As of right now I won't buy a car with "push button ignition". It is a convenience I don't need, and there are enough situations where manual control is a huge feature, like these. There are also plenty of more minor stories of being unable to properly tow a car with a dead battery and other stupidities.
I hope I always have the option to buy a car with a real key and ignition, but who knows, if people like the push buttons I may not have a choice in a few years.
I am not a Ham. I'm not interested in being one. That said, I have chased listening to some interesting things from time to time. I went to the effort of installing a long line antenna to listen to some shortwave from around the world. I have a scanner I've used to listen in on trains and planes.
What I want is a "magic radio". I want the interface to look something like a google search box, and take a wide range of inputs. I want to be able to enter a radio station call sign, a frequency, a call sign and get back a list of things that might match. Clicking on one would tune it in on one of these SDR radio thingies, and perhaps pop up some info that says what sort of antenna(s) should work so I can connect the right one to the computer.
I am not interested in transmitting, or at least, when I am I can use more traditional gear.
I agree, and in fact find its "decline" natural and healthy. Perl was the only option for many things for too long, and so it was used. It may not have been the best option, but it worked. Since then the world has developed better options for certain applications, like Ruby or Python. As a result Perl is no longer used for some classes of applications, but that's a good thing. It keeps the language from being pushed and morphed in bad ways to solve non-core problems. While in absolute terms Perl may have "shrunk", the result is a strong, vibrant core of things it's good at, and a developer community focused on those things.
I would love to banish Java from all of my machines never to see it again. Most of the uses for Java are well, useless to me, HOWEVER....
There are a few things I do that require Java and even if I wanted to badger my vendors to do them in some other cross platform way I'm not sure how they could. The two I regularly use are access to IPMI cards and Cisco WebEx. Both do things that as far as I can tell can't simply be done in a browser with HTML5 and JavaScript.
If someone had a good solution for those sorts of things I would dump Java in a heartbeat.
The biggest problem with the Pi is the packaging. It was clearly designed to be cheap and thus use the smallest board area possible, but that makes it strange to put into cases and use in practical ways.
Part of what VIA brings to the table here is packaging experience. Yes, the board is a bit bigger, but it was designed to go in a proper case. Depending on the application that may be important and worth the extra bucks.
Actually it may not be that simple without verifying the certificates.
Many corporations for instance use products that look inside SSL streams (typically IM's) for sensitive data. The way they do this is to install a cert signed by the company on the proxy, and set the company's CA cert on your computer to always trust. Your machine makes a connection which is grabbed by the proxy, the proxy presents the valid corporate certificate. It then makes a connection off to the real service using SSL as well. Your basic man in the middle attack.
For clients that don't show the cert (like many IM clients) there's no way to know, and on those that do the user would have to check. If they are trained to just look for the padlock it appears all is well.
I can't tell if Nokia is doing something like that or not, but if you work at a big corporation you might want to check the cert fingerprints for say your bank and compare them to an access from home. I've been told the newer products can generate a cert per site on the fly, making the fake certs look correct (right company name and all of that). If your company is going to that length to spy on you, perhaps it's time to rethink your employer...
I have a desktop, laptop, and iPad, and would consider myself a power user. In an effort to travel lighter I've tried taking the iPad only on some trips to see if it can fit the bill. The answer to me is a resounding maybe, and depends entirely on what you want to do.
Tablets are terrible content creation devices. Writing an e-mail, editing a picture, cutting a movie, or even filling in a web form to buy something are all much more difficult. The lack of a keyboard is a big part of it, and can be mitigated with a keyboard for the tablet, but that's not the whole story. The lack of screen space, and the touch interfaces also make things less efficient.
However, they are excellent content consumption devices. I prefer reading e-mail and browsing the web casually on my iPad. I grab it for simple apps like checking the weather, or my portfolio. On trips it offers a vastly better interface for things like Yelp or UrbanSpoon. For older relatives, things like PhotoStream can be huge if you have other family members with the small children willing to use it.
As a geek, if I'm going away for a day or two and just want to casually stay in touch it's a winner. Smaller, lighter, better battery life. However if I need to do any work, it's right out as an option, more of a nuisance than a help.
So at the end of the day, it really depends on what your mother does online. Does she just want to read some e-mail and get pictures of the grandkids? A tablet may be an excellent choice. Does she make her own electronic scrapbooks? A tablet would probably be a horrible choice.
Controllers came well after AP's were invented, so people had to solve this problem for years without them as an option at all. Multiple AP's sharing the same SSID and key is exactly how the standard was designed, and was the best practice for deployment for many years. The short answer is, it works great, and is how you should be deploying.
For the long answer, you have to understand what happens when a user needs to switch AP's, and how the controllers improve that process. When a client wants to switch from one AP to another it must dissociate from the first, associate with the second which includes exchanging new session keys, gratuitous ARP to inform the L2 network, and then carry on. This process typically takes between 100-500ms, depending on the client, AP, and random luck. For most users doing most things this is all fine, if you're browsing the web and chatting on IM it's a non-issue.
However, for some clients like VoIP phones and video chat a 100-500ms pause is a disaster. Enter the controller solution. The WiFi protocol was divided between things that require hardware (transmitting at the right time, rf modulation, etc) and things that were all in software, just on the AP like exchanging key material. The hardware kept doing the hardware things, but the software activities were moved to the controller. The advantage is that the entire session does not need to be torn down, the radio can switch AP affinity (BSSID) while using the same key material since the key material is tunned back to the controller from both AP's. A client can now switch AP's in 10-50ms, which for most VoIP apps and video conferencing means seamless connections.
Note to the pedantic: yes, there are some other details, controllers enable triangulation features and some other RF analysis, there are a few protocol nits I omitted, and this omits a lot of important design considerations like proper AP placement and channel selection.
Now, go back to the requirements. If you don't deploy WiFi VOIP phones, and don't have other real time streams, controllers may be a total waste of your money. If the goal is to get users e-mail and web access when sitting in the conference room or courtyard, vendors are selling something not needed when they push controllers.
Second note to the pedantic: Controllers can make networks scale better, so if you're deploying 25+, or more likely 100+ AP's my previous paragraph doesn't apply, but that's not what most people reading this are doing.
So to the OP, yes, put them on the same channel. For less than 10 AP's with no real time requirements it is the best practice, and a perfectly valid way to deploy a WiFi network. A controller may be able to get some advanced features (auto-channel management, threat detection, triangulation), but in most small businesses they are features that would rarely if ever be used. There are thousands of WiFi networks deployed without controllers that work quite well. Do read a good document on how to place AP's and select channels, you'll want to use non-overlapping channels in a grid pattern and try and get it to where clients can always see 2-3 AP's, no more, no less.
If you really want a controller, there are some lower cost options than the big players. Ubiquity has a nice solution in their UniFi line, and Netgear now offers an appliance based controller. Aruba has several mid priced offerings. They don't all have the features of say high end Cisco gear, but offer a lower cost solution.
I'm going to respectfully disagree with you on term limits. Yes, freshman are courted, and there are many reasons, but many of them will be weakened by term limits. The lobbyists are making an investment in folks they hope will be on their side long term. Term limits mean they need a much faster ROI, and change the decision process on how to invest money in a way I think would be beneficial.
As you point out seniority is huge in the committee system today, and I do believe that is part of the issue. Freshman often can't get an audience with senior members themselves as they have little to offer, and the lobbyists can get them an introduction and bring them along. If seniority were less important, there would be less division between the old guard and new guard, and less gatekeeping by lobbyists. Moreover, if committees were done by say a lottery freshman would get some key ones, giving them power to hold over other members and lobbyists. It would give them a bargaining chip if you will, unlike their current powerless position.
The key though is to move past arguing over which method is best, and start trying some of them. Lots of people have ideas for changes from filibuster reform to term limits that could improve Congress, but we keep arguing over which is best which just serves to keep the status quo. The status quo does not work, so let's try a handful of ideas even if they aren't our personal first choices.
The Tea Party means well, but I don't think any of the things listed start to solve the problem. They are an attempt to return to an earlier time that does not match the modern world. They might as well add to their plan banning the automobile and returning to the horse and buggy since it would end our dependance on oil. We don't live in a world where pushing entitlements like Social Security to the states makes any sense. Grow up and work in New York, and retire to Florida and all the sudden you get different benefits? No way, no how. Doesn't work for those administering such programs, or receiving the benefits.
The real problems here are much simpler, and sadly the Tea Party is part of the problem. The number 1 problem is gerrymandered districts, particularly in the house. When representatives don't have to fear electoral challenges they are free to be beholden to the corporations. Many of the Tea Party folks were only able to get elected because of these gerrymandered districts, otherwise they would have had no chance. The number 2 problem is career politicians. If you're looking to a 30, 40, or 50 year career there will be many elections, costing a lot of money. Fundraising is hard, and takes a lot of time. The siren song of corporate dollars is too hard to pass up. There is no way to ever get the money out of politics, but with term limits it is possible to prevent long term corrupting relationships from setting in. Two terms and out works for the president, it should be the standard for the house and senate as well.
Every Russian has a dash cam because the insurance company and courts there have a history of not paying out a dime unless you have proof. Where Americans seem to think in a "reasonable doubt" methodology from our courts, in Russia it's apparently "any doubt at all" and you lose. So if someone hits you while you're parked and they show up and say you ran into them you'd better have video or witnesses or something or no money for you!
Other countries seem to have systems that skew that way, and thus more dash cams (China, Taiwan, Korea), but not the quantity of videos. I think that's due to the bad Russian driving, there's simply more wild videos coming out of Russia than anywhere else!
In theory, and probably in practice the frequency going through a transformer does not change. It may lead or lag slightly from one side to the other, which is basically the power factor, but other than that offset, it should be stable.
However, you got me thinking. Power factor tends to be stable, and there are devices that correct the power factor. I wonder if such a device could be modified to produce an unstable power factor, possibly driven by a pseudo-random generator. The result would be an output that seems to "move around" relative to the input. On a small scale, probably not that interested, but if done for a large building drawing megawats of power (perhaps even a data center), it might produce enough random noise +-50hz to make a recording in the area untraceable.
On a smaller scale, it would be easy to create a solar installation in the middle of nowhere that does not exhibit this property (because it is DC, not AC). Now with a battery source some simple circuits could generate 50Hz hum at an independent from the grid rate, and/or lots of similar "noise". While perhaps impossible to get far enough from the mains (in the UK anyway) that none of the actual grid would be picked up, it's probably possible to muddy the right part of the spectrum enough it can't be traced.
There are plenty of businesses that run with no traditional phones on a desk, including some of the most phone-intensive ones. Many call centers for instance have dropped the desk phone for a 100% software solution. Lots of small companies with no physical office space use soft phones for mobility and work from home users.
The business must adapt to make it possible. Rather than dropping a grand to put a land line in an office (which is what it costs, time you do phone, PBX, wiring, people time), they have to be willing to spend $200 on headsets and such, and $200 on software and training. They have to be willing to have road warriors make it past the corporate firewall to the PBX for VoIP. They have to run and manage the internal network to a standard where it can deliver quality voice, and cats on youtube don't affect voice quality. It's all very much possible, but it is not quite as trival as the OP implies.
However, having seen a few places that dumped the land line, I can say it is the future. Wide band audio sounds a million times better, yes you can get it on a desk phone, but it's far cheaper to deploy soft clients. VoIP soft switches make least cost routing to dozens of providers much easier than traditional PBX's. Integrated video and white board features can increase collaboration for companies with people in multiple locations. Having everyone have the capabilities to participate in call center like functions during emergencies can be a huge win.
The only place I see the OP going wrong is with the cell phone included as a business device. They are simply not clear enough, or reliable enough for many business purposes. They are a much better tool than a pager to reach someone who is out of the office, but they are not a replacement for in-office communication at all.
I actually think there is a "killer app", well, feature, in this space which could turn the phone industry upside down. Imagine if Dell/HP/Lenovo integrated on most of their products a second mic/speaker jack, but presented it physically as a RJ11 unit on the side of the laptop/desktop/monitor. The ability to plug in everything from an old-school Ma-Bell handset to a modern GN-Netcom handset would make the transition from physical phones to soft clients MUCH easier. I'm really surprised someone hasn't tried it on a business laptop yet for road warriors who spend a lot of time on the phone on soft clients.
FedEx's large freighter aircraft, with a full load of cargo, can't make it from Shanghai to Memphis without refueling.
I've seen many packages shipped that route, they show a stopover in Anchorage while the plane is refueled on the tracking. I think they may also technically clear customs in Alaska where the shipments are for all pre-cleared merchandise (e.g. where Apple charters the whole plane at launch). They can't bulk-clear the packages you and I ship.
From Memphis, they enter the regular FedEx domestic shipment network to the lower 48, which should mean one more flight to a nearby city, and then off in a truck.
Actually, I think you're both missing the biggest issue by focusing on true accidents. I think the OP's point is legitimate, even in the face of your assertion that rates go down. Companies are still taking on the risk as they are now the "driver". While the liabilities of these situations is large, there is a situation that is much, much larger.
What happens when there is a bug in the system? Think the liability is bad when one car has a short circuit and veers head on into another? Imagine if there is a small defect. There are plenty of examples, like the Mariner 1 crash, or the AT&T System Wide Crash in 1990. We've seen the lengths to witch companies will go to track down potentially common issues, like the Jeep Cherokee sudden acceleration, or the Toyota sudden acceleration issues because it has the potential to affect all cars. But let's imagine a future where all cars are driverless, and the accident rate is 1/100th of what it is now.
What happens when there is a Y2K style date bug? When some sensor fails if the temperature drops below a particular point? When a semi-colon is forgotten in the code, and the radio broadcast that sends out notification of an accident causes thousands of cars to execute the same re-route routine with the messed up code all at the same time.
There is the very real potential for thousands, or even millions of cars to all crash _simultaneously_. Imagine everyone on the freeway simply veering left all the sudden. That should be the manufacturers largest fear. Crashes one at a time can be litigated and explained away, the business can go on. The first car company that crashes a few thousands cars all at the same time in response to some input will be out of business in a New York minute.
Basically back in the day model airplanes didn't go far enough, fast enough, or high enough to matter. There was no video back to the ground that a hobbiest could afford, so it was "stay under 400', and keep it in sight", and basically no rules.
UAVs, and law enforcement's interests in them have changed that, so the FAA is scrambling to draft rules for them.
This also has implications for the hunters, I would suppose. If the courts think this was a model plane, then probably it's a civil tort for them shooting it and destroying it. If the courts think it is an aircraft operating over the space shooting at it likely carries the same potential federal penalty as taking down a jetliner with a stinger missile...
Title 14, Code of Federal Regulations, Section 91.119 Minimum safe altitudes; general Except when necessary for takeoff or landing, no person may operate an aircraft below the following altitudes; (a) Anywhere. An altitude allowing, if a power unit fails, an emergency landing without undue hazard to persons or property on the surface. (b) Over congested areas. Over any congested area of a city, town, or settlement, or over any open air assembly of persons, an altitude of 1,000 feet above the highest obstacle within a horizontal radius of 2.000 feet of the aircraft. (c) Over other than congested areas. An altitude of 500 feet above the surface except over open water or sparsely populated areas. In that case, the aircraft may not be operated closer than 500 feet to any person, vessel, vehicle, or structure. (d) Helicopters. Helicopters may be operated at less than the minimums prescribed In paragraph (b) or (c) of this section if the operation is conducted without hazard to persons or property on the surface. In addition, each person operating a helicopter shall comply with routes or altitudes specifically prescribed for helicopters by the Administrator. Helicopter operations may be conducted below the minimum altitudes set for fixed-wing aircraft. The reason? The helicopter's unique operating characteristics, the most important of which is its ability to execute pinpoint emergency landings during power failure. Further, the helicopter's increased use by law enforcement and emergency medical service agencies requires added flexibility in the application of many FAA provisions.
+1 on the Uniball. I like a regular Uniball Vision for every day writing, the line is probably too thick for his needs but it meets all the other criteria. Cheap, reliable, good ink, last forever. I have a couple of the Micros I use for fine drawings, too fine for every day writing, but good for drawings.
Reading the article it's easy to see that there was a huge discrepancy in capabilities, at least to anyone familiar with the various product lines. Cisco proposed a very high end solution, for instance offering up their Nexus solution for the data centers. Alcatel-Lucent simply doesn't have anything similar, although they could build a fine data center solution with slightly less bells and whistles. HP, well, they make some great switching devices, but their L3 routing capabilities are woefully short of both Cisco and Alcatel-Lucents. In fact, that's my biggest clue something went wrong here, if an HP solution is being compared to Nexus, well, that's about as far on opposite ends of the networking spectrum as you can get.
These bids were not at all for the same thing, which tells me the university did a very bad job of writing the RFP. If you put out an RFP saying "I need a car that can take 2 people 100 miles" that spec can be met by a Lamborghini Aventador and a Nissan Versa. The reality is probably neither are appropriate for someone who wants a good value, middle of the road solution.
I have no doubt Cisco could offer up a solution with the same capabilities as Alcatel-Lucent or HP for a competitive price, and no one knows why they didn't do that here. Also, even with similar hardware capabilities speced Cisco software has a lot of features the other vendors simply do not have. Are they worth millions extra? Probably not, but they are worth some extra. If the university had competent people writing the RFP they could have pointed to features that reduce manpower needs and gotten more appropriately priced equipment.
Having written and reviewed a number of RFP's, one of our criteria was the spread on the responses. When it is this large something has likely gone wrong with the RFP process, and it needs to be rebid with better specifications. Back to my car example you can throw in things like it needs to run on regular gas (no more Aventador, or other high end cars), or that it needs to have at least 15 cubic feet of trunk space (no more Versa), and put yourself in a much more reasonable range.
Rather than picking the low bid here the university needs to take a serious look at their requirements, and put out a revised RFP.
Planning for the future is the key, and equally key is keeping it SIMPLE.
Dropped ceilings make it much easier to run cable later. Your HVAC guy will want to run his duct work down the center of the hall, don't let him. During construction it's only slightly harder for him to run it over the offices. Run a tray over the hall for data cabling. Down the road when you need drops to a remodeled office or conference room you can run them in the hall without interrupting all the people working at their desks along the way.
Similarly, a couple of 4" conduits to the roof, basement, or other areas that seem like "they will never need cabling" will pay huge dividends down the road when just one thing needs to be installed in those locations, and it will. This is especially true for non-computer IT stuff; security cameras can be very difficult to install/cable if not thought about ahead of time. Things like curtesy phones are rarely properly planned.
Several of my companies "suppliers" use Salesforce.com's tools to manage their customer base, that means me. As a result I've been a user of Salesforce's "solution" for some time. The result is some really, special hate for Salesforce.
Aside from the usual complaints that their software is super-buggy, requiring almost monthly tickets with my vendor to have someone on their side open a ticket with Salesforce to fix some relatively minor data corruption issue that should have never of happened, I can also see where he is going and how stupid everyone at salesforce.com must be to go along. In the latest iteration rolled out at one of my vendors I can "friend" people in my vendor portal, and get a news feed from my friends. Of course, my vendor won't let me see what their other customers are doing, so the grand total of my "friend" list is myself, my boss (so he can place orders if I'm hit by a bus), and my vendor sales rep. Never mind that under normal circumstances there is zero activity for my boss or my sales rep, but even though they have disabled me seeing other customers the software repeatedly asks me if I want to "find more friends", or share what I just did with them.
I'm leaving out what my vendor actually does, as it's esoteric, and now going to use a made up example.
Me: Please ship me 1 case of packing tape. Web site: Did you know your friends might be interested in Packing Tape, would you like to share?
I can see some niche markets where they might have a play, but honestly for most people using their software their direction makes absolutely no sense. More importantly, spending all the time on these "social" features when the base application is buggy and slow and never works right makes absolutely no sense to me. Their various iterations have been so bad my boss has actually agreed to add a "no salesforce.com portal" to the checklist for new vendors, and it's one of the major reasons we're thinking about moving away from one of our current vendors.
Having done a number of HDD->SSD upgrades for friends and family, I can tell you this quite simply. Anyone asking the question has never used an SSD, because if they had they wouldn't be asking it.
How a desktop "feels" to the user isn't about raw throughput, but it is very often about IOPS and more importantly latency. It may not seem like waiting 5-8ms for the rotational latency of a drive is a big deal, but spread that out over a pile of IOPS and it is a huge deal. The original post even shows how much, boot time with an SSD was 9 seconds, HDD 21. That's 50% faster. Now probably most people don't care if the boot time is 9 or 21 seconds, but I bet most folks would like their system a lot better if every application load time was 50% faster!
SSD is the single biggest no-brainer upgrade to me, it's even surpassed the "add ram" no brainer. The only time SSD's get questioned is for bulk storage. If the users needs include large music, photo, or video archives then it is worth asking questions about the cost of storage. Even in those cases, going with a hybrid drive or two drives is always the right answer.
Taking a counter offer has a lot of down sides. The replies here concentrate on the most common fear, that folks will question your loyalty, and/or your boss will retaliate in some way. I actually think those are unlikely outcomes.
What actually happens is more subtle. The money is supposed to make you happy. There was a reason you obtained a job offer in the first place, you were unhappy about something. Your leadership is going to assume that by paying you more money you will no longer be unhappy. This is only true if what made you go looking was money. Otherwise that annoying boss will still be there. The soul sucking project must still be completed. The crappy commute continues to happen every morning. Not only do you still have to deal with all the things that made you unhappy, but now you have to think about what could have been if you had taken the other job every time they really piss you off.
I know multiple people who took the counter offer. Not a single one ended up happy. There is only one case where I think it is a good idea, and that is if you're being paid significantly below market rates. Most companies balk at more than a 10-15% raise for a new hire or promotion, so if you're more than 15% down it's hard to make it up. Taking a counter offer ups your base, and lets you immediately shop for a new job where you can tell them your current (now higher) salary and it's true and verifiable.
Otherwise, I'd really advise never taking a counter offer, and if that's the case there's really not much point in getting one. All it does is make your decision seem harder, and/or make you less positive about the new job. Neither are good for your long term emotional health.
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As of right now I won't buy a car with "push button ignition". It is a convenience I don't need, and there are enough situations where manual control is a huge feature, like these. There are also plenty of more minor stories of being unable to properly tow a car with a dead battery and other stupidities.
I hope I always have the option to buy a car with a real key and ignition, but who knows, if people like the push buttons I may not have a choice in a few years.
I am not a Ham. I'm not interested in being one. That said, I have chased listening to some interesting things from time to time. I went to the effort of installing a long line antenna to listen to some shortwave from around the world. I have a scanner I've used to listen in on trains and planes.
What I want is a "magic radio". I want the interface to look something like a google search box, and take a wide range of inputs. I want to be able to enter a radio station call sign, a frequency, a call sign and get back a list of things that might match. Clicking on one would tune it in on one of these SDR radio thingies, and perhaps pop up some info that says what sort of antenna(s) should work so I can connect the right one to the computer.
I am not interested in transmitting, or at least, when I am I can use more traditional gear.
I agree, and in fact find its "decline" natural and healthy. Perl was the only option for many things for too long, and so it was used. It may not have been the best option, but it worked. Since then the world has developed better options for certain applications, like Ruby or Python. As a result Perl is no longer used for some classes of applications, but that's a good thing. It keeps the language from being pushed and morphed in bad ways to solve non-core problems. While in absolute terms Perl may have "shrunk", the result is a strong, vibrant core of things it's good at, and a developer community focused on those things.
I would love to banish Java from all of my machines never to see it again. Most of the uses for Java are well, useless to me, HOWEVER....
There are a few things I do that require Java and even if I wanted to badger my vendors to do them in some other cross platform way I'm not sure how they could. The two I regularly use are access to IPMI cards and Cisco WebEx. Both do things that as far as I can tell can't simply be done in a browser with HTML5 and JavaScript.
If someone had a good solution for those sorts of things I would dump Java in a heartbeat.
The biggest problem with the Pi is the packaging. It was clearly designed to be cheap and thus use the smallest board area possible, but that makes it strange to put into cases and use in practical ways.
Part of what VIA brings to the table here is packaging experience. Yes, the board is a bit bigger, but it was designed to go in a proper case. Depending on the application that may be important and worth the extra bucks.
If you look at some of their other infrastructure projects connecting 40M homes by 2015 is an almost trivial task.
Actually it may not be that simple without verifying the certificates.
Many corporations for instance use products that look inside SSL streams (typically IM's) for sensitive data. The way they do this is to install a cert signed by the company on the proxy, and set the company's CA cert on your computer to always trust. Your machine makes a connection which is grabbed by the proxy, the proxy presents the valid corporate certificate. It then makes a connection off to the real service using SSL as well. Your basic man in the middle attack.
For clients that don't show the cert (like many IM clients) there's no way to know, and on those that do the user would have to check. If they are trained to just look for the padlock it appears all is well.
I can't tell if Nokia is doing something like that or not, but if you work at a big corporation you might want to check the cert fingerprints for say your bank and compare them to an access from home. I've been told the newer products can generate a cert per site on the fly, making the fake certs look correct (right company name and all of that). If your company is going to that length to spy on you, perhaps it's time to rethink your employer...
I have a desktop, laptop, and iPad, and would consider myself a power user. In an effort to travel lighter I've tried taking the iPad only on some trips to see if it can fit the bill. The answer to me is a resounding maybe, and depends entirely on what you want to do.
Tablets are terrible content creation devices. Writing an e-mail, editing a picture, cutting a movie, or even filling in a web form to buy something are all much more difficult. The lack of a keyboard is a big part of it, and can be mitigated with a keyboard for the tablet, but that's not the whole story. The lack of screen space, and the touch interfaces also make things less efficient.
However, they are excellent content consumption devices. I prefer reading e-mail and browsing the web casually on my iPad. I grab it for simple apps like checking the weather, or my portfolio. On trips it offers a vastly better interface for things like Yelp or UrbanSpoon. For older relatives, things like PhotoStream can be huge if you have other family members with the small children willing to use it.
As a geek, if I'm going away for a day or two and just want to casually stay in touch it's a winner. Smaller, lighter, better battery life. However if I need to do any work, it's right out as an option, more of a nuisance than a help.
So at the end of the day, it really depends on what your mother does online. Does she just want to read some e-mail and get pictures of the grandkids? A tablet may be an excellent choice. Does she make her own electronic scrapbooks? A tablet would probably be a horrible choice.
Oh crap, totally missed that in my proof reading. It should have said "put them on the same SSID", not channel.
I 100% agree that a proper channel plan is necessary using non-overlapping channels. And you're right that 802.1x caching can help.
Folks, mod up, not down the AC post I'm replying to, he's right and I made an important typo.
Controllers came well after AP's were invented, so people had to solve this problem for years without them as an option at all. Multiple AP's sharing the same SSID and key is exactly how the standard was designed, and was the best practice for deployment for many years. The short answer is, it works great, and is how you should be deploying.
For the long answer, you have to understand what happens when a user needs to switch AP's, and how the controllers improve that process. When a client wants to switch from one AP to another it must dissociate from the first, associate with the second which includes exchanging new session keys, gratuitous ARP to inform the L2 network, and then carry on. This process typically takes between 100-500ms, depending on the client, AP, and random luck. For most users doing most things this is all fine, if you're browsing the web and chatting on IM it's a non-issue.
However, for some clients like VoIP phones and video chat a 100-500ms pause is a disaster. Enter the controller solution. The WiFi protocol was divided between things that require hardware (transmitting at the right time, rf modulation, etc) and things that were all in software, just on the AP like exchanging key material. The hardware kept doing the hardware things, but the software activities were moved to the controller. The advantage is that the entire session does not need to be torn down, the radio can switch AP affinity (BSSID) while using the same key material since the key material is tunned back to the controller from both AP's. A client can now switch AP's in 10-50ms, which for most VoIP apps and video conferencing means seamless connections.
Note to the pedantic: yes, there are some other details, controllers enable triangulation features and some other RF analysis, there are a few protocol nits I omitted, and this omits a lot of important design considerations like proper AP placement and channel selection.
Now, go back to the requirements. If you don't deploy WiFi VOIP phones, and don't have other real time streams, controllers may be a total waste of your money. If the goal is to get users e-mail and web access when sitting in the conference room or courtyard, vendors are selling something not needed when they push controllers.
Second note to the pedantic: Controllers can make networks scale better, so if you're deploying 25+, or more likely 100+ AP's my previous paragraph doesn't apply, but that's not what most people reading this are doing.
So to the OP, yes, put them on the same channel. For less than 10 AP's with no real time requirements it is the best practice, and a perfectly valid way to deploy a WiFi network. A controller may be able to get some advanced features (auto-channel management, threat detection, triangulation), but in most small businesses they are features that would rarely if ever be used. There are thousands of WiFi networks deployed without controllers that work quite well. Do read a good document on how to place AP's and select channels, you'll want to use non-overlapping channels in a grid pattern and try and get it to where clients can always see 2-3 AP's, no more, no less.
If you really want a controller, there are some lower cost options than the big players. Ubiquity has a nice solution in their UniFi line, and Netgear now offers an appliance based controller. Aruba has several mid priced offerings. They don't all have the features of say high end Cisco gear, but offer a lower cost solution.
I'm going to respectfully disagree with you on term limits. Yes, freshman are courted, and there are many reasons, but many of them will be weakened by term limits. The lobbyists are making an investment in folks they hope will be on their side long term. Term limits mean they need a much faster ROI, and change the decision process on how to invest money in a way I think would be beneficial.
As you point out seniority is huge in the committee system today, and I do believe that is part of the issue. Freshman often can't get an audience with senior members themselves as they have little to offer, and the lobbyists can get them an introduction and bring them along. If seniority were less important, there would be less division between the old guard and new guard, and less gatekeeping by lobbyists. Moreover, if committees were done by say a lottery freshman would get some key ones, giving them power to hold over other members and lobbyists. It would give them a bargaining chip if you will, unlike their current powerless position.
The key though is to move past arguing over which method is best, and start trying some of them. Lots of people have ideas for changes from filibuster reform to term limits that could improve Congress, but we keep arguing over which is best which just serves to keep the status quo. The status quo does not work, so let's try a handful of ideas even if they aren't our personal first choices.
The Tea Party means well, but I don't think any of the things listed start to solve the problem. They are an attempt to return to an earlier time that does not match the modern world. They might as well add to their plan banning the automobile and returning to the horse and buggy since it would end our dependance on oil. We don't live in a world where pushing entitlements like Social Security to the states makes any sense. Grow up and work in New York, and retire to Florida and all the sudden you get different benefits? No way, no how. Doesn't work for those administering such programs, or receiving the benefits.
The real problems here are much simpler, and sadly the Tea Party is part of the problem. The number 1 problem is gerrymandered districts, particularly in the house. When representatives don't have to fear electoral challenges they are free to be beholden to the corporations. Many of the Tea Party folks were only able to get elected because of these gerrymandered districts, otherwise they would have had no chance. The number 2 problem is career politicians. If you're looking to a 30, 40, or 50 year career there will be many elections, costing a lot of money. Fundraising is hard, and takes a lot of time. The siren song of corporate dollars is too hard to pass up. There is no way to ever get the money out of politics, but with term limits it is possible to prevent long term corrupting relationships from setting in. Two terms and out works for the president, it should be the standard for the house and senate as well.
Every Russian has a dash cam because the insurance company and courts there have a history of not paying out a dime unless you have proof. Where Americans seem to think in a "reasonable doubt" methodology from our courts, in Russia it's apparently "any doubt at all" and you lose. So if someone hits you while you're parked and they show up and say you ran into them you'd better have video or witnesses or something or no money for you!
Other countries seem to have systems that skew that way, and thus more dash cams (China, Taiwan, Korea), but not the quantity of videos. I think that's due to the bad Russian driving, there's simply more wild videos coming out of Russia than anywhere else!
Over at Jalopnik there is an entire section devoted to Russian dash cams. If you waste the next few hours watching them all it's not my fault!
In theory, and probably in practice the frequency going through a transformer does not change. It may lead or lag slightly from one side to the other, which is basically the power factor, but other than that offset, it should be stable.
However, you got me thinking. Power factor tends to be stable, and there are devices that correct the power factor. I wonder if such a device could be modified to produce an unstable power factor, possibly driven by a pseudo-random generator. The result would be an output that seems to "move around" relative to the input. On a small scale, probably not that interested, but if done for a large building drawing megawats of power (perhaps even a data center), it might produce enough random noise +-50hz to make a recording in the area untraceable.
On a smaller scale, it would be easy to create a solar installation in the middle of nowhere that does not exhibit this property (because it is DC, not AC). Now with a battery source some simple circuits could generate 50Hz hum at an independent from the grid rate, and/or lots of similar "noise". While perhaps impossible to get far enough from the mains (in the UK anyway) that none of the actual grid would be picked up, it's probably possible to muddy the right part of the spectrum enough it can't be traced.
There are plenty of businesses that run with no traditional phones on a desk, including some of the most phone-intensive ones. Many call centers for instance have dropped the desk phone for a 100% software solution. Lots of small companies with no physical office space use soft phones for mobility and work from home users.
The business must adapt to make it possible. Rather than dropping a grand to put a land line in an office (which is what it costs, time you do phone, PBX, wiring, people time), they have to be willing to spend $200 on headsets and such, and $200 on software and training. They have to be willing to have road warriors make it past the corporate firewall to the PBX for VoIP. They have to run and manage the internal network to a standard where it can deliver quality voice, and cats on youtube don't affect voice quality. It's all very much possible, but it is not quite as trival as the OP implies.
However, having seen a few places that dumped the land line, I can say it is the future. Wide band audio sounds a million times better, yes you can get it on a desk phone, but it's far cheaper to deploy soft clients. VoIP soft switches make least cost routing to dozens of providers much easier than traditional PBX's. Integrated video and white board features can increase collaboration for companies with people in multiple locations. Having everyone have the capabilities to participate in call center like functions during emergencies can be a huge win.
The only place I see the OP going wrong is with the cell phone included as a business device. They are simply not clear enough, or reliable enough for many business purposes. They are a much better tool than a pager to reach someone who is out of the office, but they are not a replacement for in-office communication at all.
I actually think there is a "killer app", well, feature, in this space which could turn the phone industry upside down. Imagine if Dell/HP/Lenovo integrated on most of their products a second mic/speaker jack, but presented it physically as a RJ11 unit on the side of the laptop/desktop/monitor. The ability to plug in everything from an old-school Ma-Bell handset to a modern GN-Netcom handset would make the transition from physical phones to soft clients MUCH easier. I'm really surprised someone hasn't tried it on a business laptop yet for road warriors who spend a lot of time on the phone on soft clients.
FedEx's main US hub is in Memphis, TN.
FedEx's large freighter aircraft, with a full load of cargo, can't make it from Shanghai to Memphis without refueling.
I've seen many packages shipped that route, they show a stopover in Anchorage while the plane is refueled on the tracking. I think they may also technically clear customs in Alaska where the shipments are for all pre-cleared merchandise (e.g. where Apple charters the whole plane at launch). They can't bulk-clear the packages you and I ship.
From Memphis, they enter the regular FedEx domestic shipment network to the lower 48, which should mean one more flight to a nearby city, and then off in a truck.
Actually, I think you're both missing the biggest issue by focusing on true accidents. I think the OP's point is legitimate, even in the face of your assertion that rates go down. Companies are still taking on the risk as they are now the "driver". While the liabilities of these situations is large, there is a situation that is much, much larger.
What happens when there is a bug in the system? Think the liability is bad when one car has a short circuit and veers head on into another? Imagine if there is a small defect. There are plenty of examples, like the Mariner 1 crash, or the AT&T System Wide Crash in 1990. We've seen the lengths to witch companies will go to track down potentially common issues, like the Jeep Cherokee sudden acceleration, or the Toyota sudden acceleration issues because it has the potential to affect all cars. But let's imagine a future where all cars are driverless, and the accident rate is 1/100th of what it is now.
What happens when there is a Y2K style date bug? When some sensor fails if the temperature drops below a particular point? When a semi-colon is forgotten in the code, and the radio broadcast that sends out notification of an accident causes thousands of cars to execute the same re-route routine with the messed up code all at the same time.
There is the very real potential for thousands, or even millions of cars to all crash _simultaneously_. Imagine everyone on the freeway simply veering left all the sudden. That should be the manufacturers largest fear. Crashes one at a time can be litigated and explained away, the business can go on. The first car company that crashes a few thousands cars all at the same time in response to some input will be out of business in a New York minute.
The FAA is currently drafting rules:
http://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/uas/uas_faq/
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304066504576341780810193932.html
Basically back in the day model airplanes didn't go far enough, fast enough, or high enough to matter. There was no video back to the ground that a hobbiest could afford, so it was "stay under 400', and keep it in sight", and basically no rules.
UAVs, and law enforcement's interests in them have changed that, so the FAA is scrambling to draft rules for them.
This also has implications for the hunters, I would suppose. If the courts think this was a model plane, then probably it's a civil tort for them shooting it and destroying it. If the courts think it is an aircraft operating over the space shooting at it likely carries the same potential federal penalty as taking down a jetliner with a stinger missile...
Here's the FAA altitude regulations:
Title 14, Code of Federal Regulations, Section 91.119 Minimum safe altitudes; general
Except when necessary for takeoff or landing, no person may operate an aircraft below the following altitudes;
(a) Anywhere. An altitude allowing, if a power unit fails, an emergency landing without undue hazard to persons or property on the surface.
(b) Over congested areas. Over any congested area of a city, town, or settlement, or over any open air assembly of persons, an altitude of 1,000 feet above the highest obstacle within a horizontal radius of 2.000 feet of the aircraft.
(c) Over other than congested areas.
An altitude of 500 feet above the surface except over open water or sparsely populated areas. In that case, the aircraft may not be operated closer than 500 feet to any person, vessel, vehicle, or structure.
(d) Helicopters. Helicopters may be operated at less than the minimums prescribed In paragraph (b) or (c) of this section if the operation is conducted without hazard to persons or property on the surface. In addition, each person operating a helicopter shall comply with routes or altitudes specifically prescribed for helicopters by the Administrator.
Helicopter operations may be conducted below the minimum altitudes set for fixed-wing aircraft. The reason? The helicopter's unique operating characteristics, the most important of which is its ability to execute pinpoint emergency landings during power failure. Further, the helicopter's increased use by law enforcement and emergency medical service agencies requires added flexibility in the application of many FAA provisions.
+1 on the Uniball. I like a regular Uniball Vision for every day writing, the line is probably too thick for his needs but it meets all the other criteria. Cheap, reliable, good ink, last forever. I have a couple of the Micros I use for fine drawings, too fine for every day writing, but good for drawings.
Reading the article it's easy to see that there was a huge discrepancy in capabilities, at least to anyone familiar with the various product lines. Cisco proposed a very high end solution, for instance offering up their Nexus solution for the data centers. Alcatel-Lucent simply doesn't have anything similar, although they could build a fine data center solution with slightly less bells and whistles. HP, well, they make some great switching devices, but their L3 routing capabilities are woefully short of both Cisco and Alcatel-Lucents. In fact, that's my biggest clue something went wrong here, if an HP solution is being compared to Nexus, well, that's about as far on opposite ends of the networking spectrum as you can get.
These bids were not at all for the same thing, which tells me the university did a very bad job of writing the RFP. If you put out an RFP saying "I need a car that can take 2 people 100 miles" that spec can be met by a Lamborghini Aventador and a Nissan Versa. The reality is probably neither are appropriate for someone who wants a good value, middle of the road solution.
I have no doubt Cisco could offer up a solution with the same capabilities as Alcatel-Lucent or HP for a competitive price, and no one knows why they didn't do that here. Also, even with similar hardware capabilities speced Cisco software has a lot of features the other vendors simply do not have. Are they worth millions extra? Probably not, but they are worth some extra. If the university had competent people writing the RFP they could have pointed to features that reduce manpower needs and gotten more appropriately priced equipment.
Having written and reviewed a number of RFP's, one of our criteria was the spread on the responses. When it is this large something has likely gone wrong with the RFP process, and it needs to be rebid with better specifications. Back to my car example you can throw in things like it needs to run on regular gas (no more Aventador, or other high end cars), or that it needs to have at least 15 cubic feet of trunk space (no more Versa), and put yourself in a much more reasonable range.
Rather than picking the low bid here the university needs to take a serious look at their requirements, and put out a revised RFP.
Planning for the future is the key, and equally key is keeping it SIMPLE.
Dropped ceilings make it much easier to run cable later. Your HVAC guy will want to run his duct work down the center of the hall, don't let him. During construction it's only slightly harder for him to run it over the offices. Run a tray over the hall for data cabling. Down the road when you need drops to a remodeled office or conference room you can run them in the hall without interrupting all the people working at their desks along the way.
Similarly, a couple of 4" conduits to the roof, basement, or other areas that seem like "they will never need cabling" will pay huge dividends down the road when just one thing needs to be installed in those locations, and it will. This is especially true for non-computer IT stuff; security cameras can be very difficult to install/cable if not thought about ahead of time. Things like curtesy phones are rarely properly planned.
Several of my companies "suppliers" use Salesforce.com's tools to manage their customer base, that means me. As a result I've been a user of Salesforce's "solution" for some time. The result is some really, special hate for Salesforce.
Aside from the usual complaints that their software is super-buggy, requiring almost monthly tickets with my vendor to have someone on their side open a ticket with Salesforce to fix some relatively minor data corruption issue that should have never of happened, I can also see where he is going and how stupid everyone at salesforce.com must be to go along. In the latest iteration rolled out at one of my vendors I can "friend" people in my vendor portal, and get a news feed from my friends. Of course, my vendor won't let me see what their other customers are doing, so the grand total of my "friend" list is myself, my boss (so he can place orders if I'm hit by a bus), and my vendor sales rep. Never mind that under normal circumstances there is zero activity for my boss or my sales rep, but even though they have disabled me seeing other customers the software repeatedly asks me if I want to "find more friends", or share what I just did with them.
I'm leaving out what my vendor actually does, as it's esoteric, and now going to use a made up example.
Me: Please ship me 1 case of packing tape. Web site: Did you know your friends might be interested in Packing Tape, would you like to share?
I can see some niche markets where they might have a play, but honestly for most people using their software their direction makes absolutely no sense. More importantly, spending all the time on these "social" features when the base application is buggy and slow and never works right makes absolutely no sense to me. Their various iterations have been so bad my boss has actually agreed to add a "no salesforce.com portal" to the checklist for new vendors, and it's one of the major reasons we're thinking about moving away from one of our current vendors.
Having done a number of HDD->SSD upgrades for friends and family, I can tell you this quite simply. Anyone asking the question has never used an SSD, because if they had they wouldn't be asking it.
How a desktop "feels" to the user isn't about raw throughput, but it is very often about IOPS and more importantly latency. It may not seem like waiting 5-8ms for the rotational latency of a drive is a big deal, but spread that out over a pile of IOPS and it is a huge deal. The original post even shows how much, boot time with an SSD was 9 seconds, HDD 21. That's 50% faster. Now probably most people don't care if the boot time is 9 or 21 seconds, but I bet most folks would like their system a lot better if every application load time was 50% faster!
SSD is the single biggest no-brainer upgrade to me, it's even surpassed the "add ram" no brainer. The only time SSD's get questioned is for bulk storage. If the users needs include large music, photo, or video archives then it is worth asking questions about the cost of storage. Even in those cases, going with a hybrid drive or two drives is always the right answer.
Taking a counter offer has a lot of down sides. The replies here concentrate on the most common fear, that folks will question your loyalty, and/or your boss will retaliate in some way. I actually think those are unlikely outcomes.
What actually happens is more subtle. The money is supposed to make you happy. There was a reason you obtained a job offer in the first place, you were unhappy about something. Your leadership is going to assume that by paying you more money you will no longer be unhappy. This is only true if what made you go looking was money. Otherwise that annoying boss will still be there. The soul sucking project must still be completed. The crappy commute continues to happen every morning. Not only do you still have to deal with all the things that made you unhappy, but now you have to think about what could have been if you had taken the other job every time they really piss you off.
I know multiple people who took the counter offer. Not a single one ended up happy. There is only one case where I think it is a good idea, and that is if you're being paid significantly below market rates. Most companies balk at more than a 10-15% raise for a new hire or promotion, so if you're more than 15% down it's hard to make it up. Taking a counter offer ups your base, and lets you immediately shop for a new job where you can tell them your current (now higher) salary and it's true and verifiable.
Otherwise, I'd really advise never taking a counter offer, and if that's the case there's really not much point in getting one. All it does is make your decision seem harder, and/or make you less positive about the new job. Neither are good for your long term emotional health.