It seems that there are currently two types of IT professionals in the US at the moment. Those who are competent and those who are 'certified' by a commercial organisation.
I suggest that there should be an independant not for profit organisation which requires a certain level of academic qualification *and* experience to join. An example of this is the 'British Computer Society'.
There are several levels of membership from 'Associate' to 'Fellow' depending on experience and qualifications. It encourages experience, training and *professional standards*!
The US government should just stop wasting money. Throwing good money after bad. Close down NASA and open up the space industry to anyone that wants to take part.
I've hacked together a system which uses INN as a sort of cheapo message oriented middleware server. Works quite well. It's pretty much what INN was designed for anyway.
It's basically INN with newsgroups acting as the queues. You have to do a little coding on the client side for posting/reading and loading/unloading the data, I used Perl and shell scripts for that but it isn't difficult.
Lets see, it's been a while... unload, compress, mimencode, encrypt, digitally sign and post. Cron job running every minute to read/post messages.
I don't use XML as the message format, it's just delimited ascii files but that's only because I haven't got round to it.
Microsoft know it. They are positioning themselves to be the broker for every electronic inter business transaction.
Middleware is going to be acting as the central nervous system of businesses. MS want that central nervous system running on MSMQ on W2K.
It's going to be like MS owning the TCP/IP protocol. The world needs a completely free, open, cross platform message oriented middleware system which uses open standards like those being created by Rosettanet.
At the moment, all the various middleware systems are incompatible. It's the same as the situation we had with all of the networking protocols before TCP/IP.
If they would start using DNS the way it was designed to be used, none of this would be a problem.
I mean, giving away second level domains directly? It's mad, a license for chaos (what we have now...). It's like a land grab. No end user should have a domain higher than a 3rd or 4th level domain.
The.com,.org,.net organisational domains should all have at least one additional layer of subdomains underneath which describe the area that a company or organisation is interested in. ford.land.vehicles.com microsoft.os.software.com microsoft.application.software.com fred.plumbers.co.uk linux.free.software.org
The existing DNS architecture is essentially flat with all the *.com entries, and that is not how it was designed to be used. DNS scales fine, the way it's being abused at the moment doesn't scale.
Create new top level domains, stop handing out.com,.net etc addresses and codify second/third level domain creation. Delegate the handing out of 3rd/4th level domains and make sure that the people you delegate it to strictly adhere to the purpose of that particular domain.
The design doesn't need to vent helium as no ballast is being burned off.
The weight of solar cell is irrelevant, the lifting capability of a lighter than air vehicle increases with the volume of helium. The surface area increases as the square of the size, the volume increases as the cube of the size. Bigger is better. Take a look at the CargoLifter web site (http://www.cargolifter.com/) for an example of an airship that's going to be used to lift 160 tonne cargos. The solar cells are still way less expensive than launching rockets into space.
I Am Not A Meteorologist (IANAM), but I understood that thunderstorms were limited to the troposphere and the stratosphere was relatively unaffected.
Development has started fairly recently: http://www.skystation.com/ is one company I've come across.
Until now the thinking has been fairly blinkered; ground or satellite. The problem is that both are very expensive to put in place and very expensive to upgrade.
Airships have had a bad rap since the Zeppelins crashed and burned, but it's gradually dawning on people (100 years of dawning) that they do have some features that no other aircraft can match.
The ships'll fly at 20Km (64,000 feet) which is twice as high as your regular airliner.
The metro/roaming argument is a fair one but ground based coverage started patchy and I now have to work hard to get out of regular ground based GSM coverage. With an airship, you just build it and tell it to fly out to where you want coverage, even easier than building a network of towers. The one thing that might be a problem is the use indoors. Satellite phones pretty much need line of site to the satellite and you'd typically switch to ground based mode to use it indoors.
I think the 'cover the world' attempts are misguided and pretty much doomed to failure at the moment. I can see satellites providing intercontinental routing for calls, but I just don't see a market for the mobile phone users.
The problem with the satellites is the launch costs. The satellite itself is $100 million, the launch is another $300 million. It's getting close to half a billion, and you need to launch 10 of them successfully for this particular network. That's several billion dollars outlay before you even get a customer.
Each airship is a few million dollars.
Thing is, you don't need to cover every inch of the planet. Start with the population centres; 1 for Milan, 1 for London, 1 for New York, 1 for Tokyo, 1 for Washington etc etc. As demand increases you fly more ships and the cost per unit goes down.
Each airship itself is an unmanned drone which flies at 20Km, there isn't a surface to air missile in existence which can fly that high. The gas bags are divided up so that a single failure can't bring the thing down. It gets a leak, put up a replacement and bring the damaged ship down for repair. What do you do when some space garbage hits a satellite at 50km/hr? Hope your spare will survive till you spend another $400 million to get a replacement up.
As to the technology to keep it up there. That's been around since the 19th century. Helium and a gas tight envelope.
One of the really cool features is the ability to upgrade such a network a bit at a time without having to spend billions of dollars in advance.
And at least the guy who forgot to let go would get in to the Darwin awards.:)
Don't need 100% coverage of the whole earth surface, just 100% coverage of 99% of the population. The ground based systems already provide this (in Europe). They just need to updgrade to GPRS.
15 years ago I'd have though this would be a great idea but not any more.
These satellite systems only apply to the 1% of the population who don't have ground based coverage. Not a lot of people.
GPRS will deliver 128K to the handset within a year or so. More later.
A much better solution for telecoms is stratospheric airships. They can be put on station for months and be brought back down for maintenance and upgrades. You'll need more of them than you would of satellites, but they don't cost half a billion dollars each.
All these satellites are silly. Good for the launchers though.
I predict that by the time the satellites are operational and they are selling a service to customers, the ground based systems will have bypassed them in terms of cost and coverage.
They'll go broke. A much cheaper and more flexible solution is stratospheric airships:
I reckon taxes are collected in the wrong way at the moment. This includes the UK as well.
At the moment, the national gvernment grabs about 40% of everything I earn and then grants some back to the local governments (councils). I would much rather see my tax revenue go to the local councils who can use the money for local services and projects which will benefit me and my neighbours. They could then decide what services the national government should be providing and how much they should cost.
Actually, the problem is that domains have not been delegated properly.
There should be a set of subdomains under the.coms and.orgs which describe what kind of business and organisations we're dealing with. A new set of top level domains isn't going to help.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems that there are currently two types of IT professionals in the US at the moment. Those who are competent and those who are 'certified' by a commercial organisation.
I suggest that there should be an independant not for profit organisation which requires a certain level of academic qualification *and* experience to join. An example of this is the 'British Computer Society'.
There are several levels of membership from 'Associate' to 'Fellow' depending on experience and qualifications. It encourages experience, training and *professional standards*!
British Computer Society:
http://www.bcs.org.uk/
I woudn't touch AD&D. What a pile of junk.
There are so many free RPG systems that are superior to D&D.
The US government should just stop wasting money. Throwing good money after bad. Close down NASA and open up the space industry to anyone that wants to take part.
I've done this with INN. It's in an earlier post.
I've hacked together a system which uses INN as a sort of cheapo message oriented middleware server. Works quite well. It's pretty much what INN was designed for anyway.
It's basically INN with newsgroups acting as the queues. You have to do a little coding on the client side for posting/reading and loading/unloading the data, I used Perl and shell scripts for that but it isn't difficult.
Lets see, it's been a while... unload, compress, mimencode, encrypt, digitally sign and post. Cron job running every minute to read/post messages.
I don't use XML as the message format, it's just delimited ascii files but that's only because I haven't got round to it.
I'm not going to tell you specifically what you need to do, everyone's requirements are unique. Instead, here are some links on middleware:
m l
http://www.sei.cmu.edu/str/descriptions/momt.ht
http://www.internet2.edu/middleware/
http://www.moma-inc.org/
http://www.xmlBlaster.org/
Microsoft know it. They are positioning themselves to be the broker for every electronic inter business transaction.
Middleware is going to be acting as the central nervous system of businesses. MS want that central nervous system running on MSMQ on W2K.
It's going to be like MS owning the TCP/IP protocol. The world needs a completely free, open, cross platform message oriented middleware system which uses open standards like those being created by Rosettanet.
At the moment, all the various middleware systems are incompatible. It's the same as the situation we had with all of the networking protocols before TCP/IP.
http://www.internet2.edu/middleware/
http://www.rosettanet.org/
Just thought I'd point this out though I'm replying to myself.
looks like middleware to me.
At the same clock speed, PowerPC chips run approx 40-50% faster than the PIII equivalent. So your 550MHz PPC is approx equivalent to a 750MHz PIII.
Though (Hint Hint IBM/Motorola) it *would* be really nice to have a 1+GHz PPC! A 1GHz PPC would be approx equivalent to a 1.5GHz Intel.
Of course in *real* life, CPU speed is largely irrelevant. RAM and disk performance is much much more important. (It's all about I/O)
I mean, giving away second level domains directly? It's mad, a license for chaos (what we have now...). It's like a land grab. No end user should have a domain higher than a 3rd or 4th level domain.
The .com, .org, .net organisational domains should all have at least one additional layer of subdomains underneath which describe the area that a company or organisation is interested in. ford.land.vehicles.com
microsoft.os.software.com
microsoft.application.software.com
fred.plumbers.co.uk
linux.free.software.org
The existing DNS architecture is essentially flat with all the *.com entries, and that is not how it was designed to be used. DNS scales fine, the way it's being abused at the moment doesn't scale.
Create new top level domains, stop handing out .com, .net etc addresses and codify second/third level domain creation. Delegate the handing out of 3rd/4th level domains and make sure that the people you delegate it to strictly adhere to the purpose of that particular domain.
The weight of solar cell is irrelevant, the lifting capability of a lighter than air vehicle increases with the volume of helium. The surface area increases as the square of the size, the volume increases as the cube of the size. Bigger is better. Take a look at the CargoLifter web site (http://www.cargolifter.com/) for an example of an airship that's going to be used to lift 160 tonne cargos. The solar cells are still way less expensive than launching rockets into space.
I Am Not A Meteorologist (IANAM), but I understood that thunderstorms were limited to the troposphere and the stratosphere was relatively unaffected.
What if some h@x0r takes control of your satellite?
Flying computer controlled aircraft is much easier than trying to control a car completely by computer. Every jet liner is fly by wire these days.
Development has started fairly recently:
http://www.skystation.com/ is one company I've come across.
Until now the thinking has been fairly blinkered; ground or satellite. The problem is that both are very expensive to put in place and very expensive to upgrade.
Airships have had a bad rap since the Zeppelins crashed and burned, but it's gradually dawning on people (100 years of dawning) that they do have some features that no other aircraft can match.
A 20km tether?
The metro/roaming argument is a fair one but ground based coverage started patchy and I now have to work hard to get out of regular ground based GSM coverage. With an airship, you just build it and tell it to fly out to where you want coverage, even easier than building a network of towers. The one thing that might be a problem is the use indoors. Satellite phones pretty much need line of site to the satellite and you'd typically switch to ground based mode to use it indoors.
I think the 'cover the world' attempts are misguided and pretty much doomed to failure at the moment. I can see satellites providing intercontinental routing for calls, but I just don't see a market for the mobile phone users.
Each airship is a few million dollars.
Thing is, you don't need to cover every inch of the planet. Start with the population centres; 1 for Milan, 1 for London, 1 for New York, 1 for Tokyo, 1 for Washington etc etc. As demand increases you fly more ships and the cost per unit goes down.
Each airship itself is an unmanned drone which flies at 20Km, there isn't a surface to air missile in existence which can fly that high. The gas bags are divided up so that a single failure can't bring the thing down. It gets a leak, put up a replacement and bring the damaged ship down for repair. What do you do when some space garbage hits a satellite at 50km/hr? Hope your spare will survive till you spend another $400 million to get a replacement up.
As to the technology to keep it up there. That's been around since the 19th century. Helium and a gas tight envelope.
One of the really cool features is the ability to upgrade such a network a bit at a time without having to spend billions of dollars in advance.
And at least the guy who forgot to let go would get in to the Darwin awards. :)
Don't need 100% coverage of the whole earth surface, just 100% coverage of 99% of the population. The ground based systems already provide this (in Europe). They just need to updgrade to GPRS.
15 years ago I'd have though this would be a great idea but not any more.
These satellite systems only apply to the 1% of the population who don't have ground based coverage. Not a lot of people.
A much better solution for telecoms is stratospheric airships. They can be put on station for months and be brought back down for maintenance and upgrades. You'll need more of them than you would of satellites, but they don't cost half a billion dollars each.
All these satellites are silly. Good for the launchers though.
I predict that by the time the satellites are operational and they are selling a service to customers, the ground based systems will have bypassed them in terms of cost and coverage.
They'll go broke. A much cheaper and more flexible solution is stratospheric airships:
http://www.skystation.com/
While commercial satellite launches are a good starting point I'd like to see some manned vehicles, and that needs near 100% success. :)
It's a cheap, innovative launch platform and the thing is insured. However they'll have to do better than 66% success.
More I say, More.
I reckon taxes are collected in the wrong way at the moment. This includes the UK as well.
At the moment, the national gvernment grabs about 40% of everything I earn and then grants some back to the local governments (councils). I would much rather see my tax revenue go to the local councils who can use the money for local services and projects which will benefit me and my neighbours. They could then decide what services the national government should be providing and how much they should cost.
When have you ever heard of MS shipping a product on time?
It'll appear on the shelves in 2005 and be renamed to 'X-Box 2010 Pro'.
Actually, the problem is that domains have not been delegated properly.
.coms and .orgs which describe what kind of business and organisations we're dealing with. A new set of top level domains isn't going to help.
There should be a set of subdomains under the
ie.
sun.os-vendors.software.com
microsoft.os-vendors.software.com
microsoft.productivi.software.com
Linux.os.free.software.org
*.telecoms.electronics.com
etc etc
The client software then hides the various domains from the user.
The existing flat structures are completely fucked up. I bet they'll fuck up any new structures as well.