1) Where are you located? What's the terrain?
2) What's the availability of local utilities?
On the US east coast, most of the terrain could be reasonably called "rolling hills." The terrain is not flat... Its either going up or going down. Eventually the slope gets steep enough and the heights tall enough that we stop calling them hills and start calling them mountains. And there's another phenomenon: Two story buildings and three story trees.
Not true of the great plains or even as far west as Nevada and Arizona. I'd read you guys describing mountains as if they were obstacles on the landscape, but I didn't understand until I visited. Your land is perfectly flat until all of the sudden without warning there's a mountain. And, there are few if any trees blocking the horizon. That's not true out east where our mountains are just as tall, but a mountain is nothing more than a slightly taller hill.
Yes, I realize you're in Canada, but I can only speak from my experience.
If you're in forested rolling-hills territory, you can pretty much forget going 45 miles with 802.11. You need -clear- line of sight and you're not going to get it. Two or three miles and a lucky path is a practical limit if you want any sort of reliability over time.
On the other hand, on nice flat terrain (or flat with the occasional mountain) all you really need is the right one or two repeater sites with solar plants and batteries. You're still into the project for $40k+ after building a couple self-contained repeater stations, but you can reasonably expect it to work well when you're done.
I don't know the Canadian telephone tariffs, but in the US you can generally buy an "alarm circuit" anywhere that you can buy a telephone line for around $20/month. An alarm circuit is a copper pair with no attachments between point A and point B. Drive the cable path in a truck and pick repeater stations along the same cable run so that the telco doesn't have to go all the way to the CO and back (the copper is laid out in a star configuration radiating from the local central office). Pick points a mile or two apart. Invest in a $4000 cable tester so that you can certify the copper pairs are clean (on the first or second go around they'll miss load coils and damaged cable, but by the third or fourth the telco techs will realize that you mean it) and then buy some cheap DSL bridges off ebay.
Which, incidentally, is very similar to how telcos in the US deliver rural T1 service these days... Except they have two-pair DSL equipment in addition to one-pair equipment for locations where they want to go further without a repeater.
As you get closer to the city, the cable paths will become more tangled or shift to mux-based systems making this method less practical, but by then you'll be close enough to order a real data circuit or (with luck) within reach of some ISP's local POP site.
We have some folks here who telecommute and some folks who don't. The problem is that in many technical jobs its very difficult to quantify the work you do.
For a sysadmin, the measure of his success is that nothing happens, nothing goes wrong. Cell phones ring anywhere. If the quality sysadmin doesn't keep hours at the office where he can be seen to be working, how does the manager know he works at all?
So, to answer the poster's question: To convince your manager to let you telecommute you must first convince him that your work is quantifiable without you keeping office hours. Keep a log of what you do. Start emailing the boss a Friday Report. Get him comfortable with the idea that he knows and can justify to his boss exactly what your contribution to the company is each week. THEN bring up the idea of telecommuting.
The most successful telecommuters I've seen are the ones who produce billable hours for the company. The customers know whether the work was done and the boss knows how many billable hours to expect per pay period based on what's generated by the folks who do work in the office.
This all assumes you're with a small company where the boss is able to authorize telecommuting. If you're a cog in a monolithic bureaucracy or working for the government, forget it. Your choices there are: stay or go. If you stay its by their rules.
Important note: Its much easier for the guy in the office to get a merit based raise. Even with the suggestions above, the hard worker is the guy who is seen to be working hard.
Bright creative people tend not to get that bent out of shape about salary. Ever heard of the starving artist? That's not why the public schools have such trouble attracting teachers. The reason is that bureaucracy and regulation tend to punish and prevent creativity. The smarter and more creative the teacher, the harder it is to put up with the administration's / school board's / government's rules.
Should be easy enough to prove. No two encoders produce exactly the same output, even before you look at things like bit rate. Even with the same encoder, the internal tags and the filename would not be chosen the same. If an infringing copy downloaded via Napster matches bit-for-bit with the copy in mp3.com's vast library then it most likely originated from mp3.com.
Conversely, if the copy from napster isn't a perfect match then it almost certainly didn't originate from mp3.com.
'Course, if they file in California, they might win even without proving genunine matches. Those California judges are weird that way.
Where is your bachelors degree from (or if you're still a student, where will it be from)? Anyone who shows poor enough judgement to skip getting a real education shouldn't have root on my servers.
What certificates do you have? The best answer is "None." More than two you don't get a second interview. If you have an MCSE, you don't get a second interview, especially if I need an NT sysadmin. Certificates mean that you went to lame training courses, probably on your employers coin and missed work to do it. I want employees who know how to read to learn, instead of expecting to go sit in a course and have knowledge dropped in their lap.
Most folks (including the junk dealers who have them) don't realize that Sparcserver 490's, 690's, and 2000's are actually multiple components installed in a very high-quality, very standard 5' tall 4-post 19" rack enclosure. They even have some keen 3U spots rotated by 90 degrees and located on the side, great for network switches and rackmount surge protectors.
They can be had cheap, and in most cases, you'll even get some nice rackmount hardware with the enclosure.
My boss, who is not a sysadmin, installed Symantec's firewall product on his DSL connected home computer about 6 months ago. I applaud his interest in security, but it was a big embarassment when he complained to the registrant of a multicast address about the hacking attempts to his PC and the registrant happened to know me. The packets with the multicast source address were, of course, coming from his other Windows PC.
My company has purchased boxes from VA since back when they were VA Research. Rock solid boxes. Generally well engineered. Most of them, even the Pentiums, are still in service.
The sales/business side was the death of VA Linux.
I bought what I needed to buy from VA Research before they became VA Linux. They built it to order. It was great.
Have you tried to buy something from VA Linux that didn't precisely match what they thought you should buy? If you succeeded, I'd like to know which of the folks on their staff is your drinking buddy.
I tried to buy some hard disk brackets for my FullOn servers. They had the chutzpah to _require_ me to buy drives if I wanted the brackets. And if I want 9 gig seagates instead of 9 gig quantums? Hoo boy am I talking to the wrong people. Bad enough I have to take that attitude from Microsoft. I won't accept it from a Linux company.
I'll miss the hardware but I won't miss the company. Good riddance.
Two basic rules to the security model when building an online game:
1) A clever, capable player will know everything his computer knows about the state of the game.
Corollary: Expect secrets told to the player's computer to be overheard by the player. Especially secrets like the position of objects not in the player's line of sight.
2) A clever, capable player will control everything about the state of the game that his computer controls about the state of the game.
Corollary: Borg assists have been around since nettrek in the early '90s and will surely be around 10 years from now. Design a game that works as well with as without them, and you won't have a cheating problem.
Game companies who "cheated" on these two rules in their development phase now have a cheating problem. Isn't that circular?
Actually, netFilter has been using a real-time AIish system for years now, with an exceptions list serving to correct the site interpretations that the AI gets wrong. And it runs on Linux and can use the transparent proxy feature too.
No mass-mailing system I've seen, not even otherwise legitimate mailing list software, permits the owner of a mail server to opt out of his server receiving their mail. When challenged on disallowing the owners to opt out, spammers insist that allowing only exact email addresses to opt out makes them defenders of free speech.
So long as this is the case, opt-out systems are just an excuse by spammers to send the crap that they're going to send anyway.
By way of introduction, let me say that I'm the Chief Engineer at a major regional ISP on the US East Coast and Myers-Briggs personality typing has been very useful in my job.
I've found that the Thinker/Feeler distinction has little utility as a predictor for an employee's success in a computing job. Quite the contrary: far and away the best Webmaster we ever had was an INFP, and we lost him to a customer who nearly doubled his not inconsiderable salary. F's excel in jobs with a significant customer-contact component, which is to say most of the highly paid ones. They excel at most of the lower paid ones too, for that matter; there aren't many pure back-room jobs.
So, the notion that women do poorly in computer jobs because two thirds are F's while two thirds of men are T's is pure drivel.
In fact, the only MBTI category that seems to have any impact on an employee's success in a computer job is the iNtutive vs. Sensor category. Strong sensors rarely make it past the heavily proceduralized first-tier support positions and the ones that do are usually on a management path. But there is no men-versus-women imbalance in the N/S category.
As to your archetypal hacker, the INTP type, such folks often have a hard time here. INFP's get their dynamicity fix from the customers; INTP's get it from emergencies. Outside of the second-tier support and fieldwork jobs, a well-run organization rarely has enough emergencies to keep an INTP interested... And that's deadly because an unchallenged INTP creates his own emergencies. A hacker's reputation is well earned.
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1) Where are you located? What's the terrain?
2) What's the availability of local utilities?
On the US east coast, most of the terrain could be reasonably called "rolling hills." The terrain is not flat... Its either going up or going down. Eventually the slope gets steep enough and the heights tall enough that we stop calling them hills and start calling them mountains. And there's another phenomenon: Two story buildings and three story trees.
Not true of the great plains or even as far west as Nevada and Arizona. I'd read you guys describing mountains as if they were obstacles on the landscape, but I didn't understand until I visited. Your land is perfectly flat until all of the sudden without warning there's a mountain. And, there are few if any trees blocking the horizon. That's not true out east where our mountains are just as tall, but a mountain is nothing more than a slightly taller hill.
Yes, I realize you're in Canada, but I can only speak from my experience.
If you're in forested rolling-hills territory, you can pretty much forget going 45 miles with 802.11. You need -clear- line of sight and you're not going to get it. Two or three miles and a lucky path is a practical limit if you want any sort of reliability over time.
On the other hand, on nice flat terrain (or flat with the occasional mountain) all you really need is the right one or two repeater sites with solar plants and batteries. You're still into the project for $40k+ after building a couple self-contained repeater stations, but you can reasonably expect it to work well when you're done.
I don't know the Canadian telephone tariffs, but in the US you can generally buy an "alarm circuit" anywhere that you can buy a telephone line for around $20/month. An alarm circuit is a copper pair with no attachments between point A and point B. Drive the cable path in a truck and pick repeater stations along the same cable run so that the telco doesn't have to go all the way to the CO and back (the copper is laid out in a star configuration radiating from the local central office). Pick points a mile or two apart. Invest in a $4000 cable tester so that you can certify the copper pairs are clean (on the first or second go around they'll miss load coils and damaged cable, but by the third or fourth the telco techs will realize that you mean it) and then buy some cheap DSL bridges off ebay.
Which, incidentally, is very similar to how telcos in the US deliver rural T1 service these days... Except they have two-pair DSL equipment in addition to one-pair equipment for locations where they want to go further without a repeater.
As you get closer to the city, the cable paths will become more tangled or shift to mux-based systems making this method less practical, but by then you'll be close enough to order a real data circuit or (with luck) within reach of some ISP's local POP site.
We have some folks here who telecommute and some folks who don't. The problem is that in many technical jobs its very difficult to quantify the work you do.
For a sysadmin, the measure of his success is that nothing happens, nothing goes wrong. Cell phones ring anywhere. If the quality sysadmin doesn't keep hours at the office where he can be seen to be working, how does the manager know he works at all?
So, to answer the poster's question: To convince your manager to let you telecommute you must first convince him that your work is quantifiable without you keeping office hours. Keep a log of what you do. Start emailing the boss a Friday Report. Get him comfortable with the idea that he knows and can justify to his boss exactly what your contribution to the company is each week. THEN bring up the idea of telecommuting.
The most successful telecommuters I've seen are the ones who produce billable hours for the company. The customers know whether the work was done and the boss knows how many billable hours to expect per pay period based on what's generated by the folks who do work in the office.
This all assumes you're with a small company where the boss is able to authorize telecommuting. If you're a cog in a monolithic bureaucracy or working for the government, forget it. Your choices there are: stay or go. If you stay its by their rules.
Important note: Its much easier for the guy in the office to get a merit based raise. Even with the suggestions above, the hard worker is the guy who is seen to be working hard.
Bright creative people tend not to get that bent out of shape about salary. Ever heard of the starving artist? That's not why the public schools have such trouble attracting teachers. The reason is that bureaucracy and regulation tend to punish and prevent creativity. The smarter and more creative the teacher, the harder it is to put up with the administration's / school board's / government's rules.
Should be easy enough to prove. No two encoders produce exactly the same output, even before you look at things like bit rate. Even with the same encoder, the internal tags and the filename would not be chosen the same. If an infringing copy downloaded via Napster matches bit-for-bit with the copy in mp3.com's vast library then it most likely originated from mp3.com.
Conversely, if the copy from napster isn't a perfect match then it almost certainly didn't originate from mp3.com.
'Course, if they file in California, they might win even without proving genunine matches. Those California judges are weird that way.
Where is your bachelors degree from (or if you're still a student, where will it be from)? Anyone who shows poor enough judgement to skip getting a real education shouldn't have root on my servers.
What certificates do you have? The best answer is "None." More than two you don't get a second interview. If you have an MCSE, you don't get a second interview, especially if I need an NT sysadmin. Certificates mean that you went to lame training courses, probably on your employers coin and missed work to do it. I want employees who know how to read to learn, instead of expecting to go sit in a course and have knowledge dropped in their lap.
Most folks (including the junk dealers who have them) don't realize that Sparcserver 490's, 690's, and 2000's are actually multiple components installed in a very high-quality, very standard 5' tall 4-post 19" rack enclosure. They even have some keen 3U spots rotated by 90 degrees and located on the side, great for network switches and rackmount surge protectors.
They can be had cheap, and in most cases, you'll even get some nice rackmount hardware with the enclosure.
We in the US tend to forget that we live in a non-US world.
Folks in China are not violating any software licenses, because inside China those software licenses simply do not exist.
Its like my old law professor said: The contract can say anything you want but that doesn't make it true.
My boss, who is not a sysadmin, installed Symantec's firewall product on his DSL connected home computer about 6 months ago. I applaud his interest in security, but it was a big embarassment when he complained to the registrant of a multicast address about the hacking attempts to his PC and the registrant happened to know me. The packets with the multicast source address were, of course, coming from his other Windows PC.
My company has purchased boxes from VA since back when they were VA Research. Rock solid boxes. Generally well engineered. Most of them, even the Pentiums, are still in service.
The sales/business side was the death of VA Linux.
I bought what I needed to buy from VA Research before they became VA Linux. They built it to order. It was great.
Have you tried to buy something from VA Linux that didn't precisely match what they thought you should buy? If you succeeded, I'd like to know which of the folks on their staff is your drinking buddy.
I tried to buy some hard disk brackets for my FullOn servers. They had the chutzpah to _require_ me to buy drives if I wanted the brackets. And if I want 9 gig seagates instead of 9 gig quantums? Hoo boy am I talking to the wrong people. Bad enough I have to take that attitude from Microsoft. I won't accept it from a Linux company.
I'll miss the hardware but I won't miss the company. Good riddance.
Two basic rules to the security model when building an online game:
1) A clever, capable player will know everything his computer knows about the state of the game.
Corollary: Expect secrets told to the player's computer to be overheard by the player. Especially secrets like the position of objects not in the player's line of sight.
2) A clever, capable player will control everything about the state of the game that his computer controls about the state of the game.
Corollary: Borg assists have been around since nettrek in the early '90s and will surely be around 10 years from now. Design a game that works as well with as without them, and you won't have a cheating problem.
Game companies who "cheated" on these two rules in their development phase now have a cheating problem. Isn't that circular?
Actually, netFilter has been using a real-time AIish system for years now, with an exceptions list serving to correct the site interpretations that the AI gets wrong. And it runs on Linux and can use the transparent proxy feature too.
No mass-mailing system I've seen, not even otherwise legitimate mailing list software, permits the owner of a mail server to opt out of his server receiving their mail. When challenged on disallowing the owners to opt out, spammers insist that allowing only exact email addresses to opt out makes them defenders of free speech.
So long as this is the case, opt-out systems are just an excuse by spammers to send the crap that they're going to send anyway.
By way of introduction, let me say that I'm the Chief Engineer at a major regional ISP on the US East Coast and Myers-Briggs personality typing has been very useful in my job.
I've found that the Thinker/Feeler distinction has little utility as a predictor for an employee's success in a computing job. Quite the contrary: far and away the best Webmaster we ever had was an INFP, and we lost him to a customer who nearly doubled his not inconsiderable salary. F's excel in jobs with a significant customer-contact component, which is to say most of the highly paid ones. They excel at most of the lower paid ones too, for that matter; there aren't many pure back-room jobs.
So, the notion that women do poorly in computer jobs because two thirds are F's while two thirds of men are T's is pure drivel.
In fact, the only MBTI category that seems to have any impact on an employee's success in a computer job is the iNtutive vs. Sensor category. Strong sensors rarely make it past the heavily proceduralized first-tier support positions and the ones that do are usually on a management path. But there is no men-versus-women imbalance in the N/S category.
As to your archetypal hacker, the INTP type, such folks often have a hard time here. INFP's get their dynamicity fix from the customers; INTP's get it from emergencies. Outside of the second-tier support and fieldwork jobs, a well-run organization rarely has enough emergencies to keep an INTP interested... And that's deadly because an unchallenged INTP creates his own emergencies. A hacker's reputation is well earned.