The relatively low number of Debian [Gnome] users is probably explained by the fact that [...] users are more likely to choose one of the dozens of alternative desktops.
No, it's probably explained by Debian's heavier use in reliability-focused server environments where a desktop is a waste of resources.
Iridium is the obvious answer. It's an LEO satellite system. That means the satellites fly low in the sky, at an altitude of around 500 miles. So, you don't need a directional antenna to reach it. It's also visible from everywhere on earth. Downside: expensive per minute and oh so painfully slow (2400 baud. Call it 10% of a modern modem).
While in port, you may be able to use a set of normal satellite Internet services like Dish. Faster. Cheaper. But it communicates with geostationary orbit at an altitude of 26,000 miles. This means you're hauling a great big dish onto the deck and spending 10 or 20 minutes aiming it before you can use it, and then you only have a prayer of success while actually in port where the ship's movement is, if you're lucky, within the fraction of a degree tolerance for the dish's aim. Also, each geostationary satellite system has a earthside footprint that it can see. You'd have evaluate which satellite systems reach which footprints where you're going to be.
That's an easy one. You've already figured out what you think needs to be changed: nothing.
Pick the next part of the project you want to work on and go to it. When you turn it in, politely remind him of the list of things you'd like guidance on as to what changes he'd like to see. If you feel a need to CYA, make the request by email so that you have a record of it but don't CC folks; that's rude.
He's the project lead. Don't let him pass the buck. Guiding the other engineers is his job.
When it all comes to a head, here's what you tell the big boss: "Every week for the past X months, I've offered ProjectLead a list of modules I've completed. I've asked for his guidance on as to what changes he wants to see and what he'd like me to work on next. Every week he has declined to offer any guidance. As a result, I've moved forward as best I can based on my own judgment. If you will tell me what changes you want made, I'd be pleased to get on them immediately."
If the incompetence is several layers deep then it's time to post your resume on Career Builder. Otherwise keep going and when he's ready to tell you what he really wanted, he will.
my erratic "lead" engineer [...] is not giving me any direction
That may be solvable. Make it your business to learn the big picture for the project. If he still doesn't give you direction, pick the pieces that you *want* to work on and that you know none of your peers are working on yet and go to it.
Make sure you're turning in completed pieces of the work at least weekly. He'll either have to accept the work product or he'll have to correct you and tell you what he wants instead. Either way it's now his problem instead of yours. And you've spent your time on the interesting problems instead of the scut work.
If he's as disorganized as you suggest, the project may fail. But if you're seen to take the initiative and be productive, there will be room for you on the next project with a different lead.
That plan has no value to me. By the time I get up, shower, prepare for work and drive to work I've already spent 2 hours on work-related tasks that I don't get paid for. I'll spend another hour in the evening getting home. If I cut the daily pay in half, it cuts the value of those hours in half... and I dislike being underpaid.
You weren't willing to [coordinate the job together], instead calling the other guy an "idiot", so the attempt failed.
Please try to understand: the gentleman in question left four months after I did, without giving notice. I heard later about the circumstances: in a meeting with my former manager and another employee, Knucklehead became enraged, slammed the employee against the wall and then stormed from the building, never to return. Seriously. This from a high-level, allegedly professional IT worker.
That's the character of the guy I attempted to coordinate with. Buddy, you weren't there.
You misunderstand. I'm suggesting that someone who isn't entry level, someone with real responsibility who tries to drop to part time sets himself up for failure. He's asking the manager he works for to greatly exceed normal and reasonable expectations. Few can.
I will, however, defend my choices this far: I carried a cell phone and left standing instructions to call me when faced with something that genuinely couldn't wait. Knucklehead didn't call. He did wait though: he postponed tasks until I *wasn't* there.
And the rich guy can buy a $500 pair of shoes that are somewhat more comfortable than the $70 Nikes. My point was not that you should optimize slashdot's code so that it can run on a Commodore 64. My point was that if you have a genuine scalability problem, throwing more hardware at it is a temporary solution at best which is likely to cost you more in the long run that hiring someone to correct the system architecture. So you'd better figure out which situation you're dealing with.
Just throwing hardware at it is what I like to refer to as "poor man's economics." Poor man's economics works like this: you go to K-mart and buy a $20 pair of shoes. They last about 3 months, so then you go back and buy another pair. After a year you've spent $80. The smart guy goes to the Nike outlet and buys a $70 pair of shoes which last the whole year and don't hurt his feet.
If the software is inefficient enough that additional developer resources could significantly reduce the hardware requirements then chances are unfortunately good that you face another problem with the software: it isn't just inefficient; it's also incorrect.
Scaling a software system up doesn't mean getting it to run under heavy load. It means architecting the system for parallelism and getting it to produce correct results under heavy load. If your system depends on a database (it usually does) and the database has a probability of bugs corrupting data that varies in proportion to the number of records and the queries per second (it usually does) then just throwing more hardware at it isn't going to solve your problem for long.
I did it for about 6 months. I went from 40 hour weeks to 20 hour weeks comprised of 2 10-hour days. After a few months the situation became untenable and I chose to quit and move on.
The problem was the manager couldn't sequence the work where I could perform it on the days I was there. I wasn't just asking myself to rise to the challenge, I was asking him to do so too. He couldn't. So he placed another employee to deal with issues that came up while I was out of the office. The other guy was what I like to refer to as a brilliant idiot. That's not just sour grapes; a few months after I left he escaped just ahead of the axe. In the months I was there he took it upon himself to unilaterally reconfigure systems on the days I wasn't scheduled to work.
Faced with the conflict, the boss made the decision to go with the guy who was in the office. Not the wisest of choices as it turned out, but completely understandable.
Yes, to an extent. It's called a negative feedback loop. It maintains the environment near a particular balance despite our behavior.
There's also something called a "tipping point." Once we push the environment a certain distance away from the balance point, the feedback loop will become self-reinforcing and will proceed towards a new balance point. In fact, it will resist moving away from the new balance point even it we stop doing the things that pushed us away from the original balance point in the first place.
This is a bad thing. The current balance point treats mammals pretty well. The new balance point may be too cold or too hot for our food crops. Or the partial pressure of oxygen may be too low to breath. The natural, balanced state of the air itself could become poisonous.
Wherever the tipping point is, and no one is quite sure, we really really don't want to reach it.
The current approach to biofuels is brain-dead anyway. Sugar beets grow easily in the right climate and have such a high energy density per production cost that it makes sense to convert them to ethanol. No US crop compares. The notion that we can do as well from low-density biomatter, like corn stalks, is just plain asinine.
That doesn't mean biofuels are a bad idea altogether. I saw a carbon sequestration scheme a few years ago where algae was used to scrub carbon from coal plant emisions. After sufficient growth, the algae could be harvested and converted to biofuel. That sort of process where the biomatter growth is an in-between step without an inherent cost is not an altogether bad idea.
Nobody with a brain audits the security logs. The worms pound away at a rate of dozens per minute and the unsuccessful hack attempts are not far behind. If you were going to be able to detect a successful breach via the logs, you'd have prevented it at the firewall in the first place. The ratio between taxpayer-paid manpower to improved security would be exceptionally low.
Truth is, the logs are only valuable forensically. After detecting a breach or suspected breach, the logs can tell you more about what actually happened and how far it spread.
If a company has a significant number of computers in a lab, for example, there is probably already a staff member responsible for logging all the computers off at night and logging them back on in the morning.
That would be college, not company. While both start with a C, they're really not the same environment.
Unless your need to urinate routinely and perfectly coincides with your need to boot your PC, time speent booting your PC is still an extra cost for the company.
I can't imagine. I meant it as a double-entendre: I pointed out that most office computer users are making far more than minimum wage, hence the ratio is a lot higher that 1:5. At the same time I implied that you, specifically, were making minimum wage. I was hoping for a "funny."
In the interests of fair disclosure, my desktop is a laptop that I carry home every evening. I hibernate/dehibernate it nightly and reboot every couple weeks after it becomes unstable.
I'm not saying that an individual serious about going green can't find a reasonable way to leave his PC off at night. I am saying that as a broad corporate policy, it's misguided and typically more consumptive than just letting the employees do what they want.
Whether it's 1 climber or 20, you're shedding 22,000 miles of tether for every X tons of cargo lifted.
BTW, I did some more reading. The next problem with this idea is that the tether isn't a uniform thickness. In order to achieve the necessary tensile strength, they expect to have it significantly wider at the center of gravity. It's narrow at the ends because there isn't as much tension at the ends and the extra weight would increase the strength requirement at the center.
Hence its impractical to just reel it out unless you first redesign the tether to be a uniform width and support the extra weight.
As for one complex serving dozens of elevators, no way. These things are going to oscillate. They have to be far enough apart that they don't get tangled in each other.
You know, I see your point but you're making some big assumptions.
One of the whoppers is that tether material will be cheap enough to manufacture that we can afford to discard 22,000 miles of it for every cargo that we lift. Another is that we can apply sufficient quality control to this continuous manufacturing process that a defect doesn't cause the tether to snap.
Hard enough to do it once let alone continuously and a snapped tether means everything above whips out in to space, everything below falls to earth and you have to start all over again at geosynchronous orbit, extending tether material down and building up balanced anchor mass above.
On the other hand, there's every reason to believe that a tether with sufficient tensile strength will be effectively immune to the climber's gentle caress and we know how to build sufficient systems redundancy into a climber so that it can with five-nines probability go 22,000 miles without a fatal break down. Not easy, but doable.
Wait, so you're saying you want to put enough outward force on the tether to counteract acceleration due to gravity at the ground-level end of the tether for usefully large loads, then you're going to reel the tether out until the load reaches midway and will, if it releases the brake, climb on its own due to centripetal force?
Are you insane? We're having enough trouble just making materials whose tensile strength is sufficient that gravity on the lower half and centripetal force on the upper half won't rip it in two. Now you want to increase the strength requirement enough that you can reel it out a 50% greater distance without it tearing loose and install powerful enough systems on the ground station to then reel it back in? Haven't you ever been on a playground carousel and tried to move to the center?
Slashdot Mirror
The relatively low number of Debian [Gnome] users is probably explained by the fact that [...] users are more likely to choose one of the dozens of alternative desktops.
No, it's probably explained by Debian's heavier use in reliability-focused server environments where a desktop is a waste of resources.
Iridium is the obvious answer. It's an LEO satellite system. That means the satellites fly low in the sky, at an altitude of around 500 miles. So, you don't need a directional antenna to reach it. It's also visible from everywhere on earth. Downside: expensive per minute and oh so painfully slow (2400 baud. Call it 10% of a modern modem).
http://iridiumclassic.com/service/iri_service-detail.asp?serviceid=18&method=direct2
While in port, you may be able to use a set of normal satellite Internet services like Dish. Faster. Cheaper. But it communicates with geostationary orbit at an altitude of 26,000 miles. This means you're hauling a great big dish onto the deck and spending 10 or 20 minutes aiming it before you can use it, and then you only have a prayer of success while actually in port where the ship's movement is, if you're lucky, within the fraction of a degree tolerance for the dish's aim. Also, each geostationary satellite system has a earthside footprint that it can see. You'd have evaluate which satellite systems reach which footprints where you're going to be.
http://www.mybluedish.com/
That's an easy one. You've already figured out what you think needs to be changed: nothing.
Pick the next part of the project you want to work on and go to it. When you turn it in, politely remind him of the list of things you'd like guidance on as to what changes he'd like to see. If you feel a need to CYA, make the request by email so that you have a record of it but don't CC folks; that's rude.
He's the project lead. Don't let him pass the buck. Guiding the other engineers is his job.
When it all comes to a head, here's what you tell the big boss: "Every week for the past X months, I've offered ProjectLead a list of modules I've completed. I've asked for his guidance on as to what changes he wants to see and what he'd like me to work on next. Every week he has declined to offer any guidance. As a result, I've moved forward as best I can based on my own judgment. If you will tell me what changes you want made, I'd be pleased to get on them immediately."
If the incompetence is several layers deep then it's time to post your resume on Career Builder. Otherwise keep going and when he's ready to tell you what he really wanted, he will.
my erratic "lead" engineer [...] is not giving me any direction
That may be solvable. Make it your business to learn the big picture for the project. If he still doesn't give you direction, pick the pieces that you *want* to work on and that you know none of your peers are working on yet and go to it.
Make sure you're turning in completed pieces of the work at least weekly. He'll either have to accept the work product or he'll have to correct you and tell you what he wants instead. Either way it's now his problem instead of yours. And you've spent your time on the interesting problems instead of the scut work.
If he's as disorganized as you suggest, the project may fail. But if you're seen to take the initiative and be productive, there will be room for you on the next project with a different lead.
better do 5 four hour days
That plan has no value to me. By the time I get up, shower, prepare for work and drive to work I've already spent 2 hours on work-related tasks that I don't get paid for. I'll spend another hour in the evening getting home. If I cut the daily pay in half, it cuts the value of those hours in half... and I dislike being underpaid.
You weren't willing to [coordinate the job together], instead calling the other guy an "idiot", so the attempt failed.
Please try to understand: the gentleman in question left four months after I did, without giving notice. I heard later about the circumstances: in a meeting with my former manager and another employee, Knucklehead became enraged, slammed the employee against the wall and then stormed from the building, never to return. Seriously. This from a high-level, allegedly professional IT worker.
That's the character of the guy I attempted to coordinate with. Buddy, you weren't there.
You misunderstand. I'm suggesting that someone who isn't entry level, someone with real responsibility who tries to drop to part time sets himself up for failure. He's asking the manager he works for to greatly exceed normal and reasonable expectations. Few can.
I will, however, defend my choices this far: I carried a cell phone and left standing instructions to call me when faced with something that genuinely couldn't wait. Knucklehead didn't call. He did wait though: he postponed tasks until I *wasn't* there.
And the rich guy can buy a $500 pair of shoes that are somewhat more comfortable than the $70 Nikes. My point was not that you should optimize slashdot's code so that it can run on a Commodore 64. My point was that if you have a genuine scalability problem, throwing more hardware at it is a temporary solution at best which is likely to cost you more in the long run that hiring someone to correct the system architecture. So you'd better figure out which situation you're dealing with.
Just throwing hardware at it is what I like to refer to as "poor man's economics." Poor man's economics works like this: you go to K-mart and buy a $20 pair of shoes. They last about 3 months, so then you go back and buy another pair. After a year you've spent $80. The smart guy goes to the Nike outlet and buys a $70 pair of shoes which last the whole year and don't hurt his feet.
If the software is inefficient enough that additional developer resources could significantly reduce the hardware requirements then chances are unfortunately good that you face another problem with the software: it isn't just inefficient; it's also incorrect.
Scaling a software system up doesn't mean getting it to run under heavy load. It means architecting the system for parallelism and getting it to produce correct results under heavy load. If your system depends on a database (it usually does) and the database has a probability of bugs corrupting data that varies in proportion to the number of records and the queries per second (it usually does) then just throwing more hardware at it isn't going to solve your problem for long.
I did it for about 6 months. I went from 40 hour weeks to 20 hour weeks comprised of 2 10-hour days. After a few months the situation became untenable and I chose to quit and move on.
The problem was the manager couldn't sequence the work where I could perform it on the days I was there. I wasn't just asking myself to rise to the challenge, I was asking him to do so too. He couldn't. So he placed another employee to deal with issues that came up while I was out of the office. The other guy was what I like to refer to as a brilliant idiot. That's not just sour grapes; a few months after I left he escaped just ahead of the axe. In the months I was there he took it upon himself to unilaterally reconfigure systems on the days I wasn't scheduled to work.
Faced with the conflict, the boss made the decision to go with the guy who was in the office. Not the wisest of choices as it turned out, but completely understandable.
Yes, to an extent. It's called a negative feedback loop. It maintains the environment near a particular balance despite our behavior.
There's also something called a "tipping point." Once we push the environment a certain distance away from the balance point, the feedback loop will become self-reinforcing and will proceed towards a new balance point. In fact, it will resist moving away from the new balance point even it we stop doing the things that pushed us away from the original balance point in the first place.
This is a bad thing. The current balance point treats mammals pretty well. The new balance point may be too cold or too hot for our food crops. Or the partial pressure of oxygen may be too low to breath. The natural, balanced state of the air itself could become poisonous.
Wherever the tipping point is, and no one is quite sure, we really really don't want to reach it.
Sure, because nothing improves employee morale like watching their every move.
The current approach to biofuels is brain-dead anyway. Sugar beets grow easily in the right climate and have such a high energy density per production cost that it makes sense to convert them to ethanol. No US crop compares. The notion that we can do as well from low-density biomatter, like corn stalks, is just plain asinine.
That doesn't mean biofuels are a bad idea altogether. I saw a carbon sequestration scheme a few years ago where algae was used to scrub carbon from coal plant emisions. After sufficient growth, the algae could be harvested and converted to biofuel. That sort of process where the biomatter growth is an in-between step without an inherent cost is not an altogether bad idea.
But growing corn to make ethanol is ridiculous.
Nobody with a brain audits the security logs. The worms pound away at a rate of dozens per minute and the unsuccessful hack attempts are not far behind. If you were going to be able to detect a successful breach via the logs, you'd have prevented it at the firewall in the first place. The ratio between taxpayer-paid manpower to improved security would be exceptionally low.
Truth is, the logs are only valuable forensically. After detecting a breach or suspected breach, the logs can tell you more about what actually happened and how far it spread.
If a company has a significant number of computers in a lab, for example, there is probably already a staff member responsible for logging all the computers off at night and logging them back on in the morning.
That would be college, not company. While both start with a C, they're really not the same environment.
Yeah, back when I was in school, I made a pencil drawing of a wico joystick. The teacher saw and thought it was something else...
Unless your need to urinate routinely and perfectly coincides with your need to boot your PC, time speent booting your PC is still an extra cost for the company.
How is this insightful?
I can't imagine. I meant it as a double-entendre: I pointed out that most office computer users are making far more than minimum wage, hence the ratio is a lot higher that 1:5. At the same time I implied that you, specifically, were making minimum wage. I was hoping for a "funny."
In the interests of fair disclosure, my desktop is a laptop that I carry home every evening. I hibernate/dehibernate it nightly and reboot every couple weeks after it becomes unstable.
I'm not saying that an individual serious about going green can't find a reasonable way to leave his PC off at night. I am saying that as a broad corporate policy, it's misguided and typically more consumptive than just letting the employees do what they want.
That takes care of the minutes it spends "applying group policy" *after* the login prompt?
You're making the assumption that people work continuously whenever their computer is on
I'm also assuming that you earn minimum wage. ;)
1.42kw for the computer to run overnight has a cost of around 10 cents to the company.
Waiting 5 minutes for your PC to boot at the federal minimum wage of $6.55 per hour has a cost of around 55 cents to the company.
It costs the company at least 5 times as much to have you boot your PC in the morning as it does to let it run overnight.
Whether it's 1 climber or 20, you're shedding 22,000 miles of tether for every X tons of cargo lifted.
BTW, I did some more reading. The next problem with this idea is that the tether isn't a uniform thickness. In order to achieve the necessary tensile strength, they expect to have it significantly wider at the center of gravity. It's narrow at the ends because there isn't as much tension at the ends and the extra weight would increase the strength requirement at the center.
Hence its impractical to just reel it out unless you first redesign the tether to be a uniform width and support the extra weight.
As for one complex serving dozens of elevators, no way. These things are going to oscillate. They have to be far enough apart that they don't get tangled in each other.
You know, I see your point but you're making some big assumptions.
One of the whoppers is that tether material will be cheap enough to manufacture that we can afford to discard 22,000 miles of it for every cargo that we lift. Another is that we can apply sufficient quality control to this continuous manufacturing process that a defect doesn't cause the tether to snap.
Hard enough to do it once let alone continuously and a snapped tether means everything above whips out in to space, everything below falls to earth and you have to start all over again at geosynchronous orbit, extending tether material down and building up balanced anchor mass above.
On the other hand, there's every reason to believe that a tether with sufficient tensile strength will be effectively immune to the climber's gentle caress and we know how to build sufficient systems redundancy into a climber so that it can with five-nines probability go 22,000 miles without a fatal break down. Not easy, but doable.
Wait, so you're saying you want to put enough outward force on the tether to counteract acceleration due to gravity at the ground-level end of the tether for usefully large loads, then you're going to reel the tether out until the load reaches midway and will, if it releases the brake, climb on its own due to centripetal force?
Are you insane? We're having enough trouble just making materials whose tensile strength is sufficient that gravity on the lower half and centripetal force on the upper half won't rip it in two. Now you want to increase the strength requirement enough that you can reel it out a 50% greater distance without it tearing loose and install powerful enough systems on the ground station to then reel it back in? Haven't you ever been on a playground carousel and tried to move to the center?