Really? Because I live in Michigan, and I've ridden to work every day of the year for 3 years now. Temps down to -25*F. It's not a problem. $100 for some studded tires that last 3 years isn't a bad investment when it saves you a couple hundred bucks a month in gas.
In addition, 4 of the 11 miles of my one-way route are on very washboarded and potholed gravel roads. Anything with any paving on them is better than that, unless there's absolutely nothing left of the pavement anymore.
Almost all of my riding is on roads with a 55 MPH speed limit, and all winter I'm riding in pitch black predawn. Buy a light. All problems are solvable.
As a bonus, people who cycle daily will be much healthier in the long term; that's statistical fact.
Call me when they release with ZERO DRM. Until then I'm not interested.
I'll only even buy games with copy protection (CD insertion type) AFTER I find that there's a NoCD patch available. I've done this from the beginning; back in the '80s I only bought floppy-based games once I'd found a working pirated copy which ran OK without copy protection; THEN I'd go out and buy a copy (and never install it) and I'd write a note saying what I'd done and sent it in with the registration card.
I WILL give them money for their games, but NOT if there's DRM. I am not a huge game purchaser, but I've skipped both of the games I thought I'd be guying this year due to them having DRM. So far this year no game maker has gotten a dime from me, when if they'd not had DRM, they could have had $100 or so of my money.
We would most certainly have bought our copy of Spore by now had they not put DRM in. Our family has been looking forward to it for months, but we won't be buying it now that I know that crap is in it. I've paid for all the games our family plays, and I barely put up with CD checks (though honestly I get a NoCD patch as soon as I can, nobody likes having to hunt up the CD every time). But no way am I going to give money to someone who's spending it on DRM.
Black and white prints will last many times longer than color. If you have black and white photos, sure. If you have color, encode the bits onto black and white paper. Heck, it's pretty much guaranteed that laser printed 2d barcodes on acid-free paper will last several hundred years if stored well.
I wonder if recovery after one overwrite might have been possible once, back when data densities were very low (like in the days of 20 megabyte hard drives) or even floppy drives. These days hard drive manufacturers are busy using every last square micron of space on a platter. To do this they're keeping the data track narrow and well defined, and one of the ways they do that is to increase the coercivity threshold of the media, so the field needed to change the bits are stronger. The odds of there being enough oversplash off the sides, or residual magnetism in the track, to read the previous data has to be almost zilch by now, but it could have been possible at one time.
Render the bits as a 2D barcode, print them on silver halide black and white film. That's going to last 100 years easily, probably many hundreds. Include the decoding algorithm, and as long as there are optical scanners they'll be able to read it. Odds are that even 50 years from now barcode scanners would be able to just read it.
It's Massachusetts! Anything that falls slightly outside the realm of "normal" as judged by a paranoid cop must be raided and destroyed. Just be happy they didn't decide to call in the bomb squad and detonate the house.
What, you think you can go and buy gunpowder by the ounce? If you're hand loading a few hundred shotgun shells for a Saturday at the skeet range, you're going to need a few pounds of gunpowder. Handloaders typically buy quite a few pounds at once. I know several people who do, and I don't know of any of them ever having a fire or explosion as a result. I used to shoot black powder rifles, and bought powder in pound cans, usually 4 or 5 of them at a time. It sounds like you might be very surprised to find out how many people in an average town probably have many pounds of gunpowder on their property at once.
...and light pollution. I wish there were some standard way to get idiots with security lights that spill onto my property to shield them or shut them off.
I dunno. Most everything recycles. I sort of wonder what most people are doing that allows them to generate that much waste.
We don't have a garbage disposal, but there's a garden and a nice corn field out back that love to have vegetable-type scraps dumped in them.
Most houses in our neighborhood totally fill one of those big rolling trash cans - those must be 70 gallons or so. It'd take us at least a month to fill one. There's one house I ride by on the way home from work every day that has TWO of those big rolling things, always totally full every week AND usually another couple of bags beside it, every week, and I've seen them have those two, 4 or 5 smaller barrels and 6 bags piled up. The only way I could think of to do that would be to have big parties several times a week.
It's just a procedural language. Any decent programmer should be able to start working in it with 3 or 4 days sitting down with a book on the language. One of the classes we were required to take for graduation was basically "10 languages in 10 weeks" - You got an hour intro to a language on Monday and an assignment. Wednesday was more coverage and questions on the assignment. Friday was wrapup and discussion of what advantages this particular language had for certain things. The assignment was due on Monday when they started on the next assignment.
What they told us on day one was "Any graduate of this college should be able to pick up a language they've never seen before and start doing productive work on it in less than a week."
I also wonder about the statement that they haven't been able to "modernize" it. It's possible that it doesn't NEED modernization. COBOL is a pretty good language for what it does.
That's true, but our family gets far more bags than we use. All our rubbish goes into plastic grocery sacks, yet we have a large plastic bag full of hundreds of smaller bags that we've accumulated over the years. I've given a few hundred to animal shelters who use them to pick up dog waste. I threw away several hundred when it got to the point where we had probably well over 1000 bags. We started using reusable bags over a year ago, and we still have hundreds of plastic bags in the stash; probably enough to last several more years.
Our trash output (as opposed to recycling) is probably the lowest of anyone I know; it takes our family of 4 two weeks to fill a 30 gallon garbage bag (with smaller bags). It gets kind of irritating in the summer; I have to pay my $1.50 to get rid of only half a bag, or let the garbage sit for 2 weeks (stinky).
Go get yourself some Brasso. Shake well, apply with an old cotton cloth (or I've used paper toweld but I prefer cotton cloth) and rub in small circular motions over the scratched area while pressing down a bit. Keep the thing damp, don't let the Brasso dry out. Apply more brasso as necessary.
Rinse off and check occasionally.
I found a DVD on the side of the road once that had clearly been run over a few times and had horrendous scratches on it. I got it to playable condition with Brasso.
Of course, if there's a scratch on the label side that penetrates the silver layer, you're fsked, the data is gone.
There are bike garment bags that can easily transport a suit without wrinkling it.
Many gyms have "shower only" memberships that are really cheap. You might have to ask about it, they probably don't publish it.
If the gym is within 2 miles of work, it's certainly possible to ride that distance without getting sweaty at all; just take it easy.
It's not about losing weight, it's about becoming fit. Bicycle 10 miles a day and your heart will be in a lot better shape. Heart disease is one of the most likely ways to die, and it's expensive and can really screw up your life even if you don't die.
Once they get used to it, many people say they ride simply to ride; the ride itself is reason enough to do it. I'm certainly in that camp; I have two good cars at my disposal, no problems paying for gas, free and ample parking, but I'd ride every day even if gas were free. They'd have to pay me to drive.
Do a search on bikeforums.net. There are many people there that have come up with solutions to this. You can be surprisingly fresh if you take a shower BEFORE you leave home (stink comes from bacteria on your skin, NOT from sweat - sweat is odorless) - and then using baby wipes in a bathroom when you get there.
Others have found that they can buy a "showers only" membership in a nearby gym, or that there is a hidden shower in the maintenance area they could get permission to use, etc. Most people who really try find a way.
If it's less than 4 or 5 miles and at least on non-hot-sweaty days of the year, you can just take it easy and not be sweating much when you get there. This works for some people. Some of us sweat almost instantly though.
I bike to work every day, 22 miles a day (actually closer to 30 right now with some construction I'm avoiding). Summer and winter (studded tires in the winter). I started out partially as exercise, partially as ecological friendliness. Those are still pertinent reasons, but now I add to it that I love it so much more than driving. I honestly hate days that I have to drive, and avoid them if possible. I probably only drive 4 or 5 days a year, if I have something big to carry.
I love getting outside. I hate riding in groups; I keep getting asked but I ride partially to get away from people.
Check out bikeforums.net, particularly the commuting forum. You'll find that people credit bicycling with much better health, physically and mentally. I know that when I go on vacation for more than a week, by the end of it I'm starting to feel really lousy due to lack of vigorous exercise. I assume that this "lousy" is what non-exercising people call "normal".
There's always someone who claims it's too dangerous; the statistics indicate that the lifetime benefits outweigh the risks by 20:1 - for every year taken off the life of a bicyclist by accident, 20 years are added to bicyclists lives by not getting cancer, heart disease, etc due to the increased cardio exercise.
I haven't had any trouble since I switched to a Linksys WRT54GL and installed DD-WRT. Previously I had a very old WRT54G (version 3 I think) and it couldn't handle bittorrent, it had to be rebooted a lot. I replaced that with a Netgear WGR614, which worked OK but I found that after a couple of years they died of bad capacitor illness. I fixed the caps a few times but eventually it bought it in a lightning strike. I tried a DLink (against my better judgement) but it went back to the store in 2 days; DLink should find something to do in the food service industry or something. I've been on the GL + DDWRT for about 9 months now and I have yet to have to reboot it. It has been rebooted due to power failures or me moving it around but that's it.
Not only are you making more money, you're building a readership. If you sell 50 paper books, some people won't like it, and you'll be lucky to sell 50 copies of your next book even with pulling in new people.
If you sell those 1000 copies and 11000 people read it, if even 10% of those people like it and are inclined to pay money for your next book, you've got 1100 potential sales next time around.
Almost all books are available electronically; either for sale or from Usenet/torrents. If I'm looking for a book, I want the ebook version; it's what I bought a Reader for. If you sell an electronic copy without DRM for a reasonable price, I'll buy it, and I won't share it. If not, alt.binaries.... And the stuff I get from there, I'm likely to pass on to friends.
In a pinch I might buy DRMd content, but only if the DRM is known to be broken. I'd rather not though. I played the DRM game years ago with Peanut Press and I now have about 10 books I paid for that I can't read.
null modem cable. The Model 100 has a terminal program built in and will stream a text file from its memory out the line. Use a terminal program on the PC side to capture, just takes a minute. 1200 baud seems like it would be painful but even a lot of notes transfers in less than a minute.
I have 3 of them, picked up a couple of spares off eBay for $30 total.
I use them to take minutes at meetings. I used to have a PC laptop but since all I used it for was to take minutes, I gave it to my brother who actually needed it. The Model 100 performs minute-taking just fine. Also I can touch type on it better than on a newer laptop keyboard.
The Model 100 was a MAINSTAY of journalists at the time; since it ran for many hours on AA batteries which you could get anywhere, even in small towns in foreign countries, and it had a built-in modem and a very portable acoustic coupler that would work with any phone you could find. I bet the majority of remote print reporting for several years was typed in the field on a Model 100.
I've carried 4 foot tubes out behind my house and held them up as high as I could directly under the wires and got nothing. Certainly they WILL light up in the presence of a big electrical field; anywhere near a Tesla coil and they're quite bright.
OTOH, it's fun to put a couple of poly and wool blankets together on a bed in the winter, then after they've been there a day (time to rub together) put a fluorescent tube on them, turn off the lights, and pull them apart. You'll get a nice electrical show in the gap between the sheets, and the tube will light up a lot.
Heat in the PC is a serious issue. 10 watts less draw by the hard drive is 10 watts less heat in the hard drive. That's significant in the life expectancy of the drive.
I bought one of the WD green line (750G) as a NAS drive (hosted on my MythTV box). SMART reports that the drive's temperature is only about 5 degrees above the ambient temperature in the case, while the other drives run about 12 to 15 degrees warmer. I have no special cooling on the drives, they're just sitting in a normal cheap PC case with no fans or heat sinks on the drives themselves. They are NOT sitting right next to one another though, I don't do that unless I have to.
I bought and live in a house near high voltage lines. Remember the distance-squared law? If you're worried about high voltage power lines 400 feet from a house, you should be very concerned about the 110v 2 feet away in the wall, and absolutely terrified by an electric blanket a fraction of an inch away!
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Really? Because I live in Michigan, and I've ridden to work every day of the year for 3 years now. Temps down to -25*F. It's not a problem. $100 for some studded tires that last 3 years isn't a bad investment when it saves you a couple hundred bucks a month in gas.
In addition, 4 of the 11 miles of my one-way route are on very washboarded and potholed gravel roads. Anything with any paving on them is better than that, unless there's absolutely nothing left of the pavement anymore.
Almost all of my riding is on roads with a 55 MPH speed limit, and all winter I'm riding in pitch black predawn. Buy a light. All problems are solvable.
As a bonus, people who cycle daily will be much healthier in the long term; that's statistical fact.
Call me when they release with ZERO DRM. Until then I'm not interested.
I'll only even buy games with copy protection (CD insertion type) AFTER I find that there's a NoCD patch available. I've done this from the beginning; back in the '80s I only bought floppy-based games once I'd found a working pirated copy which ran OK without copy protection; THEN I'd go out and buy a copy (and never install it) and I'd write a note saying what I'd done and sent it in with the registration card.
I WILL give them money for their games, but NOT if there's DRM. I am not a huge game purchaser, but I've skipped both of the games I thought I'd be guying this year due to them having DRM. So far this year no game maker has gotten a dime from me, when if they'd not had DRM, they could have had $100 or so of my money.
We would most certainly have bought our copy of Spore by now had they not put DRM in. Our family has been looking forward to it for months, but we won't be buying it now that I know that crap is in it.
I've paid for all the games our family plays, and I barely put up with CD checks (though honestly I get a NoCD patch as soon as I can, nobody likes having to hunt up the CD every time). But no way am I going to give money to someone who's spending it on DRM.
Black and white prints will last many times longer than color. If you have black and white photos, sure. If you have color, encode the bits onto black and white paper.
Heck, it's pretty much guaranteed that laser printed 2d barcodes on acid-free paper will last several hundred years if stored well.
I wonder if recovery after one overwrite might have been possible once, back when data densities were very low (like in the days of 20 megabyte hard drives) or even floppy drives.
These days hard drive manufacturers are busy using every last square micron of space on a platter. To do this they're keeping the data track narrow and well defined, and one of the ways they do that is to increase the coercivity threshold of the media, so the field needed to change the bits are stronger. The odds of there being enough oversplash off the sides, or residual magnetism in the track, to read the previous data has to be almost zilch by now, but it could have been possible at one time.
Render the bits as a 2D barcode, print them on silver halide black and white film. That's going to last 100 years easily, probably many hundreds. Include the decoding algorithm, and as long as there are optical scanners they'll be able to read it. Odds are that even 50 years from now barcode scanners would be able to just read it.
It's Massachusetts! Anything that falls slightly outside the realm of "normal" as judged by a paranoid cop must be raided and destroyed. Just be happy they didn't decide to call in the bomb squad and detonate the house.
What, you think you can go and buy gunpowder by the ounce? If you're hand loading a few hundred shotgun shells for a Saturday at the skeet range, you're going to need a few pounds of gunpowder. Handloaders typically buy quite a few pounds at once. I know several people who do, and I don't know of any of them ever having a fire or explosion as a result.
I used to shoot black powder rifles, and bought powder in pound cans, usually 4 or 5 of them at a time.
It sounds like you might be very surprised to find out how many people in an average town probably have many pounds of gunpowder on their property at once.
...and light pollution. I wish there were some standard way to get idiots with security lights that spill onto my property to shield them or shut them off.
I dunno. Most everything recycles. I sort of wonder what most people are doing that allows them to generate that much waste.
We don't have a garbage disposal, but there's a garden and a nice corn field out back that love to have vegetable-type scraps dumped in them.
Most houses in our neighborhood totally fill one of those big rolling trash cans - those must be 70 gallons or so. It'd take us at least a month to fill one. There's one house I ride by on the way home from work every day that has TWO of those big rolling things, always totally full every week AND usually another couple of bags beside it, every week, and I've seen them have those two, 4 or 5 smaller barrels and 6 bags piled up. The only way I could think of to do that would be to have big parties several times a week.
"Can't find COBOL programmers?"
It's just a procedural language. Any decent programmer should be able to start working in it with 3 or 4 days sitting down with a book on the language.
One of the classes we were required to take for graduation was basically "10 languages in 10 weeks" - You got an hour intro to a language on Monday and an assignment. Wednesday was more coverage and questions on the assignment. Friday was wrapup and discussion of what advantages this particular language had for certain things. The assignment was due on Monday when they started on the next assignment.
What they told us on day one was "Any graduate of this college should be able to pick up a language they've never seen before and start doing productive work on it in less than a week."
I also wonder about the statement that they haven't been able to "modernize" it. It's possible that it doesn't NEED modernization. COBOL is a pretty good language for what it does.
That's true, but our family gets far more bags than we use. All our rubbish goes into plastic grocery sacks, yet we have a large plastic bag full of hundreds of smaller bags that we've accumulated over the years. I've given a few hundred to animal shelters who use them to pick up dog waste. I threw away several hundred when it got to the point where we had probably well over 1000 bags. We started using reusable bags over a year ago, and we still have hundreds of plastic bags in the stash; probably enough to last several more years.
Our trash output (as opposed to recycling) is probably the lowest of anyone I know; it takes our family of 4 two weeks to fill a 30 gallon garbage bag (with smaller bags). It gets kind of irritating in the summer; I have to pay my $1.50 to get rid of only half a bag, or let the garbage sit for 2 weeks (stinky).
Go get yourself some Brasso. Shake well, apply with an old cotton cloth (or I've used paper toweld but I prefer cotton cloth) and rub in small circular motions over the scratched area while pressing down a bit. Keep the thing damp, don't let the Brasso dry out. Apply more brasso as necessary.
Rinse off and check occasionally.
I found a DVD on the side of the road once that had clearly been run over a few times and had horrendous scratches on it. I got it to playable condition with Brasso.
Of course, if there's a scratch on the label side that penetrates the silver layer, you're fsked, the data is gone.
There are bike garment bags that can easily transport a suit without wrinkling it.
Many gyms have "shower only" memberships that are really cheap. You might have to ask about it, they probably don't publish it.
If the gym is within 2 miles of work, it's certainly possible to ride that distance without getting sweaty at all; just take it easy.
It's not about losing weight, it's about becoming fit. Bicycle 10 miles a day and your heart will be in a lot better shape. Heart disease is one of the most likely ways to die, and it's expensive and can really screw up your life even if you don't die.
Once they get used to it, many people say they ride simply to ride; the ride itself is reason enough to do it. I'm certainly in that camp; I have two good cars at my disposal, no problems paying for gas, free and ample parking, but I'd ride every day even if gas were free. They'd have to pay me to drive.
Do a search on bikeforums.net. There are many people there that have come up with solutions to this. You can be surprisingly fresh if you take a shower BEFORE you leave home (stink comes from bacteria on your skin, NOT from sweat - sweat is odorless) - and then using baby wipes in a bathroom when you get there.
Others have found that they can buy a "showers only" membership in a nearby gym, or that there is a hidden shower in the maintenance area they could get permission to use, etc. Most people who really try find a way.
If it's less than 4 or 5 miles and at least on non-hot-sweaty days of the year, you can just take it easy and not be sweating much when you get there. This works for some people. Some of us sweat almost instantly though.
I bike to work every day, 22 miles a day (actually closer to 30 right now with some construction I'm avoiding). Summer and winter (studded tires in the winter). I started out partially as exercise, partially as ecological friendliness. Those are still pertinent reasons, but now I add to it that I love it so much more than driving. I honestly hate days that I have to drive, and avoid them if possible. I probably only drive 4 or 5 days a year, if I have something big to carry.
I love getting outside. I hate riding in groups; I keep getting asked but I ride partially to get away from people.
Check out bikeforums.net, particularly the commuting forum. You'll find that people credit bicycling with much better health, physically and mentally. I know that when I go on vacation for more than a week, by the end of it I'm starting to feel really lousy due to lack of vigorous exercise. I assume that this "lousy" is what non-exercising people call "normal".
There's always someone who claims it's too dangerous; the statistics indicate that the lifetime benefits outweigh the risks by 20:1 - for every year taken off the life of a bicyclist by accident, 20 years are added to bicyclists lives by not getting cancer, heart disease, etc due to the increased cardio exercise.
I haven't had any trouble since I switched to a Linksys WRT54GL and installed DD-WRT.
Previously I had a very old WRT54G (version 3 I think) and it couldn't handle bittorrent, it had to be rebooted a lot.
I replaced that with a Netgear WGR614, which worked OK but I found that after a couple of years they died of bad capacitor illness. I fixed the caps a few times but eventually it bought it in a lightning strike.
I tried a DLink (against my better judgement) but it went back to the store in 2 days; DLink should find something to do in the food service industry or something.
I've been on the GL + DDWRT for about 9 months now and I have yet to have to reboot it. It has been rebooted due to power failures or me moving it around but that's it.
Not only are you making more money, you're building a readership. If you sell 50 paper books, some people won't like it, and you'll be lucky to sell 50 copies of your next book even with pulling in new people.
If you sell those 1000 copies and 11000 people read it, if even 10% of those people like it and are inclined to pay money for your next book, you've got 1100 potential sales next time around.
Almost all books are available electronically; either for sale or from Usenet/torrents. If I'm looking for a book, I want the ebook version; it's what I bought a Reader for. If you sell an electronic copy without DRM for a reasonable price, I'll buy it, and I won't share it. If not, alt.binaries.... And the stuff I get from there, I'm likely to pass on to friends.
In a pinch I might buy DRMd content, but only if the DRM is known to be broken. I'd rather not though. I played the DRM game years ago with Peanut Press and I now have about 10 books I paid for that I can't read.
null modem cable. The Model 100 has a terminal program built in and will stream a text file from its memory out the line. Use a terminal program on the PC side to capture, just takes a minute. 1200 baud seems like it would be painful but even a lot of notes transfers in less than a minute.
I have 3 of them, picked up a couple of spares off eBay for $30 total.
I use them to take minutes at meetings. I used to have a PC laptop but since all I used it for was to take minutes, I gave it to my brother who actually needed it. The Model 100 performs minute-taking just fine. Also I can touch type on it better than on a newer laptop keyboard.
The Model 100 was a MAINSTAY of journalists at the time; since it ran for many hours on AA batteries which you could get anywhere, even in small towns in foreign countries, and it had a built-in modem and a very portable acoustic coupler that would work with any phone you could find. I bet the majority of remote print reporting for several years was typed in the field on a Model 100.
Our school district already gives laptops to students, and their books are already loaded on the laptop as ebooks.
I've carried 4 foot tubes out behind my house and held them up as high as I could directly under the wires and got nothing. Certainly they WILL light up in the presence of a big electrical field; anywhere near a Tesla coil and they're quite bright.
OTOH, it's fun to put a couple of poly and wool blankets together on a bed in the winter, then after they've been there a day (time to rub together) put a fluorescent tube on them, turn off the lights, and pull them apart. You'll get a nice electrical show in the gap between the sheets, and the tube will light up a lot.
Heat in the PC is a serious issue. 10 watts less draw by the hard drive is 10 watts less heat in the hard drive. That's significant in the life expectancy of the drive.
I bought one of the WD green line (750G) as a NAS drive (hosted on my MythTV box). SMART reports that the drive's temperature is only about 5 degrees above the ambient temperature in the case, while the other drives run about 12 to 15 degrees warmer. I have no special cooling on the drives, they're just sitting in a normal cheap PC case with no fans or heat sinks on the drives themselves. They are NOT sitting right next to one another though, I don't do that unless I have to.
I bought and live in a house near high voltage lines. Remember the distance-squared law? If you're worried about high voltage power lines 400 feet from a house, you should be very concerned about the 110v 2 feet away in the wall, and absolutely terrified by an electric blanket a fraction of an inch away!