Should you buy a $25 computer?

thetechblock.com

Story thanks to Kim Komando at komando.com. Link provided below:

The hottest computer on the market isn't a $1,000+ decked-out gaming machine. It's actually a bare bones circuit board the size of a credit card. And it costs just $25!

Meet the Raspberry Pi. What's it good for?

For starters, you hook the Pi to an HDTV or digital monitor using HDMI. It can display high-definition videos, browse the Internet, play games or work on spreadsheets.

Sound great! Is it for you, though? Well, it depends.

First, let's look at a bit of history.

The low-cost Raspberry Pi is the brainchild of Eben Upton. In 2006, he was teaching computer science at the University of Cambridge. He found that computers were too expensive and too hard for ordinary users to program.

So, he set out to make a low-cost programming computer. His charitable foundation is working to get Raspberry Pis to kids all over the world. He hopes this will create a new generation of programmers.

Watch what a middle school girls engineering class in Charlotte, NC, does with the Pi. One student programmed a Pi to control brake and turn-indicator lights on her rolling backpack!

Upton expected to sell 10,000 units, tops. So far, it has sold more than a million units and counting. It isn't just schools who want it. Computer programmers and hobbyists around the world are going crazy for it.

So, how can it improve your life?

At a basic level, you can use a Raspberry Pi as a media computer. It's also a capable second PC or a computer for kids. It runs the Linux operating system, which is free and very secure.

There are two models. The Model A ($25) has 256MB of RAM and one USB port. Model B ($35) has 512MB of RAM and adds a second USB connection and an Ethernet port.

Both flavors have an HDMI connection, an audio jack and an RCA video jack. You can add a USB hub to connect a keyboard, mouse and USB Wi-Fi.

The Pi is powered by a 32-bit 700 MHz ARM processor that's roughly equivalent to the performance of a Pentium 2 chip. Upton says the multimedia performance is between a Playstation 2 and Playstation 3. That's enough for most basic computer uses.

To make the Pi operational, you need to supply a 5 volt micro USB power supply. An Android smartphone charger should do the trick. Just be sure to read the label. It needs to provide 700mA or better at 5V. Otherwise the Pi will behave erratically (or won't work at all).

The Pi has no internal storage; it boots from a standard SD card. You can buy a card pre-loaded with a compatible operating system. Or make one yourself by downloading a drive image from the Raspberry Pi website. Of course, you can also hook up an external hard drive.

You should buy a case for the computer. It could get fried if it comes in contact with liquids or conductive metals. Or you can make your own, if you're so inclined. Some people have used LEGO!

Cases, power supplies and other accessories are available from a variety of third-party vendors. The two official U.S. Raspberry Pi sellers - Allied Electronics and Newark - also sell accessories and bundles.

You can use the Raspberry Pi for basic computer functions. Or you can take it to the next level with your own programs.

Python is the programming language of the Raspberry Pi. It's easy to learn but very powerful. Click here to find out where you can take free self-guided Python lessons online. You'll be coding in no time!

If you're considering buying, definitely check out the Raspberry Pi website for more information. Read through the instructions and see if it's something you can handle. Be sure to check out the forums for great ideas on ways that you can use it.

http://www.komando.com/columns/index.aspx?id=14646&utm_medium=nl&utm_source=column&utm_content=2013-06-09-column-end&page=4

Beige Book relays concerns over HOS rules

adslogistics.com

JUNE 5, 2013

The Federal Reserve’s latest commentary on current economic conditions throughout its 12 districts — popularly known as the Beige Book — noted concerns over the availability of truck drivers, especially in light of the upcoming changes to the hours-of-service regulations. Unless blocked by a federal appeals court by then, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration on July 1 will implement new rules that will restrict use of the 34-hour restart of drivers’ cumulative duty-time and require drivers to take a break during their driving time.

According to the Fed’s Fourth District in Cleveland, freight executives in the region were optimistic about growth prospects for the rest of the year but were worried about the potential impact on operations of the HOS changes. Another concern noted in the Fourth District was a shortage of skilled mechanics.

The Fifth District in Richmond also reported that a national trucking firm executive indicated that implementation of new federal restrictions on driver hours of service will exacerbate the shortage of drivers for long-haul trucking. The driver shortage wasn’t just a concern for trucking companies themselves, the district said. It noted that despite the prospects of higher port traffic due to the soon-to-be-completed expansion of the Panama Canal, one port operator in the region is concerned that the truck driver shortage could slow container shipping.

A shortage of truck drivers was also reported in the Kansas City and Dallas Fed districts. Two other Fed districts — Atlanta and Chicago — reported higher demand for heavy-duty trucks.

For a copy of the entire Beige Book report, click here.

http://www.truckgauge.com/2013/06/05/beige-book-relays-concerns-over-hos-rules/?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_content=06-06-2013&utm_campaign=CCJ&ust_id=137f89555c&

‘Best thing that ever happened’ to former owner-operator team

pactrucking

Article thanks to Max Heine or overdriveonline.com. Link provided below:

Pete Carpenter, of Nashville, Tenn., spent 25 years as a one-truck owner-operator, many of them team driving with his wife, Christine. After working for North American Van Lines and FedEx Express, in 2003 the Carpenters finally settled on FedEx Ground.

In 2008, “We decided we’d had enough of being on the road and started purchasing other contractors’ trucks,” Pete Carpenter recalls. That year they bought three small fleets. Then they added three used Volvos, growing the new Pac Trucking to 19 tractors by 2009.

Their career track is a good example of what the U.S. Small Business Administration celebrates this month with its National Small Business Week, June 17-21. Many owner-operators make good money and enjoy their work without growing to a small fleet. But it’s worthwhile noting what the Carpenters learned about operating under their own authority and expanding beyond one truck.

STAY ON TOP OF PAPERWORK. “That will make you or break you,” Carpenter says. File papers on time. Use financial services providers.

PLAN TIME OFF AROUND FREIGHT. “Take your vacation when there’s ice and snow and no one’s got freight,” he says.

USE A PAYROLL SERVICE. The Carpenters use ADP, which provides weekly paychecks and handles financial reports and taxes. “Why would you want to do that if someone else will do it for $92 a week?”

USE A GOOD ACCOUNTANT. “They’re paid to keep up with that stuff,” says Carpenter, who tried to do his own taxes at first.

USE A GOOD SHOP. He ran his own at first, then sold it to his head mechanic. “He’s got seven full-time employees. He still fixes my trucks.”

ADD AT LEAST TWO TRUCKS. Having three or more trucks is best suited to the business model of a small fleet.

FOCUS ON PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE. Each of their trucks gets a thorough inspection every 15,000 miles to help avoid expensive downtime on the road.

TREAT DRIVERS WELL. Pac Trucking sets pay rates above average, and doesn’t shirk on equipment needs – Sirius XM, good seats, mattresses changed every few years. “We know what it takes to be comfortable out there. Team life is rough,” says Carpenter, who has 10 full-time teams.

FOCUS ON SAFETY. Pac Trucking gives a 2 cents per mile bonus for any month when there are no violations or customer complaints.  That and other safety initiatives have paid off: The company went more than 8 million miles without an at-fault accident until a minor trailer scrape this year.

The Carpenters’ last five years have seen no shortage of challenges. But Carpenter doesn’t shortchange their earlier years, when they embarked upon “our adventure of adventures.”

“Everyone thought we’d lost our gourds,” he recalls. “We sold everything and bought a truck. It was the best thing that ever happened to us.”

http://www.overdriveonline.com/best-thing-that-ever-happened-to-former-owner-operator-team/

Evel Knievel’s driver and the 1973 Overdrive interview

overdriveonline.com

Story thanks to Todd Dills of overdriveonline.com |March 12, 2012 
Link provided:

Wichita, Kan.-based medical equipment salesman Mike Draper, 59, has been doing his current work, traveling all over the state of Kansas in a four-wheeler, for around 16 years, he says, after many years working as an officer with the Wichita Sheriff’s office. Before that, as a green 19-year-old working with Hugo Shea, owner of a series of Harley-Davidson dealerships around Oklahoma and Kansas, he lucked his way into the driving gig of a lifetime.

Daredevil Evel Knievel (pictured here around the time of his Snake River Canyon jump in 1974) had been driving his touring haul rig himself – with his wife and kids in tow – when Draper first met him at a promotional event at one of Shea’s dealerships. “Shea had a Chevy Titan 90 semi that I drove,” as well as another truck, says Draper, to move equipment and inventory around between dealerships and other locations.

Knievel asked Shea if he had someone who might be willing to drive the truck for him. Draper wasn’t the only big-rig-capable hauler in the outfit, and ultimately Knievel got two drivers out of the deal, Draper and a man Draper taught to drive diesels himself, Lee Ratliff.

overdriveonline.com

 Draper and Ratliff are both mentioned in a story American Trucker TV show hostRobb Mariani got wind of and which we dug up from the archive in Overdrive‘sTuscaloosa, Ala., office. Download a pdf of the 1973 Overdrive interview with Knievel via this link, or click through the opening page image below.

The story reveals the man known for beating death in spite of the odds. Describing the then-in-planning “SkyCycle” steam rocket-on-wheels jump to Overdrive in 1973, Knievel had this to say: “I open the valve, let the water from the heater into the rocket, and when it drops from 500 [psi degrees] to 420, the engineer, Bob Truax, points at me. I’m looking right up the ramp over the canyon. I go at 350 miles an hour in eight seconds and hope like hell I get there. If I do, I drop down to both knees, grab a handful of dirt and thank God Almighty that I’m still alive. If I splat against the [canyon wall], I just get somewhere quicker where you’re going someday and I’ll wait for you. Dying is part of living.”

The daredevil had kind words for Draper and Ratliff in that story, too. In 1973, Knievel’s Post Coach living quarters was mounted on and his new trailer toted by a custom-designed Kenworth cabover, which would be swapped for the Mack currently undergoing restorationlate that year or early in 1974.

overdriveonline.com

“Mike and Lee,” Knievel toldOverdrive in 1973 when asked about the drivers who kept up with the Kenworth’s maintenance. “They’re great guys. I never look at [the rig] because I know that it’s going to be taken care of like I take care of it myself. They drive it all over the United States and they’ve never put a single scratch on it.”

Draper told me about witnessing an incident in Minneapolis where one of Knievel’s planes was landed on a drag strip during one of his shows — “We had a trailer parked at the starting point of the drag strip with the back end of the trailer parked at the finish line, all the motorcycles lined up. Lee and I were at the back.”

When the airplane landed “in the middle of the drag strip,” Draper says, it was going too fast and blew its tires, “and he’s coming right for us.”

Fortunately, everyone emerged unscathed after impact — not so the trailer. “The plane didn’t move the trailer one iota,” says Draper. “There was no fire, no smoke, no nothing, but the plane was just a total wreck.” And the trailer emerged with a gaping hole in it.

Knievel mentions the incident as the “one accident” he’d had with his Kenworth in the Overdrive interview. He later “told everyone I was then going to fly a plane head-on into the tractor. I was told it would be very expensive.”

When on tour in those days, Draper says, in the trailer “we used to haul three motorcycles, all the aluminum ramps,” and one or more of Knievel’s Cadillac station wagons and pickups, as well as the SkyCycle (pictured being loaded here).

“He’d pay us twice a week,” Draper adds, “and for whatever we spent we’d turn in our receipts and he was good with reimbursements.” The drivers were paid $500 a week salary, otherwise.

What was it like driving a truck for arguably the most famous man on the planet at the time?

“We never had to drive near as hard as most of the truck drivers, unless scheduling difficulties required it,” says Draper. Nonetheless, the rig drew plenty of interaction with working long-haulers. “The truckstops we’d pull into – nobody saw many automatic transmissions on over-the-road trucks in those days. And at that time nobody was putting that big a coach on the back of a semi truck,” Draper adds. “A lot of guys got to get in there and give it a look, too.

“It was quite an experience for a 19-year-old to start out with.”

Draper drove for Knievel off an on through his mid-20s into the late 1970s.

http://www.overdriveonline.com/evel-knievels-driver-and-the-1973-overdrive-interview/

Costs, regulations forcing out trucking’s ‘first generation’

truckinginfo.com

Article thanks to Jame Jaillet at ccjdigital.om Link provide below:

American Trucking Associations Chairman and Combined Transport President Mike Card delivered a simple — though slightly dire — message to attendees of the Great West Fleet Executive Conference Thursday, May 30: Smaller carriers can’t handle the increased costs of industry regulations and can’t hold their heads above water any longer.

Many of these smaller carriers are owned and operated by what Card calls “the first generation,” as they got their starts after deregulation in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a time when doors opened for owner-operators and small fleets to emerge.

This generation, however, “will see no baby boom,” Card said, as reregulation has given them basically only three options for leaving the industry, “merger, sale or death,” Card said.

“Trucking has been consolidated,” he said. “The primary reason for consolidation in the trucking industry is the costs associated with increased regulation. We’re the most over reregulated industry out there, in my opinion,” Card said, referencing multiple hours-of-service changes, CSA, drug testing implementation, upcoming electronic onboard recorder requirements and a litany of equipment mandates like emissions standards, anti-lock brakes, fuel standards and more.

Since deregulation, the industry’s also seen the institution of heavy vehicle use taxes, excise taxes and the creation of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, Card said.

“They’re all great regulations, but almost all of them have raised the cost of owning a trucking company,” Card said.

In today’s climate, he added, fleet age or owner experience carries hardly any weight compared to fleet size. “It doesn’t matter how old you are,” he said. “It matters how big you are. If you’re not big enough and profitable enough to handle the additional cost of regulation, you’re going to struggle to survive.”

Card said a major issue with dealing with the over regulation is that carriers and ATA can’t deal directly with Congress. They instead are dealing with federal bureaucrats from an agency. “Congress has given up their responsibility to legislate this country to regulators,” Card said.

Now, trucking is “at the whim” of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, which, unlike agencies that oversee other modes of freight transportation, does not advocate for the industry.

“Why do we have FMCSA? Why not FMCA?” Card asked. “Railroads have the Federal Railroad Administration. Ocean carriers have the Federal Maritime Commission. Why is it that the largest freight mode hauling over 70 percent of freight doesn’t have a federal bureaucratic administration to propagate our industry? Why don’t we have an administration to help us?”

Card blames Congress, and he also blames them for the country’s lack of “adequate infrastructure,” as ATA and the trucking industry have asked for Congress to increase fuel taxes to pay for better highways, Card said.

“We said ‘Do it, and give us the roads we need,’” Card said. “But they won’t because they’re afraid they won’t get reelected” if they raise taxes, he said.

Because of the issues with Congress, FMCSA and increasing regulations, Card says the industry will continue to consolidate and one day might be like the airline industry, in which customers have only four or five companies to choose from, and they simply go online and book one.

“Unless we get Congress to act, our industry is only going to be made up of the biggest trucking companies,” Card says “And those companies will be under attack constantly from [federal regulations].”

Card offered as an example of Congress yielding power to regulators ATA’s current fight with FMCSA over hours-of-service implementation — a rule Card says will have “very little safety benefit” but will cost the industry lots of money. “At ATA we worked hard and got Congressmen to write a letter to FMCSA asking for a delay. FMCSA said no.”

In years past, Congress “wouldn’t have stood for that,” Card says, and would have passed a law to get done what they wanted, which in this case is a delay in implementation of the rule.

Toward the end of his address, Card posed the question: “What can we do to keep common sense in the trucking industry?”

His suggestion, he says, starts with recreating trucking’s image in the minds of the public and moves to taking action by influencing Congress and state legislatures.

As far as image is concerned, “We cannot be Smokey and the Bandit,” Card says. “We need to get back to being knights of the road. Our drivers should be wearing uniforms and be driving clean and safe trucks. We need to get the public to trust in us again.”

The industry needs to make use of social media, YouTube, earned media and purchased media to remake its image, Card says, and to educate the public about trucking.

That education needs to extend to Congress, too, to influence a better regulatory environment. ATA has reached out to other trucking-related associations like the Truckload Carriers Association, the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, the Teamsters, FMCSA and others “trying to make this a collaborative effort,” Card said.

“Working together we can make a difference and influence government in such a way that we bring common sense back to trucking,” Card said. “We’re either going to lose our first generation, small carriers and owner-operators or make Congress step up and listen.”

“That’s how we’re going to make the trucking industry strong,” he said, “and that’s how we’re going to make the country strong.”

http://www.ccjdigital.com/atas-card-costs-regulations-forcing-out-truckings-first-generation/?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_content=06-03-2013&utm_campaign=CCJ&ust_id=137f89555c&