My wife's parents had some kind of low water usage toilet installed at their house that had some kind of vortex generating crazy-assed system in it that made every flush super-effective.
It also sounded like it was sucking down half the bathroom and part of the main floor of the house with every flush.
It was funny to watch the unsuspecting use it during family gatherings -- the flush heard round the world.
Actually another even more effective solution would be a "NONE OF THE ABOVE" ability during an election to say, "Nope... send in the next two clowns until we find someone worth voting for."
Good lord, I've been doing Unix for a very long time and I just realized I'm completely and utterly annoyed with myself for not noticing that the "cat" in most things I use "cat" for is completely unnecessary.
I'm going to have to freak some people out at work with this.;-)
I'm up against that 10-year-plus wall right now. Not a coder, never was a coder. Just a good sysadmin. Paid slightly better than average as I've gotten older, and always worked hard at knowing my stuff.
But, knowing that the company would easily hire someone for half my salary to do my job is a bit of a downer and motivational problem.
The replacement wouldn't do as good a job, but the managers don't know that -- anyone above our supervisory level doesn't understand even half of what I work on today anyway.
The older you get in IT, the more you have to "sell yourself" and look like a complete ass-kissing schmuck to the younger guys/gals who are wondering why you're always doing it, as you attempt to add value to your position.
(Well maybe with most employers not giving even cost-of-living raises anymore, perhaps not.)
In most industries, elders are respected and allowed to slow up a bit when they've been at something for 30 years. It's even institutionalized. Think Sr. Partner in a Law Firm, for example.
In IT, you'd be gone long before 20 years was up, and someone less experienced, less careful, and more costly in terms of mistakes, will be doing your job. But only a very few companies keep engineers around long enough to see the benefits from their life-long experience. (HP is a good example, probably IBM too.)
I started as one of those bright-eyed, cheap, 20-somethings who was clueless but had a chip on my shoulder and something to prove. Now heading into my mid-30's I realize that my knowledge and experience won't mean shit in ten more years.
I'm partial to all things Unix'y, so I'm always at the command line and get plenty of work done.
But you've answered your own question:
The people in the department that don't take time to learn the tools at as deep a level as you have, aren't as productive.
The computer's just a tool. Figuring out how to do your work more efficiently is a personal challenge we all face.
Really astute folks in your department that see you going faster than they can who also have a personal interest in bettering themselves will ask you how you're doing it. Take the time to help them out.
Go to a local second-hand stereo store. Buy a big huge heavy stereo with a Tape input (line level) and a big linear amp. Feed the PC into that.
Some old stereos have up to four "zones" of stereo speaker outputs. Buy a speaker switchbox or make one from a bunch of good quality switches. Be nice to your amp and don't switch things in and out when it's on... turn it all the way down or off and switch in the zones you want music in. (Takes a whole 5 seconds.)
Run speaker cables around the house and hook up good quality speakers whereever you want tunes. You can buy some nice stuff at that same second-hand store, probably -- or on eBay. Hunt around for old "audiophile" gear that's completely lost its monetary value (and looks old too, for that "retro" look), and you'll get great gear for next to nothing.
Don't buy fancy "monster" cable... just get a nice solid large gauge wire. Spend a weekend running cables through walls, under floors, etc.
Save some money and do it the way everyone did in the 70's! You'll be able to absolutely blow your house away with sound that sounds good for only a couple hundred bucks.
I guess my point was that the datacenter needs to come up to telco standards of reliability before playing around in the big-boy world of -48VDC power. The power plant is designed for shit that works, and doesn't need to be replaced every year.;-)
And now we have an article that believes that DC power is cheaper than the equivalent AC power. Watts is watts.... just because data centers don't charge correctly for both, doesn't mean DC is more efficient than AC... and any server eating so much power in the conversion from AC to DC internally that shows a larger percentage difference than necessary -- is just a poorly designed power supply.
Hmm, maybe turning some real Engineers who used to work in the Bell system loose on some of this crap hardware might result in something that works right and doesn't have to be upgraded every day. Of course, they might take away completely unnecessary crap the end-user and admin don't really need to get their jobs done making it "un-fun" in the process, but the damn things will run for 20 years.
Meanwhile, back in reality-land... a properly designed system can easily have hard-wired power changes done in about 10 minutes. They make some nifty screw terminal blocks rated for some pretty amazing current ratings for such things. PC/Datacenter kids just have never seen them.
Telco's have large battery plants that are charged from city power. The battery plant powers the Central Office. Most hardware is HARD wired into to DC power distribution plant. No need for a connector on things that are never supposed to be unplugged. PC's break, telco equipment gets installed, stays installed (and running) for years at a time. Totally different world. You've obviously never been in a CO.
Yeah, I was definitely being sarcastic about the "digital nirvana" part.
Analog TV works fine. And economics teaches us that the "works most of the time just fine" solution that is cheaper than the perfect solution always wins.
The biggest (by far) users of analog tech and bandwidth are broadcasters, and the biggest of those is TV. And the FCC's already asked them to move along... but the public isn't buying the technology yet, really.
So when everyone sees the digital nirvana that you have (The question they're asking is: "Why would I need a perfect TV picture in a new format at 4-10x the price, I honestly don't know -- doesn't my TV work and do its job just fine right now?"), the broadcasters will be right there doing it.
The FCC push is the only reason the industry is moving toward digital. Otherwise, it wouldn't be cost-effective in even the broadest sense of the term.
I'm curious about this so-called "software packet filtering" you talk about on FRS. FRS is analog, and on a very small number of actual frequencies in the old UHF commerical 2-way band.
FRS radios use subaudible tones (either continuous ones, called CTCSS -- or slowly changing ones in a set pattern called DCS) to keep your receiver from opening up on unwanted signals. But if one of those unwanted signals is stronger than your person you're intending to talk to, they're just jammed and you never knew it... because your radio's audio circuit didn't open up -- so you didn't hear anything.
Your assertion that 32 people can share the frequency is dead wrong. It's analog "under the hood" and the manufacturers are pulling a quickie on people. Your "channel" on an FRS radio is actually shared by a whole bunch of people -- you just don't hear them. Try using FRS at a ski area sometime -- where people at the top of the mountain have line of sight coverage of the entire valley, even at the low power levels required by FRS.
GMRS is more useful, but still sharing frequencies with FRS.
Amateur (Ham) VHF/UHF handhelds for those willing to take a VERY simple test, with their 5w of RF output and a well-built repeater system built by those that know how to do it correctly (technically, GMRS can have repeaters also), offer clear solid communications vs. the complete mess that is FRS.
But the point still stands. There are places that you can walk and places that you can't.
The bigger the transportation medium the more infrastructure it needs, and the more rules it naturally has to follow, just by sheer size.
Same thing with RF spectrum, and the FCC understands how to manage it. This moron from Forbes with a PC and a dream is woefully out of touch (and the resulting slashdot commenters also salivating about it).
900 MHz and 2.4 GHz are already in that "only a nuclear strike will clean them up" mode, for sure. The technology used is pretty resilient to the mess, but only to a point. Eventually both ISM bands will be full of garbage, and people will move on to make a bigger mess somewhere else. 5.8 GHz is already headed the same direction.
You are confusing regulation with enforcement. People using illegal transmitters should be prosecuted as they are not allowed to do that.
So what's an illegal transmitter if there are no regulations?
That's the dumbest comment I've read in this thing so far...
In order to set transmitter standards, one must know their purpose, their emission type, their expected use, the needed coverage (power), and a lot of things the FCC *does* today.
If you take away the regulations, you automatically take away the ability to enforce. Isn't that obvious?!
You don't have to pick on Hams to make your point.
Most Public Safety systems are still analog trunking or single-channel repeaters in everything but large cities, digital is just barely deployed and seriously working in large population areas.
And even then, none of todays highest-end digital radio systems have ANY capability to be as frequency agile as the idiot at Forbes recommends.
Hell, if he'd ever seen the amount of work that goes into tuning filters and techniques to keep Intermodulation interference (mixing) out of systems, etc...
Try moving a 100,000 watt FM station around in frequency on whatever whim or algorhythm his proposed idiotic technology is going to use. As it wanders around the band (assuming that the end-users could even find the thing, since their receivers have to somehow know where it went), it'll be hammering anything within a few megahertz, just due to its output power.
RF carriers are ANALOG no matter how they're modulated. They have skirts and no transmitter ONLY transmits on a perfect discreet frequency.
Broadcasters and high power operations are segregated from low-power, weak-signal operations. Digital is segregated from analog modulation types because digital modulation forms typically throw pulsed "noise" into analog systems nearby (i.e. Nextel vs. Public Safety in 800 MHz band).
All of which is done for very good, well-known reasons in RF Engineering.
Let's just say that saying this guy is COMPLETELY clueless, doesn't even come close.
Watching the typical modern computer geek who's never touched a soldering iron or worked on any serious electronic or RF system debate whether or not this moron's article is correct is even more funny, or sad -- depending on whether or not any of the Slashdot crowd call themselves "Engineers".
You see you're living in a world where if some code doesn't meet a standard, no one dies.
Jam a Public Safety frequency with some moronic radio design that doesn't work correctly and then sit around waiting for Ambulances and Fire Departments while some industry standard for not doing stupid things is arranged?
Slashdot Mirror
You won't find many cars that hold their value that well.
The overlords felt it was time to try out some of their new marketing materials. "Neighbors" sounds so homey, they went with it.
My wife's parents had some kind of low water usage toilet installed at their house that had some kind of vortex generating crazy-assed system in it that made every flush super-effective.
It also sounded like it was sucking down half the bathroom and part of the main floor of the house with every flush.
It was funny to watch the unsuspecting use it during family gatherings -- the flush heard round the world.
Actually another even more effective solution would be a "NONE OF THE ABOVE" ability during an election to say, "Nope... send in the next two clowns until we find someone worth voting for."
Good lord, I've been doing Unix for a very long time and I just realized I'm completely and utterly annoyed with myself for not noticing that the "cat" in most things I use "cat" for is completely unnecessary.
;-)
I'm going to have to freak some people out at work with this.
Thanks for the link and the reminder.
You can talk about needing more wireless bandwidth when the 802.11a spectrum is full.
IMAP on your own server.
POP3 clients that can "leave mail on server".
Something like gmail (if you trust them to keep your mail safe and never disappear)
A service like GoToMyPC.
There's about a million ways to do what you're looking to do. It's almost too easy.
You said everything I was thinking. Nicely done.
I'm up against that 10-year-plus wall right now. Not a coder, never was a coder. Just a good sysadmin. Paid slightly better than average as I've gotten older, and always worked hard at knowing my stuff.
But, knowing that the company would easily hire someone for half my salary to do my job is a bit of a downer and motivational problem.
The replacement wouldn't do as good a job, but the managers don't know that -- anyone above our supervisory level doesn't understand even half of what I work on today anyway.
The older you get in IT, the more you have to "sell yourself" and look like a complete ass-kissing schmuck to the younger guys/gals who are wondering why you're always doing it, as you attempt to add value to your position.
(Well maybe with most employers not giving even cost-of-living raises anymore, perhaps not.)
In most industries, elders are respected and allowed to slow up a bit when they've been at something for 30 years. It's even institutionalized. Think Sr. Partner in a Law Firm, for example.
In IT, you'd be gone long before 20 years was up, and someone less experienced, less careful, and more costly in terms of mistakes, will be doing your job. But only a very few companies keep engineers around long enough to see the benefits from their life-long experience. (HP is a good example, probably IBM too.)
I started as one of those bright-eyed, cheap, 20-somethings who was clueless but had a chip on my shoulder and something to prove. Now heading into my mid-30's I realize that my knowledge and experience won't mean shit in ten more years.
Lovely career path.
I'm partial to all things Unix'y, so I'm always at the command line and get plenty of work done.
But you've answered your own question:
The people in the department that don't take time to learn the tools at as deep a level as you have, aren't as productive.
The computer's just a tool. Figuring out how to do your work more efficiently is a personal challenge we all face.
Really astute folks in your department that see you going faster than they can who also have a personal interest in bettering themselves will ask you how you're doing it. Take the time to help them out.
Fire the HR person, then.
Just do it the old fashioned way.
Go to a local second-hand stereo store. Buy a big huge heavy stereo with a Tape input (line level) and a big linear amp. Feed the PC into that.
Some old stereos have up to four "zones" of stereo speaker outputs. Buy a speaker switchbox or make one from a bunch of good quality switches. Be nice to your amp and don't switch things in and out when it's on... turn it all the way down or off and switch in the zones you want music in. (Takes a whole 5 seconds.)
Run speaker cables around the house and hook up good quality speakers whereever you want tunes. You can buy some nice stuff at that same second-hand store, probably -- or on eBay. Hunt around for old "audiophile" gear that's completely lost its monetary value (and looks old too, for that "retro" look), and you'll get great gear for next to nothing.
Don't buy fancy "monster" cable... just get a nice solid large gauge wire. Spend a weekend running cables through walls, under floors, etc.
Save some money and do it the way everyone did in the 70's! You'll be able to absolutely blow your house away with sound that sounds good for only a couple hundred bucks.
All this stuff is what the BUTLER is for, isn't it?
I guess my point was that the datacenter needs to come up to telco standards of reliability before playing around in the big-boy world of -48VDC power. The power plant is designed for shit that works, and doesn't need to be replaced every year. ;-)
And now we have an article that believes that DC power is cheaper than the equivalent AC power. Watts is watts.... just because data centers don't charge correctly for both, doesn't mean DC is more efficient than AC... and any server eating so much power in the conversion from AC to DC internally that shows a larger percentage difference than necessary -- is just a poorly designed power supply.
Hmm, maybe turning some real Engineers who used to work in the Bell system loose on some of this crap hardware might result in something that works right and doesn't have to be upgraded every day. Of course, they might take away completely unnecessary crap the end-user and admin don't really need to get their jobs done making it "un-fun" in the process, but the damn things will run for 20 years.
Meanwhile, back in reality-land... a properly designed system can easily have hard-wired power changes done in about 10 minutes. They make some nifty screw terminal blocks rated for some pretty amazing current ratings for such things. PC/Datacenter kids just have never seen them.
Telco's have large battery plants that are charged from city power. The battery plant powers the Central Office. Most hardware is HARD wired into to DC power distribution plant. No need for a connector on things that are never supposed to be unplugged. PC's break, telco equipment gets installed, stays installed (and running) for years at a time. Totally different world. You've obviously never been in a CO.
Yeah, I was definitely being sarcastic about the "digital nirvana" part.
Analog TV works fine. And economics teaches us that the "works most of the time just fine" solution that is cheaper than the perfect solution always wins.
Analog has advantages. Big ones, in some cases.
The biggest (by far) users of analog tech and bandwidth are broadcasters, and the biggest of those is TV. And the FCC's already asked them to move along... but the public isn't buying the technology yet, really.
So when everyone sees the digital nirvana that you have (The question they're asking is: "Why would I need a perfect TV picture in a new format at 4-10x the price, I honestly don't know -- doesn't my TV work and do its job just fine right now?"), the broadcasters will be right there doing it.
The FCC push is the only reason the industry is moving toward digital. Otherwise, it wouldn't be cost-effective in even the broadest sense of the term.
I'm curious about this so-called "software packet filtering" you talk about on FRS. FRS is analog, and on a very small number of actual frequencies in the old UHF commerical 2-way band.
FRS radios use subaudible tones (either continuous ones, called CTCSS -- or slowly changing ones in a set pattern called DCS) to keep your receiver from opening up on unwanted signals. But if one of those unwanted signals is stronger than your person you're intending to talk to, they're just jammed and you never knew it... because your radio's audio circuit didn't open up -- so you didn't hear anything.
Your assertion that 32 people can share the frequency is dead wrong. It's analog "under the hood" and the manufacturers are pulling a quickie on people. Your "channel" on an FRS radio is actually shared by a whole bunch of people -- you just don't hear them. Try using FRS at a ski area sometime -- where people at the top of the mountain have line of sight coverage of the entire valley, even at the low power levels required by FRS.
GMRS is more useful, but still sharing frequencies with FRS.
Amateur (Ham) VHF/UHF handhelds for those willing to take a VERY simple test, with their 5w of RF output and a well-built repeater system built by those that know how to do it correctly (technically, GMRS can have repeaters also), offer clear solid communications vs. the complete mess that is FRS.
But the point still stands. There are places that you can walk and places that you can't.
The bigger the transportation medium the more infrastructure it needs, and the more rules it naturally has to follow, just by sheer size.
Same thing with RF spectrum, and the FCC understands how to manage it. This moron from Forbes with a PC and a dream is woefully out of touch (and the resulting slashdot commenters also salivating about it).
Tell him to publish the damn thing then, and we'll see.
Everything in your comment was great other than the whole "radiating the neighbors" B.S.
1000 watts at roughly 100 MHz FM into a low-gain antenna system isn't anything to even care about.
900 MHz and 2.4 GHz are already in that "only a nuclear strike will clean them up" mode, for sure. The technology used is pretty resilient to the mess, but only to a point. Eventually both ISM bands will be full of garbage, and people will move on to make a bigger mess somewhere else. 5.8 GHz is already headed the same direction.
You are confusing regulation with enforcement. People using illegal transmitters should be prosecuted as they are not allowed to do that. So what's an illegal transmitter if there are no regulations? That's the dumbest comment I've read in this thing so far... In order to set transmitter standards, one must know their purpose, their emission type, their expected use, the needed coverage (power), and a lot of things the FCC *does* today. If you take away the regulations, you automatically take away the ability to enforce. Isn't that obvious?!
What do you think religious programming is? It's advertising, 24/7.
Walk down the center line of an Interstate and see if the cops don't bother you.
Your analogy is seriously screwed.
You don't have to pick on Hams to make your point.
Most Public Safety systems are still analog trunking or single-channel repeaters in everything but large cities, digital is just barely deployed and seriously working in large population areas.
And even then, none of todays highest-end digital radio systems have ANY capability to be as frequency agile as the idiot at Forbes recommends.
Hell, if he'd ever seen the amount of work that goes into tuning filters and techniques to keep Intermodulation interference (mixing) out of systems, etc...
Try moving a 100,000 watt FM station around in frequency on whatever whim or algorhythm his proposed idiotic technology is going to use. As it wanders around the band (assuming that the end-users could even find the thing, since their receivers have to somehow know where it went), it'll be hammering anything within a few megahertz, just due to its output power.
RF carriers are ANALOG no matter how they're modulated. They have skirts and no transmitter ONLY transmits on a perfect discreet frequency.
Broadcasters and high power operations are segregated from low-power, weak-signal operations. Digital is segregated from analog modulation types because digital modulation forms typically throw pulsed "noise" into analog systems nearby (i.e. Nextel vs. Public Safety in 800 MHz band).
All of which is done for very good, well-known reasons in RF Engineering.
Let's just say that saying this guy is COMPLETELY clueless, doesn't even come close.
Watching the typical modern computer geek who's never touched a soldering iron or worked on any serious electronic or RF system debate whether or not this moron's article is correct is even more funny, or sad -- depending on whether or not any of the Slashdot crowd call themselves "Engineers".
And in the meantime, no one communicates.
You see you're living in a world where if some code doesn't meet a standard, no one dies.
Jam a Public Safety frequency with some moronic radio design that doesn't work correctly and then sit around waiting for Ambulances and Fire Departments while some industry standard for not doing stupid things is arranged?
No thanks.