You are doing things in a different way. This is a mind stretch moment.
When I went form DOS to Mac, one of the concepts that took me a bit to realize is that the syntax is inverted:
In a gui world, much of the itme, syntax is Object -> Verb. Select what you want, then what you do to it.
In a cli world, the verb comes first.
In vi it varies. 6} the 6 is an adverb, modifying how many paragraphs to go. But in:s/foo/bar/g the adverb (g) comes at the end.
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One of the ways that will help you teach is to present the same task in both a gui and cli way to do it. So as an example use an event log, and go through it looking for certain types of events. Then show them grep and sort
When I learned to use a NeXT one of the joys of it was that for most things there was a GUI way (good for doing it the first or occasional times) and a CLI way (good for frequent, automated use.)
SMIT, the AIX admin interface, was way cool in that as you used the GUI interface there was a window that constructed the cli command that was going to actually do the work.
Another cool thing to show them is how easy it is to monitor a bunch of computers/processes with a combination of x11 and xterm. When I was sysadmin I frequently had 30-40 xterms spread over 8 virtual workspaces.
An optical link may have advantages for EMP protection.
There may also be merit in having an optical bus through the aircraft. A device has a conventional wire of some form to the nearest bus stop.
An optical data path means that damage can't short a power line to a data line. "Mayday" had one episode where a powerline chafing against a fuel tank fuel level sensor shorted to the sensor, causing a spark in the nearly empty fuel tank. Boom.
As a NON electrical engineer -- as someone who was only a sysadmin geek, I did the entire upgrade 10Base2 to 100BaseT at the university math department.
I checked with the computing and network services department as to standards.
1. Plenum rated cable was only necessary if you were running substantial lengths IN a plenum.
2. The ceiling already had solidly set anchors for the T-bars. Reusing them was acceptable.
3. No I didn't wear a hard hat. The only thing loose up there was dust.
4. I did wear my glasses while working there.
The current safety obsession is not rational. Workman's compensation insurance costs roughly 2% of pay, and in our province it is a net money maker for the province. If you were going to be rational about it, you would not enforce standards that made your employees more than 2% less productive.
Oh, yes. I also did a home reno to my laundry and bath that included doing both electrical and plumbing and carpentry, and tile setting work. I didn't even have a permit! I did work through the electrical code, asked an electrician some of the why's behind some of the rules.
I'm not a total scofflaw. Lots of the rules make sense. I own a hard hat. And I use it where appropriate. I also own chainsaw pants and use them when cutting firewood.
Parent poster is correct. It's hard to do in an organizational setting. Safety is much more a mindset, rather than a set of rules. But what happens is that the safety officer fusses at you, and raises a flap about the rules, that workmen are 'trained' to be contemptuous of the rules. Some of the better SOs will ignore breaches of the rules that don't make sense, point out better practices even if there are no rules about them in situations that merit them, and generally work hard both to make the workspace truly more safe, and to get people realizing that ultimately they are responsible for their own actions. I have a lot of respect for these guys.
But here's how ridiculous it's gotten:
I just renewed my St. John Ambulance First Aid.
1. You are no longer trained to take a pulse. "It's too difficult to teach reliable pulse taking in a 16 hour course" A recent SJAFA graduate was present when a drowned boy was pulled from a local lake. Since the boy wasn't breathing, the first aider immediately started CPR. Chest compressions stopped the boy's heart and killed him.
2. You are taught to recognize a probable heart attack victim. You are not allowed to give him an aspirin, even though it will vastly increase his survival chances. That is practicing medicine. (A small number of people are allergic to aspirin) If he has his own aspirin, you can help him take it. Open the bottle put it in his hand, put a glass of water to his lips. But you can't recommend the taking. That is practicing medicine. Nor are you allowed to use an epi-pen on a person who is suffering from anaphylactic shock.
3. There is no practical exam. However, on the bandaging section, you are supposed to be checked that your knots are reef knots, (square knots) not granny knots. (On hard surface ropes, a granny knot will slip. On fabric it doesn't matter)
4. All but one of the training videos uses standard splints, and standard kits, with very little emphasis on the need to improvise.
5. Almost all of the training finishes with, "summon immediate qualified help" although the course is intended for oil patch workers where the hospital/ambulance is often hours away.
6. The test is 70 question multiple choice open book, with a pass mark of I think 50.
(In passing: If you need a real first aid course, take a Wilderness First Responder course. LOTS of emphasis on making do, lots of emphasis on maintenance while waiting for the medics. I'm in the process of reviewing my coursework for that one to get the bad taste of this one out of my mouth.)
The H2S alive course is a similar piece of crap. Nominally an all day course, I spent an hour reading the book, asked if I could take the test, and aced it.
The article says that there needs to be an overall solution. Traffic shaping at your end can do some to mitigate the problem, and some expense of total bandwidth.
Slamming is a bit harsh for what TCP does.
Basically TCP keeps increasing the speed until there are dropped packets. Then it backs off. With large buffers, you don't get a dropped packet until the buffer fills up. TCP ramps up until the buffer is full, then drops back. With a full buffer an interactive packet has to join the queue and wait it's turn.
Buffers help overall throughput, at the expense of higher latency.
One possible answer is to buffer each connection connection separately. An array of buffers. Then for each one, delay the ACK according to how many packets are in the buffer, and control the window size according to how full the array is. This requires more smarts on the hardware.
On top of this, some degree of packet inspection to classify packets into priorities.
The long term answer is going to be some mix of what you propose, and differential pricing for QoS. E.g. Supernet, our Alberta Government project to bring fiber to every school, library and community office (and then sell bandwidth to local ISPs) has 3 provisioning levels -- Gold, Silver, Bronze. You can buy, say, a 5 Mb/s pipe, and allowcate the 5 Mbit to 0.5Mbit gold, 1 Mbit silver, 3.5 bronze. Gold is (surprise) more expensive than bronze. The higher price service has guaranteed latency X. In typical use, VOIP is routed at gold, Video Conferencing & interactive database use (Department of Motor Vehicles; School Records) silver or gold, web surfing, email, file transfer: bronze
Of course Supernet only guarantees service to your internet portal.
Cost for this:
Supernet connection at 5 Mbit/s provisioned as above: $500/month. In addition to this, you had to buy bandwidth from an ISP who had a point of presence on Supernet. That was $150/Mbit/Month.
These figures are somewhat out of date, as it's been 4 years since I was administering at a school.
If ghosts have some existence, and shuffle energy, are they dead?
Sure seems to be a lot of arrogance on this site.
Very few people have stated what sort of evidence would they accept that something unusual was going on.
My working hypothesis is that people are deluding themselves in an unfamiliar environment with reduced visual input.
My secondary hypothesis is that there is an outside agent running a fraud.
That doesn't mean that the research can't be fun, and even profitable.
A: By discovering and reproducing the phenomena you can better set up your own haunted house. B: You can better debunk claims of the paranormal. C: By reproducing the phenomena and sucking your group in, then revealing the mechanism you strike a blow generally for skepticism.
Instruments you can consider:
1. Handheld optical (IR) temperature spot meters. Can remotely measure the IR peak, and hence temperature, of a surface. (Might be possible to spoof with a selective emitter surface.)
2. Remote thermometers are often register to 0.1 degree. It would take some doing to see if they were both precise and accurate. Many base stations can handle up to 4 of these.
3. Very slow air movements can be investigated using common incense sticks. A mobile is also an extremely sensitive air movement detector -- so much so that you may have to set it up a couple days in advance to allow the thread to unwind an reach equilibrium.
An event I would consider significant would be a several degree temperature change without any apparent fluctuation in the incense stream. I would consider it more significant if the observed temperature was below min(outside temp, basement temp, room surfaces temp) or above max(outside temp, attic temp, room surfaces temp) This would imply no ready source for the observed temperature difference.
4. Enclosing a thermometer in a peanut butter jar is a fairly low mass way to isolate it from air currents. Pre-trial experiments could determine the response characteristics to a change in temperature outside the jar. A phenomena that extracted energy from bulk matter (air...) would show up as a thermal change in the isolated thermometer that was too fast.
A thermal rise in this case could be spoofed by aiming an infra-red source at the instrument.
Taping a thermal cold pack into the lid would allow you to spoof a 'micro cold spot' The thermometer inside the jar is much cooler than the one outside it. Making the lid thicker with various openings it and calling the whole thing an ectoplasm trap will do wonders.
Humidity changes are often perceived as temperature changes. The skin tries to keep a layer of 30% RH next to it. A house in winter often has much lower humidity than this, and the resulting evaporation makes it 'feel' colder. This can be used to cause 'psychic cold spots' that don't appear on thermometers.
Air currents that are undetectable as currents to the unaided observer also disrupt this air layer next to the skin. Bare ankles in a house that doesn't have forced air heating are good detectors. When a house is warmer than outside temps, an attic hole can be used to create a cascade of cooler air. If you are clever you can disguise the hole so that it is not obvious. (E.g. A frame of hardware cloth, lightly sprayed with ceiling texture. Throughout that room, you place similar frames, but the ceiling above them is painted black. You now have some oddball ceiling decorations, and ONE of them is a cold spot.)
A non-heated house after a sunny day is very non-uniform in temperature. Surfaces exposed to sunlight, rooms with large windows will be warmer than ambient. Core walls will be warmer than exterior walls. The tighter the building envelope the stronger I'd expect these differences to be.
Spoofs involving light should be easy. The human eye is very sensitive to low light levels. Use of UV fluorescent material and a variable intensity UV flashlight that shed no visible light could create
Not disagreeing with you. In my particular case it was mapmaker pro and MS access.
But even in Word processing, linux doesn't cut it. Open Office is clunky and slow, and has limited documentation. Abiword is faster, but had some odd bugs. (Why do non-standard page sizes print with only half the text on the frame -- or just print blank. I spent a day on this. Gave up, and redid it in Word.) Don't get me started on the problems using the Excel wannabees.
I use linux. A lot. Linux or Freebsd is my first choice for servers. I run my windows under virtual box. Linux provides much of the security. I do all my email, all my web browsing on the linux side. All my file downloading.
But to write anything -- done on the windows side, saving my files to the linux side's samba file server.
We used them in a school when running wilderness trips. A local company rents them for about $200/month. Minutes were $2.50.
We made a point of daily use, just so that we had practice using them. Typically we'd call in to the school and leave a message saying all was well, our present location, and a story or two to put up on the web page. 3 mintues tops.
Three times we've used to phones to coordinate a medivac. (One broken ankle, one bad burn from a kid who stepped into a bucket of hot soup, one torn knee ligament.) One time it was crucial to re-route around a forest fire.
I know of outfitters who do the same thing. $3-400/month isn't unreasonable to have a safety net.
I agree that having a plan where you could BUY the phone, and it would stay registered with the system until the Sun grows cold, and then paying even $10/minute would be a fabulous safety system.
The alternative before there were sat phones were SSB radios. In Saskatchewan and Manitoba these could tie into the phone system. The frequencies they used were around 5 to 7 MHz, which made for absurdly long antennas. Getting through was chancy at best, and required repeated attempts at different times of day, and careful attention to detail setting up the antennas. Frequently we'd have to clear a cutline to get it up properly. Getting it high enough was always an issue.
I've seen combo units. The phone is smart enough to try for a cell network, uses satellite if cell services isn't available.
The market is small for $3/minute phone service. And as others have pointed out sat phones don't have the 'phone from anywhere but the 3rd sub basement.' capability.
So you've got the following:
1. Of the wealthy part of the world, 99+% of the people are in current cell phone coverage.
2. Of the remaining fraction: * Many are poor. Rock farmers in the Appalacians, Indians on reserves. * Some live where they do precisely because they don't have all the 'convenience' of modern tech.
3. The towers (satellites) are really expensive to put up. Service calls are a bitch.
4. Geosync satellites can be zoned, but a zone is about two states across. You can't get the tiny cells that are used in the city.
5. Because of the distances involved, it takes more power at both ends to get a signal through.
#1 and #2 mean that the market is small. 3-5 mean that the expenses are large.
In Alberta we don't even have cell coverage on all of our highways. I live 75 km from Edmonton, and we know of several dead zones between us and the city, going on paved highways. Driving to Vancouver on the Yellowhead, there is little coverage outside of towns between Jasper and Kelowna -- about 5 hours.
So this contradicts my small market statement. On the otherhand I'm guessing that plopping cell towers along a highway corridor would be a lot cheaper than provisioning sat service.
I wish that more DJ's were like you, and had some degree of autonomy.
Right now Edmonton, Alberta is a market of a bit over a million people. We have 20+ radio stations.
Country western (new style) 4-5
Oldie Goldie Pop 3-4
Rock 3
Multicultural 1 (dutch, chinese, ukranian,... )
Access Radio multiple music formats, -- jazz, classical, folk.
CBC radio -- english & french. 3
So it's not too bad.
One of the pop/oldie stations has a 'no repeat workday' And it's true. They don't repeat during the day. But the same 40 or 50 songs come back again on Tuesday.
I don't know how the radio market works. I'd love to know how they decide what to put on:
Example: That pop/oldie station has ONE Neil Diamond song in it's rotation. This is a guy who had more than one hit. Why is only one played.
Example: Enya's "Orinoco Flow" got air time -- lots of air time when it came out. Why would any radio station only play the one song? Enya puts out a record every few years. Surely there is more than one that deserves air time.
Lorenna McKennit has had two songs on the pop charts, "The Bonny Swans" and "Mummer's Dance" She sells out audiences at our folk festival every year. But other air time?
Two other fav's of mine, Stan Rogers and James Keelaghan get no air time at all other than an occasional play on CBC.
I don't get it. Why are there not more stations like Access which have actual time slots of classical, folk, jazz, alternative? Why aren't there stations with the 'no repeat work month?'
Young kids have awful coordination. Big blocks. You can make a good set of blocks for about $10 and a day of your time.
On legos -- the themed ones are ok, but they need a bunch of extra 'generic' bricks. My nephews certainly don't seem to be restricted to building the theme.
Erector sets (small steel girders and a million tiny nuts and bolts) are another good toy.
We had a bunch of plastic puzzles (Pentiminoes, Tangrams, various peg jumping puzzles) that I played with for hours.
Don't forget magnets. I had an uncle who gave me a pair of magnets that they feed to cows to collect bits of iron in their first stomach. (Still used bailing wire then..) They are about a cm in diameter and about 10 cm long. You can get them from any large animal vet.
Gyroscope.
A toy I've been considering even getting as an adult is a microscope/camera. 10-150 power. Small screen to use in the field. Standard USB connection. Age 12+ but only after they show an interest in natural history.
If they have an interest in dinosaurs, there are some good kits for do it yourself skeletons -- even one that starts with, "Take two whole chickens..."
If they are using a computer, a good fractal program, and a good turtle graphics program.
Some kids are really into jigsaw puzzles. These are mostly one use, but they are cheaper that bits of plastic, and generally engage them longer. In our house we'd go on a puzzle spree, and for 3 weeks in mid winter, there would be a card table in the corner of the living room with the current puzzle. And you can often exchange them with other people. One place I was at you could check them out at the library.
I'll second the idea that taking them to the library on a regular basis is probably one of the best things you can do.
Give games -- some two person games, some whole family.
Another good gift you can give both the kids and the family is to destroy their TV. A lot to be said for NOT having a TV in the house, and spending an hour each night playing games.
I traded a $70,000/year job as a sysadmin in a cubicle farm for a $20,000/year job as a self employed tree farmer.
Sure it's hard labour. Last year I moved two dump truck loads of dirt into pots with a grain scoop. But a lot of the time I can do that on autopilot. My attention is focused on watching the hawks hunt mice. Watching the dogs hunt mice. Watching the cats tease the mice. Chatting with the high school kids I hire to give me a hand. Feeling the sun on my shoulders.
It's a rare day that I don't see something new. Weed, grass, bug, bird.
If the weather sucks one day, then I spend that day working on my web page, or on the phone.
It's not the same old same old every day. Some days are transplanting, some days weeding, some days working on the irrigation system, some days building the 16 acre Christmas tree maze, some days cutting next year's heating wood, some days mowing. Some days going to town with a load of trees to deliver and plant. And most days interupted at least once by someone coming out to learn about what trees will work for their situation.
My 75 minute (each way) commute replaced by a 5 minute walk through the woods to my tree yard.
My blood pressure is down to 105/65, and I no longer come home with adreneline exhaustion from putting up with dinks.
This winter I need to find a job -- the tree farm doesn't pay enough yet. But I'm looking for construction/shop job. Not an IT job.
In general a more diverse OS environment is more robust. The virus/malware/bad patch/ doesn't take out the whole system.
Given Windows propensity for security holes, there is merit in running windows on immutable VM's either local or on a honking big server. For most windows users this would be fine, and could be used to delay the next desktop hardware upgrade cycle.
My wife works with Macs to edit journals. She now uses Pages and Numbers to work with the authors word and excel docs, and only rarely opens her copy of MS Word and MS Excel.
Office applications for Linux are still badly documented. It's fine for people who are typing memos, but using the advanced features of either OpenOffice or AbiWord results in 'undocumented features'
As to interconnection:
Apple's support for SMB is pretty good. I routinely mount file systems from my linux box onto our macs. Printing is easy too.
The VM solution is sub-optimal for graphics intensive operations, but if you are using Macs for that anyway, this isn't an issue.
My experience with exchange is a long time ago. At that point for a large organization (A univerisity) there were 3 guys that JUST sorted out exchange problems.
I like gmail as a solution, use it myself personally, and also used it for an organization of 150 users a while back.
Calendaring is certainly a significant issue.
Since both Mac and Linux support Sun VirtualBox, one solution is to run VM's for the windows apps. This gives the windows users the apps they love in a much more secure environment, allows the linux guys and the mac guys to do their thing.
In principle immutable VM's will simplify the patch process, make reversion fairly easy. (Point the symlink to the previous disk image, and reboot the client)
Savage talks about floating cities in his book "The Millenium Project."
His proposal works on a larger scale:
1. Each city has massive pipes (30-50 feet diameter) made from seacrete. Water is pumped from the abyssal plain and acts as the cold end of a heat engine.
2. The city is surrounded by shallow black bottomed pools for farming algae, shell fish, finned fish.
3. This water moves in from the edge, and when it reaches the city, is used as the warm side of the heat engine.
4. The abyssal water, now somewhat warmer, is added to the farm ponds at the edge, where the nutrients are available for the algae and zoo plankton.
5. The farm pond water, now somewhat cooler, is released into the open ocean, where it will create a plume of nutrient rich water for a wild fishery.
6. The farm ponds act as wave dampers.
7. The city itself is a mix of both underwater and above water structures.
8. His initial plan is to build the first ones on the equator. -- no hurricanes, maximum insolation.
Savage doesn't address either fouling or hull wear.
I'm still looking for a well documented stable office suite that runs on Linux.
1. A good desktop publishing package that understands kerning and tracking, and has decent (doesn't have to be as good as TeX) equation setting that can be done without a mouse. And handles nested lists of various types without getting hopelessly confused. And can produce a table of contents from a list of styled headlines. E.g. TOC consists of a nested list using Heading1, heading2, and heading3. But the TOC headlines can be styled differently from their appearence in the document. And can produce a decent index. And allows you to flag a word, and index it in various ways. E.g. 'twist tie' is indexed as "fastener -> wire & paper" "bag closers -> twist tie" (The index entry for duct tape would be endless...)
2. A spreadsheet program that is a reasonable superset of excel. Every one I've tried so far has problems running VLookUp against another sheet in the same workbook. If it doesn't implement the same syntax, that's ok: But then it has to have documentation.
3. A presentation/outline generator that is even half as capable as the one on NextStep -- Concurrence. It allowed me to move back and forth between an outline form and a slide form, allowed speaker notes, and allowed printing with/without speaker notes.
4. A database front end with the capability of Access
5. A drawing program with the capability of Canvas or Create.
Having WATCHED bumblebees at work, I am doubtful about the paper's claim.
Example: We have a stand of delphinium. For those of you who are not gardeners, and individual plant will have 3-8 spikes of flowers. Each spike has blooms on about a 2 foot segment.
Bee will typically do 2-3 flowers on one spike, then move to another, not necessarily the adjacent. Then move to another, perhaps back to the first. The only decision making seems to be, "Does this flower have enough pollen to plunder" as visits are usually either 1-2 seconds long, or 5 seconds long. I've seen bees revisit the same flower.
Last week I needed some 5x8 printed cards. Crank up Abiword. Specify custom page, 5x8 inches portrait. Do my layout -- headline, 4 bulleted items, 3 paragraphs.
Print from regular paper tray. Works.
Print from manual feed tray with 5x8 card stock. Prints blank page.
Two hours later after massive internet searching. Find lots of people with similar problems. And no answers. More time playing with printer settings, I email my text to my wife to run through In Design. 5 minutes later I have my cards.
Similarly wanted a larger sign that would have to tile over 8 pages. On Indesign it was simple. On Linux I couldn't find an app.
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Wanted a quick and dirty database to track inventory at my tree farm. The kind of thing that even a noob can do in Access in half an hour, and then in an hour each pull all kinds of different reports out of it.
The database part isn't bad. Lots of fine DB's in Linux. Indeed, at this level, I could probably do it with YellowPages.
Easy to do forms for input? Easy reports for output? Nada.
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Wanted a spread sheet where part of it had a code for the tree. If you typed this code in column 1, then column 2 would hve the common name of the tree, 3 would have the botanical name, column 4, the price unit, column 5 the price per unit...
Tried doing it in OOcalc. Tried doing it in Gnumeric. No documentation on the fancy lookup functions on one, and an average uptime without crashing of about 10 minutes on the other. Right now I don't remember which was which.
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Wanted a 3D landscape design program in Linux. One that has a decent database to go with it of trees & shrubs, their appearence, their growth habits. Not happening. Mind you, I've not found that in windows either.
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Wanted a way to create maps for orienteering. Oh. yeah. Linux doesn't do mapping software either.
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Had sound working nicely in Fedora 9. Upgraded to 10. Has never worked since.
BUoT is a crock. It's based on the idea that you buy fungible units in the work marketplace, use them for 30 years, and discard with pension.
BUoT leads to extreme specialization and job standardization. "Me? I replace left handed flibbits. I don't have the training to do bertwigs."
You WANT your people to do a variety of tasks. You want your people to do as many different tasks as they are capable of.
I worked for 20 years in IT. Always for small departments. It probably wasn't the best use of my time, but I did cable drops, spec'd switches, built servers, did hardware troubleshooting.
If I was building computers from the component level, I think I'd try to get all my waterfowl in alignment, and hire a couple of summer students to do most of the actual assembly.
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Business has this idea now that it is most efficient to have zero cushion. Everyone runs full speed from the time they get to the office to the time they go home. Sure that means you have an IT department of 6 instead of 10. But your people don't have time to learn new technologies. Don't have time to have coffee and BS about the interesting problem they just solved.
And when a real crunch happens, they don't have the loads of different experience that allows them to uncrunch the issue.
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Don't outsource. Insource. Take the attitude that the feudal manor houses did: Try to be as independant of outside supply. In those times it meant that each manor tried to have it's own grain mill, looms, fuller hammers, blacksmith...
Working for the bottom line is a mistake. Oh sure, it's necessary to pay attention to it, but getting that last 2% should not be the main goal.
Too many people and firms think "I do X in order to get Money." Instead, think "I make some money in order to do X well."
If you want silent failover, yeah, it's hard. But the PC user is used to the occasional blip. Furthermore, a very large number of typical employees don't need their computer every minute. At the U. where I was working we had occasional problems due to working on a shoestring budget. The admin prior to me told everyone that the HP unix server -- which had ALL of the department's disks on it, and ran a raft of X-stations -- was going to be down for maintenance every Monday morning. Planned or unplanned when the network was down, people did paperwork, or had ad-hoc meetings.
6 nines uptime is hard. But 4 nines is easy.
Example: You run 2 drops to each cubicle. One of the standard responses is to 'plug your computer into the other ethernet socket.' This puts you on the 'other' network path. This is your failover at the cubicle level.
At the bottom tier wiring closets, you have N+1 switches cascaded together, with dual power supplies. You only use N of them. If a switch fails, you go visit the closet, and move 24 cables to the spare switch
At the server level you're running identical copies of virtual machines for the cubie dwellers. They will have lost state, and unsaved work. Server fails, the clients restart.
Sure you still need to have decent NAS -- but the key is that your redundency and expensive stuff is in the server room.
If the building power goes off, you send people home.
Many many moons ago I heard of people who had lens replacements in their eye using a material that didn't block UV. Yes, they can see by 'black light' but it's the purple cones that respond. They see UV as blue.
Birds apparently can see 4 distinct colours -- so it's a 4 dimensional colour space.
This could make for interesting perception problems when we meet aliens. Right now we have various ways to represent the world around us in a limited number of colours. Print, film, various kinds of monitors. And even with presenting to a single set of 'wetware' (our eyes) the problems of doing this in a consistent manner are far from trivial.
We may have to go back to B&W communications when dealing with aliens.
(And it could be far worse: What if sight worked like hearing? Each frequency (+- 1/4 tone) was perceived as distinct. The human eye tends to average mixed pigments. The ear processes them as chords.)
I don't write like that. When I've taken on a large writing project -- an outdoor program safety manual -- I found myself jumping around like crazy. I'd work on one section for a while, and something I'd write would remind me of something else in an entirely different section. So I'd open another file, and at least scribble down the idea.
Ed is fine if you are an author that writes a list of chapter headings, then 10-12 points for each chapter, then you start at the front and write to the end.
From my perspective, a text processor (no formatting controls) needs to have, at minimum: * outlining * folding * multiple file capability.
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As a sidelight, while unix/linux has lots of good text processors, (I like geany and vim) I'm *still* looking for a good formatting system.
* Don't tell me about TeX. If you want to do your own template in TeX you've got quite a learning curve.
* I gave up on Abiword and Open Office both because of irregular crashes that lost all work. Neither has documentation that is worth a damn. Neither has good support for styles.
So I still use Adobe FrameMaker 5.56 Beta when I have to make more than a few pages pretty.
Ideally you also print it using 4 point squint; print it on paper that has lots of defects in it; format your data so that some of the columns run together so that using OCR cannot produce a whitespace delimited table;
Print it on paper that is larger than conventional paper. (Tabloid printers are common. Tabloid scanners less so.)
And, because this data itself is copyright by the ISP, print it on that green paper that is really hard to scan/photocopy.
Slashdot Mirror
Yah. And if I can spoof that signal, pretend to be a string of 8 cars, spread out over a 100 meters, then I get to go even faster.
What happens if you jam that signal on a busy freeway?
What if you can get the codes so that you are seen by the system as an ambulance?
Or drop a hockey puck sized transmitter at a stop light that makes the light broadcast that's 'green' both ways.
I can just see people wwatching Simson's reruns on their way to work counting on the system to tell them when they have to pay attention.
13% crime rate for the best group? 56% for the worst?
On the average one in three?
I must lead a sheltered life. Unless they are counting people with speeding tickets.
You are doing things in a different way. This is a mind stretch moment.
When I went form DOS to Mac, one of the concepts that took me a bit to realize is that the syntax is inverted:
In a gui world, much of the itme, syntax is Object -> Verb. Select what you want, then what you do to it.
In a cli world, the verb comes first.
In vi it varies. 6} the 6 is an adverb, modifying how many paragraphs to go. But in :s/foo/bar/g the adverb (g) comes at the end.
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One of the ways that will help you teach is to present the same task in both a gui and cli way to do it.
So as an example use an event log, and go through it looking for certain types of events. Then show them grep and sort
When I learned to use a NeXT one of the joys of it was that for most things there was a GUI way (good for doing it the first or occasional times) and a CLI way (good for frequent, automated use.)
SMIT, the AIX admin interface, was way cool in that as you used the GUI interface there was a window that constructed the cli command that was going to actually do the work.
Another cool thing to show them is how easy it is to monitor a bunch of computers/processes with a combination of x11 and xterm. When I was sysadmin I frequently had 30-40 xterms spread over 8 virtual workspaces.
An optical link may have advantages for EMP protection.
There may also be merit in having an optical bus through the aircraft. A device has a conventional wire of some form to the nearest bus stop.
An optical data path means that damage can't short a power line to a data line. "Mayday" had one episode where a powerline chafing against a fuel tank fuel level sensor shorted to the sensor, causing a spark in the nearly empty fuel tank. Boom.
As a NON electrical engineer -- as someone who was only a sysadmin geek, I did the entire upgrade 10Base2 to 100BaseT at the university math department.
I checked with the computing and network services department as to standards.
1. Plenum rated cable was only necessary if you were running substantial lengths IN a plenum.
2. The ceiling already had solidly set anchors for the T-bars. Reusing them was acceptable.
3. No I didn't wear a hard hat. The only thing loose up there was dust.
4. I did wear my glasses while working there.
The current safety obsession is not rational. Workman's compensation insurance costs roughly 2% of pay, and in our province it is a net money maker for the province. If you were going to be rational about it, you would not enforce standards that made your employees more than 2% less productive.
Oh, yes. I also did a home reno to my laundry and bath that included doing both electrical and plumbing and carpentry, and tile setting work. I didn't even have a permit! I did work through the electrical code, asked an electrician some of the why's behind some of the rules.
I'm not a total scofflaw. Lots of the rules make sense. I own a hard hat. And I use it where appropriate. I also own chainsaw pants and use them when cutting firewood.
Parent poster is correct. It's hard to do in an organizational setting. Safety is much more a mindset, rather than a set of rules. But what happens is that the safety officer fusses at you, and raises a flap about the rules, that workmen are 'trained' to be contemptuous of the rules. Some of the better SOs will ignore breaches of the rules that don't make sense, point out better practices even if there are no rules about them in situations that merit them, and generally work hard both to make the workspace truly more safe, and to get people realizing that ultimately they are responsible for their own actions. I have a lot of respect for these guys.
But here's how ridiculous it's gotten:
I just renewed my St. John Ambulance First Aid.
1. You are no longer trained to take a pulse. "It's too difficult to teach reliable pulse taking in a 16 hour course" A recent SJAFA graduate was present when a drowned boy was pulled from a local lake. Since the boy wasn't breathing, the first aider immediately started CPR. Chest compressions stopped the boy's heart and killed him.
2. You are taught to recognize a probable heart attack victim. You are not allowed to give him an aspirin, even though it will vastly increase his survival chances. That is practicing medicine. (A small number of people are allergic to aspirin) If he has his own aspirin, you can help him take it. Open the bottle put it in his hand, put a glass of water to his lips. But you can't recommend the taking. That is practicing medicine. Nor are you allowed to use an epi-pen on a person who is suffering from anaphylactic shock.
3. There is no practical exam. However, on the bandaging section, you are supposed to be checked that your knots are reef knots, (square knots) not granny knots. (On hard surface ropes, a granny knot will slip. On fabric it doesn't matter)
4. All but one of the training videos uses standard splints, and standard kits, with very little emphasis on the need to improvise.
5. Almost all of the training finishes with, "summon immediate qualified help" although the course is intended for oil patch workers where the hospital/ambulance is often hours away.
6. The test is 70 question multiple choice open book, with a pass mark of I think 50.
(In passing: If you need a real first aid course, take a Wilderness First Responder course. LOTS of emphasis on making do, lots of emphasis on maintenance while waiting for the medics. I'm in the process of reviewing my coursework for that one to get the bad taste of this one out of my mouth.)
The H2S alive course is a similar piece of crap. Nominally an all day course, I spent an hour reading the book, asked if I could take the test, and aced it.
The article says that there needs to be an overall solution. Traffic shaping at your end can do some to mitigate the problem, and some expense of total bandwidth.
Slamming is a bit harsh for what TCP does.
Basically TCP keeps increasing the speed until there are dropped packets. Then it backs off. With large buffers, you don't get a dropped packet until the buffer fills up. TCP ramps up until the buffer is full, then drops back. With a full buffer an interactive packet has to join the queue and wait it's turn.
Buffers help overall throughput, at the expense of higher latency.
One possible answer is to buffer each connection connection separately. An array of buffers. Then for each one, delay the ACK according to how many packets are in the buffer, and control the window size according to how full the array is. This requires more smarts on the hardware.
On top of this, some degree of packet inspection to classify packets into priorities.
The long term answer is going to be some mix of what you propose, and differential pricing for QoS. E.g. Supernet, our Alberta Government project to bring fiber to every school, library and community office (and then sell bandwidth to local ISPs) has 3 provisioning levels -- Gold, Silver, Bronze. You can buy, say, a 5 Mb/s pipe, and allowcate the 5 Mbit to 0.5Mbit gold, 1 Mbit silver, 3.5 bronze. Gold is (surprise) more expensive than bronze. The higher price service has guaranteed latency X. In typical use, VOIP is routed at gold, Video Conferencing & interactive database use (Department of Motor Vehicles; School Records) silver or gold, web surfing, email, file transfer: bronze
Of course Supernet only guarantees service to your internet portal.
Cost for this:
Supernet connection at 5 Mbit/s provisioned as above: $500/month.
In addition to this, you had to buy bandwidth from an ISP who had a point of presence on Supernet. That was $150/Mbit/Month.
These figures are somewhat out of date, as it's been 4 years since I was administering at a school.
If ghosts have some existence, and shuffle energy, are they dead?
Sure seems to be a lot of arrogance on this site.
Very few people have stated what sort of evidence would they accept that something unusual was going on.
My working hypothesis is that people are deluding themselves in an unfamiliar environment with reduced visual input.
My secondary hypothesis is that there is an outside agent running a fraud.
That doesn't mean that the research can't be fun, and even profitable.
A: By discovering and reproducing the phenomena you can better set up your own haunted house.
B: You can better debunk claims of the paranormal.
C: By reproducing the phenomena and sucking your group in, then revealing the mechanism you strike a blow generally for skepticism.
Instruments you can consider:
1. Handheld optical (IR) temperature spot meters. Can remotely measure the IR peak, and hence temperature, of a surface. (Might be possible to spoof with a selective emitter surface.)
2. Remote thermometers are often register to 0.1 degree. It would take some doing to see if they were both precise and accurate. Many base stations can handle up to 4 of these.
3. Very slow air movements can be investigated using common incense sticks. A mobile is also an extremely sensitive air movement detector -- so much so that you may have to set it up a couple days in advance to allow the thread to unwind an reach equilibrium.
An event I would consider significant would be a several degree temperature change without any apparent fluctuation in the incense stream. I would consider it more significant if the observed temperature was below min(outside temp, basement temp, room surfaces temp) or above max(outside temp, attic temp, room surfaces temp) This would imply no ready source for the observed temperature difference.
4. Enclosing a thermometer in a peanut butter jar is a fairly low mass way to isolate it from air currents. Pre-trial experiments could determine the response characteristics to a change in temperature outside the jar. A phenomena that extracted energy from bulk matter (air...) would show up as a thermal change in the isolated thermometer that was too fast.
A thermal rise in this case could be spoofed by aiming an infra-red source at the instrument.
Taping a thermal cold pack into the lid would allow you to spoof a 'micro cold spot' The thermometer inside the jar is much cooler than the one outside it. Making the lid thicker with various openings it and calling the whole thing an ectoplasm trap will do wonders.
Humidity changes are often perceived as temperature changes. The skin tries to keep a layer of 30% RH next to it. A house in winter often has much lower humidity than this, and the resulting evaporation makes it 'feel' colder. This can be used to cause 'psychic cold spots' that don't appear on thermometers.
Air currents that are undetectable as currents to the unaided observer also disrupt this air layer next to the skin. Bare ankles in a house that doesn't have forced air heating are good detectors. When a house is warmer than outside temps, an attic hole can be used to create a cascade of cooler air. If you are clever you can disguise the hole so that it is not obvious. (E.g. A frame of hardware cloth, lightly sprayed with ceiling texture. Throughout that room, you place similar frames, but the ceiling above them is painted black. You now have some oddball ceiling decorations, and ONE of them is a cold spot.)
A non-heated house after a sunny day is very non-uniform in temperature. Surfaces exposed to sunlight, rooms with large windows will be warmer than ambient. Core walls will be warmer than exterior walls. The tighter the building envelope the stronger I'd expect these differences to be.
Spoofs involving light should be easy. The human eye is very sensitive to low light levels. Use of UV fluorescent material and a variable intensity UV flashlight that shed no visible light could create
Not disagreeing with you. In my particular case it was mapmaker pro and MS access.
But even in Word processing, linux doesn't cut it. Open Office is clunky and slow, and has limited documentation. Abiword is faster, but had some odd bugs. (Why do non-standard page sizes print with only half the text on the frame -- or just print blank. I spent a day on this. Gave up, and redid it in Word.) Don't get me started on the problems using the Excel wannabees.
I use linux. A lot. Linux or Freebsd is my first choice for servers. I run my windows under virtual box. Linux provides much of the security. I do all my email, all my web browsing on the linux side. All my file downloading.
But to write anything -- done on the windows side, saving my files to the linux side's samba file server.
We used them in a school when running wilderness trips. A local company rents them for about $200/month. Minutes were $2.50.
We made a point of daily use, just so that we had practice using them. Typically we'd call in to the school and leave a message saying all was well, our present location, and a story or two to put up on the web page. 3 mintues tops.
Three times we've used to phones to coordinate a medivac. (One broken ankle, one bad burn from a kid who stepped into a bucket of hot soup, one torn knee ligament.) One time it was crucial to re-route around a forest fire.
I know of outfitters who do the same thing. $3-400/month isn't unreasonable to have a safety net.
I agree that having a plan where you could BUY the phone, and it would stay registered with the system until the Sun grows cold, and then paying even $10/minute would be a fabulous safety system.
The alternative before there were sat phones were SSB radios. In Saskatchewan and Manitoba these could tie into the phone system. The frequencies they used were around 5 to 7 MHz, which made for absurdly long antennas. Getting through was chancy at best, and required repeated attempts at different times of day, and careful attention to detail setting up the antennas. Frequently we'd have to clear a cutline to get it up properly. Getting it high enough was always an issue.
I've seen combo units. The phone is smart enough to try for a cell network, uses satellite if cell services isn't available.
The market is small for $3/minute phone service. And as others have pointed out sat phones don't have the 'phone from anywhere but the 3rd sub basement.' capability.
So you've got the following:
1. Of the wealthy part of the world, 99+% of the people are in current cell phone coverage.
2. Of the remaining fraction:
* Many are poor. Rock farmers in the Appalacians, Indians on reserves.
* Some live where they do precisely because they don't have all the 'convenience' of modern tech.
3. The towers (satellites) are really expensive to put up. Service calls are a bitch.
4. Geosync satellites can be zoned, but a zone is about two states across. You can't get the tiny cells that are used in the city.
5. Because of the distances involved, it takes more power at both ends to get a signal through.
#1 and #2 mean that the market is small. 3-5 mean that the expenses are large.
In Alberta we don't even have cell coverage on all of our highways. I live 75 km from Edmonton, and we know of several dead zones between us and the city, going on paved highways. Driving to Vancouver on the Yellowhead, there is little coverage outside of towns between Jasper and Kelowna -- about 5 hours.
So this contradicts my small market statement. On the otherhand I'm guessing that plopping cell towers along a highway corridor would be a lot cheaper than provisioning sat service.
I wish that more DJ's were like you, and had some degree of autonomy.
Right now Edmonton, Alberta is a market of a bit over a million people. We have 20+ radio stations.
Country western (new style) 4-5
Oldie Goldie Pop 3-4
Rock 3
Multicultural 1 (dutch, chinese, ukranian, ... )
Access Radio multiple music formats, -- jazz, classical, folk.
CBC radio -- english & french. 3
So it's not too bad.
One of the pop/oldie stations has a 'no repeat workday' And it's true. They don't repeat during the day. But the same 40 or 50 songs come back again on Tuesday.
I don't know how the radio market works. I'd love to know how they decide what to put on:
Example: That pop/oldie station has ONE Neil Diamond song in it's rotation. This is a guy who had more than one hit. Why is only one played.
Example: Enya's "Orinoco Flow" got air time -- lots of air time when it came out. Why would any radio station only play the one song? Enya puts out a record every few years. Surely there is more than one that deserves air time.
Lorenna McKennit has had two songs on the pop charts, "The Bonny Swans" and "Mummer's Dance" She sells out audiences at our folk festival every year. But other air time?
Two other fav's of mine, Stan Rogers and James Keelaghan get no air time at all other than an occasional play on CBC.
I don't get it. Why are there not more stations like Access which have actual time slots of classical, folk, jazz, alternative? Why aren't there stations with the 'no repeat work month?'
You don't say what age you are working with.
Young kids have awful coordination. Big blocks. You can make a good set of blocks for about $10 and a day of your time.
On legos -- the themed ones are ok, but they need a bunch of extra 'generic' bricks. My nephews certainly don't seem to be restricted to building the theme.
Erector sets (small steel girders and a million tiny nuts and bolts) are another good toy.
We had a bunch of plastic puzzles (Pentiminoes, Tangrams, various peg jumping puzzles) that I played with for hours.
Don't forget magnets. I had an uncle who gave me a pair of magnets that they feed to cows to collect bits of iron in their first stomach. (Still used bailing wire then..) They are about a cm in diameter and about 10 cm long. You can get them from any large animal vet.
Gyroscope.
A toy I've been considering even getting as an adult is a microscope/camera. 10-150 power. Small screen to use in the field. Standard USB connection. Age 12+ but only after they show an interest in natural history.
If they have an interest in dinosaurs, there are some good kits for do it yourself skeletons -- even one that starts with, "Take two whole chickens..."
If they are using a computer, a good fractal program, and a good turtle graphics program.
Some kids are really into jigsaw puzzles. These are mostly one use, but they are cheaper that bits of plastic, and generally engage them longer. In our house we'd go on a puzzle spree, and for 3 weeks in mid winter, there would be a card table in the corner of the living room with the current puzzle. And you can often exchange them with other people. One place I was at you could check them out at the library.
I'll second the idea that taking them to the library on a regular basis is probably one of the best things you can do.
Give games -- some two person games, some whole family.
Another good gift you can give both the kids and the family is to destroy their TV. A lot to be said for NOT having a TV in the house, and spending an hour each night playing games.
Why not tax addresses at the owner level?
If it cost you $10/month to have IP4 address, you would see a mad scramble to get to IP6.
In order to create some order out of chaos:
1. The tax would start at $1/month, and increase by $1 per month. This way someone with a large block is only paying 16 million a month initially.
2. Releasing currently unused addresses gives you a 1 year credit on your used addresses.
I traded a $70,000/year job as a sysadmin in a cubicle farm for a $20,000/year job as a self employed tree farmer.
Sure it's hard labour. Last year I moved two dump truck loads of dirt into pots with a grain scoop. But a lot of the time I can do that on autopilot. My attention is focused on watching the hawks hunt mice. Watching the dogs hunt mice. Watching the cats tease the mice. Chatting with the high school kids I hire to give me a hand. Feeling the sun on my shoulders.
It's a rare day that I don't see something new. Weed, grass, bug, bird.
If the weather sucks one day, then I spend that day working on my web page, or on the phone.
It's not the same old same old every day. Some days are transplanting, some days weeding, some days working on the irrigation system, some days building the 16 acre Christmas tree maze, some days cutting next year's heating wood, some days mowing. Some days going to town with a load of trees to deliver and plant. And most days interupted at least once by someone coming out to learn about what trees will work for their situation.
My 75 minute (each way) commute replaced by a 5 minute walk through the woods to my tree yard.
My blood pressure is down to 105/65, and I no longer come home with adreneline exhaustion from putting up with dinks.
This winter I need to find a job -- the tree farm doesn't pay enough yet. But I'm looking for construction/shop job. Not an IT job.
In general a more diverse OS environment is more robust. The virus/malware/bad patch/ doesn't take out the whole system.
Given Windows propensity for security holes, there is merit in running windows on immutable VM's either local or on
a honking big server. For most windows users this would be fine, and could be used to delay the next desktop hardware upgrade cycle.
My wife works with Macs to edit journals. She now uses Pages and Numbers to work with the authors word and excel docs, and only rarely opens her copy of MS Word and MS Excel.
Office applications for Linux are still badly documented. It's fine for people who are typing memos, but using the advanced features of either OpenOffice or AbiWord results in 'undocumented features'
As to interconnection:
Apple's support for SMB is pretty good. I routinely mount file systems from my linux box onto our macs. Printing is easy too.
The VM solution is sub-optimal for graphics intensive operations, but if you are using Macs for that anyway, this isn't an issue.
My experience with exchange is a long time ago. At that point for a large organization (A univerisity) there were 3 guys that JUST sorted out exchange problems.
I like gmail as a solution, use it myself personally, and also used it for an organization of 150 users a while back.
Calendaring is certainly a significant issue.
Since both Mac and Linux support Sun VirtualBox, one solution is to run VM's for the windows apps. This gives the windows users the apps they love in a much more secure environment, allows the linux guys and the mac guys to do their thing.
In principle immutable VM's will simplify the patch process, make reversion fairly easy. (Point the symlink to the previous disk image, and reboot the client)
Savage talks about floating cities in his book "The Millenium Project."
His proposal works on a larger scale:
1. Each city has massive pipes (30-50 feet diameter) made from seacrete. Water is pumped from the abyssal plain and acts as the cold end of a heat engine.
2. The city is surrounded by shallow black bottomed pools for farming algae, shell fish, finned fish.
3. This water moves in from the edge, and when it reaches the city, is used as the warm side of the heat engine.
4. The abyssal water, now somewhat warmer, is added to the farm ponds at the edge, where the nutrients are available for the algae and zoo plankton.
5. The farm pond water, now somewhat cooler, is released into the open ocean, where it will create a plume of nutrient rich water for a wild fishery.
6. The farm ponds act as wave dampers.
7. The city itself is a mix of both underwater and above water structures.
8. His initial plan is to build the first ones on the equator. -- no hurricanes, maximum insolation.
Savage doesn't address either fouling or hull wear.
I'm still looking for a well documented stable office suite that runs on Linux.
1. A good desktop publishing package that understands kerning and tracking, and has decent (doesn't have to be as good as TeX) equation setting that can be done without a mouse. And handles nested lists of various types without getting hopelessly confused. And can produce a table of contents from a list of styled headlines. E.g. TOC consists of a nested list using Heading1, heading2, and heading3. But the TOC headlines can be styled differently from their appearence in the document. And can produce a decent index.
And allows you to flag a word, and index it in various ways. E.g. 'twist tie' is indexed as "fastener -> wire & paper" "bag closers -> twist tie" (The index entry for duct tape would be endless...)
2. A spreadsheet program that is a reasonable superset of excel. Every one I've tried so far has problems running VLookUp against another sheet in the same workbook. If it doesn't implement the same syntax, that's ok: But then it has to have documentation.
3. A presentation/outline generator that is even half as capable as the one on NextStep -- Concurrence. It allowed me to move back and forth between an outline form and a slide form, allowed speaker notes, and allowed printing with/without speaker notes.
4. A database front end with the capability of Access
5. A drawing program with the capability of Canvas or Create.
Having WATCHED bumblebees at work, I am doubtful about the paper's claim.
Example: We have a stand of delphinium. For those of you who are not gardeners, and individual plant will have 3-8 spikes of flowers. Each spike has blooms on about a 2 foot segment.
Bee will typically do 2-3 flowers on one spike, then move to another, not necessarily the adjacent. Then move to another, perhaps back to the first. The only decision making seems to be, "Does this flower have enough pollen to plunder" as visits are usually either 1-2 seconds long, or 5 seconds long. I've seen bees revisit the same flower.
Last week I needed some 5x8 printed cards. Crank up Abiword. Specify custom page, 5x8 inches portrait. Do my layout -- headline, 4 bulleted items, 3 paragraphs.
Print from regular paper tray. Works.
Print from manual feed tray with 5x8 card stock. Prints blank page.
Two hours later after massive internet searching. Find lots of people with similar problems. And no answers. More time playing with printer settings, I email my text to my wife to run through In Design. 5 minutes later I have my cards.
Similarly wanted a larger sign that would have to tile over 8 pages. On Indesign it was simple. On Linux I couldn't find an app.
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Wanted a quick and dirty database to track inventory at my tree farm. The kind of thing that even a noob can do in Access in half an hour, and then in an hour each pull all kinds of different reports out of it.
The database part isn't bad. Lots of fine DB's in Linux. Indeed, at this level, I could probably do it with YellowPages.
Easy to do forms for input? Easy reports for output? Nada.
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Wanted a spread sheet where part of it had a code for the tree. If you typed this code in column 1, then column 2 would hve the common name of the tree, 3 would have the botanical name, column 4, the price unit, column 5 the price per unit...
Tried doing it in OOcalc. Tried doing it in Gnumeric. No documentation on the fancy lookup functions on one, and an average uptime without crashing of about 10 minutes on the other. Right now I don't remember which was which.
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Wanted a 3D landscape design program in Linux. One that has a decent database to go with it of trees & shrubs, their appearence, their growth habits. Not happening. Mind you, I've not found that in windows either.
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Wanted a way to create maps for orienteering. Oh. yeah. Linux doesn't do mapping software either.
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Had sound working nicely in Fedora 9. Upgraded to 10. Has never worked since.
BUoT is a crock. It's based on the idea that you buy fungible units in the work marketplace, use them for 30 years, and discard with pension.
BUoT leads to extreme specialization and job standardization. "Me? I replace left handed flibbits. I don't have the training to do bertwigs."
You WANT your people to do a variety of tasks. You want your people to do as many different tasks as they are capable of.
I worked for 20 years in IT. Always for small departments. It probably wasn't the best use of my time, but I did cable drops, spec'd switches, built servers, did hardware troubleshooting.
If I was building computers from the component level, I think I'd try to get all my waterfowl in alignment, and hire a couple of summer students to do most of the actual assembly.
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Business has this idea now that it is most efficient to have zero cushion. Everyone runs full speed from the time they get to the office to the time they go home. Sure that means you have an IT department of 6 instead of 10. But your people don't have time to learn new technologies. Don't have time to have coffee and BS about the interesting problem they just solved.
And when a real crunch happens, they don't have the loads of different experience that allows them to uncrunch the issue.
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Don't outsource. Insource. Take the attitude that the feudal manor houses did: Try to be as independant of outside supply. In those times it meant that each manor tried to have it's own grain mill, looms, fuller hammers, blacksmith...
Working for the bottom line is a mistake. Oh sure, it's necessary to pay attention to it, but getting that last 2% should not be the main goal.
Too many people and firms think "I do X in order to get Money." Instead, think "I make some money in order to do X well."
If you want silent failover, yeah, it's hard. But the PC user is used to the occasional blip. Furthermore, a very large number of typical employees don't need their computer every minute. At the U. where I was working we had occasional problems due to working on a shoestring budget. The admin prior to me told everyone that the HP unix server -- which had ALL of the department's disks on it, and ran a raft of X-stations -- was going to be down for maintenance every Monday morning. Planned or unplanned when the network was down, people did paperwork, or had ad-hoc meetings.
6 nines uptime is hard. But 4 nines is easy.
Example: You run 2 drops to each cubicle. One of the standard responses is to 'plug your computer into the other ethernet socket.' This puts you on the 'other' network path. This is your failover at the cubicle level.
At the bottom tier wiring closets, you have N+1 switches cascaded together, with dual power supplies. You only use N of them. If a switch fails, you go visit the closet, and move 24 cables to the spare switch
At the server level you're running identical copies of virtual machines for the cubie dwellers. They will have lost state, and unsaved work. Server fails, the clients restart.
Sure you still need to have decent NAS -- but the key is that your redundency and expensive stuff is in the server room.
If the building power goes off, you send people home.
Many many moons ago I heard of people who had lens replacements in their eye using a material that didn't block UV. Yes, they can see by 'black light' but it's the purple cones that respond. They see UV as blue.
Birds apparently can see 4 distinct colours -- so it's a 4 dimensional colour space.
This could make for interesting perception problems when we meet aliens. Right now we have various ways to represent the world around us in a limited number of colours. Print, film, various kinds of monitors. And even with presenting to a single set of 'wetware' (our eyes) the problems of doing this in a consistent manner are far from trivial.
We may have to go back to B&W communications when dealing with aliens.
(And it could be far worse: What if sight worked like hearing? Each frequency (+- 1/4 tone) was perceived as distinct. The human eye tends to average mixed pigments. The ear processes them as chords.)
I don't write like that. When I've taken on a large writing project -- an outdoor program safety manual -- I found myself jumping around like crazy. I'd work on one section for a while, and something I'd write would remind me of something else in an entirely different section. So I'd open another file, and at least scribble down the idea.
Ed is fine if you are an author that writes a list of chapter headings, then 10-12 points for each chapter, then you start at the front and write to the end.
From my perspective, a text processor (no formatting controls) needs to have, at minimum:
* outlining
* folding
* multiple file capability.
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As a sidelight, while unix/linux has lots of good text processors, (I like geany and vim) I'm *still* looking for a good formatting system.
* Don't tell me about TeX. If you want to do your own template in TeX you've got quite a learning curve.
* I gave up on Abiword and Open Office both because of irregular crashes that lost all work. Neither has documentation that is worth a damn. Neither has good support for styles.
So I still use Adobe FrameMaker 5.56 Beta when I have to make more than a few pages pretty.
Great idea.
Now if Adobe would release CS for Linux;
If only I could get Mapmaker Pro for Linux;
If only I could get an app that lets me throw together an off the cuff database with forms and reports like MS access for linux;
If only I could get a word processor/ spread sheet for linux that had decent documentation, and didn't crash every two hours;
If only a half dozen web sites that I have to access to run my business didn't require using IE to access their web site;
. . .
Ideally you also print it using 4 point squint; print it on paper that has lots of defects in it; format your data so that some of the columns run together so that using OCR cannot produce a whitespace delimited table;
Print it on paper that is larger than conventional paper. (Tabloid printers are common. Tabloid scanners less so.)
And, because this data itself is copyright by the ISP, print it on that green paper that is really hard to scan/photocopy.
Oh: Print it using an inkjet printer.