You don't seem to understand the idea of TCP ACK windowing - you DON'T ack each packet.
Instead, the sender starts sending packets, and will send some number N packets before requiring an ACK. The receiver will NOT ack each and every packet, but rather it acks groups of packets.
For example, the sender might start with a window of 100 packets - it will send 100 packets before pausing for an ack. The receiver might ack the first packet, then ack packet 10 (implicitly acking packets 2-9), then packet 50, then packet 100. Upon receiving the ack for packet 10, the sender might increase its window size to 1000 packets.
Thus, unless the delay*bandwidth product is HUGE, the data will keep streaming until either a) there is a NACK due to corruption of a packet or b) the job is done.
So for non-interactive moving of freight like BIG FTP transfers (downloading an.ISO image, for example) the latency is a non-issue.
However, interactive operations like browsing suck because you pay the startup penalty for each HTTP request. However, modern browsers have HTTP pipelining, wherein the broswer can open the connection, request the main document, then, as the document comes in and is parsed, send additional requests (for images, etc.) without closing the connection and before the main document has been fully retrieved, thus burying the cost of the startup in the transfer.
However, this is less effective with everybody and their dog's website putting images on a seperate server, thus requiring a second channel to be opened.
There is a world of difference between 250ft and 25000ft.
At 250ft, you might be able to see 10 cell towers, but each of them will have a different Digital Color Code - a code used to differentiate between adjacent cell sites on the same frequency.
Also, those 10 cells will each have their own frequency assignements - cells are laid out in a more or less hexagonal pattern with no adjacent cells sharing the same channel assignments.
So hanging off your tower, you might see 10 cells, but you are not likely to see 2 cells with the same frequency plan and DCC.
At 25000 feet, you WILL see multiple cells with the same DCC and frequency - and each of those cells will be trying to talk to your phone.
Also, there is the matter of speed. Hanging off your tower, you aren't moving very much relative to the cells (at least, one HOPES you are not). As a result, there is very little Doppler shift to your phone, and the time-of-flight from your cell to the tower is not changing. In a jet moving at 300-600kts, there is a non-trivial Doppler frequency shift to content with, but more importantly, the time of flight to the cell tower is changing rapidly. If your phone cannot compensate, it will start transmitting out of its assigned time slot, screwing up the adjacent time slots (other people's calls). Most phones' tracking loops are not set up to handle a relative velocity that high.
One of the problems Novell (and Microsoft) has, as a network server platform, is being tied to the ia32 platform. This meant that if you wanted a file server with boatloads of RAM to cache data, you slammed into the 32 bit address limits (yes, I know, 36 bits on later processors, but that is an ugly hack - bank switching once again.)
Novell has realized that the OS the server runs is largely irrelevant to the users - they just care about the SERVICES the server provides. Migrating away from NetwareOS to an OS that supports 64 bit platforms allows Novell to break through the 4G barrier.
So, what do you want from your file server? Massive RAM, MASSIVE DISK I/O and even more massive network I/O. Reliability. Fault tolerance. Expandability. Hot-swap EVERYTHING.
Now, name a vender of server iron that meets those specs. I know of a little company that can do that - so little they only need three letters for their name. A company who's middle name literally IS "business".
Imagine what would happen if Novell made Netware services available on the IBM zSeries or iSeries. Now you have a platform that supports massive quantities of FAST disks, smart disk I/O subsystems, smart network subsystems. A system that can sense a failing disk and phone home - you come to work in the morning and an IBM tech is waiting at the door with a replacement disk before the disk fails, swaps it out in a minute, and you users never notice.
A system where if you find yourself a little light on CPU, a phone call fixes the problem. A system where you can run multiple virtual servers as needed. You want database? Run DB2, either on the Linux image or under OS400/OS390.
A Novell/IBM teamup would be SCARY compelling for IT managers world-wide.
Now, I don't have any insider information, but I cannot beleive that this is NOT being worked upon in Deep Dark Places at Novell and IBM.
The virus writers DO NOT WANT their worms to be destructive to the host IN ANY WAY.
If the worm did randomly corrupt the spreadsheet, the user will eventually clue to the fact that his PC is infected, and will take steps to clean it up.
What these guys want is a silent infection. They want your computer to stay infected forever, so that they may continue to use it forever. Thus, ANY effect of the worm that is negative to the computer owner is to be avoided (the worms that cause instability do so because they are poorly written, not by design).
Yes, if a worm writer wanted to be destructive to as many hosts as possible, then he would write his worm to silently infect as many hosts as possible until some trigger event, then wipe the hosts out.
But were he to do so, then he would not be able to resell the services of the infected machines to spammers and make money.
If a child does not care about school, it is NOT always the home environment's fault.
A friend of mine's kid is getting F's and a few D's in school - not because the kid is stupid, but because he has figured out that it just does not matter if he does the work. Due to this attitude, the kid has been grounded, his games confiscated, he didn't get anything for Christmas, etc. Both his parents and all their friends (myself included) have been beating on the kid (figuratively!) to aggregate his fecal matter in this matter.
His folks went to the school with a seemingly simple request - Hold Him Back A Grade! Let him repeat the eight grade. Let him watch his friends move on, while he doesn't. Let him suffer the jokes. Make not doing the work have a consequence.
The principal's response: "Oh, we don't hold kids his age back!"
So, when the school system itself makes it very clear that doing the work is optional, why should the kids care about it?
One good rule I wish people would follow is simply to know to whom you are speaking before you continue.
We have Direct Inward Dial at work - this means that in addtion to being able to dial the main number, then at the prompt enter an extension, it is also possible to dial a different number and get an extension directly - so if my extension was 123, you could dial ###-#123 where the #'s are a fixed prefix.
Now, for the sales guys this is great, but for me it sucks, since I generally don't need to talk to anybody directly, and I'd rather they have to dial the main number and my extension if they want to reach me - I have systems to design, code to write and debug, work to do!
So, when I answer the phone directly, it is simply "Engineering, this is (name)". If you really are trying to reach me, you will know you have the right number and can continue. Hopefully, if this is the WRONG number, you will clue into that and check - "Excuse me, but I was trying to read Edith's Toenail service, do I have the correct number?"
Thursday the phone rigs the "outside line" ring, and I answer it - I am having a bunch of work done on my house and it might have been one of the contractors. I give my usual answer, "Engineering, this is (name)".
And this gal starts in - "This is (name) and my son is (name) and he had his thing stolen at school and " and so on for a good 15 seconds at a mile a minute before I get a chance to break in. "Excuse me miss, but you have the wrong number." "This isn't XYZ school?" "No ma'am" "What number is this" (Now, I happen to feel this is improper ettiquette - IMHO she should have said "Is this ###-####" - she does not need to know what number this is, only if this is the number she was trying to dial) "No ma'am, this is %%%-%%%%" (the main number, not my D.I.D. number) "Oh, I have the wrong number (click)".
Beat. Beat. Ra-Ring. (sigh) "(Full company name) this is (name) can I help you?" "I have the wrong number again - is this ^^^-^^^^" "No, ma'am, this is ^^^-^^**" (Last 2 digits wrong) "Oh, I'm sorry (click)"
Now, the point of this story is that, upon first hearing something that was NOT "XYZ school", she SHOULD have said, "Excuse me, but I am trying to reach XYZ school, do I have the right number?" rather than launching into her life's story.
I'm sure she was upset by whatever was happening in her life, but she told me things that not only did I not CARE to hear, but were pretty damn personal - all because she did not confirm the identity of the person with whom she was speaking.
Of course, we live in a society that will blindly fill in whatever forms J.Random.URL asks - I should expect no different for the telephone.
Except that neither this hotel nor the ISS are in geo sync, they are in low earth orbit.
It is HARD to read geosync - that is why you did not see the shuttle going up to fix or retrieve broken communications sats, as the delta-V needed far exceeds the shuttle's ability.
I'd like to see the HL speedruns, but the FullPlanet mirrors are/.'ed - what, no BitTorrents?
And how come you don't see anybody do like the old Quake Done Quicker, and put a bit of humor into the demo? I just about died the first time I saw it, when the happy face sprang out at the guy, and then he turns around and berates you for laughing! As well as the running commentary during the run - why don't we see that done a bit more?
This was done a long time before Mr. Niven wrote about it: The Man In The White Suit, starring Alec Guinness (NOT Sir Alec Guinness - that should clue you in to how long ago the movie was made.)
The issue of the names assigned by NATO to the Soviet missles/planes/tanks/whatever raises a question in my mind:
What were the names assigned by the Soviets to our stuff, specifically the SR-71? They had to know of its existance long before the name Blackbird (or Habu) was made public.
Well, the reason that Amateur radio still has an edge over a COW is that a COW or COLT still need to be tied to the PSTN (public switched telephone network) to operate - they have to hand the call over to the system to be routed. Also, the cell system is a one-to-one system, not a one-to-many - you cannot easily say "All units, this is the Emergency operations center - we need somebody with blankets and food to respond to 9th and Main - any unit that can respond, please answer."
An amateur radio repeater just needs power, and can then provide service to the folks in the area. We don't need a link to the PSTN, and we can do a one-to-many dispatch. Hell, my *car* can be a crossband repeater with the press of a couple of buttons on the radio in it - park on a hilltop and it can provide coverage for miles.
Cellular is great for what it was designed for - acting like wireline service without the wires. It SUCKS for emergency dispatch and response, because it was not designed for that. One hopes you would not use your computer to crack walnuts or use a nutcracker to dig a hole, stop trying use the wrong tool for the job.
Compunction - you keep using that word - I do not think it means what you think it means:
compunction ( P ) Pronunciation Key (km-pngkshn) n.
1. A strong uneasiness caused by a sense of guilt. See Synonyms at penitence.
2. A sting of conscience or a pang of doubt aroused by wrongdoing or the prospect of wrongdoing. See Synonyms at qualm.
To have no compunction about installing Real would mean you had no fear of installing Real.
I think you mean you had no motivation to install Real.
Most designs for such a system use a phased-array antenna for transmit - the beam angle can be switched in milliseconds.
They also use a very large beam with a very low power density, so that even if you were to stand in the middle of the beam you would not be cooked - you'd just feel warmth like standing in the sun.
Lastly, most designs use a retroreflector on the ground to send a small reference signal back to the bird, which uses the reference signal to steer the beam. If the beam drifts, the reference signal is lost and the system shuts down automatically.
Personally, I'd like to see MORE real-world issues added to Civ:
How about making resources be NEEDED, rather than simply nice - what if you HAD to trade with (and thus be at peace with) that other country to trade for oil, or else all of your tanks stop working? What if you HAD to trade for uranium or all your city's nuke plants shut down (and pollution skyrockets).
How about making things like water and electricity issues for a city - not enough power and your fancy electric mines stop producing? Not enough water and your farms dry up?
What if you could build aquaducts between water sources and where it is needed? (but defend those or the enemy will shut them down, and then see previous paragraph). What is you could build power lines so that the cities with excess power could help the other cities out?
What if you could caravan food from places with a surplus to places that needed it? What if you could poach your enemy's caravans for food?
CivCTP is my crack cocaine - I start a game and next thing I know it's three AM. But you really cannot do diplomacy against the AIs - they have no reason to trade. Make it a bit more like the real world - if the Zulus need chromium and I have all the chromium mines, then no matter what their prediliction towards war, if they want to build their railroads they'd better not piss me off!
If I have to stay on hold for a long time, playing a story I can be interested in might keep me from noticing the time - I know that when I am on a long drive, queuing up the Stories directory on my Neo makes the miles fly by better than any of the music directories.
Of course, when you DO finally pick up, you might get people saying "Awww, man! It was just getting good!"
In trying to be brief in my slashdot posting, I did not go into full depth on the questions I ask, but rather gave a shorthand description of the results sufficient to get my point across.
Hell, I have been an engineer for 17 years, and I would try to keep my resumee down to 3 pages!
First pass, your resumee will get about 10 seconds of review, if that. If I cannot extract the meaningful information in that length of time, bu-bye.
If you are using a head-hunting service, they WILL hammer the shit out of your resumee - it will look like absolute CRAP when they are done with it (scan it, OCR it, condense it, fax it, convert it back to a PDF). True, IF you are sending your resumee directly to the company you need to make sure it is cleanly printed, preferably on a good high bond weight paper. But don't be like Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes - a shiny binder and pretty paper will not disguise the absense of content.
You need to play up whatever experience you have - even if it was just washing dishes or pushing a lawnmower for a parks department (those items are autobiographical). Demonstrating a good work ethic at a crap job is STILL very valuable.
But DON'T exaggerate yourself - you may have taking Signal Processing 101, but you don't know CRAP about signal processing yet (substitute anything from your own education you want). I cannot count the number of times I've interviewed someone who said "C++ experience" on their resumee who could not tell me the difference between IS-A and HAS-A, or even what a class is!
Since you are staring out, you DO need to tell me where in general you want to go - a one or two sentence goals section is helpful. Be real, be specific - "I want to develop Web applications for public use" or "I want to be a technical writer" is good, "I want to excel in creating software" is bad.
Apply for approrpiate jobs. I had a candidate come in the other day - she had been an engineer for some time, but had basically been doing mostly apps level work. She had studied DSP in school, and wanted to get more into that. Unfortunately, she was applying for a senior DSP position. She wasted our time and airfare for the second interview, and that makes us LESS likely to hire her. I am going to give you the three most important words any technical person can learn, right now. Study them well:
I don't know.
I'd FAR rather deal with somebody who is willing to say they don't know (but are willing to try to find out) than to deal with somebody who is unwilling to EVER admit ignorance. Hell, I am one of the "go-to guys" at work, I *do* know the answers most of the times, but I still often have to say "I don't know, that is not my field of expertise - I can look it up, or you might talk to [person] as they would know more about it"
One last piece of advice: Be trustworthy. Be the sort of person your supervisor can say "This needs to be done. Handle it." and feel that it will be handled. If you have problems, by all means ask for help - but make sure that what has been assigned to you gets done - if not by you then by somebody. One of the best job recommendations I had was from the foreman at the Parks department - while all of the other summer help fuckoffs needed constant supervision to insure they did their jobs and weren't out joyriding or smoking dope, he knew he could just say "The city building needs work today." and I would do it - quickly, properly, and professionally - the Mayor would not be calling about me screwing off.
This camera operates in many ways the same as the cameras on Viking I and II - a rotating platform presents a line of pixels to an imaging element - in Viking the system went a bit further in that the line of image data was scanned by a mirror to direct it to one of several photodiodes to image the different parts of the spectrum.
The advantage to a system like this is that number of pixels in the axis scanned by the slit can be increased by finer control over the stepping motors driving it. While at some point you end overscanning scene (each strip covers much of the same ground as the previous strip due to the angle of view of the imaging element) you do gain some information by that overscanning - so you do increase the resolution in that axis.
Now, a camera like this is USELESS for motion photography (so all the one-handed typists drooling over pr0n are S.O.L.) - in fact the Viking camera team created a picture of themselves while they were testing the camera on Earth - one guy got in the shot five times by waiting until he had been scanned, then running around behind the camera, getting into position again, and being scanned again.
HOWEVER, I'd love to have a camera like this for taking pictures of places like The Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, the view from Pike's Peak, and other scenic vistas - there is simply no way to capture these places with anything like a normal camera.
Imagine if a camera like this could be located at the summit of Mt. Everest!
Slashdot Mirror
Vegetables: Boy-bands and Brittney Spears
Cruel and unusual - you'll have Greenpeace on you in a cocaine heartbeat.
Genetically modified crops: "Weird" Al
Wrong. Genetically modified crops: DEVO
And of course we need an industrial strength version to make a pine tree sing I'm a lumberjack and I'm OK...
Yes, but do HalfLife 2 and DoomIII support IPv6?
Until these two critical applications support it, I ain't agonna go!
You don't seem to understand the idea of TCP ACK windowing - you DON'T ack each packet.
.ISO image, for example) the latency is a non-issue.
Instead, the sender starts sending packets, and will send some number N packets before requiring an ACK. The receiver will NOT ack each and every packet, but rather it acks groups of packets.
For example, the sender might start with a window of 100 packets - it will send 100 packets before pausing for an ack. The receiver might ack the first packet, then ack packet 10 (implicitly acking packets 2-9), then packet 50, then packet 100. Upon receiving the ack for packet 10, the sender might increase its window size to 1000 packets.
Thus, unless the delay*bandwidth product is HUGE, the data will keep streaming until either a) there is a NACK due to corruption of a packet or b) the job is done.
So for non-interactive moving of freight like BIG FTP transfers (downloading an
However, interactive operations like browsing suck because you pay the startup penalty for each HTTP request. However, modern browsers have HTTP pipelining, wherein the broswer can open the connection, request the main document, then, as the document comes in and is parsed, send additional requests (for images, etc.) without closing the connection and before the main document has been fully retrieved, thus burying the cost of the startup in the transfer.
However, this is less effective with everybody and their dog's website putting images on a seperate server, thus requiring a second channel to be opened.
But I thought that Al WAS a jousting pole!
There is a world of difference between 250ft and 25000ft.
At 250ft, you might be able to see 10 cell towers, but each of them will have a different Digital Color Code - a code used to differentiate between adjacent cell sites on the same frequency.
Also, those 10 cells will each have their own frequency assignements - cells are laid out in a more or less hexagonal pattern with no adjacent cells sharing the same channel assignments.
So hanging off your tower, you might see 10 cells, but you are not likely to see 2 cells with the same frequency plan and DCC.
At 25000 feet, you WILL see multiple cells with the same DCC and frequency - and each of those cells will be trying to talk to your phone.
Also, there is the matter of speed. Hanging off your tower, you aren't moving very much relative to the cells (at least, one HOPES you are not). As a result, there is very little Doppler shift to your phone, and the time-of-flight from your cell to the tower is not changing. In a jet moving at 300-600kts, there is a non-trivial Doppler frequency shift to content with, but more importantly, the time of flight to the cell tower is changing rapidly. If your phone cannot compensate, it will start transmitting out of its assigned time slot, screwing up the adjacent time slots (other people's calls). Most phones' tracking loops are not set up to handle a relative velocity that high.
One of the problems Novell (and Microsoft) has, as a network server platform, is being tied to the ia32 platform. This meant that if you wanted a file server with boatloads of RAM to cache data, you slammed into the 32 bit address limits (yes, I know, 36 bits on later processors, but that is an ugly hack - bank switching once again.)
Novell has realized that the OS the server runs is largely irrelevant to the users - they just care about the SERVICES the server provides. Migrating away from NetwareOS to an OS that supports 64 bit platforms allows Novell to break through the 4G barrier.
So, what do you want from your file server? Massive RAM, MASSIVE DISK I/O and even more massive network I/O. Reliability. Fault tolerance. Expandability. Hot-swap EVERYTHING.
Now, name a vender of server iron that meets those specs. I know of a little company that can do that - so little they only need three letters for their name. A company who's middle name literally IS "business".
Imagine what would happen if Novell made Netware services available on the IBM zSeries or iSeries. Now you have a platform that supports massive quantities of FAST disks, smart disk I/O subsystems, smart network subsystems. A system that can sense a failing disk and phone home - you come to work in the morning and an IBM tech is waiting at the door with a replacement disk before the disk fails, swaps it out in a minute, and you users never notice.
A system where if you find yourself a little light on CPU, a phone call fixes the problem. A system where you can run multiple virtual servers as needed. You want database? Run DB2, either on the Linux image or under OS400/OS390.
A Novell/IBM teamup would be SCARY compelling for IT managers world-wide.
Now, I don't have any insider information, but I cannot beleive that this is NOT being worked upon in Deep Dark Places at Novell and IBM.
The virus writers DO NOT WANT their worms to be destructive to the host IN ANY WAY.
If the worm did randomly corrupt the spreadsheet, the user will eventually clue to the fact that his PC is infected, and will take steps to clean it up.
What these guys want is a silent infection. They want your computer to stay infected forever, so that they may continue to use it forever. Thus, ANY effect of the worm that is negative to the computer owner is to be avoided (the worms that cause instability do so because they are poorly written, not by design).
Yes, if a worm writer wanted to be destructive to as many hosts as possible, then he would write his worm to silently infect as many hosts as possible until some trigger event, then wipe the hosts out.
But were he to do so, then he would not be able to resell the services of the infected machines to spammers and make money.
If a child does not care about school, it is NOT always the home environment's fault.
A friend of mine's kid is getting F's and a few D's in school - not because the kid is stupid, but because he has figured out that it just does not matter if he does the work. Due to this attitude, the kid has been grounded, his games confiscated, he didn't get anything for Christmas, etc. Both his parents and all their friends (myself included) have been beating on the kid (figuratively!) to aggregate his fecal matter in this matter.
His folks went to the school with a seemingly simple request - Hold Him Back A Grade! Let him repeat the eight grade. Let him watch his friends move on, while he doesn't. Let him suffer the jokes. Make not doing the work have a consequence.
The principal's response: "Oh, we don't hold kids his age back!"
So, when the school system itself makes it very clear that doing the work is optional, why should the kids care about it?
One good rule I wish people would follow is simply to know to whom you are speaking before you continue.
We have Direct Inward Dial at work - this means that in addtion to being able to dial the main number, then at the prompt enter an extension, it is also possible to dial a different number and get an extension directly - so if my extension was 123, you could dial ###-#123 where the #'s are a fixed prefix.
Now, for the sales guys this is great, but for me it sucks, since I generally don't need to talk to anybody directly, and I'd rather they have to dial the main number and my extension if they want to reach me - I have systems to design, code to write and debug, work to do!
So, when I answer the phone directly, it is simply "Engineering, this is (name)". If you really are trying to reach me, you will know you have the right number and can continue. Hopefully, if this is the WRONG number, you will clue into that and check - "Excuse me, but I was trying to read Edith's Toenail service, do I have the correct number?"
Thursday the phone rigs the "outside line" ring, and I answer it - I am having a bunch of work done on my house and it might have been one of the contractors. I give my usual answer, "Engineering, this is (name)".
And this gal starts in - "This is (name) and my son is (name) and he had his thing stolen at school and " and so on for a good 15 seconds at a mile a minute before I get a chance to break in. "Excuse me miss, but you have the wrong number." "This isn't XYZ school?" "No ma'am" "What number is this" (Now, I happen to feel this is improper ettiquette - IMHO she should have said "Is this ###-####" - she does not need to know what number this is, only if this is the number she was trying to dial) "No ma'am, this is %%%-%%%%" (the main number, not my D.I.D. number) "Oh, I have the wrong number (click)".
Beat.
Beat.
Ra-Ring.
(sigh)
"(Full company name) this is (name) can I help you?" "I have the wrong number again - is this ^^^-^^^^" "No, ma'am, this is ^^^-^^**" (Last 2 digits wrong) "Oh, I'm sorry (click)"
Now, the point of this story is that, upon first hearing something that was NOT "XYZ school", she SHOULD have said, "Excuse me, but I am trying to reach XYZ school, do I have the right number?" rather than launching into her life's story.
I'm sure she was upset by whatever was happening in her life, but she told me things that not only did I not CARE to hear, but were pretty damn personal - all because she did not confirm the identity of the person with whom she was speaking.
Of course, we live in a society that will blindly fill in whatever forms J.Random.URL asks - I should expect no different for the telephone.
Except that neither this hotel nor the ISS are in geo sync, they are in low earth orbit.
It is HARD to read geosync - that is why you did not see the shuttle going up to fix or retrieve broken communications sats, as the delta-V needed far exceeds the shuttle's ability.
I'd like to see the HL speedruns, but the FullPlanet mirrors are /.'ed - what, no BitTorrents?
And how come you don't see anybody do like the old Quake Done Quicker, and put a bit of humor into the demo? I just about died the first time I saw it, when the happy face sprang out at the guy, and then he turns around and berates you for laughing! As well as the running commentary during the run - why don't we see that done a bit more?
This was done a long time before Mr. Niven wrote about it: The Man In The White Suit, starring Alec Guinness (NOT Sir Alec Guinness - that should clue you in to how long ago the movie was made.)
You say this is for a geek audience? Then how about building Mozilla, Linux, and/or X?
I remember building Linux back on a 486/66 - set the options, start the compile, go to sleep, and HOPE it builds over night rather than erroring out.
One of my co-workers tells me of building X on an HP workstation back in the day - it took 4 days to compile.
Now we can build Linux in tens of seconds on the right hardware (and THAT is with the kernel being over twice as many lines of code as before!)
The issue of the names assigned by NATO to the Soviet missles/planes/tanks/whatever raises a question in my mind:
What were the names assigned by the Soviets to our stuff, specifically the SR-71? They had to know of its existance long before the name Blackbird (or Habu) was made public.
No, you do NOT remember correctly. While Von Braun may have designed the Saturn V, he DID NOT invent rockets.
Solid fuel rockets were invented in China a very long time ago.
Liquid fuel rockets were developed by Robert Goddard, who's work Von Braun studied.
Well, the reason that Amateur radio still has an edge over a COW is that a COW or COLT still need to be tied to the PSTN (public switched telephone network) to operate - they have to hand the call over to the system to be routed. Also, the cell system is a one-to-one system, not a one-to-many - you cannot easily say "All units, this is the Emergency operations center - we need somebody with blankets and food to respond to 9th and Main - any unit that can respond, please answer."
An amateur radio repeater just needs power, and can then provide service to the folks in the area. We don't need a link to the PSTN, and we can do a one-to-many dispatch. Hell, my *car* can be a crossband repeater with the press of a couple of buttons on the radio in it - park on a hilltop and it can provide coverage for miles.
Cellular is great for what it was designed for - acting like wireline service without the wires. It SUCKS for emergency dispatch and response, because it was not designed for that. One hopes you would not use your computer to crack walnuts or use a nutcracker to dig a hole, stop trying use the wrong tool for the job.
Compunction - you keep using that word - I do not think it means what you think it means:
compunction ( P ) Pronunciation Key (km-pngkshn)
n.
1. A strong uneasiness caused by a sense of guilt. See Synonyms at penitence.
2. A sting of conscience or a pang of doubt aroused by wrongdoing or the prospect of wrongdoing. See Synonyms at qualm.
To have no compunction about installing Real would mean you had no fear of installing Real.
I think you mean you had no motivation to install Real.
May I ask what a "variant symbolic link" is?
Does this anectode remind anybody else of Dover from Suburban Jungle?
Most designs for such a system use a phased-array antenna for transmit - the beam angle can be switched in milliseconds.
They also use a very large beam with a very low power density, so that even if you were to stand in the middle of the beam you would not be cooked - you'd just feel warmth like standing in the sun.
Lastly, most designs use a retroreflector on the ground to send a small reference signal back to the bird, which uses the reference signal to steer the beam. If the beam drifts, the reference signal is lost and the system shuts down automatically.
Personally, I'd like to see MORE real-world issues added to Civ:
How about making resources be NEEDED, rather than simply nice - what if you HAD to trade with (and thus be at peace with) that other country to trade for oil, or else all of your tanks stop working? What if you HAD to trade for uranium or all your city's nuke plants shut down (and pollution skyrockets).
How about making things like water and electricity issues for a city - not enough power and your fancy electric mines stop producing? Not enough water and your farms dry up?
What if you could build aquaducts between water sources and where it is needed? (but defend those or the enemy will shut them down, and then see previous paragraph). What is you could build power lines so that the cities with excess power could help the other cities out?
What if you could caravan food from places with a surplus to places that needed it? What if you could poach your enemy's caravans for food?
CivCTP is my crack cocaine - I start a game and next thing I know it's three AM. But you really cannot do diplomacy against the AIs - they have no reason to trade. Make it a bit more like the real world - if the Zulus need chromium and I have all the chromium mines, then no matter what their prediliction towards war, if they want to build their railroads they'd better not piss me off!
Why not play a radio drama, rather than music?
If I have to stay on hold for a long time, playing a story I can be interested in might keep me from noticing the time - I know that when I am on a long drive, queuing up the Stories directory on my Neo makes the miles fly by better than any of the music directories.
Of course, when you DO finally pick up, you might get people saying "Awww, man! It was just getting good!"
In trying to be brief in my slashdot posting, I did not go into full depth on the questions I ask, but rather gave a shorthand description of the results sufficient to get my point across.
Hell, I have been an engineer for 17 years, and I would try to keep my resumee down to 3 pages!
First pass, your resumee will get about 10 seconds of review, if that. If I cannot extract the meaningful information in that length of time, bu-bye.
If you are using a head-hunting service, they WILL hammer the shit out of your resumee - it will look like absolute CRAP when they are done with it (scan it, OCR it, condense it, fax it, convert it back to a PDF). True, IF you are sending your resumee directly to the company you need to make sure it is cleanly printed, preferably on a good high bond weight paper. But don't be like Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes - a shiny binder and pretty paper will not disguise the absense of content.
You need to play up whatever experience you have - even if it was just washing dishes or pushing a lawnmower for a parks department (those items are autobiographical). Demonstrating a good work ethic at a crap job is STILL very valuable.
But DON'T exaggerate yourself - you may have taking Signal Processing 101, but you don't know CRAP about signal processing yet (substitute anything from your own education you want). I cannot count the number of times I've interviewed someone who said "C++ experience" on their resumee who could not tell me the difference between IS-A and HAS-A, or even what a class is!
Since you are staring out, you DO need to tell me where in general you want to go - a one or two sentence goals section is helpful. Be real, be specific - "I want to develop Web applications for public use" or "I want to be a technical writer" is good, "I want to excel in creating software" is bad.
Apply for approrpiate jobs. I had a candidate come in the other day - she had been an engineer for some time, but had basically been doing mostly apps level work. She had studied DSP in school, and wanted to get more into that. Unfortunately, she was applying for a senior DSP position. She wasted our time and airfare for the second interview, and that makes us LESS likely to hire her.
I am going to give you the three most important words any technical person can learn, right now. Study them well:
I'd FAR rather deal with somebody who is willing to say they don't know (but are willing to try to find out) than to deal with somebody who is unwilling to EVER admit ignorance. Hell, I am one of the "go-to guys" at work, I *do* know the answers most of the times, but I still often have to say "I don't know, that is not my field of expertise - I can look it up, or you might talk to [person] as they would know more about it"
One last piece of advice: Be trustworthy. Be the sort of person your supervisor can say "This needs to be done. Handle it." and feel that it will be handled. If you have problems, by all means ask for help - but make sure that what has been assigned to you gets done - if not by you then by somebody. One of the best job recommendations I had was from the foreman at the Parks department - while all of the other summer help fuckoffs needed constant supervision to insure they did their jobs and weren't out joyriding or smoking dope, he knew he could just say "The city building needs work today." and I would do it - quickly, properly, and professionally - the Mayor would not be calling about me screwing off.
This camera operates in many ways the same as the cameras on Viking I and II - a rotating platform presents a line of pixels to an imaging element - in Viking the system went a bit further in that the line of image data was scanned by a mirror to direct it to one of several photodiodes to image the different parts of the spectrum.
The advantage to a system like this is that number of pixels in the axis scanned by the slit can be increased by finer control over the stepping motors driving it. While at some point you end overscanning scene (each strip covers much of the same ground as the previous strip due to the angle of view of the imaging element) you do gain some information by that overscanning - so you do increase the resolution in that axis.
Now, a camera like this is USELESS for motion photography (so all the one-handed typists drooling over pr0n are S.O.L.) - in fact the Viking camera team created a picture of themselves while they were testing the camera on Earth - one guy got in the shot five times by waiting until he had been scanned, then running around behind the camera, getting into position again, and being scanned again.
HOWEVER, I'd love to have a camera like this for taking pictures of places like The Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, the view from Pike's Peak, and other scenic vistas - there is simply no way to capture these places with anything like a normal camera.
Imagine if a camera like this could be located at the summit of Mt. Everest!
Or better still, Mare Tranquillitatis