If you think that $25,000 per 5 seats per year is expensive for embedded linux - just wait until you get a quote from Wind River for VxWorks - and then hold on as they give you the additional charge per unit sold.
My experience is very different. Maybe it's because I work mostly with embedded systems. There most programmers are either CS/CE people who have school training, or they are EE people who did the 2 software course that they had to in school.
I found that the "EE" programmers - that is the ones without much formal programming training can knock out a simple function really well - but can not build a bigger system to save their soul. The CE/CS programmers on the other hand get the big picture of the software realm and use data structures in a sensible manner, break things down into sensible functions or objects, etc. To the non-trained programmer an object is often just a container for a bunch of loosely related functions.
Now - that being said it doesn't always break down along the lines of what their formal training was, but it often does - even if their schooling was 20 years ago.
Now - to rip on some of the CS people - I've had new CS grads that didn't understand that hex was just another way of writing a number - they thought it was another data type. I've also run into CS grad students that didn't understand bit-wise operators. < sigh >
I actually haven't had that problem, and I have a lot of lecture notes that I created in Word a couple of years ago, and now do everything in OpenOffice.
My biggest problem is that Word was buggy as hell when doing outlines. The autonumbers could get messed up and there was no good way to get rid of the "mess up". Things like sequences restarting even though no restart flag was set in the properties, or the fun one was the font being changed for some of the numbers, and again not being able to change it back. I ended up deleting and retyping a lot of sections just to clear up some of these issues.... I miss the old WordPerfect "Reveal Codes" feature!
18.67batches x 3 min/batch = 56 minutes to pop a bushel of popcorn
1.24 cubic ft/bushel unpopped x 38 = 47.2 cu ft popped corn
From this you can see that you can get about 50 cubic feet of popcorn per hour. That is from a multi-thousand $ machine.
A small bedroom (10x12x8) is 960 cubic feet. Thats about 20 hours to fill that one room. They do have dual popper machines and I think one that went as high as 66 oz of popcorn per batch - but even so that is A LOT of popcorn.
Call some concession businesses in the yellow pages and ask about getting 100's of pounds of popcorn popped. A lot of the places will think you are nuts (you are) but one of them will probably be able to point you to someone who can or does do that kind of volume of pre-popped corn for stadiums, etc. Another avenue might be to find someone who works for a snack food
You will NOT get enough dust in the air to be explosive. Dust has to be so thick that you can't see more than a meter or so through it to be explosive. Go google dust collection systems and static discharge and grouding PVC pipes (check out rec.woodworking archive in Google in particular). This topic has been beat to death there (repeatedly) and no one has yet to show proof of a dust explosion in something like a home woodshop environment which can be plenty dusty.
Yes - popped popcorn is flamable. So is the newspaper laying there and the cardboard box containing all your treasures. There there are the wood studs and paper faced drywall in your home. Yup that's all flamable too. You don't worry about those catching fire that much do you?
Re:Buy a new fridge, and other suggestions.
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I just couldn't let this pass by -
"I worked it out once...100-200W over 24x7x365 equals a LOT of money per year!"
First - that math is for 7 years, it should be 24 x 7 x 52.179 or 24 x 365.25
200W x 24hrs/day x 365.25days/year = 1753.2kW-hours / year.
At a rate of $0.08/kW-hour = $140.
Now - that is assuming that it is using the full 200W all the time. A 200W or 300W power supply is needed because there is a lot more power used when the disks are spinning up or that CD/DVD is spinning and writing. Even a more busy CPU and graphics card will draw significantly more power. So that box is probably drawing only a fraction of that power on average which means that it isn't really close to that much.
Now if I could just find my clamp-on amp-meter to give some real power numbers on my own boxen.........
DS3 does run over copper - but it can't over twisted pair. It is generally run using coax cable, and not exactly the cable-tv type of coax either. The equipment is set up for a 75ohm impedance, and expects repeaters on a regular basis. If the cable isn't already there - you might as well run fiber as it will be cheaper because of fewer repeaters and give you more bandwidth.
I have had good luck modifying such contracts and getting the bogus stuff removed or reworked.
A few points - first hire a lawyer - it will cost you a few bucks, but should be less than $200. Go over it with them and do not mention the lawyer to your potential employer.
Once you sat down with the lawyer and reviewed the document in person with them you have a shopping list of things you want to change. Then set up a meeting with the HR person or boss or whoever will have the authority to make the changes on the company side.
In the past I have explained about having a friend who got burned by a over reaching contract such as this. The company went under and the bankruptcy lawyers were trying to lay their hands on anything of value including the friends open-source project. Of course once they got hold of the source it was worthless as it was only of value when it was freely given away. So in the end no-one won anything. Once you've given this kind of little story they are more sympathetic to how you just want to CYA and prevent any potential future uglyness just as they want to cover their assets and prevent any future problems.
In some (several) states, agreements that attempt to get your work even in out of company time and property are illegal - but that doesn't stop lawyers from using the broadest language possible because they know that it will just get narrowed down to what the law allows. Unless there was "willful" over-reaching (i.e. something almost impossible to prove for a reasonable amount of money) the court wouldn't throw out the whole ageeement because of it.
One other thing to watch out for is some language to the effect that the contract should not be construed as being drafted by either party. I forget the term, but there is a legal idea that in the case of ambigious language the interpretation goes against the person who drafted the contract. This way the drafter shouldn't purposefully put in ambigious terms. And - it is assumed that the person writing the contract is probably a lawyer and has better knowledge too. By putting in a clause that the contract is assumed to not be drafted by either party they tip the scales back so that anything ambigious is to be weighed based on other terms, not against the company.
If you follow the link to this guys homepage and do a little digging you come across:
http://mlcastle.net/tech/1.html
Which state "... active street medic, meaning that during major protests I travel in a squad of medics providing support in the "hot zone", where EMS will not go"
So - no the cops will probably not help these guys out and they are most definetly not authorized to talk on the police bands.
From my work in the telecom industry for the last 11 years all of it with making fiber optic equipment, a piece of dark fiber is really just a piece of glass with nothing hooked to it. Newton's Telecom Dictionary also says that dark fiber is fiber with nothing on it.
Now - you may work with a telco company that calls their point-to-point service selling "dark fiber" but they are abusing the term. If the telco provides repeaters, then you can't run anything you want over the fiber you must run exactly what they provide for. If they have OC-3 repeaters - then all you can hook up in a 155Mbps OC-3. If they have 100Mbps Ethernet repeaters - then you can only use that. This means it is not really that flexible - they are selling OC-3 or 100Mbps Ethernet service - not dark fiber that can run anything that has enough power to reach from one point to another.
A gray area is when you have DWDM systems that can take a single wavelength of light at any bit rate and transport it through the system. Those systems will often have optical amplifiers which don't care about bit rate or frame format - but they are just what the name says - an amplifier. If noise gets into the signal they amplify that along with the signal so you eventually need a repeater which will convert the signal back to digital form and resend it. Repeaters are therefore bit rate dependant and therefore mean you can't run just any signal over that kind of a system.
Again - my experience with lots of telecom companies and fiber optic equipment is that dark fiber is just a piece of glass - almost always single mode fiber. Multimode fiber can't go more than a couple of hundred meters at any decent bit rate. Therefore the only place it makes sense to use is inside the same building. That would mean that your connection in your type of system would need to be in the telco central office, or they bring the single mode up to your building and then put a box there to do the single mode to multi mode conversion. If they are selling dark fiber they aren't adding equipment - so it will almost undoubtably be single mode fiber.
Just because you have state the same incorrect statements more than anyone else doesn't make the correct.
Of course - the submitter of this story didn't even start to give enough information and apparently doesn't want to show his face here to provide more. Without more information you can't even begin to know what to recommend.
Absolutely. Teaching can be good. (I do it myself) You just have to resign yourself to the fact that many of the students won't know crap and don't care as long as they get the grade so they can get the piece of paper.
I went to class to learn something - and was under the dillusion that many of the students were there for the same reason. Many of them aren't.
Once I stopped caring so much about people who didn't give a crap about the class I found that I didn't spend too many hours on the class and the pay wasn't so bad. Besides - you can spend a good number of the hours preparing class material, correcting papers, etc. at home and with the family. No you aren't as productive when you have to jump up and catch the kids before they knock over the xmas tree - but you do get to see them and interact with them at the same time.
Hmmmm - use lots of parallel wires at a lower speed rather than higher speed serial links. Sounds like you just rediscovered the idea that drove HIPPI (Hi-Performance-Parallel-Interconnect) back in the 60's
Actually - there are a lot of other posts here that talk about why parallel necessarily isn't better. At high speeds with long cables it can be a pain in the ass to keep all the bits lined-up. Sometimes it is easier to develope hardware that does serial faster than it is to add more wires and do it parallel.
If you are looking to write software that talks over sockets/pipes/anything in unix - you must have Richard Steven's books - Unix Network Programming - 1 & 2
If you want to know the theory behind a lot of the networking stuff - then Tannebaum's "Computer Networks" is an excellent book as it Stalling's "Data and Computer Communications" (any edition - of course later ones are better but even the older ones are good)
Fiber and copper cables cost about the same per foot today. Or so close it doesn't matter. The copper or glass in the cable doesn't cost so much - it is all the stuff around that - the protective coatings to keep rocks and stuff from hurting the cable that cost money.
Coax can carry a lot of bandwidth - BUT if you are talking digital data it takes relatively expensive equipment to encode/decode that digital data into the RF spectrum that is carried over the coax.
Fiber can carry a lot of bandwidth - BUT the termination points have relatively expensive equipment to get the data from electrons to optical and back.
Coax can carry DC power in the cable to power amplifiers, etc. This DC power tends to degrade the connections if they aren't made extremely well and well protected from the elements (i.e. no Radio Scrap or Walmart connections if you want it to last) Those amplifiers etc are active electronics hanging on some telephone pole or in some green hut near the curb. Prime targets for snowplows or SUVs backing up if on the ground, and lightening strikes if in the air. They are also active electronics so they are prone to breaking down over time (those -40 degree temperatures in the north or +120 in the south of the US aren't kind to electronics.) Fiber systems often do not have any active electronics in the field making them more reliable and cheaper to maintain.
Disclaimer - my current employer makes this kind of equipment so I am somewhat biased. But it also means I know something about it.
Our field engineers have shown that a fiber system will cost the same or less than a coax or DSL type system when you are installing new cables anyway. The big costs are still the initial install to each home. If you have the trenches open already and are installing something - then fiber costs the same and gives you far more capabilities.
For costs - you could use these very rough numbers to guess what it will cost you.
Start with around 40 cents per foot for your fiber. (my number on that might be a little old)
What do you want to hook up? Ethernet over single mode fiber will cost a couple of hundred $ per end point. You want more than point-to-point Ethernet? Maybe doing voice, video, etc? Then you are talking significantly more.
You do know that this almost has to be single mode fiber don't you? Single mode fiber is more expensive, and the connections to it are more expensive, but multi-mode fiber has too much dispersion to be usable beyond a couple of hundred meters.
Then there are some installation costs. You may need to pay the city for the right to put the fiber in the trench with the sewer pipe.
The big question is who is going to put up the money to buy the fiber, build a place for all the fiber to go to? How are you going to get a connection to the Net? Just because there is a fiber bundle running down the main road near you doesn't mean that it is that easy to tap into. The owner may not want to talk to you, the fiber may be running highly WDM traffic that makes it cost $100k+ just to install a add/drop multiplexer.
Now - please don't get discouraged by this - I my current employer builds Fiber-To-The-Home equipment, so my livelyhood depends on things like this. It will however take a significant amount of effort to build something like this. It's not as easy as stringing some CAT5 in the dorms to make a floor network.
It looks like Peter Olson is a patent attorney for 3M (Which is based in St. Paul - the address in the patent) Look at these couple of documents that talk about a "Peter L Olson" First document and second document
From the last paragraph of the patent it states "the present invention may be referred to by the present inventor and his sister as "Tarzan" swinging."
I'm going to guess that Peter Olson is dad and he gave his son, Steven, a gift of his very own patent. A pretty cool hack of the patent system if you ask me. Also goes to show how screwed up the system is.
A little poking at Mapquest and you can get a good aerial view the tree that inspired the patent as well.
Fiber isn't that expensive. This post is so full of problems it isn't even funny. Just watching somebody put in a fiber doesn't make you an expert.
> Fiber is hard to work with. Not really - you don't have to be much more skilled than someone who is good at doing cable terminations, or good at doing RJ-45s on Cat-5. Yes, you can screw it up - but how many of you have dealt with messed up RJ-45 connections?
> You have to run it all the way back to a powered node... Its not good enough to run it back to a simple splitter. Wrong. You do eventually have to get to a powered node, but the whole point of PON technology (Passive Optical Network) is that you don't need powered nodes in the field. That is a HUGE problem with cable company systems. They need these green boxes in every neighborhood, and those green boxes need power, and a whole shelf of batteries for backup power. Lots of cost, maintenance, etc.
> Fusion splicing requires special training, expensive equiment and expertise that simple coax does not. Ok - Fusion splicing does take some more specialized equipment. But the cost of a splice is down to $25. Not that expensive.
> But if the connectors get dirty, its toast No. If the connector gets dirty, you clean it. Normally people doing FTTH don't use pre-terminated cable. They have found it cheapest to run unterminated cable, and then fusion splice on terminations. You could also put terminations directly onto the fiber in the field, but that take more time so it is more expensive.
>Coax has plenty of bandwidth Yes - it has a lot of bandwidth, BUT fiber has much much more.
Talk to the department secretary and find out who the local salesperson is for the publishers of the texts you are looking at. OR just go to their website and surf to find the right salesperson.
The book publishers are more than happy to send out a copy here or there to someone who is looking to choose a text for a college course. Think about it - it costs them $30 to give away a $60 book. IF it is chosen for the text then they sell 20-50 copies. If the profit for the publisher is only $10 per book that still leaves them a lot left over.
My experience - I started teaching a class almost a year ago. It is my first teaching experience. Since then I have received 1 book that I specifically asked for and about 5 or 6 that just appeared in the mail for me. I know of some other professors who have asked for and received whole boxes of books.
The sales guys did call the department secretary to verify that I was actually teaching the course I said I was, and since the saleman is local he knew the school and the departments, etc. So if you want to scam the publishers to try and get some textbooks for free you'll have to work at it a little bit.
Of course, the cover will possibly be stamped "Review Copy - Not for Resale" which means you can't unload the extra copies for suplemental income. Which at the rate college profs get paid could be handy <-grin->
My situation - my home is hanging off an 802.11 network and I get about 600kbps over that (give or take). My work is connected via T1 and we are about 9 hops away. Ping times around 60-100ms.
I used VNC all day yesterday with screen resolutions of 1600x1200 @ 32 bits.
Windoze 98 client, Windoze NT server.
General performance was "ok". Pulling up a new window had a 1 second or so of lag, and once in a while the rxvt or xemacs screen wouldn't update until I clicked or did some typing in the window. I noticed it most if I was watching while I typed. Then it was ok sometimes, and sometimes I ran into more lag and could be 10-20 characters ahead in my typing from what was being displayed.
I have tried using TightVNC which works ok - but I 've also had some stability problems with it. It is supposed to work better for low bandwidth applications, but I haven't been able to do a side-by-side type of comparison.
Your post mentioned several typical computer geek or engineer solutions. i.e. meausre productivity somehow objectively. Programming or most engineering productivity isn't something that can be easily measured objectively. The problem is compounded by the fact that you are a small shop. The measurement criteria has to be constantly evaluated itself, and adjusted. This takes time and manpower that just isn't available unless you are a big shop.
Counter examples to most "objective" measurement schemes are easy to create.
Bonus based on number of bugs fixed? - see the old Dilbert strips on "I'm going to code me a new car today" by inserting bugs to be fixed.
Bonus based on lack of bugs in code? Testers and coders quickly collaberate to fix minor bugs via water-cooler talk rather than through the bug tracking system. These bugs also tend to get mostly reported against the user interface people and not the deeper level logic people, even if that is the root cause and the interface coders end up coding work-arounds.
Bonus based on lines of code produced? What about the coder who takes a large bunch of code with hairy logic and cut the number of lines down to 1/10th. Was that programmer negatively productive? What about the original programmer who artificially inflated his lines of code count (or function points - they are only slightly harder to inflate).
The solution - especially in a small shop - is a manager who knows the people and actually does management. They will know who is churning out good stuff and who is slowing progress. This means a good manager - not a pointy hair boss. Of course, this isn't a popular thing with techies (myself included there) but experience has shown me that it is true.
IEEE has a whole series of different finicial programs for members, that includes life, health, dental, liability, etc. insurance.
I have their life insurance (New York Life is the real company behind the IEEE offer) that came in at less than 1/3 the cost of any open market policy I could find. I looked at their health insurance and it seemed reasonable to me at the time, but I didn't need it as my current employeer has an ok plan.
Check out the details for the IEEE health plan for yourself. I see that you must have been a member for at least 2 years, which means it doesn't help you much if your aren't already a member.
The article is pretty short on technical details - go figure. I'll start by pointing people to a site that I like - while not always 100% accurate - it is much better than most out there.
Lucent among many others is developing MEMs technology for switching beams of light in telecom systems. The basics for MEMs technology is understood by a bunch of companies that use it for such mundane things such as accelerometers in air bag deployment systems. Now many of them are looking to use this basic technology of building mechanical things on a chip to create better communication systems.
Since a MEMs device is basically just a mirror that can be adjusted to bounce light to a different place - it can be used in a couple of different ways.
The simplest way is to use MEMs devices to act like an optical patch panel. A bunch of fibers come in, and a bunch go out. The MEMs device bounces light from one of the input fibers to one of the output fibers. If someone has used DWDM (dense wavelength division multiplexing) to put a bunch of signals on that one fiber, all of them get switched together. BUT there is no optical-electrical-optical conversion, so the switching system doesn't need to know much about what it is switching. It could be OC-192 SONET or 10Gb ethernet and it really doesn't care. A very cool benefit.
A slightly more complex way to use MEMs devices is to take the different wavelengths of light in a DWDM system and split them out. Then bounce these individual wavelengths through the MEMs device. Take the wavelengths comeing out and combine them back together into a different set of fibers. The problem with this is that if you can't put two signals using the exact same wavelength down the same desination fiber. This can be solved with devices that convert the wavelength, but today that usually involves an optical-eletrical-optical conversion.
The one big plus of MEMs devices is that you avoid the optical-eletrical-optical conversion that can be costly for the electronics, and requires the electronics to be set up for the exact kind of signal you are passing through. The one big minus to MEMs devices is that they all "eat" some of the light going through them. A loss of a couple dB is not uncommon. This means that you can't avoid the optical-eletrical-optical conversion forever. As the technology matures, it will get better with less light loss, but it will take time.
Note - MEMs devices today are *not* for doing packet switching. They are more for doing optical circuit switching. They typically take a relatively long time to move from one posisition to another (10 millisecons or more). In that amount of time, you could have a shitload of data go through your system. There are companies working on doing an all optical packet switch, but that is a ways off yet today.
But this article was talking about MEMs technology - which is fiber optic switching *without* converting the signal to electrical. MEMs is really just lots of very tiny mirrors bouncing light around to do the switching. Simple ones will take one input and switch to 2 different outputs. Slightly more complicated ones take 1 input and switch to 8 or 16 outputs. The most complicated ones take up to 64 inputs and switch them to any of 64 outputs.
And - and optical-eletrical-optical switch is not really that slow. If you are talking about switching Sonet signals (aka TDM streams - not packet streams) then your latency through a node is measure in nano-seconds. Not really "slow"
Slashdot Mirror
If you think that $25,000 per 5 seats per year is expensive for embedded linux - just wait until you get a quote from Wind River for VxWorks - and then hold on as they give you the additional charge per unit sold.
My experience is very different. Maybe it's because I work mostly with embedded systems. There most programmers are either CS/CE people who have school training, or they are EE people who did the 2 software course that they had to in school.
I found that the "EE" programmers - that is the ones without much formal programming training can knock out a simple function really well - but can not build a bigger system to save their soul. The CE/CS programmers on the other hand get the big picture of the software realm and use data structures in a sensible manner, break things down into sensible functions or objects, etc. To the non-trained programmer an object is often just a container for a bunch of loosely related functions.
Now - that being said it doesn't always break down along the lines of what their formal training was, but it often does - even if their schooling was 20 years ago.
Now - to rip on some of the CS people - I've had new CS grads that didn't understand that hex was just another way of writing a number - they thought it was another data type. I've also run into CS grad students that didn't understand bit-wise operators. < sigh >
I actually haven't had that problem, and I have a lot of lecture notes that I created in Word a couple of years ago, and now do everything in OpenOffice.
My biggest problem is that Word was buggy as hell when doing outlines. The autonumbers could get messed up and there was no good way to get rid of the "mess up". Things like sequences restarting even though no restart flag was set in the properties, or the fun one was the font being changed for some of the numbers, and again not being able to change it back. I ended up deleting and retyping a lot of sections just to clear up some of these issues.... I miss the old WordPerfect "Reveal Codes" feature!
Corn is about 56lbs/bushel (popcorn might be a bit denser, but I couldn't find any good numbers)
A bushel is 1.24 cubic feet
56 lbs = 896 oz.
M asJ:dspace.library.cornell.edu/bitstream/1813/118/ 4/Popcorn.PDF&hl=en
Now if you look at concessionstands.com they have 48 oz poppers that will pop 48oz of popcorn in about 3 minutes.
The volume ratio of popped corn to un-popped corn is pretty variable - but google provides thishttp://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:6MLAWvN-
that shows a "good" batch should provide 38 to 1 ratio.
So taking that information all together we get
896oz / 48oz/batch = 18.67 batches
18.67batches x 3 min/batch = 56 minutes to pop a bushel of popcorn
1.24 cubic ft/bushel unpopped x 38 = 47.2 cu ft popped corn
From this you can see that you can get about 50 cubic feet of popcorn per hour. That is from a multi-thousand $ machine.
A small bedroom (10x12x8) is 960 cubic feet. Thats about 20 hours to fill that one room. They do have dual popper machines and I think one that went as high as 66 oz of popcorn per batch - but even so that is A LOT of popcorn.
Call some concession businesses in the yellow pages and ask about getting 100's of pounds of popcorn popped. A lot of the places will think you are nuts (you are) but one of them will probably be able to point you to someone who can or does do that kind of volume of pre-popped corn for stadiums, etc. Another avenue might be to find someone who works for a snack food
You will NOT get enough dust in the air to be explosive. Dust has to be so thick that you can't see more than a meter or so through it to be explosive. Go google dust collection systems and static discharge and grouding PVC pipes (check out rec.woodworking archive in Google in particular). This topic has been beat to death there (repeatedly) and no one has yet to show proof of a dust explosion in something like a home woodshop environment which can be plenty dusty.
Yes - popped popcorn is flamable. So is the newspaper laying there and the cardboard box containing all your treasures. There there are the wood studs and paper faced drywall in your home. Yup that's all flamable too. You don't worry about those catching fire that much do you?
I just couldn't let this pass by -
"I worked it out once...100-200W over 24x7x365 equals a LOT of money per year!"
First - that math is for 7 years, it should be 24 x 7 x 52.179 or 24 x 365.25
200W x 24hrs/day x 365.25days/year = 1753.2kW-hours / year.
At a rate of $0.08/kW-hour = $140.
Now - that is assuming that it is using the full 200W all the time. A 200W or 300W power supply is needed because there is a lot more power used when the disks are spinning up or that CD/DVD is spinning and writing. Even a more busy CPU and graphics card will draw significantly more power. So that box is probably drawing only a fraction of that power on average which means that it isn't really close to that much.
Now if I could just find my clamp-on amp-meter to give some real power numbers on my own boxen.........
DS3 does run over copper - but it can't over twisted pair. It is generally run using coax cable, and not exactly the cable-tv type of coax either. The equipment is set up for a 75ohm impedance, and expects repeaters on a regular basis. If the cable isn't already there - you might as well run fiber as it will be cheaper because of fewer repeaters and give you more bandwidth.
I have had good luck modifying such contracts and getting the bogus stuff removed or reworked.
A few points - first hire a lawyer - it will cost you a few bucks, but should be less than $200. Go over it with them and do not mention the lawyer to your potential employer.
Once you sat down with the lawyer and reviewed the document in person with them you have a shopping list of things you want to change. Then set up a meeting with the HR person or boss or whoever will have the authority to make the changes on the company side.
In the past I have explained about having a friend who got burned by a over reaching contract such as this. The company went under and the bankruptcy lawyers were trying to lay their hands on anything of value including the friends open-source project. Of course once they got hold of the source it was worthless as it was only of value when it was freely given away. So in the end no-one won anything. Once you've given this kind of little story they are more sympathetic to how you just want to CYA and prevent any potential future uglyness just as they want to cover their assets and prevent any future problems.
In some (several) states, agreements that attempt to get your work even in out of company time and property are illegal - but that doesn't stop lawyers from using the broadest language possible because they know that it will just get narrowed down to what the law allows. Unless there was "willful" over-reaching (i.e. something almost impossible to prove for a reasonable amount of money) the court wouldn't throw out the whole ageeement because of it.
One other thing to watch out for is some language to the effect that the contract should not be construed as being drafted by either party. I forget the term, but there is a legal idea that in the case of ambigious language the interpretation goes against the person who drafted the contract. This way the drafter shouldn't purposefully put in ambigious terms. And - it is assumed that the person writing the contract is probably a lawyer and has better knowledge too. By putting in a clause that the contract is assumed to not be drafted by either party they tip the scales back so that anything ambigious is to be weighed based on other terms, not against the company.
Good luck!
If you follow the link to this guys homepage and do a little digging you come across:
http://mlcastle.net/tech/1.html
Which state "... active street medic, meaning that during major protests I travel in a squad of medics providing support in the "hot zone", where EMS will not go"
So - no the cops will probably not help these guys out and they are most definetly not authorized to talk on the police bands.
Didn't anyone else think that maybe just asking the reporter would do the trick? His email address is right at the bottom of the article.
<sarcasm> oh wait - this is slashdot right - only two people actually read the article. </sarcasm>
I emailed Mr. David Phelps asking what an "Internet Protocol Address Verifier" was and his brief reply was the following.
"it's commonly referred to as a web bug. i used the term as contained in the government's search warrant."
So while the theorizing here did come up with that as a possibility - it also came up with lots of other BS.
Now the bizarre thing is that the feds used such a wierd term. Then again to a judge or lawyer the term "web bug" probably seems pretty bizarre.
I think your definition is messed up.
From my work in the telecom industry for the last 11 years all of it with making fiber optic equipment, a piece of dark fiber is really just a piece of glass with nothing hooked to it. Newton's Telecom Dictionary also says that dark fiber is fiber with nothing on it.
Now - you may work with a telco company that calls their point-to-point service selling "dark fiber" but they are abusing the term. If the telco provides repeaters, then you can't run anything you want over the fiber you must run exactly what they provide for. If they have OC-3 repeaters - then all you can hook up in a 155Mbps OC-3. If they have 100Mbps Ethernet repeaters - then you can only use that. This means it is not really that flexible - they are selling OC-3 or 100Mbps Ethernet service - not dark fiber that can run anything that has enough power to reach from one point to another.
A gray area is when you have DWDM systems that can take a single wavelength of light at any bit rate and transport it through the system. Those systems will often have optical amplifiers which don't care about bit rate or frame format - but they are just what the name says - an amplifier. If noise gets into the signal they amplify that along with the signal so you eventually need a repeater which will convert the signal back to digital form and resend it. Repeaters are therefore bit rate dependant and therefore mean you can't run just any signal over that kind of a system.
Again - my experience with lots of telecom companies and fiber optic equipment is that dark fiber is just a piece of glass - almost always single mode fiber. Multimode fiber can't go more than a couple of hundred meters at any decent bit rate. Therefore the only place it makes sense to use is inside the same building. That would mean that your connection in your type of system would need to be in the telco central office, or they bring the single mode up to your building and then put a box there to do the single mode to multi mode conversion. If they are selling dark fiber they aren't adding equipment - so it will almost undoubtably be single mode fiber.
Just because you have state the same incorrect statements more than anyone else doesn't make the correct.
Of course - the submitter of this story didn't even start to give enough information and apparently doesn't want to show his face here to provide more. Without more information you can't even begin to know what to recommend.
Absolutely. Teaching can be good. (I do it myself) You just have to resign yourself to the fact that many of the students won't know crap and don't care as long as they get the grade so they can get the piece of paper.
I went to class to learn something - and was under the dillusion that many of the students were there for the same reason. Many of them aren't.
Once I stopped caring so much about people who didn't give a crap about the class I found that I didn't spend too many hours on the class and the pay wasn't so bad. Besides - you can spend a good number of the hours preparing class material, correcting papers, etc. at home and with the family. No you aren't as productive when you have to jump up and catch the kids before they knock over the xmas tree - but you do get to see them and interact with them at the same time.
Actually - there are a lot of other posts here that talk about why parallel necessarily isn't better. At high speeds with long cables it can be a pain in the ass to keep all the bits lined-up. Sometimes it is easier to develope hardware that does serial faster than it is to add more wires and do it parallel.
If you are looking to write software that talks over sockets/pipes/anything in unix - you must have Richard Steven's books - Unix Network Programming - 1 & 2
If you want to know the theory behind a lot of the networking stuff - then Tannebaum's "Computer Networks" is an excellent book as it Stalling's "Data and Computer Communications" (any edition - of course later ones are better but even the older ones are good)
Fiber and copper cables cost about the same per foot today. Or so close it doesn't matter. The copper or glass in the cable doesn't cost so much - it is all the stuff around that - the protective coatings to keep rocks and stuff from hurting the cable that cost money.
Coax can carry a lot of bandwidth - BUT if you are talking digital data it takes relatively expensive equipment to encode/decode that digital data into the RF spectrum that is carried over the coax.
Fiber can carry a lot of bandwidth - BUT the termination points have relatively expensive equipment to get the data from electrons to optical and back.
Coax can carry DC power in the cable to power amplifiers, etc. This DC power tends to degrade the connections if they aren't made extremely well and well protected from the elements (i.e. no Radio Scrap or Walmart connections if you want it to last) Those amplifiers etc are active electronics hanging on some telephone pole or in some green hut near the curb. Prime targets for snowplows or SUVs backing up if on the ground, and lightening strikes if in the air. They are also active electronics so they are prone to breaking down over time (those -40 degree temperatures in the north or +120 in the south of the US aren't kind to electronics.) Fiber systems often do not have any active electronics in the field making them more reliable and cheaper to maintain.
Disclaimer - my current employer makes this kind of equipment so I am somewhat biased. But it also means I know something about it.
Our field engineers have shown that a fiber system will cost the same or less than a coax or DSL type system when you are installing new cables anyway. The big costs are still the initial install to each home. If you have the trenches open already and are installing something - then fiber costs the same and gives you far more capabilities.
For costs - you could use these very rough numbers to guess what it will cost you.
Start with around 40 cents per foot for your fiber. (my number on that might be a little old)
What do you want to hook up? Ethernet over single mode fiber will cost a couple of hundred $ per end point. You want more than point-to-point Ethernet? Maybe doing voice, video, etc? Then you are talking significantly more.
You do know that this almost has to be single mode fiber don't you? Single mode fiber is more expensive, and the connections to it are more expensive, but multi-mode fiber has too much dispersion to be usable beyond a couple of hundred meters.
Then there are some installation costs. You may need to pay the city for the right to put the fiber in the trench with the sewer pipe.
The big question is who is going to put up the money to buy the fiber, build a place for all the fiber to go to? How are you going to get a connection to the Net? Just because there is a fiber bundle running down the main road near you doesn't mean that it is that easy to tap into. The owner may not want to talk to you, the fiber may be running highly WDM traffic that makes it cost $100k+ just to install a add/drop multiplexer.
Now - please don't get discouraged by this - I my current employer builds Fiber-To-The-Home equipment, so my livelyhood depends on things like this. It will however take a significant amount of effort to build something like this. It's not as easy as stringing some CAT5 in the dorms to make a floor network.
It looks like Peter Olson is a patent attorney for 3M (Which is based in St. Paul - the address in the patent) Look at these couple of documents that talk about a "Peter L Olson" First document and second document
From the last paragraph of the patent it states "the present invention may be referred to by the present inventor and his sister as "Tarzan" swinging."
I'm going to guess that Peter Olson is dad and he gave his son, Steven, a gift of his very own patent. A pretty cool hack of the patent system if you ask me. Also goes to show how screwed up the system is.
A little poking at Mapquest and you can get a good aerial view the tree that inspired the patent as well.
Nice idea - but Marconni killed off their FTTH product line. (Website is out of date)
See this analysis of their most recent reorganization
Fiber isn't that expensive. This post is so full of problems it isn't even funny. Just watching somebody put in a fiber doesn't make you an expert.
> Fiber is hard to work with.
Not really - you don't have to be much more skilled than someone who is good at doing cable terminations, or good at doing RJ-45s on Cat-5. Yes, you can screw it up - but how many of you have dealt with messed up RJ-45 connections?
> You have to run it all the way back to a powered node... Its not good enough to run it back to a simple splitter.
Wrong. You do eventually have to get to a powered node, but the whole point of PON technology (Passive Optical Network) is that you don't need powered nodes in the field. That is a HUGE problem with cable company systems. They need these green boxes in every neighborhood, and those green boxes need power, and a whole shelf of batteries for backup power. Lots of cost, maintenance, etc.
> Fusion splicing requires special training, expensive equiment and expertise that simple coax does not.
Ok - Fusion splicing does take some more specialized equipment. But the cost of a splice is down to $25. Not that expensive.
> But if the connectors get dirty, its toast
No. If the connector gets dirty, you clean it. Normally people doing FTTH don't use pre-terminated cable. They have found it cheapest to run unterminated cable, and then fusion splice on terminations. You could also put terminations directly onto the fiber in the field, but that take more time so it is more expensive.
>Coax has plenty of bandwidth
Yes - it has a lot of bandwidth, BUT fiber has much much more.
Talk to the department secretary and find out who the local salesperson is for the publishers of the texts you are looking at. OR just go to their website and surf to find the right salesperson.
The book publishers are more than happy to send out a copy here or there to someone who is looking to choose a text for a college course. Think about it - it costs them $30 to give away a $60 book. IF it is chosen for the text then they sell 20-50 copies. If the profit for the publisher is only $10 per book that still leaves them a lot left over.
My experience - I started teaching a class almost a year ago. It is my first teaching experience. Since then I have received 1 book that I specifically asked for and about 5 or 6 that just appeared in the mail for me. I know of some other professors who have asked for and received whole boxes of books.
The sales guys did call the department secretary to verify that I was actually teaching the course I said I was, and since the saleman is local he knew the school and the departments, etc. So if you want to scam the publishers to try and get some textbooks for free you'll have to work at it a little bit.
Of course, the cover will possibly be stamped "Review Copy - Not for Resale" which means you can't unload the extra copies for suplemental income. Which at the rate college profs get paid could be handy <-grin->
My situation - my home is hanging off an 802.11 network and I get about 600kbps over that (give or take). My work is connected via T1 and we are about 9 hops away. Ping times around 60-100ms.
I used VNC all day yesterday with screen resolutions of 1600x1200 @ 32 bits.
Windoze 98 client, Windoze NT server.
General performance was "ok". Pulling up a new window had a 1 second or so of lag, and once in a while the rxvt or xemacs screen wouldn't update until I clicked or did some typing in the window. I noticed it most if I was watching while I typed. Then it was ok sometimes, and sometimes I ran into more lag and could be 10-20 characters ahead in my typing from what was being displayed.
I have tried using TightVNC which works ok - but I 've also had some stability problems with it. It is supposed to work better for low bandwidth applications, but I haven't been able to do a side-by-side type of comparison.
Your post mentioned several typical computer geek or engineer solutions. i.e. meausre productivity somehow objectively. Programming or most engineering productivity isn't something that can be easily measured objectively. The problem is compounded by the fact that you are a small shop. The measurement criteria has to be constantly evaluated itself, and adjusted. This takes time and manpower that just isn't available unless you are a big shop.
Counter examples to most "objective" measurement schemes are easy to create.
Bonus based on number of bugs fixed? - see the old Dilbert strips on "I'm going to code me a new car today" by inserting bugs to be fixed.
Bonus based on lack of bugs in code? Testers and coders quickly collaberate to fix minor bugs via water-cooler talk rather than through the bug tracking system. These bugs also tend to get mostly reported against the user interface people and not the deeper level logic people, even if that is the root cause and the interface coders end up coding work-arounds.
Bonus based on lines of code produced? What about the coder who takes a large bunch of code with hairy logic and cut the number of lines down to 1/10th. Was that programmer negatively productive? What about the original programmer who artificially inflated his lines of code count (or function points - they are only slightly harder to inflate).
The solution - especially in a small shop - is a manager who knows the people and actually does management. They will know who is churning out good stuff and who is slowing progress. This means a good manager - not a pointy hair boss. Of course, this isn't a popular thing with techies (myself included there) but experience has shown me that it is true.
IEEE has a whole series of different finicial programs for members, that includes life, health, dental, liability, etc. insurance.
I have their life insurance (New York Life is the real company behind the IEEE offer) that came in at less than 1/3 the cost of any open market policy I could find. I looked at their health insurance and it seemed reasonable to me at the time, but I didn't need it as my current employeer has an ok plan.
Check out the details for the IEEE health plan for yourself. I see that you must have been a member for at least 2 years, which means it doesn't help you much if your aren't already a member.
The article is pretty short on technical details - go figure. I'll start by pointing people to a site that I like - while not always 100% accurate - it is much better than most out there.
Go to http://www.lightreading.com/ and look up MEMs
Lucent among many others is developing MEMs technology for switching beams of light in telecom systems. The basics for MEMs technology is understood by a bunch of companies that use it for such mundane things such as accelerometers in air bag deployment systems. Now many of them are looking to use this basic technology of building mechanical things on a chip to create better communication systems.
Since a MEMs device is basically just a mirror that can be adjusted to bounce light to a different place - it can be used in a couple of different ways.
The simplest way is to use MEMs devices to act like an optical patch panel. A bunch of fibers come in, and a bunch go out. The MEMs device bounces light from one of the input fibers to one of the output fibers. If someone has used DWDM (dense wavelength division multiplexing) to put a bunch of signals on that one fiber, all of them get switched together. BUT there is no optical-electrical-optical conversion, so the switching system doesn't need to know much about what it is switching. It could be OC-192 SONET or 10Gb ethernet and it really doesn't care. A very cool benefit.
A slightly more complex way to use MEMs devices is to take the different wavelengths of light in a DWDM system and split them out. Then bounce these individual wavelengths through the MEMs device. Take the wavelengths comeing out and combine them back together into a different set of fibers. The problem with this is that if you can't put two signals using the exact same wavelength down the same desination fiber. This can be solved with devices that convert the wavelength, but today that usually involves an optical-eletrical-optical conversion.
The one big plus of MEMs devices is that you avoid the optical-eletrical-optical conversion that can be costly for the electronics, and requires the electronics to be set up for the exact kind of signal you are passing through. The one big minus to MEMs devices is that they all "eat" some of the light going through them. A loss of a couple dB is not uncommon. This means that you can't avoid the optical-eletrical-optical conversion forever. As the technology matures, it will get better with less light loss, but it will take time.
Note - MEMs devices today are *not* for doing packet switching. They are more for doing optical circuit switching. They typically take a relatively long time to move from one posisition to another (10 millisecons or more). In that amount of time, you could have a shitload of data go through your system. There are companies working on doing an all optical packet switch, but that is a ways off yet today.
But this article was talking about MEMs technology - which is fiber optic switching *without* converting the signal to electrical. MEMs is really just lots of very tiny mirrors bouncing light around to do the switching. Simple ones will take one input and switch to 2 different outputs. Slightly more complicated ones take 1 input and switch to 8 or 16 outputs. The most complicated ones take up to 64 inputs and switch them to any of 64 outputs.
And - and optical-eletrical-optical switch is not really that slow. If you are talking about switching Sonet signals (aka TDM streams - not packet streams) then your latency through a node is measure in nano-seconds. Not really "slow"