Oh, one more thing I forgot to mention - WiFi coverage is getting to be scary ubiquitous. About two weeks ago I had a Skype conversation with a friend on his boat in Tuamotus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuamotus, which is basically a circular bump in the water that has a village with about 10 people and two chickens. Pretty much all over the South Pacific they find the same thing: there is usually a somewhat-usable WiFi connection available.
There are some realities with offshore cruising that still would probably make your round-the-world telecommuting dream possible.
1. You don't do much during passages except stand watch, sleep and eat. If you think you are going to be able to crank out that last bit of code during a passage, you are kidding yourself. It's either too bumpy or too busy. You don't want to do other things except keep the boat moving toward your destination.
2. Crusing sailboats spend a very small percentage of their lives making passages. 10% is a lot. Most of the time is spent at anchor or in marinas enjoying the local color. Assuming you are in a place with WiFi, you are pretty much good to go.
3. You can use text-only email to keep up with things during your passages. That may be enough until you get to where you have better Internet access.
4. I don't know where you thinking of going, but pretty much your longest passage is going to be around 4 weeks offshore. That's West Coast to the Marquesas. Otherwise, you just won't be out of touch for that long.
The only issue with BGAN offshore is antenna orientation. There are plenty of (expensive) solutions to that problem.
There are no multipath problems with talking to satellites from an ocean-based antenna, unless you are waaaay north or south and your antenna look angles are very low. Otherwise, you are looking up, away from any real or imagined multipath.
Much depends on where you are going to be, exactly what access you want, and how much you are willing to pay.
Long distance cruisers generally go for SSB-based email (either Sailmail or Winlink) because it's cheap and relatively reliable. Of course, "reliable" in this context means that depending on the HF propagation conditions you can probably get an email message out sometime that day. And you are limited to short, text-only messages. Still, these days you can update blogs, Facebook, etc. via email...
Other systems like Ocens are also available for email via Iridium.
After that, if you are offshore and away from GSM coverage, you start talking about real bucks. Inmarsat is the most common. Iridium, Inmarsat, Globalstar, etc. all pretty much have two things in common - they are slow compared to land-based systems and they bill by the bit.. a lot. Streaming video and surfing Spring Break Girls Gone Wild is probably not in the cards. Hell, even checking a webmail email account is not really feasible unless you are Carlos Slim and own a telephone company.
So, that's a long way of getting around to saying this: In the past 10 years, not a lot has changed. Inshore, close to cell coverage, you can do very well. Offshore, you are still pretty much stuck with the same old systems that were in place 10 years ago, only now they are more expensive. Oh, and in the case of Globalstar, they are also less reliable now.
He may be a software engineer, but I'm retired from the oil business. Where did he get that the pipes are 5 feet in diameter? What a moron. Drill pipe diameters are around 8 inches MAX outside diameter, many much smaller than that. I don't know where his "trained eye" comes from, but it isn't from drilling. Yes, this field might produce as much as 500,000 barrels per day, if SCORES of wells are drilled. This is an exploration well, to boot. You drill enough of a hole to see what's there, cap it, and let the production rigs come in later.
A fractionating column? Give me a break. He's comparing the high pressure and cold water at 5000 feet deep to a hot distillation device?
Oh wait, this is Slashdot. Never mind. Put on your tinfoil hats and return to what you were doing.
Dude, I live in Mexico. I went down to get my drivers license - they didn't require any drivers tests, but they wanted fingerprints. What, I'm not going to drive?
These days, everybody has everything on file about you. Give them your freaking fingerprints.
You know, every few days we get another story from China of some crackdown or another, in which "thousands were arrested". Pretty soon they'll just have to put up a big wall that you can see from space to keep everyone in...no, wait.
It's more of an internal vs external thing. Nothing wrong with the rest of the company calling the people in the IT department "IT Guys". Internally, I'm assuming there would be more respect for each other in titles (programmers, database support, systems analysts, etc.) You put me in mind of one of the scenes in the old James Bond movie "Golden Eye". One of the key characters was a geek who did all the programming and hacking for the main bad guy. Near the end he encounters another programmer, saying "She's a moron. A second-level programmer. She works on the guidance system. She doesn't even have access to the firing codes." while the others look on, mystified.
Worry more about providing a good working environment for your good people. Give them a killer sandbox and a decent outlet for their creativity, and you will retain them.
Metered pricing is used in many other places in the world. South Africa is a good example. It's just a great way for the providers to make lots of money and users to get the shaft. It limits innovation and provides zero incentive for service providers to increase capacity or quality of service.
Once metered Internet gets it's ugly, smelly foot in the door, it's nearly impossible to make it go away. Just say no.
A buddy brought one of these on our last backpacking trip. Nice an light, and surprisingly good for something with plastic optics. A couple of words of warning: the images are inverted, so they are great for looking at the sky but not as good for spying on your fellow backpackers. Also, the focus is a simple slide, so it's tough to get a good focus without moving the scope around. I can see how a kid might grow impatient with those faults. You are going to want to put this on a secure tripod - they aren't so good holding in your hands.
Aside from that, I agree that this is something that every kid should have. Perhaps it will get them outside looking at the sky instead of inside immersed in some FPS game.
While it might be technically possible, it seems to me that the simpler solution would be just to work on making existing systems more efficient and putting them on the side of the road. I'm in the middle of a road trip across the US, and if Interstate 40 is anything to go by, it would be a cold day in hell before they made this system strong enough to survive just a few weeks of the sort of traffic I've seen.
Most of the major highways have pretty large center divides - just put the solar arrays there and stop with the fancy stuff already!
I worked in and around West Africa for a number of years. We waited for SAT-3 to be installed, then upgraded, and then the East Africa cables to be installed as backup. While they are somewhat vulnerable to anchors and such, keep in mind that it's a big ocean out there and the cable is pretty small. Typically the cables like this one and SAT-3 are laid far enough offshore to keep them in really deep water. Having said that, the links to the beach are probably the most at risk. The cable companies trench them in as deep as possible to try to avoid anchors and such.
The main issue with Africa data comms access is in the inside of the country. Getting to the beach is relatively easy, but after that, the African internal infrastructure is often in very sad shape. Even trenching next to a road or putting cables on poles can be a huge problem. Our biggest problem with communications into Angola was not with the offshore cable (SAT3) but with the links that connected to the landing point in Luanda. Think about what it would be like in the US or Europe if there were little or no permitting systems for digging or other construction. We multi-day cable cuts in areas that really had no backup.
The issue with pre-made patch cables is that you never end up with the right length, so you hide the cable in your cable frame (or worse, let it fall to the floor). Cables heavy with coils clog up your frame and put unnecessary weight on the connectors. Next time you have a problem, you have to spend considerably more time sorting out your excess cable, not only adding to your troubleshooting time, but also risking pulling out or damaging the other patch cables hanging around.
Get the right tools and make your own cables that are the right length. Test them to make sure they are good. Also, develop a color standard for patch cables to speed tracing cables and troubleshooting.
Oh, and one more thing: Document, document, document!
I was experimenting with amateur packet radio in the early 90s. Used a TCP stack called "NOS" for a while. It had to fit in 640K, so every time you compiled it you had to compromise on features to make the final executable fit. Heard about Linux and ended up compiling version 1.2. Never looked back.
Ever since then there has been a computer somewhere near me running a variant of Linux, even though I have since given up on packet radio.
If they have improved sound quality, as they claim, perhaps we can have speaker in public places that won't need to be so loud and still be understood. One of the reasons speakers have to be so loud is that hey are so muddy and distorted that you can't understand them at lower levels. Also, if they are easier and cheaper to distribute, you can distribute the speakers and not have to turn up the speaker on one side of the space so that it can be understood on the other side of the space.
I don't know about you guys, but when I'm in an airport or a train station, it's pretty important to me to understand what is being said on the loudspeakers. If that sound is coming off a nearby wall instead of a large horn 20 yards away, I think I have a better chance of getting to my plane on time.
It was great. I usually put in 10 hour days anyway, so someone telling me that I was to get every other Friday off was great! Not only do you get the occasional 3 day weekend, but you will probably find that the Fridays that you do work are really quiet - assuming not everyone in the office is on the same 9/80 schedule. If you are in a "meeting rich" environment, you are spared on Fridays because half the people aren't there.
After I got into middle management, 9/80 basically meant that I didn't feel guilty for taking a Friday off, but often-times I was working those days as well.
In big companies where folks that work a normal 8 hour day are treated like slackers, it's a good way to actually get some benefit for those 8+ hour days. Also, remember that 5 days of vacation turns into 10 days off! Bonus!
Have any of you ever been to New Orleans? Met the people there? Know the history and the tradition of the place? Experienced the pride of people who have lived in a city with so much history?
Give me a break. What's next, are you going to tell the people in San Francisco they have to move because an earthquake is coming in a few years? How about the midwest where tornados wipe small towns clean every few years? Where are you going to move them?
We took this country and made it what it is - in many cases we had to work hard to make a place for our people to live. There's hardly a location in the US that isn't threatened by some natural disaster or another. We adapt and we make it work.
Move them out? Are you kidding? "Oh, we can't afford you anymore, you need to move." If they were to give me a choice of where my taxes went, I'd tell them to take all that money that is being spent "protecting" us in Iraq and send it down to protect one of the most beautiful and unique cities in the world.
You all go hide in a corner somewhere lest a drop of rain fall on you. I intend to enjoy the natural diversity of this great country we live in.
Hey, I'm a child of the 60s. I watched every launch, and attempted launch, that I could. I can't tell you the number of times that NASA blew things up in those early days. Had they quit after only three failures, the world would be a very, very different place today.
Keep launching SpaceX! You'll succeed and the world will change again...
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, one more thing I forgot to mention - WiFi coverage is getting to be scary ubiquitous. About two weeks ago I had a Skype conversation with a friend on his boat in Tuamotus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuamotus, which is basically a circular bump in the water that has a village with about 10 people and two chickens. Pretty much all over the South Pacific they find the same thing: there is usually a somewhat-usable WiFi connection available.
There are some realities with offshore cruising that still would probably make your round-the-world telecommuting dream possible.
1. You don't do much during passages except stand watch, sleep and eat. If you think you are going to be able to crank out that last bit of code during a passage, you are kidding yourself. It's either too bumpy or too busy. You don't want to do other things except keep the boat moving toward your destination.
2. Crusing sailboats spend a very small percentage of their lives making passages. 10% is a lot. Most of the time is spent at anchor or in marinas enjoying the local color. Assuming you are in a place with WiFi, you are pretty much good to go.
3. You can use text-only email to keep up with things during your passages. That may be enough until you get to where you have better Internet access.
4. I don't know where you thinking of going, but pretty much your longest passage is going to be around 4 weeks offshore. That's West Coast to the Marquesas. Otherwise, you just won't be out of touch for that long.
The only issue with BGAN offshore is antenna orientation. There are plenty of (expensive) solutions to that problem.
There are no multipath problems with talking to satellites from an ocean-based antenna, unless you are waaaay north or south and your antenna look angles are very low. Otherwise, you are looking up, away from any real or imagined multipath.
Much depends on where you are going to be, exactly what access you want, and how much you are willing to pay.
Long distance cruisers generally go for SSB-based email (either Sailmail or Winlink) because it's cheap and relatively reliable. Of course, "reliable" in this context means that depending on the HF propagation conditions you can probably get an email message out sometime that day. And you are limited to short, text-only messages. Still, these days you can update blogs, Facebook, etc. via email...
Other systems like Ocens are also available for email via Iridium.
After that, if you are offshore and away from GSM coverage, you start talking about real bucks. Inmarsat is the most common. Iridium, Inmarsat, Globalstar, etc. all pretty much have two things in common - they are slow compared to land-based systems and they bill by the bit.. a lot. Streaming video and surfing Spring Break Girls Gone Wild is probably not in the cards. Hell, even checking a webmail email account is not really feasible unless you are Carlos Slim and own a telephone company.
So, that's a long way of getting around to saying this: In the past 10 years, not a lot has changed. Inshore, close to cell coverage, you can do very well. Offshore, you are still pretty much stuck with the same old systems that were in place 10 years ago, only now they are more expensive. Oh, and in the case of Globalstar, they are also less reliable now.
Which part of "loan guarantee" do you not understand?
Okay, you started it:
How exactly does invading countries of mostly peaceful Muslum people make them less likely to do such things.
(with solar power... just to stay on topic)
It sounds like they could use some upgraded equipment.
He may be a software engineer, but I'm retired from the oil business. Where did he get that the pipes are 5 feet in diameter? What a moron. Drill pipe diameters are around 8 inches MAX outside diameter, many much smaller than that. I don't know where his "trained eye" comes from, but it isn't from drilling. Yes, this field might produce as much as 500,000 barrels per day, if SCORES of wells are drilled. This is an exploration well, to boot. You drill enough of a hole to see what's there, cap it, and let the production rigs come in later.
A fractionating column? Give me a break. He's comparing the high pressure and cold water at 5000 feet deep to a hot distillation device?
Oh wait, this is Slashdot. Never mind. Put on your tinfoil hats and return to what you were doing.
Dude, I live in Mexico. I went down to get my drivers license - they didn't require any drivers tests, but they wanted fingerprints. What, I'm not going to drive?
These days, everybody has everything on file about you. Give them your freaking fingerprints.
You know, every few days we get another story from China of some crackdown or another, in which "thousands were arrested". Pretty soon they'll just have to put up a big wall that you can see from space to keep everyone in. ..no, wait.
Clearly these guys never read Kurt Vonnegut's "Galapagos"
"Thanks a lot, big brain"
It's more of an internal vs external thing. Nothing wrong with the rest of the company calling the people in the IT department "IT Guys". Internally, I'm assuming there would be more respect for each other in titles (programmers, database support, systems analysts, etc.) You put me in mind of one of the scenes in the old James Bond movie "Golden Eye". One of the key characters was a geek who did all the programming and hacking for the main bad guy. Near the end he encounters another programmer, saying "She's a moron. A second-level programmer. She works on the guidance system. She doesn't even have access to the firing codes." while the others look on, mystified.
Worry more about providing a good working environment for your good people. Give them a killer sandbox and a decent outlet for their creativity, and you will retain them.
Metered pricing is used in many other places in the world. South Africa is a good example. It's just a great way for the providers to make lots of money and users to get the shaft. It limits innovation and provides zero incentive for service providers to increase capacity or quality of service.
Once metered Internet gets it's ugly, smelly foot in the door, it's nearly impossible to make it go away. Just say no.
A buddy brought one of these on our last backpacking trip. Nice an light, and surprisingly good for something with plastic optics. A couple of words of warning: the images are inverted, so they are great for looking at the sky but not as good for spying on your fellow backpackers. Also, the focus is a simple slide, so it's tough to get a good focus without moving the scope around. I can see how a kid might grow impatient with those faults. You are going to want to put this on a secure tripod - they aren't so good holding in your hands.
Aside from that, I agree that this is something that every kid should have. Perhaps it will get them outside looking at the sky instead of inside immersed in some FPS game.
While it might be technically possible, it seems to me that the simpler solution would be just to work on making existing systems more efficient and putting them on the side of the road. I'm in the middle of a road trip across the US, and if Interstate 40 is anything to go by, it would be a cold day in hell before they made this system strong enough to survive just a few weeks of the sort of traffic I've seen.
Most of the major highways have pretty large center divides - just put the solar arrays there and stop with the fancy stuff already!
...but, if you install "emacs-snapshot" you get emacs23.
(Am I talking to myself? Nahhhh.)
Emacs23 isn't on the Ubuntu PPA archive yet, only emacs22, published last year.
I worked in and around West Africa for a number of years. We waited for SAT-3 to be installed, then upgraded, and then the East Africa cables to be installed as backup. While they are somewhat vulnerable to anchors and such, keep in mind that it's a big ocean out there and the cable is pretty small. Typically the cables like this one and SAT-3 are laid far enough offshore to keep them in really deep water. Having said that, the links to the beach are probably the most at risk. The cable companies trench them in as deep as possible to try to avoid anchors and such.
The main issue with Africa data comms access is in the inside of the country. Getting to the beach is relatively easy, but after that, the African internal infrastructure is often in very sad shape. Even trenching next to a road or putting cables on poles can be a huge problem. Our biggest problem with communications into Angola was not with the offshore cable (SAT3) but with the links that connected to the landing point in Luanda. Think about what it would be like in the US or Europe if there were little or no permitting systems for digging or other construction. We multi-day cable cuts in areas that really had no backup.
The issue with pre-made patch cables is that you never end up with the right length, so you hide the cable in your cable frame (or worse, let it fall to the floor). Cables heavy with coils clog up your frame and put unnecessary weight on the connectors. Next time you have a problem, you have to spend considerably more time sorting out your excess cable, not only adding to your troubleshooting time, but also risking pulling out or damaging the other patch cables hanging around.
Get the right tools and make your own cables that are the right length. Test them to make sure they are good. Also, develop a color standard for patch cables to speed tracing cables and troubleshooting.
Oh, and one more thing: Document, document, document!
I was experimenting with amateur packet radio in the early 90s. Used a TCP stack called "NOS" for a while. It had to fit in 640K, so every time you compiled it you had to compromise on features to make the final executable fit. Heard about Linux and ended up compiling version 1.2. Never looked back.
Ever since then there has been a computer somewhere near me running a variant of Linux, even though I have since given up on packet radio.
If they have improved sound quality, as they claim, perhaps we can have speaker in public places that won't need to be so loud and still be understood. One of the reasons speakers have to be so loud is that hey are so muddy and distorted that you can't understand them at lower levels. Also, if they are easier and cheaper to distribute, you can distribute the speakers and not have to turn up the speaker on one side of the space so that it can be understood on the other side of the space.
I don't know about you guys, but when I'm in an airport or a train station, it's pretty important to me to understand what is being said on the loudspeakers. If that sound is coming off a nearby wall instead of a large horn 20 yards away, I think I have a better chance of getting to my plane on time.
It was great. I usually put in 10 hour days anyway, so someone telling me that I was to get every other Friday off was great! Not only do you get the occasional 3 day weekend, but you will probably find that the Fridays that you do work are really quiet - assuming not everyone in the office is on the same 9/80 schedule. If you are in a "meeting rich" environment, you are spared on Fridays because half the people aren't there.
After I got into middle management, 9/80 basically meant that I didn't feel guilty for taking a Friday off, but often-times I was working those days as well.
In big companies where folks that work a normal 8 hour day are treated like slackers, it's a good way to actually get some benefit for those 8+ hour days. Also, remember that 5 days of vacation turns into 10 days off! Bonus!
Leave it to Microsoft to not consider the 7% of the population that is left handed.
"They're probably lefty commie Mac users anyway"
Have any of you ever been to New Orleans? Met the people there? Know the history and the tradition of the place? Experienced the pride of people who have lived in a city with so much history?
Give me a break. What's next, are you going to tell the people in San Francisco they have to move because an earthquake is coming in a few years? How about the midwest where tornados wipe small towns clean every few years? Where are you going to move them?
We took this country and made it what it is - in many cases we had to work hard to make a place for our people to live. There's hardly a location in the US that isn't threatened by some natural disaster or another. We adapt and we make it work.
Move them out? Are you kidding? "Oh, we can't afford you anymore, you need to move." If they were to give me a choice of where my taxes went, I'd tell them to take all that money that is being spent "protecting" us in Iraq and send it down to protect one of the most beautiful and unique cities in the world.
You all go hide in a corner somewhere lest a drop of rain fall on you. I intend to enjoy the natural diversity of this great country we live in.
Hey, I'm a child of the 60s. I watched every launch, and attempted launch, that I could. I can't tell you the number of times that NASA blew things up in those early days. Had they quit after only three failures, the world would be a very, very different place today.
Keep launching SpaceX! You'll succeed and the world will change again...
"Mommeeeeee! Please buy me Ubuntu! Please, please please?"