The reason people pick on mobile phones is because they (sometimes) use a relatively large amount of electromagnetic power to communicate with the base station (perhaps several hundred metres away). This is in contrast to cordless phones which have a range of a few metres, so use far less power (also, you probably don't carry your cordless around all day).
You have to remember that mobile phones change the power they use to transmit depending on signal strength. Ironically, if you live near a base station, your phone will be less harmful to you (although of course, one could argue the base station will be beaming it's rays into you far more strongly). Also, newer phones are far, far better than old ones. The extended battery life of new phones is not all down to the batteries, it's also down to the reduced use of the transmitter (old analogue phones are really nasty, and sent some of the BT engineers bonkers within a couple of years - aledgedly).
Something else to know: the frequencies used by mobile phones are only slightly different from microwave ovens. Given oven manufacturers have been researching using a whole raft of frequencies besides the one generally used, it would suggest that more or less any frequency would cook food (albeit with different penetration and other characteristics). So it would be reasonable to assume that the mobile phone frequency would also cook food (or your brain, skin, sperm, whatever).
Conversely, one also has to remember that you're unlikely to be able to cook your Pot Noodle with a phone, because the power it uses is broadcast in all directions, rather than concentrated at the food (and is far lower power than a microwave oven). However, prolonged phone use, within millimetres of your brain could be construed as the same thing.
Last bit of wisdom from me: A phone on standby uses fractions of the power used for talking. Text messaging uses a bit more power than standby, but of course only for a short period of time. A phone with no signal will keep trying to get a base station, so will be transmitting periodically (sort bursts, regularly). In other words, being asked to carry a phone (by werk, for example) is not likely to be too bad for you. Of course, once they actually call you, you're in trouble. Get a pager - being receive only they're far safer.
Remember kids: Using your phone makes your ear get hot. Think about why that might be...?
Yeah, but think ahead of your immediate complexity. Imagine you could have a button that says "do just what you want me to do", that figures out that you want to connect to the internet, email your friend and fiddle your taxes.
(and I don't mean some goddam paper clip that buggers up everything you're trying to do)
Pretty hard to do because it requires... complexity.
In my experience (having played at being the highly paid consultant who comes in to fix stuff once you've messed it up) I'd always point the finger at the linkage between components ("components" being items in your architecture, including the people you're using to help you).
In a three tier environment (a sensible approach, almost regardless of your technology), the database is often a problem. DBAs jump on that pretty quickly, so what's left? Networks are normally easily sorted, but you may still find your application idles when you expect it to be returning pages faster. Here the linkage plays a part. It's the linkage between the parts (not necessarily the connectivity though) that'll be the issue.
Failing that, make code changes to your application. I haven't seen an application yet that didn't benefit from lots of code tweaking to make it more efficient, use the DB better, generate better SQL, less SQL or what ever.
Either way, the OpenSTA route (or LoadRunner if you can afford it) is the only way to do testing. Setting up the tool is a job in itself, and very worth doing carefully (after all, making a virtual user overly aggressive makes it harder to meet targets, but too weak and your system doesn't do what you say it will).
As for all the posts about redundancy, load balancing etc - all good information, and something you will need if you need something like 100% uptime. That said, I know of a bank that ran a system supporting hundreds of concurrent users with a single line of three sun boxes (+ mainframe) - they got their uptime targets, and at a fraction of the cost of their rivals who have two of everything, and then duplicate that in two buildings (but can't run it for toffee).
Yebbut... If they can download more films than they can actually watch, then it could easily lead to a nice sideline of DVD distribution in war zones. Just imagine what Vietnam, Afganistan and Iraq would look like now with decent DVD distribution? There'd be no insurgents anywhere, except "doing it the US way", couch-potatoing watching endless (propaganda) DVDs.
Any spare bandwidth after all that could be used by front line soldiers to play Day of Defeat. I guess with all those dollars knocking around, they could create maps that look just like their real surroundings.
The most advanced army in the world? Maybe, but possibly not the most productive;-)
I suspect NatWest et al. will do a fairly good job if they continue to use Windows. However, I don't trust the rail companies (and countless others) putting Windows based ticket/vending machines in. They arn't nearly as likely to engineer them nearly as well, but they're just as capable of being financially problematic. A crafted virus could be scooping credit card details, or even making purchases on my behalf.
It looks like the US is falling to the lowest common denominator. If one big player does it, the others have to follow or lose out.
If Sun are giving any patent royalties to charity, then I suspect they're saying "we don't want this, but we've got to do it". I'd sort of imagine they wouldn't need to bother collecting any money for the patent though, would they?
It looks to me like most folks here have a problem with the fact that such a patent can exist, and can get past the utter stupidity of the USPTO, as opposed to anything to do with Sun doing things as lowly as MS et al. CNet are hamming it up for the benefit of chest-beating/.ers.
Do something about that daft patent system. And please don't let it happen here in Europe. It's only a way to create jobs in the PTO and Law sectors, everyone else loses.
My personal top 1 CSS problem:
1) It's incredibly complicated to do what you want.
I know most people will think I'm some idiot who uses Frontpage for saying that, but CSS isn't easy to get right, if you're just getting into it. I'd say the learning curve is pretty steep (browser non-standards and IE bugs don't help).
Say you want a simple two column layout. In tables, that's the simplest thing in the world, and well within the cognitive grasp of just about anyone. Even pixel perfection is easy to achieve, if you want it (actually, flexible layout with pixel perfect lining up is easy too).
Do the same thing in CSS. Once you've done it a few times, it's fairly obvious, but CSS seems to favour stacking box elements rather than putting them side to side. Float-left, position-absolute etc etc all seem very non-intuitive to me. Once done though, browser resizes tend not to do anything unexpected.
Don't get me wrong, I'm trying to move more and more of my work into CSS, but every so often, I'll use a table to lay stuff out just because it's so much easier to do what you want (quickly).
So I might well be nipping down the local bookshop to see if this book (or the others mentioned) are any use to me.
I'm sure I'm in US-dodgy legal territory here (but then, what isn't?), but isn't it every web site owner's responsibility to host a file called "matrixrevolutions.avi", which is of course a renamed HTML of the RIAA/MPAA website or something?
Hmm... maybe cover it with robots.txt and see if anyone finds it. Maybe you could get them on two counts of stupidity and misuse?
Not all of us are in the US (or it's outlying provinces);-)
Any of the Via based PCs should do the necessaries. They're mostly very quiet, with minimum fans in the case, and probably have a decent disk that doesn't make much noise. Via mobos also support CF cards and the like, so you could even make it diskless, if you want.
Surely the best thing is a bit of common sense?
The post about talking to your neighbours is way the best thing to do. I used to live in an area where no one gave a monkeys about anyone else. Guess what, crime all over the place. Now I live in a "nice" area, where people want to make it better, so there's way less crime.
All the talk about guns and stuff is just macho US bollocks. It takes the stance of "I can shoot better/more/quicker than you, therefore I will win". Your attacker thinks the same thing! The best defense is not to have a confrontation at all. The fight you're most likely to win in one you don't have. Being "nice" will most likely save getting shot or injured (draw any Iraq parallels you like on that).
Besides that, take all the normal, sensible precautions. Get decent locks, perhaps toughened glass on doors and windows, maybe a house alarm, or internal cameras or whatever. The truth is, people that care around you are going to be far better than any technological solution. The analogy with open source/security is a good one.
It's true, Europe generally trails the US in all things stupid, but in one respect we're showing you how dangerous life can be:
http://www.mapamobile.com/
"mapAmobile is a service which can give you the peace of mind of knowing where your children, loved ones or colleagues are at any time, without intruding on their day to day activity. It uses the mobile phone network to locate a mobile phone anywhere in the UK. You can access this information from this website, via text message, via WAP or by making a simple phone call."
We had a spare Sun Ultra 1, so I pinched it and run Netsaint, MRTG, Nessus and smsclient on it. I'd like to put SmokePing on as well, but haven't got around it it yet.
I'd also like to get some sort of I/O capability, so it could monitor the temprature in the computer room, or check if the aircon's dribbled water over the floor. I guess it could also switch on a "red alert" light over the computer room door too (or just blink the light inside the red phone).
I don't have any dual-headed machines around, just the Netsaint status screen on my PC from time to time. I've even got the users trained to look at the status page themselves (I've got nice simple "Internet Access, Email, Office Network" statuses on the intranet home page too). I can see, at a glance, what's up and what's not, and get weekly security scans of the entire network. I guess some sort of network sniffer would be good too, but switches make that a bit of a pain. All that, and it can send me text messages when things go wrong.
Keep 'em peeled, someone's going to make an off the shelf product like this soon...
Slashdot Mirror
The reason people pick on mobile phones is because they (sometimes) use a relatively large amount of electromagnetic power to communicate with the base station (perhaps several hundred metres away). This is in contrast to cordless phones which have a range of a few metres, so use far less power (also, you probably don't carry your cordless around all day).
You have to remember that mobile phones change the power they use to transmit depending on signal strength. Ironically, if you live near a base station, your phone will be less harmful to you (although of course, one could argue the base station will be beaming it's rays into you far more strongly). Also, newer phones are far, far better than old ones. The extended battery life of new phones is not all down to the batteries, it's also down to the reduced use of the transmitter (old analogue phones are really nasty, and sent some of the BT engineers bonkers within a couple of years - aledgedly).
Something else to know: the frequencies used by mobile phones are only slightly different from microwave ovens. Given oven manufacturers have been researching using a whole raft of frequencies besides the one generally used, it would suggest that more or less any frequency would cook food (albeit with different penetration and other characteristics). So it would be reasonable to assume that the mobile phone frequency would also cook food (or your brain, skin, sperm, whatever).
Conversely, one also has to remember that you're unlikely to be able to cook your Pot Noodle with a phone, because the power it uses is broadcast in all directions, rather than concentrated at the food (and is far lower power than a microwave oven). However, prolonged phone use, within millimetres of your brain could be construed as the same thing.
Last bit of wisdom from me: A phone on standby uses fractions of the power used for talking. Text messaging uses a bit more power than standby, but of course only for a short period of time. A phone with no signal will keep trying to get a base station, so will be transmitting periodically (sort bursts, regularly). In other words, being asked to carry a phone (by werk, for example) is not likely to be too bad for you. Of course, once they actually call you, you're in trouble. Get a pager - being receive only they're far safer.
Remember kids: Using your phone makes your ear get hot. Think about why that might be...?
Yeah, but think ahead of your immediate complexity. Imagine you could have a button that says "do just what you want me to do", that figures out that you want to connect to the internet, email your friend and fiddle your taxes.
(and I don't mean some goddam paper clip that buggers up everything you're trying to do)
Pretty hard to do because it requires... complexity.
In my experience (having played at being the highly paid consultant who comes in to fix stuff once you've messed it up) I'd always point the finger at the linkage between components ("components" being items in your architecture, including the people you're using to help you). In a three tier environment (a sensible approach, almost regardless of your technology), the database is often a problem. DBAs jump on that pretty quickly, so what's left? Networks are normally easily sorted, but you may still find your application idles when you expect it to be returning pages faster. Here the linkage plays a part. It's the linkage between the parts (not necessarily the connectivity though) that'll be the issue. Failing that, make code changes to your application. I haven't seen an application yet that didn't benefit from lots of code tweaking to make it more efficient, use the DB better, generate better SQL, less SQL or what ever. Either way, the OpenSTA route (or LoadRunner if you can afford it) is the only way to do testing. Setting up the tool is a job in itself, and very worth doing carefully (after all, making a virtual user overly aggressive makes it harder to meet targets, but too weak and your system doesn't do what you say it will). As for all the posts about redundancy, load balancing etc - all good information, and something you will need if you need something like 100% uptime. That said, I know of a bank that ran a system supporting hundreds of concurrent users with a single line of three sun boxes (+ mainframe) - they got their uptime targets, and at a fraction of the cost of their rivals who have two of everything, and then duplicate that in two buildings (but can't run it for toffee).
Yebbut... If they can download more films than they can actually watch, then it could easily lead to a nice sideline of DVD distribution in war zones. Just imagine what Vietnam, Afganistan and Iraq would look like now with decent DVD distribution? There'd be no insurgents anywhere, except "doing it the US way", couch-potatoing watching endless (propaganda) DVDs.
;-)
Any spare bandwidth after all that could be used by front line soldiers to play Day of Defeat. I guess with all those dollars knocking around, they could create maps that look just like their real surroundings.
The most advanced army in the world? Maybe, but possibly not the most productive
Yep, I've had one reboot with my card inside.
I suspect NatWest et al. will do a fairly good job if they continue to use Windows. However, I don't trust the rail companies (and countless others) putting Windows based ticket/vending machines in. They arn't nearly as likely to engineer them nearly as well, but they're just as capable of being financially problematic. A crafted virus could be scooping credit card details, or even making purchases on my behalf.
It looks like the US is falling to the lowest common denominator. If one big player does it, the others have to follow or lose out.
/.ers.
If Sun are giving any patent royalties to charity, then I suspect they're saying "we don't want this, but we've got to do it". I'd sort of imagine they wouldn't need to bother collecting any money for the patent though, would they?
It looks to me like most folks here have a problem with the fact that such a patent can exist, and can get past the utter stupidity of the USPTO, as opposed to anything to do with Sun doing things as lowly as MS et al. CNet are hamming it up for the benefit of chest-beating
Do something about that daft patent system. And please don't let it happen here in Europe. It's only a way to create jobs in the PTO and Law sectors, everyone else loses.
My personal top 1 CSS problem: 1) It's incredibly complicated to do what you want. I know most people will think I'm some idiot who uses Frontpage for saying that, but CSS isn't easy to get right, if you're just getting into it. I'd say the learning curve is pretty steep (browser non-standards and IE bugs don't help). Say you want a simple two column layout. In tables, that's the simplest thing in the world, and well within the cognitive grasp of just about anyone. Even pixel perfection is easy to achieve, if you want it (actually, flexible layout with pixel perfect lining up is easy too). Do the same thing in CSS. Once you've done it a few times, it's fairly obvious, but CSS seems to favour stacking box elements rather than putting them side to side. Float-left, position-absolute etc etc all seem very non-intuitive to me. Once done though, browser resizes tend not to do anything unexpected. Don't get me wrong, I'm trying to move more and more of my work into CSS, but every so often, I'll use a table to lay stuff out just because it's so much easier to do what you want (quickly). So I might well be nipping down the local bookshop to see if this book (or the others mentioned) are any use to me.
I'm sure I'm in US-dodgy legal territory here (but then, what isn't?), but isn't it every web site owner's responsibility to host a file called "matrixrevolutions.avi", which is of course a renamed HTML of the RIAA/MPAA website or something?
;-)
Hmm... maybe cover it with robots.txt and see if anyone finds it. Maybe you could get them on two counts of stupidity and misuse?
Not all of us are in the US (or it's outlying provinces)
Any of the Via based PCs should do the necessaries. They're mostly very quiet, with minimum fans in the case, and probably have a decent disk that doesn't make much noise. Via mobos also support CF cards and the like, so you could even make it diskless, if you want.
http://www.hoojum.com/
http://www.hushtechnologies.net/
(and many more besides for you non-europeans)
Surely the best thing is a bit of common sense? The post about talking to your neighbours is way the best thing to do. I used to live in an area where no one gave a monkeys about anyone else. Guess what, crime all over the place. Now I live in a "nice" area, where people want to make it better, so there's way less crime. All the talk about guns and stuff is just macho US bollocks. It takes the stance of "I can shoot better/more/quicker than you, therefore I will win". Your attacker thinks the same thing! The best defense is not to have a confrontation at all. The fight you're most likely to win in one you don't have. Being "nice" will most likely save getting shot or injured (draw any Iraq parallels you like on that). Besides that, take all the normal, sensible precautions. Get decent locks, perhaps toughened glass on doors and windows, maybe a house alarm, or internal cameras or whatever. The truth is, people that care around you are going to be far better than any technological solution. The analogy with open source/security is a good one.
It's true, Europe generally trails the US in all things stupid, but in one respect we're showing you how dangerous life can be:
http://www.mapamobile.com/
"mapAmobile is a service which can give you the peace of mind of knowing where your children, loved ones or colleagues are at any time, without intruding on their day to day activity. It uses the mobile phone network to locate a mobile phone anywhere in the UK. You can access this information from this website, via text message, via WAP or by making a simple phone call."
We had a spare Sun Ultra 1, so I pinched it and run Netsaint, MRTG, Nessus and smsclient on it. I'd like to put SmokePing on as well, but haven't got around it it yet.
I'd also like to get some sort of I/O capability, so it could monitor the temprature in the computer room, or check if the aircon's dribbled water over the floor. I guess it could also switch on a "red alert" light over the computer room door too (or just blink the light inside the red phone).
I don't have any dual-headed machines around, just the Netsaint status screen on my PC from time to time. I've even got the users trained to look at the status page themselves (I've got nice simple "Internet Access, Email, Office Network" statuses on the intranet home page too). I can see, at a glance, what's up and what's not, and get weekly security scans of the entire network. I guess some sort of network sniffer would be good too, but switches make that a bit of a pain. All that, and it can send me text messages when things go wrong.
Keep 'em peeled, someone's going to make an off the shelf product like this soon...