If you think of it as being another physical location, then yes it's stupid. If you think of it as having a level of reality that can be mapped into a visual metaphor where in your metaphor you can hurl a ball of fire at a server and destory the server, then yes, it's stupid.
But viewing it as a set of constraints in a parallel universe makes sense.
E.g. On Planet Earth we have a distance function. Give me two locations, and I can tell you the great circle distance between them. A different distance function will give you one of several highway routes beween them.
In Cyber earth there is also a distance function. Generally called ''latency' Physically I live 50 miles from the University of Alberta. But the U of A is 750 ms from me. My local library, 10 km from here is only 35 ms from the U of A.
So Cyber Earth has a very different 'geography' Places that have much longer latency can be visualized as being on high mountain tops. Cyber Earth looks much like a spiny sea urchin with most of the space being very high 700 ms plateaus on a 40 ms diameter sphere.
There are entire transactions that can take place digitally e.g. you buy a digital song with digital representations of cash. Similarly the people I know as online personalities that I've neer meant. In that sense, cyber space is reality.
Also, that bits can move across borders mostly without impediment, creating confusion about jurisdiction when a crime has been committed, that lends some sense of reality to cyber space. (Dammit, it didn't happen here. I happened in Cyberspace)
Seriously. Macs are pricey, but are pretty solid hardware. At that point you can: * run MacOS X * run VirtualBox or Parallels, then inside that run your choise of windows operating systems.
(Recently I have hada to do this in order to run MS Access. So I've got Snow Leopard -> Virtual Box -> Windows XP -> Access.
Actually runs better than when I had a single purpose win xp box 8 years ago to do the same thing.
Getting it right all the time is impossible. Getting it right 80% of the time should be easy. Much of the problem is due to bad assumptions about 'progress' E.g. The classic windows file copying progress bar. I think it works on the basis of the number of files. The estimation doesn't take into account the size of the files, or the depth of the directory tree, or how busy the disk subsystem is.
What *should* happen: * A better estimation algolrithm taking into account the 4-5 leading factors. * Smart modification of that estimate based on a weighted average of the progress to date.
Sure it's not going to take into account the 'getting hit by a bus' scenario mentioned in another response. But it should be able to make better and better estimates for MOST of the circumstances.
In addtion, if the program is smart, and sees random events interfering with the progress, it could express a range.
Even in Canada global warming is a mixed blessing. Yes summers will get longer, winters shorter.
And that means that the edge of the permafrost moves north. The areas where the permafrost melts is close to impassible.
Lot of the northern mines depend on bringing equipment in over winter roads. It's not practical to make all weather roads for a single mine site. (There are still significant communities that have no all season road access.)
In addition while climate change makes northern lands warmer, the northern limit to agriculture in Canada is not limited by climate so much as it is by soil and drainage. The edge of agriculture is the edge of the Canadian sheild. Above that line is rock, and bog and lakes.
Now admitedly places that now only grow rye could grow wheat. Places that are currently pasture could grow crops.
The other issue is rainfall. GW is almost certainly going to change rainfall patterns. About half of Alberta's farm land is in the Palliser triangle which has long cycle periods of adequate rain and drought. In a good year we get 16-20 inches of precip. In a bad year 6. The current best guess of the climate modelers is that we will get more precipitation, but not as much as the increase in evaporation from the warmer temperatures.
This will mean that bunch grass ecozones move into the sod grass areas, sod grass moves into parkland. In the mountains it will get too dry for spruce, so the line demarking spruce/pine moves up and north. Depending on fire management policies pondersosa pine may replace lodgepole pine in forest land management.
Or pine may be locally extinct. We aren't getting cold enough winters to kill enough of hte pine beatle larva. Northern BC is a mess. Some cases where pine beatle has attacked and successfully reproduced using spruce. This could take out most of the southern half of the boreal forest.
A. "It's not my fault, so I don't have to do anything or change my way of life"
"Why" matters in the long run. Understanding the mechanisms that control climate is important in the long run, both for more accurate prediciton, and for geo-engineering a solution.
As an example: A garden hose spewing SO2 into the high stratosphere could generate enough clouds to drop the temperature. This was in effect what the erruption of Mt. Pinatubu did. Everyone points to that erruption and says "see! We can control this." It was also a drought year for major regions. Thinking: The SO2 produced high cloud. The surface temp dropped, the stratosphere temp rose, the lapse rate dropped, decreasing the height of rain clouds. Less rain gets over mountain barriers. Result: Drought.
In the short run, it's changing. Adapt, or die.
A hundred foot rise in ocean levels is going to call for some pretty massive resettlements.
I think there is merit in WYSIWYG editors for 'story boards' It's quick to layout. You can try various looks, even create sample navigation for interaction.
But any significant website is almost certain to use some form of template system.
I ended up doing a first stab at my personal web page using the composer in Mozilla. Once I got the LOOK I wanted, I redid the first few pages in HTML by hand. And then with MUCH cleaner and simpler HTML, I went to Template Toolkit to control page generation. And then I installed the Markdown module for TT and essentially eliminated 95% of my html. (I still have to use some divs for positioning.)
Spent a lot of time with a single CSS file so that the page behaves reasonably with any non-pathological browser/screen combo.
The end result is a site with about 80 pages, statically served, but regenerated as needed. http://sherwoods-forests.com/ if you want to look.
Even logging in manually to turn on the wifi has the problem of: * Various people have to know to log in. * Remember to turn it off.
How about wiring a plug into coat room light circuit. Plug with wifi hub into that plug. When the coat room light is on, you have wifi. When people are gone, the wife is turned off with the lights.
I'll admit being puzzled by this. The wires on the pole outside my house are 6 strands of aluminum around a steel core. I don't think I have ever seen copper distribution lines.
At one point as a kid, I looked into salvaging a mile of power line that went to an abandoned mine. It too was Al over steel. We talked to various scrap dealers. They weren't interested unless we separated the aluminum from the steel. We tried that with a 20 foot chunk and decided to cut firewood instead.
Standard behavioral psych: It's not the harshness of the penalty, it's te probability of being caught. Draconian punishments have seldom been effective, as long as people had a good chance of getting away with it.
14 years in Australia, and no right to come home? Used to be a British punishment for poaching rabbits. Hanging for stealing a loaf of bread. People still stole bread.
DUA? loss of license. By itself it doesn't work. Checkstops? Works.
10 years for marijuana possession? That's been effective, hasn't it?
Part of this is is due to 'reuse' and is a consequence of abstraction.
I've done remodeling. Electrical is always interesting. Electricians have no real organized system of working. You can't predict where a wire will run. Open up a wall, and spend a few hours going back and forth. (Does the line go to the light, then the switch, or is the switch 'beyond' the light. Can I splice in to *THIS* box and get power all the time, or will in be dead at one setting of the 3 way switches at either end.
If I reuse a 2x4 do I care if there are wiring holes I don't use? No. Do I care if there are nails clipped off and hammered flat. Not usually. If I move the sink, do I take apart the wall to remove the old sewer line? No.
Houses are not designed to be maintained. Nor are cities. (Try upgrading a city sewer system.)
In the Bad Old Days microsoft figured that for each legit copy of MS Word there were 3 pirated copies. That destroyed sales to the point that there is little effective competition to Word.
One of the murky areas is that copyright holders can withhold their product. If a book is out of print, you are SOL. At one point if a publisher refused to sell you a copy of a book you could take over the copyright, subject to the same terms with the author.
Copyright gives a monopoly on the sale of a something. Monopolies generally are subject to abuse and need to be regulated.
An earlier post commented on cheering the GPL rights holders, and panning the RIAA.
I object to the music/movie industry's mode of action. Getting these enormous awards for infringement is out of line. Non-commercial infringement should be both simpler to enforce, and should have reasonably small penalties -- e.g. 3 times cover price.
I also object to people getting inordinate awards for small efforts. A book in many ways is a bargain. A print run of 10,000 can pay for the publication, transport, etc at $40. But textbooks are often 5 times that. Why? Becuase they have you by the short and curlies. A huge part of the cost of a book deals with the issues of dealing with dead trees -- paper, printing, binding, transport. So an ebook/digital download/ should be MUCH cheaper than the same material as a DVD with case, book with dustjacket. That it isn't is greed. And yes, I resent it.
Can small penalties be effective? Consider trespass. This is a civil offence and in Alberta common tresspass is subject to a maximum award of $250. Yet "no trespass" signs are pretty well respected.
Regarding pre-copyright material.
My sister is a storyteller, with a niche for aboriginal stories. In the coastal indian cultures it is traditional to ask for permission to tell some one else's story. E.g. a story has an owner. True some stories are 'public domain' but some aren't. Or the way of telling it is unique.
Leo sats are only above your local horizon for about 7-9 minutes. It takes ~10 LEO sats to provide continuous coverage over about a 200 mile wide path. And it takes dozens of paths to cover the world. Putting the up from 100 miles to 200 miles however cuts the number by roughly 4. (Each satellite is visible twice as long from about twice as far away.)
However there are possibly alternative orbits to Geosync. Even if you were half the distance, it would take 1/4 the power -- or rather 4 times as many bits for the same power.
If we take the numbers at face value:
Viasat has 140 Gb/s throughput. Typical over subscribing is about a factor of 20. So if we choose 5 mbit/s as our package, then the satellite can handle 28,000 simultaneous channels and with over subscription can handle 560,000 subscribers. The sat itself cost 400 million to put in place. Not quite a thousand bucks per subscriber. I would be quite happy to get 5 Mb/s 1/20 of the time.
Aptly named variables are a good start. I had a grad student who came to me trying to debug fortran code (physics student). I took one look at it, and said: R1? S2? Before I will even look at this, go back and rename all your variables except loop counters to meaningfull names.
"But I know what they are."
"You may know, but I don't. And you are asking ME for help."
The clarity he found in renameing solved his problem.
If good code is worth documenting then try one or more of these:
1. Write the overview documentation BEFORE writing the code. This helps clarify the coding process. So documentation is about what you did, it's about what you are going to do.
2. Have another person review it. Does it make sense? Does the overview match the actual code?
For especially clever high production workers, you may have a documentor assigned full time to them. You hire a secretary to keep the boss out of trouble. Hire a documentor to keep up with the coder.
It's not an improvement. Under the Anik F2 I can reliably get 20 MB/hour = 480 MB/Day = 15 GB/month. Under new system I can use up my daily cap in half an hour, and my monthly cap in 10 hours, if I didn't have the daily cap in place.
Your cap is 10 GB/month. There is also a daily cap of something like 500MB/day. This would mean it would take 9days to download Mac Lion (4.7 GB)
I'm currently on Anik F2. I'm tolerant of the speed I have now, but it's capped at 24 MB/hour. Go over that, and you are throttled back to dialup speed for the remainder of the hour and the next hour.
Both the WLAN and satellite companies grossly oversubscribe their packages. I'm holding out until I can get a guaranteed bandwidth, and a reasonable cap.
If you ike the wiki solution keep at it. I find wiki to be a bit cumbersome, and would likely do some form of template toolkit plus markdown or pandoc. However if you need reversion or comparison to previous forms of documentation, then wiki may be the way to go.
What I would suggest doing, is to budget a time slot each day for system documentation.
Step one: Consolidate into a single system.
Step two: Look at your work for the day before. Based on that spend an hour working on that chunk of the documentation. If that chunk is already up to scratch, then work on another.
So MY phone runs an imap client. The original data is on a corporate server. The imap server is modified so that 'delete' means 'archive' and thereafter follows whatever data retention policy you have.
The issue with a my phone is this: Do YOU as a company have a right to wipe my phone if I have confidential information on it. Do you have the right to MY iCloud password to check for data.
The problem is one of trust. If you have a reasonable HR depeartment you hire people with integrity. You let them go for sufficient cause. You ask them to delete the information they have on their personal equipment. If you cannot trust them to do this, you have failed earlier in the process.
If, as a company you can't afford to trust people, then: A. I don't want to work for you. B. You will have to issue all their stuff. You will also have to have totally locked down equipment with no removeable access storage. You will likely have to run deep packet inspection on all net traffic, as well as traffic analysis. (Why is there so much https traffic between John's comptuter and this one web site, and why is up traffic so much larger than down traffic...)
1. I don't want to carry two cell phones with me. If the boss wants me on call after hours, then he can use my own number.
2. I don't use MS. I'll use my mac, with linux running in virtualbox for developement. Yes, if they insist on using some MS programs, I;ll run VB for winsnooze too.
3. I may have different ideas of what software to run than the company does.
How much of this to allow is a company decision. They pay the coin. They set the rules. In many industrial sites here you have to wear Nomex coveralls. Not permitted on the job site without them. I don't choose to work for those outfits.
I walked into a job interview at HP.. My interviewer was wearing a 3 piece suit. Five minutes in, I asked, "Is suit and tie expected wear here?" "Why yes it is" he said, surprised. "I don't want to work here. I don't own a tie, and have no intention of starting now."
Another job wanted me on call with their own cell phone. I demonstrated conclusively with 4 different phones that there was no point. I lived out of cell phone reach. They reluctantly agreed that I could keep the phone at work.
How do you get that K-12 is the most expensive part? Typically public school costs 5-6 thosuand bucks a year plus infrastructure. (In Canada the school buildings are a capital expense picked up under a different budget. School construction costs are 200-300 per square foot, so if you go with 1000 square feet per classroom (20x30 room 400 feet share of hallways etc) then that's 300,000 per classroom. At 25 kids per room that's $12000 per kid. Amortize over 30 years...
Not a troll. Suppose you use 10 non MS apps: You can't upgrade to win7 until all 10 apps have upgraded, OR you have to maintain a winxp environment in a virtual box, or have a few machines that remain on winxp.
Maybe everyone doesn't need all 10 apps. Suppose you're running support. Do you *really* want to support two different versions of windows?
When I was a sysadmin, my rule for windows was easy: 1. Stay 1 full OS version behind the edge. E.g. I ran Win2K until Vista came out. 2. Don't even test the current version until service pack 1 was available.
I just did an update/fix for a friend after he hosed his partition table. (fixed the partition table, updated linux, reinstalled winsnooze)
He is a metal worker. The software that controls his plasma cutter runs only on windows XP and older. It's not likely to change soon.
Most of the time he runs WinXP in VirtualBox. However he needs to update his in-car GPS with new maps. This program *really* doesn't like virtual box, and won't run. I didn't try to figure out why.
Mod parent up. The key for you are small companies -- ones too small to have an HR department. Hole in the wall outfits where you probably not only program, but answer the phone, and make coffee some of the time too.
Not sure the best way to find these outfits. Many are too small to bother with a yellow pages listing.
Try searching by industry. Find an industry that interests you,and dig into who does what. See if they have an annual trade fair.
Try the local classifieds. NOT the career section. The small print section. It's a common place for small companies to start looking, because they don't want to spend the bucks on even a 2 col x 5" ad.
Be candid in your expectations at the interview. Explain how YOU see THEIR dilemma. You know that they know that if they offer you strictly entry level position they will worry about you finding something better 6 months down the line. And you also know that they know that your experience is lightweight because it's out of date. Propose to them that they offer you a position equivalent to 3 years experience initially, but that time with the company counts as 2:1 or 3:1 for salary grid as you come up to speed, AND there will be an N month probation period.
Make it 'win win' Your paycheck rises fast enough that they don't worry about you deserting the ship. They get experience at a discount.
Two mikes give you the difference in distance to the source, if you are doing it just with timing. The solution to a point that is x cm from one mike and x+y cm from another is a hyperbola. Done with radio, and the other way around, you get Loran navigation.
Three mikes can intersect two hyperbolas for a location.
Positional accuracy is limited. Human hearable frequencies top out at about 18 KHz, which in air has a wavelength of about 1.9 cm. At CD audio speed, you can get 44,000 samples per second, which corresponds to about 0.7 cm. To do better than this you have to sample fast enough to get phase information. And to work with the speed of sound in most solids, you have to have another factor of 10 in sampling speed.
However you don't necessarily need high fidelity. I suspect that even 3-4 bit sampling at a megahertz or so would be sufficient.
I've got an online history course that I pickup on podcast. They are audio only, which presents minor problems. However:
* Every Um and Ah is included. I don't notice this in live conversation, but I find them very distracting.
* The author uses a fixed mike, so the volume level varies when he wanders.
* About every 5-10 minutes the classroom door slams as someone goes in or out.
* 3-4 minutes of every class is taken up with the kind of housekeeping that occurs in live classes. (Because of a dental appointment, my office hours are different this week... There will be a makeup exam for those of you out with the flu last week here on Friday. If you were here for the exam, you don't need to come.)
* The lectures were constantly making references to the text book, and were not a stand alone component.
Good online lectures should be reusable. In my view the minimum setup is:
1 camera at the back of the lecture hall focused on the speaker. 1 camera on any screen, whiteboard, chalkboard or map being used. A wireless mike on the professor.
If the class is interactive, then a person with a parabolic mike to pick up whoever has the talking stick.
At least a preliminary edit to clip out the extraneous bits, clean up the sound and so on.
If there are written materials to accompany the lecture, they should also be online ideally.
If possible an audio only version should be prepared, with described video for illustrations. This isn't always practical. E.g. Math.
If questions from the audience don't come through the prof's mike, and you don't have separate miking for the class, then the professor has to repeat the question. It's also a good idea if he speaks the equations as he writes them as this can compensate for bad screen images, or sloppy handwriting.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think of it as being another physical location, then yes it's stupid. If you think of it as having a level of reality that can be mapped into a visual metaphor where in your metaphor you can hurl a ball of fire at a server and destory the server, then yes, it's stupid.
But viewing it as a set of constraints in a parallel universe makes sense.
E.g. On Planet Earth we have a distance function. Give me two locations, and I can tell you the great circle distance between them. A different distance function will give you one of several highway routes beween them.
In Cyber earth there is also a distance function. Generally called ''latency' Physically I live 50 miles from the University of Alberta. But the U of A is 750 ms from me. My local library, 10 km from here is only 35 ms from the U of A.
So Cyber Earth has a very different 'geography' Places that have much longer latency can be visualized as being on high mountain tops. Cyber Earth looks much like a spiny sea urchin with most of the space being very high 700 ms plateaus on a 40 ms diameter sphere.
There are entire transactions that can take place digitally e.g. you buy a digital song with digital representations of cash. Similarly the people I know as online personalities that I've neer meant. In that sense, cyber space is reality.
Also, that bits can move across borders mostly without impediment, creating confusion about jurisdiction when a crime has been committed, that lends some sense of reality to cyber space. (Dammit, it didn't happen here. I happened in Cyberspace)
Seriously. Macs are pricey, but are pretty solid hardware. At that point you can:
* run MacOS X
* run VirtualBox or Parallels, then inside that run your choise of windows operating systems.
(Recently I have hada to do this in order to run MS Access. So I've got Snow Leopard -> Virtual Box -> Windows XP -> Access.
Actually runs better than when I had a single purpose win xp box 8 years ago to do the same thing.
Getting it right all the time is impossible. Getting it right 80% of the time should be easy. Much of the problem is due to bad assumptions about 'progress' E.g. The classic windows file copying progress bar. I think it works on the basis of the number of files. The estimation doesn't take into account the size of the files, or the depth of the directory tree, or how busy the disk subsystem is.
What *should* happen:
* A better estimation algolrithm taking into account the 4-5 leading factors.
* Smart modification of that estimate based on a weighted average of the progress to date.
Sure it's not going to take into account the 'getting hit by a bus' scenario mentioned in another response. But it should be able to make better and better estimates for MOST of the circumstances.
In addtion, if the program is smart, and sees random events interfering with the progress, it could express a range.
Even in Canada global warming is a mixed blessing. Yes summers will get longer, winters shorter.
And that means that the edge of the permafrost moves north. The areas where the permafrost melts is close to impassible.
Lot of the northern mines depend on bringing equipment in over winter roads. It's not practical to make all weather roads for a single mine site. (There are still significant communities that have no all season road access.)
In addition while climate change makes northern lands warmer, the northern limit to agriculture in Canada is not limited by climate so much as it is by soil and drainage. The edge of agriculture is the edge of the Canadian sheild. Above that line is rock, and bog and lakes.
Now admitedly places that now only grow rye could grow wheat. Places that are currently pasture could grow crops.
The other issue is rainfall. GW is almost certainly going to change rainfall patterns. About half of Alberta's farm land is in the Palliser triangle which has long cycle periods of adequate rain and drought. In a good year we get 16-20 inches of precip. In a bad year 6. The current best guess of the climate modelers is that we will get more precipitation, but not as much as the increase in evaporation from the warmer temperatures.
This will mean that bunch grass ecozones move into the sod grass areas, sod grass moves into parkland. In the mountains it will get too dry for spruce, so the line demarking spruce/pine moves up and north. Depending on fire management policies pondersosa pine may replace lodgepole pine in forest land management.
Or pine may be locally extinct. We aren't getting cold enough winters to kill enough of hte pine beatle larva. Northern BC is a mess. Some cases where pine beatle has attacked and successfully reproduced using spruce. This could take out most of the southern half of the boreal forest.
Most of the GW deniers deny because:
A. "It's not my fault, so I don't have to do anything or change my way of life"
"Why" matters in the long run. Understanding the mechanisms that control climate is important in the long run, both for more accurate prediciton, and for geo-engineering a solution.
As an example: A garden hose spewing SO2 into the high stratosphere could generate enough clouds to drop the temperature. This was in effect what the erruption of Mt. Pinatubu did. Everyone points to that erruption and says "see! We can control this." It was also a drought year for major regions. Thinking: The SO2 produced high cloud. The surface temp dropped, the stratosphere temp rose, the lapse rate dropped, decreasing the height of rain clouds. Less rain gets over mountain barriers. Result: Drought.
In the short run, it's changing. Adapt, or die.
A hundred foot rise in ocean levels is going to call for some pretty massive resettlements.
I think there is merit in WYSIWYG editors for 'story boards' It's quick to layout. You can try various looks, even create sample navigation for interaction.
But any significant website is almost certain to use some form of template system.
I ended up doing a first stab at my personal web page using the composer in Mozilla. Once I got the LOOK I wanted, I redid the first few pages in HTML by hand. And then with MUCH cleaner and simpler HTML, I went to Template Toolkit to control page generation. And then I installed the Markdown module for TT and essentially eliminated 95% of my html. (I still have to use some divs for positioning.)
Spent a lot of time with a single CSS file so that the page behaves reasonably with any non-pathological browser/screen combo.
The end result is a site with about 80 pages, statically served, but regenerated as needed. http://sherwoods-forests.com/ if you want to look.
Even logging in manually to turn on the wifi has the problem of:
* Various people have to know to log in.
* Remember to turn it off.
How about wiring a plug into coat room light circuit. Plug with wifi hub into that plug. When the coat room light is on, you have wifi. When people are gone, the wife is turned off with the lights.
I'll admit being puzzled by this. The wires on the pole outside my house are 6 strands of aluminum around a steel core. I don't think I have ever seen copper distribution lines.
At one point as a kid, I looked into salvaging a mile of power line that went to an abandoned mine. It too was Al over steel. We talked to various scrap dealers. They weren't interested unless we separated the aluminum from the steel. We tried that with a 20 foot chunk and decided to cut firewood instead.
Standard behavioral psych: It's not the harshness of the penalty, it's te probability of being caught. Draconian punishments have seldom been effective, as long as people had a good chance of getting away with it.
14 years in Australia, and no right to come home? Used to be a British punishment for poaching rabbits. Hanging for stealing a loaf of bread. People still stole bread.
DUA? loss of license. By itself it doesn't work. Checkstops? Works.
10 years for marijuana possession? That's been effective, hasn't it?
Part of this is is due to 'reuse' and is a consequence of abstraction.
I've done remodeling. Electrical is always interesting. Electricians have no real organized system of working. You can't predict where a wire will run. Open up a wall, and spend a few hours going back and forth. (Does the line go to the light, then the switch, or is the switch 'beyond' the light. Can I splice in to *THIS* box and get power all the time, or will in be dead at one setting of the 3 way switches at either end.
If I reuse a 2x4 do I care if there are wiring holes I don't use? No. Do I care if there are nails clipped off and hammered flat. Not usually. If I move the sink, do I take apart the wall to remove the old sewer line? No.
Houses are not designed to be maintained. Nor are cities. (Try upgrading a city sewer system.)
In the Bad Old Days microsoft figured that for each legit copy of MS Word there were 3 pirated copies. That destroyed sales to the point that there is little effective competition to Word.
One of the murky areas is that copyright holders can withhold their product. If a book is out of print, you are SOL. At one point if a publisher refused to sell you a copy of a book you could take over the copyright, subject to the same terms with the author.
Copyright gives a monopoly on the sale of a something. Monopolies generally are subject to abuse and need to be regulated.
An earlier post commented on cheering the GPL rights holders, and panning the RIAA.
I object to the music/movie industry's mode of action. Getting these enormous awards for infringement is out of line. Non-commercial infringement should be both simpler to enforce, and should have reasonably small penalties -- e.g. 3 times cover price.
I also object to people getting inordinate awards for small efforts. A book in many ways is a bargain. A print run of 10,000 can pay for the publication, transport, etc at $40. But textbooks are often 5 times that. Why? Becuase they have you by the short and curlies. A huge part of the cost of a book deals with the issues of dealing with dead trees -- paper, printing, binding, transport. So an ebook/digital download/ should be MUCH cheaper than the same material as a DVD with case, book with dustjacket. That it isn't is greed. And yes, I resent it.
Can small penalties be effective? Consider trespass. This is a civil offence and in Alberta common tresspass is subject to a maximum award of $250. Yet "no trespass" signs are pretty well respected.
Regarding pre-copyright material.
My sister is a storyteller, with a niche for aboriginal stories. In the coastal indian cultures it is traditional to ask for permission to tell some one else's story. E.g. a story has an owner. True some stories are 'public domain' but some aren't. Or the way of telling it is unique.
Leo sats are only above your local horizon for about 7-9 minutes. It takes ~10 LEO sats to provide continuous coverage over about a 200 mile wide path. And it takes dozens of paths to cover the world. Putting the up from 100 miles to 200 miles however cuts the number by roughly 4. (Each satellite is visible twice as long from about twice as far away.)
However there are possibly alternative orbits to Geosync. Even if you were half the distance, it would take 1/4 the power -- or rather 4 times as many bits for the same power.
If we take the numbers at face value:
Viasat has 140 Gb/s throughput. Typical over subscribing is about a factor of 20. So if we choose 5 mbit/s as our package, then the satellite can handle 28,000 simultaneous channels and with over subscription can handle 560,000 subscribers. The sat itself cost 400 million to put in place. Not quite a thousand bucks per subscriber. I would be quite happy to get 5 Mb/s 1/20 of the time.
BUT
140 Gb/s = 14 GB/s (allow 2 bits per byte for overhead)
= 840 GB/min
= 50,400 GB/hour
= 36288000 GB/month
But you get smacked if you use more than 7.5 GB/ month.
So, on the base package you can support 4,383,400 subscribers.
I smell pig.
Aptly named variables are a good start. I had a grad student who came to me trying to debug fortran code (physics student). I took one look at it, and said: R1? S2? Before I will even look at this, go back and rename all your variables except loop counters to meaningfull names.
"But I know what they are."
"You may know, but I don't. And you are asking ME for help."
The clarity he found in renameing solved his problem.
If good code is worth documenting then try one or more of these:
1. Write the overview documentation BEFORE writing the code. This helps clarify the coding process. So documentation is about what you did, it's about what you are going to do.
2. Have another person review it. Does it make sense? Does the overview match the actual code?
For especially clever high production workers, you may have a documentor assigned full time to them. You hire a secretary to keep the boss out of trouble. Hire a documentor to keep up with the coder.
May be worth having a documentor for a team.
It's worth checking out. When the CuNim is piled 35,000 feet thick, we lose connectivity. But the average drizzle isn't too bad.
It's not an improvement. Under the Anik F2 I can reliably get 20 MB/hour = 480 MB/Day = 15 GB/month. Under new system I can use up my daily cap in half an hour, and my monthly cap in 10 hours, if I didn't have the daily cap in place.
And the caps are absurd.
3 Mbit/s down = 300KB/s (figureing 20% overhead) = 18 MB/min = 1 GB/hour.
Your cap is 10 GB/month. There is also a daily cap of something like 500MB/day. This would mean it would take 9days to download Mac Lion (4.7 GB)
I'm currently on Anik F2. I'm tolerant of the speed I have now, but it's capped at 24 MB/hour. Go over that, and you are throttled back to dialup speed for the remainder of the hour and the next hour.
Both the WLAN and satellite companies grossly oversubscribe their packages. I'm holding out until I can get a guaranteed bandwidth, and a reasonable cap.
If you ike the wiki solution keep at it. I find wiki to be a bit cumbersome, and would likely do some form of template toolkit plus markdown or pandoc. However if you need reversion or comparison to previous forms of documentation, then wiki may be the way to go.
What I would suggest doing, is to budget a time slot each day for system documentation.
Step one: Consolidate into a single system.
Step two: Look at your work for the day before. Based on that spend an hour working on that chunk of the documentation. If that chunk is already up to scratch, then work on another.
So MY phone runs an imap client. The original data is on a corporate server. The imap server is modified so that 'delete' means 'archive' and thereafter follows whatever data retention policy you have.
The issue with a my phone is this: Do YOU as a company have a right to wipe my phone if I have confidential information on it. Do you have the right to MY iCloud password to check for data.
The problem is one of trust. If you have a reasonable HR depeartment you hire people with integrity. You let them go for sufficient cause. You ask them to delete the information they have on their personal equipment. If you cannot trust them to do this, you have failed earlier in the process.
If, as a company you can't afford to trust people, then:
A. I don't want to work for you.
B. You will have to issue all their stuff. You will also have to have totally locked down equipment with no removeable access storage. You will likely have to run deep packet inspection on all net traffic, as well as traffic analysis. (Why is there so much https traffic between John's comptuter and this one web site, and why is up traffic so much larger than down traffic...)
Why?
1. I don't want to carry two cell phones with me. If the boss wants me on call after hours, then he can use my own number.
2. I don't use MS. I'll use my mac, with linux running in virtualbox for developement. Yes, if they insist on using some MS programs, I;ll run VB for winsnooze too.
3. I may have different ideas of what software to run than the company does.
How much of this to allow is a company decision. They pay the coin. They set the rules. In many industrial sites here you have to wear Nomex coveralls. Not permitted on the job site without them. I don't choose to work for those outfits.
I walked into a job interview at HP.. My interviewer was wearing a 3 piece suit. Five minutes in, I asked, "Is suit and tie expected wear here?" "Why yes it is" he said, surprised. "I don't want to work here. I don't own a tie, and have no intention of starting now."
Another job wanted me on call with their own cell phone. I demonstrated conclusively with 4 different phones that there was no point. I lived out of cell phone reach. They reluctantly agreed that I could keep the phone at work.
How do you get that K-12 is the most expensive part? Typically public school costs 5-6 thosuand bucks a year plus infrastructure. (In Canada the school buildings are a capital expense picked up under a different budget. School construction costs are 200-300 per square foot, so if you go with 1000 square feet per classroom (20x30 room 400 feet share of hallways etc) then that's 300,000 per classroom. At 25 kids per room that's $12000 per kid. Amortize over 30 years...
Not a troll. Suppose you use 10 non MS apps: You can't upgrade to win7 until all 10 apps have upgraded, OR you have to maintain a winxp environment in a virtual box, or have a few machines that remain on winxp.
Maybe everyone doesn't need all 10 apps. Suppose you're running support. Do you *really* want to support two different versions of windows?
When I was a sysadmin, my rule for windows was easy:
1. Stay 1 full OS version behind the edge. E.g. I ran Win2K until Vista came out.
2. Don't even test the current version until service pack 1 was available.
I just did an update/fix for a friend after he hosed his partition table. (fixed the partition table, updated linux, reinstalled winsnooze)
He is a metal worker. The software that controls his plasma cutter runs only on windows XP and older. It's not likely to change soon.
Most of the time he runs WinXP in VirtualBox. However he needs to update his in-car GPS with new maps. This program *really* doesn't like virtual box, and won't run. I didn't try to figure out why.
Mod parent up. The key for you are small companies -- ones too small to have an HR department. Hole in the wall outfits where you probably not only program, but answer the phone, and make coffee some of the time too.
Not sure the best way to find these outfits. Many are too small to bother with a yellow pages listing.
Try searching by industry. Find an industry that interests you,and dig into who does what. See if they have an annual trade fair.
Try the local classifieds. NOT the career section. The small print section. It's a common place for small companies to start looking, because they don't want to spend the bucks on even a 2 col x 5" ad.
Be candid in your expectations at the interview. Explain how YOU see THEIR dilemma. You know that they know that if they offer you strictly entry level position they will worry about you finding something better 6 months down the line. And you also know that they know that your experience is lightweight because it's out of date. Propose to them that they offer you a position equivalent to 3 years experience initially, but that time with the company counts as 2:1 or 3:1 for salary grid as you come up to speed, AND there will be an N month probation period.
Make it 'win win' Your paycheck rises fast enough that they don't worry about you deserting the ship. They get experience at a discount.
Two mikes give you the difference in distance to the source, if you are doing it just with timing. The solution to a point that is x cm from one mike and x+y cm from another is a hyperbola. Done with radio, and the other way around, you get Loran navigation.
Three mikes can intersect two hyperbolas for a location.
Positional accuracy is limited. Human hearable frequencies top out at about 18 KHz, which in air has a wavelength of about 1.9 cm. At CD audio speed, you can get 44,000 samples per second, which corresponds to about 0.7 cm. To do better than this you have to sample fast enough to get phase information. And to work with the speed of sound in most solids, you have to have another factor of 10 in sampling speed.
However you don't necessarily need high fidelity. I suspect that even 3-4 bit sampling at a megahertz or so would be sufficient.
I've got an online history course that I pickup on podcast. They are audio only, which presents minor problems. However:
* Every Um and Ah is included. I don't notice this in live conversation, but I find them very distracting.
* The author uses a fixed mike, so the volume level varies when he wanders.
* About every 5-10 minutes the classroom door slams as someone goes in or out.
* 3-4 minutes of every class is taken up with the kind of housekeeping that occurs in live classes. (Because of a dental appointment, my office hours are different this week... There will be a makeup exam for those of you out with the flu last week here on Friday. If you were here for the exam, you don't need to come.)
* The lectures were constantly making references to the text book, and were not a stand alone component.
Good online lectures should be reusable. In my view the minimum setup is:
1 camera at the back of the lecture hall focused on the speaker.
1 camera on any screen, whiteboard, chalkboard or map being used.
A wireless mike on the professor.
If the class is interactive, then a person with a parabolic mike to pick up whoever has the talking stick.
At least a preliminary edit to clip out the extraneous bits, clean up the sound and so on.
If there are written materials to accompany the lecture, they should also be online ideally.
If possible an audio only version should be prepared, with described video for illustrations. This isn't always practical. E.g. Math.
If questions from the audience don't come through the prof's mike, and you don't have separate miking for the class, then the professor has to repeat the question. It's also a good idea if he speaks the equations as he writes them as this can compensate for bad screen images, or sloppy handwriting.
1. Just be there. That is often enough.
2. Don't ignore the elephant. Be open. Be candid.
Everyone dies. It's a matter of when. Our culture has a huge fear/denial of death.