The fact that you have strong feelings about this now, and that the two of you are conflicted over who should have the decision making authority demonstrates that your company was/is ripe for a very costly power struggle if you were to maintain the 50/50 partnership. As hard as it sounds, make the decision now and the company will be better off in the long run.
As for who should be CEO - many posters have provided good ideas, but I would like to point out that if it is a technical company you will need strong technical leadership and vision. In my opinion, GM is failing right now, and HP fell dramatically when these technically oriented companyies no longer had technical visionaries at the helm. Apple on the other hand has done well precisely because of the technical vision & leadership it has in Jobs. But remember, technical leadership is only a benefit after the day-to-day busness savvy is already there. If you don't have the business savvy, then your technical vision won't get you anywhere.
Great, he had a shadow of the right idea but completely and utterly failed to implement it correctly. The idea behind a 49/51 split is to provide a clear path in the event of a major disagreement. It is not to provide all the spoils to the person with the 51% share.
Next time do 51/49, with a buyout requirement in the event that the subserviant partner is required to leave and/or take a demotion.
What so many people who like the idea of a 50/50 split don't understand is that choosing 50/50 is like deciding not to make a decision while you are in agreement and still like each other, and instead agreeing to make the decision when you are in the midst of a passionate disagreement and think the other party is completely unreasonable. Now tell me, under which of those two scenarios are you more likely to make a reasonable and fair compromise?
Deciding and agreeing upfront on how to solve a serious disagreement will result in a more stable and ultimately more profitable company after the inevitable disagreement that will happen in any successful endevor.
To the original poster: VC's know this, they have seen it happen many times, that's why they have wisely required you to have this discussion now. The fact that you are obviously finding it difficult to make the decisions
I did as you suggested and spent some time reading about the Hurricane Pam exercise. It appears to have been an exercised organized by FEMA for the benefit of helping the emergency preparedness officials in Louisiana plan and prepare their response. One article I found discussed the difficulty that the *state* anticipated in effectively evacuating the city. The remedy was to call in the national guard (commanded by the governor of the state, not the federal government) before the hurricane and use them to help in the evacuation process (as we all know, the governor made no such effort).
Once again massive failures at the state and local level caused most of the early 'slow-response' problems, despite FEMA's attempts to help them be prepared.
I think you meant to say "don't vote Democrat in Louisiana anymore". If you believe the media circus about FEMA failing as first-response agency you have been sadly mislead. First response has always been a state and local government function, no exceptions. Louisiana as a state and New Orleans as a city badly failed to plan for a hurricane, to develop a response plan, or to properly manage the aftermath. For example, the governor herself prevented the Red Cross from providing relief (out of fear that it would encourage people to stay in the city) until days after the hurricane was past.
Louisiana has been dominated by the Democratic party for generations and the disastrous incompetence was a direct result of that one-party rule. The best thing a voter could do for Louisiana would be to not vote for a single incumbent in the next state and local elections.
FEMA's website (before this hurricane season) explicitly instructs people to not expect help from them for several days (7+) after a disaster. A 2000 person agency simply cannot provide first response services. FEMA was formed for long-term cleanup and this myth of first-response failure is entirely a case of party politics.
CDMA as implemented by Sprint uses 8kb/s vocoders. They replaced all of the 13kb/s ones in late 2000. The voice quality is still much better though since the EVRC (enhanced variable rate c...) benefited from several years of additional vocoder research.
This is a somewhat common misconception. None of the antennas on the market today are efficent enought to cause this effect. If you were using a microwave dish you would certainly have this problem, but the panel antennas in common use leak enough signal in the non-radiating directions to provide good coverage to people nearby the tower (where near = 0.1 mi) Beyond that distance morphological effects will dominate. The exception to this is if you live in an underground bunker, in that case you won't have good coverage no matter where you are.
As I stated earlier, if you have specific equipment that you know you need to protect then by all means request an intermod study. An intermod study calculates the harmonics that are produced by the mixing of different signals inside transmit and receive equipment (or when mixed by rusty bolts on the tower). Your equipment has some sort of receiver filtering on it and interference will not be an issue as long as no signals are generated that fall into the passband of the receiver filter. Certainly none of the directly produced frequencies will fall into the passband since the nearest wireless provider (Nextel) is hundreds of MHz away from your equipments band of operation. The only concern then is that one of the harmonics might fall into your band. Since you are not locating on the tower yourself you will probably have enough isolation from free-space pathloss that it wouldn't be a problem even if there were a problematic harmonic, but you could allieviate any concerns in your company by having an intermod study performed.
If the company doesn't already have a consultant that they work with to perform those studies you could tell them to contact me:) If your interested let me know and I'll provide contact info.
...While the SPCS site at Cornell is located on a 30' power pole in a substation along 366 just south of campus. I bet no one has noticed it either.
Cornell is a real pain to work with and I had a tight deadline to get the Ithaca system up and running. Barton tower is a better site (it provides a more even distribution of capacity between the sectors), but you do what you can.
It seems perfectly reasonable that he would ask Slashdot, after all, someone like myself might take the time to write back...
I am an RF Engineer, and I provide consulting services to the wireless industry including expert testimony supporting tower placement, interference analysis, RF exposure reports, and other such studies.
Interference will likely be a non-issue, but you don't have to take my word for it. You can ask the provider to supply an intermod study that includes any equipment you have concerns about. You will need to give them the location, make, model, and frequency of the equipment you have questions about.
Aesthetic issues / neighbors - this is really a matter of location. I personally think that most towers don't look too bad, certainly much better then power lines at least. You really won't know how big these issues will be until the public meeting. In some places (like the meeting I will be testifying at next week) a small tower is a huge issue, in other places no one cares. You probably have a feel for the community you are in.
You might have some say in how the tower looks. I say might because there are almost always other landowners that would be quite happy to receive the rent that you would otherwise receive. If you try to dictate too much the company could go elsewhere. At the very least it is reasonable to ask for landscaping and fencing that hides the base station equipment. Asking for a stealth tower will only work if no one else will lease space to them, or if the municipality 'demands' it. Stealth towers cost an arm, leg and three vital organs (and have maintenance issues), so they are seldom used if the carrier can avoid it.
It is very important to know if the developer has carriers that are already interested or if he is developing on speculation. Building on speculation usually looks bad to a zoning board (rightfully so) and will engender hostile feelings if there is any community opposition (much more then a carrier supported build).
I hope that helps some. If you have any more specific questions post them as responses to this post and I will try to get to them before the end of the week.
Ding! Ding! Ding! This poster gave the correct answer. Running a business, even working for a business requires a whole level of skills that most people need practice to develop. Simple things like placing buisiness related phone calls, keeping track of tasks, managing business relationships. Soft skills that make all the difference in the real world.
It depends on the state. In New York, Cornell university offers DEM (digital elevation model) files for the entire state at 10-meter resolution (that's very good). The NY State GIS office offers aerial photography of the entire state at 1 foot resolution (that is phenomenal). In Pennsylvania, Penn State offers 10-meter DEM files for the entire state, and in New Hampshire, the State GIS office offers aerial photography of the entire state.
Doing a search online could reveal some good data sources, but it will only be useful if you have the appropriate GIS software to open the files. Topo maps have 95% of the information you need (though aerial photography can be quite helpful if used properly), and for a small city like Pueblo the effort of getting the GIS software up and running and learning how to use it would be more then just doing the design on paper.
The two most popular (and the only ones you will find compatible data for) GIS packages are Mapinfo and ARCView. I am quite adept with software and do plenty of programming on all different environments, but I must say that these GIS packages are pretty much impossible to learn with a high level of competency without help. They are completely unintuitive. Since you would already be spending $1500+ for the basic program (you will need to purchase at least some data as well), it would be a wise idea to take some of the training classes on the software so that you can actually use it.
I design wirless networks for a living, so I'd like to add a few words...
Get a good set of topo maps for the entire area you want to cover. Don't let anybody fool you, real paper maps and a good distance calculator like "Topo Companion" are the best way to do wireless design. Next, go to the FCC and download their Antenna Registration Database. You will need the "EN" and "CO" and one other table. Join the tables (useing MS Access would be easiest) using the unique site id and then query out the sites that have coordinates within the boundaries of Pueblo (latitude > y1 and latitude x1 and longitue
Now use your "Topo" companion to mark existing towers on the map. Look for ones that are on hills or mountains near the desired coverage area. Some simple trig will tell you if you have line-of-site (LOS). Add the average tree height to your ground elevation when doing calcuations, 802.11x is very low power and high frequency, so you can't afford any pathloss burning through vegetation.
Unlike the parent, I would strongly recommend 30 degree panels for this kind of system, since you are likely to encounter capacity issues, and even log-periodic 60 degree panels have enough overlap between sectors to guarentee a huge interference problem if you use more then one transmitter. Find the equipment you are going to use and use your gains and losses to calculate the ERP / EIRP from your transmit antennas at each site. Now go ahead and use the free-space pathloss equation to figure out the signal strenght at you target locations. If you have adequate signal to meet the needs of the subscriber equipment you plan on using then great (Note: if you plan on supplying subscriber equipment then you can guarentee a minimum quality. If not, your design will need to be especially robust to accomodate low-quality receivers). If not, keep tweeking the design until it will work. Develop a plan for directing the different channels away from each other. Make sure you calculate your expected interference from other sites using the same channel. If you several mountaintop sites this will be a killer.
Once you have it built on paper, the rest is fairly straightforward. Have fun!
This software's primary function is to identify mathematical patterns in music that are innately appealing to humans*
It accomplishes this by mapping the patterns of hit music from the past. Songs can then be compared to the database of patterns that are known to be appealing to see if they match a known pattern.
No doubt there are other patterns that have never been reflected in American pop music that are also appealing, songs that fit that category will not be identified.
Are there other factors that come into play besides just the intrinsic appeal? Of course, plenty of music fails to match any intrinsically appealing pattern and still does ok because of external factors. Nevertheless, big hits that will be appealing for years to come will do so by appealing to the audience at a very basic level. This software helps to test if a particular song has that potential.
If you read the article, you would note that two radically different pieces of music can both match the same basic pattern. I'd say this software is likely to reduce the production of music that isn't intrinsically appealing, and will have no effect on new music that hits on a new pattern that has not yet been discovered - songs like that will take off despite the music industry.
*This may be somewhat culturally based, though I suspect that the cultural aspect is not very strong.
I would repeat after you, but what would I gain by repeating something that isn't true?
Ok, there is a lot of truth there, but to dismiss the analogy out of hand is to miss some very important lessons. My dad manages large-scale construction projects so I know a little bit about the industry.
Some lessons that may relate
1. The team that designs a project is always different from the team that constructs the project. They are seldom even from the same company. The client gets to arbitrate between the two when conflicts come up.
2. Many projects are extensively estimated after design, but before construction by the constructor (who has much more experience and motivation to accurately assess project costs then the designing company).
3. Design firms, and construction firms often specialize in very specific types of buildings (i.e. one company may construct only clean-room facilities, another company designs only bridges, etc.). When companies take on specialized projects that they have no institutional experience with, they often fail spectacularly.
4. The designing company divides the project design documents into known specialties. Metalwork, brickwork, glasswork, electrical work, etc. There are hundreds of catagories, and the design documents break out the project into those standard catagories. When the construction company builds the project, they hire subcontractors to perform work in each specialty. The company that does the glasswork has lots of experience with glasswork. The company doing roofing has lots of experience with roofing, etc.
5. Changing the design in mid-construction (which always happens) cost big bucks. No exceptions.
There are more, but I'm bored with this post so I'll stop now.
Therac-25, for those of you who don't know, was a radiation treatment machine. It was an upgrade to the previous model, and included all-new electronic controls. The controls had one small bug that wasn't discovered until the machine had been on the market for a while.
There were two modes of operation, a very low power mode - intended for long, slow radiation treatment, and a very high power mode - intended for very short bursts of radiation treatment. If a technician accidentally selected the high power mode, then switched back to the low power mode and hit the radiate button immediately, the device would deliver the high power beam, but the display would show it as a low power beam.
Patients would complain about a burning sensation, and then die. Happened quite a few times before anyone figured out what was going wrong.
Yeah, with all the advances in bandwidth and hard drive capacity since 1995 the compressed formats we used back then have become obsolete, replaced with uncompressed goodness.
Oh, wait they haven't. JPEG is still in use, as is GIF and ZIP files. When our storage space grows we simply increase the number of things we want to store. Human nature gets you every time.
Nextel is an interesting case. They are technically not a cellular or PCS provider, instead, they are a two-way provider.
Wireless licensing can be a little complicated and Nextel used a novel approach to aquiring their spectrum for a fraction of the cost that anyone else spent.
Several years ago, if you were a local business that had a dispatch operation, you would purchase service from a local two-way radio provider. These were mostly mom-and-pop operations with a few mountaintop towers covering a city. They would provide you with an analog radio that you could mount in your service trucks. They worked very much like a CB, only with a much greater range since "calls" went to the tower and then were rebroadcast from the tower to all the other radios in the area.
Nextel bought some licenses from a few of the mom-and-pop operations and rolled out Motorola's iDen network. The iDen equipment was head-and-sholders better then anything anyone else was using. It offered digital two-way, fairly secure communications, better battery life, and the option of using it like a phone to place calls.
As a result, Nextel steamrolled the two-way competition. Other mom-and-pop shops folded in the face of Nextel's service and then sold their licenses to Nextel. A few years of this and Nextel became so big they were able to challenge traditional wireless carriers.
Of course Nextel's path had a few downsides. They have severe capacity restrictions since there simply wasn't much two-way spectrum available. They buy all their equipment from one suppler - Motorola. Trust me, when your vendor has no competition for your business they act like it. Motorola's iDen equipment is clunky and antiquated.
For the consumer this isn't particularly relevant. Nextel seems to have done a pretty good job building out their network. It operates in the 700 & 800 MHz bands, so in-building penetration and rural coverage (where they offer it) should be quite good. Of course they offer push-to-talk that utilizes dedicated equipment (push-to-talk on all the other networks acts like voice IM over the carrier's data network) - so there is very little delay, and no other carrier will be able to match this for some time to come (think years).
When I said that service varies per city I really meant it. Each major city was built out by a different engineering team. Some were fantastic and did a great job even though they were working for a "bad" carrier. Others were horrible and built terrible networks that even years of patching still haven't completely fixed. You need to talk to people that use the service, that's the bottom line.
Also, be aware that the quality of service can change dramatically throughout the year. All the wireless carriers have seen their network usage grow by leaps and bounds. Some proactively expand their capacity to handle the growth, others wait until the service has degraded significantly before making changes. Many network changes have 3-6 month lead times, so if the carrier only fixes problems once they occure, then expect periodic 3-6 month periods of poor service.
I'm not going to give any recomendations, but I will say that the Consumer Reports evalations tend to match my general impressions of the carriers on a broad scale. As a consumer though, you probably don't care about the broad scale as much as you care about your house and the areas you frequent. Only word-of-mouth can give you specific information like that.
That's exactly how it works. Every license has mandatory build out dates. For the PCS auctions, the first build out date was 5 years from the day the license was issued. By that point the licensee had to cover 60% of the population in the license block.
I'm an engineer in the wireless industry. I can tell you definitively that Verizon uses CDMA and has no plans to switch to GSM. GSM is an old standard that has been extended several times to try and keep up with CDMA. It is running out of steam - no one* with a technical familiarity with the two standards would even pretend that GSM is as good** as CDMA2000.
All the GSM providers on the other hand are looking at switching to CDMA at some point in the next few years. Granted, it is UTMS CDMA not CDMA 2000, but the argument over TDMA vs. CDMA is effectively over. UTMS CDMA is being used for the 3G rollout in Europe right now.
*Ok, actually Ericsson (major manufacturer of GSM equipment for wireless companies) did try and claim that GSM was just as good for a little while. It was purely a marketing tactic. GSM is a great TDMA based standard but falls short in many ways when compared to the much newer CDMA2000 standard.
**Good is a relative term. Wireless networks have to balance a lot of variables including build cost (slight GSM advantage due to widespread equipment availability), capacity (huge CDMA advantage), voice quality (CDMA advantage, but the carrier can chose to offer a lower voice quality more in line with GSM to further increase capacity), engineering maintenance burden (slight CDMA advantage), and several others. Consumers are often more concerned with "do my calls drop a lot" and "do I have coverage where I need it". These issues are largely independent of the technology, though they do have some relation to the freqency blocks used by the carrier (lower==better). Rather, these issues depend on:
1 - the skill of the engineers who designed the network AND how much their opinion mattered when the network was being built (most of the networks were built out very quickly. The construction and legal advisors could say "hey, we could build a site here in a month!" and approval would be granted even if the engineer said it wouldn't work - I deal with the repercussions of this a lot).
2 - the size of the build out. The more area covered the better.
3 - the commitment by the company to improve the existing network. There seems to be a insanity in the industry that says "we can only improve the network by adding new sites". That sounds great, but in practice it means there is little resources provided to fix problems on exisiting sites. You even see new sites built to fix a problem that could have been corrected by fixing the original site - all part of the more sites is better philosophy.
each of these aspects vary by carrier and by city, blanket statements about quality based on technology or carrier are seldom true.
It is even more cool if you read the original article by Ian Stewart in Scientific American. The article (if I recall) was about these monks that wanted an easier way to know when the proper prayer times should be. They got to talking about how useful it would be to have a digital sundial, and then did some of the background calculations needed to see if it was possible. I remember when I read that article back in high school (someone gave me a huge collection of old Scientific American magazines and I read through all the back issues - I certainly wasn't in high school in 1987)I thought it sounded like an really cool idea. Now that they exist I would love to have one!
What do you have against turkies? We bought ours fresh from a farm (well, only a day or two after it was slaughtered anyway) last year. It tasted so fantastic we will certainly be buying from them again.
Wow! This post is incredibly insightful. It is somewhere between depressing and funny to see how many people use "science" to defend their strong biases. Science is about using consistent methodology to analyze new information. Very seldom is there enough data on a new theory to truly say that it is "not true" with certainty - only that it is "more probably false". Likewise with existing established theories - evidence indicates that they are "probably true", and rarely that they are "certainly true". When you forget that these gradients exist you no longer have science, you have a religion (and a psudo-scientific one at that) and probably don't even realize it.
This has become a disturbing precedence among high courts in the past decade or two. Think about it - if you use precedence from courts in other countries you are being subjected to the laws and rules of that other country without representation!
If you have any interest in real democracy (or a real republic for that matter) this should bother you tremendously.
My dad made me a set of wooden blocks out of 2x4s. It took a little work as he had to cut them up into 12", 6", 3", and 6" diagnal-cut pieces but they were hours of fun.
The best part was that I could make buildings that were large enough to be useful (wood has that special property:) )
Later on, my parents got my younger siblings a set of cardboard blocks. The blocks were about 12" x 6" x 3". There were enough that we could actually make little houses and forts, and strong enough to hold our weight. Of course we could also hurl them at each other while hiding behind walls made of the same. That was pretty cool, since the blocks weighed enough to knock out portions of the opponents wall but not enough to cause any serious damage to the basement. It was a little like real-life space invaders
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that you have strong feelings about this now, and that the two of you are conflicted over who should have the decision making authority demonstrates that your company was/is ripe for a very costly power struggle if you were to maintain the 50/50 partnership. As hard as it sounds, make the decision now and the company will be better off in the long run.
As for who should be CEO - many posters have provided good ideas, but I would like to point out that if it is a technical company you will need strong technical leadership and vision. In my opinion, GM is failing right now, and HP fell dramatically when these technically oriented companyies no longer had technical visionaries at the helm. Apple on the other hand has done well precisely because of the technical vision & leadership it has in Jobs. But remember, technical leadership is only a benefit after the day-to-day busness savvy is already there. If you don't have the business savvy, then your technical vision won't get you anywhere.
Next time do 51/49, with a buyout requirement in the event that the subserviant partner is required to leave and/or take a demotion.
What so many people who like the idea of a 50/50 split don't understand is that choosing 50/50 is like deciding not to make a decision while you are in agreement and still like each other, and instead agreeing to make the decision when you are in the midst of a passionate disagreement and think the other party is completely unreasonable. Now tell me, under which of those two scenarios are you more likely to make a reasonable and fair compromise?
Deciding and agreeing upfront on how to solve a serious disagreement will result in a more stable and ultimately more profitable company after the inevitable disagreement that will happen in any successful endevor.
To the original poster: VC's know this, they have seen it happen many times, that's why they have wisely required you to have this discussion now. The fact that you are obviously finding it difficult to make the decisions
Once again massive failures at the state and local level caused most of the early 'slow-response' problems, despite FEMA's attempts to help them be prepared.
Louisiana has been dominated by the Democratic party for generations and the disastrous incompetence was a direct result of that one-party rule. The best thing a voter could do for Louisiana would be to not vote for a single incumbent in the next state and local elections. FEMA's website (before this hurricane season) explicitly instructs people to not expect help from them for several days (7+) after a disaster. A 2000 person agency simply cannot provide first response services. FEMA was formed for long-term cleanup and this myth of first-response failure is entirely a case of party politics.
CDMA as implemented by Sprint uses 8kb/s vocoders. They replaced all of the 13kb/s ones in late 2000. The voice quality is still much better though since the EVRC (enhanced variable rate c...) benefited from several years of additional vocoder research.
This is a somewhat common misconception. None of the antennas on the market today are efficent enought to cause this effect. If you were using a microwave dish you would certainly have this problem, but the panel antennas in common use leak enough signal in the non-radiating directions to provide good coverage to people nearby the tower (where near = 0.1 mi) Beyond that distance morphological effects will dominate. The exception to this is if you live in an underground bunker, in that case you won't have good coverage no matter where you are.
If the company doesn't already have a consultant that they work with to perform those studies you could tell them to contact me :) If your interested let me know and I'll provide contact info.
Cornell is a real pain to work with and I had a tight deadline to get the Ithaca system up and running. Barton tower is a better site (it provides a more even distribution of capacity between the sectors), but you do what you can.
I am an RF Engineer, and I provide consulting services to the wireless industry including expert testimony supporting tower placement, interference analysis, RF exposure reports, and other such studies.
Interference will likely be a non-issue, but you don't have to take my word for it. You can ask the provider to supply an intermod study that includes any equipment you have concerns about. You will need to give them the location, make, model, and frequency of the equipment you have questions about.
Aesthetic issues / neighbors - this is really a matter of location. I personally think that most towers don't look too bad, certainly much better then power lines at least. You really won't know how big these issues will be until the public meeting. In some places (like the meeting I will be testifying at next week) a small tower is a huge issue, in other places no one cares. You probably have a feel for the community you are in.
You might have some say in how the tower looks. I say might because there are almost always other landowners that would be quite happy to receive the rent that you would otherwise receive. If you try to dictate too much the company could go elsewhere. At the very least it is reasonable to ask for landscaping and fencing that hides the base station equipment. Asking for a stealth tower will only work if no one else will lease space to them, or if the municipality 'demands' it. Stealth towers cost an arm, leg and three vital organs (and have maintenance issues), so they are seldom used if the carrier can avoid it.
It is very important to know if the developer has carriers that are already interested or if he is developing on speculation. Building on speculation usually looks bad to a zoning board (rightfully so) and will engender hostile feelings if there is any community opposition (much more then a carrier supported build).
I hope that helps some. If you have any more specific questions post them as responses to this post and I will try to get to them before the end of the week.
Ding! Ding! Ding! This poster gave the correct answer. Running a business, even working for a business requires a whole level of skills that most people need practice to develop. Simple things like placing buisiness related phone calls, keeping track of tasks, managing business relationships. Soft skills that make all the difference in the real world.
It is a very realistic scenario. The fact that you doubt it leads me to belive you are quite disconnected from the real world.
Doing a search online could reveal some good data sources, but it will only be useful if you have the appropriate GIS software to open the files. Topo maps have 95% of the information you need (though aerial photography can be quite helpful if used properly), and for a small city like Pueblo the effort of getting the GIS software up and running and learning how to use it would be more then just doing the design on paper.
The two most popular (and the only ones you will find compatible data for) GIS packages are Mapinfo and ARCView. I am quite adept with software and do plenty of programming on all different environments, but I must say that these GIS packages are pretty much impossible to learn with a high level of competency without help. They are completely unintuitive. Since you would already be spending $1500+ for the basic program (you will need to purchase at least some data as well), it would be a wise idea to take some of the training classes on the software so that you can actually use it.
Get a good set of topo maps for the entire area you want to cover. Don't let anybody fool you, real paper maps and a good distance calculator like "Topo Companion" are the best way to do wireless design. Next, go to the FCC and download their Antenna Registration Database. You will need the "EN" and "CO" and one other table. Join the tables (useing MS Access would be easiest) using the unique site id and then query out the sites that have coordinates within the boundaries of Pueblo (latitude > y1 and latitude x1 and longitue Now use your "Topo" companion to mark existing towers on the map. Look for ones that are on hills or mountains near the desired coverage area. Some simple trig will tell you if you have line-of-site (LOS). Add the average tree height to your ground elevation when doing calcuations, 802.11x is very low power and high frequency, so you can't afford any pathloss burning through vegetation.
Unlike the parent, I would strongly recommend 30 degree panels for this kind of system, since you are likely to encounter capacity issues, and even log-periodic 60 degree panels have enough overlap between sectors to guarentee a huge interference problem if you use more then one transmitter. Find the equipment you are going to use and use your gains and losses to calculate the ERP / EIRP from your transmit antennas at each site. Now go ahead and use the free-space pathloss equation to figure out the signal strenght at you target locations. If you have adequate signal to meet the needs of the subscriber equipment you plan on using then great (Note: if you plan on supplying subscriber equipment then you can guarentee a minimum quality. If not, your design will need to be especially robust to accomodate low-quality receivers). If not, keep tweeking the design until it will work. Develop a plan for directing the different channels away from each other. Make sure you calculate your expected interference from other sites using the same channel. If you several mountaintop sites this will be a killer.
Once you have it built on paper, the rest is fairly straightforward. Have fun!
It accomplishes this by mapping the patterns of hit music from the past. Songs can then be compared to the database of patterns that are known to be appealing to see if they match a known pattern.
No doubt there are other patterns that have never been reflected in American pop music that are also appealing, songs that fit that category will not be identified.
Are there other factors that come into play besides just the intrinsic appeal? Of course, plenty of music fails to match any intrinsically appealing pattern and still does ok because of external factors. Nevertheless, big hits that will be appealing for years to come will do so by appealing to the audience at a very basic level. This software helps to test if a particular song has that potential.
If you read the article, you would note that two radically different pieces of music can both match the same basic pattern. I'd say this software is likely to reduce the production of music that isn't intrinsically appealing, and will have no effect on new music that hits on a new pattern that has not yet been discovered - songs like that will take off despite the music industry.
*This may be somewhat culturally based, though I suspect that the cultural aspect is not very strong.
Ok, there is a lot of truth there, but to dismiss the analogy out of hand is to miss some very important lessons. My dad manages large-scale construction projects so I know a little bit about the industry.
Some lessons that may relate
1. The team that designs a project is always different from the team that constructs the project. They are seldom even from the same company. The client gets to arbitrate between the two when conflicts come up.
2. Many projects are extensively estimated after design, but before construction by the constructor (who has much more experience and motivation to accurately assess project costs then the designing company).
3. Design firms, and construction firms often specialize in very specific types of buildings (i.e. one company may construct only clean-room facilities, another company designs only bridges, etc.). When companies take on specialized projects that they have no institutional experience with, they often fail spectacularly.
4. The designing company divides the project design documents into known specialties. Metalwork, brickwork, glasswork, electrical work, etc. There are hundreds of catagories, and the design documents break out the project into those standard catagories. When the construction company builds the project, they hire subcontractors to perform work in each specialty. The company that does the glasswork has lots of experience with glasswork. The company doing roofing has lots of experience with roofing, etc.
5. Changing the design in mid-construction (which always happens) cost big bucks. No exceptions.
There are more, but I'm bored with this post so I'll stop now.
There were two modes of operation, a very low power mode - intended for long, slow radiation treatment, and a very high power mode - intended for very short bursts of radiation treatment. If a technician accidentally selected the high power mode, then switched back to the low power mode and hit the radiate button immediately, the device would deliver the high power beam, but the display would show it as a low power beam.
Patients would complain about a burning sensation, and then die. Happened quite a few times before anyone figured out what was going wrong.
Oh, wait they haven't. JPEG is still in use, as is GIF and ZIP files. When our storage space grows we simply increase the number of things we want to store. Human nature gets you every time.
Wireless licensing can be a little complicated and Nextel used a novel approach to aquiring their spectrum for a fraction of the cost that anyone else spent.
Several years ago, if you were a local business that had a dispatch operation, you would purchase service from a local two-way radio provider. These were mostly mom-and-pop operations with a few mountaintop towers covering a city. They would provide you with an analog radio that you could mount in your service trucks. They worked very much like a CB, only with a much greater range since "calls" went to the tower and then were rebroadcast from the tower to all the other radios in the area.
Nextel bought some licenses from a few of the mom-and-pop operations and rolled out Motorola's iDen network. The iDen equipment was head-and-sholders better then anything anyone else was using. It offered digital two-way, fairly secure communications, better battery life, and the option of using it like a phone to place calls.
As a result, Nextel steamrolled the two-way competition. Other mom-and-pop shops folded in the face of Nextel's service and then sold their licenses to Nextel. A few years of this and Nextel became so big they were able to challenge traditional wireless carriers.
Of course Nextel's path had a few downsides. They have severe capacity restrictions since there simply wasn't much two-way spectrum available. They buy all their equipment from one suppler - Motorola. Trust me, when your vendor has no competition for your business they act like it. Motorola's iDen equipment is clunky and antiquated.
For the consumer this isn't particularly relevant. Nextel seems to have done a pretty good job building out their network. It operates in the 700 & 800 MHz bands, so in-building penetration and rural coverage (where they offer it) should be quite good. Of course they offer push-to-talk that utilizes dedicated equipment (push-to-talk on all the other networks acts like voice IM over the carrier's data network) - so there is very little delay, and no other carrier will be able to match this for some time to come (think years).
When I said that service varies per city I really meant it. Each major city was built out by a different engineering team. Some were fantastic and did a great job even though they were working for a "bad" carrier. Others were horrible and built terrible networks that even years of patching still haven't completely fixed. You need to talk to people that use the service, that's the bottom line.
Also, be aware that the quality of service can change dramatically throughout the year. All the wireless carriers have seen their network usage grow by leaps and bounds. Some proactively expand their capacity to handle the growth, others wait until the service has degraded significantly before making changes. Many network changes have 3-6 month lead times, so if the carrier only fixes problems once they occure, then expect periodic 3-6 month periods of poor service.
I'm not going to give any recomendations, but I will say that the Consumer Reports evalations tend to match my general impressions of the carriers on a broad scale. As a consumer though, you probably don't care about the broad scale as much as you care about your house and the areas you frequent. Only word-of-mouth can give you specific information like that.
All the GSM providers on the other hand are looking at switching to CDMA at some point in the next few years. Granted, it is UTMS CDMA not CDMA 2000, but the argument over TDMA vs. CDMA is effectively over. UTMS CDMA is being used for the 3G rollout in Europe right now.
*Ok, actually Ericsson (major manufacturer of GSM equipment for wireless companies) did try and claim that GSM was just as good for a little while. It was purely a marketing tactic. GSM is a great TDMA based standard but falls short in many ways when compared to the much newer CDMA2000 standard.
**Good is a relative term. Wireless networks have to balance a lot of variables including build cost (slight GSM advantage due to widespread equipment availability), capacity (huge CDMA advantage), voice quality (CDMA advantage, but the carrier can chose to offer a lower voice quality more in line with GSM to further increase capacity), engineering maintenance burden (slight CDMA advantage), and several others. Consumers are often more concerned with "do my calls drop a lot" and "do I have coverage where I need it". These issues are largely independent of the technology, though they do have some relation to the freqency blocks used by the carrier (lower==better). Rather, these issues depend on:
1 - the skill of the engineers who designed the network AND how much their opinion mattered when the network was being built (most of the networks were built out very quickly. The construction and legal advisors could say "hey, we could build a site here in a month!" and approval would be granted even if the engineer said it wouldn't work - I deal with the repercussions of this a lot).
2 - the size of the build out. The more area covered the better.
3 - the commitment by the company to improve the existing network. There seems to be a insanity in the industry that says "we can only improve the network by adding new sites". That sounds great, but in practice it means there is little resources provided to fix problems on exisiting sites. You even see new sites built to fix a problem that could have been corrected by fixing the original site - all part of the more sites is better philosophy.
each of these aspects vary by carrier and by city, blanket statements about quality based on technology or carrier are seldom true.
If you have any interest in real democracy (or a real republic for that matter) this should bother you tremendously.
The best part was that I could make buildings that were large enough to be useful (wood has that special property :) )
Later on, my parents got my younger siblings a set of cardboard blocks. The blocks were about 12" x 6" x 3". There were enough that we could actually make little houses and forts, and strong enough to hold our weight. Of course we could also hurl them at each other while hiding behind walls made of the same. That was pretty cool, since the blocks weighed enough to knock out portions of the opponents wall but not enough to cause any serious damage to the basement. It was a little like real-life space invaders