Your ISP can give you a block of dynamic/static IP addresses, which your router assigns instead of 192.168.1.X?
That's how the internet works to begin with, and it used to be the norm for IPv4 networks. A lot of large networks still do it that way -- the computer I'm on at work has a globally unique IP address. You can still get a block of static IPs if you buy a business-class connection. That used to be almost the definition of a business connection, back when more people ran their own servers instead of using hosting services. IP addresses cost money, so ISPs try to have as few as possible. NAT came about when people started getting multiple computers per household but didn't want to pay for a business connection. It was never meant to prop up the internet as a whole.
Unsurprisingly, address exhaustion still going on. APNIC and RIPE are down to their last/8 and are now handing out addresses as slowly as they can. ARIN and LACNIC will reach their last/8 this year. AFRINIC won't run out for years, so I suspect their new infrastructure will be built on IPv6. Here's the relevant data.
There's a finite number of addresses, guys. They're not going to magically stop running out.
EEs have been designing circuits with structural complexity at least as great as any software program, using graphical tools, all along.
The most complex circuits (in ICs) are synthesized from text-based HDLs or automatically generated by software tools. Schematics are common at the board level, but that's nowhere near the complexity of even a medium-sized software program. And of course all functionality is explained through text-based documentation.
Text is better for expressing abstract concepts. Graphics are better for expressing concrete concepts. If you try to use graphics for abstract concepts, you end up adding a lot of text anyway -- flowcharts, for example.
Amazon has much better selection than any store and doesn't require me to drive anywhere, plus it has reviews. I buy almost everything that isn't groceries off of Amazon with Prime. If I need something quickly, I do the $3.99 upgrade to overnight shipping.
If you don't care about long it takes a package to arrive, there's free super saver shipping on the same items eligible for Prime. It's just different tiers of service for people with different preferences.
Wild animals often live in dirty environments and eat questionable foods, and yet they are usually just fine.
No they aren't. They die in large numbers. Take housecats, for example -- indoor average lifespan is >12 years, outdoor average lifespan is 5 years. Stray dogs live 1-2 years on the street, but average 11 years in a home.
"Generally speaking", are you kidding me? Calling someone doesn't require fraud -- people put their phone number in their email sigs and on resumes. For that matter, you can solicit someone via email or LinkedIn.
Well, empirically, it's not self-defeating -- their scheme worked:
The companies argued that the non-recruitment agreements had nothing to do with driving down wages. But the court ruled that there was “extensive documentary evidence” that the pacts were designed specifically to push down wages, and that they succeeded in doing so. The evidence includes software tools used by the companies to keep tabs on pay scales to ensure that within job “families” or titles, pay remained equitable within a margin of variation, and that as competition and recruitment boiled over in 2005, emails between executives and human resources departments complained about the pressure on wages caused by recruiters cold calling their employees, and bidding wars for key engineers....
As Intel’s director of Compensation and Benefits bluntly summed up the Silicon Valley culture’s official cant versus its actual practices,
While we pay lip service to meritocracy, we really believe more in treating everyone the same within broad bands.
The article offers an unsurprising explanation:
One of the reasons why non-recruitment works so well in artificially lowering workers’ wages is that it deprives employees of information about the job market, particularly one as competitive and overheating as Silicon Valley’s in the mid-2000s. As the companies’ own internal documents and statements showed, they generally considered cold-calling recruitment of “passive” talent — workers not necessarily looking for a job until enticed by a recruiter — to be the most important means of hiring the best employees.
Salaries are major secrets in large corporations. That means senior management and HR have access to information that workers don't. Information asymmetry breaks markets. As for why nobody else tried it... first, smaller companies often don't have tons of money to offer rock star salaries. Second, smaller companies can be intimidated. Adobe, for example:
Shortly after sealing the pact with Google, Jobs strong-armed Adobe into joining after he complained to CEO Bruce Chizen that Adobe was recruiting Apple’s employees. Chizen sheepishly responded that he thought only a small class of employees were off-limits:
I thought we agreed not to recruit any senior level employees. I would propose we keep it that way. Open to discuss. It would be good to agree.
Jobs responded by threatening war:
OK, I’ll tell our recruiters they are free to approach any Adobe employee who is not a Sr. Director or VP. Am I understanding your position correctly?
Adobe’s Chizen immediately backed down:
I’d rather agree NOT to actively solicit any employee from either company..If you are in agreement, I will let my folks know.
The next day, Chizen let his folks — Adobe’s VP of Human Resources — know that “we are not to solicit ANY Apple employees, and visa versa.” Chizen was worried that if he didn’t agree, Jobs would make Adobe pay:
if I tell Steve [Jobs] it’s open season (other than senior managers), he will deliberately poach Adobe just to prove a point. Knowing Steve, he will go after some of our top Mac talent... and he will do it in a way in which they will be enticed to come (extraordinary packages and Steve wooing).
Indeed Jobs even threatened war against Google early 2005 before their “gentlemen’s agreement,” telling Sergey Brin to back off recruiting Apple’s Safari team:
if you [Brin] hire a single one of these people that means war.
Brin immediately advised Google’s Executive Management Team to halt all recruiting of Apple employ
Not-so-coincidentally, six years ago was 2008, when Obama got elected president. When there's a Democrat in the White House, the right-wing fringe groups go crazy and the big-money donors open the taps to fund them in the hope of winning the next election. Climate change denial is basically a big conspiracy theory that plays off of right-wing paranoia. (The UN! Socialism! Elitists! Foreign aid!Poor people are coming for our money!) It benefits a lot of Republican donors. It's pretty straightforward, really. In the absence of expertise, it's easy to manufacture doubt. We see it with evolution all the time. Slashdotters just like the think they're too good to fall for that sort of manipulation.
I'm sure the process is more complicated than I think, but it bothers me that we need an entire book to tell people that you should have something to say *before* you try to communicate with others. Perhaps a visit to Condescending Corporate Brand Page would be more helpful.
Bitcoin is the most amazing thing happening in the world today.
This is only true if you believe that central banking is inherently harmful/evil, and things like a gold standard are a great idea. Despite the article's claim that economists constantly argue over everything and thus know nothing (which is incredible ignorance on its own), the case for fiat currency is pretty good. But the discussion here is being driven by Libertarians, who A) love abstract reasoning and hypothetical examples, and B) are obsessed with the fantasy that people everywhere are conspiring to steal all their money using institutions like the Federal Reserve. Thus, Bitcoin stories and discussions are both inherently political and utterly divorced from actual domain knowledge. Slashdot, like any discussion site, is at its worst when faced with such a combination. It gets old after a while, especially when there's not much new to be said.
(Not to say that everyone supporting Bitcoin is a Libertarian, but most people seem to adopt their framing as a starting point. Anonymous financial transactions *must* be a good thing, because now you can hide from the government! Never mind that corrupt rich people benefit far more from that than we do...)
Not exactly. The same mechanism used in Bitcoin for mining is also used in twister but for a different purpose, ensuring the order in which user registrations took place (the nickname belongs to whoever registered it first). twister network must incentive users to mine, so block chain may keep advancing. However, unlike Bitcoin, there is no monetary value involved. The twister incentive is: whoever finds the hash collision to validate a new block of transactions will be awarded with the right to send a promoted message. Promoted messages have a certain probability of being displayed by twister client.
Promoted messages? Am I going to be flooded with SPAM?
No, I hope not. I don’t like promoted message any more than you do, but I believe that a fair balance between the allowed volume of promoted messages will not upset the users while providing a good incentive for people to run the twister infrastructure. Currently there is a maximum of one promoted message to be shown every 8 hours for every client, but the exact policy to be used is meant to be decided by the community. The mechanism is actually quite democratic. Anyone can start generating blocks to send promoted messages, so this is effectively an advertising mechanism reaching the entire population of twister users. While an entrepreneur may invest in a mining rig to announce his product, a non-profit organization may ask his supporters to use their own personal computers to increase the probability of spreading their message.
Interesting! I didn't see it in the DD-WRT router database so I assumed it wasn't compatible. I'll have to run some tests and see if I want to give it a try.
Wireless-AC is still at a very early stage, but there are a few routers available. I just replaced my DIR-655 N router with a Netgear Nighthawk R7000, which was a huge improvement. I previously got about 3 Mbps with 2.4 GHz, but now I can use the full 24 Mbps of my internet connection on 5 GHz AC. The existing (good) routers are all about $200 with three antennas. The Linksys has four, so maybe they're going for higher bandwidth. (There are several tiers of AC performance.) Plus, MSRP is not the same as retail price. So my guess is that the WRT1900 will be a sort of next-gen AC router at a similar price point.
Before you all rush to upgrade, note that there aren't many AC adapters yet. There's an Intel 7260HMW mini-PCIe for laptops ($25, no antenna included) and the Asus PCE-AC68 for desktops ($100), plus several USB adapters. I've never had much luck with USB wireless, but YMMV. I'm using the PCE-AC68 with good results. I needed a new router anyway for my new home, so I took the plunge. If you're okay with your current network, I'd suggest waiting another year before you upgrade.
Yeah, but the GGP was confused about something else -- they were talking like more transistors per unit area *only* gets you more functionality. What's happening now is that die shrinkage is offset by process costs. If the die size wasn't still shrinking, prices would be rising, not holding steady.
more transistors per unit area on a chip is worthless atm.
That assumes your processor is a fixed size. It isn't. The smaller your die is, the cheaper it is. That's how process improvements make things cheaper.
If even half of the FDA's letter is correct (and I see no reason to doubt it), they've been bending over backwards to work with 23andMe for years. The company made a deliberate decision to both ignore the regulators and (more damningly) fail to study the effectiveness of their own product, and now they're paying for it. Here's the relevant section of the letter:
Your company submitted 510(k)s for PGS on July 2, 2012 and September 4, 2012, for several of these indications for use. However, to date, your company has failed to address the issues described during previous interactions with the Agency or provide the additional information identified in our September 13, 2012 letter for (b)(4) and in our November 20, 2012 letter for (b)(4), as required under 21 CFR 807.87(1). Consequently, the 510(k)s are considered withdrawn, see 21 C.F.R. 807.87(1), as we explained in our letters to you on March 12, 2013 and May 21, 2013. To date, 23andMe has failed to provide adequate information to support a determination that the PGS is substantially equivalent to a legally marketed predicate for any of the uses for which you are marketing it; no other submission for the PGS device that you are marketing has been provided under section 510(k) of the Act, 21 U.S.C. 360(k).
The Office of In Vitro Diagnostics and Radiological Health (OIR) has a long history of working with companies to help them come into compliance with the FD&C Act. Since July of 2009, we have been diligently working to help you comply with regulatory requirements regarding safety and effectiveness and obtain marketing authorization for your PGS device. FDA has spent significant time evaluating the intended uses of the PGS to determine whether certain uses might be appropriately classified into class II, thus requiring only 510(k) clearance or de novo classification and not PMA approval, and we have proposed modifications to the device’s labeling that could mitigate risks and render certain intended uses appropriate for de novo classification. Further, we provided ample detailed feedback to 23andMe regarding the types of data it needs to submit for the intended uses of the PGS. As part of our interactions with you, including more than 14 face-to-face and teleconference meetings, hundreds of email exchanges, and dozens of written communications, we provided you with specific feedback on study protocols and clinical and analytical validation requirements, discussed potential classifications and regulatory pathways (including reasonable submission timelines), provided statistical advice, and discussed potential risk mitigation strategies. As discussed above, FDA is concerned about the public health consequences of inaccurate results from the PGS device; the main purpose of compliance with FDA’s regulatory requirements is to ensure that the tests work.
However, even after these many interactions with 23andMe, we still do not have any assurance that the firm has analytically or clinically validated the PGS for its intended uses, which have expanded from the uses that the firm identified in its submissions. In your letter dated January 9, 2013, you stated that the firm is “completing the additional analytical and clinical validations for the tests that have been submitted” and is “planning extensive labeling studies that will take several months to complete.” Thus, months after you submitted your 510(k)s and more than 5 years after you began marketing, you still had not completed some of the studies and had not even started other studies necessary to support a marketing submission for the PGS. It is now eleven months later, and you have yet to provide FDA with any new information about these tests. You have not worked with us toward de novo classification, did not provide the additional information we requested necessary to complete review of your 510(k)s, and FDA has n
The Voodoo (and sequels) was 3dfx's chipset. I'm not sure where Creative comes from; they were never big in the 3D graphics arena. The GP is mostly correct in context -- it's been around 15 years since anyone other than Nvidia or ATI/AMD had a competitive 3D graphics card for gaming, and developers were favoring certain vendors even in the pre-3dfx days, so the GGP's statement:
Now all the high profile game engine developers are in bed with NVIDIA and to a lesser extent AMD... Carmack was the last voice and force of independence.
If you have a device that performs most of the same functions as a scope for digital systems, and you mostly work on digital systems, then no, you probably don't need a scope. But a scope is sufficient for most tasks, easy to acquire, and has more educational value. If you ever want to try anything analog, even if it's just scoping a power outlet, you'll need one.
I recommend an auto-ranging multimeter, a three-output power supply, and a super-cheap scope to start with. For embedded systems, don't forget that you can also use software debugging techniques.
Other useful hardware: a good soldering iron (for moving beyond breadboards), fine-tip tweezers (for surface-mount work), and a clean desk, preferably with shelves for your equipment.
Slashdot Mirror
Your ISP can give you a block of dynamic/static IP addresses, which your router assigns instead of 192.168.1.X?
That's how the internet works to begin with, and it used to be the norm for IPv4 networks. A lot of large networks still do it that way -- the computer I'm on at work has a globally unique IP address. You can still get a block of static IPs if you buy a business-class connection. That used to be almost the definition of a business connection, back when more people ran their own servers instead of using hosting services. IP addresses cost money, so ISPs try to have as few as possible. NAT came about when people started getting multiple computers per household but didn't want to pay for a business connection. It was never meant to prop up the internet as a whole.
Unsurprisingly, address exhaustion still going on. APNIC and RIPE are down to their last /8 and are now handing out addresses as slowly as they can. ARIN and LACNIC will reach their last /8 this year. AFRINIC won't run out for years, so I suspect their new infrastructure will be built on IPv6. Here's the relevant data.
There's a finite number of addresses, guys. They're not going to magically stop running out.
EEs have been designing circuits with structural complexity at least as great as any software program, using graphical tools, all along.
The most complex circuits (in ICs) are synthesized from text-based HDLs or automatically generated by software tools. Schematics are common at the board level, but that's nowhere near the complexity of even a medium-sized software program. And of course all functionality is explained through text-based documentation.
Text is better for expressing abstract concepts. Graphics are better for expressing concrete concepts. If you try to use graphics for abstract concepts, you end up adding a lot of text anyway -- flowcharts, for example.
I wonder how much it would cost to buy Slashdot from DICE? Maybe we could have a Kickstarter.
According to Measuring Worth, the inflation-adjusted price of Prime today would be ~$90 per year. $99 isn't a huge step up from there.
Amazon has much better selection than any store and doesn't require me to drive anywhere, plus it has reviews. I buy almost everything that isn't groceries off of Amazon with Prime. If I need something quickly, I do the $3.99 upgrade to overnight shipping.
If you don't care about long it takes a package to arrive, there's free super saver shipping on the same items eligible for Prime. It's just different tiers of service for people with different preferences.
Wild animals often live in dirty environments and eat questionable foods, and yet they are usually just fine.
No they aren't. They die in large numbers. Take housecats, for example -- indoor average lifespan is >12 years, outdoor average lifespan is 5 years. Stray dogs live 1-2 years on the street, but average 11 years in a home.
Wrong. Circulators are able to perform this function without any input energy.
Technically, some of the energy from the transmitted signal is lost.
Also, you're not going to be making glass out of these.
"Generally speaking", are you kidding me? Calling someone doesn't require fraud -- people put their phone number in their email sigs and on resumes. For that matter, you can solicit someone via email or LinkedIn.
Well, empirically, it's not self-defeating -- their scheme worked:
The companies argued that the non-recruitment agreements had nothing to do with driving down wages. But the court ruled that there was “extensive documentary evidence” that the pacts were designed specifically to push down wages, and that they succeeded in doing so. The evidence includes software tools used by the companies to keep tabs on pay scales to ensure that within job “families” or titles, pay remained equitable within a margin of variation, and that as competition and recruitment boiled over in 2005, emails between executives and human resources departments complained about the pressure on wages caused by recruiters cold calling their employees, and bidding wars for key engineers. ...
As Intel’s director of Compensation and Benefits bluntly summed up the Silicon Valley culture’s official cant versus its actual practices,
While we pay lip service to meritocracy, we really believe more in treating everyone the same within broad bands.
The article offers an unsurprising explanation:
One of the reasons why non-recruitment works so well in artificially lowering workers’ wages is that it deprives employees of information about the job market, particularly one as competitive and overheating as Silicon Valley’s in the mid-2000s. As the companies’ own internal documents and statements showed, they generally considered cold-calling recruitment of “passive” talent — workers not necessarily looking for a job until enticed by a recruiter — to be the most important means of hiring the best employees.
Salaries are major secrets in large corporations. That means senior management and HR have access to information that workers don't. Information asymmetry breaks markets. As for why nobody else tried it... first, smaller companies often don't have tons of money to offer rock star salaries. Second, smaller companies can be intimidated. Adobe, for example:
Shortly after sealing the pact with Google, Jobs strong-armed Adobe into joining after he complained to CEO Bruce Chizen that Adobe was recruiting Apple’s employees. Chizen sheepishly responded that he thought only a small class of employees were off-limits:
I thought we agreed not to recruit any senior level employees. I would propose we keep it that way. Open to discuss. It would be good to agree.
Jobs responded by threatening war:
OK, I’ll tell our recruiters they are free to approach any Adobe employee who is not a Sr. Director or VP. Am I understanding your position correctly?
Adobe’s Chizen immediately backed down:
I’d rather agree NOT to actively solicit any employee from either company..If you are in agreement, I will let my folks know.
The next day, Chizen let his folks — Adobe’s VP of Human Resources — know that “we are not to solicit ANY Apple employees, and visa versa.” Chizen was worried that if he didn’t agree, Jobs would make Adobe pay:
if I tell Steve [Jobs] it’s open season (other than senior managers), he will deliberately poach Adobe just to prove a point. Knowing Steve, he will go after some of our top Mac talent... and he will do it in a way in which they will be enticed to come (extraordinary packages and Steve wooing).
Indeed Jobs even threatened war against Google early 2005 before their “gentlemen’s agreement,” telling Sergey Brin to back off recruiting Apple’s Safari team:
if you [Brin] hire a single one of these people that means war.
Brin immediately advised Google’s Executive Management Team to halt all recruiting of Apple employ
Not-so-coincidentally, six years ago was 2008, when Obama got elected president. When there's a Democrat in the White House, the right-wing fringe groups go crazy and the big-money donors open the taps to fund them in the hope of winning the next election. Climate change denial is basically a big conspiracy theory that plays off of right-wing paranoia. (The UN! Socialism! Elitists! Foreign aid!Poor people are coming for our money!) It benefits a lot of Republican donors. It's pretty straightforward, really. In the absence of expertise, it's easy to manufacture doubt. We see it with evolution all the time. Slashdotters just like the think they're too good to fall for that sort of manipulation.
(Spoiler: We're not.)
I'm sure the process is more complicated than I think, but it bothers me that we need an entire book to tell people that you should have something to say *before* you try to communicate with others. Perhaps a visit to Condescending Corporate Brand Page would be more helpful.
Wrong. Currencies with central authorities and bitcoin-like denectralised cryptocurencies can very well coexist.
Can you elaborate on that? Are there cryptocurrencies that don't need to be mined?
Bitcoin is the most amazing thing happening in the world today.
This is only true if you believe that central banking is inherently harmful/evil, and things like a gold standard are a great idea. Despite the article's claim that economists constantly argue over everything and thus know nothing (which is incredible ignorance on its own), the case for fiat currency is pretty good. But the discussion here is being driven by Libertarians, who A) love abstract reasoning and hypothetical examples, and B) are obsessed with the fantasy that people everywhere are conspiring to steal all their money using institutions like the Federal Reserve. Thus, Bitcoin stories and discussions are both inherently political and utterly divorced from actual domain knowledge. Slashdot, like any discussion site, is at its worst when faced with such a combination. It gets old after a while, especially when there's not much new to be said.
(Not to say that everyone supporting Bitcoin is a Libertarian, but most people seem to adopt their framing as a starting point. Anonymous financial transactions *must* be a good thing, because now you can hide from the government! Never mind that corrupt rich people benefit far more from that than we do...)
Mmm... social networking and telecommunications on a decentralised network with no way of inserting advertising
Actually, it does. From the FAQ:
Can I mine Bitcoins with twister?
Not exactly. The same mechanism used in Bitcoin for mining is also used in twister but for a different purpose, ensuring the order in which user registrations took place (the nickname belongs to whoever registered it first). twister network must incentive users to mine, so block chain may keep advancing. However, unlike Bitcoin, there is no monetary value involved. The twister incentive is: whoever finds the hash collision to validate a new block of transactions will be awarded with the right to send a promoted message. Promoted messages have a certain probability of being displayed by twister client.
Promoted messages? Am I going to be flooded with SPAM?
No, I hope not. I don’t like promoted message any more than you do, but I believe that a fair balance between the allowed volume of promoted messages will not upset the users while providing a good incentive for people to run the twister infrastructure.
Currently there is a maximum of one promoted message to be shown every 8 hours for every client, but the exact policy to be used is meant to be decided by the community.
The mechanism is actually quite democratic. Anyone can start generating blocks to send promoted messages, so this is effectively an advertising mechanism reaching the entire population of twister users. While an entrepreneur may invest in a mining rig to announce his product, a non-profit organization may ask his supporters to use their own personal computers to increase the probability of spreading their message.
Don't forget apple's router and macbooks.
Oh yeah, good point. I don't have any Mac stuff, so someone else will have to comment on those.
Interesting! I didn't see it in the DD-WRT router database so I assumed it wasn't compatible. I'll have to run some tests and see if I want to give it a try.
Wireless-AC is still at a very early stage, but there are a few routers available. I just replaced my DIR-655 N router with a Netgear Nighthawk R7000, which was a huge improvement. I previously got about 3 Mbps with 2.4 GHz, but now I can use the full 24 Mbps of my internet connection on 5 GHz AC. The existing (good) routers are all about $200 with three antennas. The Linksys has four, so maybe they're going for higher bandwidth. (There are several tiers of AC performance.) Plus, MSRP is not the same as retail price. So my guess is that the WRT1900 will be a sort of next-gen AC router at a similar price point.
Before you all rush to upgrade, note that there aren't many AC adapters yet. There's an Intel 7260HMW mini-PCIe for laptops ($25, no antenna included) and the Asus PCE-AC68 for desktops ($100), plus several USB adapters. I've never had much luck with USB wireless, but YMMV. I'm using the PCE-AC68 with good results. I needed a new router anyway for my new home, so I took the plunge. If you're okay with your current network, I'd suggest waiting another year before you upgrade.
Find another router with 600Mbps AC for under $399.
Netgear Nighthawk (R7000), $200, currently working great in my house.
You're not going to be wrapping an optical sensor in Mylar, so the laser can still blind the UAV.
Yeah, but the GGP was confused about something else -- they were talking like more transistors per unit area *only* gets you more functionality. What's happening now is that die shrinkage is offset by process costs. If the die size wasn't still shrinking, prices would be rising, not holding steady.
more transistors per unit area on a chip is worthless atm.
That assumes your processor is a fixed size. It isn't. The smaller your die is, the cheaper it is. That's how process improvements make things cheaper.
If even half of the FDA's letter is correct (and I see no reason to doubt it), they've been bending over backwards to work with 23andMe for years. The company made a deliberate decision to both ignore the regulators and (more damningly) fail to study the effectiveness of their own product, and now they're paying for it. Here's the relevant section of the letter:
Or voodoo, or 3dfx, or creative, or.......
The Voodoo (and sequels) was 3dfx's chipset. I'm not sure where Creative comes from; they were never big in the 3D graphics arena. The GP is mostly correct in context -- it's been around 15 years since anyone other than Nvidia or ATI/AMD had a competitive 3D graphics card for gaming, and developers were favoring certain vendors even in the pre-3dfx days, so the GGP's statement:
Now all the high profile game engine developers are in bed with NVIDIA and to a lesser extent AMD ... Carmack was the last voice and force of independence.
is wishful thinking.
If you have a device that performs most of the same functions as a scope for digital systems, and you mostly work on digital systems, then no, you probably don't need a scope. But a scope is sufficient for most tasks, easy to acquire, and has more educational value. If you ever want to try anything analog, even if it's just scoping a power outlet, you'll need one.
I recommend an auto-ranging multimeter, a three-output power supply, and a super-cheap scope to start with. For embedded systems, don't forget that you can also use software debugging techniques.
Other useful hardware: a good soldering iron (for moving beyond breadboards), fine-tip tweezers (for surface-mount work), and a clean desk, preferably with shelves for your equipment.