Charon VAX and Charon Alpha have been around for years. Those DECies that are hard core will know that TOPS-10 lives on on emulated DECsystem10 software. A emulated VAX on a modern low end desktop PC runs faster than fastest physical VAX. Want your VAX/VMS application to have the advantages of SAN attached SSD storage? Easy. Allowed to use Gigabit? Done. VMS doesn't think it has any of that, but the host has it and the emulator presents it as older gear to the OS. For those that don't want to be 32bit limited Charon Alpha works too.
For those that think this is not the way to run a serious IT shop, consider that I wouldn't recommend running your business or shop floor app on a low end desktop. I'd buy a 1st tier data center class box, running Windows Server. I'd buy full hardware and software support for the host. Frequently those costs are recouped quickly from the fact that hardware support for 15 year gear is no longer needed. The users don't need to be retrained. Business isn't disrupted with data migrations to new databases and software that doesn't have the same features.
With VAX and Alpha emulation, you don't even source code because a VAX is a VAX and an Alpha is an Alpha. Unfortunately not needing the source code is an advantage more often than you'd think.
BTW as a 27 year veteran of the sys admin camp, since when have programmers been "above" sys admins? Respect disappeared when we stopped being system managers and became sys admins. Instead of managing things we administered them sounding more like an admin assist. That's I'm glad my title is engineer or consultant depending on the day.
IMHO, your best chance at compensation is to be creative. Comp time? Time to monitor campus classes (or take them for credit.) Agreement to change your title without a raise. Title's look good on resumes. Job flexibility in general tends to come to employees who go above and beyond.
How about a signed agreement that the software and copyright are yours and that you'll continue support and development outside of work hours for free allows you to own the software and a chance to make it marketable.
If you're looking for cold hard cash I think you are out of luck. Let's say the college finds the budget. Why would they necessarily select your solution? Oh and BTW you can't be on the selection committee as you have an inherent conflict of interests. In fact even selection of your solution would create substaintial conflicts.
If you're a government run/owned college the rules will be even tougher on conflicts of interest. Be VERY careful in that case trying to extract cash from this situation. Otherwise a felony conviction and prison time are not outside the realm of possibilities.
But let me use an example wholely within the HP environment. I can buy new, refurb consumer or used refurb'ed business PC. I never go the business PC route for personal use as because I get less horsepower for the buck. Theoretically what I'm paying for in a business machine is higher reliability and lower support costs. However when the support cost is personal time that costs $0 to me, I pay the lower cost.
So I posit is that if cost of support labor and downtime is low, then the self build self support model makes sense. If the cost of labor is higher, then paying for a higher qualtiy, more reliable, extrenally supported solution makes more sense. Those labor costs need to include cost of down time of idled employees as well as support costs.
I disagree that noone born after 1990 wants to play pen and paper D&D. My two boys ages 9 and 13 are hooked. My 4 year-old daughter wants to play SO BAD. There is a whole gaggle of boys at scouts that have been roped in. Of course maybe that's because ipods, cell phones and computers are banned at overnighters! But that's not really the reason.
Why did I show D&D to my boys? The answer will surprise you. My older son was then 8. He was an advanced reader, but he much preferred books on tape, CD or later iPod. However none of the D&D books, my AD&D versions in particular, had audio versions. He had to wade through them himself. Seriously, how many 8 year olds are reading and trying to undrestand what a theocracy is. Then he wanted to take over and refurbish the moat house in one of the modules. He then needed to figure out the costs in GPs to plan. Enter the need for Excel!
D&D has been a tool to teach Microsoft Office skills, governments, reading, folklore, map making, budgets, medival culture, etc. I highly recommend it as a cirriculum for home schooling! Okay maybe that's taking it a bit too far.
There's a big difference between trademark and copyright. A Trademark is a mark on a item that is meant to show it's origin. It's a mark of trade that is supposed to prevent anyone from stitching a shirt together and selling it as a Prada. So in this case the IOC is saying it is going to mark its official items as "with glowing hearts" and thus doesn't anyone else printing that on shirt and caps and selling them as if they were official Olympic items.
There's nothing to prevent me to using the phrase "with glowing hearts" in literature, I just can't slap it on a shirt and sell the shirt, just like I can't slap Calvin Klein or Prada on clothing.
Now I could probably slap "Prada" on a camera and sell it as trademarks are specific to a set of related products. Think for example the name "Nationwide". There is a trucking company, an insurance company and a trailer rental company all using the trademark Nationwide, but only for their business segment.
For that manner, a sign company in the U.S. might choose to trademark the name "Star Spangled Banner", or a fireworks company trademark the name "Rocket's Red Glare." The IOC is doing what any smart marketeer would do.
If you think your building AC is up to the load over all, have you considered better ventilation from the ambient air outside the room. Faster turn over of air can go a long way in cooling. Though it's doubtful you'll be able to high turnover of ambient office space air to bring your server room down to 20C, I'll bet you can make a dent in the current 30+C level. This might even be possible without making your co-workers too uncomfortable by maknig sure that the exhaust air is discharged into the return air plenum, which is usually the space above the drop ceiling.
All that fan power and ventilation might however increase the noise level near the server room.
CoreFTP www.coreftp.com has many of the features you're seeking but it's a Windows tool. If can compare timestamps to see if the client file is newer. It encrypts each individual file before sending it across the FTP link. The files are stored individually on the host. The only piece that I'm not sure it can do is be on a USB drive.
And while not open source, the 'lite' version is free.
Each parent is going to have his/her own hot buttons as to what is acceptable and what isn't. Even with sexual content there is anything from sexual tension to some down right nasty stuff.
You specifically ask for SciFi and you're examples are in the SciFi area rather than Fantasy.
My kid's reading list:
L Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth. (Not to be mistaken with Hubbard's "Mission Earth" dekaology the is not appropriate in my opinion for pre-teens.)
Piers Anthony's Xanth Series. It's thirty three books and counting of bad puns. Just the thing for pre-teen boys. Careful on the sex topics of his other books and series as some of them are graphic and other sexual themes aren't appropriate for pre-teens.
Roger Zelazny's Amber Series.
CS Lewis's Narnia Series.
Pulman's His Dark Materials series.
Asimov's Foundation series would be okay.
Red Wall.
In the fantasy the gorilla in the room is Harry Potter.
I haven't tried them but the Star Trek and Star Wars book series are probably acceptable even if not "serious" literature.
One could always plumb the depths of the Gutenberg Project's text library and pull classics like Jules Verne and Dan Defoe. Some care is needed even here as I recently read Robinson Crusoe and it is not exactly politically correct in the treatment of indigenous people and is a bit snobbish about the ingenuity of Brits.
However the important piece in any of these is to be reading the material in advance and being able to discuss the good and questionable themes with your kid. Saw a study that along the lines of children, parents and TV. The study found that when children watched TV shows with their parents in the room, even of some of the show's themes might be counter to the family's values, the kids would pick up even the subtle vibes of the parents. That if they watched the shows without the parents present, then they tended to mroe directly absorb the values as presented in the show.
I think books are similar. They offer the chance to discuss values. Is Malfroy a bad person or he simply a tragic character in the wrong family at the wrong time? What do you think of Harry kissing girls? (I doubt a parent could ask that question without conveying his/her expectation of there own child's behavior.)
As an HP employee I hope HP is smarter than GM was. Remember the GM bought EDS in the 80s and EDS milked GM for all it was worth. EDS did great; GM not so. Of course GM thought it was buying a company to outsource its IT to while HP is looking to merge outsourcing operations with EDS.
The use of MP3 software (or the like) while working is probably less about memory and more about the sound card, or lack there of. We had a low end 512MB XP PC with embedded sound. Any time Itunes was running we could forget doing anything else. That problem was solved, not by adding more memory, but by installed a dedicated sound card that off loaded the CPU.
I agree 100% with the previous posts that say the parents have a responsibility to monitor their own children's PC usage. It's the same way with anything. At the child grows and show greater judgment and responsibility they are given more trust and privacy. It's an irony that the children that most rail at the lack of privacy are often the same children who haven't earned it.
One thing I don't agree with is the statement that a 7 year old with a personally locked down but not internet connected PC is no more at risk than a kid with a pen and paper. What's to keep the older sibling that sees nothing wrong with a 7 year old locking out her parents from secretly installing a WIFI card to the 7 year old can access the internet through a neighbor's access point? What's to prevent the 7 year old from using her PC to copy music CDs or DVDs and distributing them to friends. That would expose her parents to possible copyright litigation. What's to keep the 7 year from using the privacy of her room and PC to author content she shouldn't, burning it to CD and using a public PC to post it to the web?
Yes the 7 year old should be able to lock out her older siblings. That is fair and understandable. Her parents need to have access, even if they never do. And if her PC is to be connected to the internet, then she should have "strict parental control" software loaded.
I draw analogy to my phone. Many people today only have cell phones and have dispensed with hard wired ones. I have a cell phone but I'm not ready to give up my land lines. I work on the phone. While coverage for cell phones at the house is *usually* good, quality isn't consistently good. For the sake of others, in particular my customers, a quiet quality line is mandatory. Also There are many days where I'll spend hours on the phone and cell phone batteries aren't up to the task. More importantly cell phone batteries aren't up to the thankfully few outage situation that require 1-10 hour bridge sessions. Also a wired land line phone offers more quality options: better speaker phones, bigger buttons and dedicated function buttons, cordless options, amplified headsets, two ear head sets, robust headsets that can take constant use for years, etc.
Granted not everyone needs this, and that's why some have eliminated the monthly bill for land lines.
Take that analogy to wired vs. mobile ISP service. Based on the comments so far, wired ISP service + WIFI offers more consistently higher speed service than mobile. The number of routers and their features available are very diverse for wired service. Network configurations behind those routers are also very flexible. For example I use a router to get to the ISP and an access point in a better local for WIFI. The telcos and cable service providers are, in my opinion, a much tighter race for your $20-30/mo. They offer extra services that might appeal to some.
Anyway I agree with most of the other comments. The economics of wired ISP+WIFI compared to Mobile are going to be very subjective to the usage of individual users. For example how many people or systems are you trying to support? A single person might not see much incremental cost. If you already have Mobile service then dropping the cost of wired ISP makes even more sense.
The technical viability of Mobile over wired ISP+WIFI is also very subjective to your home location and your vendors network. My great analogy for this is pager coverage. My company four years ago was very committed to Skytel paging plans. So much so that even though I had a text messaging plan, was forced to get a Skytel Pager. However... I spend the majority of my time working from home in the basement and at home in general. Though I'm in a built up suburb of Cleveland, my home sat in a hole in the Skytel network. A half mile any direction and paging was reliable. But not at my house. My company finally had to admit that for me, mobile service text messaging was a better solution. Meanwhile others on my team find that Skytel coverage is better for their neighborhoods.
The blogger touts his math/stat skills and then argues that multi choice scores are a fraud. Like many self proclaimed experts, this one falls short. He posts a formula without variables and show the wrong answer.
Worse as a supposed stats expert, he also quotes the formula for guessing incorrectly.
He doesn't mention that standardized tests that use the "guessing formula" do not require one to guess. If you know only two answers and answer ONLY those questions, there is no penalty for unanswered questions.
Also his extreme examples aren't the ones to support his hypothesis. His primary two examples were both 100 True/False questions. In on "extreme" example one person knowing one answer and the other two. That case, regardless of the math we know on average the more knowledgeable person. His second example on this test was comparing two people. One knowing all and one knowing half. Aganig applying the guessing formula widens the delta but we still know who's more knowledgeable.
The example that exposes the fraud is a 100 question T/F test where one person knows 50 and marks guesses for the other 50, while the second person knows 64 answers and doesn't guess leaving 35 questions unmarked. Person 1 is going to average a score of 75, frequently a passing grade, while the more knowledgeable person scores a 64, often a failing grade.
However the blame here lies with the test preparation. If there is no "guessing" penalty for wrong answers, then all test takers should guess on all unknown questions. If all do then that person that knew 64 answer will on average score an 82 beating the person who knew only 50. If there is a "guessing" penalty for wrong answers, then whether or not the test takers makes blind guesses is irrelevant. AS another reply to the blogger points out, knowledgeable people rarely are blind guessers and thus should guess as they are likely to beat the odds of the guessing penalty.
If there is a fraud, it is if the standard for passing is so low that a person making random guesses can pass the exam one out of three or four times.
People are missing the point comparing the $15 GB card with the 2gb + Wifi for $100. This isn't about space. Take Nikon for example. You have to shell out some $2K for a D200 to even have the option to ADD the feature of wifi. With this card a $1000 D80 can have wifi.
Where is WIFI useful? Not on your hiking trip to the back country. In those cases one can easily make the case for high density memory cards and perhaps a digital wallet type device.
Where is is a WIFI camera useful? Around the house and around the studio. A point and shoot WIFI camera can automatically upload the pictures to the house network. A lower cost D80 that meets 100% of portrait studio needs or 98% commercial studio needs uses the 2GB card as a buffer and uploads to the business computer. Imagine you family portrait pictures appearing on a large flat panel display behind the photographer within seconds of the camera shutter being tripped. All without the family having to break poses. Imagine a wedding photographer where the on location printing service displays candids of the chicken dance even before the music stops. Meanwhile the photographer never needs to reload, switch cards, or manage the images other than to occasionally make sure he's got images in the bag, or in the computer. All without having to pay the extra $1000. Both the $1000 D80 and the $2000 D200 depreciate to a couple of hundred dollars within 3 years. So saving the $1000 up front means the photographer has an extra $333/year to do somethings else with.
Also think amusements parks. Just inside the gate of most are a flock of photographers grabbing pictures of couples and small groups. They typically use cheap cameras with an off camera flash. Cheap WIFI would mean the park goers' pictures would be ready for viewing and purchase before they could walk to the kiosk.
Disney could take this to a whole new level. Already Disney's photographers are at a whole different level than your typical summer amusement parks entrance flock. They are full time well trained year round employees. The Disney photographer hands you an ID card with a bar code. They scan the bar code after they shoot you and your pictures appear on your own personal webe site. With WIFI the pictures could be on the web site within seconds. More and more people walk around with web enabled phones so you could be viewing your Disney pictures while you wait in line at It's a Small World.
So compare 2GB+WIFI with a high density card. The goal of the high density card is to carry fewer cards and make fewer switches. 2GB + WIFI can eliminate the need for multiple cards for some and eliminate switches.
This is a complicated set of questions the you've boiled down to should I use RAID 5 array. Yes a small array of three disks set up at RAID 5 can only present two times the space of the smallest drive in the configuration. So have 3 * 250GB today you have 500GB of usable space. Tomorrow replace two of those drives with 750 GB drives and you still will only have 500GB of usable space. While I haven't studied it, I can also image low end arrays that if you now replace the last 250 GB drive with a 750 GB drive you might still only have 500Gb of usable space until you do something.
If you're talking significantly larger arrays, then the hot topic in storage is virtualized RAID. You throw several dozen to several hundred drives at a virtualized array, you tell the array how much RAID 0, RAID 1, and RAID5 storage you want and the array builds that across the drives available. You can even define some drives as hot spares. Somehow from you comments this sounds much larger than you're talking.
Also RAID 5 doesn't have to be a set of three disks. It can be any number of disks with parity space. The smallest RAID5 set is three, but there are arrays that build four, five, six, and seven disk RAID 5 sets. If with three disk (all the same size) sets one third of the space is lost to parity information. With seven disk sets only one seventh. Three is the common number for low end arrays because, well they are low end arrays and disk slots consume space and money. At the high end the number of disks in a RAID 5 set is set based on space savings vs. performance needs. The more disk in a RAID 5 set, the worse performance random writes will get.
Lastly while RAID 1 and/or 5 is a good way to protect you from the hardware failure of one disk, it is not the end all be all of data protection.
Whole arrays aren't as likely to go bad, but it has been known to happen. That's where host based RAID 1 between two arrays comes in for the highest availability.
In many configurations user error is the most likely concern. Wild card deletes, programatic corruptions, overwriting old valid files with new files are as likely to cause you grief in a given year, and RAID 5 (nor 1) won't give you the least bit of protection against that. Backups do better. And with todays cost of storage, and disk to disk backup is a practical way to give yourself another level of protection. Arguably for low update rates a nightly backup is better than RAID 1 as the likelihood of overwriting a file or deleting it is higher on a given day than a hard disk failure.
If your data is more valuable then you need to consider offsite backups. Again this doesn't necessarily mean investment in an expensive tape drive and expensive tape cartridges. External USB, Firewire or SATA drives even the NET can be a cost effective way to move data offsite.
I've worked in a tech support role for 8 years. Prior to the I worked in the field as a consultant.
In the field I sometimes needed to depend on tech support myself. I learned in the field that if I called tech support and wanted effective help, I needed to humble myself and pretend that I knew absolutely nothing. SO in a sense I lied to tech support by playing dumb. Playing dumb seemed like waste of time. I had to let tech support take me down the same blind alleys I'd already been down. I had to humor them by redoing what I believed I'd already done. But by letting them work through they methodology one of a few things would happen: they'd find what I'd missed, they'd eventually take the problem to resolution down a path I wouldn't have followed, we'd gain mutual respect and put our heads together to solve the problem, or we'd need to escalate.
Within the first week of moving to phone support I learned the lesson, "Never entirely trust what the caller says." Seems not all people who can't find the answer themselves are filling to humble themselves to admitting they don't know the answer. Some, not all, want to gloss over then initial stages of the troubleshooting methodology, to get to the "heart of the problem."
Techsupport: "Do you have files in such and such a directory?" C: "No."
Did the customer look? maybe yes, or maybe he thinks, hey I never put files there so there can't be any there, I'll save time by answering intuitively....
Sometimes it's not a matter of the customer trying to pull one over, as the customer doesn't want to admit they don't know how to empirically find the answer. Other times the customer didn't understand the question to begin with.
Anyway some of the deepest rat holes I found myself in were because I understood the customer to tell me something that in the end turned out not to be true. As a phone support person the customer has to be my eyes and ears. If I get incorrect information, whether my misunderstanding or the customer lie, I won't get to problem resolution. Some phone support personnel start to treat the customer as a hostile witness. Others have more gentle ways of starting over from the very beginning and looking for what was missed.
It makes more sense to me to declare some none default port as the "clean" port. Then have a cerification process for anyone who wants to use that port. Net Nanny type software and even FireFox and IE could be made aware port "G" (whatever number) is the G rated port. Countries and jurisdictions worldwide could adopt policies and law for people who post non "G" rated material to the "G" port. Countries and juristictions could out right filter out other juristictions that allow non "clean" material to the "G" port.
Meanwhile port 80 continues unincumbered. No "freedom of speach" issues to derail the plan.
NOTE: The "G" rated is probably a trademark of the MPA so some other similar rating scheme would be needed.
From the DEC (Digital Equipment Corp) inventory...
A MicroVAX II. First system with the CPU on one chip.
A "Jensen" AlphaStation 150. Representing early 64 bit processing.
A DECtalk or DECvoice unit. Featured voice in "War Games" and Steven Hawkings "voice."
An 11/780. Would take up a lot of space, but there's a guy that converted the cabinet of one into a bar...
Any of the long list of failed DEC PC products... better, but incompatible: VT180 "Robin", Rainbow, VAXmate, Pro 350... I believe that the "Rainbow" was author Peirs Anthony's first computer and featured in his author's notes of several novels, and quite likely the inspiration of the "ComPewter" of Xanth.
Many people may not remember the mini or mainframe computers they used, as they may not have ever been in the same room. They might however remember the terminals they used. Can I suggest: - VT100, the early face of online terminals in the 1980s. - LA100, this hardcopy terminal was the console of many a systems and the face of online computing for those without a CRT terminal. This hardcopy terminal could double as a printer too. They came with many different labels and brands, but they are all essentially the same beast. - 2780 terminal, for those IBMers out there.
Some sample cables: an RS-232 cable, a parallel printer, a thick wire Ethernet cable, transceiver and transciever cable, a thinwire Ethernet cable and T connecter, etc.
Some sample media with storage capacity: computer card, paper tape, 9-track tape, misc. floppies, TU-52, TK50 (20 year-old predecessor to the current DLT family.)
At least not for what are list as their most "hideos" examples.
In War Games the Norad computer WHOPPER doesn't talk. It places text on a screen. Matthew B.'s character purposefully flips a switch to impress the girl. The switch enables a speach synthesizer. In this case, I beliece the voice is that of then current DECtalk by Digital Equipment Corporation. Same voice for Stephen Hawkin uses or used.
I didn't see Antitrust so I don't know the actual protrayal of the technology. But I do know that the image provided is that of a CRT. CRT's are patently insecure. There are devices that can rebuild the image on a CRT screen from the flicker created on the wall. Since at any instant only one pixel is illuminated at a time, the pixel's color can be picked up off the wall. Since the CRT is refreshed in a certain order the device can pick of all the pixels in order and recreate the screen. All that's left is deciding where the screen begins. Was the screen image is know, simple OCR algorithms can do the rest.
That may or may not mean they hit a performance wall. In multiple CPU configurations there can be many reasons that not all 8 CPUs were used. The implication of the statement was, "Gee, this thing must be SO fast that they couldn't find enough work for all 8 CPUs to do." However equally possible is that even though there was computable work to do, the OS, application environment and hardware archtecture was not able to take advantage of use all 8 CPUs. In which case having all those CPUs is a pure waste of money.
This comes from twenty years of multiple CPU OS performance work. OpenVMS has had effective multiple CPU environments for that long. As the number of CPUs increases, there is always more tweaking to be done to take advantage of the CPUs.
I now little about how the Unix based Mac OS uses multiple CPUs. I suspect that few others do too.;)
Ah come on. No mention of Rainbow nor VAXmate in the top 25? Rainbow was years ahead of its time. (Too bad it was compatible with nothing.) And I'm still convinced that the VAXmate was the inspiration for the lastest round of all-in-1 MAC desktops. An who could forget the venerable PRO 350? A PC which could run a mini-computer's OS?
I have an old Gateway 2000 tower cab that is capable of holding 8 3.5" drives, plus 3 5.25" bays. So a new mother board, beefier power supply, as many fans as I can pack in and I could get to 10 IDE/ATA drives (one 5.25" bay for CD-rom) with a total of 2.5 TB before RAID. Carve that into two 5 disks RAID 5 sets and I have a live 1 TB volume and then use system guardian for backup and have a 1 TB volume of offline back for when I mistakenly delete/overwrite the wrong things.
Several things I'm missing... 1) not sure the is a power supply to handle 10 drives plus the other stuff. 2) not sure I can get enough airflow to keep it cool. 3) not sure there is one RAID controller that can manage easier manager 5 disks into one RAID 5 set. 4) not sure I can route the seven IDE flat cables (1 to CD, 2 to single drives, 4 to two drives) 5) I know I don't have the $$$ to spend.;) We're talking a $1K-3K project.
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Charon VAX and Charon Alpha have been around for years. Those DECies that are hard core will know that TOPS-10 lives on on emulated DECsystem10 software. A emulated VAX on a modern low end desktop PC runs faster than fastest physical VAX. Want your VAX/VMS application to have the advantages of SAN attached SSD storage? Easy. Allowed to use Gigabit? Done. VMS doesn't think it has any of that, but the host has it and the emulator presents it as older gear to the OS. For those that don't want to be 32bit limited Charon Alpha works too.
For those that think this is not the way to run a serious IT shop, consider that I wouldn't recommend running your business or shop floor app on a low end desktop. I'd buy a 1st tier data center class box, running Windows Server. I'd buy full hardware and software support for the host. Frequently those costs are recouped quickly from the fact that hardware support for 15 year gear is no longer needed. The users don't need to be retrained. Business isn't disrupted with data migrations to new databases and software that doesn't have the same features.
With VAX and Alpha emulation, you don't even source code because a VAX is a VAX and an Alpha is an Alpha. Unfortunately not needing the source code is an advantage more often than you'd think.
You can't if it is government related.
BTW as a 27 year veteran of the sys admin camp, since when have programmers been "above" sys admins? Respect disappeared when we stopped being system managers and became sys admins. Instead of managing things we administered them sounding more like an admin assist. That's I'm glad my title is engineer or consultant depending on the day.
IMHO, your best chance at compensation is to be creative. Comp time? Time to monitor campus classes (or take them for credit.) Agreement to change your title without a raise. Title's look good on resumes. Job flexibility in general tends to come to employees who go above and beyond.
How about a signed agreement that the software and copyright are yours and that you'll continue support and development outside of work hours for free allows you to own the software and a chance to make it marketable.
If you're looking for cold hard cash I think you are out of luck. Let's say the college finds the budget. Why would they necessarily select your solution? Oh and BTW you can't be on the selection committee as you have an inherent conflict of interests. In fact even selection of your solution would create substaintial conflicts.
If you're a government run/owned college the rules will be even tougher on conflicts of interest. Be VERY careful in that case trying to extract cash from this situation. Otherwise a felony conviction and prison time are not outside the realm of possibilities.
(Disclaimer: I'm an HP Employee)
But let me use an example wholely within the HP environment. I can buy new, refurb consumer or used refurb'ed business PC. I never go the business PC route for personal use as because I get less horsepower for the buck. Theoretically what I'm paying for in a business machine is higher reliability and lower support costs. However when the support cost is personal time that costs $0 to me, I pay the lower cost.
So I posit is that if cost of support labor and downtime is low, then the self build self support model makes sense. If the cost of labor is higher, then paying for a higher qualtiy, more reliable, extrenally supported solution makes more sense. Those labor costs need to include cost of down time of idled employees as well as support costs.
I disagree that noone born after 1990 wants to play pen and paper D&D. My two boys ages 9 and 13 are hooked. My 4 year-old daughter wants to play SO BAD. There is a whole gaggle of boys at scouts that have been roped in. Of course maybe that's because ipods, cell phones and computers are banned at overnighters! But that's not really the reason.
Why did I show D&D to my boys? The answer will surprise you. My older son was then 8. He was an advanced reader, but he much preferred books on tape, CD or later iPod. However none of the D&D books, my AD&D versions in particular, had audio versions. He had to wade through them himself. Seriously, how many 8 year olds are reading and trying to undrestand what a theocracy is. Then he wanted to take over and refurbish the moat house in one of the modules. He then needed to figure out the costs in GPs to plan. Enter the need for Excel!
D&D has been a tool to teach Microsoft Office skills, governments, reading, folklore, map making, budgets, medival culture, etc. I highly recommend it as a cirriculum for home schooling! Okay maybe that's taking it a bit too far.
There's a big difference between trademark and copyright. A Trademark is a mark on a item that is meant to show it's origin. It's a mark of trade that is supposed to prevent anyone from stitching a shirt together and selling it as a Prada. So in this case the IOC is saying it is going to mark its official items as "with glowing hearts" and thus doesn't anyone else printing that on shirt and caps and selling them as if they were official Olympic items.
There's nothing to prevent me to using the phrase "with glowing hearts" in literature, I just can't slap it on a shirt and sell the shirt, just like I can't slap Calvin Klein or Prada on clothing.
Now I could probably slap "Prada" on a camera and sell it as trademarks are specific to a set of related products. Think for example the name "Nationwide". There is a trucking company, an insurance company and a trailer rental company all using the trademark Nationwide, but only for their business segment.
For that manner, a sign company in the U.S. might choose to trademark the name "Star Spangled Banner", or a fireworks company trademark the name "Rocket's Red Glare." The IOC is doing what any smart marketeer would do.
If you think your building AC is up to the load over all, have you considered better ventilation from the ambient air outside the room. Faster turn over of air can go a long way in cooling. Though it's doubtful you'll be able to high turnover of ambient office space air to bring your server room down to 20C, I'll bet you can make a dent in the current 30+C level. This might even be possible without making your co-workers too uncomfortable by maknig sure that the exhaust air is discharged into the return air plenum, which is usually the space above the drop ceiling.
All that fan power and ventilation might however increase the noise level near the server room.
CoreFTP www.coreftp.com has many of the features you're seeking but it's a Windows tool. If can compare timestamps to see if the client file is newer. It encrypts each individual file before sending it across the FTP link. The files are stored individually on the host. The only piece that I'm not sure it can do is be on a USB drive.
And while not open source, the 'lite' version is free.
Each parent is going to have his/her own hot buttons as to what is acceptable and what isn't. Even with sexual content there is anything from sexual tension to some down right nasty stuff.
You specifically ask for SciFi and you're examples are in the SciFi area rather than Fantasy.
My kid's reading list:
L Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth. (Not to be mistaken with Hubbard's "Mission Earth" dekaology the is not appropriate in my opinion for pre-teens.)
Piers Anthony's Xanth Series. It's thirty three books and counting of bad puns. Just the thing for pre-teen boys. Careful on the sex topics of his other books and series as some of them are graphic and other sexual themes aren't appropriate for pre-teens.
Roger Zelazny's Amber Series.
CS Lewis's Narnia Series.
Pulman's His Dark Materials series.
Asimov's Foundation series would be okay.
Red Wall.
In the fantasy the gorilla in the room is Harry Potter.
I haven't tried them but the Star Trek and Star Wars book series are probably acceptable even if not "serious" literature.
One could always plumb the depths of the Gutenberg Project's text library and pull classics like Jules Verne and Dan Defoe. Some care is needed even here as I recently read Robinson Crusoe and it is not exactly politically correct in the treatment of indigenous people and is a bit snobbish about the ingenuity of Brits.
However the important piece in any of these is to be reading the material in advance and being able to discuss the good and questionable themes with your kid. Saw a study that along the lines of children, parents and TV. The study found that when children watched TV shows with their parents in the room, even of some of the show's themes might be counter to the family's values, the kids would pick up even the subtle vibes of the parents. That if they watched the shows without the parents present, then they tended to mroe directly absorb the values as presented in the show.
I think books are similar. They offer the chance to discuss values. Is Malfroy a bad person or he simply a tragic character in the wrong family at the wrong time? What do you think of Harry kissing girls? (I doubt a parent could ask that question without conveying his/her expectation of there own child's behavior.)
What that EDS "bought" GM?
As an HP employee I hope HP is smarter than GM was. Remember the GM bought EDS in the 80s and EDS milked GM for all it was worth. EDS did great; GM not so. Of course GM thought it was buying a company to outsource its IT to while HP is looking to merge outsourcing operations with EDS.
The use of MP3 software (or the like) while working is probably less about memory and more about the sound card, or lack there of. We had a low end 512MB XP PC with embedded sound. Any time Itunes was running we could forget doing anything else. That problem was solved, not by adding more memory, but by installed a dedicated sound card that off loaded the CPU.
I agree 100% with the previous posts that say the parents have a responsibility to monitor their own children's PC usage. It's the same way with anything. At the child grows and show greater judgment and responsibility they are given more trust and privacy. It's an irony that the children that most rail at the lack of privacy are often the same children who haven't earned it.
One thing I don't agree with is the statement that a 7 year old with a personally locked down but not internet connected PC is no more at risk than a kid with a pen and paper. What's to keep the older sibling that sees nothing wrong with a 7 year old locking out her parents from secretly installing a WIFI card to the 7 year old can access the internet through a neighbor's access point? What's to prevent the 7 year old from using her PC to copy music CDs or DVDs and distributing them to friends. That would expose her parents to possible copyright litigation. What's to keep the 7 year from using the privacy of her room and PC to author content she shouldn't, burning it to CD and using a public PC to post it to the web?
Yes the 7 year old should be able to lock out her older siblings. That is fair and understandable. Her parents need to have access, even if they never do. And if her PC is to be connected to the internet, then she should have "strict parental control" software loaded.
My $.02.
I draw analogy to my phone. Many people today only have cell phones and have dispensed with hard wired ones. I have a cell phone but I'm not ready to give up my land lines. I work on the phone. While coverage for cell phones at the house is *usually* good, quality isn't consistently good. For the sake of others, in particular my customers, a quiet quality line is mandatory. Also There are many days where I'll spend hours on the phone and cell phone batteries aren't up to the task. More importantly cell phone batteries aren't up to the thankfully few outage situation that require 1-10 hour bridge sessions. Also a wired land line phone offers more quality options: better speaker phones, bigger buttons and dedicated function buttons, cordless options, amplified headsets, two ear head sets, robust headsets that can take constant use for years, etc.
Granted not everyone needs this, and that's why some have eliminated the monthly bill for land lines.
Take that analogy to wired vs. mobile ISP service. Based on the comments so far, wired ISP service + WIFI offers more consistently higher speed service than mobile. The number of routers and their features available are very diverse for wired service. Network configurations behind those routers are also very flexible. For example I use a router to get to the ISP and an access point in a better local for WIFI. The telcos and cable service providers are, in my opinion, a much tighter race for your $20-30/mo. They offer extra services that might appeal to some.
Anyway I agree with most of the other comments. The economics of wired ISP+WIFI compared to Mobile are going to be very subjective to the usage of individual users. For example how many people or systems are you trying to support? A single person might not see much incremental cost. If you already have Mobile service then dropping the cost of wired ISP makes even more sense.
The technical viability of Mobile over wired ISP+WIFI is also very subjective to your home location and your vendors network. My great analogy for this is pager coverage. My company four years ago was very committed to Skytel paging plans. So much so that even though I had a text messaging plan, was forced to get a Skytel Pager. However... I spend the majority of my time working from home in the basement and at home in general. Though I'm in a built up suburb of Cleveland, my home sat in a hole in the Skytel network. A half mile any direction and paging was reliable. But not at my house. My company finally had to admit that for me, mobile service text messaging was a better solution. Meanwhile others on my team find that Skytel coverage is better for their neighborhoods.
The blogger touts his math/stat skills and then argues that multi choice scores are a fraud. Like many self proclaimed experts, this one falls short. He posts a formula without variables and show the wrong answer.
Worse as a supposed stats expert, he also quotes the formula for guessing incorrectly.
He doesn't mention that standardized tests that use the "guessing formula" do not require one to guess. If you know only two answers and answer ONLY those questions, there is no penalty for unanswered questions.
Also his extreme examples aren't the ones to support his hypothesis. His primary two examples were both 100 True/False questions. In on "extreme" example one person knowing one answer and the other two. That case, regardless of the math we know on average the more knowledgeable person. His second example on this test was comparing two people. One knowing all and one knowing half. Aganig applying the guessing formula widens the delta but we still know who's more knowledgeable.
The example that exposes the fraud is a 100 question T/F test where one person knows 50 and marks guesses for the other 50, while the second person knows 64 answers and doesn't guess leaving 35 questions unmarked. Person 1 is going to average a score of 75, frequently a passing grade, while the more knowledgeable person scores a 64, often a failing grade.
However the blame here lies with the test preparation. If there is no "guessing" penalty for wrong answers, then all test takers should guess on all unknown questions. If all do then that person that knew 64 answer will on average score an 82 beating the person who knew only 50. If there is a "guessing" penalty for wrong answers, then whether or not the test takers makes blind guesses is irrelevant. AS another reply to the blogger points out, knowledgeable people rarely are blind guessers and thus should guess as they are likely to beat the odds of the guessing penalty.
If there is a fraud, it is if the standard for passing is so low that a person making random guesses can pass the exam one out of three or four times.
People are missing the point comparing the $15 GB card with the 2gb + Wifi for $100. This isn't about space. Take Nikon for example. You have to shell out some $2K for a D200 to even have the option to ADD the feature of wifi. With this card a $1000 D80 can have wifi.
Where is WIFI useful? Not on your hiking trip to the back country. In those cases one can easily make the case for high density memory cards and perhaps a digital wallet type device.
Where is is a WIFI camera useful? Around the house and around the studio. A point and shoot WIFI camera can automatically upload the pictures to the house network. A lower cost D80 that meets 100% of portrait studio needs or 98% commercial studio needs uses the 2GB card as a buffer and uploads to the business computer. Imagine you family portrait pictures appearing on a large flat panel display behind the photographer within seconds of the camera shutter being tripped. All without the family having to break poses. Imagine a wedding photographer where the on location printing service displays candids of the chicken dance even before the music stops. Meanwhile the photographer never needs to reload, switch cards, or manage the images other than to occasionally make sure he's got images in the bag, or in the computer. All without having to pay the extra $1000. Both the $1000 D80 and the $2000 D200 depreciate to a couple of hundred dollars within 3 years. So saving the $1000 up front means the photographer has an extra $333/year to do somethings else with.
Also think amusements parks. Just inside the gate of most are a flock of photographers grabbing pictures of couples and small groups. They typically use cheap cameras with an off camera flash. Cheap WIFI would mean the park goers' pictures would be ready for viewing and purchase before they could walk to the kiosk.
Disney could take this to a whole new level. Already Disney's photographers are at a whole different level than your typical summer amusement parks entrance flock. They are full time well trained year round employees. The Disney photographer hands you an ID card with a bar code. They scan the bar code after they shoot you and your pictures appear on your own personal webe site. With WIFI the pictures could be on the web site within seconds. More and more people walk around with web enabled phones so you could be viewing your Disney pictures while you wait in line at It's a Small World.
So compare 2GB+WIFI with a high density card. The goal of the high density card is to carry fewer cards and make fewer switches. 2GB + WIFI can eliminate the need for multiple cards for some and eliminate switches.
Todd
This is a complicated set of questions the you've boiled down to should I use RAID 5 array. Yes a small array of three disks set up at RAID 5 can only present two times the space of the smallest drive in the configuration. So have 3 * 250GB today you have 500GB of usable space. Tomorrow replace two of those drives with 750 GB drives and you still will only have 500GB of usable space. While I haven't studied it, I can also image low end arrays that if you now replace the last 250 GB drive with a 750 GB drive you might still only have 500Gb of usable space until you do something.
If you're talking significantly larger arrays, then the hot topic in storage is virtualized RAID. You throw several dozen to several hundred drives at a virtualized array, you tell the array how much RAID 0, RAID 1, and RAID5 storage you want and the array builds that across the drives available. You can even define some drives as hot spares. Somehow from you comments this sounds much larger than you're talking.
Also RAID 5 doesn't have to be a set of three disks. It can be any number of disks with parity space. The smallest RAID5 set is three, but there are arrays that build four, five, six, and seven disk RAID 5 sets. If with three disk (all the same size) sets one third of the space is lost to parity information. With seven disk sets only one seventh. Three is the common number for low end arrays because, well they are low end arrays and disk slots consume space and money. At the high end the number of disks in a RAID 5 set is set based on space savings vs. performance needs. The more disk in a RAID 5 set, the worse performance random writes will get.
Lastly while RAID 1 and/or 5 is a good way to protect you from the hardware failure of one disk, it is not the end all be all of data protection.
Whole arrays aren't as likely to go bad, but it has been known to happen. That's where host based RAID 1 between two arrays comes in for the highest availability.
In many configurations user error is the most likely concern. Wild card deletes, programatic corruptions, overwriting old valid files with new files are as likely to cause you grief in a given year, and RAID 5 (nor 1) won't give you the least bit of protection against that. Backups do better. And with todays cost of storage, and disk to disk backup is a practical way to give yourself another level of protection. Arguably for low update rates a nightly backup is better than RAID 1 as the likelihood of overwriting a file or deleting it is higher on a given day than a hard disk failure.
If your data is more valuable then you need to consider offsite backups. Again this doesn't necessarily mean investment in an expensive tape drive and expensive tape cartridges. External USB, Firewire or SATA drives even the NET can be a cost effective way to move data offsite.
Todd
I've worked in a tech support role for 8 years. Prior to the I worked in the field as a consultant.
In the field I sometimes needed to depend on tech support myself. I learned in the field that if I called tech support and wanted effective help, I needed to humble myself and pretend that I knew absolutely nothing. SO in a sense I lied to tech support by playing dumb. Playing dumb seemed like waste of time. I had to let tech support take me down the same blind alleys I'd already been down. I had to humor them by redoing what I believed I'd already done. But by letting them work through they methodology one of a few things would happen: they'd find what I'd missed, they'd eventually take the problem to resolution down a path I wouldn't have followed, we'd gain mutual respect and put our heads together to solve the problem, or we'd need to escalate.
Within the first week of moving to phone support I learned the lesson, "Never entirely trust what the caller says." Seems not all people who can't find the answer themselves are filling to humble themselves to admitting they don't know the answer. Some, not all, want to gloss over then initial stages of the troubleshooting methodology, to get to the "heart of the problem."
Techsupport: "Do you have files in such and such a directory?"
C: "No."
Did the customer look? maybe yes, or maybe he thinks, hey I never put files there so there can't be any there, I'll save time by answering intuitively....
Sometimes it's not a matter of the customer trying to pull one over, as the customer doesn't want to admit they don't know how to empirically find the answer. Other times the customer didn't understand the question to begin with.
Anyway some of the deepest rat holes I found myself in were because I understood the customer to tell me something that in the end turned out not to be true. As a phone support person the customer has to be my eyes and ears. If I get incorrect information, whether my misunderstanding or the customer lie, I won't get to problem resolution. Some phone support personnel start to treat the customer as a hostile witness. Others have more gentle ways of starting over from the very beginning and looking for what was missed.
It makes more sense to me to declare some none default port as the "clean" port. Then have a cerification process for anyone who wants to use that port. Net Nanny type software and even FireFox and IE could be made aware port "G" (whatever number) is the G rated port. Countries and jurisdictions worldwide could adopt policies and law for people who post non "G" rated material to the "G" port. Countries and juristictions could out right filter out other juristictions that allow non "clean" material to the "G" port.
Meanwhile port 80 continues unincumbered. No "freedom of speach" issues to derail the plan.
NOTE: The "G" rated is probably a trademark of the MPA so some other similar rating scheme would be needed.
From the DEC (Digital Equipment Corp) inventory...
A MicroVAX II. First system with the CPU on one chip.
A "Jensen" AlphaStation 150. Representing early 64 bit processing.
A DECtalk or DECvoice unit. Featured voice in "War Games" and Steven Hawkings "voice."
An 11/780. Would take up a lot of space, but there's a guy that converted the cabinet of one into a bar...
Any of the long list of failed DEC PC products... better, but incompatible: VT180 "Robin", Rainbow, VAXmate, Pro 350... I believe that the "Rainbow" was author Peirs Anthony's first computer and featured in his author's notes of several novels, and quite likely the inspiration of the "ComPewter" of Xanth.
Many people may not remember the mini or mainframe computers they used, as they may not have ever been in the same room. They might however remember the terminals they used. Can I suggest:
- VT100, the early face of online terminals in the 1980s.
- LA100, this hardcopy terminal was the console of many a systems and the face of online computing for those without a CRT terminal. This hardcopy terminal could double as a printer too. They came with many different labels and brands, but they are all essentially the same beast.
- 2780 terminal, for those IBMers out there.
Some sample cables: an RS-232 cable, a parallel printer, a thick wire Ethernet cable, transceiver and transciever cable, a thinwire Ethernet cable and T connecter, etc.
Some sample media with storage capacity: computer card, paper tape, 9-track tape, misc. floppies, TU-52, TK50 (20 year-old predecessor to the current DLT family.)
At least not for what are list as their most "hideos" examples.
In War Games the Norad computer WHOPPER doesn't talk. It places text on a screen. Matthew B.'s character purposefully flips a switch to impress the girl. The switch enables a speach synthesizer. In this case, I beliece the voice is that of then current DECtalk by Digital Equipment Corporation. Same voice for Stephen Hawkin uses or used.
I didn't see Antitrust so I don't know the actual protrayal of the technology. But I do know that the image provided is that of a CRT. CRT's are patently insecure. There are devices that can rebuild the image on a CRT screen from the flicker created on the wall. Since at any instant only one pixel is illuminated at a time, the pixel's color can be picked up off the wall. Since the CRT is refreshed in a certain order the device can pick of all the pixels in order and recreate the screen. All that's left is deciding where the screen begins.
Was the screen image is know, simple OCR algorithms can do the rest.
That may or may not mean they hit a performance wall. In multiple CPU configurations there can be many reasons that not all 8 CPUs were used. The implication of the statement was, "Gee, this thing must be SO fast that they couldn't find enough work for all 8 CPUs to do." However equally possible is that even though there was computable work to do, the OS, application environment and hardware archtecture was not able to take advantage of use all 8 CPUs. In which case having all those CPUs is a pure waste of money.
;)
This comes from twenty years of multiple CPU OS performance work. OpenVMS has had effective multiple CPU environments for that long. As the number of CPUs increases, there is always more tweaking to be done to take advantage of the CPUs.
I now little about how the Unix based Mac OS uses multiple CPUs. I suspect that few others do too.
Ah come on. No mention of Rainbow nor VAXmate in the top 25? Rainbow was years ahead of its time. (Too bad it was compatible with nothing.) And I'm still convinced that the VAXmate was the inspiration for the lastest round of all-in-1 MAC desktops. An who could forget the venerable PRO 350? A PC which could run a mini-computer's OS?
Lets see.
;) We're talking a $1K-3K project.
I have an old Gateway 2000 tower cab that is capable of holding 8 3.5" drives, plus 3 5.25" bays. So a new mother board, beefier power supply, as many fans as I can pack in and I could get to 10 IDE/ATA drives (one 5.25" bay for CD-rom) with a total of 2.5 TB before RAID. Carve that into two 5 disks RAID 5 sets and I have a live 1 TB volume and then use system guardian for backup and have a 1 TB volume of offline back for when I mistakenly delete/overwrite the wrong things.
Several things I'm missing...
1) not sure the is a power supply to handle 10 drives plus the other stuff.
2) not sure I can get enough airflow to keep it cool.
3) not sure there is one RAID controller that can manage easier manager 5 disks into one RAID 5 set.
4) not sure I can route the seven IDE flat cables (1 to CD, 2 to single drives, 4 to two drives)
5) I know I don't have the $$$ to spend.
I hope they use good encryption, otherwise we'll all have to wear wet suits to avoid "hackers" in a crowd.