hummm,, that is one way of getting a day off...

For the temperature, it depends on where you live. If they are covered with snow & Ice then it is obvious, and if the temp is below 0C then it's obvious. but where i live we have a lot of humid wind and bridges. This means you can have black ice when it is 40F or below. funny thing about black ice is it doesn't cover up the road, unless you can catch a glare off of it you can't tell it's there till you hit it.

I think it would be nice to have a color change at least on bridges to show that the surface is below freezing, to warn drivers that there is a strong possibility of black ice.

wouldn't work for most places, but would be really useful for where i live.

Wish i had mod points, first useful example of the actual thing.

They do look quite nice, and i'd love to have them where i live, and if they can get rid of the light pollution by reducing the number of street lights i'd be all for them (and willing to pay extra for it too).

Personally i see more value in the temperature sensitive idea, i'd love to see coloration showing up on roads and bridges when the surface temps get down to freezing. Where i live we don't get a lot of snow and ice, but when we do it shuts the place down because people don't know how to spot, avoid, and/or handle it. Giving a visual indication that conditions are right for ice/black ice would be wonderful.

I remember a few years ago when they did the black out of the world cup in the US. we had a computer setup back in my area streaming the World Cup in ASCII. It was actually quite good and you could follow the game fairly easily.. At one point we had 3-4 of us standing around watching it..

http://ascii-wm.net/

I will say i bought and installed their thermostats, and i do like them. especially the remote control, with my travel schedule..

But i fully agree that things that are safety devices (like fire/smoke detectors) should be as simple as possible.

I highly doubt that they have applied/executed a RAM analysis on their smoke detectors (either do to ignorance or complexity), but my bet is their reliability would be much lower than they believe them to be if they did. and then you have to ask your self. do you want 10-20% risk of failure in a lifesaving device? not a chance.

Personally i think their protect product is pointless, and more of a liability for them and the user than anyone needs.

27-9=18 not 16

Thanks, that is one amazing view. i can only dream of visiting it one day.

The other main point i see between consumer drives and enterprise is the behavior. Especially when the drive encounters a bad sector.

Consumer drive encounters a bad sector, it retries for a long time and then eventual remaps it. In the mean time it has stopped talking to the raid controler and gets dropped from the array as a failed drive.

Enterprise drive encounters a bad sector, it relays the write fail and bad sector to the raid controller who then remaps and reissues a write command. Drive never becomes unresponsive and never gets dropped from the array.

In one case you have a degraded raid array and the overhead of a rebuild putting data at risk, on the other you have a log entry/notification of a drive starting to degrade and very limited risk.

Enterprise drives allow you to manage your storage arrays and handle small failures on your time, consumer drives force you to do it when ever even the smallest errors occur.

This matters a lot when you get to larger arrays where rebuild times can be in the days and not hours..

Sure it's just a firmware/behavior difference, but until they allow you to control that on consumer drives, or allow you to flash consumer drives with raid friendly firmwares, it would be unwise to use consumer drives in hardware driven arrays.

This firm can get away with it because they don't use normal raid striping, they use a mixture of software raid distribution logic (reminding me of something akin to ZFS) where you have better separation and control over how things react to minor failures and behavioral differences.

But for most people, we use hardware driven arrays, and in that world enterprise drives win over consumer drives.

I've only found a few with the same functionality as exchange, and i can say that they are not free. while they have "community" versions, to get full exchange functionality you end up having to pay licencing fees to access and use it, and in the end it is borderline cost effective vs exchange. (yes the licenses are cheaper but support and experienced techs aren't)

I think you are thinking about the Exchange server filesystem api. for exchange server 2003 and performance reasons exchange would replace the file system io with a special customized for exchange version. A few competitors complained that this was unfair, i think the final verdict was if they wanted "fair" they where free to write their own drop in replacement for the filesystem i/o

I don't think the issue is so much with having a skimmer. Right now if i show up with a card that doesn't look like an actual CC the person at the counter will think something is up. But if this gets going and has blessings of the CC makers, and looks official the teller will just say "hey he has that neat new card" and not care that you are no infact using a skimmer.

I'm sorry but i just don't trust those things for anything above the lightest load.. the way they are made ALL of the load is on the weld from the ball to draw bar. and honestly the welds look questionable.. especially when the ball and the drawbar look to be different grades of steel..

There are so many things i see when i look at that, no way i'm towing with one..

And if you have ever seen SAP licensing costs that is less than yearly maintenance costs alone for a 900 employee company.

With Tesla employing ~3000 people 1.25m is cheep compared to SAP, really cheap.