I also have an EU2000i. Haven't had to use it in an outage yet, but I know it'll work. After sitting - totally unprepared - for several days without power last winter, I started looking for options. While a whole-house generator was really tempting, the vast majority of residential-grade stuff that was reasonably affordable uses air-cooled engines that are extremely noisy, VERY thirsty, and apparently don't live very long when you look at the rated lifetime hours info. I also wasn't too keen on eating up a chunk of the backyard for something I may not need but once in a blue moon. A portable would also be useful to others - just as I got my power back last winter, my parents lost theirs.
When I started sizing generators, I was a bit dismayed by the charts I found online. If I believed them, I needed something in the 4-6kW range minimum. But I started logging peak power usage for the devices I wanted to run (furnace and fridge, mainly) and found their peak and average draws were considerably lower than the online guides listed. While the EU2000i is not going to have much spare for other things while running the furnace and fridge, I decided to go with it because it is still easily carried around and those things don't run continuously anyway - I can let the furnace cycle off, then do other things.
To feed the power in, I opted to install a dedicated generator circuit. I put in a locking power receptacle in the eave of the house near where the generator sits out back, and fed three outlets, one in the back of the house, one in the kitchen, one in the garage by the furnace. I then just set up the generator, get it running, and plug in the things I want to power off of it. No cords through the doors or windows, no worry about backfeeding or messing with the breaker panel.
I test-run the generator each month, actually hooking things up. Usually I'll plug the furnace in, as even with A/C running it'll still run the blower, sometimes the fridge or the computer. Let it run an hour. Been doing that since around May, and I still haven't used the first gallon of gas I put in it! The EcoThrottle feature definitely conserves fuel. In contrast, some of the cheapo generators my friends bought will go through a gallon of gas in less than an hour of operation with no load. I bought a 5-gallon gas can, put StaBil in it, and thus have potentially a week's fuel supply for the Honda - as opposed to tank-farm sized requirements to run some of the other generators I looked at.
The low fuel requirements do pose an issue - how to keep the fuel fresh. But between the StaBil which many have assured me works wonders, and the fact my cars use gasoline as well I'm not concerned. If I don't have an outage anytime soon, I can just dump the old gas into my car then refill the can with fresh. And if I have an overly long outage I can use the fuel in my vehicles to power the generator.
The Honda uses an inverter to produce AC power too, which besides the efficiency means it's clean power. Even my furnace has an (expensive!) electronic circuit board on it, so I wanted something that wouldn't put the electronics at risk.
Not quite right, the Honda generators are actually inverters. The generator windings make "wild" AC of varying frequency / voltage that gets rectified then sent to an inverter section. Thus, the engine doesn't have to maintain a specific speed to maintain its output frequency. The inverter is also why they are so much more expensive than other generators.
The EcoThrottle adjusts engine speed based on the load the inverter is seeing, so when you are pulling a light load (in my experience, just about anything short of full rated power) the engine can idle down quite low. This helps to significantly improve fuel efficiency and engine life too.
At that, Honda still doesn't corner the market with this - there are a couple other vendors, and they are slightly cheaper though still considerably higher cost than the old-style fixed-RPM generators.
Part of the problem is the "7 year lifespan" at least for the bulbs I bought at Home Depot (Commercial Electric, then nVision) was based on an unrealistic two or three hours per day use. That seems unrealistically low to me. The lights in my living room are generally on all evening every day and all day on weekends.
That said, I must have really good power. My first-installed CFLs are now about three years old, the second batch around two years old, and all but one are working just fine. That one was a 100W equivalent and it went out in style - nice frying sound and lots of smoke. I have also been less than impressed with the other 100W equiv bulbs, they are very dim at startup and take a long time to warm. But the 60W equiv bulbs are working just wonderfully even now.
Of course, I also got MUCH longer runtime out of incandescents than most people claim. There are some incandescent bulbs in my house that were here when I moved in 4 years ago - still working just fine. I was using 100W indandescents in my living room, and most of them lasted at least a year. (I was running one CFL one incandescent in each lamp at first, now I'm 100% CFL.)
I've had more CFLs DOA than fail on me over time so far. Had one that just wouldn't do anything, and another that emitted a weird purplish glow.
I haven't had any major issues, but the audio quality is definitely lacking on occasion, with lots of glitches and echo. I'm not sure just why it happens, the bad times don't match my peak Inet usage so I guess it's an issue outside my home. And I can't use a modem on the line, even though they said I would be able to when I asked up front. (Not that I expected it to work, but they did say it would. I occasionally need to call older dialup systems for work. Now I VPN to a computer at the office with a regular POTS line.)
Long as Vonage is cheaper (and it is still significantly cheaper on the 500 min/mo plan) than cable, I'll keep it because I almost never use the phone. Were the cost to rise anywhere near what the cable company wants, I'd definitely switch back as I get better audio and can use the modem. The extra features Vonage offers are nice, but I find I don't use anything but CID anyway...
Line of sight, it takes very little signal to get that far. You're only talking a little less than two miles distance, and ham radio operators have gone much farther on very low signal levels. Frequency also enters into it of course, lower ones will go much better than higher, but still - two miles is nothing.
That said, the aluminum skin of the aircraft is going to interfere and cut the signal strength. And the antennas for most cell sites are designed for maximum gain looking horizontally and slightly downward so they should be pretty deaf to signals from above.
Speaking of code violations... When I went to replace some outside lighting on my newly-purchased house, I found that the previous owner's son evidently thought he was a pretty handy electrician...
They had replaced the garage light switch with a two-switch unit, so they could turn the outside light over the garage on/off from there. Of course, there weren't enough wires in the existing cable and I guess it was too much trouble to pull a new one. So I found that black was hot to the garage light, white was hot (and not marked as such) to the outside light. The much thinner ground wire (installed in 1963, was code at the time) was neutral for everything. (Even better, he didn't even have the branch's ground tied to the neutral in the feed cable, he just used the ground wiring all the way back to the panel.)
All the D-series laptops we got at my office in the past 6-8 months or so (as well as the docking stations) have 2-prong cords. I got mine May last year and it had grounded plugs, but was about the last one... Other than the AC cord, there doesn't appear to be any significant difference.
I'm going to take your post as an opportunity to go off on a tangent - since you seem to be using IPv6 already...
I've toyed with the idea of playing with it, but am not sure from what I've read (been a while - forgot about it until recently, with the story on China and now this one) whether I can do what I'm thinking about.
Can I set up my home network (mostly Linux, one WinXP laptop for work, and occasionally a Mac Mini) to use IPv6 internally, then have my Linux router/firewall handle the translation to/from IPv4 for the cable connection? I assume my dumb/basic switches are fine, although I'm not sure about the WRT54G AP (or maybe one of the replacement firmwares for it supports IPv6?). Some of the stuff I read back when I thought about this last left me with the impression this might not work very well...
Secondarily, when I enable IPv6 on my laptops, I assume (would hope!) that Linux and XP can switch back and forth between the two without issue, for when I go connect to another network? (For that matter, I'm not sure what the company IT folks would say if I enabled it on the work laptop - would they necessarily even notice or care?)
Thanks for any info! Now I'll depart from Slashdot tradition and actually go do some reading of my own...:) Hopefully things are a little less confusing than they were last time...
While I don't necessarily agree with the person you were originally discussing this with (I'm rather partial to Gnome now, oddly enough - used to hate it) there are two things OS X does that drive me up the wall...
First, is the menubar at the top of the screen. I guess I'm just used to having it in each window, that's where I go reflexively to use a menu. And even after a little over 6 months of using my Mac Mini exclusively I still did that.
Worst, though, is that I can't (haven't found a way, anyway) have focus-follows-mouse for EVERYTHING. And yes, I've seen plenty of commenters who think that's stupid but Ever since using Linux that has become the first option I enable on any install! I also understand that with the menubar at the top of the screen it'd be pretty difficult to implement in OS X (yet another reason for my first complaint).
My primary reason for liking focus-follows-mouse is that I very frequently find myself needing to reference one window while typing in another. I don't need to see what I'm typing, I'm quite good at touch-typing. But on OS X (and Windows, by default) I'm forced to have the active window on top. Wouldn't be a problem if I had a huge, hi-res screen to lay things out on but I don't. It's bad enough on the Dell laptops I use at work (1600x1200, but only 15") last time I looked at Apple laptops (before the Intel line) I couldn't get anywhere near that resolution on anything. Which means I *will* be stacking windows.
Don't know if it's the norm, but Cox has been fantastic in my area (OKC). Certainly as reliable as a regular landline ever was.
In my apartment, the only time it was down was if the power for the whole complex was out. That happened twice in three years, thanks to some severe storms.
Now, in my house (maybe 7 miles from the apartments) over the past three years it's been out ONCE for an extended period. I think that was about 45 minutes - and was because the buried main feeder cable (their BIG one, not the one to the house) went bad in my neighbor's backyard. They came out and had a temporary cable draped across a few yards within the hour, and I didn't even notice when they replaced it permanently. Power failures don't seem to bring it down either, guess they have better backup systems in this area. (Only had one brief powerfail so far anyway, nice being around the corner from a hospital!)
Other than that, I've had a few instances here and there where it dropped out, but that was almost always my now 6-year-old Linksys cablemodem flaking out and needing reset. Everything is now on a big UPS salvaged from work ("toss it, it's bad" - I bring it home, $60 for new batteries and I have a 1400VA UPS!) so everything stays up thru power bumps and I haven't had any more of the drops since.
I've had Vonage for two years now, and it's been just fine. Occasionally the audio has been flaky - but I'd just call it comparable to cell phone service, which is what I'd have otherwise. I really don't need a landline very often. $18/month is a lot better-sounding for my limited phone use than the $30+/month I was paying before.
Is there a reason not to use the "official" Linux client from Citrix? My company is definitely beholden to MS, but they recently set up an Internet-accessible Citrix gateway to most of our internal apps. I went to the Citrix website and got the Linux client. Works for everything we use it for, anyway... Now I don't have to dig out my work laptop for every little thing when I'm at home!
Granted, I had to go install it myself - it would certainly make things much nicer to have a client ready to go in the distro's package manager.
If everyone I make regular monthly payments to was required to report on-time payments to the credit bureaus, this wouldn't be such an issue. But they seldom do. I've heard in some areas they will, but NONE of mine report anything unless you MISS a payment. So when I bought my house, I had a -zero- credit score since I didn't have credit cards, and had paid off the student loans years before.
Now, while I have the mortgage I'll have a spiffy credit score. But I am in the process of extremely accelerated payoff on that. In two more years (5 1/2 years from purchase) I won't have a mortgage anymore. And that credit score will drop out again.
Have I lived? Sure. I go on vacations, purchased a new car, have six months' expenses in savings (will be a year once the house is paid off), pay everything on time or early. I'm in a hell of a lot better financial shape than almost anyone I know. But the insurance companies will insist I'm a higher risk because my credit score is low!
There was a report some time back that Fair Isaac (who does the FICO scoring) now has an "alternate" score for people in my position. But it's voluntary - if the company pulling the score doesn't want to bother, they won't know about that alternate scoring. I'm not big on government intervention, but for something that's becoming so pervasive as FICO, I really wish they would. If they would either require the use of the alternate score as well, OR require anyone you make regular payments to (utilities, landlord, etc) to make on-time entries to the standard report, I'd probably be just fine.
And you are correct - the reports are frequently highly inaccurate, and can be a pain to fix. First time I pulled mine, I found I had had a Sears credit card ever since I was 1 year old! (It was my dad's.) None of the three match, all of them miss at least one past residence, one didn't even show my current job - that I've had for over 10 years!
No, I had my usual knee-jerk *sigh* as well. I'm getting so tired of hearing a few of the ads on the radio lately - "go to this website to know what to do in case of a natural disaster or terrorist attack!" "Things you should know to prepare your family for a disaster or terror attack!" Today I heard one that mentioned a site giving info on what to do if you are subject to a "cyber-attack"! WTF...
I can only assume it actually works on some people... Haven't seen too many building bomb shelters out back yet, though...
While I'm sure some (smaller?) companies will use whatever OS comes by default, many do not. When I order computers at my office, we have a corporate web page with Dell. Our new systems are all "No Image" systems. When they arrive, we toss in the corporate image disk, tell it what its name is on the network and who its user is.
Our corporate disks are now XP, have been for a little over a year. *Maybe* two. I seriously doubt we'll be using Vista anytime soon! (In spite of the fact our IT department is seemingly in bed with MS...)
They are still fairly common, although it seems to be dwindling in some areas.
My pay is deposited directly to my account, but the company still sends me a "statement" that is identical to the checks they used to send, except it now has "Non-Negotiable" stamped across it. I use online bill-paying for the most part, but two of my bills are actually mailed by my credit union as checks instead of EFTs! But it's no fee to me, and I don't have to buy stamps.
Anymore I still write one check per month - for the mortgage. If I were just paying minimum on it, I would pay it online as well, but I'm paying it down with a large and variable dollar amount each month so I prefer to write a check on which I can detail how I want the transaction applied, along with the payment slip from the mortgage company.
One reason I took so long to use online or auto-payment is that so many companies and utilities here have such an idiotic way of viewing the "service". While THEY should be hoping to get everyone using it since it lowers their costs not having to deal with the flood of checks each month, instead they charge fees "because it's a convenience to the customer". Fortunately, most have figured this out and dropped the fee, and now that my CU provides free bill-pay (used to be $5/month!) I can pay anyone that way.
I am curious - several people mention just transferring money directly between accounts. So if you are doing a private sale with someone, not at a store, for - say - $2000, does the payee give you their account number to do the transfer? Or is there some mechanism in place to handle this we don't have? I wouldn't care too much for handing out my account number to people! My debit card doesn't use my account number, but I can't use it in a private transaction. Wire transfers were also mentioned, but when I checked into doing that it's a royal pain at least with my bank. (Requires I physically go there, first of all!;)
Liability depends on who backs the card. (The cards with credit card-like usability are frequently called "check cards", in fact mine even says that on the card.) The VISA or Mastercard backed check cards have the same liabilities as a VISA or Mastercard credit card. The catch is that evidently a lot of banks who are issuing those cards will attempt to convince you otherwise if you report missing money. Quite a few people have lost money over that. But if you check with the backer, the rules for issuing the cards are that the banks must honor those liability rules.
They've changed some over the years, when I first got mine it was that I'd be on the hook for the first $50 but get the rest back as long as false charges were reported within 3 days of *my*discovery* of them. (Some of the banks would also try to say you had to report within 3 days of the *charge* which wasn't right.) But now, at least my credit union if not VISA says I'll get ALL my money back and there's not as much of a restriction on the reporting either. (Can't remember exactly what it is, not had a problem yet!)
There were some banks (still are?) that were backing their own check cards and those are completely up to the whims of the bank. The VISA/MC backed ones have a VISA/MC logo, the others will not.
Actually, what I would like them to do is offer a per-disc plan for higher-volume viewers like me. (Gawd, I can't believe watching 3-5 movies in a week is HIGH VOLUME! But I'm most definitely getting throttled!)
Come up with a price that gives them a decent profit - say, $2 per movie - then charge me that. Wow, metered service, whodathunkit. Then I can be assured of receiving 6-7 movies in a week (one a day, I don't have cable) and they aren't stingy about it because they are assured of making their money.
Instead, I'm not guaranteed anything because if I return two in the same day, they'll hold onto one and not check it in until a week later. Last few weeks, I've had nothing to watch over the weekend. Two weeks ago I got all of ONE movie in the whole week!
I agree, the price is great even at 11 for $18. And no one else seems to beat their selection (I've been getting some really old movies). I'm upset with the spotty, crappy delivery, which is apparently caused by their throttling algorithm.
I'm surprised you don't get throttled just doing what you are doing. I signed up in November because I got tired of the dreck on cable and cancelled it. Netflix sent a "free two weeks" flyer so I decided to try them. I had already heard all the fun horror stories, so I went in with my eyes open, but then I wasn't planning on trying to get huge numbers of discs.
The first two weeks were great. I got six per week. I'd get one, watch it that evening, then send it back. Next day they shipped another.
Then I had two movies to send back the same day (2-disc LOTR). According to NF, one arrived the next day, the other not for a WEEK. A few weeks later the same thing happened. Then the first of the year, it's like the tap ran dry. Conincidentally, I had been in a discussion on a forum about favorite movies, and had filled my queue to around 50 or so. Not sure if that contributed to their formula or not, but before then I had been running only 6 in the queue and would add as I returned one. The biggest time delay was supposedly the return shipment. Of course, they blamed the USPS, but I highly doubt it. The returns managed next-day just fine through the pre-Christmas rush.
Two weeks ago they suddenly said it was going to take 2-3 days to get a movie out the door (they acknowledged my return, but didn't send another for 2-3 days), then the movie took 3 days to mail (it shipped clear across the country) and I got ONE movie that week! This past week I got three, two Monday and one Tuesday. I returned one each day Tue, Wed, Thu and so far NF says NONE of them have returned.
Coincidentally, when I went to check the queue this morning I had a big banner across the top saying my email address was invalid. I go to the email page, just hit save, and what do you know a confirmation email popped up in my mailbox. But I _still_ have an "invalid email" banner on their webpage.
Point is, I was doing good to get six per week - not quite one a night - and would be fine with three per week (12 per month) but they are having some real trouble accomplishing that! I'm most certainly not one of these 3-per-day pirates everyone keeps assuming is who gets throttled.
A coworker has been using NF for a long time. He recently decided to try the 8-at-a-time plan, and he said he's actually getting FEWER movies now than he was before!
If Netflix wants to limit people, that's fine. But they need to state that's what they are doing. If they can come up with a minimum cost per movie, and sell it that way, I'm fine with that too, just say so. Can they make money at $2/movie? Still cheaper than the rental store and I don't have to go get it. So say that, I'm happy, they are happy. They need to stop the "unlimited" bullshit and underhanded juggling acts.
You don't mention if you use Linux, but that's how I managed this. I don't do Windows enough to know if it's possible that way...
I just set up a spare Linux box with three NICs - one to the cablemodem, one to the wired LAN, one to the AP. Then just set up whatever software you want for isolating / verifying / authenticating. I used OpenVPN to allow access to the wired LAN, although I've considered trying out NoCatAuth as well. I am also thinking about implementing some firewall rules to impose throttling on unauthenticated connections to discourage anyone from saturating my link with P2P or getting too comfy being a leech but if they have proper access (i.e. they have talked to me) they'll get full access.
But, then, I've never had anyone else connect to mine so I haven't bothered to go to the trouble. It's more of an academic learning experience at this point, whenever I have the time.
Granted, this isn't plug-and-play easy setup, but it really isn't that bad. And a lot cheaper than VLAN switches, as you mention.
Interesting. Provided the customer brings in their original install discs, just so you can prove they had them, how would MS or anyone KNOW that you used your own slipstreamed copy of the same version OS? Is there actually something individually keyed on each of those (non-corporate) versions? I always figured they were just identical discs. Then you plug in the customer's own license key at the end...
Seems like as long as the customer shows up with a valid XP/2K/98/however-far-back-you-go CD, you'd be able to pull out your image of it and no one would be the wiser. Granted, it wouldn't have the brand-specific crap that gets loaded from the likes of Dell and Gateway, perhaps that's the issue.
When you say "not ours, not an OEM disc, not a copy" do you actually mean you can't restore a customer's computer from one of those stupid "image" discs the OEMs were providing for a while?!? I as a customer would have major issues with that, considering that's the only "original" disk they provided. (Well, _I_ wouldn't... I never even boot Windows on my own new machines, but you know...;) Did they provide a rational explanation for this bit?
As others mentioned, it really needs to be water. Air won't hold the temp long enough. The most effective method of doing this - especially when taking storage space into account - is using ice. Install ice tanks a chiller that can go low enough to freeze the tanks, then use the ice to cool the building during the "on-peak" hours during the day. The tanks get re-frozen overnight. The great capacity comes from the phase-change, lots of energy involved there. However, it isn't all that "efficient" and only helps because it's cheaper to use more nighttime / offpeak kWhs than to use the daytime / onpeak kWhs to directly cool the building.
Another option is just to cool a large tank of water. With the proper spreaders inside, you don't get turbulence in the water and as you use/charge the tank, a fairly sharp line forms between warmer/cooler water. If it mixes, then you lose a lot of the usefulness. Anyway, during lighter-load conditions excess chiller capacity is routed into the tank, "charging" it. As demand exceeds chiller capacity, you start drawing water from the tank to supplement. The nice thing here is smoothing out your peak demand loads which lowers utility bills, and you don't have to buy as much chiller capacity. But it can take a LARGE water tank (or series of tanks) to get sufficient capacity.
I've set up quite a few ice systems, they work pretty well but can be hard on the chillers. Producing 21 degree water for 8-10 hours is tough on a machine designed for 42 degrees. The water systems are much easier on the equipment, and less complex (you have to protect against freezing the wrong things when making ice) but the space requirements make them hard to sell.
As for precooling, if the temperature changes slowly enough while people are in the building they won't notice. Just start the system before opening to do the precool, then let the building drift slowly upward during open hours. It's when the temp changes more quickly, or when the air stops/starts that people start to complain. We do a bit of this sort of thing in our commercial systems when people hire us for energy management services. It's all a tradeoff- comfort versus energy savings. Some people aren't willing to sacrifice comfort at any price! (At least, not yet...)
I set up TikiWiki for my department to track projects. We are a commercial HVAC firm (my dept is the automation side), so CVS and the like don't (at least I don't think!) really apply. But I do the engineering and layout, with others doing the actual installations and we needed a way to easily transfer information. They always have their laptops with them, and have VPN access to the office, so this idea came to mind.
It has worked pretty well, and quite a few people in other departments have started using it too. It's a nice way to do "brain dumps" and record those things people tend to say in passing in the hall! I still have a few people that "forget" about it and call / barge into my office to ask a question. "Did you check the wiki?" standard response now!
Hm, that's great to know. I'm not sure if Ubuntu is using any of those patches, the version string is 2.6.12-10-686-mp. However, I did redo my Slackware server back in October and it's running 2.6.14 (no extra patches). I'll get the 2.6.15 and try that out too.
Thanks! I dropped those in and it improved quite a bit. Writes still surge a lot, but they now average 200-300Mbps. At least I'm getting somewhere, gives a bit more motivation to keep trying!
I use OpenVPN. I found it a whole lot easier to set up than IPsec. I set up an endpoint on a DSL firewall I maintain at work (not on the corporate network) and on my firewall at home. I can connect to either, at which point it's like I'm sitting in the office or at home.
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I also have an EU2000i. Haven't had to use it in an outage yet, but I know it'll work. After sitting - totally unprepared - for several days without power last winter, I started looking for options. While a whole-house generator was really tempting, the vast majority of residential-grade stuff that was reasonably affordable uses air-cooled engines that are extremely noisy, VERY thirsty, and apparently don't live very long when you look at the rated lifetime hours info. I also wasn't too keen on eating up a chunk of the backyard for something I may not need but once in a blue moon. A portable would also be useful to others - just as I got my power back last winter, my parents lost theirs.
When I started sizing generators, I was a bit dismayed by the charts I found online. If I believed them, I needed something in the 4-6kW range minimum. But I started logging peak power usage for the devices I wanted to run (furnace and fridge, mainly) and found their peak and average draws were considerably lower than the online guides listed. While the EU2000i is not going to have much spare for other things while running the furnace and fridge, I decided to go with it because it is still easily carried around and those things don't run continuously anyway - I can let the furnace cycle off, then do other things.
To feed the power in, I opted to install a dedicated generator circuit. I put in a locking power receptacle in the eave of the house near where the generator sits out back, and fed three outlets, one in the back of the house, one in the kitchen, one in the garage by the furnace. I then just set up the generator, get it running, and plug in the things I want to power off of it. No cords through the doors or windows, no worry about backfeeding or messing with the breaker panel.
I test-run the generator each month, actually hooking things up. Usually I'll plug the furnace in, as even with A/C running it'll still run the blower, sometimes the fridge or the computer. Let it run an hour. Been doing that since around May, and I still haven't used the first gallon of gas I put in it! The EcoThrottle feature definitely conserves fuel. In contrast, some of the cheapo generators my friends bought will go through a gallon of gas in less than an hour of operation with no load. I bought a 5-gallon gas can, put StaBil in it, and thus have potentially a week's fuel supply for the Honda - as opposed to tank-farm sized requirements to run some of the other generators I looked at.
The low fuel requirements do pose an issue - how to keep the fuel fresh. But between the StaBil which many have assured me works wonders, and the fact my cars use gasoline as well I'm not concerned. If I don't have an outage anytime soon, I can just dump the old gas into my car then refill the can with fresh. And if I have an overly long outage I can use the fuel in my vehicles to power the generator.
The Honda uses an inverter to produce AC power too, which besides the efficiency means it's clean power. Even my furnace has an (expensive!) electronic circuit board on it, so I wanted something that wouldn't put the electronics at risk.
Not quite right, the Honda generators are actually inverters. The generator windings make "wild" AC of varying frequency / voltage that gets rectified then sent to an inverter section. Thus, the engine doesn't have to maintain a specific speed to maintain its output frequency. The inverter is also why they are so much more expensive than other generators.
The EcoThrottle adjusts engine speed based on the load the inverter is seeing, so when you are pulling a light load (in my experience, just about anything short of full rated power) the engine can idle down quite low. This helps to significantly improve fuel efficiency and engine life too.
At that, Honda still doesn't corner the market with this - there are a couple other vendors, and they are slightly cheaper though still considerably higher cost than the old-style fixed-RPM generators.
Part of the problem is the "7 year lifespan" at least for the bulbs I bought at Home Depot (Commercial Electric, then nVision) was based on an unrealistic two or three hours per day use. That seems unrealistically low to me. The lights in my living room are generally on all evening every day and all day on weekends.
That said, I must have really good power. My first-installed CFLs are now about three years old, the second batch around two years old, and all but one are working just fine. That one was a 100W equivalent and it went out in style - nice frying sound and lots of smoke. I have also been less than impressed with the other 100W equiv bulbs, they are very dim at startup and take a long time to warm. But the 60W equiv bulbs are working just wonderfully even now.
Of course, I also got MUCH longer runtime out of incandescents than most people claim. There are some incandescent bulbs in my house that were here when I moved in 4 years ago - still working just fine. I was using 100W indandescents in my living room, and most of them lasted at least a year. (I was running one CFL one incandescent in each lamp at first, now I'm 100% CFL.)
I've had more CFLs DOA than fail on me over time so far. Had one that just wouldn't do anything, and another that emitted a weird purplish glow.
I haven't had any major issues, but the audio quality is definitely lacking on occasion, with lots of glitches and echo. I'm not sure just why it happens, the bad times don't match my peak Inet usage so I guess it's an issue outside my home. And I can't use a modem on the line, even though they said I would be able to when I asked up front. (Not that I expected it to work, but they did say it would. I occasionally need to call older dialup systems for work. Now I VPN to a computer at the office with a regular POTS line.)
Long as Vonage is cheaper (and it is still significantly cheaper on the 500 min/mo plan) than cable, I'll keep it because I almost never use the phone. Were the cost to rise anywhere near what the cable company wants, I'd definitely switch back as I get better audio and can use the modem. The extra features Vonage offers are nice, but I find I don't use anything but CID anyway...
Line of sight, it takes very little signal to get that far. You're only talking a little less than two miles distance, and ham radio operators have gone much farther on very low signal levels. Frequency also enters into it of course, lower ones will go much better than higher, but still - two miles is nothing.
That said, the aluminum skin of the aircraft is going to interfere and cut the signal strength. And the antennas for most cell sites are designed for maximum gain looking horizontally and slightly downward so they should be pretty deaf to signals from above.
Speaking of code violations... When I went to replace some outside lighting on my newly-purchased house, I found that the previous owner's son evidently thought he was a pretty handy electrician...
They had replaced the garage light switch with a two-switch unit, so they could turn the outside light over the garage on/off from there. Of course, there weren't enough wires in the existing cable and I guess it was too much trouble to pull a new one. So I found that black was hot to the garage light, white was hot (and not marked as such) to the outside light. The much thinner ground wire (installed in 1963, was code at the time) was neutral for everything. (Even better, he didn't even have the branch's ground tied to the neutral in the feed cable, he just used the ground wiring all the way back to the panel.)
Such fun cleaning up after wanna-bes...
All the D-series laptops we got at my office in the past 6-8 months or so (as well as the docking stations) have 2-prong cords. I got mine May last year and it had grounded plugs, but was about the last one... Other than the AC cord, there doesn't appear to be any significant difference.
I'm going to take your post as an opportunity to go off on a tangent - since you seem to be using IPv6 already...
:) Hopefully things are a little less confusing than they were last time...
I've toyed with the idea of playing with it, but am not sure from what I've read (been a while - forgot about it until recently, with the story on China and now this one) whether I can do what I'm thinking about.
Can I set up my home network (mostly Linux, one WinXP laptop for work, and occasionally a Mac Mini) to use IPv6 internally, then have my Linux router/firewall handle the translation to/from IPv4 for the cable connection? I assume my dumb/basic switches are fine, although I'm not sure about the WRT54G AP (or maybe one of the replacement firmwares for it supports IPv6?). Some of the stuff I read back when I thought about this last left me with the impression this might not work very well...
Secondarily, when I enable IPv6 on my laptops, I assume (would hope!) that Linux and XP can switch back and forth between the two without issue, for when I go connect to another network? (For that matter, I'm not sure what the company IT folks would say if I enabled it on the work laptop - would they necessarily even notice or care?)
Thanks for any info! Now I'll depart from Slashdot tradition and actually go do some reading of my own...
While I don't necessarily agree with the person you were originally discussing this with (I'm rather partial to Gnome now, oddly enough - used to hate it) there are two things OS X does that drive me up the wall...
First, is the menubar at the top of the screen. I guess I'm just used to having it in each window, that's where I go reflexively to use a menu. And even after a little over 6 months of using my Mac Mini exclusively I still did that.
Worst, though, is that I can't (haven't found a way, anyway) have focus-follows-mouse for EVERYTHING. And yes, I've seen plenty of commenters who think that's stupid but Ever since using Linux that has become the first option I enable on any install! I also understand that with the menubar at the top of the screen it'd be pretty difficult to implement in OS X (yet another reason for my first complaint).
My primary reason for liking focus-follows-mouse is that I very frequently find myself needing to reference one window while typing in another. I don't need to see what I'm typing, I'm quite good at touch-typing. But on OS X (and Windows, by default) I'm forced to have the active window on top. Wouldn't be a problem if I had a huge, hi-res screen to lay things out on but I don't. It's bad enough on the Dell laptops I use at work (1600x1200, but only 15") last time I looked at Apple laptops (before the Intel line) I couldn't get anywhere near that resolution on anything. Which means I *will* be stacking windows.
Don't know if it's the norm, but Cox has been fantastic in my area (OKC). Certainly as reliable as a regular landline ever was.
In my apartment, the only time it was down was if the power for the whole complex was out. That happened twice in three years, thanks to some severe storms.
Now, in my house (maybe 7 miles from the apartments) over the past three years it's been out ONCE for an extended period. I think that was about 45 minutes - and was because the buried main feeder cable (their BIG one, not the one to the house) went bad in my neighbor's backyard. They came out and had a temporary cable draped across a few yards within the hour, and I didn't even notice when they replaced it permanently. Power failures don't seem to bring it down either, guess they have better backup systems in this area. (Only had one brief powerfail so far anyway, nice being around the corner from a hospital!)
Other than that, I've had a few instances here and there where it dropped out, but that was almost always my now 6-year-old Linksys cablemodem flaking out and needing reset. Everything is now on a big UPS salvaged from work ("toss it, it's bad" - I bring it home, $60 for new batteries and I have a 1400VA UPS!) so everything stays up thru power bumps and I haven't had any more of the drops since.
I've had Vonage for two years now, and it's been just fine. Occasionally the audio has been flaky - but I'd just call it comparable to cell phone service, which is what I'd have otherwise. I really don't need a landline very often. $18/month is a lot better-sounding for my limited phone use than the $30+/month I was paying before.
Is there a reason not to use the "official" Linux client from Citrix? My company is definitely beholden to MS, but they recently set up an Internet-accessible Citrix gateway to most of our internal apps. I went to the Citrix website and got the Linux client. Works for everything we use it for, anyway... Now I don't have to dig out my work laptop for every little thing when I'm at home!
Granted, I had to go install it myself - it would certainly make things much nicer to have a client ready to go in the distro's package manager.
I can "live" quite well without using ANY debt.
If everyone I make regular monthly payments to was required to report on-time payments to the credit bureaus, this wouldn't be such an issue. But they seldom do. I've heard in some areas they will, but NONE of mine report anything unless you MISS a payment. So when I bought my house, I had a -zero- credit score since I didn't have credit cards, and had paid off the student loans years before.
Now, while I have the mortgage I'll have a spiffy credit score. But I am in the process of extremely accelerated payoff on that. In two more years (5 1/2 years from purchase) I won't have a mortgage anymore. And that credit score will drop out again.
Have I lived? Sure. I go on vacations, purchased a new car, have six months' expenses in savings (will be a year once the house is paid off), pay everything on time or early. I'm in a hell of a lot better financial shape than almost anyone I know. But the insurance companies will insist I'm a higher risk because my credit score is low!
There was a report some time back that Fair Isaac (who does the FICO scoring) now has an "alternate" score for people in my position. But it's voluntary - if the company pulling the score doesn't want to bother, they won't know about that alternate scoring. I'm not big on government intervention, but for something that's becoming so pervasive as FICO, I really wish they would. If they would either require the use of the alternate score as well, OR require anyone you make regular payments to (utilities, landlord, etc) to make on-time entries to the standard report, I'd probably be just fine.
And you are correct - the reports are frequently highly inaccurate, and can be a pain to fix. First time I pulled mine, I found I had had a Sears credit card ever since I was 1 year old! (It was my dad's.) None of the three match, all of them miss at least one past residence, one didn't even show my current job - that I've had for over 10 years!
No, I had my usual knee-jerk *sigh* as well. I'm getting so tired of hearing a few of the ads on the radio lately - "go to this website to know what to do in case of a natural disaster or terrorist attack!" "Things you should know to prepare your family for a disaster or terror attack!" Today I heard one that mentioned a site giving info on what to do if you are subject to a "cyber-attack"! WTF...
I can only assume it actually works on some people... Haven't seen too many building bomb shelters out back yet, though...
While I'm sure some (smaller?) companies will use whatever OS comes by default, many do not. When I order computers at my office, we have a corporate web page with Dell. Our new systems are all "No Image" systems. When they arrive, we toss in the corporate image disk, tell it what its name is on the network and who its user is.
Our corporate disks are now XP, have been for a little over a year. *Maybe* two. I seriously doubt we'll be using Vista anytime soon! (In spite of the fact our IT department is seemingly in bed with MS...)
They are still fairly common, although it seems to be dwindling in some areas.
;)
My pay is deposited directly to my account, but the company still sends me a "statement" that is identical to the checks they used to send, except it now has "Non-Negotiable" stamped across it. I use online bill-paying for the most part, but two of my bills are actually mailed by my credit union as checks instead of EFTs! But it's no fee to me, and I don't have to buy stamps.
Anymore I still write one check per month - for the mortgage. If I were just paying minimum on it, I would pay it online as well, but I'm paying it down with a large and variable dollar amount each month so I prefer to write a check on which I can detail how I want the transaction applied, along with the payment slip from the mortgage company.
One reason I took so long to use online or auto-payment is that so many companies and utilities here have such an idiotic way of viewing the "service". While THEY should be hoping to get everyone using it since it lowers their costs not having to deal with the flood of checks each month, instead they charge fees "because it's a convenience to the customer". Fortunately, most have figured this out and dropped the fee, and now that my CU provides free bill-pay (used to be $5/month!) I can pay anyone that way.
I am curious - several people mention just transferring money directly between accounts. So if you are doing a private sale with someone, not at a store, for - say - $2000, does the payee give you their account number to do the transfer? Or is there some mechanism in place to handle this we don't have? I wouldn't care too much for handing out my account number to people! My debit card doesn't use my account number, but I can't use it in a private transaction. Wire transfers were also mentioned, but when I checked into doing that it's a royal pain at least with my bank. (Requires I physically go there, first of all!
Liability depends on who backs the card. (The cards with credit card-like usability are frequently called "check cards", in fact mine even says that on the card.) The VISA or Mastercard backed check cards have the same liabilities as a VISA or Mastercard credit card. The catch is that evidently a lot of banks who are issuing those cards will attempt to convince you otherwise if you report missing money. Quite a few people have lost money over that. But if you check with the backer, the rules for issuing the cards are that the banks must honor those liability rules.
They've changed some over the years, when I first got mine it was that I'd be on the hook for the first $50 but get the rest back as long as false charges were reported within 3 days of *my*discovery* of them. (Some of the banks would also try to say you had to report within 3 days of the *charge* which wasn't right.) But now, at least my credit union if not VISA says I'll get ALL my money back and there's not as much of a restriction on the reporting either. (Can't remember exactly what it is, not had a problem yet!)
There were some banks (still are?) that were backing their own check cards and those are completely up to the whims of the bank. The VISA/MC backed ones have a VISA/MC logo, the others will not.
Actually, what I would like them to do is offer a per-disc plan for higher-volume viewers like me. (Gawd, I can't believe watching 3-5 movies in a week is HIGH VOLUME! But I'm most definitely getting throttled!)
Come up with a price that gives them a decent profit - say, $2 per movie - then charge me that. Wow, metered service, whodathunkit. Then I can be assured of receiving 6-7 movies in a week (one a day, I don't have cable) and they aren't stingy about it because they are assured of making their money.
Instead, I'm not guaranteed anything because if I return two in the same day, they'll hold onto one and not check it in until a week later. Last few weeks, I've had nothing to watch over the weekend. Two weeks ago I got all of ONE movie in the whole week!
I agree, the price is great even at 11 for $18. And no one else seems to beat their selection (I've been getting some really old movies). I'm upset with the spotty, crappy delivery, which is apparently caused by their throttling algorithm.
I'm surprised you don't get throttled just doing what you are doing. I signed up in November because I got tired of the dreck on cable and cancelled it. Netflix sent a "free two weeks" flyer so I decided to try them. I had already heard all the fun horror stories, so I went in with my eyes open, but then I wasn't planning on trying to get huge numbers of discs.
The first two weeks were great. I got six per week. I'd get one, watch it that evening, then send it back. Next day they shipped another.
Then I had two movies to send back the same day (2-disc LOTR). According to NF, one arrived the next day, the other not for a WEEK. A few weeks later the same thing happened. Then the first of the year, it's like the tap ran dry. Conincidentally, I had been in a discussion on a forum about favorite movies, and had filled my queue to around 50 or so. Not sure if that contributed to their formula or not, but before then I had been running only 6 in the queue and would add as I returned one. The biggest time delay was supposedly the return shipment. Of course, they blamed the USPS, but I highly doubt it. The returns managed next-day just fine through the pre-Christmas rush.
Two weeks ago they suddenly said it was going to take 2-3 days to get a movie out the door (they acknowledged my return, but didn't send another for 2-3 days), then the movie took 3 days to mail (it shipped clear across the country) and I got ONE movie that week! This past week I got three, two Monday and one Tuesday. I returned one each day Tue, Wed, Thu and so far NF says NONE of them have returned.
Coincidentally, when I went to check the queue this morning I had a big banner across the top saying my email address was invalid. I go to the email page, just hit save, and what do you know a confirmation email popped up in my mailbox. But I _still_ have an "invalid email" banner on their webpage.
Point is, I was doing good to get six per week - not quite one a night - and would be fine with three per week (12 per month) but they are having some real trouble accomplishing that! I'm most certainly not one of these 3-per-day pirates everyone keeps assuming is who gets throttled.
A coworker has been using NF for a long time. He recently decided to try the 8-at-a-time plan, and he said he's actually getting FEWER movies now than he was before!
If Netflix wants to limit people, that's fine. But they need to state that's what they are doing. If they can come up with a minimum cost per movie, and sell it that way, I'm fine with that too, just say so. Can they make money at $2/movie? Still cheaper than the rental store and I don't have to go get it. So say that, I'm happy, they are happy. They need to stop the "unlimited" bullshit and underhanded juggling acts.
You don't mention if you use Linux, but that's how I managed this. I don't do Windows enough to know if it's possible that way...
I just set up a spare Linux box with three NICs - one to the cablemodem, one to the wired LAN, one to the AP. Then just set up whatever software you want for isolating / verifying / authenticating. I used OpenVPN to allow access to the wired LAN, although I've considered trying out NoCatAuth as well. I am also thinking about implementing some firewall rules to impose throttling on unauthenticated connections to discourage anyone from saturating my link with P2P or getting too comfy being a leech but if they have proper access (i.e. they have talked to me) they'll get full access.
But, then, I've never had anyone else connect to mine so I haven't bothered to go to the trouble. It's more of an academic learning experience at this point, whenever I have the time.
Granted, this isn't plug-and-play easy setup, but it really isn't that bad. And a lot cheaper than VLAN switches, as you mention.
Interesting. Provided the customer brings in their original install discs, just so you can prove they had them, how would MS or anyone KNOW that you used your own slipstreamed copy of the same version OS? Is there actually something individually keyed on each of those (non-corporate) versions? I always figured they were just identical discs. Then you plug in the customer's own license key at the end...
;) Did they provide a rational explanation for this bit?
Seems like as long as the customer shows up with a valid XP/2K/98/however-far-back-you-go CD, you'd be able to pull out your image of it and no one would be the wiser. Granted, it wouldn't have the brand-specific crap that gets loaded from the likes of Dell and Gateway, perhaps that's the issue.
When you say "not ours, not an OEM disc, not a copy" do you actually mean you can't restore a customer's computer from one of those stupid "image" discs the OEMs were providing for a while?!? I as a customer would have major issues with that, considering that's the only "original" disk they provided. (Well, _I_ wouldn't... I never even boot Windows on my own new machines, but you know...
As others mentioned, it really needs to be water. Air won't hold the temp long enough. The most effective method of doing this - especially when taking storage space into account - is using ice. Install ice tanks a chiller that can go low enough to freeze the tanks, then use the ice to cool the building during the "on-peak" hours during the day. The tanks get re-frozen overnight. The great capacity comes from the phase-change, lots of energy involved there. However, it isn't all that "efficient" and only helps because it's cheaper to use more nighttime / offpeak kWhs than to use the daytime / onpeak kWhs to directly cool the building.
Another option is just to cool a large tank of water. With the proper spreaders inside, you don't get turbulence in the water and as you use/charge the tank, a fairly sharp line forms between warmer/cooler water. If it mixes, then you lose a lot of the usefulness. Anyway, during lighter-load conditions excess chiller capacity is routed into the tank, "charging" it. As demand exceeds chiller capacity, you start drawing water from the tank to supplement. The nice thing here is smoothing out your peak demand loads which lowers utility bills, and you don't have to buy as much chiller capacity. But it can take a LARGE water tank (or series of tanks) to get sufficient capacity.
I've set up quite a few ice systems, they work pretty well but can be hard on the chillers. Producing 21 degree water for 8-10 hours is tough on a machine designed for 42 degrees. The water systems are much easier on the equipment, and less complex (you have to protect against freezing the wrong things when making ice) but the space requirements make them hard to sell.
As for precooling, if the temperature changes slowly enough while people are in the building they won't notice. Just start the system before opening to do the precool, then let the building drift slowly upward during open hours. It's when the temp changes more quickly, or when the air stops/starts that people start to complain. We do a bit of this sort of thing in our commercial systems when people hire us for energy management services. It's all a tradeoff- comfort versus energy savings. Some people aren't willing to sacrifice comfort at any price! (At least, not yet...)
I set up TikiWiki for my department to track projects. We are a commercial HVAC firm (my dept is the automation side), so CVS and the like don't (at least I don't think!) really apply. But I do the engineering and layout, with others doing the actual installations and we needed a way to easily transfer information. They always have their laptops with them, and have VPN access to the office, so this idea came to mind.
It has worked pretty well, and quite a few people in other departments have started using it too. It's a nice way to do "brain dumps" and record those things people tend to say in passing in the hall! I still have a few people that "forget" about it and call / barge into my office to ask a question. "Did you check the wiki?" standard response now!
Hm, that's great to know. I'm not sure if Ubuntu is using any of those patches, the version string is 2.6.12-10-686-mp. However, I did redo my Slackware server back in October and it's running 2.6.14 (no extra patches). I'll get the 2.6.15 and try that out too.
Thanks!
Thanks! I dropped those in and it improved quite a bit. Writes still surge a lot, but they now average 200-300Mbps. At least I'm getting somewhere, gives a bit more motivation to keep trying!
I use OpenVPN. I found it a whole lot easier to set up than IPsec. I set up an endpoint on a DSL firewall I maintain at work (not on the corporate network) and on my firewall at home. I can connect to either, at which point it's like I'm sitting in the office or at home.