No power strip should be the size that thing is unless its also an integrated UPS. The oversized nature of it should be a huge tipoff. Figuring out that it was up to no good is easy too if you suspected it: plug it in to a kill-a-watt. Draws power when "off"? Time to get a hammer...
"The client is in the hands of the enemy." - Koster
It applies just as much to hardware you sell me as to the bits residing on it. If you were right about the secure device thing, there wouldn't be all the cracks on the console/handled systems.
I missed one important thing: which frame I had. I got the max large frame (as opposed to the max small frame -- capacity vs surface size is why they are named oddly).
TBH, I think mine looks better. No pics, sorry. Imagine a nice dark stain on oak, with the characteristic light/dark/light of plywood on the edge.
I have a geek desk. I love it. Actually I have half a geek desk -- the frame only. I put my own surface on it. All theirs are laminated formaldehyde-laced pasteboard. Bleh. I can buy that crap from Ikea.
So I got a sheet of the soy-glued plywood, stained, sealed it in many (many) layers of poly, let it get good and dry in the garage, ordered frame only, fit two together with provided 3/4" wood screws and life is good.
Baby can't reach a 47" high desk surface. This is convenient. I've also found its really convenient to use to just stop by, check something, and go on my way. There's no butt-in-chair intertia to get over.
I've been looking for a cheap treadmill to try the walking thing. I haven't managed to nab one yet. That is probably a no-go other than as an experiment until the kid is a bit older though, since I think there'd be fingers pinched all the time otherwise.
They probably figured someone at the store blew it.
One time we hauled a pallet's load worth of Jones soda out of our local sams club. They were apparently discontinuing carrying it (it hasn't reappeared in the 3 years since). I think they'd *tried* to price it at 12-something (12.38?) per 12 pack. They instead managed to fat-finger it at 2.38 per 12 pack.
We saw it, said, "no possible way." Took it to a scanner, yep 2.38. Took one up to a cashier, "can you price check this?" "2.38" "Seems odd" "That's what the computer says" "Okay, I'll be back" -- and I was, with their whole stock of it.
I don't remember what our total bill was that time, but we bought them out. We had a ziggurat of soda, waist high, in our garage for months... maybe over a year. It was awesome. 20 friends over for BBQ? Bust out the Jones!
The "doesn't break into tiny glass shards" and "doesn't contain vaporized poisons" got much higher on my list now that I have a toddler. They're actually really cheap piece of mind -- mostly the "doesn't break into a bajillion sharp bits" aspect. The mercury is unlikely to make him cry.
If your writing is different, your precision use of scissors is also almost certainly different. Also, if left handed scissors didn't help you, blame your parents for buying crappy left handed scissors, or letting a rightie use them.
So you're saying that the TSA guy who took the bribe trusted the obviously trustworthy guy trying to bribe him that it was really coke, as opposed to say, 10 lbs of plastic explosives?
Security theater to catch the rare stupid attacker and enrich the buddies of those in congress and nothing more is all it is.
I happen to have gone to a large midwestern big 10 and I've heard all the same thing about the sports program. I've also worked at said same school while my better half was doing her PhD work, and then some after. They paid the "big 2" coaches well over a million a year. Plus get to keep paying it on contract buyouts.
Let's just say they aren't paying their administrative/it staff, nor even most professors like that.
So when the engineering dept called up looking for a donation, I said, sorry but no. When the U quits pissing money away on the big 2 coaches like that, call me back. Until then you get nothing.
If having sports is a revenue center because people donate to it, you don't have to bitch about it. You can swim against the tide.
My state funded high school, which does not piss buttloads of bucks away on sports programs (it has sports, but they clearly aren't a focus like at college) does get a nice donation from me, every year.
I have older gen phillips LEDs we bought to trial LEDs and swapped them into a dimmable fixture. The dimmer itself is what came with the house and is space age technology... by which I mean from 1968 to 1969, original to the house. They dim just fine, though they hit cut-off well before dimmed to minimal brightness as defined by the switch.
I actually like the cut off behavior, after having found during our first few months here that we/friends would miss turning the dimmer switch fully off (it looks like a regular on-off throw switch, but is actually a dimmer), so the lights would be on (but not visible during daylight) and the switch wall unit itself would get warm to the touch.
When they die in 2 months, buy something other than a Feit. Their (CFL, probably other) bulbs are garbage. Sure, I pay more for the GEs I switched to (that's what we have around here at the stores, blame them not me if you hate GE), but they also don't blow out every 12 seconds. Nor do they usually die in quite such a spectacular manner as the Feits.
We picked up a few of the older Phillips dimmable, enclosed fixture rated LEDs a couple months back and put them in the one dimmable, enclosed fixture in the house and have so far been very very happy with them. They won't dim down as low as I'd like before going out, but they do dim and don't have flicker-fits like the dimmable CFLs we tried before did.
So you're against coal mining too right? Maybe you've never looked into strip mining or topping...
Hell, we're far more likely to render land unusable in much larger swaths if this global warming thing you hear about is true. Or by causing catastrophic ecosystem collapse through other pollution (see also: Lake Erie) or slash&burn tactics (see the Amazon Rainborest).
Note I'm not, strictly, making a claim about global warming's truth one way or the other. What I am making a claim about is that it is possible at a non-zero probability and if true going to eff things up to a scale that a dozen nuclear plants going off worst-case could only dream of.
Speaking as someone who lived in England for two years when I was 8-11 (ish... its tricky when you fly to/from on your birthday) because my dad was doing an exchange program, yes!
When we did travel through western europe (mainly France, Italy, Germany, and the low countries), it was rare we had a language problem, even outside of the standard touristy areas. It did help dad knew some French still from his school days.
There was at the time though, some anti-american snobbishness in the touristy/semi-touristy areas. Americans (at the time, late 80s) had the reputation of being loud obnoxious jerks (truth, then and now). Hint: if you do go and have a kid, have the kid speak/order/etc first. They will probably have the local accent (I did, British) and tended to get better service for the whole family.
So, back about 10-12 years ago when I was doing masters work on HPC, one of the class assignments a group of us got was HPC gaming. Chess, connect4, othello, etc.
Let me tell you, it was stupid. It knew of no opening books or anything. It was also really damn sharp -- doing a good job beating everyone on our team at whichever game they preferred vastly more than any (consumer-grade) computer opponent at that time had.
If the machine is fast enough to search sufficiently deep in the tree from the starting board position, it doesn't need a book of opening moves. In related news, 15 years is enough time for moore's law to take a supercomputer that is ~#50 on release on top500.org and put it on your desk.
You can do the math. If it can't beat you "honestly" now, wait five years and it will.
For 'over-funded by percent' it is going to be hard to beat the order of the stick reprint drive, which is, last I saw, approaching 1000% funded (also currently ongoing).
I am seriously pissed that pretty much the rest of the #@*&(%#!@ world has rear view cameras in cars as basic as the Fit/Jazz but it is absolutely not available in the US-of-A.
Talking to a passenger isn't the same as on a cell (hands free or not). Your buddy on the cell phone isn't going to shout "stop!" if you're about to hit something. Passengers (if they notice) will. They also tend to shut the heck up when it is obvious that driving is difficult -- or if they don't you should feel free to tell them to shut up.
You're right, its lack of regulations and oversight. Its also a panicky and scientifically illiterate population where reporting the truth to the media sends them (the media, the population, pick one or both) into a tizzy over nothing.
Have a transformer original with dock. Love it. Not quite as much as my 901 which died, but close. Only less so due to the latching mechanism not being quite as robust as I'd like (easy to knock the tablet part just slightly out of the dock), and because it doesn't have the handy gripper-battery the 901 did which made it super convenient to carry around.
I'd say I use it about 50/50 as tablet/notebook. Its almost always docked, but at lunch I tend to be using it as a web tablet... but sitting at a hands-free angle more convenient than flat or in my lap while I'm eating. Safer for the tablet too...
Okay, I'll play ball. Go snuff out the sun. Go on. Go do it. I'm waiting...
You could measure radioactivity anywhere on earth. The earth is radioactive. In all likelyhood the only reason we're here alive is a natural reactor running in the earth's core right now.
Take my basement in the US midwest. We had a radioactivity problem there, so now we have a radon system. What's your solution for me? Don't build a house, live in the trees like a monkey? The Uranium that's producing the radon has been in the soil for eons, it isn't the byproduct of any of the bombs or accidents (the three biggies are quite a bit younger than our house).
While we're at it, why don't you go measure radioactivity released by coal plants. What you find might surprise you. Then again I suspect the thought of uranium in your soil might surprise you too.
If you're going to piss in the pool about running out of fuel for fusion power, have you ever stopped to consider that the big ball of fusion in the sky that powers most of your renewables (solar, wind, hydro) is also a finite fusion power source?
That ignores the other renewables, with geo being of course fission powered in earth's core (just as bad, lots less fuel there) and tidal being leftover gravitational energy/angular momentum from when we captured the moon and earth's orbit around the sun.
A quick self reply: Companies like to spin things, so should you. Want to get into programming and have been working as a sysadmin?
* I know what it is like to deal with software from the sysadmin side. I've seen the things not to do from the other side (software is singlethreaded and doesn't do multithreaded? Don't propose a configuration with expensive 8-way Sun machines.) so I can help your team avoid them.
* I can speak the sysadmin's language, so when they have an issue getting the product to launch at system startup or logging isn't working, they don't have to explain init or syslog to me.
That's less spin than most companies -- your average UNIX sysadmin both of those are very true and useful for future programming work.
Wasn't an issue for me, but that may because my IT group was special. We were sysadmins for hire within a university, working heavily with researchers.
That CS background meant I could talk intelligently with the researchers -- ask them questions about how they processed data -- mass throughput from disk or tightly coupled parallel physics sims? Lots of integer ops, SP or DP float-heavy? How big is your working set and what CPU does that imply you should or shouldn't choose?
Being able to do that was super useful for my group and the researchers -- they got what they needed for machines. It also gave me leverage working with vendors for quotes, because I could tell them that the researcher doesn't need XYZ but does need 64 Gigs of memory.
I've since switched out to programming full time, but I never quit programming even when I was a sysadmin. UNIX sysadmins (which is what I was) should be writing automation scripts day in and day out. Windows/mac admins probably should too but may have more hurdles to pass to do it. Running a big HPC cluster probably didn't hurt -- you have to automate installation, patching, monitoring, password resets, etc on a machine with 800 nodes and 400 users.
I think what you do with what you have and if you keep your programming skills up or not really matters a lot more than anything else. YMMV, maybe I'm just unique.
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No power strip should be the size that thing is unless its also an integrated UPS. The oversized nature of it should be a huge tipoff. Figuring out that it was up to no good is easy too if you suspected it: plug it in to a kill-a-watt. Draws power when "off"? Time to get a hammer...
I too fear our socialist asphault (or concrete) underlords. Don't let the roads get you too boy.
"The client is in the hands of the enemy." - Koster
It applies just as much to hardware you sell me as to the bits residing on it. If you were right about the secure device thing, there wouldn't be all the cracks on the console/handled systems.
I missed one important thing: which frame I had. I got the max large frame (as opposed to the max small frame -- capacity vs surface size is why they are named oddly).
TBH, I think mine looks better. No pics, sorry. Imagine a nice dark stain on oak, with the characteristic light/dark/light of plywood on the edge.
I have a geek desk. I love it. Actually I have half a geek desk -- the frame only. I put my own surface on it. All theirs are laminated formaldehyde-laced pasteboard. Bleh. I can buy that crap from Ikea.
So I got a sheet of the soy-glued plywood, stained, sealed it in many (many) layers of poly, let it get good and dry in the garage, ordered frame only, fit two together with provided 3/4" wood screws and life is good.
Baby can't reach a 47" high desk surface. This is convenient. I've also found its really convenient to use to just stop by, check something, and go on my way. There's no butt-in-chair intertia to get over.
I've been looking for a cheap treadmill to try the walking thing. I haven't managed to nab one yet. That is probably a no-go other than as an experiment until the kid is a bit older though, since I think there'd be fingers pinched all the time otherwise.
They probably figured someone at the store blew it.
One time we hauled a pallet's load worth of Jones soda out of our local sams club. They were apparently discontinuing carrying it (it hasn't reappeared in the 3 years since). I think they'd *tried* to price it at 12-something (12.38?) per 12 pack. They instead managed to fat-finger it at 2.38 per 12 pack.
We saw it, said, "no possible way." Took it to a scanner, yep 2.38. Took one up to a cashier, "can you price check this?" "2.38" "Seems odd" "That's what the computer says" "Okay, I'll be back" -- and I was, with their whole stock of it.
I don't remember what our total bill was that time, but we bought them out. We had a ziggurat of soda, waist high, in our garage for months... maybe over a year. It was awesome. 20 friends over for BBQ? Bust out the Jones!
Mostly its too much trust in the machine.
The "doesn't break into tiny glass shards" and "doesn't contain vaporized poisons" got much higher on my list now that I have a toddler. They're actually really cheap piece of mind -- mostly the "doesn't break into a bajillion sharp bits" aspect. The mercury is unlikely to make him cry.
If your writing is different, your precision use of scissors is also almost certainly different. Also, if left handed scissors didn't help you, blame your parents for buying crappy left handed scissors, or letting a rightie use them.
So you're saying that the TSA guy who took the bribe trusted the obviously trustworthy guy trying to bribe him that it was really coke, as opposed to say, 10 lbs of plastic explosives?
Security theater to catch the rare stupid attacker and enrich the buddies of those in congress and nothing more is all it is.
I happen to have gone to a large midwestern big 10 and I've heard all the same thing about the sports program. I've also worked at said same school while my better half was doing her PhD work, and then some after. They paid the "big 2" coaches well over a million a year. Plus get to keep paying it on contract buyouts.
Let's just say they aren't paying their administrative/it staff, nor even most professors like that.
So when the engineering dept called up looking for a donation, I said, sorry but no. When the U quits pissing money away on the big 2 coaches like that, call me back. Until then you get nothing.
If having sports is a revenue center because people donate to it, you don't have to bitch about it. You can swim against the tide.
My state funded high school, which does not piss buttloads of bucks away on sports programs (it has sports, but they clearly aren't a focus like at college) does get a nice donation from me, every year.
I have older gen phillips LEDs we bought to trial LEDs and swapped them into a dimmable fixture. The dimmer itself is what came with the house and is space age technology... by which I mean from 1968 to 1969, original to the house. They dim just fine, though they hit cut-off well before dimmed to minimal brightness as defined by the switch.
I actually like the cut off behavior, after having found during our first few months here that we/friends would miss turning the dimmer switch fully off (it looks like a regular on-off throw switch, but is actually a dimmer), so the lights would be on (but not visible during daylight) and the switch wall unit itself would get warm to the touch.
When they die in 2 months, buy something other than a Feit. Their (CFL, probably other) bulbs are garbage. Sure, I pay more for the GEs I switched to (that's what we have around here at the stores, blame them not me if you hate GE), but they also don't blow out every 12 seconds. Nor do they usually die in quite such a spectacular manner as the Feits.
We picked up a few of the older Phillips dimmable, enclosed fixture rated LEDs a couple months back and put them in the one dimmable, enclosed fixture in the house and have so far been very very happy with them. They won't dim down as low as I'd like before going out, but they do dim and don't have flicker-fits like the dimmable CFLs we tried before did.
So you're against coal mining too right? Maybe you've never looked into strip mining or topping...
Hell, we're far more likely to render land unusable in much larger swaths if this global warming thing you hear about is true. Or by causing catastrophic ecosystem collapse through other pollution (see also: Lake Erie) or slash&burn tactics (see the Amazon Rainborest).
Note I'm not, strictly, making a claim about global warming's truth one way or the other. What I am making a claim about is that it is possible at a non-zero probability and if true going to eff things up to a scale that a dozen nuclear plants going off worst-case could only dream of.
Speaking as someone who lived in England for two years when I was 8-11 (ish... its tricky when you fly to/from on your birthday) because my dad was doing an exchange program, yes!
When we did travel through western europe (mainly France, Italy, Germany, and the low countries), it was rare we had a language problem, even outside of the standard touristy areas. It did help dad knew some French still from his school days.
There was at the time though, some anti-american snobbishness in the touristy/semi-touristy areas. Americans (at the time, late 80s) had the reputation of being loud obnoxious jerks (truth, then and now). Hint: if you do go and have a kid, have the kid speak/order/etc first. They will probably have the local accent (I did, British) and tended to get better service for the whole family.
So, back about 10-12 years ago when I was doing masters work on HPC, one of the class assignments a group of us got was HPC gaming. Chess, connect4, othello, etc.
Let me tell you, it was stupid. It knew of no opening books or anything. It was also really damn sharp -- doing a good job beating everyone on our team at whichever game they preferred vastly more than any (consumer-grade) computer opponent at that time had.
If the machine is fast enough to search sufficiently deep in the tree from the starting board position, it doesn't need a book of opening moves. In related news, 15 years is enough time for moore's law to take a supercomputer that is ~#50 on release on top500.org and put it on your desk.
You can do the math. If it can't beat you "honestly" now, wait five years and it will.
For 'over-funded by percent' it is going to be hard to beat the order of the stick reprint drive, which is, last I saw, approaching 1000% funded (also currently ongoing).
I am seriously pissed that pretty much the rest of the #@*&(%#!@ world has rear view cameras in cars as basic as the Fit/Jazz but it is absolutely not available in the US-of-A.
Talking to a passenger isn't the same as on a cell (hands free or not). Your buddy on the cell phone isn't going to shout "stop!" if you're about to hit something. Passengers (if they notice) will. They also tend to shut the heck up when it is obvious that driving is difficult -- or if they don't you should feel free to tell them to shut up.
How about like our navy?
You're right, its lack of regulations and oversight. Its also a panicky and scientifically illiterate population where reporting the truth to the media sends them (the media, the population, pick one or both) into a tizzy over nothing.
Have a transformer original with dock. Love it. Not quite as much as my 901 which died, but close. Only less so due to the latching mechanism not being quite as robust as I'd like (easy to knock the tablet part just slightly out of the dock), and because it doesn't have the handy gripper-battery the 901 did which made it super convenient to carry around.
I'd say I use it about 50/50 as tablet/notebook. Its almost always docked, but at lunch I tend to be using it as a web tablet... but sitting at a hands-free angle more convenient than flat or in my lap while I'm eating. Safer for the tablet too...
Okay, I'll play ball. Go snuff out the sun. Go on. Go do it. I'm waiting...
You could measure radioactivity anywhere on earth. The earth is radioactive. In all likelyhood the only reason we're here alive is a natural reactor running in the earth's core right now.
Take my basement in the US midwest. We had a radioactivity problem there, so now we have a radon system. What's your solution for me? Don't build a house, live in the trees like a monkey? The Uranium that's producing the radon has been in the soil for eons, it isn't the byproduct of any of the bombs or accidents (the three biggies are quite a bit younger than our house).
While we're at it, why don't you go measure radioactivity released by coal plants. What you find might surprise you. Then again I suspect the thought of uranium in your soil might surprise you too.
Why wouldn't you use the method they can't deny? FOIA their butt and be done with it:
University of Kentucky
www.uky.edu/
Located in Lexington. The state's only comprehensive, land-grant research university.
If you're going to piss in the pool about running out of fuel for fusion power, have you ever stopped to consider that the big ball of fusion in the sky that powers most of your renewables (solar, wind, hydro) is also a finite fusion power source?
That ignores the other renewables, with geo being of course fission powered in earth's core (just as bad, lots less fuel there) and tidal being leftover gravitational energy/angular momentum from when we captured the moon and earth's orbit around the sun.
A quick self reply: Companies like to spin things, so should you. Want to get into programming and have been working as a sysadmin?
* I know what it is like to deal with software from the sysadmin side. I've seen the things not to do from the other side (software is singlethreaded and doesn't do multithreaded? Don't propose a configuration with expensive 8-way Sun machines.) so I can help your team avoid them.
* I can speak the sysadmin's language, so when they have an issue getting the product to launch at system startup or logging isn't working, they don't have to explain init or syslog to me.
That's less spin than most companies -- your average UNIX sysadmin both of those are very true and useful for future programming work.
Wasn't an issue for me, but that may because my IT group was special. We were sysadmins for hire within a university, working heavily with researchers.
That CS background meant I could talk intelligently with the researchers -- ask them questions about how they processed data -- mass throughput from disk or tightly coupled parallel physics sims? Lots of integer ops, SP or DP float-heavy? How big is your working set and what CPU does that imply you should or shouldn't choose?
Being able to do that was super useful for my group and the researchers -- they got what they needed for machines. It also gave me leverage working with vendors for quotes, because I could tell them that the researcher doesn't need XYZ but does need 64 Gigs of memory.
I've since switched out to programming full time, but I never quit programming even when I was a sysadmin. UNIX sysadmins (which is what I was) should be writing automation scripts day in and day out. Windows/mac admins probably should too but may have more hurdles to pass to do it. Running a big HPC cluster probably didn't hurt -- you have to automate installation, patching, monitoring, password resets, etc on a machine with 800 nodes and 400 users.
I think what you do with what you have and if you keep your programming skills up or not really matters a lot more than anything else. YMMV, maybe I'm just unique.