Corneal reshaping (popularly, Ortho-k) is a temporary fix, and in my experience, a very painful fix. Special hard contact lenses are produced that literally mold your eyeball into a shape that compensates for specific deficits in your visual acuity. It can address myopia and farsightedness, but not astigmatism.
I underwent ortho-k 25 years ago in order to pass a flight physical for the USAF. It brought my eyes to 20/20 and kept them there for 30 days. USAF regs require removal of contacts 30 days prior to a flight physical. Once you pass the physical and get trained, it doesn't matter if your visual acuity eventually goes south -- by the time you are ready to strap on an F-15, they have too much invested in you to DQ you because of your bad eyesight. Cheaper to grind lenses for your O2 mask.
But, man I don't ever want to go through that again. I wore them every day for six months. I had a 5 minute reprieve every hour to lubricate my eyes. The pain was constant and non-trivial. Unless you are looking to become a commercial or military pilot, don't bother with Ortho-k. After I left the Air Force, I got LASIK, and I am hugely satisfied with it.
I did it, it worked, and I am very happy with it. LASIK took me from 20/40 in one eye and 20/60 in the other with moderate to severe astigmatic error (>1.5 diopters) in both eyes to 20/10 in both eyes with no measurable astigmatic error in either eye.
These results are somewhat atypical, but the average post-op visual acuity for the 30,000 LASIK patients ahead of me at Barnett, Dulaney, and Perkins was 20/15. I ceremonially smashed my old bi-focals and bought myself a nice pair of Maui Jim's in celebration. Since I can now see clearly without glasses, my paintball and racquetball games have reached a new level. And as an amateur astronomer, having one less layer of glass between me and the universe is a good thing.:)
I have had three negative side-effects, but all were transitory or responded to treatment.
The first was some some artifacting around diffuse light sources for the first six months post-op. This was a minor thing -- I spent most of my childhood swimming in chlorinated pools, so the haloing I was seeing around the flourscents above my cube was kinda familiar.
The second was artifacting around point sources at night for the first twelve months post-op, and this was not so minor. I would see diffraction patterns that obscured anything in close proximity to the point source. It was pretty, but damned annoying at times. As a matter of fact, it made driving near pedestrians with on-coming trafic, like in stadium parking lots at night after a ball game, no bloody fun at all. I coped by taking taxis at night until the artifacting went away.
The third side effect was reduced tearing leading to dry eyes at about 8 months post-op, caused by inflamed lachrymal ducts, but that has been successfully treated with an anti-inflammatory. It was annoying at times, yes, but I considered the bottle of artificial tears I carried with me everywhere until it was fixed a small price to pay.
Potential side-effects were identified to me before the surgery, along with their incident rates. The artifacting and haloing will occur in 99.9% of people undergoing LASIK, and will last for six to twelve months post-op. The inflamed lachrymal ducts occur in 33 percent. Until this year, the only remediation option for the inflamed ducts was a surgical procedure with a ten percent success rate to block the uptake ducts, keeping what tears you do produce around longer, or so the theory goes. Available just this spring, though, is a specific anti-inflammatory called cyclosporin (retail name Restasis) that has been approved for treating LASIK-induced lachrymal duct inflammation. It definitely worked for me.
I should point out that LASIK has been an approved procedure here in the US for less than ten years. There are no long term, longitudinal studies available, so don't be dismayed if you don't find any in your research. In lieu of a real study, I checked with ten people where I work that have undergone the procedure. Nine of them reported outstanding results, which happily, I was able to personally verify. The tenth had a negative experience (still wears glasses, and actually had to get a new, stronger, prescription) and is understandably quite bitter about it. It is, after all, elective surgery, and the risk is real.
One final note: Motorcycle riders have an old adage: If you have a $10 head, buy a $10 helmet. Don't try to save money if you decide to have LASIK. Do your research and pay for the best. I went with Barnett, Dulaney and Perkins because they've done the most LASIK procedures in my state, and they have done the third most in the nation. I could have had it done for 1/5 what they charged me, but my eyes are kinda important to me...
I'm not sure where they land on the geek scale, but there are three books I would recommend for any young person starting out on a life in the sciences. The first is _Stranger in a Strange Land_ by Robert A. Heinlein. When I read it as a young teen, it was a life-altering event. I could never look at my society or my culture the same way again. The second is _A Canticle for Leibowitz_, by Walter M. Miller, Jr. Science without perspective is sterile, and this novel really drove that home for me. The third, and a great complement to the other two, is Ray Bradbury's _Farenheit 451_, which needs to be read by every child and young adult on the planet.
Again, these books are non-technical, but they address science and culture in extremely thought-provoking ways.
Lots of good suggestions so far. As a long-time Citrix admin, I would add a couple questions to the fairly good ones you already have.
Will the app vendor still support the app if it is deployed via Citrix? In my experience, this is a really good question to ask up front before deploying the app!
Are your apps mission critical? Do you need high availability for them? Citrix really reduces the cost of deploying and supporting mission critical applications, but at a price, as another poster in this thread rightly pointed out. If you don't have the numbers to get the bulk discount rate, Citrix may not save you all that much.
Finally, one that probably doesn't need to go on a checklist, but one that you should ask yourself anyway. Are you willing to work with Metaframe, with your users, and with the app vendors to make it work? We have a nice stable Citrix environment here at the rocket ranch, but we worked with our vendors, and with Metaframe to make it that way. It didn't happen overnight, and I had to take several Citrix training courses before I got really comfortable with Citrix. It was worth it, but that is just my environment -- ymmv.
Your management seems to be giving you an opportunity to demonstrate you are capable of increased responsibility, but you seem reluctant to step up to the plate. You can't always pick your assignments, you know. You are going to have to decide what is more important, your ambition or your comfort level. As Bill the Bard put it, ambition should be made of sterner stuff. If you turn down this opportunity, you will probably be passed over at the next opportunity for somebody who is more about fixing problems than avoiding them.
I have been using a sony ericsson HBH-60 bluetooth headset with my sony ericsson T616. The HBH-60 is an over-the-ear type with a short, stylish boom (my manger calls it my Borg implant.) The bluetooth combination has worked well for me. I have a '94 Corvette coupe which I drive with the lid off most of the time (I love this Arizona weather!) and the radio cranked. I used to miss voice calls from friends and collegues, and text pages from my servers on a regular basis. The wind noise made it impossible to hear the phone ring. Road vibration and stun mode were pretty much indistinguishable -- more than once I thought I felt it vibrate and tried to answer when there was no call. With the headset, however, the alerts for calls and pages are transmitted directly to my ear. My friends and collegues say they can tell I'm in the car, but can hear me fine. It is very comfortable to wear (23 grams) though I sometimes wonder if it is going to fly off my head when I'm cornering hard. I can feel it pendulum a bit, but it hasn't fallen off yet. The wirelessness is absolutely fabulous. I tried a wired headset with my last phone and gave it up after yanking the headset off my head or the phone off its clip numerous times as I extricated myself from my seatbelt. I know you mentioned you wanted a set with a standard plug-in, so I would recommend you get a bluetooth headset with a separate phone module if your phone doesn't have bluetooth onboard.
A key point I think you are missing is that one of the basic assumptions about the net while it was being engineered was that those who were using it would be responsible for the content, which was mostly engineering data on various nuclear weapon systems. Granted, USENET was parasitic on the net, but in a very constructive way, much the same way as the bacteria in your stomach help you digest food more efficiently than you would be able to absent their assistence.
I think you need to to understand that the net was not engineered to be a billboard with planetary visibility, nor was it created for joe and jane average to surf for cool stuff. You must realize that it was not created to provide employment to web layout artists, html/php/cold fusion programmers, or MBAs with an "e-marketing emphasis".
The net was created by engineers and scientists so that engineers and scientists could share information. The net is about the free exchange of information (free as in free speech) and marketing is about the exact opposite, the control of information to influence your behavior. These two concepts are mutually incompatible.
If you view the net, as I am coming to do, as a cybernetic organism with clusters of cognitive capacity connected by ever more complex pathways, it is reasonable to view commercialism as a cancer or virus in the organism, and ad blocking as a natural response by the organism to an attack.
I use ad blocking software precisely because it has the potential to return the net to its pre-infection state, if enough people use it. The commercial parasites will fail to reproduce themselves in this host, and will have to go back to their old mass media hosts, where the control of information is still possible.
But even in the mass media, that control is slipping. PVRs are making it less and less likely that a given commercial will be seen by a significant portion of the target audience. Turner Network Television has already attacked PVR users along the same lines as your parasite argument, though TNT's chairman characterized PVR users as thieves and not parasites.
I don't wish to belabor the point, but the net is a hostile environment when it comes to commercialization. I have a cube mate who is fond of pointing out that for everything there is a value and a price. It is pretty obvious that a lot of people have decided that the value of "free content" is not worth the price of banner ads.
I have four servers configured with a single PIII 1.4GHz CPU and 2GB of SDRAM in a Citrix farm supporting 1100 Mac and Unix users for MS Office apps, Lotus Notes and MS Internet Explorer. *My* Citrix sales engineer claimed that only 15 to 25 concurrent users can be supported per CPU, but I have found that 4x that is easily doable.
Individual users have different ways of working --not everybody is going to slam the farm in the same way at the same time every time they need to use a published app. Even with all one hundred of my client access licenses checked out, CPU utilization and paging on individual boxes in the farm stayed well below my alarm thresholds.
Generic productivity apps for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations and email just don't demand much from a CPU. Given the apps you intend to support (Groupwise, MS Office, and some Oracle front ends) I can't see you needing even 10 Citrix servers. Your best bet is put up a test farm and then perfmon your CPU utilization and swapping. Baseline it and then start adding users. Citrix have a very liberal demo program and you should take advantage of it.
As far as corroborating the claim of 1000 clients on a single Citrix server, I supported over twice that many (2270 to be exact) UNIX users with a single Citrix server, a PII running at 233MHz with 768MB of RAM. I started with 15 concurrent access licenses and 512MB of RAM. I added 15 more access licenses and another stick of SDRAM after the early users started spreading the word to the rest of the users how useful it was to be able to take care of company documentation right on your HPUX box and not have to wait for one of the five bull-pen NT workstations to open up. I published the MS Office 97 suite, plus Lotus cc:Mail and Visio, and the server never bottlenecked at the CPU or in paging. I also got to surplus those 5 bull-pen boxes and save the company the annual support fee we were paying to our out-sourcer, half of which, btw, showed up in my xmas bonus that year.:)
If you are going to publish apps with low CPU utilization like Word and Excel, I think you can easily support your thousand users with a handful of Citrix boxes.
I have my mom using McAfee's Spamkiller. (www.mcafee.com) The learning curve isn't too steep (Mom got the hang of it almost immediately) and it is remarkably effective. The first time she launched it, the default filters correctly identified 36 out of 42 messages as spam. She occasionally asks me for help with particularly pernicious spammers, and I use those opportunities to educate her on creating more effective filters. Last time I checked, Spamkiller was knocking down 98% of her spam.
I don't think that we should pass another law that will benefit insurance carriers. They have enough already. As you suggest, and as Heinlein eloquently put it, stupidity is self-correcting:
Stupidity is the only sin in nature. Judgment is swift; the punishment harsh. And there is no appeal: You live and you learn or you don't live long.
A better solution would be to engineer personal transportation that doesn't require people to be strapped in for safety. But hey, I have stock in several insurance companies and three of the Big Four automakers; pass any laws you want.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Corneal reshaping (popularly, Ortho-k) is a temporary fix, and in my experience, a very painful fix. Special hard contact lenses are produced that literally mold your eyeball into a shape that compensates for specific deficits in your visual acuity. It can address myopia and farsightedness, but not astigmatism.
I underwent ortho-k 25 years ago in order to pass a flight physical for the USAF. It brought my eyes to 20/20 and kept them there for 30 days. USAF regs require removal of contacts 30 days prior to a flight physical. Once you pass the physical and get trained, it doesn't matter if your visual acuity eventually goes south -- by the time you are ready to strap on an F-15, they have too much invested in you to DQ you because of your bad eyesight. Cheaper to grind lenses for your O2 mask.
But, man I don't ever want to go through that again. I wore them every day for six months. I had a 5 minute reprieve every hour to lubricate my eyes. The pain was constant and non-trivial. Unless you are looking to become a commercial or military pilot, don't bother with Ortho-k. After I left the Air Force, I got LASIK, and I am hugely satisfied with it.
I did it, it worked, and I am very happy with it. LASIK took me from 20/40 in one eye and 20/60 in the other with moderate to severe astigmatic error (>1.5 diopters) in both eyes to 20/10 in both eyes with no measurable astigmatic error in either eye.
:)
These results are somewhat atypical, but the average post-op visual acuity for the 30,000 LASIK patients ahead of me at Barnett, Dulaney, and Perkins was 20/15. I ceremonially smashed my old bi-focals and bought myself a nice pair of Maui Jim's in celebration. Since I can now see clearly without glasses, my paintball and racquetball games have reached a new level. And as an amateur astronomer, having one less layer of glass between me and the universe is a good thing.
I have had three negative side-effects, but all were transitory or responded to treatment.
The first was some some artifacting around diffuse light sources for the first six months post-op. This was a minor thing -- I spent most of my childhood swimming in chlorinated pools, so the haloing I was seeing around the flourscents above my cube was kinda familiar.
The second was artifacting around point sources at night for the first twelve months post-op, and this was not so minor. I would see diffraction patterns that obscured anything in close proximity to the point source. It was pretty, but damned annoying at times. As a matter of fact, it made driving near pedestrians with on-coming trafic, like in stadium parking lots at night after a ball game, no bloody fun at all. I coped by taking taxis at night until the artifacting went away.
The third side effect was reduced tearing leading to dry eyes at about 8 months post-op, caused by inflamed lachrymal ducts, but that has been successfully treated with an anti-inflammatory. It was annoying at times, yes, but I considered the bottle of artificial tears I carried with me everywhere until it was fixed a small price to pay.
Potential side-effects were identified to me before the surgery, along with their incident rates. The artifacting and haloing will occur in 99.9% of people undergoing LASIK, and will last for six to twelve months post-op. The inflamed lachrymal ducts occur in 33 percent. Until this year, the only remediation option for the inflamed ducts was a surgical procedure with a ten percent success rate to block the uptake ducts, keeping what tears you do produce around longer, or so the theory goes. Available just this spring, though, is a specific anti-inflammatory called cyclosporin (retail name Restasis) that has been approved for treating LASIK-induced lachrymal duct inflammation. It definitely worked for me.
I should point out that LASIK has been an approved procedure here in the US for less than ten years. There are no long term, longitudinal studies available, so don't be dismayed if you don't find any in your research. In lieu of a real study, I checked with ten people where I work that have undergone the procedure. Nine of them reported outstanding results, which happily, I was able to personally verify. The tenth had a negative experience (still wears glasses, and actually had to get a new, stronger, prescription) and is understandably quite bitter about it. It is, after all, elective surgery, and the risk is real.
One final note: Motorcycle riders have an old adage: If you have a $10 head, buy a $10 helmet. Don't try to save money if you decide to have LASIK. Do your research and pay for the best. I went with Barnett, Dulaney and Perkins because they've done the most LASIK procedures in my state, and they have done the third most in the nation. I could have had it done for 1/5 what they charged me, but my eyes are kinda important to me...
I'm not sure where they land on the geek scale, but there are three books I would recommend for any young person starting out on a life in the sciences. The first is _Stranger in a Strange Land_ by Robert A. Heinlein. When I read it as a young teen, it was a life-altering event. I could never look at my society or my culture the same way again. The second is _A Canticle for Leibowitz_, by Walter M. Miller, Jr. Science without perspective is sterile, and this novel really drove that home for me. The third, and a great complement to the other two, is Ray Bradbury's _Farenheit 451_, which needs to be read by every child and young adult on the planet.
Again, these books are non-technical, but they address science and culture in extremely thought-provoking ways.
No -- southern Arizona.
> Any more suggestions to add to the checklist?
Lots of good suggestions so far. As a long-time Citrix admin, I would add a couple questions to the fairly good ones you already have.
Will the app vendor still support the app if it is deployed via Citrix? In my experience, this is a really good question to ask up front before deploying the app!
Are your apps mission critical? Do you need high availability for them? Citrix really reduces the cost of deploying and supporting mission critical applications, but at a price, as another poster in this thread rightly pointed out. If you don't have the numbers to get the bulk discount rate, Citrix may not save you all that much.
Finally, one that probably doesn't need to go on a checklist, but one that you should ask yourself anyway. Are you willing to work with Metaframe, with your users, and with the app vendors to make it work? We have a nice stable Citrix environment here at the rocket ranch, but we worked with our vendors, and with Metaframe to make it that way. It didn't happen overnight, and I had to take several Citrix training courses before I got really comfortable with Citrix. It was worth it, but that is just my environment -- ymmv.
Your management seems to be giving you an opportunity to demonstrate you are capable of increased responsibility, but you seem reluctant to step up to the plate. You can't always pick your assignments, you know. You are going to have to decide what is more important, your ambition or your comfort level. As Bill the Bard put it, ambition should be made of sterner stuff. If you turn down this opportunity, you will probably be passed over at the next opportunity for somebody who is more about fixing problems than avoiding them.
I have been using a sony ericsson HBH-60 bluetooth headset with my sony ericsson T616. The HBH-60 is an over-the-ear type with a short, stylish boom (my manger calls it my Borg implant.) The bluetooth combination has worked well for me. I have a '94 Corvette coupe which I drive with the lid off most of the time (I love this Arizona weather!) and the radio cranked. I used to miss voice calls from friends and collegues, and text pages from my servers on a regular basis. The wind noise made it impossible to hear the phone ring. Road vibration and stun mode were pretty much indistinguishable -- more than once I thought I felt it vibrate and tried to answer when there was no call. With the headset, however, the alerts for calls and pages are transmitted directly to my ear. My friends and collegues say they can tell I'm in the car, but can hear me fine. It is very comfortable to wear (23 grams) though I sometimes wonder if it is going to fly off my head when I'm cornering hard. I can feel it pendulum a bit, but it hasn't fallen off yet. The wirelessness is absolutely fabulous. I tried a wired headset with my last phone and gave it up after yanking the headset off my head or the phone off its clip numerous times as I extricated myself from my seatbelt. I know you mentioned you wanted a set with a standard plug-in, so I would recommend you get a bluetooth headset with a separate phone module if your phone doesn't have bluetooth onboard.
A key point I think you are missing is that one of the basic assumptions about the net while it was being engineered was that those who were using it would be responsible for the content, which was mostly engineering data on various nuclear weapon systems. Granted, USENET was parasitic on the net, but in a very constructive way, much the same way as the bacteria in your stomach help you digest food more efficiently than you would be able to absent their assistence.
I think you need to to understand that the net was not engineered to be a billboard with planetary visibility, nor was it created for joe and jane average to surf for cool stuff. You must realize that it was not created to provide employment to web layout artists, html/php/cold fusion programmers, or MBAs with an "e-marketing emphasis".
The net was created by engineers and scientists so that engineers and scientists could share information. The net is about the free exchange of information (free as in free speech) and marketing is about the exact opposite, the control of information to influence your behavior. These two concepts are mutually incompatible.
If you view the net, as I am coming to do, as a cybernetic organism with clusters of cognitive capacity connected by ever more complex pathways, it is reasonable to view commercialism as a cancer or virus in the organism, and ad blocking as a natural response by the organism to an attack.
I use ad blocking software precisely because it has the potential to return the net to its pre-infection state, if enough people use it. The commercial parasites will fail to reproduce themselves in this host, and will have to go back to their old mass media hosts, where the control of information is still possible.
But even in the mass media, that control is slipping. PVRs are making it less and less likely that a given commercial will be seen by a significant portion of the target audience. Turner Network Television has already attacked PVR users along the same lines as your parasite argument, though TNT's chairman characterized PVR users as thieves and not parasites.
I don't wish to belabor the point, but the net is a hostile environment when it comes to commercialization. I have a cube mate who is fond of pointing out that for everything there is a value and a price. It is pretty obvious that a lot of people have decided that the value of "free content" is not worth the price of banner ads.
-Randy
...which NASA will buy from the lowest bidder for $50
Sorry -- I should have been more clear. It is a mix of Unix and Mac users, about 400 Mac users and 700 Unix users. I work for Raytheon.
-Rocket Rancher
I have four servers configured with a single PIII 1.4GHz CPU and 2GB of SDRAM in a Citrix farm supporting 1100 Mac and Unix users for MS Office apps, Lotus Notes and MS Internet Explorer. *My* Citrix sales engineer claimed that only 15 to 25 concurrent users can be supported per CPU, but I have found that 4x that is easily doable.
:)
Individual users have different ways of working --not everybody is going to slam the farm in the same way at the same time every time they need to use a published app. Even with all one hundred of my client access licenses checked out, CPU utilization and paging on individual boxes in the farm stayed well below my alarm thresholds.
Generic productivity apps for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations and email just don't demand much from a CPU. Given the apps you intend to support (Groupwise, MS Office, and some Oracle front ends) I can't see you needing even 10 Citrix servers. Your best bet is put up a test farm and then perfmon your CPU utilization and swapping. Baseline it and then start adding users. Citrix have a very liberal demo program and you should take advantage of it.
As far as corroborating the claim of 1000 clients on a single Citrix server, I supported over twice that many (2270 to be exact) UNIX users with a single Citrix server, a PII running at 233MHz with 768MB of RAM. I started with 15 concurrent access licenses and 512MB of RAM. I added 15 more access licenses and another stick of SDRAM after the early users started spreading the word to the rest of the users how useful it was to be able to take care of company documentation right on your HPUX box and not have to wait for one of the five bull-pen NT workstations to open up. I published the MS Office 97 suite, plus Lotus cc:Mail and Visio, and the server never bottlenecked at the CPU or in paging. I also got to surplus those 5 bull-pen boxes and save the company the annual support fee we were paying to our out-sourcer, half of which, btw, showed up in my xmas bonus that year.
If you are going to publish apps with low CPU utilization like Word and Excel, I think you can easily support your thousand users with a handful of Citrix boxes.
I have my mom using McAfee's Spamkiller. (www.mcafee.com) The learning curve isn't too steep (Mom got the hang of it almost immediately) and it is remarkably effective. The first time she launched it, the default filters correctly identified 36 out of 42 messages as spam. She occasionally asks me for help with particularly pernicious spammers, and I use those opportunities to educate her on creating more effective filters. Last time I checked, Spamkiller was knocking down 98% of her spam.
Q: What do CS majors call MIS majors five years after graduation?
A: Boss.
-Rocket Rancher
I don't think that we should pass another law that will benefit insurance carriers. They have enough already. As you suggest, and as Heinlein eloquently put it, stupidity is self-correcting:
A better solution would be to engineer personal transportation that doesn't require people to be strapped in for safety. But hey, I have stock in several insurance companies and three of the Big Four automakers; pass any laws you want. :)