Was this even an article? I'm really surprised that there was no mention of the Telebit Trailblazer or AppleCat? Both extraordinary modems that I had the honor of owning.

Lame.

Wish I had mod points right now. Finally a dead on post. This girl needs to understand the rest of the world is not like the US and her rights don't extend outside it's boarders. She's just lucky she didn't pull this BS in some third world country otherwise she may have just disappeared.

In my business I always purchase the HP extended warranties on the laptops. Never on desktops as I consider them disposable. HP's service has always been very good. Next day onsite replacement of any faulty parts with no questions asked.

I never purchased them in the past. However in the last five years I bought two that have been worth their weight in gold. The first was a high end refrigerator that I got from Lowes. The extended warranty was less than 4% of the total cost. One month out of the factory 1 yr warranty the refrigerator stopped working. Service came out on a holiday weekend and swapped out all the electronics. It ended up not fixing the problem and the following week I got a brand new replacement. Even better was they reset the warranty to start over again. My Dad has a little lower end refrigerator like mine and had a simple repair that ran him $800. Definitely money well spent.

The other was I purchased a car that was just coming off lease. For 2k I was able to extend the bumper to bumper warranty for 7 more years. About two years later, which was just over the 5 year factory warranty, I had a major transmission problem. Not a penny out of pocket for the tow or repairs. No doubt the total repair cost was more than I paid for the warranty. If anything else goes wrong it's just more money in my pocket.

I think on low end electronics or where the warranty is in excess of 5% of the original purchase price you are better off passing.

I have to tell you that this argument is getting really old. Not all teachers make nothing. As a matter of fact I think many people would be happy bringing in 50k as starting pay these days. Not to mention the jobs are pretty secure in comparison to the general business environment and get the summers off.

I make this statement because these days I do a lot of work for a local non profit. A few years ago they sent out their annual solicitation to the teachers. There was a husband and wife team that had been in this city's school system for a long time and didn't donate anything. Of course we knew they had the means as they both made over 100k. We knew this as it was published in the newspaper a few months before when the city announced the top paid employees. Upon asking them why they did not donate they said they were teachers and could not afford to donate. I was quite annoyed at this response and mentioned that I had seen their names on the list. The woman then fired back that well that may be true but they had struggled as underpaid teachers for a long time. Of course this argument makes no sense and I didn't want to aggravate them so I just let it go.

I do agree that teachers are very important and should be compensated appropriately but the old blanket argument that they are very underpaid just doesn't hold water anymore...

I think a larger portion of readers understood than you think. If you haven't heard of the Xen hypervisor or this type of virtualization then you probably have nothing to do with managing a server farm. If someone in that business has not heard of Xen then maybe they should be in another line of work.

I agree that keeping up with all tech would be a full time job. However this is pretty main stream stuff.

S.

I guess it depends on your school and instructor. I also assume you are using Karate as a generic name for all similar martial arts. I study TKD and we do lots of self defense in our class. Just a week ago we did a drill where you stand up against a wall and one person squeezed your windpipe (standing from the side) while another came at you with a blocking pad. You had to fight through the discomfort of being choked and fight off the attacker with the pad. Prior to that we did a drill where your partner two hand choked you and you had to get out of it. Of course prior to doing the drill we went through 5 or 6 ways to get out of the choke. Just the other night we did a self defense drill where your partner got a piece of kids sidewalk chalk and used it as a knife. It was really easy to see who did a good job defending themselves and who didn't via their white uniforms at the end of the night!

In addition to these type of drills we have basic self defense moves such as getting out of wrist grabs or headlocks which must be mastered for belt testing.

If that's not enough there is an additional class called Masters which deals with street fighting scenarios such as knife or gun attacks. The class is entirely devoted to how to deal with these situations and trains a lot with rubber weapons. Finally there is also a MMA (mixed martial arts) course where you can really get into the grappling type fighting you see on UFC. So all schools are not created equal and I'd hate to run into most of my instructors in an alley.

What about residential driveways? I know that it would not apply to everyone but if that tech existed, my driveway is long enough that it might just power my entire house. They don't get the traffic or the weight that a major highway receives which would aid in their longevity.

The parent is absolutely correct! I configured a very similar system a year ago for a non-profit.

I purchased two quad Xeon processor HP boxes with 20 GB of RAM each and run Xen just as suggested above. Two virtual web servers on each machine. In this case there is also a third virtual server on each that runs mySQL. The two mySQL instances are set up with replication. For the load balancing I picked up an old Alteon AD3. This setup has worked flawlessly since installation. Not one second of downtime.

I also threw together a script so that when you update the 'master' web server it automatically rsync's the html across the other three web servers.

The best part, the whole project cost under $1000. Since I was so under budget I picked up a third server for development and a second AD3 as a hot swap backup and still had lots of money to spare.

This assumes you have cell service at your home. Unfortunately even in this day and age there is still no service at my place from any of the cell companies. It ceases to amaze me but with the 'not in my backyard' mentality of the residents regarding towers it's just never going to happen. Not to mention that you also have to have a phone that can be tethered to your computer in addition to actually having service.

Your joking right? I live in New England and my winter bills are usually between $600 and $800/mo. Granted the house is electric and just over 3k s.q ft. But it is 2x6 construction, I have replaced all the exterior windows & doors, put cfl's in most rooms, put set back thermostats in all the rooms and we only heat the rooms we are in and using. This has cut our consumption by about 40%. The real issue is our wonderful state decided to deregulate power generation to save us money. Yea right! All that has happened is we have had rate increases upon increases. Our monthly expenditure year over year is almost exactly the same because the rate increases have eaten up all the savings from our improvements.

The real kicker here is that I averaged my annual expenditure against our next door neighbor who has a similar sized house with oil heat. If I total his annual electric and oil vs. my electric we come out about $100 apart. Had oil not come down like it did I would probably have done much better than him.

Not really hard to come by. Go to a motorcycle shop and ask for flexible exhaust tubing. My generator is in my garage and vented to the outside by about 15 ft of this kind of exhaust tubing. I also have a CO2 sensor hanging right off the generator just in case there is any leakage. In 10 years it has worked flawlessly.

The table is a bad idea though...

Great post. I have a similar setup but I have my living room instead of a bed room. This is because I have gas logs in the fireplace which will heat that room. I also hook my well pump up as I have no furnace (electric heat).

One thing to note is no matter what make sure you maintain your gas generator at least twice a year. I made the mistake of not doing it last year and a month ago I was in the dark with a small flashlight trying to take of the carb bowl and clean it out. Not a pretty sight! Don't make the same mistake.