For learning how to use Unix, I liked The Unix Programming Environment. Although it shows its age, the book helped me move from the opaque feeling I get from working with black-box GUIs to an understanding of the Unix philosophy: tools that are as simple as possible. It taught me to be comfortable with the shell and low-level utilities. And I love Kernighan's dense writing style.
This may not apply to you, but any resident of California can get a San Francisco library card, which gives free access to Britannica online. When I was in high school (right before Wikipedia took off), I used to use Britannica all the time to look up facts.
Of course, I never use Britannica anymore, even for free. Using Google and Wikipedia is much faster than logging in and using Britannica search over a proxy. Without single-sign-on, micropayments, and the ability of crawlers to access the text, I don't see how Britannica can survive on their current business model.
If a company makes a hackable device, it's in everyone's interest for that company to be rewarded, so that more companies will make open devices. The question of whether the government is wasting vast sums of money on subsidies is independent. But given that thousands of Slashdotters will be using their subsidies (if they haven't already), let's direct those funds constructively.
I wish I had known of a geek-friendly device. Just to keep my old TV usable, I bought a random converter box, and now both of them are off for weeks at a time. I would use a more flexible computer-controlled one much more often. If you can kill two birds with one stone, why not?
There's an important step that this guy missed: cutting consumption.
Not if his concern is to ensure that his panels are "still worth the time and money." If he conserves enough to get a lower marginal rate, then it may no longer be worth it to have solar panels! A household's load on the grid is linear in its consumption or production of electricity, but the bill is nonlinear. And solar companies would do best to market their products to the most gluttonous consumers of energy, not the ones who conserve greatly. Perhaps the state should revisit the set of incentives it wants to provide with respect to net metering.
the DoE reports that California's average was $0.1459 per KWh. Are there enough taxes to raise that by 66%?
At least for PG&E, the minimum is $0.14784/kWh, but it rises as you use more than the "baseline usage" until the marginal rate for usage above 3 * baseline is $0.41049/kWh, according to the tariff book. On the coasts, the baseline usage for gas-heated houses is 9.8kWh/day=408W. So yes, if you turn on a 2kW electric heater or use a bunch of appliances it is quite easy to rack up a large bill. Great incentive to insulate.
You're placing the blame for presidential election results on an appreciation for tongue-in-cheek ads for a consumer device? Methinks your cynicism is misdirected.
I'm getting really annoyed at the Mac commercials that constantly slam PC's.
I get the opposite reaction. I find Apple's ads cute, fun, and surprisingly truthful as Microsoft runs desperate "I'm a PC, so I'm nowhere near my computer" ads.
And the iPhone and iPod Touch ads are musical, elegant, and actually make me want to buy the device, as opposed to the other carriers' ads that show dominoes of inventory but no one doing anything cool with their phones.
we have a ballot measure this November to borrow $10 billion dollars (and receive matching amounts from fed) to build a bullet train line half a century after the Japanese did it. According to the planners, maglev was rejected because there are no large-scale deployments. Why do we never get to leapfrog technology in the US?
I would not be so eager to defend Chase. They try to make an almost-two-factor security (I need my password, as well as a browser cookie. When I use a new browser, they call my phone number that they have on record to validate the new cookie). But where they apparently drop the ball is on man-in-the-middle attacks. I haven't found a secure login page, so short of checking every line of Javascript (or writing my own login form) I'm never sure where I'm submitting my password. Furthermore, the cookie they took great pains to authenticate can be accessed by "/ FALSE" (i.e., any unsecure site claiming to be chase.com).
The problem is that they're essentially telling you to sign a two year contract committing yourself to paying whatever bill they send you, but won't tell you what the bill will be.
It's actually a bit more complicated than that, as I found when I shopped last fall for a major carrier:
Verizon seemed to have the best agreement; it allowed me to cancel (within 60 days of notice) without early termination fees for any billing change that would cause a material adverse effect on me--including any tax they were not required to pass to the consumer but did anyway. I cancelled mostly due to their locked-down phones, their anti-consumer attitude, and their anti-openness lobbying; but when they chose to pass to me an increased state tax it was a last straw and get-out-of-ETF-free card.
As I recall, Sprint's agreement was similar to Verizon's, but specifically allowed them to increase text message fees without limit, and you would have no recourse. When I see their material adverse effect clause now, it seems that they've removed that exception to be equivalent to Verizon standards (but you must cancel within 30 days of when higher rates take effect).
When AT&T raises any fees, you may cancel without ETF (within 30 days of first affected bill), except for a change in how much tax they wish to pass to you (in which case you have no recourse).
T-Mobile's terms are the worst: they say you can cancel without ETF (within 30 days of notice) only if the advertised monthly charge changes, but they can change any "fees" arbitrarily!
I ended up going with T-Mobile's prepaid FlexPay account, which is the same price as the normal one but without the 2-year unbounded risk and without subsidized phones.
The problem isn't the size of the script; it's the latency. As I understand, when I browser encounters a script element, it loads and executes the code before rendering the rest of the page. Images, on the other hand, can load after the rest of the page is parsed. Depending on how close your servers are to your users and whether your users have Google ready in their DNS caches, this may be a win even if the scripts aren't already in the user's browser cache.
Always check the fine print at the back of your bill for price increases. For example, last month's statement said that Verizon will pass onto its customers an increase in the California PUC surcharge. Since this is a fee to Verizon that they willingly forward to their customers, it is considered a Verizon fee increase, so I have the right under the ToS to end service without an early termination fee. It took some arguing, but by pointing to the clear wording on the back of the bill and the terms of service, I got a promise by a manager to waive ETF when I switch carriers.
The filters are basically big capacitors to smooth out the power. I watched a talk a couple years ago at UC Berkeley by Prof. Martin Graham, EE professor emeritus, in which he made this same claim. He referred us to this site. Unfortunately, his evidence was largely anecdotal too.
Slashdot Mirror
For learning how to use Unix, I liked The Unix Programming Environment. Although it shows its age, the book helped me move from the opaque feeling I get from working with black-box GUIs to an understanding of the Unix philosophy: tools that are as simple as possible. It taught me to be comfortable with the shell and low-level utilities. And I love Kernighan's dense writing style.
This may not apply to you, but any resident of California can get a San Francisco library card, which gives free access to Britannica online. When I was in high school (right before Wikipedia took off), I used to use Britannica all the time to look up facts.
Of course, I never use Britannica anymore, even for free. Using Google and Wikipedia is much faster than logging in and using Britannica search over a proxy. Without single-sign-on, micropayments, and the ability of crawlers to access the text, I don't see how Britannica can survive on their current business model.
If a company makes a hackable device, it's in everyone's interest for that company to be rewarded, so that more companies will make open devices. The question of whether the government is wasting vast sums of money on subsidies is independent. But given that thousands of Slashdotters will be using their subsidies (if they haven't already), let's direct those funds constructively.
I wish I had known of a geek-friendly device. Just to keep my old TV usable, I bought a random converter box, and now both of them are off for weeks at a time. I would use a more flexible computer-controlled one much more often. If you can kill two birds with one stone, why not?
There's an important step that this guy missed: cutting consumption.
Not if his concern is to ensure that his panels are "still worth the time and money." If he conserves enough to get a lower marginal rate, then it may no longer be worth it to have solar panels! A household's load on the grid is linear in its consumption or production of electricity, but the bill is nonlinear. And solar companies would do best to market their products to the most gluttonous consumers of energy, not the ones who conserve greatly. Perhaps the state should revisit the set of incentives it wants to provide with respect to net metering.
the DoE reports that California's average was $0.1459 per KWh. Are there enough taxes to raise that by 66%?
At least for PG&E, the minimum is $0.14784/kWh, but it rises as you use more than the "baseline usage" until the marginal rate for usage above 3 * baseline is $0.41049/kWh, according to the tariff book. On the coasts, the baseline usage for gas-heated houses is 9.8kWh/day=408W. So yes, if you turn on a 2kW electric heater or use a bunch of appliances it is quite easy to rack up a large bill. Great incentive to insulate.
You're placing the blame for presidential election results on an appreciation for tongue-in-cheek ads for a consumer device? Methinks your cynicism is misdirected.
I'm getting really annoyed at the Mac commercials that constantly slam PC's.
I get the opposite reaction. I find Apple's ads cute, fun, and surprisingly truthful as Microsoft runs desperate "I'm a PC, so I'm nowhere near my computer" ads.
And the iPhone and iPod Touch ads are musical, elegant, and actually make me want to buy the device, as opposed to the other carriers' ads that show dominoes of inventory but no one doing anything cool with their phones.
we have a ballot measure this November to borrow $10 billion dollars (and receive matching amounts from fed) to build a bullet train line half a century after the Japanese did it. According to the planners, maglev was rejected because there are no large-scale deployments. Why do we never get to leapfrog technology in the US?
I would not be so eager to defend Chase. They try to make an almost-two-factor security (I need my password, as well as a browser cookie. When I use a new browser, they call my phone number that they have on record to validate the new cookie). But where they apparently drop the ball is on man-in-the-middle attacks. I haven't found a secure login page, so short of checking every line of Javascript (or writing my own login form) I'm never sure where I'm submitting my password. Furthermore, the cookie they took great pains to authenticate can be accessed by "/ FALSE" (i.e., any unsecure site claiming to be chase.com).
The problem is that they're essentially telling you to sign a two year contract committing yourself to paying whatever bill they send you, but won't tell you what the bill will be.
It's actually a bit more complicated than that, as I found when I shopped last fall for a major carrier:
I ended up going with T-Mobile's prepaid FlexPay account, which is the same price as the normal one but without the 2-year unbounded risk and without subsidized phones.
The problem isn't the size of the script; it's the latency. As I understand, when I browser encounters a script element, it loads and executes the code before rendering the rest of the page. Images, on the other hand, can load after the rest of the page is parsed. Depending on how close your servers are to your users and whether your users have Google ready in their DNS caches, this may be a win even if the scripts aren't already in the user's browser cache.
Always check the fine print at the back of your bill for price increases. For example, last month's statement said that Verizon will pass onto its customers an increase in the California PUC surcharge. Since this is a fee to Verizon that they willingly forward to their customers, it is considered a Verizon fee increase, so I have the right under the ToS to end service without an early termination fee. It took some arguing, but by pointing to the clear wording on the back of the bill and the terms of service, I got a promise by a manager to waive ETF when I switch carriers.
The filters are basically big capacitors to smooth out the power. I watched a talk a couple years ago at UC Berkeley by Prof. Martin Graham, EE professor emeritus, in which he made this same claim. He referred us to this site. Unfortunately, his evidence was largely anecdotal too.