It's just getting more difficult and expensive. I put a Dish Network dish on my first house back then, too. They'd encourage self-installs. Of course, you only had to aim at one orbital slot, or perhaps two. Now you may need to hit as many as five, depending on what you want to receive, and from who. It can be hard to get certain discounts or agreements directly from the DBS companies without a dealer installation. I am told, for instance, that my DirecTV HD programming will go away soon. They are switching to MPEG 4 and abandoning all HD service on the orbital slots I have dishes aimed at. If I want a new MPEG 4 receiver at a discount, they say I have to have a dealer put it in, and the new 5-slot dish (which won't work on my lot) as well. I have asked two CSRs about doing the install myself and have been given a flat "no" from both. I can still pay full price for the receiver on the aftermarket and roll my own dish solution, but it's expensive.
More on-topic, there's a thread on DSL Reports about doing a HughesNet self installation. It's not impossible, but they really don't encourage it.
I live on the north side of a heavily-wooded slope, too. When I invited a Dish Network installer out, he took one quick look, said "no way", and left.
It took me a while to find a solution. In my case, parts of the property do have narrow views through trees that, while not due South, proved to be adequate. I figured out what orbital slots a network of dishes would need to "see" in order to serve my needs, and used this French guy's magic calculator to figure out at exactly what time and date the sun would be directly behind those orbital slots. At those times (I actually took an afternoon off of work to do this), I ran around hurriedly snapping pictures of sunlit areas on my property.
Some of 'em are on the roof of the house (biggest clearing on the property). Others are in totally never-would-have-guessed-that locations on the ground. I parked dishes in those locations, and used RG-11 cable to help overcome some distance problems, along with off-the-shelf switch gear to integrate them.
You'd need to sort out where Hughes has orbital slots serving its satellite network, then calculate the right dates and times, and take the pictures. Any sunlit area revealed by your just-at-the-right-moment photos, in my experience, about six to eight feet wide is viable. In some cases you can stretch a smaller opening by taking down a few limbs. If you find viable dish locations, then you need the toughest thing of all to find - an installer with a sense of humor.
That's because the days of self-installs are generally long over with. You could do sort of a proof-of-concept setup for an installer, though, by putting up the post or posts and using used low-end used gear from eBay to verify reception.
I'd suggest at least doing the math to figure out when your next opportunity is (they occur twice a year, one in the Spring and one the Fall), and taking the pictures. You never know. My access to the 101 orbital slot is from a short post on the ground underneath a dogwood tree, which is now missing a few limbs on one side. To look at it from the house, you'd swear there'd be no way this thing could see the sky, much less a satellite. It generates signal strength levels in the low 90s.
Granted, I've only demonstrated that this technique works for satellite television reception. I haven't tried it for bidirectional satellite internet access. I do know that my Dad's got satellite internet access, and while it is certainly not ideal, he would never go back to dialup.
This dialog on/. does a better job of supporting the first point you made for her than anything else I've seen, and a lot of the responses align really well with what happened in my house. Our son is 13, so we've had our own chance to tackle the parents vs. porn issue.
From that, I'd echo a lot of what's said here. You can't stop 'em - you have to teach 'em. It's not that different from parenting on any other tough topic (drugs, sex in the real world, etc.). I think what a lot of these posts reflect, though, is that the environment you create for your kids' internet access can help you teach.
Putting the hardware in a public place (our family computer's on a desk in the kitchen), makes an occasional over-the-shoulder check easy, so when you find the kid at a gaming site or an on-line forum you get an instant opportunity to talk about privacy and safety issues. When they're at sites that may have some borderline content, you get an excuse to explain what's OK to look at and what isn't. You don't have to watch them every second to get those points across. Checking the browser history on the machine and not hesitating to discuss what you see there with your kid creates another opportunity.
While we tried a few different approaches in our house, knowing full well they could be circumvented (notably Cybersitter, and a Netgear router with a parental controls feature from TrendMicro which well and truly sucked), what works in the end for us is this:
Access to the 'net from the computer in the kitchen is proxied and logged, but not filtered for content.
Access to the 'net from the computer in room next to the kid's bedroom ("his computer") is content-restricted and limited to certain hours of the day by Cybersitter, and is also proxied and logged.
The other computers in the house are password protected.
My wife checks browser history on the kitchen computer and the proxy logs once in a while for anything that might offer an opportunity for discussion, and we both lurk over his shoulder now and then.
We both talk to our kid at every opportunity about internet safety and porn. The environment in the kitchen helps to create opportunities, and the rest of it helps to reinforce the notion that his parents really do care about what they say.
This, after a few failed attempts at other methods, actually seems to work. Sure, he could hack his way through it, but so far we have the impression that he's really getting a grip on why he shouldn't do that. He's also got some sense of what kind of torment he'll be in if he were to be caught doing so. The fences we've put up aren't impenetrable, but they do help to show where the boundaries are. Breaking past them would require a determined and intentional violation of trust.
For what it's worth, the most effective case we've been able to make with him so far seemed to be right after he got busted for the second time. He'd seen some moderately nasty stuff (briefly), and we had a chance to explain in detail just why we wanted him to stay away from it. Our major point was that while the stuff exists, kids don't have a frame of reference to put it in, and need to stay away from it until they do. That probably sounds a little trite, but I swear it seemed to help.
This thread's become a great resource already. I plan to bookmark it and share it with the next person who asks me the same question that your boss did.
Does anyone know of a book like Tracy Kidder's "Soul of a New Machine" that is perhaps a little more recently written? Kidder's book captivated me back when it was published, and I'm astonished to see that it's still in print, but it is pretty dated now. Amazon's got some similar items listed, but I haven't read 'em. "Soul" helped to fire me up about engineering.
I think that TV and movies rarely tell the stories of engineers and scientists in a way that will pique a kid's interest, and a kid who has a tendency toward leveraging their right brain much more than their left may not be reachable. For some kids, though, a well-written story about the human side of technology disciplines can turn a tiny inclination into a passion. Are there any out there that were written in this century?
Your company would probably be happy to pay the $99 for you to join the ACM, if you're not already a member. They've got a slew of learn-when-you-have-the-time online courses (now from Skillpath) that cover a lot of management and business turf, as well as tech. Some of the content may make you want to shoot yourself, but whenever you get that nagging feeling that you didn't handle a situation just right, or want to prepare for something you know is coming, you can pick a topic, do some drill and kill (um, "online learning"), and at least get another perspective. I agree with all the advice here about listening to your people, finding mentors, and trying to crack a book, too. An ACM membership has a lot of legs, though, and makes a nice add to all of that.
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It's just getting more difficult and expensive. I put a Dish Network dish on my first house back then, too. They'd encourage self-installs. Of course, you only had to aim at one orbital slot, or perhaps two. Now you may need to hit as many as five, depending on what you want to receive, and from who. It can be hard to get certain discounts or agreements directly from the DBS companies without a dealer installation. I am told, for instance, that my DirecTV HD programming will go away soon. They are switching to MPEG 4 and abandoning all HD service on the orbital slots I have dishes aimed at. If I want a new MPEG 4 receiver at a discount, they say I have to have a dealer put it in, and the new 5-slot dish (which won't work on my lot) as well. I have asked two CSRs about doing the install myself and have been given a flat "no" from both. I can still pay full price for the receiver on the aftermarket and roll my own dish solution, but it's expensive.
More on-topic, there's a thread on DSL Reports about doing a HughesNet self installation. It's not impossible, but they really don't encourage it.
I live on the north side of a heavily-wooded slope, too. When I invited a Dish Network installer out, he took one quick look, said "no way", and left.
It took me a while to find a solution. In my case, parts of the property do have narrow views through trees that, while not due South, proved to be adequate. I figured out what orbital slots a network of dishes would need to "see" in order to serve my needs, and used this French guy's magic calculator to figure out at exactly what time and date the sun would be directly behind those orbital slots. At those times (I actually took an afternoon off of work to do this), I ran around hurriedly snapping pictures of sunlit areas on my property.
Some of 'em are on the roof of the house (biggest clearing on the property). Others are in totally never-would-have-guessed-that locations on the ground. I parked dishes in those locations, and used RG-11 cable to help overcome some distance problems, along with off-the-shelf switch gear to integrate them.
You'd need to sort out where Hughes has orbital slots serving its satellite network, then calculate the right dates and times, and take the pictures. Any sunlit area revealed by your just-at-the-right-moment photos, in my experience, about six to eight feet wide is viable. In some cases you can stretch a smaller opening by taking down a few limbs. If you find viable dish locations, then you need the toughest thing of all to find - an installer with a sense of humor.
That's because the days of self-installs are generally long over with. You could do sort of a proof-of-concept setup for an installer, though, by putting up the post or posts and using used low-end used gear from eBay to verify reception.
I'd suggest at least doing the math to figure out when your next opportunity is (they occur twice a year, one in the Spring and one the Fall), and taking the pictures. You never know. My access to the 101 orbital slot is from a short post on the ground underneath a dogwood tree, which is now missing a few limbs on one side. To look at it from the house, you'd swear there'd be no way this thing could see the sky, much less a satellite. It generates signal strength levels in the low 90s.
Granted, I've only demonstrated that this technique works for satellite television reception. I haven't tried it for bidirectional satellite internet access. I do know that my Dad's got satellite internet access, and while it is certainly not ideal, he would never go back to dialup.
Good luck!
This dialog on /. does a better job of supporting the first point you made for her than anything else I've seen, and a lot of the responses align really well with what happened in my house. Our son is 13, so we've had our own chance to tackle the parents vs. porn issue.
From that, I'd echo a lot of what's said here. You can't stop 'em - you have to teach 'em. It's not that different from parenting on any other tough topic (drugs, sex in the real world, etc.). I think what a lot of these posts reflect, though, is that the environment you create for your kids' internet access can help you teach.
Putting the hardware in a public place (our family computer's on a desk in the kitchen), makes an occasional over-the-shoulder check easy, so when you find the kid at a gaming site or an on-line forum you get an instant opportunity to talk about privacy and safety issues. When they're at sites that may have some borderline content, you get an excuse to explain what's OK to look at and what isn't. You don't have to watch them every second to get those points across. Checking the browser history on the machine and not hesitating to discuss what you see there with your kid creates another opportunity.
While we tried a few different approaches in our house, knowing full well they could be circumvented (notably Cybersitter, and a Netgear router with a parental controls feature from TrendMicro which well and truly sucked), what works in the end for us is this:
This, after a few failed attempts at other methods, actually seems to work. Sure, he could hack his way through it, but so far we have the impression that he's really getting a grip on why he shouldn't do that. He's also got some sense of what kind of torment he'll be in if he were to be caught doing so. The fences we've put up aren't impenetrable, but they do help to show where the boundaries are. Breaking past them would require a determined and intentional violation of trust.
For what it's worth, the most effective case we've been able to make with him so far seemed to be right after he got busted for the second time. He'd seen some moderately nasty stuff (briefly), and we had a chance to explain in detail just why we wanted him to stay away from it. Our major point was that while the stuff exists, kids don't have a frame of reference to put it in, and need to stay away from it until they do. That probably sounds a little trite, but I swear it seemed to help.
This thread's become a great resource already. I plan to bookmark it and share it with the next person who asks me the same question that your boss did.
Does anyone know of a book like Tracy Kidder's "Soul of a New Machine" that is perhaps a little more recently written? Kidder's book captivated me back when it was published, and I'm astonished to see that it's still in print, but it is pretty dated now. Amazon's got some similar items listed, but I haven't read 'em. "Soul" helped to fire me up about engineering.
I think that TV and movies rarely tell the stories of engineers and scientists in a way that will pique a kid's interest, and a kid who has a tendency toward leveraging their right brain much more than their left may not be reachable. For some kids, though, a well-written story about the human side of technology disciplines can turn a tiny inclination into a passion. Are there any out there that were written in this century?
Your company would probably be happy to pay the $99 for you to join the ACM, if you're not already a member. They've got a slew of learn-when-you-have-the-time online courses (now from Skillpath) that cover a lot of management and business turf, as well as tech. Some of the content may make you want to shoot yourself, but whenever you get that nagging feeling that you didn't handle a situation just right, or want to prepare for something you know is coming, you can pick a topic, do some drill and kill (um, "online learning"), and at least get another perspective. I agree with all the advice here about listening to your people, finding mentors, and trying to crack a book, too. An ACM membership has a lot of legs, though, and makes a nice add to all of that.
Nope - I don't work for the ACM!