This bill is BOTH pro-business AND pro-consumer. The only 'anti' thing it might be is anti-big-telco. For the vast majority (i.e. non-telcos) businesses, this is good, as for all customers.
Watch a video on an abbatoir? I've helped round up lambs into the van, and then *taken* them to the abbatoir. A proper abbatoir will kill fast because a panicked, fearful animal will taste worse when butchered. You want a fast kill.
My short reply hardly covered all the systems an airliner has. In particular, most airliners today will have (for radio navigation):
- An IFR-certified GPS receiver - INS - VOR/DME - ADF
Also a communications radio. If all the above fail, they can tell ATC that they have multiple failures of their navigational aids, and ask for radar vectors to the nearest suitable airfield. ATC then tells them to fly the appropriate heading.
In addition to this, the crew also have:
- a good old fashioned compass - a good old fashioned clock - Mk.I eyeball
Even with a complete loss of radio equipment, including comm radios, a properly trained crew can navigate to a VFR (visual flight rules) airfield. Aircraft fly on the principles that Newton and Bernouilli discovered, *not* on the principles that Marconi discovered.
My GSM phone sems to cause a lot more inteference to things on European frequencies than it does on US frequencies, though. I think there may be some obnoxious harmonics that get generated when on European frequencies.
An IFR-certified GPS (which, if an airliner uses GPS, it will be) has a feature called RAIM (Receiver Autonomous Integrity Monitoring). Basically, a RAIM GPS receiver will cross check its own navigational solution, and if it fails the cross check, the receiver will RAIM flag (i.e. it will show a failure flag instead of navigational information). So a GPS fitted to an airliner won't give incorrect information - it will flag instead.
They don't need to specifically monitor for it - GSM on European frequencies is particularly obnoxious to communication radios and all you have to do is listen for the 'bip b b bip b b bip b b bip' noise on the radio to know someone has left a phone switched on.
The study is flawed. Flight crew do not rely on a single source of data to tell them what's going on ever (well, at least professional ones don't - included in that are private pilots who fly in a professional manner). In addition, IFR GPS receivers have something called RAIM which enables them to know and inform the crew when their navigational accuracy is questionable.
Airliners today use not only GPS, but INS (inertial navigation - which requires no external inputs once it's set running) as well as old-fashioned VOR receivers. They can also ask for radar vectors off ATC if all their navaids were to fail.
GSM operates on a different frequency in the US and Europe - in my experience, *much* more inteference happens on the European frequencies than the US frequencies.
Cell phones DO cause inteference with aviation comm radios (I have first hand experience). It is distracting more than anything else; I've never seen a cell phone intefere with navigational radios or GPS (and IFR-certified GPS has a feature called RAIM which will prevent it from giving the crew incorrect navigational data).
Any IFR certified GPS receiver *must* include a feature called RAIM - Receiver Autonomous Integrity Monitoring. The point of RAIM is that the receiver can detect when it is giving erroneous navigational information. At that point the receiver 'RAIM flags' rather than giving the crew misleading information. The crew can then ask for radar vectors (in the highly unlikely event that GPS is their sole navigation system) from ATC because they know it's wrong.
Cell phones DO interfere with aircraft radios though, and I have first hand experience. We were about to line up for an ILS approach into runway 08 at Ronaldsway. The pilot, a friend of mine, was making his first ever night IFR approach (it was raining, and cloud bases were about 800 feet, so it wasn't a really sticky IFR approach but it was still in the clouds and at night). I was monitoring his progress from the right seat. Sadly, he had forgotten to turn off his mobile phone.
His wife decided to phone him just as we were intercepting the localizer for 08. All audio on the aircraft was obliterated by this noise: 'bip b b bip b b bip b b bip b b bip b b bip brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr' (if you have a GSM phone on European frequencies, it's likely you've heard this noise - cell phones interfere with almost *any* radio and audio equipment in Europe probably due to some harmonic off the frequency used) until he managed to shut the thing off. It was extremely distracting to say the least, and obliterated any chance of hearing any ATC instructions. It did *not* however intefere with the localiser or glideslope receiver which showed normal indications throughout. I took control while he found his phone to shut it off.
I doubt a cell phone will ever cause an accident due to disruption of navigational equipment (especially GPS) but it may do due to distraction at a critical phase of flight (especially if it occurs during a high workload situation, or perhaps when some unrelated emergency is occurring).
So how do you have simply \ instead of C:\? I know you can mount extra partitions on mounts, but you can't seem to get rid of drive C, nor can you get rid of drive letters for removable drives.
Add to that grand the cost of anti-malware subscriptions for each machine, and the cost goes up quite a bit.
A more constructive thing to advise (especially since a grand can be a lot to a cash-strapped school - we don't know *where* this school is, it could be in Mozambique for all we know) is do a bit of a cost/benefit exercise:
- what software do they run now? - out of this, what runs trouble-free on, say, Ubuntu (probably a good choice of distro for this situation) - what educational software runs on Linux natively, and does it do what you want?
Compare this to Windows running free and Free software (there's no need to buy Office, for example - in this situation, OpenOffice is fine).
Once you have that sorted, show it to the teachers who are going to use the computers. It doesn't matter how much or little it costs, if the teachers aren't going to support it you're sunk so you must have their buy-in. All you need to do is show one sample machine loaded with your proposed software and let the teachers see if it will do what they want it to do. At the end of the day, you might find that the price of Windows is worth it -- or you might find that the tradeoffs if any are acceptable, and having a small network of Ubuntu systems is better.
Funny you mention DVD-RW. I have CentOS 4.2 (basically, community supported RedHat Enterprise Linux) on my HP PC at work. Recently, I put a dual layer DVD-RW drive in the machine.
It just worked. I've happily burned dozens of DVD-R disks.
(Incidentally, all the other hardware on this HP PC just worked, too).
I've got bad news for you - you were suckered. The film 'Fargo' has absolutely no basis in fact whatsoever. They put 'based on a true story' merely to spice it up.
It's not necessarily a question of network bandwidth, either - recently, I had to fix someone's server remotely. All I had available was my GPRS mobile phone plus an SSH client. Now even if I had 3G service with adequate bandwidth for a remote GUI (but terrible latency, so it would have still sucked), the screen would be far too tiny to be useful. But with ssh, even my phone was useful for fixing a server.
This is really akin to saying "unless you're a real videophile, you're probably better off buying a 13" CRT than a 47" widescreen plasma set."
Huh? If I'd said '...you're better off buying a pair of shitty Radio Shack speakers', you'd have a point, but I said 'really nice speakers'. For $300, I could get a fantastic pair of speakers (which I would be using all the time - most people I know who aren't videophiles maybe watch one movie a week, but listen to maybe a dozen CDs a week) which work great for the music collection and the weekly movie, instead of a bunch of speakers that aren't really going to help for music, and sound nowhere near as good. As for the TV, even non-videophiles aren't going to watch movies on a 13 inch CRT except perhaps in a caravan or boat. For the video end, for someone who watches mostly TV on the device and just a few movies, a reasonable CRT or LCD tv (NON-widescreen if you mostly watch TV) is a better way to spend your money than a 42 inch plasma screen.
Alistair Cooke is famous in Britain for the radio programme, "Letter from America". He did this programme for over 50 years, and only stopped a few weeks before he died. This 20 minute (IIRC) radio show was always +5, Insightful (and is missed by many).
Unless you're a real videophile, you're probably better off just buying two really nice speakers instead of 7 average ones. Not to mention the rats nest of cables 7 will result in.
Did you try jHymn? I'm deliberately staying on iTunes 5 so I can un-DRM the stuff I buy with jHymn. My Linux box plays AAC quite happily so I'm not going to the extra step of converting them to ogg. With jHymn you get to keep all the metadata too.
Many phone plans have an allowance of free texts. Even so, people seldom have a long conversation with texts, normally it's something like 'going 2 the pub 2nite?' with a response of 'yes at 8', EOT. It's also a lot more considerate to text in a public place, such as on the train or the bus because you don't annoy your fellow passengers with annoying ringtones and conversation carried out at the top of your voice.
The other use of texting is sending messages to lots of people, for example, at the glider club I'm in, whoever does the weather check in the morning texts the membership with a message whether we are flying or not. To do it in a text takes seconds, to call each member individually would take much longer.
I think you're not reading that carefully enough. The summary is very badly written; Virgin reports... 93 million... sent every day United States.... 700 million per year.
Or to normalise the two statistics to the same time base, UK texters send 34 billion texts per year, but US texters only send 0.7 billion per year despite the population being 5 times larger.
A possible reason for the lower amount of texting in the US is that texting across networks is pretty unreliable. Texting between GSM providers in the US seems to work OK, but I have never yet successfully sent a text from my GSM phone to someone on one of these odd non-GSM systems they have in the US. In Britain and Europe, texting just works regardless of provider.
But in the case of the BOFH, who metaadmins the metaadmin? I wouldn't like to be the BOFH's metaadmin unless my practises were strictly aligned with his for fear of a long weekend in the tape safe:-)
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This bill is BOTH pro-business AND pro-consumer. The only 'anti' thing it might be is anti-big-telco. For the vast majority (i.e. non-telcos) businesses, this is good, as for all customers.
Watch a video on an abbatoir? I've helped round up lambs into the van, and then *taken* them to the abbatoir. A proper abbatoir will kill fast because a panicked, fearful animal will taste worse when butchered. You want a fast kill.
My short reply hardly covered all the systems an airliner has. In particular, most airliners today will have (for radio navigation):
- An IFR-certified GPS receiver
- INS
- VOR/DME
- ADF
Also a communications radio. If all the above fail, they can tell ATC that they have multiple failures of their navigational aids, and ask for radar vectors to the nearest suitable airfield. ATC then tells them to fly the appropriate heading.
In addition to this, the crew also have:
- a good old fashioned compass
- a good old fashioned clock
- Mk.I eyeball
Even with a complete loss of radio equipment, including comm radios, a properly trained crew can navigate to a VFR (visual flight rules) airfield. Aircraft fly on the principles that Newton and Bernouilli discovered, *not* on the principles that Marconi discovered.
My GSM phone sems to cause a lot more inteference to things on European frequencies than it does on US frequencies, though. I think there may be some obnoxious harmonics that get generated when on European frequencies.
An IFR-certified GPS (which, if an airliner uses GPS, it will be) has a feature called RAIM (Receiver Autonomous Integrity Monitoring). Basically, a RAIM GPS receiver will cross check its own navigational solution, and if it fails the cross check, the receiver will RAIM flag (i.e. it will show a failure flag instead of navigational information). So a GPS fitted to an airliner won't give incorrect information - it will flag instead.
They don't need to specifically monitor for it - GSM on European frequencies is particularly obnoxious to communication radios and all you have to do is listen for the 'bip b b bip b b bip b b bip' noise on the radio to know someone has left a phone switched on.
The study is flawed. Flight crew do not rely on a single source of data to tell them what's going on ever (well, at least professional ones don't - included in that are private pilots who fly in a professional manner). In addition, IFR GPS receivers have something called RAIM which enables them to know and inform the crew when their navigational accuracy is questionable.
Airliners today use not only GPS, but INS (inertial navigation - which requires no external inputs once it's set running) as well as old-fashioned VOR receivers. They can also ask for radar vectors off ATC if all their navaids were to fail.
GSM operates on a different frequency in the US and Europe - in my experience, *much* more inteference happens on the European frequencies than the US frequencies.
Cell phones DO cause inteference with aviation comm radios (I have first hand experience). It is distracting more than anything else; I've never seen a cell phone intefere with navigational radios or GPS (and IFR-certified GPS has a feature called RAIM which will prevent it from giving the crew incorrect navigational data).
Any IFR certified GPS receiver *must* include a feature called RAIM - Receiver Autonomous Integrity Monitoring. The point of RAIM is that the receiver can detect when it is giving erroneous navigational information. At that point the receiver 'RAIM flags' rather than giving the crew misleading information. The crew can then ask for radar vectors (in the highly unlikely event that GPS is their sole navigation system) from ATC because they know it's wrong.
Cell phones DO interfere with aircraft radios though, and I have first hand experience. We were about to line up for an ILS approach into runway 08 at Ronaldsway. The pilot, a friend of mine, was making his first ever night IFR approach (it was raining, and cloud bases were about 800 feet, so it wasn't a really sticky IFR approach but it was still in the clouds and at night). I was monitoring his progress from the right seat. Sadly, he had forgotten to turn off his mobile phone.
His wife decided to phone him just as we were intercepting the localizer for 08. All audio on the aircraft was obliterated by this noise: 'bip b b bip b b bip b b bip b b bip b b bip brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr' (if you have a GSM phone on European frequencies, it's likely you've heard this noise - cell phones interfere with almost *any* radio and audio equipment in Europe probably due to some harmonic off the frequency used) until he managed to shut the thing off. It was extremely distracting to say the least, and obliterated any chance of hearing any ATC instructions. It did *not* however intefere with the localiser or glideslope receiver which showed normal indications throughout. I took control while he found his phone to shut it off.
I doubt a cell phone will ever cause an accident due to disruption of navigational equipment (especially GPS) but it may do due to distraction at a critical phase of flight (especially if it occurs during a high workload situation, or perhaps when some unrelated emergency is occurring).
I must be missing the documentation then. Do you have a command line that will do the equivalent to:
net use x: \\servername\share
but instead of x:, to \mnt?
How do you make a removable drive mount on \mnt\cdrom or \mnt\usbkey instead of a random drive letter?
So how do you have simply \ instead of C:\? I know you can mount extra partitions on mounts, but you can't seem to get rid of drive C, nor can you get rid of drive letters for removable drives.
Add to that grand the cost of anti-malware subscriptions for each machine, and the cost goes up quite a bit.
A more constructive thing to advise (especially since a grand can be a lot to a cash-strapped school - we don't know *where* this school is, it could be in Mozambique for all we know) is do a bit of a cost/benefit exercise:
- what software do they run now?
- out of this, what runs trouble-free on, say, Ubuntu (probably a good choice of distro for this situation)
- what educational software runs on Linux natively, and does it do what you want?
Compare this to Windows running free and Free software (there's no need to buy Office, for example - in this situation, OpenOffice is fine).
Once you have that sorted, show it to the teachers who are going to use the computers. It doesn't matter how much or little it costs, if the teachers aren't going to support it you're sunk so you must have their buy-in. All you need to do is show one sample machine loaded with your proposed software and let the teachers see if it will do what they want it to do. At the end of the day, you might find that the price of Windows is worth it -- or you might find that the tradeoffs if any are acceptable, and having a small network of Ubuntu systems is better.
Funny you mention DVD-RW. I have CentOS 4.2 (basically, community supported RedHat Enterprise Linux) on my HP PC at work. Recently, I put a dual layer DVD-RW drive in the machine.
It just worked. I've happily burned dozens of DVD-R disks.
(Incidentally, all the other hardware on this HP PC just worked, too).
I've got bad news for you - you were suckered. The film 'Fargo' has absolutely no basis in fact whatsoever. They put 'based on a true story' merely to spice it up.
It's not necessarily a question of network bandwidth, either - recently, I had to fix someone's server remotely. All I had available was my GPRS mobile phone plus an SSH client. Now even if I had 3G service with adequate bandwidth for a remote GUI (but terrible latency, so it would have still sucked), the screen would be far too tiny to be useful. But with ssh, even my phone was useful for fixing a server.
Huh? If I'd said '...you're better off buying a pair of shitty Radio Shack speakers', you'd have a point, but I said 'really nice speakers'. For $300, I could get a fantastic pair of speakers (which I would be using all the time - most people I know who aren't videophiles maybe watch one movie a week, but listen to maybe a dozen CDs a week) which work great for the music collection and the weekly movie, instead of a bunch of speakers that aren't really going to help for music, and sound nowhere near as good. As for the TV, even non-videophiles aren't going to watch movies on a 13 inch CRT except perhaps in a caravan or boat. For the video end, for someone who watches mostly TV on the device and just a few movies, a reasonable CRT or LCD tv (NON-widescreen if you mostly watch TV) is a better way to spend your money than a 42 inch plasma screen.
For British readers, Alistair Cooke is famous for his show "Letter from America" on BBC Radio 4, which he presented for over 50 years.
Alistair Cooke is famous in Britain for the radio programme, "Letter from America". He did this programme for over 50 years, and only stopped a few weeks before he died. This 20 minute (IIRC) radio show was always +5, Insightful (and is missed by many).
Unless you're a real videophile, you're probably better off just buying two really nice speakers instead of 7 average ones. Not to mention the rats nest of cables 7 will result in.
Did you try jHymn? I'm deliberately staying on iTunes 5 so I can un-DRM the stuff I buy with jHymn. My Linux box plays AAC quite happily so I'm not going to the extra step of converting them to ogg. With jHymn you get to keep all the metadata too.
Many phone plans have an allowance of free texts. Even so, people seldom have a long conversation with texts, normally it's something like 'going 2 the pub 2nite?' with a response of 'yes at 8', EOT. It's also a lot more considerate to text in a public place, such as on the train or the bus because you don't annoy your fellow passengers with annoying ringtones and conversation carried out at the top of your voice.
The other use of texting is sending messages to lots of people, for example, at the glider club I'm in, whoever does the weather check in the morning texts the membership with a message whether we are flying or not. To do it in a text takes seconds, to call each member individually would take much longer.
I think you're not reading that carefully enough. The summary is very badly written; Virgin reports ... 93 million ... sent every day United States .... 700 million per year.
Or to normalise the two statistics to the same time base, UK texters send 34 billion texts per year, but US texters only send 0.7 billion per year despite the population being 5 times larger.
A possible reason for the lower amount of texting in the US is that texting across networks is pretty unreliable. Texting between GSM providers in the US seems to work OK, but I have never yet successfully sent a text from my GSM phone to someone on one of these odd non-GSM systems they have in the US. In Britain and Europe, texting just works regardless of provider.
But in the case of the BOFH, who metaadmins the metaadmin? I wouldn't like to be the BOFH's metaadmin unless my practises were strictly aligned with his for fear of a long weekend in the tape safe :-)