I used to love my Quickbooks. That was 10 years ago. Now, every new version adds more advertising built in then the last, puts more stuff in web browser style (or actual in some cases) interfaces, and starts costing more money.
Worse, they don't support common file interchanges and actually make it as hard as possible to use them, instead forcing me to pay THEM for the privilidge of connecting to my back. They also charge my bank, or charges me too! All this, for what should be free.
What stinks, is that MS Money small business is unusable (and talks to me -- which is even worse) and the other products out there are insanely expensive.
I've looked for one that runs in linux natively, but not found anything workable yet (I'd still love one that did).
Grrrrr. I've gone form loving to hating Intuit in just 3 years. What a shame.
Two converging factors are going to be a big positive net for rural communities. At the same time Verizon Wireless, Sprint, and Singular are all rolling out high speed connectivity through EVDO (or similar) offerings, big cities are breaking into the hotspot world, and other carriers are planning rollouts via powerlines and other schemes -- some really unusual ones like airships floating around and so on.
While its true that none of these are starting in rural communities and working IN toward the cities, a side effect of the increased competition in cities is that is is (or I think it is) putting more and more pressure on the cell carriers to roll their services out to the countryside much sooner and at much lower cost than previously planned.
They (the cell carriers) are quickly going to find that their "market differentiator" is going to once again be the ubuiquity of their service compared to the city wifi clouds. If your market strength is ubiquity, you'll spend more money making sure you cover more remote places. Hence, soon we'll have at least dsl comperable speeds available on EVDO cards in much more rural locations.
Sure, I know Verizon Wireless has "plans" to cover their whole digital area with EVDO. Let me tell you that it is a SLOW plan from the perspective of those of us who live in the sticks.
FWIW, I have an EVDO card in my laptop for when I travel, and find it HUGELY useful at airports, park benches, and even hotel rooms in most major cities now. Its about comperable to DSL -- maybe a little higher latency. Upload speed is much reduced compared to download speed of course. They don't want people uploading content or streaming media -- they want you buying videos.
Still, its often more reliable and faster than a hotel network. Just not at home. At home, its about dialup speed until they get EVDO turned on out here.
With a linux box and a couple of nics, I can do most of the routing and firewalling I'd ever need to do for the smallish networks I manage.
I'm fairly sure you couldn't go to a major streaming media data center and drop a PC in there to do the job of a high end linux router.
So where's the breakpoint?
Could an old linux box route packets faster than a linksys wifi router? How about a Sonicwall TZ-170? Compare to an old Cisco 1720? I have both a Sonicwall TZ-170 and a linux router doing different tasks -- would it make sense to let my linksys handle the wifi side, and router all data through the linux box -- or even just put a wifi card in the linux box?
Where is the performance breakpoint? The latest kernel patches claim to handle sip transforms and that ilk as well as the Sonicwall. There are obviously apps to handle vpn, routing failover, and dual path networking for increased performance.
One of those projects that sits on the list for along time before I get to it is to try out using a single linux box with multiple nics to handle all my SOHO network routing tasks from one place -- then if I get it figured out to stick the whole config in a VMWARE virtual machine and try it that way.
Has anyone actually TESTED this? I'd be more interested in real experience than random guesses pulled out of one's.......pocket.
We talk about the dangerous of this waste as if it were the only danger there was. In terms of its toxicity to the environment and to the people in that environment the volume of waste just isn't anything compared to the daily wreckage from burning fossil fuels. The biggest difference is that the waste from the nuc plant is contained in one place, not stuck up in their via tall stacks or blown out tailpipes.
The weaponization of the waste is an important issue, but its also one which can be managed both by so called 'fast reaction' plants and by monitoring and policing.
We focus on dangers that are BIG SCARY ones but ultimately these aren't the ones that kill people. Most of us will die earlier than our maximum potential through being lazy and eating less carefully than is optimal for our bodies. Not radiation poisoning. You have to die of something, I suppose.
This is REALLY interesting to me. I've heard the mnemonic that "contamination is the sh*t, and raditation is the stink" -- so in this case Helium is a great thing to use since sh*t doesn't stick to it and its own sh*t doesn't stink!
re-using your diswasher as a television. They're both appliances and run on electricity after all, but they do entirely different things in entirely different ways. You could probably re-use some parts -- but it would cost more than starting over.
At some point you have a heat exchange process somewhere, right? They didn't detail it -- I did listen to the hour long program. Now, isn't that heated coolant considered 'dirty' and if so, what coolant can you use to carry that heat to an exchanger but use a low enough volume of it so that what is exchanged is still hot enough to crack open water to get hydrogen and still have enough energy left open to produce the steam required to run the turbines? Once you're used the steam that way, and its gone through the expansion process, how do you STILL have enough energy to heat even more water to desalinate it?
It seems like you're re-using the same heat from that coolant quite a few times. You can't use the coolant directly without the exchanger, I assume, since it would be contaminated -- and what good would desalinated but otherwise radioactive water be to anyone?
My terms may not agree with the once used as scientists study heat transfer. The primary sources of heat we face come from the following:
- Superheated air & gasses from the source of the fire. The fire itself is (except on TV) usually in one place. We spend a lot of effort getting to the fire, crawling under hot gasses and smoke. We also spend a lot of effort doing searches in parts of the building not on fire but heavy with heat and smoke. I've been considering this convection.
- Heat radiated directly from visible flames, obviously. By the you get to this, you should be putting water on it though, and if it doesn't dampen down pretty quickly you've got something else going on and need to re-evaluate your location.
- Steam. Steam may not be as hot as fire, but its hot. Its also pervasive. If the room you're in fills with steam, you can get burned on any part of you not covered by your gear. A small part of your wrist where the glove isn't put on right, for example, can result in a burn on your wrist.
** Different construction makes a big difference though. I'm talking about fighting fire in New England, where you have mostly older wood construction, multistory family houses with basements and attic spaces as well as multiple stairways, odd closet spaces and additions and rooms that are accessed through other rooms.
I noticed when I was in Europe that so many of the structures are brick or stone of one kind or another that I'd imagine its a very different set of problems. That stonework itself won't burn and won't vent much by itself. I'd guess they don't loose the structures that often, but those room and contents fires must get insanely hot really fast with the heat radiating back from the stonework. On the west coast of the US, from what I hear they're mostly dealing with single story modern wood construction. There's usually no upstairs living space or basement to worry about. The floor doesn't drop out from under you, there's no basement fire, and people aren't trapped in the 2nd floor bedrooms. The newer construction also tends to mean there are cross pieces in the wood framing that prevent the fire from traveling quite as quickly up the side of the building to a next floor when there is one. On the other hand, newer construction means trussed roofs. Roof trusses are put together with metal butt-plates. Unfortunately, these can fail after just 15 minutes of heat making it very dangerous to enter the building to fight the fire or do a search.
The point I'm making is that any generalization you make about firefighting is probably wrong for somewhere. To me, some of the most dangerous residential firefighting sounds like it would the multi-story wood frame row houses you see so often on the east coast in poorer parts of cities. They're big and dangerous wood structures. Any bigger or more modern and you start seeing building codes that really help. They have strange modifications in them, are close together, and sometimes you see "Single Room Occupancies" where people have illegally subdivided by putting up "walls" with plywood and a padlock. I know of one case not far from me were related families had up and downstairs appartments -- so they just cut a whole in the floor of the upstairs one and passed a ladder between them to make one unit.
The big trick to interior firefighting is timing. If you vent the roof too soon, you allow the air to flow before you're really attacking and you can burn up everyone inside. If you don't vent soon enough, you've got problems with steam conversion if you've got water, or flashover if you don't. Ideally, you want to vent at about the same time you're getting water to the flames, so that the steam expansion uses up the energy in fire and pushes the smoke out the vent. Position is everything. You really don't want to be between the fire and the vent.
For now, there is PETA (People for the Ethical Treament of Animals. Probably for good (if sometimes overzealous) reasons.
For the time being, there is no PETR (...Robots). There are plenty of risky situations where a robotic carrier would be of more use than a mule. Particularly, if the robot can be effectively small arms resistant.
Convection doesn't really create the kind of turbulance you'd see in a liquid, but unless someone screws up and just starts putting too much water on the smoke and destroys the thermal layering, it can be hundreds of degrees hotter at your head high than at your feet. The rule generally goes "if you can't see your feet, crawl". In a fire where the thermal layering isn't artificially destroyed or one that is being vented once attack starts, you can sometimes see clearly at foot level and not at all at knee, waist, or head level (depending on conditions).
In one case, I remember a clear line of delination so perfect that I could put my mask halfway up into the smoke layer and see a line across the mask. Clear below, pitch black above.
It was a training excersize in a real house which had been donated and was one of the first times I'd been inside a burn building. It was VERY educational. When you hear a firefighter talk about "crawl out of the building" its not kidding or a joke. Get on your hands and knees and crawl. Even if you can still walk, crawl. The gasses in the room that you're breathing will leave you confused and overcome often before you start coughing. On the other hand, you can usually find enough air to crawl out untill the structure is very heavily involved. You may have to suck that air through the carpet, but there is air being drawn in toward the flames -- or they'd go out.
..I have seen (but don't own) video taken at several scenes where flashover has killed firefighters. There was an interview with a rare survivor -- he had made two jumps to a doorway when two of his crew were further in and could not. I think he was from Houston. The point is it does happen and depending on the construction of the building and the nature of the first response, it can happen. We take big risks if we can potentially save lives. We take smaller risks to save pets and minimal risks to save structures.
In New England, you're dealing with 200 year old wood frame structures -- often with balloon construction and no insulation. Fire and gasses can travel. At the same time you may have a poor initial response with a rural department. If you've got people trapped on a second floor, sometimes you may start in before your back up is quite ready. "2 in / 2 out" is a nice rule. We try to stick to it. The first 10 minutes can be dicey.
The safety line is for drills. The drills were done with our vision impared (hoods over masks). We'd go in a ladder, simulate doing a search, and at a command to "bail" find the window and exit. For the drill, we'd wait for an extra tap from the safety officer indicating a line had been clipped on. Obviously in the real thing you would not.
This particular class (which I was in) was taught by some guys from NY, Ft. Lauderdale, and Miami if I remember. Even the red haired kid that looks like he couldn't be more than about 14 did all these things.
..Part of the first bit of training you get covers this. It also covers the expansion of water as it turns to steam (I believe it was 1700 times the volume).
Point is, however:
A) How much more do you think I can carry and still hope to pull someone else out? Water is HEAVY.
B) What good is a cool suit if the mask I'm wearing melts off my face?
Material science can be what it is -- but I still have to look out through the mask on my face. That presents a limit that is tough to beat. Until Scotty beams down and shows us how to make transparent aluminium or something -- we're going to have a hard time standing in a room that flashes over.
True, the guys at the airport wear the silver suits that can (I'm told) handle insane amounts of heat. They can't be effectively used for structural firefighting however.
regardless of the moronic and inciteful way you made it, you're point is accurate if we're talking about how to PREVENT flashover. It is NOT, however, what the FA is about.
The story (and Slashdot isn't the place I read it first -- I think Science Daily covered it earlier in the day) claims the suit will protect firefighters during flashover.
If you've cooled the overhead there IS NO flashover. If you've vented right, there is no flashover.
If someone doing a search gets too hot and decides to break a window before you're ready to vent -- you may set the stage for something that this suit is NOT going to help protect you from. THATS my point.
As to using a pick headed axe to get out? Putting the Axe across the corner of the window and using your own weight to hold it while you bail is a well known practice. I've done it in training, from a second floor, with a blindfold (and a safety line). I've done it over, and over, and over. I've done it using a figure 8 and my built in harness, and I've done it without a figure 8 just looping the rope around my back and using my gloved hands for the friction device.
On your last comment, my copy of the NFPA Essentials guide is 3 feet to my right.
During the training for that kind of move (which actually isn't QUITE that dramatic) we were told quite clearly that the exit procedure was very dangerous and should only be done in one of two cases....
a) the room is about to flashover
b) there is a news crew out side -- it looks GOOD on film.
When I go into a building with uncontrolled fire I have gear currently weighing between 60 and 80 pounds. This includes a pants and jacket made with a gnomex fabric, traditional helmet, heavy leather boots with steel under the foot, in the toes, and at the shins (which is nice when you bark your shin on a ladder). I'm wearing on my back an air bottle and SCOTT pack good for 30 minutes or so (a full hour if I'm acting as a member of a Rapid Intervention Team - RIT). My face is covered with mask that allows me to use that air, and I'm wearing a carbon fiber hood that encircles the mask and covers my head and neck. Long leather gloves cover my wrists to the inside of my jacket. I am "Fully Encapsulated".
I am fairly safe from heat and smoke up to the point of a 'flashover' -- in which case I have between 4 and 16 seconds to be somewhere else before being incinerated. I am so well protected, that many of the guys refuse to wear the hood or else won't fold down the leather flaps on the helment to cover their ears further because their warning for when the heat is too intense is when their ears start to feel too hot even through the protection.
In addition to all this, I am carrying one or more of the following: Radio, Light, Axe (or other similar tool), Water Can, Thermal Imaging Camera, escape rope, hose line.
Exactly how is it that this fancy jacket or undershirt is going to help me? I'm hot, but not so much that I can't make it through the 20 minutes in there. When I come out, I am handed a 20oz bottle of water and expected to finish it on the spot while having my pulse and respiration checked before even considering going back in.
This jacket would supposedly protect me from flashover -- several thousand degrees where anything that can combust, will.
BULLSHIT.
Even if the jacket worked, my face mask would melt to my face while the straps on my airpack along with the protective clothing I'm wearing would literally disintegrate.
The way to be protected from a flashover is to jump out the nearest window or to use the axe you're carrying to make a hole in the exterior wall and dive through it. That's pretty much it. When it comes to flashover -- Don't be there. If you are there, get out. I've taken classes that involved practing the fine art of going out a second floor window head first onto a ladder and flipping over, or slamming an axe into a wall braced across the corner of a window, tieing off a big of rope to it and bailing out the window -- even if its just to hang 20 or 30 feet down from the room where the flashover is about to happen until someone gets around to moving a ladder to you.
Don't believe this crap that a little water held in that jacket is going to help.
....or just "work" -- lets keep in mind this is an international community.
Outsourcing (to other countries or just other firms) -- when it comes to highly skilled programming jobs runs into the problems of management and flexibility. You CAN absolutely be successful outsourcing a complex application. You damn well better have a perfect specification with excruciating detail, a timeline that's very quick -- so your market doesn't change mid-process, and a perfect business plan that won't need to change as you learn more about your market. In short -- oursourcing high skill projects fails not because of the project team, but because of the spec. You get exactly what you ask for -- but no additional analysis or reactivity.
Outsourcing lower skilled "telesales" and customer service jobs is tricky to. To be worth while, it has to be not just cheap, but very cheap. That leads to compromising voip audio quality one step too far, it leads to standards of speach skills and accent just one step too low. You CAN have great sounding voip. There ARE plenty of highly capable people who speak very well (much better than my ability to speak their language, that's for sure). Unfortunately, if you work to achieve those standards you erode the very savings you're trying to gain.
Think customer service centers don't know? Here's an annecdote: When I went to close and terminate a credit card, after many years, they transferred me to the first clearly US based service center and native English speaking person I'd EVERY spoken to at that company. His job, of course, was to try to talk me out of leaving. He asked why I was going away and I said "In all these years, the only time decided to send me to a person who speaks clearly over high quality connections was when they were trying to keep me from leaving. That tells me two things. First, it tells me that knows the quality isn't as good with the other centers they have. Second, it tells me really doesn't care.
just using the word "radiation" presents bias -- people assume this equals the same kind of radiation they've been told to fear from nuc plants and atom bombs. Nothing could be further from the truth unless it came from the U.S. Government.
Still, using the word (which has as little meaning by itself as the word Server does) presents a set of expectations which are inaccurate for most people.
in my server room and have wondered if there wasn't a simple way to hack together a few big ones and let them work together to power all the machines. Then I could focus on cooling them in one place and deal with the other hardware on its own.
....that went around the net for years. This could be the very car. Does it only run on Microsoft roads? Does it sometimes just stop and require you to restart it?
Back in the days of Lotus Notes version 3, it was very possible for Joe Salesguy to write a viable business application in formula language on the plane ride home. Many of those guys ended up in IT development writing Notes applications. A small percentage of them survived when object oriented programming languages started to show up with Notes 4.x and became real programmers later, learning Java and other languages.
My point here (and please, lets avoid a "Notes Rules/Notes Sucks" thread) is that with that tool, enough of the business value was present in environment, that a little formula based scripting could create secure, useful applications.
That's missing in most of today's tools. Some of the Portal projects had lofty goals of bringing it back -- take a bunch of corporate web service based widgets and stitch them together to build business logic. So far as I know, none have really succeeded.
..I'm all for busting people who break the law. I'm also all for more intelligent spam laws. Unfortunately, more intelligent isn't necessarily the same as simply more or strong laws.
Given that the better solution is a secured way of transferring mail (and no, lets not argue the merits of each proposed solution here) still seems to be some ways off from widespread use, we're stuck with the laws.
I ask my fellow geeks here, if we wouldn't be up in arms against nearly any other bust in the realm of what people do with their network connections. P2P music swapping violates laws as well. I don't think those are very good laws right now, but they are in place nonetheless. We do not applaud when someone gets busted in that space, however.
We need to be careful in our responses to be balanced, lest we become as bad as what we hate. We do this all the time with Microsoft and Linux related issues. By default, MS is "bad" and anyone doing something in Linux has a great deal of latitude by comparison.
One part of me says we should throw away the key here -- he's clearly abused the system terribly (assuming the reports are accurate). The other part still resists the use of laws to punish when the system itself encourages the abuse through poor design. We can't trust our mail not because of this creep, but because we do not insist on knowing the identity of who sends us mail. There may be good reasons why we do not, but the this is the consequence of that decision.
to either complain about the results version 2 will produce or not. Then, I may or may not have suggested that we not build the version 2 at all which may or may not have resulted in the version never existing. Then the universe imploded. Fortunately, that was the OTHER universe.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to love my Quickbooks. That was 10 years ago. Now, every new version adds more advertising built in then the last, puts more stuff in web browser style (or actual in some cases) interfaces, and starts costing more money.
Worse, they don't support common file interchanges and actually make it as hard as possible to use them, instead forcing me to pay THEM for the privilidge of connecting to my back. They also charge my bank, or charges me too! All this, for what should be free.
What stinks, is that MS Money small business is unusable (and talks to me -- which is even worse) and the other products out there are insanely expensive.
I've looked for one that runs in linux natively, but not found anything workable yet (I'd still love one that did).
Grrrrr. I've gone form loving to hating Intuit in just 3 years. What a shame.
...at least that is my prediction.
Two converging factors are going to be a big positive net for rural communities. At the same time Verizon Wireless, Sprint, and Singular are all rolling out high speed connectivity through EVDO (or similar) offerings, big cities are breaking into the hotspot world, and other carriers are planning rollouts via powerlines and other schemes -- some really unusual ones like airships floating around and so on.
While its true that none of these are starting in rural communities and working IN toward the cities, a side effect of the increased competition in cities is that is is (or I think it is) putting more and more pressure on the cell carriers to roll their services out to the countryside much sooner and at much lower cost than previously planned.
They (the cell carriers) are quickly going to find that their "market differentiator" is going to once again be the ubuiquity of their service compared to the city wifi clouds. If your market strength is ubiquity, you'll spend more money making sure you cover more remote places. Hence, soon we'll have at least dsl comperable speeds available on EVDO cards in much more rural locations.
Sure, I know Verizon Wireless has "plans" to cover their whole digital area with EVDO. Let me tell you that it is a SLOW plan from the perspective of those of us who live in the sticks.
FWIW, I have an EVDO card in my laptop for when I travel, and find it HUGELY useful at airports, park benches, and even hotel rooms in most major cities now. Its about comperable to DSL -- maybe a little higher latency. Upload speed is much reduced compared to download speed of course. They don't want people uploading content or streaming media -- they want you buying videos.
Still, its often more reliable and faster than a hotel network. Just not at home. At home, its about dialup speed until they get EVDO turned on out here.
With a linux box and a couple of nics, I can do most of the routing and firewalling I'd ever need to do for the smallish networks I manage.
.......pocket.
I'm fairly sure you couldn't go to a major streaming media data center and drop a PC in there to do the job of a high end linux router.
So where's the breakpoint?
Could an old linux box route packets faster than a linksys wifi router? How about a Sonicwall TZ-170? Compare to an old Cisco 1720? I have both a Sonicwall TZ-170 and a linux router doing different tasks -- would it make sense to let my linksys handle the wifi side, and router all data through the linux box -- or even just put a wifi card in the linux box?
Where is the performance breakpoint? The latest kernel patches claim to handle sip transforms and that ilk as well as the Sonicwall. There are obviously apps to handle vpn, routing failover, and dual path networking for increased performance.
One of those projects that sits on the list for along time before I get to it is to try out using a single linux box with multiple nics to handle all my SOHO network routing tasks from one place -- then if I get it figured out to stick the whole config in a VMWARE virtual machine and try it that way.
Has anyone actually TESTED this? I'd be more interested in real experience than random guesses pulled out of one's
We talk about the dangerous of this waste as if it were the only danger there was. In terms of its toxicity to the environment and to the people in that environment the volume of waste just isn't anything compared to the daily wreckage from burning fossil fuels. The biggest difference is that the waste from the nuc plant is contained in one place, not stuck up in their via tall stacks or blown out tailpipes.
The weaponization of the waste is an important issue, but its also one which can be managed both by so called 'fast reaction' plants and by monitoring and policing.
We focus on dangers that are BIG SCARY ones but ultimately these aren't the ones that kill people. Most of us will die earlier than our maximum potential through being lazy and eating less carefully than is optimal for our bodies. Not radiation poisoning. You have to die of something, I suppose.
This is REALLY interesting to me. I've heard the mnemonic that "contamination is the sh*t, and raditation is the stink" -- so in this case Helium is a great thing to use since sh*t doesn't stick to it and its own sh*t doesn't stink!
That's really interesting.
re-using your diswasher as a television. They're both appliances and run on electricity after all, but they do entirely different things in entirely different ways. You could probably re-use some parts -- but it would cost more than starting over.
At some point you have a heat exchange process somewhere, right? They didn't detail it -- I did listen to the hour long program. Now, isn't that heated coolant considered 'dirty' and if so, what coolant can you use to carry that heat to an exchanger but use a low enough volume of it so that what is exchanged is still hot enough to crack open water to get hydrogen and still have enough energy left open to produce the steam required to run the turbines? Once you're used the steam that way, and its gone through the expansion process, how do you STILL have enough energy to heat even more water to desalinate it?
It seems like you're re-using the same heat from that coolant quite a few times. You can't use the coolant directly without the exchanger, I assume, since it would be contaminated -- and what good would desalinated but otherwise radioactive water be to anyone?
My terms may not agree with the once used as scientists study heat transfer. The primary sources of heat we face come from the following:
- Superheated air & gasses from the source of the fire. The fire itself is (except on TV) usually in one place. We spend a lot of effort getting to the fire, crawling under hot gasses and smoke. We also spend a lot of effort doing searches in parts of the building not on fire but heavy with heat and smoke. I've been considering this convection.
- Heat radiated directly from visible flames, obviously. By the you get to this, you should be putting water on it though, and if it doesn't dampen down pretty quickly you've got something else going on and need to re-evaluate your location.
- Steam. Steam may not be as hot as fire, but its hot. Its also pervasive. If the room you're in fills with steam, you can get burned on any part of you not covered by your gear. A small part of your wrist where the glove isn't put on right, for example, can result in a burn on your wrist.
** Different construction makes a big difference though. I'm talking about fighting fire in New England, where you have mostly older wood construction, multistory family houses with basements and attic spaces as well as multiple stairways, odd closet spaces and additions and rooms that are accessed through other rooms.
I noticed when I was in Europe that so many of the structures are brick or stone of one kind or another that I'd imagine its a very different set of problems. That stonework itself won't burn and won't vent much by itself. I'd guess they don't loose the structures that often, but those room and contents fires must get insanely hot really fast with the heat radiating back from the stonework. On the west coast of the US, from what I hear they're mostly dealing with single story modern wood construction. There's usually no upstairs living space or basement to worry about. The floor doesn't drop out from under you, there's no basement fire, and people aren't trapped in the 2nd floor bedrooms. The newer construction also tends to mean there are cross pieces in the wood framing that prevent the fire from traveling quite as quickly up the side of the building to a next floor when there is one. On the other hand, newer construction means trussed roofs. Roof trusses are put together with metal butt-plates. Unfortunately, these can fail after just 15 minutes of heat making it very dangerous to enter the building to fight the fire or do a search.
The point I'm making is that any generalization you make about firefighting is probably wrong for somewhere. To me, some of the most dangerous residential firefighting sounds like it would the multi-story wood frame row houses you see so often on the east coast in poorer parts of cities. They're big and dangerous wood structures. Any bigger or more modern and you start seeing building codes that really help. They have strange modifications in them, are close together, and sometimes you see "Single Room Occupancies" where people have illegally subdivided by putting up "walls" with plywood and a padlock. I know of one case not far from me were related families had up and downstairs appartments -- so they just cut a whole in the floor of the upstairs one and passed a ladder between them to make one unit.
The big trick to interior firefighting is timing. If you vent the roof too soon, you allow the air to flow before you're really attacking and you can burn up everyone inside. If you don't vent soon enough, you've got problems with steam conversion if you've got water, or flashover if you don't. Ideally, you want to vent at about the same time you're getting water to the flames, so that the steam expansion uses up the energy in fire and pushes the smoke out the vent. Position is everything. You really don't want to be between the fire and the vent.
For now, there is PETA (People for the Ethical Treament of Animals. Probably for good (if sometimes overzealous) reasons.
For the time being, there is no PETR (...Robots). There are plenty of risky situations where a robotic carrier would be of more use than a mule. Particularly, if the robot can be effectively small arms resistant.
Convection doesn't really create the kind of turbulance you'd see in a liquid, but unless someone screws up and just starts putting too much water on the smoke and destroys the thermal layering, it can be hundreds of degrees hotter at your head high than at your feet. The rule generally goes "if you can't see your feet, crawl". In a fire where the thermal layering isn't artificially destroyed or one that is being vented once attack starts, you can sometimes see clearly at foot level and not at all at knee, waist, or head level (depending on conditions).
In one case, I remember a clear line of delination so perfect that I could put my mask halfway up into the smoke layer and see a line across the mask. Clear below, pitch black above.
It was a training excersize in a real house which had been donated and was one of the first times I'd been inside a burn building. It was VERY educational. When you hear a firefighter talk about "crawl out of the building" its not kidding or a joke. Get on your hands and knees and crawl. Even if you can still walk, crawl. The gasses in the room that you're breathing will leave you confused and overcome often before you start coughing. On the other hand, you can usually find enough air to crawl out untill the structure is very heavily involved. You may have to suck that air through the carpet, but there is air being drawn in toward the flames -- or they'd go out.
..I have seen (but don't own) video taken at several scenes where flashover has killed firefighters. There was an interview with a rare survivor -- he had made two jumps to a doorway when two of his crew were further in and could not. I think he was from Houston. The point is it does happen and depending on the construction of the building and the nature of the first response, it can happen. We take big risks if we can potentially save lives. We take smaller risks to save pets and minimal risks to save structures.
In New England, you're dealing with 200 year old wood frame structures -- often with balloon construction and no insulation. Fire and gasses can travel. At the same time you may have a poor initial response with a rural department. If you've got people trapped on a second floor, sometimes you may start in before your back up is quite ready. "2 in / 2 out" is a nice rule. We try to stick to it. The first 10 minutes can be dicey.
The safety line is for drills. The drills were done with our vision impared (hoods over masks). We'd go in a ladder, simulate doing a search, and at a command to "bail" find the window and exit. For the drill, we'd wait for an extra tap from the safety officer indicating a line had been clipped on. Obviously in the real thing you would not.
This particular class (which I was in) was taught by some guys from NY, Ft. Lauderdale, and Miami if I remember. Even the red haired kid that looks like he couldn't be more than about 14 did all these things.
..Part of the first bit of training you get covers this. It also covers the expansion of water as it turns to steam (I believe it was 1700 times the volume).
Point is, however:
A) How much more do you think I can carry and still hope to pull someone else out? Water is HEAVY.
B) What good is a cool suit if the mask I'm wearing melts off my face?
Material science can be what it is -- but I still have to look out through the mask on my face. That presents a limit that is tough to beat. Until Scotty beams down and shows us how to make transparent aluminium or something -- we're going to have a hard time standing in a room that flashes over.
True, the guys at the airport wear the silver suits that can (I'm told) handle insane amounts of heat. They can't be effectively used for structural firefighting however.
http://www.thenorth.com.nyud.net:8090/nctpics.nsf
and the other things related ---
http://www.thenorth.com.nyud.net:8090/nctpics.nsf
http://www.thenorth.com.nyud.net:8090/nctpics.nsf
http://www.thenorth.com.nyud.net:8090/nctpics.nsf
regardless of the moronic and inciteful way you made it, you're point is accurate if we're talking about how to PREVENT flashover. It is NOT, however, what the FA is about.
The story (and Slashdot isn't the place I read it first -- I think Science Daily covered it earlier in the day) claims the suit will protect firefighters during flashover.
If you've cooled the overhead there IS NO flashover. If you've vented right, there is no flashover.
If someone doing a search gets too hot and decides to break a window before you're ready to vent -- you may set the stage for something that this suit is NOT going to help protect you from. THATS my point.
As to using a pick headed axe to get out? Putting the Axe across the corner of the window and using your own weight to hold it while you bail is a well known practice. I've done it in training, from a second floor, with a blindfold (and a safety line). I've done it over, and over, and over. I've done it using a figure 8 and my built in harness, and I've done it without a figure 8 just looping the rope around my back and using my gloved hands for the friction device.
On your last comment, my copy of the NFPA Essentials guide is 3 feet to my right.
During the training for that kind of move (which actually isn't QUITE that dramatic) we were told quite clearly that the exit procedure was very dangerous and should only be done in one of two cases....
a) the room is about to flashover
b) there is a news crew out side -- it looks GOOD on film.
Kidding aside, a rope bag with 40' of heat resistant static line strong but thin enough to be useful isn't cheap.
When I go into a building with uncontrolled fire I have gear currently weighing between 60 and 80 pounds. This includes a pants and jacket made with a gnomex fabric, traditional helmet, heavy leather boots with steel under the foot, in the toes, and at the shins (which is nice when you bark your shin on a ladder). I'm wearing on my back an air bottle and SCOTT pack good for 30 minutes or so (a full hour if I'm acting as a member of a Rapid Intervention Team - RIT). My face is covered with mask that allows me to use that air, and I'm wearing a carbon fiber hood that encircles the mask and covers my head and neck. Long leather gloves cover my wrists to the inside of my jacket. I am "Fully Encapsulated".
I am fairly safe from heat and smoke up to the point of a 'flashover' -- in which case I have between 4 and 16 seconds to be somewhere else before being incinerated. I am so well protected, that many of the guys refuse to wear the hood or else won't fold down the leather flaps on the helment to cover their ears further because their warning for when the heat is too intense is when their ears start to feel too hot even through the protection.
In addition to all this, I am carrying one or more of the following: Radio, Light, Axe (or other similar tool), Water Can, Thermal Imaging Camera, escape rope, hose line.
Exactly how is it that this fancy jacket or undershirt is going to help me? I'm hot, but not so much that I can't make it through the 20 minutes in there. When I come out, I am handed a 20oz bottle of water and expected to finish it on the spot while having my pulse and respiration checked before even considering going back in.
This jacket would supposedly protect me from flashover -- several thousand degrees where anything that can combust, will.
BULLSHIT.
Even if the jacket worked, my face mask would melt to my face while the straps on my airpack along with the protective clothing I'm wearing would literally disintegrate.
The way to be protected from a flashover is to jump out the nearest window or to use the axe you're carrying to make a hole in the exterior wall and dive through it. That's pretty much it. When it comes to flashover -- Don't be there. If you are there, get out. I've taken classes that involved practing the fine art of going out a second floor window head first onto a ladder and flipping over, or slamming an axe into a wall braced across the corner of a window, tieing off a big of rope to it and bailing out the window -- even if its just to hang 20 or 30 feet down from the room where the flashover is about to happen until someone gets around to moving a ladder to you.
Don't believe this crap that a little water held in that jacket is going to help.
....or just "work" -- lets keep in mind this is an international community.
Outsourcing (to other countries or just other firms) -- when it comes to highly skilled programming jobs runs into the problems of management and flexibility. You CAN absolutely be successful outsourcing a complex application. You damn well better have a perfect specification with excruciating detail, a timeline that's very quick -- so your market doesn't change mid-process, and a perfect business plan that won't need to change as you learn more about your market. In short -- oursourcing high skill projects fails not because of the project team, but because of the spec. You get exactly what you ask for -- but no additional analysis or reactivity.
Outsourcing lower skilled "telesales" and customer service jobs is tricky to. To be worth while, it has to be not just cheap, but very cheap. That leads to compromising voip audio quality one step too far, it leads to standards of speach skills and accent just one step too low. You CAN have great sounding voip. There ARE plenty of highly capable people who speak very well (much better than my ability to speak their language, that's for sure). Unfortunately, if you work to achieve those standards you erode the very savings you're trying to gain.
Think customer service centers don't know? Here's an annecdote: When I went to close and terminate a credit card, after many years, they transferred me to the first clearly US based service center and native English speaking person I'd EVERY spoken to at that company. His job, of course, was to try to talk me out of leaving. He asked why I was going away and I said "In all these years, the only time decided to send me to a person who speaks clearly over high quality connections was when they were trying to keep me from leaving. That tells me two things. First, it tells me that knows the quality isn't as good with the other centers they have. Second, it tells me really doesn't care.
just using the word "radiation" presents bias -- people assume this equals the same kind of radiation they've been told to fear from nuc plants and atom bombs. Nothing could be further from the truth unless it came from the U.S. Government.
Still, using the word (which has as little meaning by itself as the word Server does) presents a set of expectations which are inaccurate for most people.
in my server room and have wondered if there wasn't a simple way to hack together a few big ones and let them work together to power all the machines. Then I could focus on cooling them in one place and deal with the other hardware on its own.
It never looked economical to do.
....that went around the net for years. This could be the very car. Does it only run on Microsoft roads? Does it sometimes just stop and require you to restart it?
Back in the days of Lotus Notes version 3, it was very possible for Joe Salesguy to write a viable business application in formula language on the plane ride home. Many of those guys ended up in IT development writing Notes applications. A small percentage of them survived when object oriented programming languages started to show up with Notes 4.x and became real programmers later, learning Java and other languages.
My point here (and please, lets avoid a "Notes Rules/Notes Sucks" thread) is that with that tool, enough of the business value was present in environment, that a little formula based scripting could create secure, useful applications.
That's missing in most of today's tools. Some of the Portal projects had lofty goals of bringing it back -- take a bunch of corporate web service based widgets and stitch them together to build business logic. So far as I know, none have really succeeded.
..I'm all for busting people who break the law. I'm also all for more intelligent spam laws. Unfortunately, more intelligent isn't necessarily the same as simply more or strong laws.
Given that the better solution is a secured way of transferring mail (and no, lets not argue the merits of each proposed solution here) still seems to be some ways off from widespread use, we're stuck with the laws.
I ask my fellow geeks here, if we wouldn't be up in arms against nearly any other bust in the realm of what people do with their network connections. P2P music swapping violates laws as well. I don't think those are very good laws right now, but they are in place nonetheless. We do not applaud when someone gets busted in that space, however.
We need to be careful in our responses to be balanced, lest we become as bad as what we hate. We do this all the time with Microsoft and Linux related issues. By default, MS is "bad" and anyone doing something in Linux has a great deal of latitude by comparison.
One part of me says we should throw away the key here -- he's clearly abused the system terribly (assuming the reports are accurate). The other part still resists the use of laws to punish when the system itself encourages the abuse through poor design. We can't trust our mail not because of this creep, but because we do not insist on knowing the identity of who sends us mail. There may be good reasons why we do not, but the this is the consequence of that decision.
to either complain about the results version 2 will produce or not. Then, I may or may not have suggested that we not build the version 2 at all which may or may not have resulted in the version never existing. Then the universe imploded. Fortunately, that was the OTHER universe.