level?"
Absolutely. I participate in a couple of other forums that are entirely social. We discuss almost everything about our lives from sex to automobile repair. People come and go, but overall it's been a relatively stable group of diverse people from across the US, Canada, Australia and Korea, with a couple other countries represented from time to time. The ages represented range from early 20's to several folks around my age.. 50s and 60s. I really enjoy that it brings demographically, geographically and economically diverse people together in a way that would probably not happen in real life.
What shortcomings endanger the forum's future, and what characteristics have allowed it to survive so far?
I'm not sure that it's endangered at all. One possible trend that I see is that younger people seem to prefer more fast moving modes such as Instant Messaging and Chat rooms. I guess I'm an old fuddy-duddy at age 60 and much prefer the more deliberate pace of the forum format so that I can focus on my messages or replies and make them more elaborate than a quick burst of typing. I like, too, that forums don't require the seeming immediate attention that chats or IMs do. I can take time to do some research for a reply if needed. Similarly I don't have to be time-coincident with another party as would be the case in a chat or IM. That helps a lot when some of the participants are half way around the world.
The characteristic that allows it to survive so far is that it seems to meet a need for this sort of interaction with other individuals regardless of geography or timing.
Why do we need forums in the first place?"
Need? We don't really need them, but then we don't "need" a lot of other things that we find enjoyable or useful. Forums have provided thousands of us a way to interact in a way that allows us to form a virtual community. If it's purpose is to provide information, then it's not much different than gathering at the general store and asking someone a question about, say, "What kind of barn paint was that you used, Jake, that held up so well?" It's just that you can do it when it's convenient and can often tap into a much larger collective intellect than at the general store down at the junction.
No, I'm not going to post the URL for the herpes site. I'm not looking to be slashdotted. If you have need of us and look, you'll eventually find us.
that keeps a Windows machine on the KVM switch under my desk. Wine and Crossover Office don't work with the current version of QB last time I checked and I've yet to see an Open Source alternative that is comparable. Intuit is right up there with MS in regard to the suckiness of their business plan with forced upgrades to software that was doing everything I wanted from it. At least I've got OO as a good alternative to Office.
Telegraph and wireless operators had similar RSI problems going back, probably at least, to the 1860's. They called it having a "glass arm". The JH Bunnell Double Speed key, also known as a side-swiper, was patented in 1888 to help solve this problem and was sold well into the 1920's when it was replaced by semi-automatic keys known as "bugs" (first patent 1892). The operation of the side-swiper was such that the motion was side to side instead of up and down. There is a contact on either side of the armature or lever so pressing the lever either way made the contact. There was no attempt to automate the dots as the later semi-automatic keys did. You can find example pictures online by searching for "Cootie key" or "side-swiper" key. I have one of the early Bunnell cooties in my telegraph apparatus collection.
the kicker there is that there's no AOL client I'm aware of for Ubuntu, or any other Linux/BSD distro. I have a small company that provides dialup access and I offered to give her a free dialup, but that didn't work since she just won't get off AOL. "I've been using it from the beginning and I don't want to change.", she said, even after I showed her how easy it was to use, my dialup and Firefox. Oh, then there's the other problem. Mom's a gamer! Boggle, Bejewled... {{sigh}}
In fairness, she's never had a virus or problems with getting choked with ad/spy/mal-ware. Since she shuts down Windows every session, she doesn't have much problem with lock-ups and so forth. Anyway, she's my mom and I try to be a good son so I'll bite my tongue do what I can to make her happy.:-)
convincing my 83 year old mother that it's OK to leave an "appliance" on when it's not being used. It uses electricity, you know, and that costs money. She's also the one who doesn't have caller ID on her phone because that costs a dollar a month or so.
I've been using the free (as in gratis) version of AVG on all the Windows computers in the family for a long time and have been very pleased with the results.. No successful virus attacks in 9 computers over a period of at least 3 years. The hard part, and this is not specific to AVG, is getting the family members who still use dialup to stay current with updates since some of the downloads take quite a while.
I can't comment on the other free antivirus programs as I've not tried them.
as in beer. It is free of cost and has been for some time now. Even when it was ad supported, I didn't mind the very small ad window.
I'm posting this using Opera 8.54 and have been using it daily since 5.xx I use Firefox, too, but visit my regular daily sites with Opera. I use it on Windows, Linux and OS-X.
When you have a radio repeater situation, as is the case with cell phones, it does not make sense to have the fixed repeater transmitter power level higher than the remote transmitter (cell phone). The cell phone power is rather low, otherwise you'd have a backpack to carry the battery. In ham radio repeater circles, a repeater with a high powered transmit is referred to as a repeater that's "All mouth". Here's some technical explaination of the radiation situation regarding cell towers. http://www.fcc.gov/oet/rfsafety/cellpcs.html/
I'm not a statistics expert, but I know that abberations in distributions of whatever effect are not impossible, or even improbably, given a sufficiently large study group. My wife has experience in disease clustering in her past administrative job at a university where there was a "cancer dorm". In the end, it was all BS, panic and hype. The actual distribution was not far off the norm. Remember that perception is often much more powerful than the truth in many people's minds.
It was a single board with 1K, yes one single kilobyte of RAM. Program storage was a tape recorder, of course, and it used an ascii teletype machine as the I/O device. I actually had a chess program that ran on it, but mostly used it to develop software for some score-keeping devices I designed for a customer of my side business.
Mostek sold those kits to employees for $25 and fortunately I had a friend who worked there so I twisted his arm to get me one. The F-8 was a miserable processor with an arcane command set, but it worked. Everything I wrote was in assembly language and hand assembled and loaded as hex code through the terminal. Great fun!!
My next home computer was an Ohio Scientific with a 6502 processor and a whopping 16K of precious memory. Same I/O device and storage. Again it was mostly used to develop assembly language software for the next generation score keeping machines.
Following that was an IBM PC-junior with a single floppy, 128K of memory, running DOS 2.1 and a CGA monitor. That was the big time. Remember those funky optical mice that you had to use on a special mouse pad with a grid on it?
More than a hundred years ago telegraphers discovered that a key that moved side to side instead of up and down and that allowed the hand to be vertical instead of horizontal greatly reduced the incidence of the dreaded "glass arm". There have been and still are lots of keys produced that take advantage of this. For one of the prime examples, see the productes still offered by Vibroplex.
Here in Central Illinois, the story is well known of a circuit riding preacher who was caught out in the sub-sero temperatures of the initial blizzard that started on December 20th, 1830. He managed to survive the night by killing his horse and using it's body warmth. For over two weeks the temperature stayed below -12 degrees F. The article heredoen't have that story, but it does describe the conditions that Winter.
Some of the worst malware cleanup jobs I've had were machines that connected via dialup. As others have already pointed out, if you have a broadband connection via a router, you at least have an incoming firewall. I'd never put a Windows machine on a dialup connection without a software firewall. Viruses, trojans, worms and adware will get you via stupidity whether you have a firewall or not.
The concern I have is whether I had a working drive to read the tapes with in 40 years.. Oh, nevermind, I'm 60 now, so that probably won't be a problem for me personally..
Perhaps I should have expanded a bit. There are finite resources in addition to food that are involved as well. The improvements in technology are, indeed, very significant with regard to better use of those resources. I still believe, though, that it is in the long-term interest of humankind to think in terms of controlled population levels while, of course, improving technology as well. Will that happen? Not likely, as the right to procreate at will is not something that people will easily give up. It's too much of a general human instinct to reproduce. Thanks again for your input.
simply the fact that there are too many people. Now, obviously, I don't have a solution to this, but the problem is clear. All our technological mechanisms are simply delaying the Malthusian Solution unless we find an effective way to either have a lot of people leave the planet for stellar parts elsewhere, and/or stabilize the population of the planet at a sustainable level.
I started my digital communications "career" as a licensed ham radio operator in 1958. In the early 60's I had a model 15 teletype machine connected to my transmitter and receiver through a home built "Terminal Unit", AKA modem, using tubes. Anyway, the teletype keyboard had a grand total of 32 keys, including the space bar, and used the venerable 5-bit Baudot code. Only upper case letters were availble with numbers and punctuation being available with the carriage shifted up by hitting the "figs" key. To return to alphabetical characters, you had to hit the "ltrs" key or there was an optional feature called "unshift on space" that returned to lower case upon receiving a space character.
Since it was printing using a mechanical printer somewhat like a typewriter, at the end of a line, the carriage took a finite amount of time to return and I quickly learned to send two carriage returns followed by a line feed so that the next character didn't try to print while the carriage was still in motion back to the left. The keyboard was strictly mechanical so you could not type faster than the distributor was sending the bits and you learned to pace yourself to the speed of the machine to get as close to the limit of 60 WPM as possible.
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Did you slip a decimal point? The average cost per kilowatt hour in the US based on 2006 YTD data ia 10.15 cents/KWH up sharply from 9.08 cents in 2005.
Where I live, we are paying about 6.5 cents and get our electricity from a non-profit municipal utility. I consider us very lucky to have this low cost electricity.
If you really have those electricity rates, then the pay back for you is pretty far down the road, but for most people, if they can afford the initial investment and have a suitable location, it's looking pretty good. You condo and apartment dwellers are probably SOL as are you lucky folks who live in neighborhoods with restrictive covenants that don't even allow an outside antenna.
this document is going to be lost **forever**...
On thousands of slashdotter's hard drives around the world.
the OS that comes with 99.6% of new computers and XP of any flavor isn't being sold anymore? I think not. I'm glad I've got Linux to upgrade to.
My wife and I share a home office. Each of us has a Windows XP machine. (I also have a Mac and a couple Linux boxes on a KVM switch) We have a wired network. There is an old Celeron machine in our "backroom" that runs XP Pro and has a 160 Gig HD. Attached to that machine via USB is an external 160 Gig hard drive.
Each of us runs a program called SmartSynch. On my machine it does a back up of files that have changed each night at Midnight. One hers, since she's a writer and does a large volume of work during the day, it does hourly similar backups to the backroom machine. At 2 am, the backroom machine backs up changed files to the USB drive. Recently I added an additional online backup using Carbonite.com. I'm impressed with that so far.
We've been using this system for about 2 years now and it's worked just fine. Restoring files is easy since they are stored as actual non-compressed copies of the files on our desktops. It's not fancy, but it's not expensive either. The key to any backup system is that you MUST do the backups. In our case, it's automatic, a big plus.
It's about herpes simplex. The forum operates at several levels and, in my opinion, is not replaced by a wiki in any significant way. People find us for two main reasons. One is that they are looking for information and the other is that they are looking for support. The result is a true virtual community with a few current members dating back to 1995 or early 1996 when the forum went "on the air". People confronting a health issue like this often feel alone due to the extremely unfair stigma attached to this most common virus. IMO the single most valuable service we provide is that a new person discovers that they are not alone and that there are lots of people out there, just like them, that are dealing with the same situation. For the record, the infection rate for the virus "below the belt" is about 25%. Overall, including cold sores, the same virus, the percentage rises to around 80% by adulthood.
To answer the questions, "Can forums exist on a purely social level?"
Absolutely. I participate in a couple of other forums that are entirely social. We discuss almost everything about our lives from sex to automobile repair. People come and go, but overall it's been a relatively stable group of diverse people from across the US, Canada, Australia and Korea, with a couple other countries represented from time to time. The ages represented range from early 20's to several folks around my age.. 50s and 60s. I really enjoy that it brings demographically, geographically and economically diverse people together in a way that would probably not happen in real life.
What shortcomings endanger the forum's future, and what characteristics have allowed it to survive so far?
I'm not sure that it's endangered at all. One possible trend that I see is that younger people seem to prefer more fast moving modes such as Instant Messaging and Chat rooms. I guess I'm an old fuddy-duddy at age 60 and much prefer the more deliberate pace of the forum format so that I can focus on my messages or replies and make them more elaborate than a quick burst of typing. I like, too, that forums don't require the seeming immediate attention that chats or IMs do. I can take time to do some research for a reply if needed. Similarly I don't have to be time-coincident with another party as would be the case in a chat or IM. That helps a lot when some of the participants are half way around the world.
The characteristic that allows it to survive so far is that it seems to meet a need for this sort of interaction with other individuals regardless of geography or timing.
Why do we need forums in the first place?" Need? We don't really need them, but then we don't "need" a lot of other things that we find enjoyable or useful. Forums have provided thousands of us a way to interact in a way that allows us to form a virtual community. If it's purpose is to provide information, then it's not much different than gathering at the general store and asking someone a question about, say, "What kind of barn paint was that you used, Jake, that held up so well?" It's just that you can do it when it's convenient and can often tap into a much larger collective intellect than at the general store down at the junction.
No, I'm not going to post the URL for the herpes site. I'm not looking to be slashdotted. If you have need of us and look, you'll eventually find us.
that keeps a Windows machine on the KVM switch under my desk. Wine and Crossover Office don't work with the current version of QB last time I checked and I've yet to see an Open Source alternative that is comparable. Intuit is right up there with MS in regard to the suckiness of their business plan with forced upgrades to software that was doing everything I wanted from it. At least I've got OO as a good alternative to Office.
Telegraph and wireless operators had similar RSI problems going back, probably at least, to the 1860's. They called it having a "glass arm". The JH Bunnell Double Speed key, also known as a side-swiper, was patented in 1888 to help solve this problem and was sold well into the 1920's when it was replaced by semi-automatic keys known as "bugs" (first patent 1892). The operation of the side-swiper was such that the motion was side to side instead of up and down. There is a contact on either side of the armature or lever so pressing the lever either way made the contact. There was no attempt to automate the dots as the later semi-automatic keys did. You can find example pictures online by searching for "Cootie key" or "side-swiper" key. I have one of the early Bunnell cooties in my telegraph apparatus collection.
copy editing services in this niche of the industry? My wife is a retired editor and could do that sort of thing as a service very easily.
I think this is a great alternative to the old vanity presses.
I'm still using Office 97.
the kicker there is that there's no AOL client I'm aware of for Ubuntu, or any other Linux/BSD distro. I have a small company that provides dialup access and I offered to give her a free dialup, but that didn't work since she just won't get off AOL. "I've been using it from the beginning and I don't want to change.", she said, even after I showed her how easy it was to use, my dialup and Firefox. Oh, then there's the other problem. Mom's a gamer! Boggle, Bejewled... {{sigh}}
:-)
In fairness, she's never had a virus or problems with getting choked with ad/spy/mal-ware. Since she shuts down Windows every session, she doesn't have much problem with lock-ups and so forth. Anyway, she's my mom and I try to be a good son so I'll bite my tongue do what I can to make her happy.
convincing my 83 year old mother that it's OK to leave an "appliance" on when it's not being used. It uses electricity, you know, and that costs money. She's also the one who doesn't have caller ID on her phone because that costs a dollar a month or so.
I've been using the free (as in gratis) version of AVG on all the Windows computers in the family for a long time and have been very pleased with the results.. No successful virus attacks in 9 computers over a period of at least 3 years. The hard part, and this is not specific to AVG, is getting the family members who still use dialup to stay current with updates since some of the downloads take quite a while.
I can't comment on the other free antivirus programs as I've not tried them.
as in beer. It is free of cost and has been for some time now. Even when it was ad supported, I didn't mind the very small ad window.
I'm posting this using Opera 8.54 and have been using it daily since 5.xx I use Firefox, too, but visit my regular daily sites with Opera. I use it on Windows, Linux and OS-X.
When you have a radio repeater situation, as is the case with cell phones, it does not make sense to have the fixed repeater transmitter power level higher than the remote transmitter (cell phone). The cell phone power is rather low, otherwise you'd have a backpack to carry the battery. In ham radio repeater circles, a repeater with a high powered transmit is referred to as a repeater that's "All mouth". Here's some technical explaination of the radiation situation regarding cell towers. http://www.fcc.gov/oet/rfsafety/cellpcs.html/
I'm not a statistics expert, but I know that abberations in distributions of whatever effect are not impossible, or even improbably, given a sufficiently large study group. My wife has experience in disease clustering in her past administrative job at a university where there was a "cancer dorm". In the end, it was all BS, panic and hype. The actual distribution was not far off the norm. Remember that perception is often much more powerful than the truth in many people's minds.
Can I get a hat made of it?
It must have been devine intervention to get this sort of action in Utah, of all places.
It was a single board with 1K, yes one single kilobyte of RAM. Program storage was a tape recorder, of course, and it used an ascii teletype machine as the I/O device. I actually had a chess program that ran on it, but mostly used it to develop software for some score-keeping devices I designed for a customer of my side business.
Mostek sold those kits to employees for $25 and fortunately I had a friend who worked there so I twisted his arm to get me one. The F-8 was a miserable processor with an arcane command set, but it worked. Everything I wrote was in assembly language and hand assembled and loaded as hex code through the terminal. Great fun!!
My next home computer was an Ohio Scientific with a 6502 processor and a whopping 16K of precious memory. Same I/O device and storage. Again it was mostly used to develop assembly language software for the next generation score keeping machines.
Following that was an IBM PC-junior with a single floppy, 128K of memory, running DOS 2.1 and a CGA monitor. That was the big time. Remember those funky optical mice that you had to use on a special mouse pad with a grid on it?
More than a hundred years ago telegraphers discovered that a key that moved side to side instead of up and down and that allowed the hand to be vertical instead of horizontal greatly reduced the incidence of the dreaded "glass arm". There have been and still are lots of keys produced that take advantage of this. For one of the prime examples, see the productes still offered by Vibroplex.
73
Here in Central Illinois, the story is well known of a circuit riding preacher who was caught out in the sub-sero temperatures of the initial blizzard that started on December 20th, 1830. He managed to survive the night by killing his horse and using it's body warmth. For over two weeks the temperature stayed below -12 degrees F. The article here doen't have that story, but it does describe the conditions that Winter.
Some of the worst malware cleanup jobs I've had were machines that connected via dialup. As others have already pointed out, if you have a broadband connection via a router, you at least have an incoming firewall. I'd never put a Windows machine on a dialup connection without a software firewall. Viruses, trojans, worms and adware will get you via stupidity whether you have a firewall or not.
The concern I have is whether I had a working drive to read the tapes with in 40 years.. Oh, nevermind, I'm 60 now, so that probably won't be a problem for me personally..
Perhaps I should have expanded a bit. There are finite resources in addition to food that are involved as well. The improvements in technology are, indeed, very significant with regard to better use of those resources. I still believe, though, that it is in the long-term interest of humankind to think in terms of controlled population levels while, of course, improving technology as well. Will that happen? Not likely, as the right to procreate at will is not something that people will easily give up. It's too much of a general human instinct to reproduce. Thanks again for your input.
simply the fact that there are too many people. Now, obviously, I don't have a solution to this, but the problem is clear. All our technological mechanisms are simply delaying the Malthusian Solution unless we find an effective way to either have a lot of people leave the planet for stellar parts elsewhere, and/or stabilize the population of the planet at a sustainable level.
They've got the same system with XP media center for $20 less.. Tell me again how there's no "Microsoft tax". http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx ?CS=19&kc=19&oc=DE510SAP
I started my digital communications "career" as a licensed ham radio operator in 1958. In the early 60's I had a model 15 teletype machine connected to my transmitter and receiver through a home built "Terminal Unit", AKA modem, using tubes. Anyway, the teletype keyboard had a grand total of 32 keys, including the space bar, and used the venerable 5-bit Baudot code. Only upper case letters were availble with numbers and punctuation being available with the carriage shifted up by hitting the "figs" key. To return to alphabetical characters, you had to hit the "ltrs" key or there was an optional feature called "unshift on space" that returned to lower case upon receiving a space character.
Since it was printing using a mechanical printer somewhat like a typewriter, at the end of a line, the carriage took a finite amount of time to return and I quickly learned to send two carriage returns followed by a line feed so that the next character didn't try to print while the carriage was still in motion back to the left. The keyboard was strictly mechanical so you could not type faster than the distributor was sending the bits and you learned to pace yourself to the speed of the machine to get as close to the limit of 60 WPM as possible.
Picture of Model 15 Teletype keyboard here .